Scott awakens. Inside the bridge, it’s impossible to say what time it is.
“Ray?” he says.
There is no answer. Scott rolls from the couch, then crawls toward the pale glow, the hole where light seeps in. Carefully, slowly, he starts down the ladder. Hanging for a moment, he lands among the scattered milk crates. The balls of his feet burn. He steps on the leaning chain-link fence, forcing it all the way to the ground, and walks across it, onto the path that runs along the river. The gravel hurts his feet, so he walks between the train tracks, on the smooth wood of the ties.
Coming out of the darkness, into the light, it seems the brightness brings a new edge to every sense. His skin prickles under the weight of the sun; distant cars’ engines, across the river on the expressway, roar. The billboards overhead are full color and all promises, too hopeful to believe, holding everything he doesn’t have. A pile of batteries shines between the tracks; he pockets a few, takes them as a sign that Ray is near.
He’s less than twenty-five feet from the boys before he sees them, off to the left, next to the bushes. Only two of them, the white one and the biggest black one, and he doubts they’ll dare say anything. Not only are they silent, they pretend not to see him. As he walks past, he feels their eyes on him; he turns to face them.
“Where’s your boy Terrell?” he says.
“Not here,” the black one says.
“He alive?”
“Far as I know.”
“Yes,” the white one says.
“So what?” says the other, stepping forward, one fist raised.
Scott doesn’t even bother to strike a jujitsu pose. Reaching into his pocket, he throws one battery, then the next; he throws them until they’re gone, then starts with the biggest pieces of gravel he can find.
The boys back off until they’re beyond his range. They stand there as if they might come after him, but he can tell by the way they move, checking each other, that there’s not enough trust between them. When he takes a step forward, they take one back.
Scott stares them down, then turns away, continuing to walk upriver. At least, he thinks, it wasn’t Terrell—that doesn’t change the fact of what happened, but at least the dead boy is not Ruth’s brother, is not someone Scott’s talked to, whose name he knows.
Under the next bridge, the shadows are even darker. Scott almost trips over the bicycle before his eyes adjust and he recognizes it, right at the edge of the river, on a concrete slab. His skin tightens, cold around his bones. It’s half taken apart, tires loose on the rims, spokes bent and broken, the makeshift rearview mirrors shattered. The plastic section of a car’s grille that Ray had attached to the front is detached now, broken apart. A raccoon tail is torn in two.
He looks back for the boys—they’re already gone, but they weren’t behind this, they don’t have it in them anymore. Turning back to the bicycle, he sees a pair of Ray’s powder blue dress pants, pulled inside out, twisted under the frame. It must have rained somewhere; the river is high, knuckling along, the color of caramel. It looks as if the old man jumped into the water—too much like that to believe it.
“This just isn’t right,” he says.
At his words, there’s motion, off to the right. Two figures step closer, from deep in the shadows; he had not noticed them because they’ve been standing perfectly still.
“Damn good thing,” Oliver says. “Here we were, waiting to have you explain to us what’s right and what’s wrong, Scotty.” He’s still wearing the same dirty tweed vest, the sandals, the stocking cap back on his head.
“What did you do with him?” Scott says.
“Who?”
“That’s his bike.”
“We just found it,” the other man says. “In the bushes. Wasn’t anyone attached to it.”
“He didn’t jump into the river,” Scott says.
“What are you talking about?” Oliver says. It looks as if he’s waxed his moustache; its tips point slightly upward. “Excuse my manners,” he says. “Scott, this is my friend Steve-O. He’s heard plenty about you.”
Steve-O just nods. He wears a red flannel shirt with the arms torn off. His own arms are thick and doughy, ready to squeeze the life out of something. The curls on his head are so blond they’re almost white. In one fist, he holds an adjustable wrench; in the other, a screwdriver. Bending down, he sharpens the screwdriver—one side, then the other—on the concrete.
“You still look tired,” Oliver says. “Like regular hell.”
“Appreciate it,” Scott says.
“He always was a big talker,” Oliver says to Steve-O, “but here lately Scotty’s been humbled some.”
Hidden cars shake the bridge overhead, then appear, blurs of color, as they merge onto 6-76. Scott thinks of his eight hundred dollars, still in his backpack, as far as he knows.
“Wouldn’t mind seeing you tangle with Steve-O,” Oliver says. “He’d do it, tear a piece out of you, if I said the word. Isn’t that right?”
“Yep,” Steve-O says.
“I have to go,” Scott says. “Maybe another time. Later.”
“Later means never,” Oliver says.
“Things to do,” Scott says. He heads into the sunlight, not looking back. Behind him, he hears Oliver’s voice.
“Busy, busy, busy”
Scott avoids the waterworks; he knows it’s wrapped in yellow police tape, and he doesn’t like the sight. Climbing the rise and crossing the grass park, then Vine Street, he picks up speed. People run up and down the steps of the museum, exercising, taking pictures of each other. He doesn’t know what day it is anymore—if it was a free Sunday, if he had the time, he’d go inside, sit down on a bench and let it all loose inside him. But he has no time. He shuffles along Kelly Drive, then crosses it.
A pigeon’s been hit and run over, smashed dead, flat except one wing, which flaps up and down with the wind of passing cars. Tin cans riddle the bushes on the other side. Condoms. Scott’s through the bushes, branches scratching his bare arms. He comes out onto more blacktop, past an abandoned car, burnt out, resting on its chassis; he skirts a baseball diamond, empty except for an old man hitting a golf ball ten feet at a time and a woman with a dog bigger than she is, letting it run.
The dog doesn’t notice Scott as he slips into the woods again, under the trees. Squirrels leap from branch to branch, talking the whole time. His energy comes in hot surges, lapses into exhaustion, then fires up again. Mansions flash through the leaves and branches—the colors of paint, straight slants of rooftops—and then they’re gone again. He can hear the cars below, down on Kelly Drive, but he can no longer see them. He wishes someone would call his name. His legs keep going, moving him through it all. Leaves slither around him. Vines tangle his ankles, can’t hold him back. Spiderwebs wrap his face, across his glasses, and he hardly notices.
The entrance is hidden, but he knows the way; the tiny bells hang from the fishing line, strung through the bushes, and he doesn’t try to cup the bells in his hands, to muffle their ringing.
He steps into the clearing and stands there, amazed, taking it all in.
Wooden animals are scattered about, some stamped straight into the mud, only their heads above the surface; some of the spoons are bent double, their photographic faces hidden, while others are so faded their features are lost. Footprints mark the dirt—painted stones, shards of mirrors and glass shine from the beneath the bushes, where they have been kicked. Chicken bones are scattered, splintered. In the pool, the plastic lining has torn, and all the water is gone; already, the bright green shoots of new plants fill the rounded indentation.
The sun, straight overhead, makes Scott shiver. Bending, he gently touches the new sprouts in the pond. He picks up a row of keys, pockets them. The main thing is that he saw the garden before this, that he won’t forget, that he knew the man who made it beautiful. He was right to bail Ray out—it was a responsibility that couldn’t be sidestepped. And he wasn’t mistaken about Ray, but that doesn’t mean the old man had to stay. It’s like with Chrissie—if someone gets in that far and burns him, he knows, that doesn’t mean his own feelings weren’t real; those muscles worked, and are stronger, ready to hold better the next time.
Next to Scott’s foot, a rusted scissors rests, one blade stuck in the mud; he pulls it out, seeing white hairs along the other blade’s edge. And then, under a bush, he notices something else. A whole line of white hairs, clumps of black ones, all blown to collect along a stick on the ground. Stepping closer, he rakes the hairs together with his fingers. Bristly, some whiskers, some longer. He spreads them more sparsely, more widely, as he walks from the garden, between the bushes, and under the trees.