Sitting on Wesley’s couch, the blood from his busted lip spilling onto the bright leather, Joel struggled to stay conscious. A satin blackness, cool and supple, wrapped itself over his eyes. There, peeking through the fibers, what did he see but the past, catching up to him at last? What did he see but everything he had worked his entire life to forget?
Ranger Mason had enlisted in the army shortly after the Bison’s first summer game ten years ago. Joel and Starsha continued as always. His shame was such that when Joel made her happy he felt wretched. When he made her sad he thought to himself, Well, at least she doesn’t know.
One evening that summer, Joel had discovered an issue of Playgirl waiting in his house’s mailbox, the naked men on its pages smeared with cow shit. A few weeks later, Joel had taken a job as a carhop at the Sonic Drive-In and one afternoon had brought an order for four fudge milk shakes to a car full of footballers who’d never once given Joel any trouble. A few seconds later he’d been covered head to toe in liquid chocolate. “Ranger says hello from Baghdad,” said the boy behind the wheel, all of them cackling on their way out of the drive-in.
Joel never told his girlfriend about the punch he’d thrown at the game, nor any of the harassment that punch had apparently brought to bear on him. When he mentioned the chocolate incident to her brother during their next round of mudding, Troy had replied offhandedly, “Oh, fuck ’em.” After a beat he’d turned to Joel with a clumsy smile and added, “But, you know, it might hurt my feelings.”
Joel had laughed, his heart in his mouth. It had been so thrilling, so distressing, to finally flirt like he meant it.
If only Troy had always been so kind. As the summer cooled and coppered into fall, his calls to Joel had become more infrequent, their time together briefer. He was always chewing pills when Joel saw him, always rubbing his neck and grumbling about the sprain he’d experienced years before, as if Joel could do anything but fret for him. Troy was always hurrying off early from their meetings or arriving hours late. Daily, hourly, Joel suffered violent fits of jealousy.
Not that Joel possessed the strength to do anything about it.
“I want you tonight,” Troy had whispered into the phone, on that final November afternoon.
“Where have you been?”
A pause. A heavy breath. “Meet me tonight? I’m seeing the game. I’ll come find you after, down at the park?”
“The public park?”
“I want you,” Troy said again in a whisper.
Joel had only hesitated for a moment. He didn’t see that he had a choice. “Of course.”
It was well past dark by the time Joel arrived, and a cold wind had harried the town all day. He listened to the Bison lose their game and snapped off the radio. He sat a long time in his car, his headlights illuminating the plain stone steps descending into the dark. He took a long breath.
As he reached out a hand to kill the engine he stopped when he heard static come leaking from the radio, a low, expectant shh, even though the little light above the speaker was a dead red. Was there another car here? A radio playing down in the gully below? But no: Joel brought his ear to the grille of the speaker and heard a faint pop from inside, a rattle, something that sounded an awful lot like a distant groan.
He told himself not to be crazy. The radio was old. Speakers got weird when they got old. That was all. That was all.
He wrenched his keys free from the ignition and hustled from the car.
Joel let his eyes adjust to the dark. The bed of the gully was thick with dead leaves that crept up his legs. He turned and spotted a little nook in the gully and took up position there. He stuck a hand down his pants to keep it warm.
The cold came rolling down the rock. The temperature was falling fast. With the game over, he estimated it would take Troy fifteen minutes to make it here from the field (though after all of Troy’s imprecations against football, Joel wondered vaguely—jealously—what could have inspired him to go to the game tonight in the first place).
Half an hour passed. Joel couldn’t pretend to be surprised. Troy was always late.
Sounds played funny against the walls of the gully: the whisper of the leaves at his feet echoed with every fresh breeze. He looked at his watch, buried his numb hand back in his underwear, then wrenched it out, sensing suddenly that he wasn’t alone. He squinted at the thicket of brambles and thorns a few yards away. That thicket was as tall as a person and tangled tight as a wall. There was no way anyone could conceal themselves in that overgrowth, Joel told himself. There was no way a person could be down here watching him, whatever the hairs on the back of his arms might say.
He sure was having to tell himself a lot this evening.
With a warm flood of relief, Joel heard the sound of tires creaking over the blacktop above him. But when the light of the car’s headlamps spilled, briefly, down into the gully, all that relief drained out of him. He held in a scream. He felt his knees struggle to hold him upright. He saw in those brambles at the end of the gully something he spent years telling himself he’d never seen.
He saw a pair of glassy black eyes watching him between the thorns and creeper. Saw them shine in the light with the ancient smug intelligence of an iguana, of a creature from the dark deep dreaming its way up to the surface, hungry for a show. Joel would have sworn—if his mind hadn’t teetered right on the absolute edge of oblivion—that those eyes, those big eyes had a smile in their shine.
And then something else registered in his panicking brain. The car above him had come to a stop but the engine hadn’t cut out.
That wasn’t Troy’s engine.
The car door swung open. Footsteps on the gravel. The headlights dimmed as someone passed in front of them. A pause. The person started down the steps.
It wasn’t Troy. The person was wheezy with the effort of the stairs, and by the time they were halfway down the side of the gully Joel was eyeing the sheer walls around him for handholds, sturdy roots, any possible escape.
There was none. Just as Joel decided to take his chances with the thicket, he saw those black eyes watching him again, saw them blink (imissedyou) and the thorns rattled in a shudder: the thing inside was stirring, settling itself in. Joel caught a smell of rot on the breeze, felt his bladder threaten to fail.
A large man, bald-headed and thick-necked, stopped at the bottom of the stairs. The man jingled with keys and some other metal sound Joel couldn’t place. Then he saw the handcuffs.
It was Sheriff’s Deputy Grissom, a man so corrupt he was practically a town joke. He had no neck, and a head all out of proportion with his body—long and narrow and raw with eczema—so that his face resembled nothing so much as a red pushpin pressed into fold upon dark fold of sweaty khaki. You could always avoid a ticket from Grissom, joked folks at the Egg House, if you just paid him in cash half of what the county would cite you. When Joel had started driving, Paulette had even given him a few twenties to keep in the glove box of his car, just in case, she said—“Better to grease the deputy than have the points on your license.”
Joel realized with a shiver that he’d spent that money weeks ago.
Grissom burped into his fist, rubbed the backs of his hands together in some weird private gesture, peered into the brambles that blocked the northern end of the gully as if he knew precisely what he was looking for. He reached for the flashlight on his belt.
Joel held his breath.
The deputy took a few heavy steps through the leaves, playing the beam of his flashlight ahead of him through the overgrowth, but there was nothing there. Where had those eyes gone? How could something so big—it would have to be big: those eyes had been the size of hubcaps, those thorns had been quaking—how could it have just slithered away without a sound?
But no, they weren’t gone. Joel felt that scrutiny, that hungry smile, watching him as his knees shook, as a single tear ran down his cheek. He had never been so afraid in his life, had never been so ashamed—of the stupidity and the hunger and the desperate love that had brought him here—and now, as he suspected that all of the summer’s happiness might be about to ruin him, Joel felt he had no one to blame but himself.
Those eyes, wherever they’d gotten to, were enjoying this.
Deputy Grissom swung around on his heel. Joel pressed himself against the rocky wall, squeezed his eyes shut. He was trapped.
There was a high whine of delight in Grissom’s voice when the beam settled on Joel. “Well—ain’t this a sight.”
Joel couldn’t speak.
“Don’t you know the park closes at dark, son?”
Grissom lowered the flashlight. Joel saw that the man was standing between him and the stairs, blocking him in.
“I didn’t see a sign, sir.” Joel’s teeth were chattering. “I’m sorry.”
“If only ignorance was an excuse. The hell are you doing out here anyway?” (And here, with a cold jolt, Joel remembered something else he’d forgotten for a decade.) “Why ain’t you out there with the other boys?”
“I was taking a walk, sir.”
Above them, another car pulled into the park. Grissom heard it too. He flicked off the light.
It was Troy. At last. Joel had spent enough hours in that truck to know the sound of its engine even with panic ringing in his ears. The truck rumbled to a stop above them, idled for a moment—just long enough, Joel later thought, for Troy to recognize what was happening in the gully beneath his headlights—and turned away.
The noise of the truck’s tires seemed to recede for an age.
The deputy clicked on the light again and laughed. “You must be so lonely out here all on your own.”
Joel struggled to breathe. He heard the roar of Troy’s engine when it returned to the highway, its eager rattle as Troy climbed from second gear to third to fourth. Joel thought of Troy’s hand falling from the truck’s stick and coming to rest on his thigh.
The engine fading, endlessly fading.
“I was actually about to leave, Officer.”
Joel took a step forward. Grissom held up a pale, fleshy palm. “You’re in quite a hurry.”
“It’s cold, sir.”
“Hence my confusion as to why you’re down here.” The man’s nose flared. “Are you familiar with the concept of loitering with intent?”
“No, sir.”
“It’s an arrestable offense.”
“But I haven’t hurt anyone.”
“Well, you’ve certainly inconvenienced me.” Grissom sucked spit between his teeth, deliberated. He lowered his voice. “Perhaps we could come to an understanding, you and me. An exchange. Would you like that, son?”
“I—I left my wallet in the car.” Leaving aside the fact he was broke, Joel wasn’t sure if this was how adults negotiated a bribe. Was there some sort of signal, something he should be doing with his eyes?
But Grissom only shook his head. “I don’t want your money, son.”
Time thickened and stopped and started sluggishly again.
The deputy stood there a long time, blocking the stairs, muttering something to himself, a whole little conversation Joel couldn’t catch. Finally Grissom straightened his uniform, nodded to Joel and said very calmly, “If you move one step they’ll find you in five pieces.”
Grissom hustled up the steps. When he reached the top, Joel heard the sound of a car’s trunk opening, a distant rustle of fabric, a zipper unfastening. Joel stared across the gully at the thorns that blocked the path out of there. They whispered in the dark.
Like a tape rewinding, all the sounds from above played back in reverse. The fat deputy returned to where he’d stood a moment before. He held a boxy camera in one hand. His other hand was draped over the gun on his hip.
“I think we might have a solution here for all parties involved.” Grissom adjusted the camera, raised it to his eye, clicked the shutter. Joel was blinded, briefly, by the flash. “Take off your shirt.”
Joel was certain he’d misheard him. “Sir?”
“I said take off your fucking shirt.”
So, Joel thought: this was how they happened, the stories you always hear about on the news. He fumbled at the hem of his shirt. His fingers had gone numb.
Flash.
Grissom shook his head. “No, no. Look like you want it.”
Joel didn’t have to ask the man what he meant. He didn’t hesitate. Joel thought, at that moment, that he would do anything he was asked if it meant he could make it out of this gully alive. He swallowed a retch, poked out his mouth in a pout. He made the face that would later fall out of newspapers all over town.
Flash.
“Better. Now your belt.”
Flash.
“Now the pants. All the way. Over the shoes, goddammit.”
Flash.
“Give me that face again. Perfect.”
Flash.
“Now the briefs.”
“Please, sir—”
“Now.”
Joel pulled down his briefs. A cold breeze ran through his bare legs.
“Pull them loose.” Grissom moved his free hand from his gun to the front of his pants. He squeezed. Flash.
Joel tugged down his frigid balls.
“If you start crying you’re a dead man. Get it hard. Christ, boy, look like you want it.”
Joel wondered if there was something in store for him tonight that might be worse than death. In his head he could still hear Troy’s truck, rumbling away.
“Turn around. Hands on the wall. Bend over.”
Flash. Flash. Flash. Grissom approached and lowered himself on his haunches. Joel could feel the man’s wet breath on the cheeks of his ass. He shuddered when he felt Grissom’s thumb rest, briefly, in their cleft.
“That one’s a beauty,” Grissom said, his voice trembling with something like awe. “Like the button on a navel orange.”
Joel heard something spatter across the leaves between his feet.
Grissom stayed crouched behind him a long time. Joel stood perfectly still. He didn’t dare to breathe.
Finally Grissom cleared his throat, rose, zipped up his fly.
“Hands behind your back, son.”
Joel didn’t move.
“I said give me your fucking hands.”
“Why?”
“Because I have a goldarn arrest to make, that’s why. Lordy, just look at the sight of you.” Grissom laughed. He leaned his bulky frame against Joel’s bare back to grab the boy’s wrists.
“We had a deal!”
“A what?” The cuffs bit Joel’s skin. Grissom gave them a tug. “Let’s get you to the station—are you gonna walk or do I need to drag you?”
Joel stumbled on the way up the stairs—had the ground quaked or had his mind just departed his body?—and nearly fell back into the dark. He couldn’t help it. He was crying so hard he could hardly see.
His tears all but choked him when he was pressed naked into the squad car, when the door was slammed, when Grissom lowered his bulk into the seat ahead of him with a spicy burp. Joel couldn’t stop shaking on the cold vinyl seat. He saw eyes in the trees, watching him with a smile.
His mind shorted out.
Was it any wonder that Joel forgot what Grissom said next? That it had taken him ten years and a blow to the head to finally see what his vaunted fucking intuition had been trying to show him all this time? To recall the way Grissom pops loose the camera’s memory card and tucks it into the shirt pocket of his uniform shakes his head shifts his cruiser into Reverse speaks with a tenderness that’s almost worse than all he’s said before:
“Cheer up, son. I weren’t ever invited out there, either.”
By the time Clark arrived Wesley was long gone. The fight for Joel’s phone (and the recording of Wesley’s confession that rested on it) had been brief. Wesley had heaved the heavy glass of bourbon. Joel had already reached his phone by the time the glass exploded against the wall. Wesley took a second too long to cross the cavernous living room: Joel had his phone jammed into his pocket by the time Wesley threw his first punch. Joel stumbled back, dodged it.
He wasn’t so lucky a second time. Wesley’s fist (and the force of all his old football muscle) had crashed into Joel’s jaw, sent his head into the little wooden end table beside the couch. Joel’s brain had flickered, his mind struggled to process the complex task of breathing, blinking, pulling loose the knife at his ankle.
But then there it was, in his hand, the blade’s tip shaking in the air.
A moment later and Wesley was heading for the hall with a sob in his throat. Joel, crouched on all fours, vomit in his mouth, watched as Wesley stumbled out the front door a minute later with his keys and a green backpack.
“Joel?” Clark was here. A half hour had passed. He thought he had hallucinated calling her.
Rising from the couch, the memory of his arrest still echoing in his brain, Joel recoiled when he saw the state she was in.
Clark was covered in ash. It powdered her hair, smudged her cheeks like theater paint. Her eyes were a violent red. When he told her that Wesley’s house was empty, she brushed glass from the sofa and dropped heavily into the seat beside him. A chalky ghost remained, briefly, suspended in the air above her.
“Are you alright?” he asked, rising to get her a drink before she could tell him otherwise.
“Have you ever seen what an oxygen tank does to someone when it explodes next to their bed?”
Joel handed her a whiskey.
She said nothing. Joel poured himself a drink and considered his approach. Clark was clearly exhausted, but he needed her now more than ever. He needed to move while the memory was still fresh. Joel needed to know what that fat fucker of a cop, like Wesley, had never been invited to.
“I have to speak to Grissom,” Joel said. “Do you know where he lives?”
Clark stared at Joel as if to confirm he wasn’t joking. She exploded with a violent spasm of laughter. Little wisps of ash drifted off her quaking body and rose through the air like she was smoldering herself.
“I was just at his house,” she said. “There’s not much of him left.”