He was only six or seven that summer when Ma came home after a long day working at the hardware store in Thread. Josh no longer recalled where Pa might have been, maybe working back in the woods or out fishing. It was getting late in summer, and the raspberries were nearing the end of the run. But when Ma reached home a little after five there were still several sunlit hours ahead. She asked Josh to head out to the patch and pick whatever berries remained. In exchange, she promised him his pie. She equipped her boy with a plastic bucket and then headed into the kitchen to start preparations for supper. Josh still remembered how tired she looked that night, having worked all day, but yet determined to make a meal for her men that included a special pie.
Under the clouds of that afternoon, he wondered what it would take to break her. It was a strange thought for a little kid. Even all these years later, Josh looked back on his former self with a sense of pride at that early precociousness. He went to the berry patch and worked hard picking those raspberries. Ignoring the thorns pricking and scratching his hands, he found every last one of them. His filled his bucket; it was enough for a pie as well as plenty left to fill several bowls with fresh berries and thick cream for their morning breakfast.
Ma came out of the house to check on his progress. “How’s the berries coming along?” she asked.
“Fine,” he yelled back.
Then he walked toward her slowly—presenting the bucket before him, looking down with pride at that luscious fruit, and inhaling the beautiful smell of overripe fruit. Ma was smiling. He remembered that.
Just as he reached the gravel driveway to cross over to the kitchen door, he made a grand show of tripping. Anyone could tell he did it on purpose, and he insured that he flung that bucket in such a way that all the berries tumbled out into the gravel. He fell to the ground, rolled across the fallen fruit, crushed their red stain into his clean clothes, and destroying any chance for a pie that night.
And he stood up and smiled. Grinned, really.
So Josh didn’t get pie that night, but he got to see the look on his mother’s face. That was almost as good. Ma had an expression of horror and fear . . . and resignation . . . and love. Even knowing what happened in that moment on the driveway, she still pretended to love him. She rushed forward to be sure he wasn’t hurt, checking if he had any knee scrapes that required an application of stinging Mercurochrome.
Josh felt satisfied. The afternoon stunt was better than eating a slice or two of raspberry custard pie, and it scratched his itch to see where he could lead people, what he could make them do, and how they would respond. He didn’t repeat such tricks often, not because he couldn’t nor because he thought there was anything wrong with his actions. But he was easily bored and he needed to continually find interesting new problems to solve. There was no satisfaction in doing the same thing over and over. It became harder and harder to invent satisfying and worthwhile new challenges.
As the growing up years went by, an uneasy truce took hold in the Gunderson household. When they thought he wasn’t paying attention, both Ma and Pa looked at Josh with suspicion, but what they never realized was that he was also always watching them. In his presence, they carefully skirted betraying any hint about what troubled them. At times he considered secreting a tape recorder in their bedroom, because he suspected that only in the twilight hours, alone in their bedroom, did they dare to whisper to one another their true thoughts about their son. But he never took that step. It was more intriguing to imagine what they might be saying than to know for certain. In the uncertainty he could think of them as both innocent and guilty. If he actually bugged the place, he would know for sure.
At school, he mostly worked his charms to make life easy. He was a good student, and if asked, the other kids would have said that they liked him. But none of them hung out with Josh. Maybe the other kids sensed that he didn’t really care about them.
At least the smart ones figured that out. There was a dim boy named Clarence who wasn’t quite so clever. About the time Josh was entering puberty, Clarence decided he wanted to be friends with Josh. Clarence, who had been held back in classes a couple of years, was already fifteen when he entered eighth grade, but mentally he was younger than Josh. Not having other friends, Josh let him hang around. They made an odd couple, but since Ma and Pa pretended not to notice that Clarence came by every afternoon, it didn’t really matter. At the small school in Thread, Josh avoided paying any public attention to Clarence, but Clarence didn’t seem to mind. Since they weren’t in the same classes and Clarence lacked the ability to recognize how he was being ignored, everything was good.
After school hours, they built a fort of hay bales in the loft of the barn. Pa pretty much ignored the little hay that was left in the upper reaches of the barn since they no longer had cows to feed. The hay fort was theirs alone. By his age, Clarence should have long given up playing cowboys and Indians in the haymow, but he still loved it. Then Josh introduced the dim boy to other kinds of games. They were ones that Josh found more interesting.
Just getting the first signs of pubic hair, Josh found his changing body especially fascinating, and it wasn’t long before he convinced Clarence to drop his trousers so he could inspect what that older boy looked like. Clarence had thick black hair around a long cock, and Josh wanted to touch it. So he did. Not long after he introduced Clarence into the art of jacking off. It was amazing that the boy hadn’t learned already, but he was slow, and once he did it, Clarence loved it. Their afternoons in the privacy of the hay bale fort became an adolescent frenzy of masturbation.
Over time, Josh began to consider the on-going hand jobs tedious, but he put up with it since the mutual activity turned Clarence into a virtual slave, letting Josh be the slave master. While he found that role interesting, it eventually became a burden because it always required Josh to monitor Clarence and keep him from ever discussing their activities in front of others. The kid was too slow to comprehend that some things couldn’t be talked about.
As autumn turned into winter, this afternoon play went on. When the weather grew colder, the boys branched out into smoking cigarettes and sipping whiskey. Josh had filched the drink from Pa’s limited alcohol cabinet. The barn’s temperature was too cold for getting naked anyway, although Clarence had a strong sex urge and was always ready for whatever Josh suggested. As hints of spring emerged, Josh came up with a different idea.
On a trip to Duluth with his Ma, he pilfered a copy of The Joy of Sex from a bookstore they visited. The book gave him a lot of ideas, especially when he read about this thing called auto-asphyxiation in which a person cuts off the flow of blood to his brain just as he’s about to climax sexually. He tried it once, and found the experience intense. He thought it would be a hoot to convince Clarence to give it a try.
Later he contemplated whether he should have been more careful in how he described the act. The kid didn’t always grasp all the implications or dangers of an action. But truthfully by spring Josh was finding Clarence tiresome, and he was ready to move on, and so he held no qualms in urging Clarence to try this new thing. He just counseled him to be sure to do it in secrecy, somewhere back in the woods where no one would possibly see him. He also said it would be better if Clarence tried it without Josh around since that would heighten the sense of danger and the reward of the thrill.
On a Saturday night when the senior play was about to open in the Thread high school gymnasium, the alarm was sounded in town to pull together the volunteer fire department. That annoyed Josh since it interfered with his evening’s plans. In a rather weak version of The Music Man, Josh was about to play the role of Harold Hill, con man par excellence. Josh was always good in any stage production, since he had the knack of assuming the right emotions. People were naturally drawn to him, and he liked to think he could display a certain light in his eyes.
But the alarm canceled the opening night. Clarence was missing and his mom was frantic. Divorced, raising the boy alone, and trying to do the best of
a difficult job, she became frantic when he wasn’t home by mealtime. Everyone in town knew about Clarence’s limited abilities, so it wasn’t difficult for the only policeman in town to believe the boy was lost and to convince dozens to join him for a search of the local woods. So many people signed up, including several students from the cast that the high school drama teacher had no choice but to postpone the play.
No one found Clarence that night. In fact, they only found his body a week later, after it had been desecrated by scavenging crows and coyotes. While the evidence wasn’t all that clear, the coroner ruled that the boy had hung himself. He declared it a suicide, although Clarence’s mom refused to believe that her son could take such an act. She said he was always so happy.
As for Josh, he was pleased to have his afternoons free once again.
That was the first time Josh’s experiments went too far, although at the time Josh didn’t think of it that way. In his opinion, every person controlled his own fate. While Josh might set in motion certain actions, it was up to the other individual to respond however he might. Josh certainly never lost any sleep over Clarence’s death.
Just like Josh never worried about the way parents died. As the years went on, Josh found Ma and Pa more and more troublesome. They were sitting atop all that life insurance, and he could use that money if they were to die since Josh’s attempted career in Hollywood was going nowhere. The charms he displayed in the small pond of Thread, Wisconsin didn’t work as well in a major city. He hadn’t counted on there being so many other people just like him. He also went a little crazy with playing up the gay thing. He blamed that on Thread. It had been so much fun in Thread to let a little mascara and flamboyance needle people, but in Hollywood, mere appearance didn’t have the same power.
As he floundered trying to find himself, he met a guy who had made a fortune flipping houses. Josh thought to himself that he could do the same. While his father might not have been very successful, Pa did succeed at drilling into Josh’s mind basic economic principles. All Josh needed to get started was a small grubstake.
So when on a summer visit to his parents Josh discovered that their chimney was clogged, he decided not to warn them. He figured Ma wouldn’t even think about such matters and that Pa, lazy as he was, would never get around to cleaning the chimney himself or calling someone out. Thinking of that untapped life insurance, Josh decided to wait and see what would happen when his Pa turned the furnace back on in the fall. To minimize heating bills, his father kept the house well insulated so if the chimney clogged and carbon monoxide backed up, it wouldn’t take much to suffocate the old folks.
He reasoned his parents never really did anything for him, and he was pretty certain they would have preferred if he hadn’t bothered to even come home for a visit. What was it to him if something should happen? It would be their own fault. It was Pa’s responsibility to maintain the old house better.
When Officer Campbell called from Thread to inform him of the tragedy, Josh was of course appropriately surprised, even after Campbell tiptoed around his disclosure so gingerly that it took all of Josh’s skill not to blurt it out first. Of course, he returned to Thread for the funeral. A good son had to do that.
And he was glad that he did. He had only been expecting to receive the life insurance. The farm was worthless. But then he discovered someone was buying up land in the area. While he had no idea it was part of a plan to build a major new resort, it didn’t matter whether he knew that or not. He was still able to negotiate a great price. That extra cash really let him transform his financial life.
The trip also had other benefits. When attending the funeral and standing by his parents graves for a tedious reading by the fussy old minister, he delighted in sporting glitter on his eyelashes just to see whether the old reverend could sputter his way through the ceremony. Then he noticed how his appearance attracted the attention of a local hunk named Tony Masters. Everyone other than Tony had their eyes down to contemplate his parents’ sad passing. But Tony was looking at Josh with interest, and Josh liked flirting with the hunky husband of the town nurse. He hoped it could lead to a pretty hot night, and make his hometown visit even more memorable.
But Josh happened to glance away from Tony and that’s when he saw Danny. Danny wasn’t looking down at the ground like any good Christian should have been doing. Rather he was spying on Tony and Danny as they gave each other the eye.
That’s when his old obsession reignited. A few years earlier, he had wondered about Danny’s purity of soul for a short period following the suicide of the boy’s mother, but Josh thought he had been able to escape that interest after the previous summer’s escapade when he convinced Oliver to play his trick on Danny. He figured he had learned what he wanted to know. But now he was suddenly jabbed with an intuition that Danny had survived that experience too easily. What had Josh really learned about Danny? Somehow the question of what constituted the true Danny became even more important. He had to find out everything about the kid.
But this time he decided to be more careful about how he approached gaining that information. He could take his time. It would be his best experiment to date. It was a long game ahead.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Firmer Ground
Colby Endicott had demanded the meeting, and he was waiting in the conference room for Danny. Danny was instead sitting in Josh’s office chair, feeling unsettled and unwilling to confront the next steps needed. A dampened sense of disorder had lowered the buzz of the office. When once the floor hummed with the energy of dozens of excited young men and women, each thinking they were about to create a new world that would endow them with riches, the remaining staff now hunkered close to their desks. They worked with a beaten air, wondering if their jobs and the company would survive to the next paycheck.
Nearly a month had passed since Josh vanished and Oliver had been found murdered. Colby and Danny needed to talk, but Danny had put it off as long as possible. No one in authority wanted to connect all the fallen pieces—Josh, Chip, and Oliver. Missing funds. Why should they? Nothing suggested that Oliver had died in anything other than a burglary gone wrong. No fingerprints on the scene linked Oliver’s murder to anyone; his own gun had been turned against him when he tried to stop a thief. Each crime was a broken shard with no matching edge to another. Different police departments. Different stories. Danny felt everything was dangerously entwined, and he suspected Colby thought the same but only Danny had access to the full details of what was hidden in the files and tapes of Josh’s secret room. But that extra knowledge gave him no insight as to what to do next.
He walked toward the conference room where Orleans was keeping Colby distracted with a review of the company’s financials. Although Orleans was upbeat about the firm’s future, Danny doubted a positive spreadsheet would diminish Colby’s concerns.
He entered the room. Colby looked a decade older. His hair needed cutting and his clothes were wrinkled. The pallor in his cheeks contradicted the beautiful spring weather outside. He smiled weakly at Danny, but his face held no joy and only sought comfort. Danny thought of the cats on the old farm where he grew up. If they lived long enough, such animals reached the point where they seemed to realize their time was over. On the sounding of their internal alarm, they would display one final bout of friendliness, rubbing their arched backs insistently once more against everyone’s legs in a final farewell before walking off in a last trek into the woods. Danny never knew where they went. But they seemed to understand there was a place waiting for their death. And he always appreciated that sad, last rub. And they never looked back once they started that stroll.
There was that scent of end times about Colby Endicott. Danny didn’t want to be in the room with him.
“Have you heard from Josh?” Colby demanded.
Knowing that Danny didn’t like to talk about Josh, Orleans quickly jumped in and answered. “The last communication we received was two weeks ago after he executed a durable power of att
orney and sent it to my attention by express mail. It came from a notary public near the Miami airport. We tracked that guy down, who said he had never seen Josh before that day. According to him, Josh didn’t say anything about what he was doing or why. He simply provided his driver’s license, stamped his fingerprint on the register, and signed the documents. We had the fingerprint checked. It was Josh’s. Since this happened in Miami, I think he may have fled to Latin America, but if he did he used a fake passport. In short, we have not seen Josh.”
Danny listened passively to Orleans’ speculation. He didn’t believe it. Josh was still nearby, watching, waiting, and plotting. He knew it. He had listened to the tapes. All of them. Josh would never let him go.
Colby feared someone was trying to kill the investors in Premios, and because he assumed Josh was motivated by that same emotion, Colby believed he had fled to safety, a step that Colby desperately wanted to take if only he knew where that zone of safety might be. So he demanded to know, “Why did Josh disappear?”
For Danny, the acceptance had been slow and painful achieved, but he finally realized that he never really knew Josh. Maybe decades of experience together and the slow accretion of daily details should have made Josh’s character clear, but it took the metaphorical bomb dropped into Danny’s life to knock down the obscuring trees of life and open up the dangerous vistas that he never realized existed.
But that wasn’t quite right. The situation was more like the first time he returned to Thread after residing in Los Angeles for several years. Upon his return, the house he grew up in seemed so small, and the stores around Thread’s town square so barren. Without being able to see them each day, the elements that once defined his life had melded into something different. The trees in the forest no longer seemed so tall, the clouds in the deep blue sky of summer appeared alien, and the shadows they pulled across the lake water below were chilly and dark. Everything was different and yet remained entirely the same. A Wisconsin summer in a small town was eternal. It was he who had changed. He grew comfortable existing under different kinds of light and shadow. The familiar elements of his youth were transformed into a foreign place, not because they had shifted, but because the man he once had been was now transformed by new experiences.
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