Lurk

by Adam Vine

  I went to the tool bench in the garage and took down the big iron shovel from the top rung. I made sure the garage door was locked before handing the shovel to Apple.

  ***

  While Apple was digging Andy’s grave, I slipped outside into the rainy night. I heard the music before I saw Bea and Jay through the kitchen window. They were sitting at the big table, drinking beers and talking. Silently, I crept up the stairs onto the sun deck to watch them. The gun was a steel anchor in my hands. The voices in my head whispered: It’s still their fault you’re fat. It’s still their fault you’re a virgin.

  All I had to do was lift the gun, point it through the window, and shoot them dead. With the rain pouring down like it was, all forensic evidence of my crime would be washed away. Apple and I could both get our revenge. I knew it wasn’t really their fault I was messed up, but changing myself seemed so hard and far away – or so the voices insisted. It was like they were fighting inside my mind against the revelation I’d had in the basement, that I was the one who needed to change if I was ever going to be happy. I fingered the Polaroid in my pocket to make sure it was still there. It was. There’s already blood on my hands. What’s a little bit more, in the grand scheme of things? You still have time.

  Despite the deep protests in my heart, my hands raised Andy’s service pistol and aimed it at my friends where they sat inside the kitchen. I finally realized what they were listening to, and why it sounded so familiar. They were listening to my chip tunes song, Don’t Go Down The Wrong Road. “Don’t – don’t – don’t – don’t go down the wrong road,” the robot voice sang. Jay must have gone into my room to get my iPhone after I went downstairs, so he and Bea could listen to my music. “It’s a very – very – very bad road. Don’t – don’t you go down – down down down, baby, down – don’t you go down that wrong, wrong road.”

  As if on cue, Jay reached for Bea’s hand and gave it a squeeze. They looked into each other’s eyes. Bea shouted over the music. “He’s really good.”

  “I know. He’s fucking talented,” Jay said.

  “You think he’ll ever make it big?”

  Jay shrugged. “Who knows? He’s only finished one song. Maybe if he applies himself.”

  Their fault you’re fat. Their fault you’re a virgin. Do it, the voices whispered. Do. It.

  “Yeah, I agree.” Bea leaned over, slicked his hair behind his ears, and smooched him on the eyelid. Jay smiled like a little kid.

  “I love you,” Jay said, holding Bea’s head to his chest.

  “Stop it,” Bea said.

  “You stop it,” Jay fired back. “What’s stop in Portuguese? El fin?”

  “That’s Spanish,” Bea said. “Jay, I’ve never fallen for anyone this fast before. It scares me. Do me a favor. Don’t say it if it isn’t true.”

  “Don’t worry. It is,” Jay said.

  Don’t Go Down the Wrong Road dwindled to its three-note finale, and another of my songs started playing, an unfinished one I hadn’t given a title yet.

  “Dude, he’s really fuggin’ good,” Bea said.

  Jay bobbed his head in time with the beats. “Yeah. Yeah man. Totally. This song’s tight. I wish the lazy bastard would finish it.”

  “Where is he, anyway?”

  “Who knows? Wasn’t in his room. Maybe he’s out for a walk. He loves taking walks late at night.”

  “He’s so weird,” Bea said.

  “Yeah, but we love him.”

  Carter’s head appeared around the corner from the hall. “Yo, can you PLEASE turn the music down?” Carter yelled.

  “This is Drew’s beat, man!” Jay said emphatically, pointing at the speaker.

  “I know it is, dawg,” Carter said. He pointed to the floor with his finger. “Turn it down anyway.”

  Jay slouched and turned the music off.

  “Was that you guys screaming a few minutes ago?”

  Bea and Jay looked at each other and both shook their heads. “What? No.”

  Carter rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “Oh. Thought I heard someone screaming.”

  Jay and Bea shrugged. “Wasn’t us,” they both said.

  “Maybe it was the neighbors. Never mind. Please keep the music down. I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but my girl and I are tryin' to sleep.”

  “Whatever, Lightning,” Bea said. “Now I see why Drew calls you the Storm.”

  Carter looked sad. “Shit,” he said at last. “Called out. You’re right. I don’t know when I turned into such a grandpa. What are you beautiful people drinkin'?”

  Jay held his Black Dog IPA up in a Vanna White pose, one hand presenting the label with a flourish. “This mystical, fantastic elixir of the mind is called beer.”

  “It makes ya funny, dummy,” Bea said, laughing at her own quip.

  “Goddamn. Fine. Roast me like the square I am, you goddamned smartasses. I probably deserve it. Mind if I join you?” Carter said.

  “We’ll mind if you don’t,” Jay said.

  Carter got himself a glass of orange juice from the fridge and sat down.

  “Carter, have you seen Drew?” Jay said.

  “Not since he went down to the basement,” Carter said. “Maybe he’s still down there. He’s been goin’ down there a lot lately.”

  Jay sighed. “He’s been having a rough time.”

  Bea hung her head. She sounded… guilty? “I never thanked him for looking out for me,” she muttered.

  “Me either,” Carter said.

  “I feel so bad about the way I blew up at him last week.”

  “He’ll survive. He’s tougher than he looks, our Thunder,” Carter said.

  In that moment, I stopped being jealous. The weight falling from my heart felt like a thousand tons of wet soil, all spilled out of me as if tipped from the blade of a shovel. But the voices in my head wouldn’t let it go. You’re fat, they whispered. You’re a virgin. Don’t you want to kill them? Don’t you want to splatter them? Don’t you want revenge? So do it. Now. This will be the last chance you get.

  Jay raised his beer in the air. “To Drew.”

  “To Drew,” Bea and Carter said. They all drank.

  Do it.

  And lowering the gun, I told the voices, No.

  Snapshot #28

  Caption: Hiking at Armstrong National Forest

  The redwoods are clairvoyants, watching the world as if through a crystal ball. There is nothing they do not know, for there is nothing outside them that has not already been. They are the beautiful reckoning of the universe distilled to the head of a pin. They are time. They are death. They line the forest path in giant, sentinel marches, drawing the mind to greater questions than modern man knows how to ask in his rat-race existence moving on conveyor belt streets through forests not made of trees, but of navel-gazing glass.

  It was not until I came here, to the foot of the Colonel Armstrong tree in the Marin headlands, a redwood over three hundred feet tall and more than a thousand years old, that I understood what it means to die.

  In the picture, Carter, Bea, Natalia, Sam, and I are standing with our stomachs facing the Armstrong Tree and our arms linked around its stump. We were laughing because our combined wingspan didn’t even cover half the circumference.

  We didn’t speak much, except to say, “Cheese!” The potent weed, mingled with the rotten but sweet scent of the forest and the towering incomprehensibility of the Armstrong, awed us into silence. We were meeting God, and God didn’t need to hear our side of the story. God already knew.

  Once you’ve been forgiven by a tree, very little else seems to matter. Not the rat race. Not school. Not sick parties or the judgments of small-minded people. Not your weight. Not the cities and their constant, silent screaming that you are less-than. Not the short, tumultuous span of a human life, even yours. Not your psychotic episodes in which you fantasize about brutally murdering your friends with a pair of giant scissors.

  Not anything but each other.

  ***


  I helped Apple wrap Andy in the crimson-soaked shreds of his sleeping bag. We rolled him into the hole, the same hole where he’d accidentally unearthed Scudds Gurney’s bones twenty years ago, where Mr. DeLucio had hidden his Piano Man pictures, where Scudds Gurney had died after drinking paint thinner and was buried. We threw his uniform down on top of him. Apple laid the first shovelful of dirt.

  Andy’s bald, badly-cut head and lazily mummified body formed a sad little stopper at the bottom of that damp abyss. I knew sacrificing Andy to Them wasn’t going to be enough. I knew that They only existed in my imagination, but somehow, that They were down there, too, and that Andy’s death wouldn’t be enough to satisfy Them. I only hoped that when I walked out of the Hobbit door and took the first steps towards my new life, that when I stopped being the old Drew and dedicated myself wholeheartedly to changing my body and mind into the man I wanted to be, that They would leave me alone.

  “It’s time for you to go,” I said.

  Apple dumped another load of dirt onto Andy’s corpse. I stopped her with a gentle hand on her wrist. “Apple. You did enough. I’ll do the rest. You need to get out of here. Disappear for a while.” Apple stared at me. “I won’t tell anyone,” I said. “I promise. Some secrets should stay buried.”

  A look of understanding passed between us. But there was something else, too, something I’d never been given by anyone.

  Was it… respect? Is this what it feels like to be respected? Apple poked me in the belly. “You don’t have to feel bad to feel good,” she said, letting out a brown-toothed cackle.

  I straightened my glasses and smiled, sticking out my hand for her to shake. Instead, she hugged me. She stank worse than week-old trash. I squeezed her and gently stroked the grimy tangles of her hair, until she pulled back, patted my head, said, “Feel good, man. Feel good, dude,” and shambled off into the darkness.

  I never saw Apple again.

  ***

  I smashed the Polaroid camera to pieces and threw it in the Hole on top of Andy, along with the tree shears and his service pistol. I cried and shook. But nothing could change what Apple and I had done. There was nothing in that hole for me but dirt.

  I took the last Polaroid out of my pocket and examined it. The image of Bea and Jay embracing on the sidewalk in front of Sunny Hill transformed into a fuzzy, poorly lit image of Andy’s corpse at the bottom of the hole. His face, mutilated and frozen in death for the rest of time, somehow still managed to look full of sadness and regret.

  Beneath the image, a word began to take form in the caption. It was written in blue ink. Andy’s worst fear, which had once been mine, too, appeared. The caption read, Attachment.

  ***

  By the time I finished refilling the hole, it was almost dawn. I smoothed over the dark patch of disturbed soil the best I could, but it would still look pretty conspicuous to anyone who ventured far enough under the house.

  I found Andy’s patrol car parked up the alley behind our house, on the ridge overlooking Mr. DeLucio’s. I had taken the keys out of his pants pocket before throwing them in the hole. I drove Andy’s car to the beach, my heart racing every time the radio chattered or a pair of headlights appeared in the rearview mirror. I left it parked in the back corner of the parking lot, as far from the sand as I possibly could, where I thought no one would disturb it for at least a few days. I was careful not to leave any loose hairs or dried mud on the driver’s seat, hoping that when the police did find it, they’d assume Andy had gone surfing and drowned.

  I walked home from the beach, and got back to Sunny Hill after a brutal, hour-long hike just as the crimson gloom of sunrise was beginning to strike the empty suburban streets. I cleaned up the basement and the garage as best I could, and was rinsing the shovel off under the driveway hose when I heard the back door open. I quickly tossed the shovel in the bushes as Bea and Jay appeared at the top of the stairs.

  They both cast me a wary, red-eyed stare. Good. They're hungover. Maybe they won't think I’m doing anything suspicious. But I’d better throw out a distraction, just in case. I held the running hose over my head and doused myself with cold water.

  Fuck!

  “Uh… hey man,” Jay said.

  Fuck oh fuck that is fucking COLD!

  “Waddar ya doin', dude?” Bea slurred.

  I sucked the pain back through my teeth. “Just taking a nice, cold shower. I read online that it boosts testosterone.” I lifted my arm and sprayed the water into my armpits. A nice ice cold FREEZING shower FUCK!

  “You’re crazy,” Jay said.

  “Why are ya showering with your clothes on?” Bea said.

  “You saying you want me to take them off? Show you this sexy body?” I rubbed my man boobs and pretended to dance.

  Bea laughed, wiped the tears from her eyes, and said, “Dude, why don’t you just go upstairs?”

  I grinned and did a ballerina twirl under the freezing cascade, almost tripping over the hose, then shoved the nozzle the hose down the front of my pants. Oh Jesus GOD sweet Jesus LORD save me kill me FUCK!

  “Al-al-always w-w-wash th-the b-balls, I said.

  Bea and Jay fell into each other, laughing. I switched the water off and shivered in the pre-dawn grey. “Hold on, you idiot,” Bea said, running upstairs.

  “Y-you guys are u-p-p early”,” I said to Jay, once she was gone.

  Jay pinched his forehead. “We’re going surfing. Man, I’m still drunk. I think we got a total of one hour of sleep, combined. Sorry, my brain’s not awake yet. Maybe I need a cold shower,” Jay said.

  Bea returned down the kitchen stairs. She threw me a bath towel.

  While I was toweling off, Jay opened the garage and loaded the surfboards into the back of his ice cream truck.

  “Drew, do you wanna come with us?” Bea said.

  No, I thought. I really don’t. I just killed someone. Murdered him, then buried him in an unmarked grave underneath our house. Plus, I’ve never been surfing before. I’ll look stupid. They’ll make fun of me.

  You really gonna take your shirt off, fat ass? Scudds Gurney’s voice echoed in my mind. “Uh… sure,” I said.

  “I’ve got an extra wetsuit back there,” Jay said, motioning to the back of his truck. “My brother’s XXL should fit you, no problem.”

  ***

  The wet suit was about one X too small. I rolled around on the wet sand struggling to pull it up past my waist. Jay had parked next to Andy’s patrol car, which, so far, was still sitting in the back of the beach parking lot, apparently untouched. The thought that I had killed Andy and might actually get away with it emboldened me enough not to care what I looked like trying to squeeze into the wetsuit.

  Jay and Bea waited for me down by the water, where glassy, knee-high waves crumbled gently towards the shore. I knew they both wanted to get out there as soon as possible, so I sucked in my gut as hard as I could and popped the wetsuit up around my arms. My huge belly bulged through the constricting neoprene, but instead of getting embarrassed when Bea and Jay smirked, I grinned at them and growled in a low, monster movie voice, “Sexy body. Sexxxxxxy bodddy.”

  They both started cracking up. I blew them a kiss and said again, “Sexxxyyy bodddy.”

  By the time I got the wet suit zipped up, they both had tears in their eyes.

  We paddled out past the break. Jay helped me back on my board when I fell off into the chilly January water. Even a ten-foot long board seemed too small to stabilize my weight. But Jay taught me a trick where you work your feet under the water like little propellers to stay sitting upright while you watched for the next wave.

  Before long, I was going for them.

  Bea and Jay were both pretty advanced, but I didn’t take it to heart when they chuckled at me as they zipped by, cutting up and down on the faces of the mushy, slow moving rollers. If they weren’t my friends, they wouldn’t bother checking on me at all, I reminded myself. The old me would’ve been furious about that.

  I paddled hard for every
wave that came my way, even the ones I knew I wouldn’t catch, my friends’ voices echoing over the water as they cheered me on. We joked and laughed like old times while we sat waiting for the sets. I splashed them and yelled “Eww” whenever they leaned across their boards to kiss.

  By ten AM, I had all but forgotten about Andy and the Hole.

  ***

  The official notice of Andy’s death appeared in the news four days later. The article said he was “reported missing” and “presumed dead,” that he would be “dearly missed by his friends, colleagues, and the community he served for over sixteen years as a highly decorated officer in the Santa Cruz Municipal Police.”

  Andy Skoakland, born 1972, was described as a lover of the ocean and the outdoors. He lived on a boat in the Santa Cruz Harbor for six years following his divorce from his first wife until the time of his death. They did not have any children.

  The last person to report seeing Andy was Bill “Thrasher” Buckley, owner of local butcher shop Bill’s Meats. Bill had been surfing with Andy for the past fifteen years (since around the time of Marty’s death). Andy was riding his stand-up paddleboard at Natural Bridges State Beach at sunset, and Bill hadn’t seen him come in. He was reported missing the following day.

  The general consensus from friends and police alike was that Andy had drowned. As of yet, no body had been found, but that wasn’t uncommon when people lost their lives to the sea. The closing line of the column stated, “It is highly likely Officer Andrew Skoakland died doing what he loved, and hopefully, all who are grieving for his loss can take some small solace in that fact.”

  He did die for something he loved, I thought as I read. But it wasn’t the ocean. It was Sunny Hill. There was no mention of any surviving family.

  ***

  I changed, at first more on the outside than in. I was sick of who I was, sick of resenting other people for my own flaws and insecurities. I cut anything out of my life that I thought would become a hindrance to becoming the man I wanted to be. I dedicated myself to a strict, six-days-a-week diet and exercise regime, allowing myself one day to rest and eat the junk foods I still craved.