by Nick White
The four of us settled around Dale on the bed. The bleeding had slowed, and when my arm got tired from keeping the sheet wrapped around him, Christopher took over, then Sparse. We tried to keep him talking, and it seemed to work for a little while. He told us to make sure when we get to the hospital to call his sister. “Not my parents,” he said, and then he told us the phone number. He made us repeat it until we had it memorized.
Rick and Larry had decided to drive to the emergency room in Kosciusko twenty minutes away. They figured it was the closest. Rick was speeding, taking crazy turns, sending Mother Maude’s collection of wigs and clothes flying out of the closet. “Jesus, that woman!” Sparse said. “The only taste she has is in her mouth.” We held on to Dale to keep him as still as possible. I was sitting on the bed against the back wall, close to Dale’s head, which I eventually placed in my lap. It was as heavy as I expected it to be, and the weight of it pressed into my groin, aggravating the sores. His eyes were open and he was talking, talking more than he ever had in the past three weeks, telling us about a roller coaster at Disney World. “A runaway train,” he said. “That’s what riding in this thing feels like.” I tilted my head back and listened to him, we all did, knowing that as long as he kept on talking he would be okay. Christopher said that’s what these paramedics did in this episode of Rescue 911 he remembered watching, but then Sparse gave him a look, and he didn’t make any more comments. I shut my eyes, and there was just Dale’s voice. In my memory, the drive to the hospital took much longer than twenty minutes, but I’m sure this is wrong. Dale was chattering about how his parents would feel so guilty now that they would have to let him go and live with his grandmother and sister. “Or maybe they will let Laura come back to visit.” He told us he was going to milk his injury for everything it was worth. “Every day,” he said. “All day long.”
When I opened my eyes, we were at the hospital, and everything had changed. Nurses in green scrubs and plastic gloves were inside the RV shouting questions at us. “Who’s hurt? Who’s hurt?” For them, it was hard to tell. We were coated in weeks-old dirt and grime, in clothes they would have to cut off, in skin they would have to disinfect. Dale’s blood was on all of us, too. He lay at the center of the bed wrapped in the sheets, pale and stiff like a piece of furniture. The other boys were talking at once, not making any sense, and one by one, the nurses were hurrying them out of the RV. Dale’s eyes looked up from my lap, glazed over and lifeless. The nurses came for us last. They needed to separate us, they said. They needed to get us help. I gripped Dale’s big, ugly, awful head and wouldn’t let go of him. “Please,” one nurse pleaded, an older woman. Her name tag said Bernice. “Please,” she said again, and they were pulling us apart anyway. And I screamed for them to close his eyes, but words were lost to me. As they carried Dale away, Bernice held me down, my puny nothing body convulsing in her arms, wild.
—
There are limits to my story. My recollections can send me in only a few directions—but no matter which way I go, I always inevitably return to the camp. I know of events that occurred in the Neck while Rick and Larry hurried us to the hospital. I don’t exactly know how long it took me to untangle all of these knots of information—the bit I gleaned from what my father told me and from what I overheard at the trial during my one and only day in the courtroom. More still from what I read in Rick’s memoir and the subsequent writings about it and the movie on the Internet. All of it coalescing to become the story I tell myself: After Father Drake regained full consciousness, he and Mother Maude squabbled over what to do next. Mother Maude wanted to follow us to the hospital, and Father Drake didn’t. During their bickering, he must have revealed something that shocked his wife. I don’t know this for sure, of course, but I certainly have my suspicions. Regardless of what he said to her, Mother Maude walked back through the woods to the cabins and the fire pit and the Sweat Shack. She found Rick and Larry’s midsize sedan parked on the side of the road. The keys were in the ignition.
She drove Rick and Larry’s car as far as Oklahoma and then disappeared from the authorities, telling those she met her name was Rosie. Here, her story becomes murkier. I know she died in a small house in San Bernardino. I’ve heard tell she was active in a small community church near her neighborhood, and the congregation reported her to be a reliable member, one who pitched in during fund-raisers for mission trips and inner-city-youth projects. And sometimes, on Christmas or Easter, she would be convinced to sing. “But we hated to ask her,” the preacher of the church said in an interview. “Because the poor thing could hardly make it all the way through a song without crying.” I don’t know if she ever felt remorse for that summer, and I don’t know if remorse would have made any difference to me or the others.
Father Drake never heard her leave that day at camp. He had gone inside his tent to nap. Like the campers, he had gotten very little sleep the night before. He had no way of knowing, I am sure, that he and Mother Maude would never, as far as I know, see each other again. He would be in prison when she died. That evening, a policeman came and found him still inside his tent, unmoving until the officer kicked Father Drake’s foot. The policeman reported he must have been having some kind of dream. He jumped awake as if he’d been electrocuted. He apologized and said he thought the officer was the boogeyman coming to get him.
I have no way of knowing how much my testimony hurt or helped him at the trial. Even today, when I think of the knife and the fight, I cannot say if Drake stabbed Dale or if the knife got knocked in there by accident. While this may mean the difference in a court of law between murder and manslaughter, or between malice and accidental, the difference means very little to me. Father Drake, I know, didn’t kill Dale all by himself. He had help from Mother Maude and from our parents who sent us there, who believed we needed radical treatment to better fit their ideas of who we should be. He had help from the counselors who stood by. He had help from me, too, who’d betrayed Dale in service of a lie that I knew to be a lie even if I had said and thought otherwise at the time.
After I gave my piddly, incoherent testimony at the trial, I had to sit in the courtroom with my legal representative until the court was adjourned. There weren’t many people in attendance. None of the parents attended. Like I had been, the other boys would be ushered in by their legal representatives to give their spiels. Our parents allowed even this begrudgingly. Even Dale’s didn’t want charges to be pressed and wanted the whole business with the camp to go away. I often wondered if this lack of support on their part didn’t play some role in Father Drake’s lax sentencing, too. Everyone, it seemed, agreed Dale’s death was a terrible accident, but they saw no need in lingering over what happened. It would be better, my legal representative told me after the judge called a recess, if all parties involved found some way to move on and forget about it. And I agreed with him. Wholeheartedly. I wanted nothing more than to get back to my new friends and my new life in Jackson.
As I exited the courtroom, I spotted two women in the very back row. They were dressed as if they were going to church. It was an old woman, maybe seventy, and her granddaughter. The granddaughter, who I would come to realize was Dale’s sister, Laura, wore a navy-blue pantsuit with a button of the rainbow flag pinned to her lapel, so tiny I almost missed it. They remained seated with their arms linked, their eyes following. Once I was outside and alone, I ran. The day was bright and warm. The more space I put between the courtroom and me, between Dale’s family and me, the easier it was to pretend I hadn’t seen them. To believe they weren’t his grandmother and sister, but just an old woman and a girl, nobody’s anything.
—
Father Drake was sentenced to ten years of prison for accidental manslaughter and the willful endangerment of a minor, and got out for good behavior in three. Of course he would go back to the Neck once he was released. I should have known, but I assumed he was still in prison. He, for one, didn’t look surprised to see me back at camp.
He seemed resigned. As if he believed all along I’d return, once and for all, to complete my rehabilitation.
NINE
■
REHABILITATION
By the time I finished my screaming, they held all the power.
Father Drake had removed his hand from my mouth and stepped around me to stand beside the boy and the car. The boy, shaking, pulled a pistol from the back of his jeans, which he now was aiming directly at my skull. I managed a lie about having people in town who were waiting on me. Father Drake shook his head at this and said, “I speck Cake here will have his feelings hurt if you don’t stay for lunch.” He reached inside the driver’s side and pulled out the keys from the ignition. “Plus, now that you are here, I want to discuss a little business matter with you.” He leaned back against Doll’s hood and shut his eyes. “I was awful shocked to find out Maudie deeded this land over to your daddy—she did it somehow before she died. Only reason I could reckon was to protect it from being taken by the law.”
Cake dropped the gun long enough to wipe sweat from his face and swat at a horsefly lobbing around his blistered ear. Then he repositioned himself in his former stance with the gun, his torso hunched over one of Doll’s open car doors. He sighed, apparently bored or frustrated by this reunion between Father Drake and me.
“Seeing as I’m her husband,” Father Drake continued, “I thought it only right to seek my claim to the property. Looked up your daddy, and when I came calling, he wouldn’t even let me through the front door—said the land was your inheritance.” He spat, and said, “Now you think Maudie would have wanted that?” When I didn’t answer, he spoke to Cake, asking him if he’d found enough food in my car to scrape together a meal for three people.
Cake loosened his grip on the pistol. “There’s beans and shit. We can figure something out.”
Father Drake, gazing over at his companion, appeared suddenly puzzled. He seized the mask still perched atop Cake’s head. “What the hell?” He stuck his thumbs through the empty eye sockets. “What sort of foolishness you call this?” He slung the mask at me, and on reflex, I caught and pocketed it.
Cake shifted his fingers around the gun, revealing there wasn’t any trigger. Only a metal rim, smooth and polished. The more I looked, the more I understood. The metal was too shiny for gunmetal, and it looked, in fact, more like plastic. I understood, and my body responded, exploding into a sprint. Yelping, Cake threw himself back into the car as I charged toward him and Father Drake. I darted by and skidded onto the gravel road. For his part, Father Drake remained where he was. He didn’t chase after me or even holler for me to stop.
I kept on running as if they were right on my heels, my thighs burning as I flung my legs into longer and longer strides. A half mile down the road, I cut left into the tree line. My path became crazed in the clot of trees and brush. My only goal was to put as much distance between Father Drake and me as I could. I pushed deeper into the Neck, slowing down to a jog. It was cooler in the trees, less sunlight seeping through the limbs. Gnats and mosquitoes swarmed my face, blurring my eyesight. Swatting them away only slowed me down, so I pulled out the princess mask and placed it over my face for protection from the insects—the mask also served to muffle the sobs shaking loose from my chest.
—
The trees were so tightly packed I felt like I’d stumbled into a maze. My jogging became a brisk walk. I was exhausted, hungry, and lost. I had no way of knowing if I had backtracked closer to camp or moved deeper into the woods, into the wide stretch of the Neck where people wandered in and were never heard from again. Some of them, of course, probably wanted to get lost, but I wasn’t sure if that was necessarily my goal. Finally, I stopped moving. Every direction looked the same: trees. Vines and weeds burst from the ground and twisted around and in between low-hanging branches, blocking most pathways. Too tired to fight my way through, I selected a shaded thicket underneath a warped pine that arched over the ground like a lamppost. I sat down. I had gone into the woods to elude capture, but now that seemed rash. Father Drake hadn’t seemed too keen on chasing me down. Neither had the boy. I felt foolish. My neck and back ached; I itched and was in need of a warm shower, a new set of clothes. I had come full circle, it seemed, returned to the similar predicaments of my younger self at camp. Oddly enough, I didn’t despair over this. For despair took energy I didn’t have. I didn’t mean to fall asleep. But I did, and the only time I realized I’d nodded off was when I woke up—very suddenly, with a jolt—to the sound of voices in the distance.
Evening in the Neck: The sky hung close to the earth, tacked above me by stars, its billowing darkness bleeding into the shadow below, crowding out anything discernible in the woods except noise. Crickets, frogs. And the voices of women—their laughter strange and tinny, like a recording of laughter from long ago. To my right, in the distance, the faintest glimmering of light. The yellow-red tongue of flames. I moved toward the light, my feet crashing through the brush. I made enough noise to announce my presence before I arrived. The chatter went silent. Their hideaway was a little opening in the trees, a meadow of monkey grass and ragweed and clover. In the center, a campfire popped and crackled, illuminating the wall of trees rising up on all sides, sealing in the two women like a house without a roof save for night sky. I wedged myself through. They stood, not alarmed, but on guard, reasonably suspicious.
They wore camouflage and matching trucker hats with their hair tucked through the backs in sloppy fat ponytails. The woman on the right was huskier than the one on the left, but both were broad shouldered and, there was no other word for it, brawny. The women were gripping metal rods with chunks of meat and vegetables speared onto them. The huskier one said, “Mister, you got a face underneath that mask of yours?”
“Oh, gosh—sorry.” I had forgotten I was still wearing it. It occurred to me how frightening I must have looked, especially given the circumstances of the movie, as I had clawed my way out of the darkness into their campfire wearing this princess mask. I took it off and apologized again. “I didn’t mean to startle.”
The littler one said, “You can’t scare us now. We know trouble when we see it.” She sat back down and returned her kebab to the fire. The huskier one remained standing a minute longer, inspecting me. “You look rough, son,” she said. “Here.” She came around the fire to hand me an open mason jar half-filled with a cloudy liquid. “Take a nip.” She returned to her post beside the other woman and I sampled the product. The liquor burned going down, but its aftertaste was sweet and left a pleasant tickle in my chest. “Why don’t you take a seat,” the littler one said.
I sat on my knees facing them, the fire bubbling between us. Neither woman asked for the jar back, and I took more swigs of the moonshine. Because I was drinking on an empty stomach, the alcohol worked fast on me, turning my joints to jelly and making my body limber enough for me to lean back on my elbows. When they finished roasting the kebabs, the littler woman scooted over and handed me hers. They shared the other one, blowing on the steaming meat and vegetables before using their mouths to pick it clean from the skewer. I followed their lead, chewing off a piece of meat first. “Is this venison?” I asked, and the huskier woman snorted. “Naw, honey,” she said. “That’s the best cut of flap steak money can buy at the Piggly Wiggly in Durant.”
“I thought y’all might be hunters,” I said.
The littler one said the only thing legal to hunt in the summer was wild pigs. “And they’ve been mostly rooted out nowadays.”
“We’re what you might call wildlife enthusiasts,” the huskier one added, her mouth full of onion.
The explanation for their presence in the woods didn’t square. I was drunk enough to press my luck. “You ever hear stories about the Neck?” I told them my mother used to tell me some, most of which I later found out were either wildly exaggerated or misconstrued. “She lied,” I said. “But she lied beautifully.”
“We he
ard a few of them,” said the littler one. “One in particular about this camp where boys were sent to get fixed.” She summarized the plot of Proud Flesh: “This boogeyman stalked the woods, a leftover from the camp, killing people left and right—heard it was a big mess.”
The fire had weakened, and we could better inspect each other.
“I’m not the boogeyman,” I said. “If that’s what you think.” I asked them if they knew about my mother’s stories. “Did y’all hear about the moonshiners?” I shook my empty mason jar at them. “Or the women in the woods, moving from place to place so nobody would ever find them?”
“Nobody, that is, until the boogeyman came looking for them,” the littler one said. Their faces went flat at the same time, and then the huskier one lurched forward suddenly, yelling, “Boo!” And I fell over, landing on my side to the sound of their cawing laughter. “Well, baby,” the littler one said to the other, “I guess he done caught us. We are women and we are in the woods.” They laughed some more until I righted myself back up.
“What are y’all doing out here then?”
The huskier one said, “Complicated. You?”
I held up the mask and shook it at them. “Same.” The littler one asked me my name, and I said, “People here know me as Rooster.” A look passed between them, the kind exchanged between two knowing parents about their child. “That may be what people call you,” the huskier one said. “But who do you answer to? I mean, what do you want to be called?”
