Saving John

by Gabe Sluis

  Chapter 22- Do shadows still exist in the dark?

  It began with a slow walk across the grassy meadow in the drizzle. The woods began, smaller oaks acting as greeters before the larger pines began. Jake and Donny took turns walking ahead of Chris, looking for the best way to take to get to the rumored trail. The crutch helped Chris quite a bit, along with Donny’s expert splint job. In the canopy of the forest, the darkness got worse. Jake was in the lead when he almost walked into the marker post.

  “Hey! I think I found it! This looks like a trail…”

  Donny and Chris caught up and they read the sign together.

  “’Jenner Redwoods,’ and an arrow pointing that way. Looks like we are in the right place,” Chris said. “I guess we just need to keep taking this north. What was the place the Sheriffs daughter said that they might be at?”

  “The cathedral redwoods.” Jake replied.

  Donny turned, startled by the crack of a twig deeper into the woods. “I’m getting a bad feeling about this place, guys. We don’t know where this guy Golden could be. And the wanted poster said he has been shooting anyone that he comes across.”

  “I doubt he will be shooting anyone in this darkness. We will be fine Donny. There are all kinds of little critters in these woods at night; they are bound to make some noise. Just give it a little while too, our eyes will adjust. I heard that your eyes get used to the dark sixty percent in the first five minutes, and take almost a half an hour to get the other forty percent. So give it a little longer and we will be right at home.”

  “Yeah, dude,” Chris added, “even Renault made it sound like we’d have to make it decently far into the woods before we would find this guy. If he can appear anywhere he wants and watch what is going on, he probably has seen where we need to go.”

  “Yeah, you are probably right about no one shooting at anything in this darkness. At least the trees are keeping us from getting totally soaked. We should still try to keep the noise to a minimum as we walk down the trail. No point in letting that guy know we are here, in case he is around.” Donny agreed.

  There was a distant rumble of thunder as Jake suggested Donny take his turn at the lead. “Give a whistle if we need to stop.” Donny agreed and began his walk down the trail and into almost total darkness.

  Alone with his thoughts, the soft sounds of his friends movement just behind, Donny watched himself walk past the faint silhouettes of large trunked trees. From what he could tell, the path was wide enough for a car to drive down, but passing another would be a problem. The ground was packed dirt and rotten asphalt with a thin layer of pine needles spread about that made the path slightly slippery when it angled downhill.

  Thunder sounded in the distance. The near distance, Donny thought. His footsteps were very audible to him, even over the gusts of wind that stirred up some of the ground coverings. To the cadence of his footfall a tune came to his head. He considered pulling out his flute and flushing out the notes that continued to coalesce in his head, but thought the better of it. For now the orchestra was confined to his imagination. As if on queue, a crack of thunder sounded on beat off to his left. The storm was getting closer, but Donny was far from worried. His eyes were doing the final adjusting Jake promised and he was feeling more at home in the dark woods.

  A sense of déjà vu swept over him as he started up a gentle grade of the trail. The feeling was so strong, that it almost forced Donny to stop in his tracks. The next few feet, all he could do was search his memories for the time in his past that must have been linked with what he was experiencing now to cause this feeling. And then it came to him.

  As a kid, it must have been back in his early high school years, he had gone camping with Chris and his family. Perhaps it had been a church thing, but it really didn’t matter. They were camping near a lake, in pinewoods similar to the ones he was in now. The event he remembered happened in the daytime, as he walked with Chris and his dad in the shade. The circumstances were not clear, nor anything other than what big John McCourtney had said that day. They were on the topic of school, and what they learned in science class at Almond Knoll. The dark path was gone and he was like a bird, far away, watching a new scene.

  “We got Mr. Davison talking for almost the whole class about how Adam and Eve didn’t have belly buttons! It was so funny,” young Donny said.

  “He taught you that in science class?” John asked.

  “Yeah, usually we learn stuff like that in Bible class, but Mr. Davison likes to talk about why evolution is bogus too, sometimes. We ask him funny questions all the time and get him derailed!”

  “I got out of my element presentation one day cuz he was answering a question about where all the water in Noah’s flood came from,” Chris added to the conversation. To the boys this was a funny topic, how they could get out of work because their old teacher would skew from topic so easily. But John picked up on something else.

  “Just because they teach you one version of the Bible at that school doesn’t mean that it is the only way it can be,” John said in his watered down accent. “Let me tell you boys something, when you get to college, or out in the real world, you are going to find that what they tell you in that school is not the way that everyone believes. There are plenty of Christians out there that don’t believe in a lot of that stuff. They should be teaching you real science instead of his own personal fantasies of the way he thinks things went.”

  The boys were quiet, still in the young age where they were prone to agree with whomever’s presence they were in that gave a strong opinion. Donny felt a bit of panic at saying something that seemed to fire up Chris’s dad.

  “Oh, he teaches us lots of real science, too. And he tells us the other theories about creation and stuff. Like the long day theory or that continents shifted around and stuff. He even tells us that evolution isn’t a bad word or something, just that there is no way that is the way it happened.”

  “Listen to me,” John began. John often began arguments this way, leaving little room to argue back, though he loved a good argument. He just liked to open with a strong position. “There are lots of good Christians out there that don’t buy all that shit. I love God, but I tell you that stuff doesn’t matter. In the big picture, it doesn’t matter if the world was created in six actual days, or each day was a million years and we did evolve from monkeys. I tend to think that it happened the second way. Men have devoted their entire lives to science that supports most of those ideas. But that doesn’t make me a bad person or not a Christian for thinking that way. It’s about Jesus, not what version of the creation story that you put your whole faith in. Remember that when you go back to your science class. Just don’t eat everything they try to feed you, or when you get to college, you will be in for a great shock.”

  The conversation ended there for Donny, and he was back in the dark. A flash of light and rumble of thunder brought him back to the present. He remembered that one point in time much clearer than anything else about the trip. He was blown away at such a young age that a man, someone’s dad, would say such a thing. This was the first time in his life that someone of high authority questioned the very well established norm. He had grown up in a strict home and to question something as fundamental as God creating the Earth was electrifying. If he ever expressed an opinion like that to his own father, a man who required that he and his brothers sing along to the hymns at church, he would be looked at like the devil had just crawled inside him. So, to hear this from Chris’ dad was the first real taste of true descent he had felt.

  At the time, this kind of thinking, that the whole world did not play by his parent’s rules, emboldened him to rebel drastically. It subconsciously gave way to not finding it that big of a deal to have a drink. As a kid, his father described taking a shot of hard alcohol as the same as drinking eight beers, and that sort of dangerous behavior was foolish and sinful. Taking his first shot turned out not to be even as close to as bad as he was told. More and more ‘truths’ were thro
wn off and replaced by experiences. This was in no way the fault of one minor speech, but a general principal of questioning his reality, which took a brief turn down a bumpy path on Donny’s search for meaning.

  Now, much closer to being an adult, the way John was, it made him look back with admiration at the man. He had had his differences with Chris’ parents in the past, fighting against veiled disapproval, but now in the darkness, things became somewhat more vivid. Lightning struck again and he thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye.

  While Donny led up front, Jake walked with Chris. It was a slow walk for Chris, using the crutch and unable to flex his foot at the ankle. Now with the splint, it felt like a dead weight on the end of his leg that he had to swing along with him. The darkness made his mind wander as well since there was not much visual input to stimulate his mind. The monotonous crutching motion added to the boredom as he followed Jake out of the corner of his eye.

  A couple of years ago he had shared rent of an apartment with another guy. He would have preferred to rent a place with Jake, but with him gone to basic training and not having much income while going to school, Chris settled for another guy he had know through work. It had gone well for six months or so. He and Mike had gone in on some cheap furniture and things for there new place, but then it went south. Mike was dirty, never did his share of the work, and seemed to bring random people over at all hours of the night. Jake would have never done that if they had split a place and it slowly wore on his nerves.

  Finally, after eight months, he had had enough. Jake was back from training and was applying for good jobs so that he could get a place of his own. The two conspired to rent together as soon as Jake had the income to co-rent with his friend. In the mean time, Chris called it off with Mike and moved back into his old room at home. But over one item, there was a point of contention, a TV they had bought together. Mike insisted on keeping it, and as he kept the apartment, Mike and his new roommate stood with arms crossed and told Chris to get lost, it was theirs. Hearing this from Chris, Jake was not pleased.

  “That is total shit, dude. But that’s okay. This is what we are going to do. First, give it a week or two, let the heat die down and let them think they’ve won. Then we go in, while they are gone at work or something, and take the TV. This dude forfeited his half when he tried to keep it for himself like that. Those dickheads don’t know who they are messing with.”

  Two weeks later, they did just that. The two jumped the back fence to the half of the duplex that Chris and Mike formerly shared. Both silently shaking their heads in disgust at the condition of the backyard in such a short time, they crept over to a side yard window and waited.

  “Mike used to always leave this window open,” Chris whispered to Jake.

  “No cars in the driveway, and I see no movement. You ready?”

  With the nod of Chris’s head, Jake slid the blade of his pocketknife next to the screen, removing it from the frame of the window. Pushing the vertical blinds to the side, he boosted himself up and went head first into the room. Chris followed and they were in the apartment.

  Despite the fact that Chris had lived here just weeks before, the place now felt completely like someone else’s home. Chris led the way into the living room and went right for the TV. He began to unplug the cables and looked back for Jake who was checking all the other rooms in the house for occupants. He came back with wide eyes.

  Chris’ heart leapt to a gallop and he threw his hands up in question. Jake, in response, put his hands in a praying position and moved them under one side of his tilted head. He pointed to the room Chris used to occupy and then made two handed swooping motion from his hair and then outlined invisible bumps on his chest. Chris showed his teeth and flexed the auxiliary muscles in his neck. He turned and finished the disconnect job, hands shaking and trying to be quieter than he already had been.

  When Chris gave the signal he was done, Jake slipped out the front door and Chris locked it after him. He then went back to the TV, stuffing the power cable in his front pocket, and took the flat screen in both arms to the back sliding door. He opened it an inch at a time, wincing at each squeak it made until it was open enough to get through. Chris set the TV down on the patio furniture and went around to their entry point to replace the screen. With it put back the best he could without using a knife or screwdriver, he went back to the prize and waited for Jake to drive the car around to the back fence.

  Listening with wide eyes for any sound of movement, the thought donned on him that he would need something to step on to make it over the fence. About to move from his crouched position to place a patio chair against the six-foot vertical board fence, he heard movement from inside. The clap of a cupboard and the sound of running water stunned him. How did he not hear her sooner? Just then, Jake drove down the back ally and stopped on the other side of the fence.

  Would she notice the TV was missing? Will she look out the sink window and see it sitting out on the patio? Chris waited, petrified, for a full minute until he decided he had to do something. Jake would be getting worried too and he didn’t want to risk his accomplice coming back over the fence looking for him and getting them both caught.

  Chris peaked his head back in the sliding glass door and saw the kitchen was clear. Listening for a second longer, the unmistakable sound of a lighter being struck and air being sucked thru water came from deeper in the apartment. Chris smiled and grabbed the closest patio chair.

  Placing it against the fence, he popped up to find Jake grinning up at him from the front driver side tire, inspecting it like there might have been something wrong. “Ready?” Jake nodded.

  Crossing the yard for the final time, Chris grabbed the TV and rushed it over to the fence. He hoisted it up and over to Jakes waiting hands and climbed the halfway to the top himself. Giving his stool a violent kick back toward where it came, Chris dismounted the fence and dove into the passenger seat of his own car. Jake was in the driver seat, having apparently already stowed the TV. They took off down the ally and were out on the main road before anyone said a word.

  Jake dropped the cars windows and Chris rotated the volume knob on his radio. Words were said and boasts were made. They had pulled off the operation faultlessly. Consequences were nowhere in sight. Two days later, Jake received a frantic phone call from Chris driving home from work.

  “A detective called me at work! I had to go in to his office on my lunch. Mike called the cops on us, dude!”

  “Slow down, tell me what happened.”

  “I didn’t tell him anything. I think we are okay. But he was trying to scare me really bad. He said there were two uniformed officers at my house, right then. About to search it, so I had better tell him the truth now.”

  “Fuck, man. Slow down! Tell me it all, from the beginning.”

  “Okay, okay. Apparently this guy was from major crimes or something. He said because the missing television was a thousand bucks brand new, it was considered grand theft.”

  “Damn, I can’t believe he called the cops!”

  “Yeah. So he said that Mike accused me specifically of stealing the TV. I told him I didn’t take anything; yeah we had a disagreement about it but that I had another at home, so I just wrote that one off. I’m glad I wore my fancy shirt and tie to work today, cuz I think he thought I really was rich enough to afford to do something like that. But I was good too, dude! I kept going up and to the right with my eyes before I answered a question. I really think he bought it!”

  “Well it’s a good fuckin’ thing we took that thing to my house instead of yours. That was a close one…”

  “What about fingerprints? You think they will find our fingerprints in the house? I knew we should have made it look like a real robbery and messed the whole place up…”

  “No, we did nothing wrong. That was your TV, we just got back what was yours. We were totally justified. And they are not going to call CSI in over some stupid TV. We’re fine, dude.”

 
“The detective did seem young, like this was pawned off on him. He didn’t ask me too many questions and it seemed like he thought it was a waste of his time. I just don’t know how I’m going to explain this to my parents.”

  “Just don’t tell them anything. Tell them the same stuff you told the cops! You don’t even know if he actually sent anyone to your house.”

  “I called my mom. She doesn’t work on Wednesdays. She was home. They came and looked through the whole house for it.”

  “Oh, man… Like I said, just tell them what you told the cops.”

  “I can’t lie to my parents like that,” Chris said.

  “Why not?” Jake said, confounded.

  “Cuz I just can’t. They are my parents. I gotta go anyway. I’m pulling into my driveway. I’ll call you later if anything changes.”

  “Yeah man, I’ll talk to you later. Don’t worry, we will take that thing and pawn it up in Reno and you can buy a new TV with the money. Just lie, dude.”

  “Yeah… later.” Chris hung up.

  Chris didn’t remember how exactly the conversation began, but both his parents were waiting for him in the kitchen when he got home. The lights were off in most of the house, except over the island in the kitchen, where they stood waiting for him. His mom was immediately on his side, believing that it must have been a misunderstanding, but his dad was not on the same track. He knew his son.

  More than anything, Chris remembered his dad seeming taller and sweaty that night. He had the look on his face that Chris associated with frustration. He had seen it on his face many times when his dad was dealing with work stuff, but now it was directed at him. He tried to spin the same story he had told the detective, but in the end he admitted that he and Jake had took the TV. His mom was just glad he was not in any trouble, but again, his father was torn.

  “I hate having to choose between the law and my son. I should make you go turn yourself in and deal with the consequences.”

  “But it was basically my TV, Dad. I just went and got it back.”

  “That’s not the point. Do you see everything we have? I worked hard to get all this stuff. You don’t take shortcuts. When someone screws you over like that, you learn your lesson from it and don’t make the same mistake again. You are lucky I place you before the law.”

  And that was the end of that. No long speeches, just disappointment from his father. You are a man now, his look said, so act like it. Everyone went to bed that night and Chris laid in his bed thinking. He was back in the dark woods now, reliving the thoughts. It was a stupid youthful stunt. It seemed perfectly reasonable at the time and he was even quite proud of what he and Jake were able to pull off. But, in the lights over the kitchen island, they were nothing like the high from the days before.

  It was his dad’s words that hit the hardest. The idea that Chris still had so much maturity to learn from his dad, even in his early twenties when he thought he had it mostly all figured out. Chris had a good job at a bank, had almost finished getting his degree at night school, and until recently he had lived on his own. He was better off than most of his friends due to sound decisions. But then he would do something he thought was sound, only to have his father point out how it was totally foolish.

  Chris still had so much to learn from the man that he couldn’t bear to loose him yet.

  Another bolt of lightning struck, pulling him out of his thoughts and back to the present (whatever it was). Up ahead, Donny had stopped, and Jake caught up to him. Chris crutched the rest of the short distance, making the huddle three.

  “I keep seeing something in the woods,” Donny said. “It’s stalking us. I see it in the flashes of lightning.”