The Clearing

by Dan Newman

  “Are you okay, Nate?” she asked again.

  “I’m not sure,” he said softly, and then it hit him. “It’s smaller. The house seems so much smaller than I remember it. Back then it was a mansion—it was this giant sprawling stately home. But now, up close from here, it’s just a house. That’s so damn weird.”

  They walked on toward the house until they were beneath the bank of windows and a few feet from the front steps. Nate put a hand on Rachael’s shoulder and stopped her. “I want you to wait here. I really appreciate you coming, I do, but you don’t need to go inside.”

  “Do you think that’s wise? I mean, if there’s two of us, he’s less likely to do anything.”

  “Vincent’s not going to do anything,” said Nate reassuringly, but inside he felt less certain. What was about to happen was entirely unpredictable.

  Rachael nodded without any more protest. Nate climbed the concrete steps to the wooden veranda, crossed the short span and knocked firmly on the door. As he stood waiting he cast his mind back to this very spot, and re-lived himself as a thirteen-year-old running headlong through the doorway, no actual door to impede him, out into the sunshine and down the stairs. They were headed to the clearing, and Nate’s heart skipped a beat at the thought of that beautiful hollow, that natural dome of greenery out there in the forest.

  He reached up and knocked again, then took a step back from the door, perhaps in deference, perhaps something else. Still no answer. Nate turned and looked out over the area in front of the house, marvelling at the fact that decades had come and gone since he’d stood there. It felt like the place had been waiting there, just for him, just to have him stand here once more. He was no longer the boy he had been, but in that moment—at the top of the steps on the landing at Ti Fenwe—adulthood could offer nothing to stifle the essence of thirteen that seemed to entirely possess him now.

  Nate looked down at Rachael. Her arms were crossed tightly and her face was drawn and pinched, like someone fighting the urge to be sick. “Are you okay?” he asked. And then Nate realized that Rachael wasn’t looking at him, but past him.

  How the door behind Nate had opened without him hearing it was unclear, but when he turned back to the house there was now a dark hollow where the door had been just moments before. Nate peered into the lightless opening, fighting the urge to take another step backwards. There was something there, in the shadow just inside the doorway, but it was hidden. All he could make out was what appeared to be the toes of two shoes peeking out of the darkness, strangely suspended in the air about four inches above the wooden floor. For a moment Nate thought of another pair of shoes—slippers, really—slippers lying just inside the bedroom door in his father’s bedroom. Nate’s eyes slowly adapted, and the shoes revealed themselves more fully, as did the metal footrests of the wheelchair in which the old man sat.

  Finally the whole form shifted, and with a quiet squeak and the whir of an electric motor, the old wheelchair and the even older man moved a half turn through the doorway. “Why are you here?” The words were hissed more than spoken.

  Nate took a reflexive half-step backwards, and as he looked into the old man’s eyes he saw a flash of something he’d seen many years ago that day by the river. Back then it was Tristan, curling his lip in disapproval, but the man in front of him now—the man bent over and curled with age and clutching at the lever of his electric wheelchair—that man was undoubtedly Vincent De Villiers. “Why are you here?” he hissed again.

  For a moment Nate was unable to answer, and all he could do was stare at the old man, at the bony hands protruding out from under his shirtsleeves, and at the brown and yellow blanket across his knees. His cheeks were bloodless and sunken, and an oxygen mask twitched against his face every time the old man drew a lungful. His eyes seemed to bulge slightly, as if panic was always nearby now, but beneath the pallid, exsiccated skin the architecture of the Vincent in Nate’s youth—that towering, wondrous, pirate of a man—was still there. “Do you know who I am?” asked Nate. His voice came out much smaller than he intended, and he felt a wash of warmth at his collar.

  The old man’s hands came together and his fingers plucked at one another in his lap. “Of course I do,” he said, his voice slightly muffled beneath the mask. “And you’re not welcome here.” He leaned slightly to one side and gazed past Nate toward the spot where Rachael was standing. “Neither of you.”

  In the shadows of the darkened room behind him Nate thought he caught movement, but as he glanced up he could see nothing. The old house still had a powerful effect on him, he thought, even after all these years.

  “I suggest you climb back into your damn vehicle and be gone,” continued the old man, his voice rattling like a pebble in a rusting tin can. “This is private property. And take that little whore with you.”

  “What did you just say?” He looked at the spiteful face gazing up at him. Rachael had already started to make her way back to the SUV. Nate suddenly felt that he had missed an important moment.

  “Listen, Mr. De Villiers, I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Is she your whore now?” He goaded Nate.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Leave these premises now, before I have someone remove you.”

  Nate stared in amazement at the man. “You know, I never saw it back then, but I do now. Clear as can be.”

  Vincent lifted his chin slightly to match Nate’s gaze, and a single bony hand reached up and momentarily pulled the mask aside. “What?” he spat. “What are you talking about?” Then he pushed the mask back over his mouth and nose and sucked the gas in deeply.

  “When we were kids here, all those years ago, we all thought you were this great guy. You were Vincent De Villiers, you were this larger than life character who drove a Land Rover and owned a plantation and told great stories. And then you beat the shit out of your son—a little thirteen-year-old kid. You’re a fucking bully. That’s all you are.”

  The old man’s face pinched tightly and his hand clutched at the black control knob on the armrest of his chair. He yanked it and the chair jerked backwards, clattering into the door frame and hooking the wheel.

  Nate was angry now, more so than he expected to be, and he stepped firmly toward the chair. Vincent dropped the knob and raised his hands defensively. His eyes cut a quick and nervous glance at the worn paper bag in Nate’s hand.

  “I’m not going to hurt you. But I do want you to tell me something.”

  Vincent simply stared up at him from the chair. He was breathing faster now, and Nate could see the old man’s breath condensing momentarily inside the mask with each exhale.

  “I want to know why you sent those people after me. All that nonsense with the dead chickens and the red paste. And then having someone run us off the road? What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  Vincent stared back acidly, and the two held each other’s gaze. Finally Vincent broke away and reached out for the black control knob. He began to manipulate the chair with a gentle whirring of the electric motor, speaking to Nate as he did but without looking up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I know exactly who you are, and I’ve known you were here from the moment you set foot on the island. But if you’ve run into trouble here it’s not been because of me.”

  The old man finally managed to free his chair and turn it to line up with the doorway. He rolled forward and then stopped just as his face dipped into the shadows. “Go home, Nate Mason. There’s nothing here for you.” The motor whirred again and the chair and its occupant slid into the darkness, leaving only a gentle swirl of dust particles that seemed determined not to be pulled inside. Nate watched as the door swung closed, and again his eyes played tricks in the darkness. Was something there? Something just inside and tucked deep enough into the umbra to be invisible?

  No. It was just the house and its history playing with him.

  Nate lingered at the top of the stairs. His hands hung loosely at his sides, the brown p
aper bag still clutched in his hand, his mind turning through the strange encounter with a man so different to the one propped up in his memory. Nate stared off down the track toward the old copra oven. He knew this was bullshit. It was Vincent, all of it—the Obeah, the attack, the police—all of it was the De Villiers closing ranks.

  At the car, Rachael sat in the passenger’s seat with her legs pulled up tight and her arms wrapped around them. “You okay?” he asked.

  Rachael nodded unconvincingly.

  “You know, I’m not sure he’s your biggest fan.”

  “He never was. But the feeling’s quite mutual.” Rachael finally looked over and met his gaze, and then her eyes dropped to the bag he was holding at the sill of the door.

  She let the moment stand, perhaps waiting for him to explain, but instead he pushed himself up from the window and began to walk back toward the copra oven.

  Rachael slipped out of the car to follow. “Where are we going?” she called out.

  Nate stopped on the track somewhere between the house and the copra oven and was craning his neck and searching for something in the bush that lined the side of the road.

  “And what are you looking for?”

  He stepped into the light bush and pushed the underbrush aside, let it fall back into place and repeated the motion a little further on. “Well, you’re staying here, but what I’m looking for is—ah,” he said with some level of satisfaction. “Here it is.”

  He stepped through the light scrub and onto a worn foot path. The path cut into the forest at a sharp angle almost parallel to the gravel track, making the entranceway almost indefinable from the gravel road. Without knowing it was there, a person could easily walk past it, covered as the entrance was with leafy bushes and tall grass.

  Rachael watched from the path and Nate turned momentarily before pushing on. He knew the question she was not asking: “I’m going to the clearing,” he said, and then turned down the path.

  He followed the path at his feet, ducking under branches and pushing leaves and vines out of his way. The path was used less now, and the forest had narrowed it and claimed some parts almost entirely. Still, he was able to find the bare brown floor with enough regularity to keep pushing on. Finally he ducked under a swath of vines that were wrapping themselves into a stand of green bamboo, and found himself standing at the edge of that natural opening in the forest, still largely dome-shaped thanks to the trees that lined the edge and cast their branches up and over. It was darker now. The holes he remembered at its zenith were now filled in, and while light did still come into the natural room, it did so in shafts that cut their individual ways through and lit small pools of light on the earthen floor like puddles after a rainstorm. At the center of the clearing there was a cluster of small angular structures, and despite his edginess Nate was somehow thrilled to recognize them as old bits of furniture, some now just steel skeletons—a chair-back here, a coil-spring base there. And at the center, like a nucleus for the litter of rusting metal and softening wooden shapes sat the circular form of the old industrial-wire spool.

  Nate walked into the clearing slowly, almost reverently, like a man entering a quiet church. He walked through the shafts of light, leaving swirling pools of dust to dance behind him, flitting in and out of the light like tiny pixies celebrating the return of some long departed king. The memories were coming fast now, and as he touched the edge of a slowly decomposing wooden chair, it was like electrifying a synapse, and his mind came alive with images of Pip, Richard, and Tristan, laughing that untroubled, carefree summertime laughter.

  For a brief moment, he tapped into an incredible sense of lightness, that state of being unique to childhood where the day is limitless, where no rules exist to restrain, and no logic cinches around us to bound ideas. Nothing is impossible: not flight, not dragons, not warring armies, not magical armor. It hovered for a brief moment, and then it was gone. He was a man again, a man standing in the penumbra of a forest clearing surrounded by the relics of a single day in his childhood.

  The laughter seemed far away now, little more than the lingering echo of something light and childlike coming from another room. As Nate approached the industrial-wire spool table, he felt a different sensation, one much less welcome but somehow seared more indelibly into his childhood memory. He remembered standing there facing Tristan, scared in a way that transcended a momentary fright. This was real fear—formative, life-changing terror. It reached past the moment, past its inception, and cast a shadow on how he would see the world from there on in. It was an awakening of sorts for Nate, a sickening realization that the world was not a safe, fun-filled romp, but rather a risky, uncertain landscape crammed with sharp edges over which a veneer of happiness and safety was thinly draped.

  He looked down at the circular wooden table top, and was not surprised to see that the old wooden box, the one that had held the wrist rockets, was no longer there. The table was bare except for four small round spheres, each caked completely with brown rust, each sitting in the parallel seams of the wood that made up the table top. He reached out and picked one up, and rolled it into his palm. It was one of the ball bearings they had used all those years ago, and he looked automatically up toward the far end of the clearing where the white blocks of Styrofoam used to hang in the trees. Of course, there was no sign of them now.

  But in their place, at the very edge of the clearing, stood a man.

  “You got a little fat,” said the man by the clearing’s edge. He was wearing a pair of tan trousers, and a white linen shirt with sleeves rolled up to expose forearms wrapped in thick, conspicuous veins. As he spoke, locks of long, dirty blonde hair flecked with gray fell across a worn face, but his eyes were bright and clear. They cut sharp and nervous glances around the clearing. Nate noticed that his feet, all these years later, were still bare.

  All Nate could do at first was look at him, at the deep lines carved in his face, at his slightly curled posture as if ready to spring away at any moment, and at the way his eyes cut anxiously around the clearing. Finally he was able to gather himself: “I heard you were dead. Some trouble out on a boat, I was told.”

  Across from him, Tristan twitched at a sound of a bird breaking cover, and his eyes stabbed at the brush all around the clearing. His gaze eventually came back to Nate, but he said nothing.

  “You done having your fun with me? Your Obeah curses and all that?”

  Tristan’s chin pushed out and up. “What you want here? You were told never to come back.”

  Nate shook his head gently. “We were kids, Tristan.”

  Again, Tristan eyed the edges of the clearing. “You were given a way out. A way to wash your hands of what you did and—”

  “What I did? You’re a fucking psychopath, you know that?”

  “—and now you force your way back into this sad, sad tragedy from so long ago. Back into something that was in the past. Dead and buried.”

  “Do you recall what happened, Tristan? Do you remember bashing your own cousin’s head in? Does that sound familiar at all?”

  There was no change in Tristan’s timbre; he kept talking in that melodic West Indian cadence, and began taking small, tentative steps into the clearing. “I gave you many chances, both back then, and now in recent days. But you refuse everything I try do for you.”

  Nate felt a cold wave of realization wash over him. Tristan believed what he was saying. Over the course of thirty-odd years he had told himself the lie so many times, so convincingly, that in his mind, he had finally made it true.

  Tristan continued on, still taking slow steps toward the center of the clearing. “And so now you force my hand, despite taking payment on our bond of silence all those years ago.”

  Taking payment, Nate said under his breath. He clenched his teeth and took a deep breath to steady himself. He looked down at the soiled brown paper bag in his hand. It had held its contents so long you could almost see the shape of it pressed forever into the paper—the knurling of the grip,
the scalloped curves that would guide fingers into place and the curve of the steel as it emerged from the top of the handle.

  Tristan was now only ten paces from where Nate stood at the table. He stopped, darted his eyes along the bush-line again, then squared his shoulders and jutted his chin out. “You should not have come here, to Ti Fenwe. You should not have come back to this island.”

  “What are you going to do, Tristan? Kill me like you did Richard? Or how about Pip? Or the reporter he was with.”

  “I can’t let you leave from here. Can’t let you spread lies ’bout that day.”

  The words struck Nate as hollow and toothless. He knew what the threat meant, but his mind never seated the words, never connected them with the possibility of the deed itself being carried out—not in real life. “If you think the story would end with killing me, well, you’d be wrong. I came here to do something I’ve needed to do since the day I left. Something for me. And if that helps set the record straight here then so be it. That’s just a bonus. The story—the real story of what happened back there at the river—is being written right now, Tristan. It’ll be front page news tomorrow. I’ve given my whole story to a reporter at The Word.”

  “You don’t understand this island, Nate. You never did. Nothing will be published in The Word,” he said snidely. “Not without my permission.”

  Nate matched his gaze. “Are you sure about that? You think you can buy your way out of that?”

  Nate looked at the bag he was carrying, and then back at Tristan. “But you know what, I don’t really give a goddamn. I’m just here to give this to you.” And as he said the words, he reached into the paper bag with his right hand.

  Tristan took a half step back, and thrust his own hand sharply into the right pocket of his baggy tan trousers. There was something about the gesture that made Nate instantly uneasy. He froze, right hand buried in the paper bag, eyes riveted on Tristan. In a fractured moment, Tristan pulled something black and compact from his pocket and Nate’s mind flashed to the day the boys had all shot at the battery from the bedroom window of the plantation house. He remembered Vincent unfolding the cloth and revealing the little black gun, and the sense of awe that had seized them. He knew with utter clarity that the black shape in Tristan’s hand was the old man’s pistol.