I come up behind her. Standing outside is Tanner Burch, one of several boys she currently has a crush on. Just last week, he took her for a ride on his friend’s four-wheeler and they kissed in the fog. He’s got on a too-big camo jacket, ripped jeans, orange trucker cap. How the hell did he find us?
“You going to let us in or what?” says Tanner.
“What’ll you give me if I do?” asks Savannah.
But of course he didn’t find us. Savannah must have told him where we were. She must have texted him to come here. To our house. Our secret.
“I’ll shoot you if you come any nearer!” I shout at Tanner, doing my pretend Uncle Myron voice. I used to crack Savannah up doing that voice, drawling, Hey there, hunny pie, you bring that sweet ass over here, give your favorite uncle some sugar.
“Who’s that?” says Tanner. He moves closer to the window, trying to peer in past Savannah. I see then that there’s someone else with him, someone standing a little ways back, toeing the dirt with his boot. Someone with pale skin and freckles and a shock of dandelion fluff hair.
Henry.
“It’s Jo,” I say in my normal voice, my anger tempered now with some other feeling, a sort of fluttering nervousness. I see Henry all the time in history, sure, but it’s different seeing him outside of school. “Wait there. We’ll come out in a second.”
I grab the back of Savannah’s tank top, haul her away from the window, over toward the rusted stove, the warped cabinets, the sink clogged with dead bluebottles.
“Dammit, Van,” I say. “Why are they here? What are you doing?”
We’d agreed, when we first started coming to Myron’s house, never to bring anyone else here. Especially guys. Savannah had promised. We both had.
She shrugs. She must have put on more mascara while I was sleeping, because her lashes are all sticking together now. “You said this was the last time you’d cut class with me. Figured I better make the most of it.”
I want to haul back and slap her across the face. My hand practically itches for it. But last time I did that she didn’t talk to me for weeks (she’d had a fight with her mother and said without thinking, I wish she was dead), so I settle for giving her a playful punch in the arm, but a little too hard.
“Come on,” she says. “You were over there snoring anyway. You’re no fun lately. All you do is sleep.”
“I get tired.”
“Well, I get lonely.”
“Fine,” I say.
“You ought to thank me,” Savannah says, “Henry’s here too.”
“Oh, shut up.”
Savannah’s grinning now. She loves to tease me about Henry, always saying I should make a move. Sometimes it seems like she wants me and him to get together more than I do. Maybe she thinks if I start kissing boys I’ll turn into her. A perfect partner in crime.
I go back over to the window. Tanner and Henry are leaning against the side of the house, passing a cigarette back and forth.
“Hey, let me help you,” says Tanner when he sees me, but I jump down on my own.
When Savannah climbs out after me she does it clumsy on purpose so that Tanner will put his hands on her hips to steady her. She plonks down to the ground and his hands slide up to her waist, her tank top bunching far enough that we can see the tiny tattoo on her hip that she got from her uncle Tad before he died. It’s supposed to be a bumblebee but the stripes kind of blurred together, so it looks more like a fly.
“Is school over already?” I ask. Henry won’t meet my eyes, like maybe he, too, feels how different it is to see each other outside of school.
Or maybe he’s embarrassed of me? Doesn’t want Tanner to know we’re sort of friends? He mostly hangs out with an older crowd these days. His brother’s friends. And Tanner, I guess, who is a grade above us.
“We skipped last period,” says Tanner. “This is a cool house. Never even knew it was here.”
“It’s full of wasps,” I tell him. “They’re used to us, but if you try to go in they’ll sting you in the face until you die.”
Tanner laughs. Savannah is scowling at me. I’m not acting how I’m supposed to, not flirting, not helping her out.
“What do we do now?” she asks, eyeing Myron’s house ruefully. Palace of lost make-out opportunities.
Henry pipes up for the first time. “Got some beers round my place.”
* * *
—
Henry’s mom is working a double shift at a restaurant in Needle, and his dad is out, probably drinking or something. Their house is at the edge of town, up an old brick road.
In Lester, everything gets shittier-looking the farther you go from Main Street. Out here, the stop signs are faded nearly to white, the letters outlined faintly in rust. The trees lean over the roads, over the houses, threatening to take back what is theirs. Vines strangle the mailboxes. Weeds and wildflowers burst through every crack in the pavement. Given half a chance, I’m sure, the forest would swallow Lester whole.
We wait on the porch while Henry goes inside. When he comes back out he has a six-pack (minus one can) of Schlitz and his guitar. He sits next to me on the beat-up floral couch.
I’ve seen him play guitar a few times before, back in the middle school talent shows, and even I have to admit that he’s terrible. But I like watching his hands go up and down the strings. I like the way his knuckles are always kind of swollen, pink and wrinkled as roses.
We drink the beers, which are warm and flat. I’m used to that, since most of the beer I’ve had so far is the dregs left at the bottom of other’s people bottles, which I drink when no one’s looking. A whole can to myself, flat or not, is a luxury. Tanner tries to chug his beer to show off and nearly chokes. Henry plays a few bars of “Smells like Teen Spirit.” Savannah tells us about her sister’s friend’s baby’s problem, which is that it was born addicted to painkillers.
“Baby’s more hardcore than any of us,” she says.
“Babies are weird,” says Tanner.
I should go home soon. It’s Friday, one of the busiest nights at the bar, and Aggie will want me to help. She started helping Grandpa Joe around the bar from basically the moment she could walk, to hear her tell it. I don’t mind helping. I even enjoy it sometimes and Aggie says if I do a good job she’ll hire me for real someday, but I know the pastor will be there. Just thinking about what he said in the car makes my skin crawl. He thinks he knows me. Thinks he’s got power over me now. I’ve got to show him he doesn’t.
And what better chance than this? It’s the first time I’ve been to Henry’s house since sixth grade, when he made every kid in the neighborhood come see the half-decayed deer at the end of the road. It was mostly bones, with a few scraps of rotting fur still clinging to it. I wanted to show that I wasn’t afraid, so I walked right up and stuck my hand inside the rib cage, where the heart would have been. Afterward Henry and Savannah and Maisie and me and one or two other kids hung out in Henry’s backyard and played at hunter (we took turns being the deer) until his dad came home.
Now, I announce that I’ve got to go to the bathroom and I grab Savannah’s arm and drag her with me.
“Girls are weird,” I hear Tanner say as the screen door bangs shut behind us.
When we get to the bathroom, I make Savannah call the bar and ask Aggie if I can stay over for dinner. Aggie says fine, as long I’m home by nine. I offer to call Savannah’s mom, but Savannah says her mom won’t even notice she’s gone. Savannah’s one of seven kids, so she’s probably right.
When we get back to the porch, Tanner’s gone. Henry says he got a text and ran off. Savannah shoots me a dirty look, as if it’s my fault somehow. Henry offers her the last beer as a consolation.
Henry is about halfway through the slowest version of “Wonderwall” in the history of the world, when his brother Jack comes out of the house. He’s got no shirt on
, just jeans. I can see his hip bones, the waistband of his underwear, the trail of hair that disappears beneath it. Henry is sixteen, a year older than Savannah and me (he got held back when he was a kid on account of his heart problems). Jack is eighteen, a senior.
Jack slouches down next to Savannah, with a nonchalance that must be practiced. Either that or he’s already stoned stupid. He moves slow and liquid. Doesn’t say anything, just pulls a joint out of his pocket, lights it up. I can’t help but look at the muscles shifting under his skin. Savannah’s looking too. Danger. He takes a hit and then passes the joint.
Normally I don’t smoke, cigarettes or anything else, a holdover from my middle school track days when our coach told us that he didn’t give a shit if we all wanted to die of cancer, but he could guarantee that smoking would cut our running times in half. Tonight, though, when Henry holds out the joint, I take it, letting our fingers brush on purpose. I feel silly immediately for that. It’s the sort of move Savannah would pull. The smoke catches in my throat and I feel a cough coming. I hold my breath, force it down.
Pastor Jones, I think, eat your heart out. I picture a whole herd of little broken-legged lambs, limping along on their own.
After the joint goes around a few times, Jack and Savannah start doing that thing where they blow smoke into each other’s mouths. The sun drips down toward the trees.
Henry puts his hand on my knee. We both just sit there for a while, staring straight ahead, and then he takes his hand back.
But I can still feel a pressure there, like the ghost of a hand, like the way I feel my sister, even when she isn’t with me.
“What was that?” asks Savannah, sitting up abruptly.
“What was what?” says Jack, sounding unconcerned, his voice as languid as his movements.
“I saw something move, there.” She points toward the woods that back up to Henry’s house. The trees are dark and thick and I know from experience that they keep on going for a long, long way. The national forest covers more than three thousand square miles and even with all the time I’ve spent out there, I’m sure I’ve seen only a fraction of it.
“Probably a squirrel,” says Henry.
“No, it was bigger than that.” Savannah sounds genuinely frightened. I wonder if she’s putting it on. She’s started doing that kind of thing more and more lately. Acting sillier than she really is, stupider, more fragile. I hate it. I wish she’d act like Savannah. The real one. The one I’ve always known.
“Deer, then,” says Henry.
“It looked like a person,” says Savannah.
My heart twists and I strain my eyes, focusing on the tree line. It couldn’t be her, right? She’d never come this close to town, to people. All I see is dark.
“Bet it’s a ghost,” says Jack.
“Nah,” says Henry, uncertainly. “Probably just a deer.”
“You don’t know shit, little brother,” says Jack. “A lot of people died around here. Hell, right there in our yard a guy shot himself in the head once.”
“Really?” asks Savannah, eyes wide.
“Sure,” says Jack, grinning at her, leaning forward. “They were picking brains out of the bushes for days.”
I snort. “Yeah, right.”
“It’s true,” says Jack, though he doesn’t look at me. He’s focused on Savannah. “You probably haven’t heard about it because it was a long time ago, before any of us were born. This guy Richard Hornbeam shot himself in the head with a .357 pistol. And the worst part is he didn’t die right away. You’d think you couldn’t mess that up, shooting yourself in the head. But this poor bastard did. He died in the hospital later, but he was alive for hours first.”
Jack is making this up, I’m pretty sure, to scare us little freshmen, because I’ve never heard about it and we get every story down at the bar, no matter how old. But I’ve got to admit he’s a good liar. Even I kind of want to believe him. Savannah has scooted closer to Jack, her eyes wide with exaggerated fright.
Jack takes a long hit off the joint, lets the smoke out slow.
“Some nights,” he says, “real late, when nobody in their right mind would be hunting, we hear gunshots. Out behind the house. It’s that same poor bastard and he’s shooting himself in the head, over and over, trying to get it right.”
“We do hear gunshots,” admits Henry. If someone is actually shooting guns in their backyard late at night, I bet it’s their dad. I’ll need to warn my sister to stay far, far away.
She probably already knows.
“Sure do,” says Jack. He’s having too much fun with this, grinning wildly. He puts his arm around Savannah, pulls her against his side. I feel a pang of something. Concern, maybe. Jealousy. “And that’s not even the worst thing we hear.”
CHAPTER THREE
About twenty minutes later we’re all in Jack’s car, on our way to Crybaby Bridge. Jack told us the story, back on the porch. Years ago a young woman came at midnight and threw her baby off the bridge into the water and then threw herself off too and if you stand in the right place you can hear the baby crying to this day. Jack said he and Henry have both heard it.
I know Jack didn’t make this story up, because I’ve actually heard it before, from an out-of-towner who came to the bar once. He was traveling across Ohio, hitting up every haunted place in the state. Lester made his list because of the No. 5 Mine disaster site, where a tunnel collapsed and crushed fifty men. The out-of-towner said there are half a dozen Crybaby Bridges in Ohio. He’d been to four of them so far and hadn’t heard a thing.
Henry’s driving, though he only has a learner’s permit. We’re going down a winding gravel road, which makes the car bump and rattle and sends bits of rock shooting up from under the tires. There are no houses out this way, no people, just trees.
Henry is biting his bottom lip, squinting at the road, clutching the wheel hard enough that his fingers are white. The beer and the joint are giving me this dreamy feeling, like we’ve crossed over into a different reality. The normal rules don’t apply here. Tonight is magic. Tonight doesn’t really count.
In the backseat, Savannah has the straps of her tank top down around her shoulders and Jack’s nuzzling against her chest like a cat. He’s got a Mountain Dew bottle, which he takes sips from and sometimes hands to Savannah. I watch them in the side mirror until Henry pulls the car up short along the side of the road.
“Here we are,” he says, and Savannah pulls her straps up and she and Jack tumble out the side door.
There are no streetlights here. But the moon is out. It would be a good night for running. The upturned faces of the leaves catch the moonlight like mirrors and everything is bathed in shades of silver. If only we had names for all those shades, maybe more people would notice them, would appreciate how bright and alive they can be. I want to point this out to Henry or Savannah, but they’d only laugh at me.
Henry digs a flashlight out of the trunk and leads us down an old dirt road, if it can even be called a road anymore. It’s overrun with weeds and lined with sticker bushes that snatch at my sleeves like little hands as I pass.
The flashlight makes the forest seem strange, washing out the trees, casting jumpy shadows that move along with us. I’d be happier in the dark, honestly. The light just means our eyes have no chance to adjust. Jack hands me the Mountain Dew bottle.
“What was your name again?” he asks. I tell him and take a sip of whatever is in the bottle. It burns, but I swallow it, writing a smug little speech in my mind about how this is all the pastor’s fault, how he drove me to it by expecting the worst of me, how I would probably be home safe in bed if it weren’t for him. Oh ye of little faith heed not the call of the something or other lest you face my eternal judgment. Prince of peace! I take another sip of the foul, numbing stuff in the bottle and hand it back.
The bridge, when we finally reach it, is tiny,
barely wide enough for a car, with rusted metal guardrails and moss dappling the pavement. It arches over Monday Creek, the orange-brown rivulet of spit and mine runoff that winds through Lester. Savannah is giggling. She runs out onto the bridge and Jack runs after her. He’s at least a foot taller than her, so he has to bend down pretty far to whisper something into her ear. He takes her hand and they run the rest of the way across the bridge. I feel a pang as the two of them disappear into the trees. I start out onto the bridge, but stop halfway, uncertain.
“I wouldn’t believe it,” Henry says behind me, “if I hadn’t heard it my own self.”
I turn.
“The crying, I mean,” he says.
“It was probably the wind,” I say.
“No way. I know the wind.”
I’ve been here before, actually, with my sister, though not recently. The bridge is somewhere roughly north of Lester, I’m pretty sure. My sister is a far better navigator than me, so I always let her lead the way. We never heard anything strange when we came. Just owls and insects. The normal cries of the forest at night.
“Has anybody seen them?” I ask Henry. “The ghosts?”
“I don’t know. Probably.” He’s got the flashlight pointing down at his side. I snatch it away from him and point it at the creek, sweep it back and forth like a searchlight.
“Just imagine,” I say, as serious as I can manage, “if we were looking down and all of a sudden we saw a pair of eyes looking back up at us.”
“Shut up,” says Henry. He tries to grab the flashlight, but I jerk it out of his reach.
“Or a tiny baby hand,” I say, “reaching out of the water.” I flick the flashlight off and on, off and on. The beam catches on a branch sticking out of the mud by the bank and Henry gasps. I laugh. The night is making us young again. I can almost forget that we aren’t kids anymore, that we aren’t friends. That we are teenagers, a boy and a girl alone and there are rules about that.
“Quit it, Jo,” Henry says.
Some Kind of Animal Page 3
