by Vicki Grove
“Tucker and Trey have been best friends all their lives,” Janet added. Her voice was trembling. She was gripping my hand between both of hers, squeezing it so hard I heard my knuckles pop. “I made both of them costumes the Halloween they were in third grade. They both wanted to be rabbits.”
Trey didn’t want to be just any rabbit, though, he wanted to be the Evil Trickster Rabbit. At school he modified his costume in the restroom, covered it with rips and nasty slogans and fake blood. I gave a snort of a laugh, thinking about that, and when I looked up, everybody was staring at me with the same strange expression on their faces.
I clasped my hands, leaned forward, and looked down at the floor, waiting for Officer Stephens to ask something else. There was a little green caterpillar down there, curled up tight into a spiral. A spiral much like the ones in the black dog’s eyes, except that those spirals whirled. Steve had a spiral tattoo on his ankle, and we stayed up half of one night in Zero’s funky little backyard talking about why he’d got it and what it . . .
“Was there drinking involved?” Officer Stephens asked.
I shrugged but didn’t look up. “Beer.” After a while I added, “Because it was the last bonfire of the season.”
Why would they send my old DARE officer to do this? If they thought they were doing me a favor because Officer Stephens had a reputation for relating to kids, well, they weren’t. He was the last person I wanted to talk to about the convenience store, the borrowed ID and the two wrapped packages, the zinc mine fields. Why should I explain to him that there was beer at the bonfires each and every time? Let Officer Stephens and the rest of them think what they thought. What difference could it possibly make now?
He asked a few other things and I stared at the spiral caterpillar and said what I said, I really can’t remember what that was. Then finally he asked a wrap-up question. “Can you remember the last thing the driver, Treyston Hughes, said to you?”
“No,” I answered. It was don’t you dare puke in my car, but there’s no way I would have told Officer Stephens or anybody else that. It was mine, those words. It was ours.
It wouldn’t have sounded friendly or natural if it hadn’t been us saying it and hearing it.
I was so glad to get out of that small green room. It smelled like flop sweat, like the kind of sweat people sweat when they’re stringing together lies.
It was nearly 2 a.m. when we got in the Taurus and Janet started driving us home. She had a bit of trouble because the chamber of commerce always strings a dense web of small orange lights in the shape of jack-o’-lanterns across Main Street in late October.
“All this light clutter drives me absolutely nuts,” she complained in a hollow voice that didn’t sound the slightest bit like her voice. “I can’t for the life of me see how people pick out which are the regular old stoplights in time to stop.”
By then she’d run one red light and had slammed on the brakes just in time to stop at the one where we were then stopped. From the corner of my eye I saw she had a shaky death grip on the steering wheel. She wasn’t looking at me and I wasn’t looking at her. She hadn’t even asked about my police sweatpants or about the yellow sack in my lap.
“They shouldn’t have got you out so late,” I murmured. “I coulda handled it myself.”
The light turned green, but Janet didn’t seem interested.
“I’m so heartsick for you, Tuck,” she whispered. “And I’m so heartsick for dear little Trey, and for those other young boys.”
“Light’s green,” I mentioned, though it was by then yellow, going on red again.
She turned off the car and sat holding her own arms, looking straight ahead. The light had turned red and now turned green again. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a lone pickup truck behind us. After a while the driver gave a single, polite honk.
Janet hit her own horn fiercely several times with her balled-up fist. The truck drove meekly around us and on down the deserted, glowing street. The driver even touched the brim of his Stetson as he passed, offering a sort of cowboy apology.
“Tucker, I know you must surely be in shock like the police were saying, but you better be listening up anyhow,” Janet said in a sharp whisper. I looked over and she caught me by the wrist. Her eyes were bright and so crazy I didn’t dare pull away.
“You have no idea how bad you look, Tucker, and why wouldn’t you look bad? What just happened is the worst that could happen. Unless you’d lost a child, that is, which’d be far, far worse, the very worst that could happen to anyone, hands down.”
I tried to ease from her grip, and she shook her head and threw my hand back to me.
“Do you remember when my dad and I moved in with you and your dad, Tuck?” she demanded. “Huh? Do you remember? Oh, Tucker, you were only eight and your mama had died just two years before. Your dad hadn’t even kept a picture of her.”
Red pain had begun ripping through my legs. I focused on it and turned to stare out my window.
“So I went to the public library and found one in the 1994 Clevesdale High yearbook, her senior picture. I made a pretty good copy, good as they could do at the Kinko’s in Tulsa, and I framed it up and hung it down low where you could see it.”
I drew a circle in the condensation my breath was leaving on the window. I touched a point in the middle and began drawing a wobbly spiral out from it. The whole thing melted into a mess before I’d got it done.
“Your father was so unknowable,” she said in an angry mutter. “I couldn’t pry that man open for love nor money. When the mine shut down six years ago, there were plenty of guys who lost their jobs and went home to make new plans with their families. But not your dad, oh no, not him. He was the only worker who got laid off and then disappeared, just up and walked away, and I believe that was because he never learned to open up and share himself with anyone. I doubt he realizes how much he’s lost because he never let that kind of knowledge in, either.”
She made a sort of choked sound, then grabbed my wrist again and dug in with her fingernails. My skin felt tight all over, like it was shrinking. I wanted out of my skin, my bones. My body was a sack of suffocating pain and I couldn’t breathe inside it.
“And Tucker, I don’t like saying it, but you can be so much like him. I’m talking about how you acted back there in the station. And how you’re acting right now. Don’t you use the excuse of some Quapaw silence to go missing on me just like he did, you hear? Because it’d just kill me, it really would.”
I pulled in some air. “Light’s green,” I told her.
“Do you think I give one single damn what color that damn light is?” She snatched the yellow bag from my hands and slammed herself sideways so hard against her door that it flew open, then rocked on its hinges. She ran from the car, stumbled over the curb, but recovered her balance and ran on to stuff the yellow sack viciously into the wire mesh trash receptacle chained in front of Andersen’s Good Value Pharmacy.
I’d never heard Janet say “damn” before. But it was nothing if not a night of firsts.
She ran back and dropped into her seat, then just stared at me again with such fierceness that I had to keep my head somewhat turned toward her.
“I’m taking you to the clinic tomorrow to get those legs treated, mister, and I don’t want one single little word of argument about it, you hear me?” She turned the key and gave the car about a gallon of gas and we lurched through the most recent red light.
“Better close your door,” I quietly advised, and she noticed it was open and closed it.
IV
When we got home, I drug upstairs, took faux-haired Larry’s painkillers from my sweatshirt pocket and flushed them down the toilet, then went into my room and dropped onto my bed. The backs of the police sweatpants had molded themselves to my legs and were plastered there with blood, but I didn’t have the energy to peel them off. Besides, the pain might lessen if they were off, and I’d decided that red pain was the only real thing I had to hang on to. Without
it I’d fall right off the world and into a bottomless pit as black as the monster dog I couldn’t possibly have seen but did see anyway.
I closed my eyes and saw Trey’s hectic last dance against my lids. I sat up, panting, and rubbed hard at my face, then I eased myself back to stare bleakly at the ceiling shadows. I envied the mindless nothingness of those shadows. I wanted to be them.
The shadows suddenly moved together and turned into a spiral, a lopsided and innocent-looking spiral like a child would have drawn, just like the one on Steve’s ankle.
Steve hadn’t wanted to go to England to visit his dad last summer, but his mother insisted. “It’ll get you out of my hair,” Steve said she said. When she found out it would cost his dad a lot more, she even let Steve take his guitar and clarinet. I guess Steve’s good looks translate well because he came back from his month over there with love bites thick on his neck and with that small spiral tat.
We met him at the Tulsa airport in the Mustang and had a welcome home barbecue for him that night. By then we’d been barbecuing in Zero’s backyard a couple of times a month for three years, ever since Steve had moved to Clevesdale and taught us the joys of doing it. I was our official cook. Burgers, hot dogs, and baby back ribs, our splurge meal. They were easy to please. They liked their meat raw, medium, or burned.
Summers I work at a landscaping company, Greenfield’s, so from that I’ve gotten way into gardening. I set up a hoop house two years ago in our backyard, twelve by eight, a semi-circular greenhouse of clear plastic stretched over bent iron rods. So we had good salads at those barbecues. They raved about my cooking.
Besides the moon, the only illumination in Zero’s bathroom-sized backyard was the many strings of tiny colored lights his mother had twisted through the branches of the three mimosa trees, saying it reminded her of her girlhood in Haiti. Those barbecues were why I started keeping my small flashlight on my belt, for enough light to cook by. Zero’s mother thought flashlights caused brain damage and wouldn’t keep one around.
Zero’s second cousin Maxwell went to prison a few years ago and left behind his two huge brown velvet sofas, so those were the seating. They’d deteriorated about as much as they could, so we didn’t have to be careful with our food, which was good, dark as it is back there. The sofas face each other with maybe three feet of walk space between them. They’re a little or a lot damp, depending on how recently it’s rained or snowed.
The night that Steve got back, he and Zero took one sofa and faced each other like mirror images, one knee up, one elbow over the back of the sofa, both rapt in eager conversation about England. Trey put in a word from the other sofa once in a while, but he was busy texting back and forth with this girl he was dating from somewhere in Texas. He’d met her when he and his band played in her town, and he’d only seen her once in the six months since. But until he gave up on owning a phone, he texted girls he’d met on the road like that a lot, sometimes juggling two or three girls in the same night.
I stood behind the grill and savored all of it, the August heat loosening its grip, the sickening-sweet smell of mimosa, the breeze that rocked those dozens of pinpoint lights, my friends’ overlapping voices and opinions, their different ways of laughing. Zero hooted or snorted, Trey gave a sort of guttural giggle, and Steve usually confined his mirth to a polite twitter but was capable of an all-out series of honks that was hilarious.
“Do they surf?” Zero mostly wanted to know about England. He’d surfed a few times at his aunt’s condo in Florida, and he dreamed of doing a lot more of it. “It’s a small country with water on all sides, so you could get to a beach quick from anywhere.”
Steve didn’t know much about that, except that the water was cold, he thought. “Blues clubs are few and far between in Wiltshire, which is the part of England where my dad is,” he complained. “And stuff is too tidy, you know? Like in a book or something, all dolled up.” He looked around Zero’s yard and nodded appreciatively. Clearly, in Steve’s opinion at least, England suffered by comparison.
“They’re cutting edge where alternative music’s concerned, have been since the Rolling Stones,” Trey put in distractedly, frowning at the message on his phone.
I turned the ribs, plastering them again with sauce. Now that it was almost completely dark, from where I stood, I could only make out certain parts of each of my friends, the parts I would know them anywhere by. Trey’s bright hair falling in his face as his thumbs moved delicately and fast on his lighted phone, Steve’s length and graceful slouch, and the way Zero’s plans and ideas kept his feet and fingers and dreads in slight motion that stirred the gathering darkness.
“What’s with the spiral on your ankle?” Zero asked Steve. It was the question we’d been waiting for, and things went instantly quiet. The story of that tattoo was going to be good, probably some situation with an English girl.
Steve straightened and stretched. Then, “Okay, guys, you gotta promise you’ll believe me because I don’t believe myself, but I gotta because I saw it with my eyes.” He pointed to his eyes with his index fingers, illustrating.
Trey pocketed his phone. I put my barbecue fork down on the broken air conditioner that served as my cook’s table and went to get comfortable on Trey’s half-empty sofa.
Steve sat forward, pushed his light hair behind his ears, then braced his elbows on his legs and let his long, callused fingers dangle, frowning in thought.
“Well, I got bored, see,” Steve began, “and my dad didn’t want me moping around, not when he’s got this new wife to show off for, so he gives in and rents me a motorbike. You would not believe some of those English bikers, guys! They go right down the middle of the road, use the broken highway line as their own special track!”
Trey and I glanced at Zero, who sure enough had that openmouthed, dazzled look on his face that meant he’d be trying some variation of that crazy little trick real soon.
“So one day I was toodling on that bike and ended up in this town called Avesbury. It was cool. It’s got a stone circle running right through it. Like Stonehenge. Only their stones are more spread out. And I found a decent pub there too, with fair music. Pub food is gross, decent or not, but there were friendly people drinking and they told me I should stop on the way home at this hill that’s actually an ancient cone-shaped pyramid or something. And a girl I was chatting with said there’s also an ancient burial ground not far from that hill, a thing called a barrel.
“This girl went on to say she’d be too scared at that barrel place when it was almost dark and that I should spend the night with her and her roommate and we’d all three go out there in the morning, but who’d want to go to a place like that in full daylight? Twilight was edging in, and by the time I got there, it would be perfect, was my thinking.”
He paused to see if we were following along, and we nodded in an interested way, probably listening to his story less than wondering why Steve had all the luck with girls and so often squandered it.
“Okay, so I get back on the bike and start toward home. Well, I’d noticed all these huge wheat fields when I’d been riding out earlier, and now all of a sudden I’m just riding along when kabam!” He slapped his leg so hard some dirt flew from the sofa. “There’s a humongous crop circle there in the middle of one of those fields, and I would swear it had not been there when I’d passed it before! I mean, boys, I’m talking a circle big as a basketball court all filled up with whirls and hexagons and lots and lots of spirals.” He pointed to his new tattoo, in case we didn’t get it. “Like this.
“So I pull my motorbike into this little stopping place they have beside their roads, they call them lay-its or lay-outs or something. Lay-bys. And I’m looking at the circle from that lay-by when I notice a small brown sign on the fence that reads West Kennet Long Barrow with an arrow pointing to this little path right along the left edge of that wheat. And I think a minute, did that girl at the pub say maybe ‘barrow’ instead of ‘barrel’? Hey, I could very well visit an ancient bur
ial site right up against a genuine crop circle, and all of this just as the sun sets, how cool would that be?”
Steve scanned our faces, waiting for an answer from us each. “Surpassingly cool,” Zero told him in an awed whisper. “Plenty cool,” Trey allowed, shaking his hair from his face. I nodded in agreement, then whispered, “Hold on one second.” I rushed over to turn my ribs, slathering them with sauce for a final time.
When I got back, Steve was stretched out with his hands behind his head and his boots crossed at the ankles. “That smells so freakin’ good, Tuck. Let’s eat.”
“No! Back to the burial site,” Zero ordered. “C’mon, did you see anything or not?”
Trey snickered and wriggled his fingers. “Little green men, riding on the shoulders of little green men?”
“Well, laugh if you want,” Steve said solemnly, “but I tell you, as I walked that path to that barrow place, my hair stood on end. Every single hair on my head just suddenly stood at attention, not from fear but from some force I reckon was coming from that crop circle. I kid you not, boys, there was something out there, some force.
“And when I finally reached that amazing rock tomb, it had a strong feeling of something still being there, after all this time. I mean, some ancient sadness, or maybe some ancient magic? It was empty, sure, but not all that deserted, not from the feel of it. No skeletons now, but I guess the whole place was filled at one time with bones. And the tomb’s marked on the outside and on the inside with, guess what? Spirals. Someone ancient has carved out spirals on some of those huge rocks, just like someone or something not so ancient carved them in that wheat. So. Let’s get at that barbecue.”
We laughed, but in a serious enough way to let Steve know we believed him, and then we got up and got set to eat, figuring that was it, the end of the story of his spiral tat.
But after we’d finished our ribs and were licking our fingers and slouching on the sofas, too full to move or even to talk much, Zero sleepily asked Steve, “So did you ever come upon that cone-shaped pyramid thing that girl in the pub told you about?”
