by Newman,James
Neither Dan nor I ever said anything to Mom about her problem. Perhaps we should have tried, during some rare moment when she was sober, but we knew it would only start another fight. If Mom was happy, see, everyone was happy. If she was pissed, she could be the nastiest person you ever met. Her disease seemed to hang over our odd little trio like some invisible veil, slowly smothering the family but never quite killing us all the way. We could see it, we could smell it, and God knows we felt it all over us like walking through spider-webs in the forest. But there wasn’t a damned thing we could do about it.
If I may digress for a moment, I remember an incident several months before the Apple Gala when Mom was at her worst…
I’d gotten up to grab a snack in the middle of the night. Some milk and cookies, maybe a Twinkie. I made my way down the hall, turned the corner, but froze when I entered the living room.
Mom sat in Dad’s old armchair in the center of the room, her mousy brown hair for once not tied into a neat little bun but flowing to her shoulders like muddy rapids. Her baggy pink nightgown seemed to swallow her whole. Her cheeks had that ruddy pink glow they always got when she’d been drinking. Lightning flickered beyond the big bay window on the far side of our living room every few seconds, casting a strobe-light effect upon her statuesque form.
She was so, so…still.
The rain started then, a heavy downpour that pelted the roof like scampering feet, and I squinted in the darkness to see that Mom held a photograph of my father. She gripped its shiny gold frame in one hand so tightly her knuckles seemed to glow bone-white in the flashes of angry lightning outside. In her other hand she held a bottle of Wild Turkey.
“Help you with something, Kyle?” she said suddenly, and my heart skipped a beat. Her tone wasn’t angry, just cold. But she didn’t even turn around. As if she had eyes in the back of her head.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I replied. “Thought I’d, um, grab a bite to eat.”
She said nothing for the next few minutes. Just kept staring at that picture of Dad as if in some spooky trance, a photograph I still have of him today: standing in front of a plane in Saigon, looking so regal in his finely-pressed fatigues…Sergeant First-Class Daniel Emmett Mackey, Sr., decorated war-hero, posthumous recipient of the Purple Heart as well as Bronze and Silver Stars…
God, how we missed him. My father had been killed by a sniper’s bullet on the other side of the world when I was five years old. They said he died instantly, didn’t suffer at all, but that hardly helped us cope with such a loss. As time passed my memories of Dad grew foggy, yet not a day went by when I didn’t wish he were around to do with me all the things fathers do with their sons.
Mom turned toward me, took another swig from her bottle. I felt naked beneath her glassy-eyed gaze.
“Where’s your brother?” she asked me, her voice flat and lifeless.
“He’s in bed, Mom.”
She laughed. A low, almost masculine laugh. I stared down at my feet, wondered what was so funny. But now I know. Nothing. It was the liquor, laughing. Laughing at my family, mocking my mother’s addiction through its slack-jawed, slurry-voiced slave.
“Mom—”
“Go get him, Kyle. My precious Kyle.” She stared at me sweetly, but something about her expression made me feel dirty. It reminded me of the look a ravenous wolf might give a sheep strayed from its flock, seconds before said wolf begins to feast.
“Dan’s asleep, Mom. Apparently he got in pretty late.”
“Apparently,” Mom mocked me. But her voice remained so calm, which made her words all the more chilling. “Go get your brother, Kyle. Wake him up. Now.”
With that she turned her back to me again, and resumed her dark ménage a trois with the liquor and Dad’s old photograph. End of discussion.
What else could I do? I sighed, staggered down the hallway, dreading what I knew was about to ensue. My heart raced. I felt like such a traitor. It took me several minutes to wake Dan, but finally he sort of sleepwalked out of bed in a pair of yellow boxers and a ratty old Alfred E. Neuman (“WHAT, ME WORRY?”) T-shirt. He cursed as he followed me, when one of his shins barked against the edge of his bedroom doorway.
I would have preferred to be anywhere on Earth than in the Mackey house that evening. I don’t know what got Mom started in the first place. I suppose she’d had a nightmare about Dad, probably rolled over to find that picture of him which looked so much like her firstborn son staring at her from her nightstand. This would have been only a matter of days after all the news programs announced how President Carter had pardoned ten thousand Vietnam draft evaders, and I guess that got Mom brooding on the injustice of it all. Dan tried to talk sensibly with her while she swung her arms and drank from her bottle and swore at him through a spray of spittle that she knew he was “gonna run off to die just like your father” and how did he think his “precious Julie” would like that? It broke my heart. The whole thing ended with Mom ripping Dan’s shirt, trying to kick him in the balls while she swung at him and wailed, “You don’t care about me or your brother! You’re gonna leave us just like that sorry son-of-a-bitch!” until she finally grew too tired to continue.
Dan caught her arms and with my help carefully laid her on the couch to sleep it off. Within a matter of seconds she was out like nothing had ever happened.
Dan looked at me, sighed.
“You okay, little bro?” he asked me.
“I’m fine,” I said. “You’re the one I’m worried about.”
“It’s cool,” he assured me with a sick little laugh. “I’m used to it, ya know?”
And that we were. So used to it.
To say the very least.
****
The Snake River Woods—so called because they ran perpendicular to a winding stream on the northern edge of our county named, you guessed it, Snake River—cut through the middle of Midnight, bisecting the town almost perfectly into two halves. On one side lay the town’s business district, home to establishments like the Big Pig Grocery, Jack’s Hardware, Corriher Guns n’ Ammo, and the offices of the Midnight Sun; on the other sat Midnight’s residential area, where our middle-class homes were nestled in a comfortable sort of juxtaposition that never felt too crowded despite the county’s growing population.
The Snake River Woods was one of my favorite places to go in the whole world, my own private domain where I could be alone, I could explore, I could do all the things boys do without adult eyes always watching like something might get broken.
My favorite thing of all was the Old Shack. And the Well.
That’s how I saw them in my mind: not just any old shack, not just any well…but the Old Shack. And the Well.
This was my secret place. My Secret Place. All boys have a Secret Place, I believe, and the Old Shack was mine.
It sat, far as I knew, smack-dab in the middle of the Snake River Woods. My estimate might have been off several hundred yards, of course, but for my purposes the Well and the Old Shack were the perfect landmarks for the halfway point between the business district of Midnight and my home at 2217 Old Fort Road on the opposite side of the forest.
The Old Shack was little more than four slanted walls, a rotting wooden floor, and a battered tin roof. No door. Inside lay a mildewed mattress that had once been white but had long ago gone a sickly yellow-gray. I often wondered if someone used to live there, if he or she had lain upon that mattress as the sounds of the forest lulled him or her to sleep. As improbable as such a thing seemed to me I suppose at one time someone had called my Old Shack home. A crotchety old hermit, perhaps. A family of hippies who had turned their backs on the Establishment to live amongst nature, but then abandoned that idea when the Age of Aquarius met its demise. Better yet, I often imagined that my Old Shack might have once been a refuge for runaway slaves in the 1800’s, a way-station on the Underground Railroad, and such possibilities made me all the more proud of my Secret Place, as if by frequenting the site I somehow became a part of history.
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The Well sat eight or nine feet from the eastern wall of my Old Shack. It was an ancient, craggy thing made of fat brown rocks like those bordering the Snake River on the other side of town. It stood even with my belt-line in those days, and was about half as wide as my closet back home. Thick moss as soft as a kitten’s fur covered most of it (not to mention a plump gray hornet’s nest on the side facing my neighborhood); no rope, no bucket, no fancy little roof like one might imagine if one ponders the aesthetics of wells for any length of time. Far as I knew, the thing went all the way to the center of the Earth. Sometimes I would imagine the Morlocks from H.G. Wells’ Time Machine living and hunting and doing dark Morlock things down there. I envisioned them looking up at me as I peered down at them, seeing me where I could not see them. It gave me delightful chills, that scenario, the same kind I used to get reading comics like The Witching Hour or watching Darren McGavin stalk the night as Kolchak.
I never even told Dan about my Secret Place, I realized several years ago. I don’t know why. I’m sure my big brother would have understood, would have shared fond memories with me of his own Secret Places when he was my age…yet the Old Shack and the Well were the only things in the world not even Dan knew about me. And that made my Secret Place all the more special.
A single room. One filthy, moth-eaten mattress. And lots of mosquitoes. They were all you’d find inside my Secret Place. But I didn’t mind. I never stayed more than a couple of hours. I think I feared if my Old Shack got too familiar it might lose its special magic.
It never did. It never lost its magic.
After the night of August 5, 1977, however, it sure as hell lost its appeal.
Forever.
CHAPTER THREE
Mom never bought us a pet—“nasty things,” she called them, especially dogs. Cats were out of the question too because she was allergic to them. I did buy a goldfish once with some birthday money my great aunt Florence sent me (I named him “Pop-Eye,” I remember, not in honor of any spinach-eating cartoon sailor but because of the animal’s huge, buggy eyes, which made old Pop-Eye appear as if he were in a constant state of fishy surprise); that lone pet died mere days after I brought him home, however, when I failed to heed Dan’s warnings about overfeeding my aquatic friend with the fragile belly.
Pop-Eye looked famished, had been my argument.
And that was the extent of my childhood experience with pets.
So…since we couldn’t have pets, I often treated my bike like one, weird as that sounds. I always thought bicycles were better than dogs, in fact, because you can ride bikes! I loved mine. I talked to him, treated him like a beloved member of my family. I even named him. I called my bicycle “Burner.” God only knows how I came up with that. I suppose I envisioned the bright blue bike as some mighty rocket from an Isaac Asimov novel, flaring out the back as it took off faster than light.
Burner was a 1975 Schwinn Scrambler Mom had given me for my tenth birthday. He sported a larger gear than the more streamlined Stingray model idolized by most kids my age, as well as a razor fender, a high-flanged front hub, and original BMX-style handlebars with those hard rubber grips that made you feel like more than just a kid on a bicycle. They made you feel like an adventurer, a rugged explorer whose hometown was an uncharted land of delicious danger just waiting to be conquered.
Burner was fast, too—did I mention that? Oh, yes. Back then I was quite sure he might have been the fastest bike ever built. I can’t begin to tell you how many scraped knees and bloody elbows were the results of our adventures around my hometown. Once I even broke my collarbone over on Orosel Avenue, when I decided to brave what us kids called Evil Knievel Hill, but that never stopped me from hopping right back on Burner and doing it all over again.
I didn’t know it then, the night of the Apple Gala, but we would only be together for another year or two before I retired my bicycle to the storage shed out back of our house. In Burner’s place would come that mysterious-sweet discovery of the burgeoning adolescent, GIRLS, followed by my first car (a’72 Nova with a terminally-ill transmission a neighbor offered me in exchange for mowing his lawn all summer).
I never regretted a single moment I shared with my best friend, even when our adventures resulted in numerous stitches or the loss of precious lifeblood.
Battle scars, I thought of the many injuries I obtained atop mighty Burner. And that made it all okay.
****
After the Gala I rode Burner out of Midnight’s business district, past the new K-Mart Plaza on Harris Boulevard, down the alley between the Midnight Drug & Sundry and Hank’s Hobby Shop, until I found our trail. It began behind the vacant lot of an abandoned feed store, a tin building with a rotten loading dock out front speckled with broken glass and soggy cigarette butts. Burner and I didn’t create the trail we used to get to my Old Shack—it had been there as long as I could remember—but we helped keep it a trail. I often imagined that some giant snail had once crawled up from the bowels of the Earth to visit Midnight, but the founders of our town shot at the poor creature simply because they did not understand it. Where our trail began was where the pitiful behemoth had dragged itself into the Snake River Woods to nurse its wounds; where the trail stopped was where it had lain down to die. A crazy story, I know, but it was fun.
As I always did, at the point where the forest swallowed up our path completely, I hopped off of Burner and proceeded to walk him the rest of the way. By the time I reached the edge of that grove in the middle of the woods where the Well and the Old Shack sat like old friends awaiting my return, a soft rain had begun to fall on Midnight. My clothes grew damp as Burner and I walked, and my hair soon lay plastered to my skull as if a schoolyard bully had spilled something there during one mean, messy prank.
I picked up my pace.
Finally the Old Shack was upon me, a squat black shape in the darkness that at first resembled a tired old beast stopped in the clearing to catch its breath.
“Here we are,” I said to Burner, stopping within a hundred yards or so of the Well. I patted the seat of my beloved bicycle, admired the way his slick blue body glistened in the night’s falling rain.
But then, I slowed as I drew closer. As I noticed something about my Secret Place.
Something wrong.
I frowned, leaned Burner up against a massive oak tree to our left. I knelt down beside my bike as if Burner might protect me.
There were lights on in there, inside my Old Shack. Flickering lights, as if from candles or kerosene lanterns.
Someone was inside.
“What the hell?” I whispered.
Never before had I encountered another person intruding upon my Secret Place. It was the first time, in fact, that I had seen any sign of civilization this deep in the Snake River Woods, with the exception of an occasional private plane coming in for a landing at the Midnight Independent Hangar. Not only was I angered by this invasion of my territory…
…I knew, immediately, that something was not right here.
“Stay here, Burner,” I said, as if he might defy the laws of physics to leave me there alone. I suppose I wanted to imagine my bike as a living companion, because somehow that made me feel better about the developments at hand.
Above the whisper of the midnight rain through the trees and the chorus of crickets chirping around me, I could hear at least two different voices coming from inside my Old Shack…
Mumbling, conspiratorial tones. An angry curse every few seconds.
Under that, music. Motown. Tinny, as if on a cheap radio.
Slowly I made my way to the Well, leaving Burner propped against the oak tree behind me. I approached the Old Shack at an angle from which I could see in at least one of its dusty yellow windows, and each step seemed to take hours. I flinched at the horrid crunching of leaves beneath my feet—a sound so terribly loud, so obvious. I knew the intruders inside were bound to hear me.
Finally I reached the Well, knelt down behind it. The rain pattered down insi
de there like tiny hands clapping against its stone walls. Like ghostly children trying to escape its cold black depths. I held my breath, squinted through the closest window of my Old Shack to see what was afoot…
The blurry tops of two heads were all I could see at first. Two men? Maybe. Until I ventured closer, though, I could not make out their features through that filthy glass. The window was covered with a dusty film, thin gray curtains of cobwebs above a silver-black carpet of dead flies, rat turds, and cricket carcasses.
“’Kinda goddamn mess you got us into, Henry?” I heard one of the men speak then, a deep voice with a gruff Southern accent that sounded very familiar.
I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe.
“Jesus H. Christ.” Deep, basso.
I knew that voice! But from where?
I still didn’t move. I still didn’t breathe. I listened. Waited.
“I said I was sorry, Dad,” came the reply at last. This voice was higher-pitched than the first, whiny. It sounded like a teenager.
“You’re sorry. I suppose you think that makes everything okay? You fucked up, Henry, and I’m the one who has to fix this shit!”
“I know, Dad.” The younger voice again. “I wish I could take it back.”
That did it. I had to see more. Curiosity killed the cat, as the saying goes, but some would argue that inquisitive ole’ feline retired from this world so satisfied…
“What a fuckin’ mess,” said the man inside as I moved closer to the cabin. A cough. “My God.”
As I drew closer to my Old Shack, I recognized the Marvin Gaye song playing on the radio inside, a soulful melody so ominously out-of-place here. Marvin was singing about lovin’ and kissin’ and sexual healin’.
But then his song went silent in mid-verse.
“For Chrissake, turn off that nigger shit. I can’t even hear myself think.”
