With a whole week before the fair was to open to the public, Fat Bobby and I needed something to do to occupy our minds. We’d spent a couple hours reading comics, and I’d let him go through my boxes and pick and choose what he wanted to read. But I stayed close by as he read them, never leaving him alone for even a second.
I’d instructed him on how to hold and care for the comics properly so as not to crease the covers or bend the binding. Nervously, I pretended to read as well, but watched my friend’s elbows and legs shuffling as he sat on my bedroom floor and flipped through the books. He came frighteningly close to trampling the comics at times, like a large circus elephant dancing dangerously close to the gleeful, pointing children, but disaster was always averted.
Finally, filled to the brim with mutants and krytponians, radioactive spiders and dark knights, even Fat Bobby had had enough superheroism for one morning and looked up and asked what we should do next.
I wanted to get out of the house as well, but was afraid to, and so didn’t immediately respond.
Sleep the past couple nights had been fitful and restless. I tossed and turned beneath the sheets, disturbing Bandit at the foot of the bed. Outside my window the branches of the apple trees tapped and clicked constantly, as if imploring my attention. Little nubs on the branches looked like switchblades, and every time headlights passed I was sure it was a sleek black Mustang out there cruising through the night.
I hadn’t told Mom or Dad about the guys in the car trailing me, or the driver with his gleaming knife. I knew I should; I knew Mr. Smirk—Dillon—was a dangerous kind of guy, not someone who’d be satisfied with just a fistfight. But I thought of the fuss and drama that would follow if I told them. How I’d probably be under house arrest until Dad got a hold of the police and the police got a hold of Dillon, his two friends, and their parents. The thought of missing even a single day of the summer was intolerable.
That was a foolish train of thought. What we as adults call irrational. I knew that even then. But kids aren’t the most rational of beings, as I’m sure you know. And boys the least of all.
Gathering up the comics we’d been reading, Bobby and I started slipping them back into their plastic sleeves as we silently considered his question. Light from the dresser lamp shone off the clear plastic sleeves in streaks and whorls of color. Thus bagged, we filed the books into their respective boxes, pushed the boxes back into the closet.
The light off the comics made me think of the light I’d seen from atop the hill on the dirt road overlooking the woods. I told Fat Bobby about it—he seemed vaguely interested—and we got up, went to the kitchen, grabbed a couple sodas and, with Bandit between us, we headed out.
As we walked, Fat Bobby’s interest seemed to grow, almost reaching a minimum level to qualify as excitement, and so mine did also, by proxy. He asked questions, and I found myself answering eagerly.
“Was it like a ghost light?” he asked. “I’ve heard that sometimes people see strange lights floating about in swamps. Was it like that? Ghost lights?”
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t like that at all. Besides, there aren’t any swamps here. It wasn’t no ghost lights.”
He looked vaguely disappointed, a scowl scrunching his face and making it look like a pile of unbaked dough grimacing. Then he smiled as some other idea struck him, something better, and the disappointment was a memory.
“Was it UFO lights?” he said, the eagerness in his tone raising his voice an octave and making me remember uncomfortably those high, whiny pleas that had first led me to the crying, nearly naked kid in the stream. “You know, all flashes of blue and green and white as the ship lands and the aliens get out and laser some holes into some cows and stuff.”
“No, no.” Shaking my head briskly, irritation gaining a foothold, I tried not to let it show. “No, it wasn’t no spaceship landing.” I wondered if maybe I should put Bobby on some sort of comic book restriction, give his brain a few days to come down from the clouds. “It was like a twinkle or something, you know, when the sun flashes off of something glass or metal.”
“Oh,” Fat Bobby said, “I think I know what that is.”
The disappointment returned to his face, and he started walking ahead of me up the dirt hill. I had to trot to catch up to him. Up at the top, the woods ahead of us a carpet of green, Fat Bobby pointed into the distance.
Away from the woods.
My eyes followed the line of his finger and arm and, sure enough, there it was: the light I’d seen—the fallen star—the sun reflecting off some surface in fiery flashes that made me squint. I swiveled my head like a periscope, looking back towards the woods where I’d originally seen the reflective light.
I saw nothing there among the trees as I had the first time.
But turning my head the other way, in the direction Bobby was pointing, and there it was, that bright light like some sort of signal, twinkling, sparkling.
How had it moved? What was it?
I scanned the landscape this way and that, and with each turn of my head I saw something surprising. There wasn’t just one flashing light out there among the hills where Fat Bobby had directed me to look. There were several. It was a veritable village of flashing lights, like bits of shattered glass or grains of sand on a beachfront catching the sunrays and throwing them back.
“What is it?” I asked, mystified.
“Come on,” Fat Bobby said, “I’ll show you.”
* * *
The junkyard held mostly dead and dilapidated cars, parked side by side and fender to fender on dirt so barren that I felt sad for the sparse and dry weeds growing out from the cracks, like fingers of penitents from hell reaching through the grating of the earth. We walked the perimeter of the chain-link fence that surrounded the yard, heading towards where Fat Bobby said the entrance was located. As we walked we heard short and harsh sounds like firecrackers exploding, and I again thought Guns! Guns! Run! Duck! as the sounds cracked the silence like small thunders.
Bobby saw me flinch, and I looked to him seeing that he hadn’t, and he gave me a wry smile that seemed to say Not always so tough, are we, dumbshit? and I thought: good for you, maybe there’s hope yet.
“That’s Jim and his dad,” he said. “They run the place.”
We reached the sliding gate that served as the entrance to the yard, and there a sign read “NO TRESPASSING.” As I gazed into the yard I realized that it wasn’t as haphazard and slapdash as I’d first thought. There was a large garage in the center of the automotive graveyard, three bay doors rolled up, and inside were various cars and trucks elevated or with hoods propped open. Parts and pieces littered the floor of the garage among shelves and tables full of tools. This wasn’t just some scrap or auto yard. This was a mechanic’s shop.
“Come on,” Fat Bobby said, grabbing the fence. He started to push, and the large entrance gate wheeled open with a screech in its rusty tract.
“Wait!” Looking at the sign and hearing the loud firecracker sounds coming from somewhere in the yard, I hung back. “It says no trespassing!”
“Don’t worry.” He looked back at me as he slipped inside. “I know them.”
Hesitantly, I followed.
As we crossed the yard towards the garage, walking around the cars in various states of disrepair and stages of rust, stepping over flaking tires and old engine blocks like the remnants of machines after Armageddon, I took in the fading chrome and metal, the shattered windshields and sun-cracked bumpers, and thought to myself: So these are my fallen stars, my great treasure in the woods. That realization carried with it a light sadness, and a soft sigh, barely perceptible, escaped me as the loss of possibilities played out in my mind. Maybe Bobby’s talk of ghost lights and UFO landings had sparked an excitement in me despite my pretenses otherwise. At certain angles, the sunlight glared off of the dead vehicles as intense as it had from far off on the hill, yet this close up the magnificence had left the display and it was just daylight bouncing off scrap metal.
Fat Bobby led me around the garage. The building in the middle of the refuse was like the last fortress on a battlefield, itself pockmarked by age or mortar fire. Then we turned a corner and there, a few feet away, were black people with guns, and with California memories like wartime flashbacks I once more thought Guns! Guns! Run! Gang war!
Bobby called out over the gunfire to the duo. Bottles and cans set up on a segment of wooden post some distance away jumped into the air, shattered, or ripped into aluminum shreds as I looked on, and I thought of the anxiety-filled freeway trips through Compton or Long Beach of years past.
The larger of the two, a tall and wiry black man with close-cropped curls of gray peppered hair, turned, saw us, flashed a bright white smile, and holstered his weapon. The second black person, a kid really, no more than a year older than me, if that, saw this, turned to look at us too, and lowered his gun also.
“Hey, my man!” the man said, in jeans and a sleeveless undershirt, grease and oil-stained, looking very much the mechanic. He stepped over to Fat Bobby, held out his hand palm up, and Bobby gave him a mighty slap, a smile brightening his fat face as I hadn’t seen it do since my dad had given him the comic book money.
Bobby gestured to the older man, then the boy, and looked at me as he said: “Joey, this is Mr. Connolly—”
“Ernest,” Mr. Connolly interjected, and shook my hand with one of his, large and long-fingered and hairy so that I thought of a tarantula as I shook it. I put him at around sixty or so, and yet he carried himself with a mild swagger and confidence of a man thirty years younger.
“—and his son, Jim,” Bobby finished, and my hand was released and taken up by the smaller hand of the black kid, wiry like his dad, but his head bald as a baby’s. Jim smiled that same flashy ivory smile his dad had, genuine and friendly, and I thought to myself for a fat kid with no friends Bobby sure had a lot of friends.
Tara bloomed in my mind briefly like a puff of smoke, and I smothered the thought and what accompanied it (the fair the fair a beautiful girl and the fair) and brought my thoughts back to the here and now.
“Joey saw the light shining off all your cars and wondered what it was,” Fat Bobby explained, “so I brought him here. Hope it’s not a problem.”
Mr. Connolly dismissed this with a combination snort and bark of a laugh, and waved the very idea away.
“No problem at all,” he said. “You know you can come around here anytime, Bobby.” With that Mr. Connolly gave Bobby a massive slap on the back, which he probably meant to be friendly but rocked Fat Bobby on his heels. Turning to his son he gathered up the pistol his kid had been using and started to walk away. “You kids have fun,” he said to all of us. And this just to Jim: “Be in for lunch.”
Then it was the three of us: Fat Bobby, myself, and the first black kid I wasn’t afraid of being shot or stabbed by in a long, long time. And Bandit, of course, off somewhere nearby, sniffing the cars and parts of cars, and the dirt and the thin, dying weeds, scents invisible in the air, there but unseen.
I felt it again, that sense of things moving and me being carried along for the ride. Another link in the chain of events, the moving of the gears, and I felt I was on a trail myself, following it like Bandit to wherever it inevitably led.
“It actually wasn’t one of the cars here I saw,” I told Jim as the three of us strolled casually through the yard, like three buddies on a fishing trip. I’d answered all the initial questions boys always had when meeting each other, like where I was from, where I lived, what I liked to do, things like that. Of course he took to Bandit real quick, which was a point in my favor: a good dog like a sign that said, Hey, I ain’t so bad. I’m pretty damn okay, actually. See, I have a dog!
“Oh?” he said, twirling a metal pipe he had scooped up off the ground. I noticed his motions weren’t clumsy, that the pipe whizzed in circles and semicircles in his hand with deftness and ease, and as sure as Bandit was a sign about me, this was a sign about Jim. It said I know how to take care of myself and like a telepathy of some sort I knew Mr. Connolly had bestowed a similar philosophy upon his son as Dad had done with me.
Don’t let fear control you.
Don’t take shit from anyone.
With just the right twist of his wrist, I knew Jim Connolly could whack something good with that small pipe. Probably without the pipe too, and I knew this was one kid I didn’t want to get in any pissing contest with. I was glad we’d hit it off so well.
“Yeah,” I said. “It was a lot like the sun shining off these cars here, but it wasn’t here. I saw it off in the woods.”
“You probably just forgot exactly where you saw it coming from,” Fat Bobby said, picking up a stick, trying to twirl and spin it like Jim. The stick went flying out of his sausage-like fingers, sailed dangerously close past my face.
I slugged him on the arm. I checked the punch at the last moment, not hitting him too hard, but Bobby still gave me an injured What’d you do that for? look.
“There’s at least half a mile between the woods and here,” I said. “I’m not fucking blind.”
“Geez,” Fat Bobby said, rubbing his shoulder where I’d hit him. “Sorry.”
“Actually,” Jim said, “there’s service roads that run all through the woods.”
“Service roads?” I asked.
“Yeah, you know, for forest rangers and firefighters and shit like that.” He had given me a look when I’d hit Bobby that said: Don’t hit the fat kid. To his credit he didn’t make a big deal about it, and so I made a mental note to myself not to hit Fat Bobby like that anymore, even in play. That Jim would come to Fat Bobby’s defense, even with just a look, was kind of cool in my book, and my respect for the kid rose a notch or two. “So it’s possible you saw something where you said you saw it.”
“I did see something where I said I saw it.” The note of challenge in my voice made Jim look up at me, and he flashed his bright smile again. I knew that he was liking me more as well, what with me not backing down from him, even about something as dumb as where some ghost lights or UFO beams had come from.
“Only one problem,” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
We came to the far rear fence of the yard at that moment, and Jim pointed off to where the woods started a hundred yards off or so. A dirt road led off that way into the trees, and there was a barricade across it, large metal crossbeams in the shape of an X. As if for added determent, thick coils of chain looped around the crossbeams, then around two trees on either side of the barricade, and a thick padlock hung at the center where the ends of the chain met up.
“Those roads have been closed for some time,” he said.
* * *
I lay in bed that night wondering how the car I had actually seen gleaming with reflected sunlight deep in the forest—not the cars at the Connolly yard that Fat Bobby assumed I’d seen—had ended up where it was.
According to Jim the access road barricades were put in place a long time before, when careless campers or hunters would improperly put out campfires; the embers would be caught in a breeze after the people had left, and acres were burnt to crisp and ashes. Only rangers and the fire department had keys to unlock the chains of the barricades, and hefty fines and jail time kept most people from messing with them.
This left me with only a few options and conclusions.
One, the access road at the Connolly yard that Jim had shown us seemed to be the closest route to the general area in which I had seen my single, distinct, reflective surface, me presuming it’s a car. Since that road was barricaded, obviously if anyone had used it, it had been someone with the keys to the chain. This would mean a ranger or the fire department. But Jim hadn’t said anything about seeing rangers or fire trucks use that road, and it was a pretty good chance, him and his dad working there, one of them would have seen or heard a vehicle driving that road. Add to that the fact that I hadn’t seen any smoke or fire when I had seen the shiny object in the distance, my fallen star, and that pretty much ruled out the rangers or fire department.
This led naturally to conclusion number two. If it hadn’t been a ranger or fire truck out there, someone authorized to pass through the barricades, then maybe it was someone with no legitimate right whatsoever. Maybe someone had busted through one of the barricades; an off-season poacher possibly, or kids doing the fleshy tango in an out of the way place, or perhaps a coven of Satanists for all I knew, dancing naked smeared with blood and chanting to the Dark Lord. Sacrificing goats, having orgies, all that crap. But the access road barricade at the Connolly yard, the most direct route to the general area of the light I’d seen, obviously hadn’t been run down or forced open.
That didn’t mean another access road hadn’t been used, and I’d asked Jim how many there were. He said several, exactly how many he didn’t know. But they were all barricaded, he said, and the rangers were real regular with their duties, checking on the barricades and patrolling the woods. Fat Bobby verified this by saying that Tara’s dad was a ranger, and he always saw the man out and about in his park jeep or truck around town, and when he wasn’t around town he was presumably out in the forest, checking on things.
I nodded at this like it made sense, which it did, but inside I was cursing up a storm at Fat Bobby for once again knowing more about this beautiful girl than I did.
So, if only rangers and the fire department could easily get vehicles into the woods, and neither one of them had been there when I saw the bright light on the ground, then that left only one other option I could think of. And it was this one that left me tossing and turning for some time, thinking of adventures and mysteries and all things that made a boy’s heart and mind race with life.
What if the car I’d seen shining back the sunlight like a beacon had been there in the woods before the barricades had gone up? How long ago would that have been? Years? Decades? And why was this possible car still there after so much time had passed? Was it forgotten? Or did people just not know where to find it? I’d only seen it myself because I’d been on high ground, looking in a particular direction.
That last intrigued me the most for some reason.
If people didn’t know where to find it, why not? Had someone put the car out there intentionally? Was there something there that wasn’t supposed to be found?
For me, in the long stretch of summer with nothing but time on my hands and a fertile imagination, this wasn’t something I could just forget. Plans were already forming in my head and the morning seemed too far away, dangling like a carrot in front of a horse, beckoning, teasing. The night lingered, taunting me, and sleep seemed a misty thing to catch, slipping through my fingers in ethereal tendrils.
Fat Bobby lived north down the highway heading into town, about a quarter mile from our place. I hadn’t been to his house before, but he’d pointed it out once from a distance when we’d been walking home from town. Whereas my neighborhood seemed something of a checkerboard with immaculate well-tended lawns and freshly painted, manicured houses interspersed with weed-strewn dirt expanses where a lawn had once been, and run-down affairs that could have been boxes and rusted shingles slapped together disguised as houses, Fat Bobby’s neighborhood was nothing but the latter. Houses with exteriors of peeling paint like flaky scabs, rusted automobiles parked out front like the husks of dead creatures, and mangy beasts with matted hair chained to posts that I could only guess were some sort of dog, were tossed about his street as if by a tornado.
It was because of these last, the dirt encrusted, sun beaten animals I thought were dogs, that I left Bandit home this time around. That might seem counterintuitive, leaving behind my dog and best protection when I was planning on walking a neighborhood populated by canine monstrosities. But that was exactly why I left him behind. Not wanting Bandit in any sort of dogfight with these sad and horrid beasts, perhaps hosting an early stage of rabies, I trusted myself to outrun these mangy mutts, but not Bandit to avoid getting into a scuffle where he might end up poisoned by the contaminated spit sluicing about their jaws.
Turning off onto Fat Bobby’s street, I moved warily along the dilapidated and depressing dirt landscape of his neighborhood. This area held not a hint of the Old West vibe that the town of Payne proper had held for me when I’d seen it from atop the hill. Rather, this neighborhood seemed like a Calcutta or something akin to one of those African villages seen on the Give-Us-Your-Money heartstring-plucking Christian Children’s Fund commercials. These weren’t homes I was seeing, but hovels, trailers weather-beaten and uncared for so that they seemed not like trailers at all, but like the shells of structures after a nuclear blast. Trees tried growing in a few of the dirt lawns and seemed like the emaciated skeletal structures of ancient beasts, gnarled and twisted by age and decay.
I approached the trailer Fat Bobby had pointed out before, a rectangular thing with duct-taped windows and flaky wisps of what might have once been blue paint fluttering down from its walls, like dying butterflies. Empty lawn chairs sat before it with loose flaps slapping about in a light breeze, like little flags.
I don’t know what I expected Bobby’s dad to look like; I guess maybe I leaned towards something like Fat Bobby himself, just a larger version. A fat and lazy man with a gut like a beach ball stuffed beneath his shirt, and beer cans littered about his feet like carelessly delivered babies.
But the man in the yard that the trailer sat on, leaning over the hood of a white Toyota pickup, wasn’t fat, and the thick cords of muscles glistened by sweat and shiny by sun showed he wasn’t lazy. He heard me approaching, stopped fidgeting with whatever part under the hood he’d been fidgeting with, and withdrew from beneath the hood to stretch to full height.
And the height was mountainous.
As I’ve said before, my dad was a large man. I was used to being dwarfed by the larger of my gender. But whereas Dad was lean and muscled like a fast stallion, Fat Bobby’s father was thick and solid like a bull. Mr. Templeton’s face was likewise bulbous, as if it was permanently swollen. This wasn’t a swelling by anything like a bee sting neither, but a red swelling of meanness, as if there was something on the inside of him that wouldn’t go away. Maybe a volcanic pressure, and at any moment he could explode with the force of the heat inside him. He looked at me like he was looking at a fly that had alighted on his food and taken a shit.
He wanted to squash me, no doubt in my mind.
Yet it wasn’t personal either. I remember thinking he wanted to squash anyone and everyone. Like the existence of other people was offensive.
Dad was no pushover by any definition of the word, but seeing this man, in torn jeans and a faded flannel shirt like he was some lumberjack-Sasquatch hybrid, I thought of the two of them tangling, Dad and Mr. Templeton, and I didn’t think I’d want to place any bets either way.
“What the hell you want?” he asked.
His lips moved beneath a wild beard like a miniature wilderness. I wondered if food crumbs and bugs lived in that tangle somewhere, in a little world separate from the one we were in. Maybe there was a whole civilization of lost bits of food and beetles in there somewhere, and when he talked it was like an earthquake and the voice of God from on high to the wee beard folk.
For a moment I thought I’d laugh.
Then I knew if that happened, I’d die, and so I didn’t laugh.
“I’m here to see Bobby, sir.”
I tried sounding as respectful as I could muster. Afraid of my head being popped like a grape, I think I did pretty good. Fear’s a fabulous motivator.
“Are you the kid he’s been hanging out with so much?” I thought about answering but he kept on talking, and so I clacked my mouth shut. “He’s been shirking his chores, the fat lazy bastard. Gone all day long, comes home late, like this is some sort of motel he can just come and go from whenever he likes.”
He paused like maybe he wanted me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say so I continued to keep my mouth shut.
“You shirk your chores too? Out here running around like you got nothing to do.” Silence still seemed the best option on my end. Then: “Your parents some kind of fucking hippies? Let their kids run around and shit?”
“No, sir,” I said, not really knowing which part I was answering to.
“Yeah right,” he said, and I didn’t know which he was referring to either. Not that it mattered, even with him talking bad about my parents in some offhand manner. I imagined myself briefly trying to stick up for my folks, flipping this guy off or something, and him coming at me, and me trying to use one of the tricky leg maneuvers that Dad had taught me. This guy just laughing as I tried to tangle his legs with mine, or kick at a kneecap like a boulder, and he just twitched a big toe or something and I busted like a little glass figurine.
“May I see Bobby, sir?” I said, deciding politeness was still the best course of action.
“You talk like a fruit, kid.” He smiled, and he had teeth yellow-stained by years of nicotine. As I watched he pulled a crumpled pack of Camels from a breast pocket, pulled out its last inhabitant, and lit it up with a lighter shaped like a little pistol. “‘May I?’” he mocked, murmuring around the cigarette. “‘Sir,’” he said in a high and whiny voice. “Goddamn queers everywhere nowadays.”
At that moment the door to the trailer swung open and hit the wall it was attached to with a metallic rattle. We both turned at the sound, and there was Fat Bobby standing in the doorframe. It took a second or two for me to notice what was different about my friend. The dark ring around his right eye seemed to call my gaze to it, like the target circle of a dartboard.
I looked back at Mr. Templeton.
He looked at his son, then looked down at me. It was clear he knew what I’d seen but he didn’t seem much concerned. As in not at all.
“You know what happens in another body’s family isn’t none of your concern, don’t you, fairy boy?” he asked, and immediately, obediently, I nodded. “You don’t doubt that if you caused me any sort of trouble I wouldn’t think twice about bouncing you around some, do you?”
I shook my head. No, I didn’t doubt it one bit.
“Good,” he said, then he looked from me back to Bobby, still standing silent and slouched in the doorway of the trailer. “Get out of my sight.”
Turning back to the Toyota he leaned once again under the hood.
Bobby stepped off the porch lightly, making almost no sound, which, with his girth, was a tremendous feat of skill. Slowly, he walked towards me, moving as if he were trying to avoid disturbing a beehive. When he was close, he waved for me to follow and together we walked softly away from the miserable trailer, out of the neighborhood like a Third World ghost town, and onto the highway. After several minutes of silence like a period of mourning, I finally opened my mouth and told him what I wanted to do.
Fat Bobby smiled as I spoke, and with that smile the effect of the black eye seemed to dwindle. Though we cheered up considerably talking about what we were going to do, time and again I turned to look at my friend and that shiner and, in my mind, I saw the fist that caused it coming down like a hammer.
* * *
On the way to the Connolly yard, we stopped at the hill on the dirt road overlooking the woods. I immediately saw the object casting back the sunlight that I’d seen before, far out into the forest among the thick carpet of trees. Fat Bobby saw it too, and I actually heard him breathe out something like an ‘ahhhhh’ of amazement.
“That isn’t ghost lights or a UFO,” he said.
“No, it isn’t,” I said and looked at my watch. It was approaching noon, and I tried to think back to that day I’d first met Fat Bobby, and what time I’d been standing on this very hill. It could have been around noon. Which meant that the object down there, be it abandoned car or something else, for some reason only reflected the sun at a certain time of the day and from a certain angle.
This was intriguing, and I was eager to get on with our plans.
“Come on,” I said and started to walk again. Bobby lingered for a moment, as if the light down there held him by a tether and was reluctant to let go. I knew the feeling. It’s that thing between boys and the mysterious, the unknown. Like an umbilical cord that gives and returns life.
* * *
Before hitting the Connolly yard we stopped by my house to pick up Bandit. The aroma of fresh cookies wrapped about us like tantalizing fingers as soon as we walked inside. We stayed awhile, watching my mom in the kitchen pulling out trays lined with brown baked delights and scooping them onto the counter to cool. We wanted them hot and begged for them, and Mom gave us each a handful. A glass of cool lemonade that fogged the glasses just a bit accompanied this feast, and we ate slowly, enjoying every bite and swallow as if they might never come again.
Mom noticed Fat Bobby’s shiner, but she didn’t say anything. She gave me a look and I gave her one back, and somewhere in that secret exchange she understood the message: Not now. I’ll tell you later. She nodded as if she’d actually heard this, told us to enjoy our cookies, and then was off somewhere else in the house.
As we were putting our glasses in the sink, Sarah came down the stairs in a summer dress, and her hair and face were all done up like for some sort of pageant. Date, I said to myself, and had to smile. Apparently, her true love in California was forgotten. Out of sight and out of mind.
She saw us in the kitchen, saw my blooming smile, and pointed at me threateningly.
“Don’t say a word,” she said, and that was like an invitation.
“I think you need more makeup,” I said. “We can still see your face.”
There was something in her other hand, the one not pointing like a dagger at me, and she wound up her arm and threw it and, too late, I saw it was her sandals and one of them hit me in the chest. The heel was broad and thick and it hurt when it struck. I laughed, though, seeing my sister’s face had turned red with the jab.
“You don’t want him to know you’re a mutant on the first date.”
And here came the other sandal, fast, and I stepped aside at the last moment and it sailed by my head, striking the refrigerator with a thump. My sister stomped determinedly towards me, and that was when Mom stepped back into the kitchen from the living room and planted herself between us.
“What on earth is going on in here?”
“Oh, Joey!” my sister bawled. “Why do you have to be such a retard?!”
She was away and back up the stairs as quick as she’d appeared, not even bothering to gather up her ballistic missile sandals. Upstairs a door slammed, the impact reverberating throughout the house. I imagined her in her room or in the bathroom, staring at herself, wiping her face clean and trying again with the makeup and lipstick and whatever other chemicals and goop girls used.
That made me smile.
That smile made my mom frown.
It wasn’t one of her vaguely comical-puzzled frowns, either, that asked “How did this happen?” Rather, it was one of her dangerous and angry frowns that said: “What the hell is your problem?” and sometimes ended with her whapping me upside the head. In moments, under that reproachful gaze, my smile dwindled and then faded altogether.
“Why are you and your sister so mean to each other?”
I shrugged. Looked down and away from her disappointment.
“You know someday it’ll just be you and her,” Mom said. “Your dad and I won’t be around forever.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I murmured.
“Someday you’ll need each other.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I muttered, really thinking: Yeah, right, like I need a rash on my sack.
“She’s growing up, Joey. Jokes like that aren’t so funny anymore. She needs to feel good about herself.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, head still hung low.
“You might not understand now, but someday you’ll meet a girl and want to say nice things to her. Then maybe you’ll think back to now and the things you said to your sister.”
I thought of Tara. I thought of the things I wanted to say to her. I thought of her in her dress at the bookstore. The shape of her. How the lights caught in the swirls of her hair. Her smile and her skin like velvet.
Suddenly, the things I’d said to my sister indeed didn’t seem so funny. But I wouldn’t—couldn’t—admit as much to my mom. So I settled with another “Yes, ma’am”, and then my mother was moving upstairs, trailing after my sister, and me and Fat Bobby were free and so we headed outside. Bandit trotted along beside us.
“Why are you so mean to your sister?” Fat Bobby asked after we were across my yard and back on the dirt road.
“Because she’s a dork,” I said, as if that explained it all.
“She’s kind of pretty.”
I looked at him like he said the sky was falling, and I saw his face was red. I remembered how I’d felt around Tara, and I thought to myself, horrified and wanting to laugh at the same time, Fat Bobby is sweet on Sarah!
But rather than laugh at him I just kept walking, adding these words in response:
“If by pretty you mean pretty stupid, then you got a point.”
Back at the Connolly yard we slid through the large sliding gate again and picked our way through the rusted heaps of automobiles and parts and piles of parts. From a distance we saw Mr. Connolly and Jim lying on rolling boards slid under an old Chevy in the garage. A clang and scuffle of metal on metal from beneath the car preceded the emergence of father and son when they heard our approach. Oil and grease-stained, the duo waved at us instead of shaking hands. We pulled Jim aside and started to tell him the conclusions I’d come to and what we wanted to do. Pretty soon he was nodding along to our words and one of his flashy white smiles spread across his face.
Although we stood grouped together in a corner of the garage and kept our voices low, Mr. Connolly lingered nearby wiping his hands on a towel. I knew he’d overheard some of what we were saying. He didn’t make any objections, but instead smiled one of his own bright smiles, as if he wished he were a boy again and could come along with us.
“If you boys are going down to the woods, stick together. Have fun and be safe,” was the closest he came to any admonishment, and then: “I have some calls to make and other office work. Be home for dinner, Jim.”
With that Jim’s dad opened a side door and disappeared into the room beyond. Jim walked to a small refrigerator humming along one wall, opened it, and fished out three bottles of water. Handing one each to me and Fat Bobby, he led the way out back, across the rear of the yard, and opened the small gate at the end of the walkway. Side by side, with Bandit doing his ghost impersonation padding along silently about us, we walked to the barricaded access road, stepped around the barrier and into the dense forest beyond.
* * *
Shadows and light passed upon us and the earth as the sun stabbed through the branches overhead in intermittent fashion. Green-heavy limbs and thick brown trunks rose all around us, so that walking the access road through these I felt as if I’d entered some fantasy world; a deep woods in which some wily wizard or wrinkled witch holed up in an old shack cast spells and charms. Looking in either direction off the road, visibility lasted only feet or a few yards at best, and then it became like a wall, the trees and the branches and the bushes obscuring things.
Deep in the woods the quiet around us was startling, so that we talked to each other just to break the silence. I thought that this far in the forest there would be sounds: birds twittering and things moving in the trees and bushes. Maybe the rustle of leaves and branches as a breeze sidled through like someone in a crowd. But this was as if only a painting of a forest, just colors and shapes, with no real life to it.
“Why is it so quiet?” I asked, my voice loud in the otherwise vast silence.
“Most of the animals around here are migratory,” Jim said. “They’re always moving and sometimes all of them are moving at once, so they’re gone for awhile and you get this.”
He made a vague gesture to indicate the silent world around us.
“Kind of creepy,” Fat Bobby said, looking about nervously with little jerks of his head, as if he were trying to watch all directions at once.
“Not really,” Jim said. “I think it’s kind of peaceful.”
Initially, I felt inclined to agree with Fat Bobby, thinking the silence and stillness of the forest was sort of spooky. I could imagine things out there in the trees or hiding in the bushes, watching us, biding their time. Creatures with fangs and claws, and holes where they dragged their prey kicking and screaming into subterranean dens. But as we continued to walk along the access road, the quiet began to lose some of its macabre atmosphere.
I was reminded of the calm and stillness I most enjoyed reading in. When my parents and sister were elsewhere and I was out on the porch, or in my room, with a comic or a paperback spread in my hands, and there seemed a hush over the whole of the earth. A stillness just for me, as if the universe were holding its breath just so I could enjoy my book.
So that when the soft running of the stream began like a whisper, and then a little louder as the road curved towards it, I was almost disappointed at the end of the silence. The appearance of the stream meant we were heading in the direction of where I’d initially met Bobby, and it was past that spot where I would have continued in my beeline for the mystery object, be it UFO or fallen star, if I hadn’t been interrupted.
I pointed this out, and we crossed the stream. The tinkling of the water seemed an invitation for us to join it and speak freely.
“So, you going to hit the fair?” Fat Bobby asked Jim as we splashed across.
“You bet,” Jim said.
“Why don’t you go with us?” I said.
“Sure thing,” he answered with a curt nod of his head, as if he’d been waiting for the offer.
On the other side the world awoke as if we’d crossed some threshold, some barrier between dimensions. The twitter of birds, two at least, calling and answering each other, was like the last song on earth, eerie and almost unnatural, following so soon after the preceding quietude. We stopped our talk in unison to listen to it, unconsciously rolling our steps to reduce the noise of our passing. Farther out in the woodlands other critters chittered and yapped, joining in on the chorus.
Soon the stream gurgled more distantly behind us, fading, and then was gone. A break in the trees to the west revealed one of the rocky outcroppings I’d seen that first day on the hill, trying to locate a landmark against which to find the fallen star. The outcropping rose like an ancient monument, and its stones like natural steps led to the top. I imagined natives with torches walking to the peak, and up there an altar and a bound virgin, willing sacrifice to the sun god.
I told Jim and Bobby how I’d seen just such a craggy hill near the light source.
“Maybe we’ll see something from up there,” Jim said, and so we broke the path of our straight line, heading on over to the foot of the monument hill.
The climb was easy and took only a few minutes, as if the stones and rocks scaling the hill had indeed been put there as steps to aid just such as us. Flat stones sat upon a grassy area at the top, with one large stone standing upright that if you looked at from the right angle looked like one of those Easter Island heads. Unfinished maybe, as if the sculptor had decided halfway through that there were better things he could do with his time. We sat with our backs against it and sipped our water, looking out over the top of the woods, daylight pouring down on us hot and bright.
“It sure is high up here,” Fat Bobby said.
“Yeah,” Jim replied, “kind of cool.”
“Like we’re on a tower, looking down on our kingdom,” I said.
“You use words like a writer,” Jim said, and his tone made this something like a compliment. “You ever think about being one someday?”
“I don’t know,” I said, when in fact that was all I ever thought about my future being. Whether it was books or comics, or something else I hadn’t thought of yet, it was stories that I wanted to tell. “What about you?”
“What about me?” Jim said, playing with the cap on his water bottle.
“What do you want to do, you know, when you grow up?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his brown skin beading with sweat under the high sun. “My dad wants me to do some kind of police work. Says I’ve got the brains for it. That I can see things and figure out how they work or how something happened.”
“What does your mom think?” I asked, earnestly, but also with a kid’s curiosity as I had yet to meet his mom. A mental CAUTION! detector blinked in my mind’s eye, recalling Bobby’s tragic answer to a similar question not so long ago. Sometimes things were better left not knowing about, and I hoped this wasn’t one of those times.
“I don’t see her that much,” Jim said. His tone was matter-of-fact, so devoid of either anger or sadness that I knew he had to feel one or the other. Perhaps both. “She met my dad young. She was still in college when she got pregnant. Had real big plans to become a lawyer. So Dad offered to take sole custody after I was born, so she could stay in school.”
I pondered this, turning it over. It seemed to me that Jim’s ability to control his emotions was just the kind of temperament an officer of the law would need, and so I said as much.
“I bet you’d make a good cop.”
Jim smiled, nodded slightly in an unspoken gratitude, our blooming manhood inhibiting anything further. I then turned to Fat Bobby.
“What about you, Bobby?” He looked over at me all surprised-like, his mouth open just a bit, as if he’d never expected to hear someone ask him this question. “What do you want to do?”
He shifted uncomfortably for a second or two, then grew still and looked out over the woods like he was trying to find something. He looked about to speak a couple times, his mouth working like words wanted to come out, and then he’d close his lips and grind his teeth. Jim and I looked at each other, and he offered me a shrug. When Fat Bobby finally answered, it was brief and to the point and spoken matter-of-factly as if it hadn’t taken him such a time to say it.
“I want to be gone from here,” he said, and I think we all knew that here meant his home, his dad, and the things like that shiner dark around his eye. I remember praying something at that moment, not like a formal prayer or anything, but just silently offering up some words to God and hoping He wasn’t too busy to hear them when they drifted His way.
Please God, let him find his way out of here, let him find what he’s looking for.
And, in the end, when all’s said and done, isn’t that pretty much what every prayer is about?
* * *
Some minutes later Jim bolted up and pointed and said: “Look!”, and I stood up and Fat Bobby did too. Following the line of his finger, we saw out to the west not more than half a mile away among a thick copse of trees, a flash of something, maybe glass, maybe metal. We started down from the rocky hill, our lookout tower, and found our way back to the access road. I wanted to cut directly through the forest in the direction of the light, but Jim suggested we follow the road a little more, and so we did. Not a hundred yards away we found that the road branched, and in one direction it continued east and in the other it looped back, heading northwest.
There was an old faded rectangular sign fallen on the ground covered by rust and weeds. I bent and tore away the weeds, but the rust I could do nothing about, and the sign remained mysterious and unreadable. For all we knew it read “DEATH AHEAD FOR STUPID BOYS,” but it didn’t matter. We took the northwest branch, which looped us back in the general direction of the light.
This branch of the road was weed strewn and deeply pitted and rutted, as if it had been in a state of disuse and in need of repair decades ago. Never tended to when it was still in use, now abandoned it seemed an artefact, a remnant of some ancient settlement recently excavated. Maybe awaiting a second death, when in the course of eons the earth would swallow it again under the dust of ages.
Bandit found his way easily enough and bounded along ahead of us, muzzle to the ground, sniffing and snorting as he followed trails that we could never see. We didn’t bound speedily and confidently about like him. We picked our way carefully along the half-hidden road, planning and measuring each step, lest a foot slip into a hole or rut and one of us snapped an ankle like a twig.
I don’t know exactly where I expected to find the proposed abandoned car, if a car it actually was, but smack dab in the middle of the road like it was waiting for us wasn’t among the possibilities I imagined. I thought of finding a cave and the car somehow in the cave (how we saw reflected light from within a cave, this scenario my imagination didn’t answer; it just seemed cool, a car in a cave!). Or the car rolled down a ditch and blackened by the flames of its explosion in the distant past. Or maybe up in a tree as the forest had grown around it, lifting it up in its branches so that it ended up like a tree house of sorts.
But right there in the middle of the road … no, that’s not what I expected at all.
Yet that’s what we found, an old Buick family affair, color long flaked away so that it was gray with the metal beneath, gray and drab, like the husk of a giant metal beetle. The forest had indeed begun to grow around it, and roots and weeds were tangled about what remained of the tires and crawled up along the grill and bumpers. The headlights were busted, shards of plastic and glass like tiny daggers littering the forest floor. We walked around the thing reverently, in silence, and tried to peer in the windows, but they were covered by years of bird shit and dirt caught in the wind and slapped onto the glass like a second skin.
Jim tried one door, Bobby another, and I a third, and all three were locked or rusted shut. Jim tried the fourth door, only to find it likewise immovable. Bandit circled the car, sniffing, poking his head underneath it, searching, his tail pumping like a crank. Eventually, we settled on the front bumper and drank from our bottled water, only Bandit still running about the car, trying to get at what was in it.
“Well,” Jim said after awhile, “we found it.”
“Yeah,” I said, staring out at the woods, not knowing what I was feeling, whether it was disappointment or just not having all the answers at once.
“I wonder what’s in it?” Fat Bobby said, and that was what we were all thinking about. Those locked doors were like a challenge. They were defying us with their stubbornness not to open and reveal to us what was inside. “Why don’t we just bust the windows?” Bobby said, and he bent over to pick up a fist-sized rock from the ground.
We looked at each other and then with a shake of our heads dismissed that idea. It would be like vandalizing a museum or a church: it just wasn’t right. We wanted to get into the car, but we wanted to do it the right way. In a way that respected the car, and how it had sat here for years waiting for just this moment, waiting for us.
“We’ll get it open,” Jim said, and he said it like it was so, like there was no alternative, no other possibility. “Don’t forget, my dad owns a car yard.”
I thought to myself, Yeah, that’s right. If anyone can find a way to open the thing, it’s this guy right next me. My momentary funk dissipated, and I was able to just sit there like I was at a park bench, enjoying the setting.
“We’ll come back,” Jim repeated, as if settling the matter. “We’ll open it.”
So it was settled, and so I knew it would be.
But the fair was tomorrow, and we made our plans for that as we made our slow way back towards the highway. And in the wake of the events of the day that followed the car was for a time, if not forgotten, then relegated to some back row of our young brains, in the shadows, biding its time.