by Newman,James
It’s a deep voice. A voice I know.
I groaned, sat up, but then let out a pained yelp when my forehead struck something hard and unyielding. Metal.
I lay in a fetal position. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t see. Everything was black. I inspected my surroundings blindly, with my palms and the tips of my fingers, and I could feel that same warm metal on all sides of me. Less than a foot or two away in all directions. It vibrated against my palms.
It was as if I had been buried alive in a tomb that throbbed with life.
Then suddenly I realized where I was, from the gentle rocking motion of my steel prison.
I was trapped inside his trunk. In his patrol car.
My heart began to race. The air was thick, hot. Fuzzy, somehow. Like trying to breathe cotton. I whimpered softly. The tires hummed beneath me, hissing on the wet pavement below as if the vehicle traveled on a bed of writhing snakes. My left foot tingled painfully, pleading for circulation with a silent pins-and-needles scream. It had gone to sleep, but I did not have enough room to move around and try to wake it up. Something slammed against the right side of my head every few seconds—something that felt and smelled like a can of gas—and once I nearly bit my tongue in half, tasting blood, when we hit a pothole that must have been the size of a swimming pool.
I slammed my fists upward, into the lid of the trunk. Trying to bust free. But of course my efforts were futile. Before long I grew tired, breathless. My hands were numb, and the heat in my sweltering black prison seemed to double. Triple.
“Help me,” I cried. My voice was hoarse. “P-p-please…s-somebody…help…”
Sweat dripped into my eyes. Into my mouth. Salty. Bitter. Blood trickled from my nose, onto my upper lip, where Baker had hit me. The entire bottom half of my face felt soft and swollen, like a rotten peach.
I tried my damnedest not to panic. It would do no good.
Long before we got there, I knew where he was taking me. I knew it as surely as I knew I would not live to see the morning sun.
We were going back to the place where it all began.
Back to the Snake River Woods.
****
Baker’s patrol car jerked to a stop a few minutes later after I came to. My heart raced as I waited for him to come for me. But he seemed to be taking his time about it. Toying with me. He gunned the engine once, let it die down, and then the vehicle reversed. Gravel crunched beneath its tires, ticked and clacked and popped against its undercarriage, echoing through my throbbing skull. Then we stopped again. Hard. I slammed so violently into the backside of a taillight I do not know to this day how my nose remained unbroken. That gas can beside my left ear thumped into my temple, and I felt some of the flammable liquid inside slosh onto the nape of my neck.
The smell of it filled the trunk. My nose. My mouth.
The radio grew quiet. The engine’s rumbling ceased.
A few seconds later I heard his car door open. The vehicle wobbled slightly, and I felt myself rise an inch or so as he got out.
Thunder barked in the distance, like the long, gruff yawn of a dragon awakening from a century’s sleep on the other side of Midnight. The rain drummed upon the car, over my head, like ghostly fingertips taunting me and my dilemma.
A key snicked into the lock before me then. It turned. So loud, right there in front of my face.
A click, and the trunk lid popped open at last.
Cold drizzle struck my face, filled my eyes. I blinked it away, recoiled when he smiled down at me.
“There you are,” he said.
“Wh-what do you want?”
“Mr. Nosey himself. The bane of my existence.”
“Please, Sheriff,” I said, “Whatever you’re about to do…”
“It ends tonight, you little fucker. Hope you said your prayers before you went to bed.”
He pulled me out of the trunk, by my left arm, before I had a chance to say another word.
And then he dragged me into the wet black bowels of the forest.
Toward the Old Shack and the Well.
****
Around us, the rain sighed through the treetops. Lightning flickered directly overhead, illuminating our way to what I had once called my Secret Place. A crack of thunder split the night, like the sound of a gargantuan tree falling somewhere nearby.
Baker seemed unfazed, however, by the storm’s increasing fury. He had a job to do.
“What are you gonna do to me?” I asked him, but my voice was barely more than a pathetic whine.
“I haven’t decided yet. But you’ll know soon enough.”
“Please…”
“It didn’t have to be like this, Kyle,” he said, his gun-belt squeaking and change jingling in his pants as he walked, “Things could have been just fine, if you hadn’t stuck your damn nose in my business. Peeking in that window. Talking to Mike…like I know you did…making me do something I wish I didn’t have to do. That guy was my best friend. One helluva deputy. But you put me in a predicament, you backed me into a fucking corner and there was only one way out. Then of course there was your little phone call. And let’s not forget the paint. That took balls, I gotta admit. Rain’s washed most of it off by now, but do you realize how hard it’s gonna be to keep your little message from leaving a stain?”
“Please, Sheriff Baker—” I started.
“Where am I gonna take it? Who’s gonna touch it up for me? Not like I can ride around in broad daylight with that…word on the side of my car.”
He was practically dragging me now, along the ground, my feet sliding through the carpet of wet leaves and pine needles along the forest floor.
“Fuck this,” he said after a few minutes. He let go of my arm, shoved me forward. “You’re a big boy. You can walk.”
“Please…look…”
He pulled his pistol from its holster, pointed it at me. It was huge. Black. Evil.
“Go.”
I did as I was told. He didn’t have to tell me which way. I knew where we were headed.
“What are you going to do to me?” I asked him.
“No questions. Just walk. You’ll find out when we get there.”
I wept softly as I staggered toward the heart of the forest. I wished I could be back home. In my bed. Safe.
Before long, I could see the Old Shack up ahead. A crooked black shape darker even than the infinite ebony night around it. It almost looked as if it had been waiting for us, crouched like a hungry predator in that grove in the center of the woods.
I expected it to spring for me any second.
I swallowed nervously, slowed my pace, but the sheriff shoved me forward again. Hard. His hand was like a blow from a sledgehammer between my shoulder blades. I slipped in the wet leaves, nearly fell, but caught myself just in time.
“Ya know, Sheriff,” I said, desperately trying to buy myself some time as we approached the Old Shack, “Even if you kill me, you won’t get away with it. I wrote a note. About what you did to Cassie Rourke. How you lied about Calvin Mooney. I have it at home, in a safe place. The whole town will know you’re a murderer.”
“Is that so?”
“Y-yeah,” I said.
“Lemme tell you something,” said Sheriff Baker. “This town will know what I want them to know, son. I rule this town.”
“Bastard,” I said, under my breath.
“Besides, who’s to say when we’re finished here…I don’t go back, find the note, kill your mother, and torch the whole goddamn house?”
I gasped, stumbled, went down. My knees sank into the mud at the edge of the forest grove.
Baker laughed.
“Get up.” He motioned with the gun.
I obeyed. But my knees were weak. And I wasn’t so sure anymore, had the Old Shack not stood less than a hundred feet ahead of us, that I could continue any further.
“Walk,” Baker said again.
And I did.
****
He shoved me roughly inside the cabin when we c
ame to it. I fell, and splinters from the shack’s rotting wooden floor dug into my palms.
I turned, preparing to die, but then I could just barely see in the darkness that he had put away his gun.
He wiped his hands on his pants, pulled something long and black from his belt with a little snap. A flashlight. He turned it on, shined it around the shack for a minute in a clockwise motion. Dust motes danced in its bright white beam. The light lingered the longest in each corner of the room, as if witnesses to the sheriff’s scheme might have been lurking there just below eye-level. Then he held it on me.
I winced. One hand came up in front of my face, shielding my eyes from the light.
“It’s a shame it has to be like this,” Baker said from behind that blinding corona. “I really like your mama.”
Lightning flickered outside. Thunder boomed above the forest, and the shed’s battered tin roof rattled as if it were trying to speak.
When he finally turned the flashlight off I scooted away from him as far as I could go until I slammed into the western wall of the Old Shack. I kept wishing Dan would arrive to save the day. My big brother, the super hero. That’s how it always happened in the movies. At the last second.
But this was real life. This wasn’t a movie.
My big brother never came.
“I can see myself marrying her some day, you know,” said the sheriff. “I mean, I haven’t said anything to her about it, and I don’t wanna count my chickens before they’re hatched, but the way things have been going so far, anything is possible.”
“Where is she?” I asked him. “D-did you hurt her?”
“Of course not,” he replied. “She’s sleeping like a baby. Won’t make a peep till mornin’.”
I scowled at him.
“Darlene sure does like her hooch, doesn’t she?” He chuckled, shook his head. “But I guess we all got our vices.”
“It’s not right,” I shouted at him, suddenly wishing if he were going to do something to me he would just get it over with and quit stalling. “You killed Cassie Rourke, and you blamed Rooster! He’s never hurt anyone. It’s not fair. It’s not fair!”
He raised his eyebrows. Shrugged. Made a clicking sound with his tongue. “There’s no such thing as ‘fair’ in this world, son. It’s not about who’s right or who’s wrong. Who’s guilty and who’s innocent. It’s about who gets caught.”
He turned to stare out one of the Old Shack’s dirty yellow windows. The same window I had peered through the night I had seen him kill Cassie Belle Rourke. The one through which all of this had started, when I allowed my curiosity to get the best of me. I didn’t dare take my eyes off of him for a second.
What came next? I wondered. What was he waiting for?
“Where’s that damn Henry?” Baker mumbled to himself.
“Please don’t do this,” I said, from my place in the corner of the shack farthest away from him. “P-please…I promise I won’t tell—”
“Don’t even start with that, Kyle,” he said. So calmly. But he didn’t turn around. “I think you know it’s much too late for that now.”
Once again, lightning lit up the night outside the Old Shack. Flickered five times fast. Died.
Burt Baker didn’t move. He didn’t even blink. He was a massive black silhouette looming over me as he stared out at the forest, a nightmare shape ten feet tall.
A crack of thunder, then. The loudest yet, like a violent rip in the fabric of night itself.
“Good,” Baker said. “Here comes Henry now.”
Indeed, I could hear the sound of someone walking through the forest. Leaves rustling, twigs snapping every few seconds beneath shoes. Maybe a tuneless whistle. Coming closer. Approaching the Old Shack.
“Jesus Christ. Could he make any more fucking noise?” The sheriff glanced back toward me, sighed. He seemed to be talking to himself, though, more than anything. “He’s a good kid, you know. He really is. He’s just made some bad decisions. A bit too impulsive. He doesn’t think before he acts. And one of these days I’m afraid I’m not gonna be there to pull his skinny ass out of the fire.”
I watched him, wondered if I should have made a run for it after all, while his back was turned. But I knew he would have caught me before I even made it to the door. He would have wrapped his giant arms around me, just like he had with Cassie Rourke, and he would…he would…
A cloud of utter hopelessness descended over me. I felt so cold. So alone.
“A good kid,” Sheriff Baker said again. “But, so far, one stupid-as-hell adult.”
He looked back at me, almost as if he expected me to agree. Or laugh.
I did neither. I just glared at him. Hating him.
He pulled out his flashlight again, shined it in Henry’s face when his son’s skinny shape at last filled the doorway.
“Whoa,” Henry said, covering his eyes. “Hi, Dad.”
Henry waited till his father had put away his flashlight before he stepped inside the shack with us. He glanced down at me, gave me a barely noticeable look of distaste, then quickly looked back toward the sheriff. His hair was wet, sticking up here and there in stiff black spikes. In one hand he held a bottle of Coca-Cola. He had changed clothes since the last time I had seen him, but there was still some dirt in his hair from our encounter up at Storch’s Rim. Raindrops beaded the sleeves of his leather jacket as if he had bathed in a sea of precious jewels, and under it he wore a faded black Styx T-shirt.
“Took your time gettin’ here, didn’t you?” his father asked him.
“Sorry.”
“Trying to wake the whole town, were you?”
Henry shook his head, ran one hand through his dripping wet hair, and glanced my way again. He took a sip from his Coke.
He said, “So what are we gonna do?”
“We’re gonna take care of business, Henry,” replied the sheriff. “That’s what we’re gonna do.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Think you can handle it?”
“It depends on what you mean.”
“I think you know what I mean.”
“Oh.”
Baker stepped toward his son. “You got any better ideas?”
“Well…n-no. Not really.”
“You ain’t gonna pussy out on me, are you?”
“No, Dad.”
Henry looked sick. The sheriff stared at him long and hard. Overhead, the rain struck the Old Shack’s tin roof with a sound like gunshots from a small-caliber pistol. Plip. Plap. Pop.
“Listen to me, son. This is our only option. I don’t like it either, but it’s got to be done.”
“I know, Dad, b-but—”
“You wanna spend the rest of your life in prison?”
“What?”
“You heard me. They’d really like you in prison, you know. I’ll bet you’d make some nigger a real nice bitch.”
Henry was repulsed. “Jesus, Dad…”
“And do you know what they would do to an officer of the law in a place like that?”
Henry shuddered, as if he could imagine what they might do but he didn’t wish to dwell on it. His head jerked upward three times fast.
“I wouldn’t last a fucking day.”
Henry started chewing at his nails. His eyes never left the Old Shack’s dusty wooden floor.
“You see now, right? You see this has got to be done?”
“I…I guess,” Henry said.
I started to cry again. “Please…”
“He needs to just disappear, I think,” said the sheriff, his brow furrowed in deep thought. “That’d be the easiest way…”
My eyes went wide. Henry’s, too. I knew what he was going to say, somehow, a second before he said it.
“Let’s take him to the well.”
“The…the well?”
“Think about it. Thing’s gotta be two hundred feet deep, at least. It could be years before they find the little bastard’s body…”
I made a high-pitched whimpering noise
.
“When they do find him, one day, it’ll look like an accident. That’s all. Kid was foolin’ around where he shouldn’t have been playin’, fell down in and broke his neck. Fuckin’ shame. Case closed.”
Henry stared at the Old Shack’s dusty wooden floor. His head jerked upward twice. Then again. He winced. Stood still.
“Yeah. I think this’ll work,” Burt Baker went on. “Of course, I’ll have to console Darlene. She already lost her husband a few years back. Won’t be easy burying her youngest son, I’m sure.”
They both looked down at me then. I cowered against the Old Shack’s far wall.
The sheriff sighed.
“Enough bullshittin’,” he said, stepping toward me. “Let’s do this.”
****
I remember, as they hauled me out to the Well that night, how I kept trying to will the lightning to strike them, to roast them alive.
But I knew it would not happen.
The rain started coming down harder than ever as Burt Baker dragged me to the Well. It felt like needles lashing my face, and sounded like the roar of a phantom lion in the trees around us.
“Please don’t do this,” I cried. “Please…”
“I want you to stay quiet,” said Sheriff Baker.
At last we stood above that deep, dark hole in the ground. The sound of the storm swirled about within the Well like a phantom voice calling out to me from the depths of the Earth, crooning some forlorn midnight song.
Henry finished off his Coke, tossed the bottle over his shoulder, and it thumped up against the Old Shack.
“What the fuck are you doing?” the sheriff asked his son.
“What?”
“Are you really that stupid, Henry? We don’t want anybody to know we’ve been here.”
Henry looked hurt. “Oh. Yeah.”
“Don’t just stand there. Pick it up!”
Henry rolled his eyes, did as he was told. He stared at the bottle as if it were his own severed hand as he rejoined us by the Well. He looked pale.
The rain pelted down upon us like hail.
The sheriff took a deep breath. “Okay. Remember. This is for the best.”
“I know.” Henry’s voice cracked as he said it. His left hand clenched and unclenched several times until he shoved it into his pocket self-consciously.
