“You think there’s a store here?” he asked Toby.
Without answering, Toby began to stroll forward, and Uncle Lud followed.
The remnants of a dirty snow covered the wooden steps up to the company store, and though they creaked and buckled, the stairs held and the door opened on the first try, its wavy glass panes shuddering. Not much on the shelves—dusty tins and cardboard boxes with their sides sunken in—but the clerk, a long-faced, unshaven man in spattered coveralls, wearing a wool hat and work gloves in the unheated store, pulled a dusty bag of potato chips from under the counter and sold that and a large bottle of seltzer to Uncle Lud for the money in his pocket. Toby bought the store’s entire supply of spicy jerky, all eight of them in homemade wrapping, and was tearing at one with his teeth before they left the store. As they meandered back over the bridge, a breeze off the falls misting their hair, Uncle Lud privately hoped the big boys were still asleep and would stay that way until he’d finished off the chips.
But the boys weren’t asleep. And they weren’t in the car, either.
“Taking a piss, I guess,” said Toby, squinting off into the woods on the other side of the falls. Footprints in the snow seemed to lead that way.
Early afternoon and already dusky and growing colder by the second.
“We’d better rouse them,” Toby said after a few minutes had passed. “We don’t have time for sightseeing. Damn kids.”
He guessed they’d gone on to get a better look at the falls. Even half-frozen, the falls were a sight. He hoped those boys weren’t foolish enough to go exploring. All of a sudden, an urgency came over them there in the fading light, and both Toby and Uncle Lud bolted for the dimming trail, calling out the boys’ names.
They followed footprints to a deer trail and were soon trotting along in the gloaming light, twisting with the trail until the footprints disappeared. For a moment, Toby and Uncle Lud paused, their frozen breath aching in their lungs as they cast around for any clue. Uncle Lud saw the broken branches, and they didn’t hesitate. They couldn’t hesitate. It was that swift decision to beat through the broken branches, sliding and falling, that ultimately saved the two reserve boys, who they finally saw ahead of them, coatless, both still in their red hockey jerseys, perched above them, mere feet from the falls. If it had been summertime, the boys never would have heard them. As it was, the waterfall’s muted winter roar kept them from noticing the newcomers at first.
“Hey!” Toby shouted, but the boys didn’t turn, and Uncle Lud noticed how brilliant the light was beyond them. Away from the trees, daylight still held sway. He and Toby climbed closer, their every step now more treacherous. As they climbed, Uncle Lud found himself whispering, Turn around, turn back. Turn around, turn back. A mantra in his mind, but Toby soon was stock-still, staring at him, because Uncle Lud was singing the words aloud now: “Turn around, turn back, turn around, turn back,” and the boys were slowly changing course, twisting away from the falls, back toward Toby and Uncle Lud. As they did, both seemed to come awake, and one almost fell backward in his horror at seeing the falls so close to him.
Uncle Lud continued his singsong, and Toby reached forward to snag first one boy, then the other, pulling them as gently as he could back down the hill into the warren of broken branches they had all ascended. It took them forever to regain the trail, which tried to disappear beneath them, and it was fully dusk when they reached the car, the two big boys shivering and blubbering now in the backseat. Toby pulled blankets from the trunk and covered them. He found an old tarp beside the spare wheel well and pressed that around them too. Then, he and Uncle Lud got back into the car and hightailed it out of Wilton’s Cross. They drove a full hour more on the highway before Toby stopped for coffee, and the boys managed to speak.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Toby began.
Tears leapt to one boy’s eyes. The other coughed. Toby waited.
“We woke up,” the coughing boy said, “because of the light. We thought we were home and you were shining a flashlight to get us out of the car.”
“Then we were outside,” the other boy continued, “and the light was . . . pulling us.”
“I saw it moving into the wood, and I knew we were supposed to follow it.”
“She was ahead of us the whole way.”
“She?” Toby asked. “Who?
The boys looked shocked and miserable. They were certain—they were . . . sure, yeah, sure—they’d seen the retreating figure of a woman with long black hair.
“Yeah,” Toby kept prodding, “a woman? Not an animal?”
“I don’t know,” the tear-streaked one said. “I don’t know. She kept calling me, and I don’t remember nothing else until I turned around and my legs began to shake.”
“Dumb-ass kids,” Toby swore. “You could have been killed.”
But he knew and Uncle Lud knew they weren’t at fault. They’d felt it too, that yarning tug through the dusky light.
Later, after they’d delivered the boys back to the reserve, Toby asked Uncle Lud, “How did you know to do that, boy? Who taught you that song?”
But Uncle Lud couldn’t say, any more than the reserve boys could explain Snow Woman, the will-o’-the-wisp who tried to woo them from this life. They’d have chills for months afterward, even into the summer. A misery set into their bones that even drink couldn’t ease. Uncle Lud played a lot of basketball then, and he remembers getting into a pickup game with one of the reserve boys from that afternoon in Wilton’s Cross. He remembers how the boy wore two shirts even in the heat, how his hands shivered on the ball, and how when their shoulders touched in a crashing jump, a cold, clean shock ran though him.
When the girls began to go missing off the highway outside town, this is what I thought of: snow and ice, a half-frozen waterfall, a flickering light, a bone-sick desire to destroy. I knew, of course, that Uncle Lud’s story had nothing to do with the vanishing girls, that it would be bullshit romanticizing to imagine they’d simply wandered away following a will-o’-the-wisp, the worst kind of rationalizing, and that it was no Snow Woman but a real monster out there. Still, for weeks, even as wailing began and fights broke out and grief saturated another family, I had gone to sleep thinking, not about that lonely road but a beckoning light that could slash across time and snatch away. And I hoped. I hoped.
“You met Snow Woman,” Uncle Lud had said.
“Nah,” I told him, feeling a cold sweat behind my neck, “that wasn’t her. That wasn’t the girl we met.”
“Are you sure?” Uncle Lud managed, looking even more tired and concerned.
“I’m still here, aren’t I?” I said, immediately hearing the echo of Hana Swann in the woods, declaring her own invincibility.
“She’s just a friend of Jackie’s,” I was insisting when I noticed Uncle Lud was drifting off again.
And then remembered Hana Swann’s white arm, that laugh, and I thought: Jackie.
The image of her trudging away from the truck beside Hana Swann twined with a fear I hadn’t felt before. It was a different kind of heartache from what came over me when my mother first told me about Uncle Lud’s illness. It was different from my constant anxiety about being near Tessa. This was raw and consuming. I could feel it roiling in my gut and rushing up my spine. What was I worried about? Jackie was the toughest girl I knew—Hana Swann sure as hell couldn’t hurt her—but still here it was: a big, heartless fear that swamped me and yet wouldn’t show its face.
As Uncle Lud’s breathing eased, I fixed his covers, adjusted the pillow behind his head, and left him sleeping in his chair. My mother had gone back to work long ago, but not before shooting both Uncle Lud and me a glance that said her heart was hollowed out and it might just be our fault. That look pushed me to my bedroom and the old computer, to my undone physics assignments, where I stared and thought of Uncle Lud, of Jackie’s sideways glances at Hana Swann, of Tes
sa. I thought of Trevor Nowicki, of my own father and his increasingly perfunctory visits, of my mother’s chronicle of butchered animals, of Tessa’s foster families. Gerald Fucking Flacker. I scrolled through screens, flipped pages, lost again and again, until I began to wonder if Disappointment was a scalar or a vector quantity; if Direction could make a human heart go bad; if the Acceleration Equation could illuminate all the ways to avoid disappearing. And in the notebook (mostly blank) that my mother liked to shuffle through, I sketched my first full equation, the first that made fractional sense to me at least:
Average acceleration = velocity + desire = vf - vi + d
time * wasted dreamst /wd1
The equation looked so right, like the first true thought I’d ever had, that I entered it into the daily log of section problems I was supposed to solve and keep, and I sent it off to the course instructor, a woman named Leila Chen who lived, I imagined, in that distant university city where this course, like the many others my mother had ordered over the years, originated. While Leila Chen frequently sent me e-mails, reminding me of deadlines I hadn’t made and offering oblique help in her stilted prose, this was my first missive to her, and I was still in the grip of a kind of euphoric stupor when I heard Bryan’s truck grabbing the gravel off Lamplight Road, and I kind of woke up, the way I imagined those two reserve boys did the afternoon they perched on a precipice, a cold ache half-formed around their eager hearts.
Turn around, turn around.
Hey, Leo. Leo Smartass, Bryan was hissing through the screen window behind me, turn around, you.
THE FIRST BAD IDEA
“Here’s the thing,” Bryan declared. “We make him disappear.”
I wasn’t in the mood to conspire, but Bryan didn’t seem to notice. He pulled a chair up beside the desk and began to hover in a way that reminded me of my mother, of an assignment on the way.
“If one girl after another can vanish off the highway without a trace, then why can’t the same happen to that fucker?” Bryan said.
“No one knows what’s going on with the girls,” I said.
Bryan scowled. “We know,” he said.
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Bryan said. “He has an accident. Let’s say his truck skids off Ledge Road—who would find it?”
If Flacker’s policeman cousin Mitchell went looking, even if he called out the entire force and sent out the kind of search parties they’d never mustered for the girls, by the time they hit Ledge Road, Bryan said, a “Good Samaritan” might have cleaned up the edge that Flacker’s truck had vaulted so that no sign of its slide would be immediately visible.
“They’d need a helicopter. Even Mitchell Flacker doesn’t have that.”
Days would pass before a more thorough examination would be launched. Meanwhile, Gerald Flacker would certainly have expired, if not from the impact, from the same dastardly care he gave to the Magnuson kids: he’d starve, pinned in the wreckage.
Bryan hadn’t worked out all the details, but the gist of this first plan had been that he’d inspire Flacker to give chase on Ledge Road, barreling directly into a trap that they would set and that Bryan would know to avoid.
“How?” I asked.
“We’ll steal from him. His drugs. His tools. Maybe even his dogs.”
“His dogs?”
In spite of myself, I began to imagine the problem in terms Leila Chen might applaud. If a truck going 40 miles an hour on a narrow mountain road . . . Almost immediately, however, I was overtaken with my usual issue regarding vector quantities. Direction I could maybe guess, but who could quantify Flacker’s rage or Flacker’s meanness or this new, near-suicidal determination of Bryan’s? Pure magnitude I would call that, and so, I’d guess, a scalar quantity only. And if—as Bryan sketched out this plan—I was along for the ride, would my innate reluctance, my tendency toward inertia and backward movements, deter Bryan’s Acceleration? And what about the Force of Desire? Whose would be greater—Bryan’s? Flacker’s? Or my own hopeless will to stay alive long enough to woo Tessa?
While Bryan yammered on, I made up equations, all variants of F = ma, a fundamental that tumbled around in my head continually and never quite made sense.
“Your truck won’t make the curve,” I finally declared with no real evidence at all.
“Well,” Bryan said as he watched my pencil dart around aimlessly on the notebook page, “all right, it might not be the best plan . . .”
“Yes,” I agreed. “You’re crazy. It’s suicide.”
Another thought came to me. “Who gave you this idea?”
“It may not be exactly right, but it’s something, isn’t it?” Bryan continued, his eyes sparking. “It’s beautiful, you know. Turnabout is fair play. We finally do something, you know?”
“Leo,” Bryan went on, “how much can Flacker destroy before someone strikes back?”
Turnabout. Something about the phrase and Bryan’s jumpiness, like a spring under pressure, jolted me. My progress through Leila Chen’s assignments might have been stuck, but in those early weeks of summer, I’d wandered through the physics course from back to front, reading pieces and scoffing at story problems I’d never halfway decipher, let alone master, and stopping whenever a real story seemed to appear. Now I found myself remembering a lesson—or at least my interpretation of a lesson—about something called Hooke’s law, about Stress and Strain and proportional elasticity.
Tit for tat, I thought. Turnabout.
A look of semi-understanding must have crossed my face, because Bryan glowed as surely as if I’d jumped up and agreed to shoot Flacker myself.
“You see?” he almost shouted. “You see?”
“You can’t knock him off a cliff,” I said. “Or poison him. He’s too damn mean. And whatever you did, you’d have to arrange it so you’d be far away at the time. Plan it to the second, so that no one could connect you.”
“Okay.” Bryan leaned forward, listening.
Displacement, as far as I understood, describes the length of an imaginary path—a description that still strikes me as funny and apt and also completely nonsensical, because how can you measure a route that doesn’t yet exist, and wouldn’t you have to know for sure where it was you started from? Displacement wasn’t only the measurement of that imagined journey, I’d read, it also was a relative point in space. That didn’t help me much. One thing I did understand, or thought I did, was this part of Hooke’s law: If you placed Weight on a spring, the measurement and relative position of that imagined path would be proportional to the Stress and Strain of that Weight. It occurred to me that if the pressure building in Bryan finally landed on Flacker, just like that Weight on a spring, Flacker might be blasted to the other side of the moon.
“And you’d have to annihilate him,” I found myself saying, “otherwise he’d be coming after you. And then there’s the Nagles and that Brit. They’ll come after you for sure.”
Because that was the other part of Hooke’s law: Restoration. All that Stress and Strain would be matched and returned, flinging itself right back at Bryan, a hard kind of justice.
Imagine a pendulum in the bottom of a clock, swinging from side to side, every bit of Displacement ultimately Restored. Hooke’s law didn’t apply to every material or situation, but it seemed to me now to perfectly describe Tessa and me, that constant movement between us, away and back, away and back. I fucking hated Hooke’s law, I realized, and the way it was ruling my life.
“Sure,” Bryan was agreeing. “It would have to be all of them.” He was grinning now.
So, imagine, I thought, Bryan sending Flacker and the Nagles into a nether region and then, whoops, the whole bunch slamming back to Earth, meaner than ever.
Figure that one out, genius.
“No, no, no. Not happening, Bry,” I concluded, coming back to myself. “It’ll be the end of the world before those fellows go down.
Fire and brimstone and all that shit. No one can calculate past that.”
But Bryan was still nodding as if we were both signing on to a plan.
“You’re right,” he said. “It would have to be complete destruction.”
He was in his own hot daze, staring out the open window he’d crawled through as if the world had suddenly become brilliant with possibility. I glanced out with him, but all I saw was the old shed where my father kept his tools and unused fertilizer, his miner’s paraphernalia, all the trappings of a man who once imagined he had a life here. The Old Miner’s Shed, my mother and I called it, as if it were an actual historical relic. I sometimes dreamed I could spirit Tessa there, that we could hide away in that shack for hours at a time, where no one—not my mother nor that raucous, needy crowd at Tessa’s house—would find us. For a long moment, the shed and its possibilities mesmerized me again. By the time I turned back to Bryan, his excitement had hardened into purpose.
“You got another one of those?” he asked, motioning toward the notebook.
In the living room, Uncle Lud began coughing.
“Hey, hey, it’s story time again,” Bryan said as I got to my feet. “See if your uncle’s got a good one about how to get a girl, huh?”
“You still picking up Ursie?” I said, glancing at the clock by my bed.
“Ah, shit,” he said, scrambling to his feet. “Is that clock right?”
“Hey, listen,” I said. I wanted to talk him out of whatever new scheme he was hatching, but even as I began, whatever argument I’d had in mind fell away, a peculiar lassitude sliding over me.
Let him go, a voice inside me said. Look how happy he is. It was true. I hadn’t seen Bryan so directed since before his mother got sick, so instead of arguing with him about Flacker or Tessa or even Uncle Lud, I only shook my head and handed him a fresh notebook from the pile of new notebooks my mother added to continually.
A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain Page 8
