The day after the incident in our front yard, and the resultant confrontation with the sheriff afterwards, wasn’t much better than the day itself. Dad stayed home from work, nursing his injuries and taking it easy. I wanted to go to the Connolly’s to see if Bobby was okay, but Dad wanted me to stay home and I stewed in anxiety and fear for my friend. I tried to read, but couldn’t concentrate on the words on the pages. Running about the yard with Bandit, who wasn’t as badly hurt as he’d initially seemed, was distracting only for a while.
The ambulance had rolled away with Mr. Templeton strapped in the back, only half conscious at best, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t the type of man to stay bedridden in a hospital, pitying himself, for very long. At some point, Fat Bobby and Tara had left the Connolly yard yesterday, and that meant they had gone home. And if Bobby was home when his dad got out of the hospital, things weren’t going to be pretty.
“Dad,” I said for the umpteenth time, plopping myself on the recliner next to the sofa, where he was lying with his head on a pillow and a compress on his head. “We’ve got to check on Bobby. You know what his dad’s going to do.”
“It’s none of our business,” Dad said.
His face wasn’t as puffy as yesterday, but still purple and blue in places. If he’d been a lot smaller and wore white underoos, he could have passed for a Smurf.
“But it’s our fault. His dad’s angry with me for keeping Bobby from home all the time, and now he’s angry with you for kicking his ass. He’s going to take it out on Bobby.”
“I said it’s none of our business,” he repeated. His eyes closed against the pain throbbing throughout his body, and his mouth was set thinly, teeth grinding. I knew not to press him any further. He recognized my distress even through his own, however, no doubt sympathized with it, and so added a belated: “Don’t worry, son. As big an ass as Sheriff Glover is, he’s now on notice about Bobby’s family situation. To keep the peace between us and Mr. Templeton, he’s going to want to keep tabs on him and his son.”
Not fully satisfied with that answer, but knowing I wouldn’t get anymore out of him, I went upstairs, where I found my sister standing in the restroom at the end of the hall. Sarah stood in the open doorway, watching me, and I knew she’d been listening. She wore a tan dress with the skirt down to her knees. Her hair was done up again like I’d seen it awhile back when she’d been getting ready for her date and I’d made fun of her, the sandal missiles launched at my head in retaliation.
For some reason she was still allowed to go out and that bothered me. Mom said it was because she was older, but just over two years didn’t seem so much older to me, not enough to warrant her being treated special and me like a baby.
“Don’t worry about your friend,” Sarah said with genuine concern.
I was reminded of the night of the fair. How after coming home she’d come into my room and given me a hug. Standing there framed in the light and white of the restroom, I had to admit that my sister wasn’t all that bad looking, and I thought of the days when maybe Tara would be spending time in the bathroom, putting on nice dresses and trying to look great for me.
“I’m sure he’ll be okay,” Sarah added.
I nodded but I couldn’t fool myself. I knew Bobby was in for it, and it was my fault. Every punch or slap or kick or belt swing delivered to him when next he saw his father may as well have been delivered by my hands. It was that cut and dry to me.
But then I got to what was really on my mind, what Bobby needed to be okay for, and what I needed to get out of the house for.
“How am I going to get out tonight?” I asked.
Leaning out of the bathroom doorway, peering down the hall and towards the stairs as if to make sure no one was creeping up behind us, Sarah motioned me closer with a wave of her hand. Grabbing me by the arm, she pulled me into the restroom and swung the door so that it was only open a crack, enough to give us some privacy but also so that we could see and hear if either of our parents came trudging up the stairs.
“I’ll get you out,” she whispered.
“How?” I asked, keeping my voice low too.
“I’ll have Barry pull up around ten o’clock.”
Barry was the name of the guy that she’d ditched my parents for at the fair, as I’d learned in the days following. His name was seemingly one of the more frequent and important words in her vocabulary now. At breakfast and at dinner and all times between, it was Barry this and Barry that, so that you’d think Barry must have been an ayatollah or king or something, and not just some guy with a hard-on for my sister.
“You be in bed by then so Mom and Dad don’t think to look in on you, but then go out the window and wait for us. I’ll come walking in, then pretend like I’ve forgotten something at the theater or restaurant, and you get in the car while I have Mom and Dad busy. I’ll have Barry drive us out to meet the others.”
“Will that buy us enough time? Mom and Dad will wonder where you are if we’re not back soon!”
She gave me a scowl and a sigh that spoke volumes, like she was a frustrated special education instructor explaining things to an especially mentally handicapped student. That was me, the Dunce of Retards.
“Then I’ll say we decided to stop by his house first so I could meet his parents! Don’t worry! Dad will swallow anything I say, hook, line and sinker!”
I mulled this over, peeking out the crack in the door now and then to make sure the hallway was still clear. I thought her plan just might work, but then I was suspicious why she was going out of her way to help me. I told her this, making my tone accusatorial like Perry Mason, pointing at her and wagging my finger in her face. She slapped my hand away and gave me a scowl, but I repeated my question again anyways.
“Why do you want to help so bad?”
“Why do you think?” she said, and answered before I could get out even a syllable. “That creepo Collector guy said he was coming for both of us. We won’t be safe until he’s out of the picture.”
Those words held a finality to them and I thought about our initial meeting on Lookout Mountain. I thought of Tara saying we’d need more than rocks, and I thought again about what me and my friends were planning on doing. My stomach briefly fluttered with nausea.
I thought also of what Jim and Tara and Bobby had been up to at the car yard yesterday, and the preparations they had presumably made. The things we were planning on doing were not things kids should be thinking about. They were things that maybe no one at all should be contemplating.
But I remembered the Collector, his long knife, and the finger flung through the air like a coin tossed. I thought of him telling us that he collected things that were owed, and sometimes he collected things for himself.
I had no doubt what category my sister and I fell into.
Of course there was the money to consider as well. I’m ashamed to say it now, but there’s no reason in lying. The money occupied a sizable space in my mind. The imaginations of youth are fertile ground, and what the money could do, the things of this world that it could accomplish, weren’t lost on me.
I have no doubt my sister and friends felt the same things, thought the same thoughts. I do not attempt to diminish my responsibility with that statement. Saying my friends felt the way I did about the money isn’t some attempt at what psychologists call diffusion of responsibility. The stain on my soul will never diminish, never diffuse.
Not in this lifetime.
That money had been at the expense of some unknown’s life, dead and rotted and now but a tangle of bones. Tied and bound and shut in a trunk, now gone as if scrubbed from existence. We wanted that money for our childish dreams, and how innocent can children be if we wanted what the dead had paid for?
My bedside clock seemed to blink the minutes away at a torturously slow pace, like it was mocking me. I tried reading, with little success, then tried to nap, with even less success, and so finally settled on just turning out the lights and staring at the dark ceiling. The plaster contours above were fuzzy and vague in shadow.
I waited and hoped for my parents to climb the stairs and go to bed, but of course they didn’t. Instead, they waited for their daughter to come home so they could quiz her on her evening out.
Did he open doors for you? Did he compliment you? What did you do? What movie did you see? I’d heard and seen the routine before in California with Mr. Greaseball, and knew my parents wouldn’t settle down for the night until Sarah came home safe and sound.
The faint grinding of rubber on dirt and gravel announced her arrival. The crunches and grinding grew louder, the hum of an engine accompanying it. My chest pounded with anticipation, and I clutched my blankets in my fists.
Headlights through the window cast moving shadows like creeping things across the walls and floor of my room. The shadows passed over me in a brief eclipse, and the car pulled to a stop outside the house.
I sat up in bed, swung my legs over the edge of the mattress, and slipped on my shoes. Bandit awoke in the process, his eyes glowing in the dark like twin stars, and I shushed him softly. Creaks and stirs sounded from below as Mom and Dad got up to meet Sarah at the door.
I crept to my window and worked at it slowly so it pushed up silently. The curtains stirred in a soft and gentle evening breeze. Outside my window the apple tree swayed its branches in a leisurely dance.
Below my window and to the right, the enclosed porch was alight and the yellow cast by the bulbs seeped through the mesh screen like the ghost lights Fat Bobby had been so intent on seeing what seemed like ages ago. Sarah climbed the steps and hugged Mom and Dad both. Turning briefly to wave back at the car, she then walked inside and closed the door.
The porch lights winked off.
I swung one leg out the window and then the other, toeing the branches below me until I found a thick and sturdy one. My hands still on the windowsill for leverage and balance, the rattle of Bandit’s chain collar made me look up, back into the dim interior of my room. The dog trotted to the window and peered out at me quizzically. I gave him another shhhh for good measure, then with one hand worked the window back down.
I knew if Sarah were to make it seem natural, I’d have only seconds before she reappeared on the porch, Mom and Dad most likely looking out the windows after her. Barry’s car idling too long in the driveway, when he should have pulled away, would attract our parents’ attention.
My hands left the windowsill and I turned and found the trunk of the tree. I lowered myself to awkward rungs on the scattered growth of branches. When these footholds terminated about halfway down the length of the trunk, I turned and leapt the last few feet to the lawn. I rolled with the fall to keep it as quiet as possible.
I moved fast in a crouch towards Barry’s car.
I saw the lock buttons pop up as I scuttled towards the rear passenger door.
Gently, I opened it, climbed in, and shut it behind me as softly as possible. There was hardly more than a click, but in the otherwise quiet of the evening I felt as if I’d slammed the door. Waiting for Mom and Dad to come bursting out of the house, find me, and drag me back inside, I curled into a ball on the passenger seat, held my breath.
“Hey, kid,” said the almost too handsome blond guy from the front seat. His pompadour bounced with the motions of his face and skull muscles.
“Hey, Fairy,” I said.
“What’d you say?” he asked, turning in his seat to look back at me.
“Hey, Barry.”
He looked at me like he was about to say something else, but then the light from the porch came on again and the slaps of sandaled feet flopping down the steps, coming our way across the lawn, silenced us both. Barry reached across the seat to pull the handle and swing the door open for my sister. Sarah climbed in the seat and when she turned to look at Barry I saw her eyes roll to look at me in her peripheral.
“Let’s go, Barry,” she said.
“Let’s go, Fairy,” I mocked in a high voice.
“Hey, kid,” Barry said and started to turn around, until Sarah stopped him with a nudge of an elbow. I took that as Mom and Dad still being at the door or the windows and watching. So Barry, instead, looked at me through the rearview mirror. “I’m doing you a favor, kid. I don’t know if you’re worried about me taking your sister away or something …”
“Please, take her away,” I said.
“Shut up, Joey,” Sarah said. Then to Barry: “Just go.”
I felt the car start to back out and then turn and shift into gear. We started down the road and when I thought we were a safe distance away I sat up and put on my seatbelt. Barry was looking at me in the rearview again and I gave him a winning smile, showing my pearly whites.
“Look kid, there’s no reason for us to be rude to each other.”
I stuck one hand beneath my shirt, under my arm. Cupping it there, I pumped my arm up and down a few times so that the mock farts squeaked loud and good.
“Was that rude enough?” I said. When he opened his mouth to respond, I gave him a few more.
“What the hell’s wrong with your brother?” he said to Sarah, and I timed my armpit farts so that they coincided with his words. What FART! the FART! hell’s FART! wrong FART! with FART! your FART! brother?
“Mom dropped him on his head,” she said, crossing her arms and looking out the window. I knew I’d embarrassed her and was rightly proud.
“At least I have a head and not two asses,” I said.
“I think this is going to be a long night,” Barry said, and I made sure to accompany his words with another armpit fart orchestra.
* * *
We reached the end of the dirt road that led to the woods, the same road I had used to come to the stream where I’d first met Fat Bobby. The same road from which Sheriff Glover had given chase, swinging his nightstick like a kid after a piñata. Barry put the car in park and turned to my sister.
“You sure you don’t want me to come with you guys?”
“No,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “Joey’s just meeting some friends of his for something.”
“Out here?” Barry prodded. “In the woods? At this hour?”
“Best time and place for Satanic worship,” I said. Both of them turned and gave me exasperated and angry looks, and I realized I wasn’t helping any, but it was fun and I couldn’t help myself. “We cover ourselves in goat’s blood and masturbate.”
They did their best to ignore me.
“How’re you going to get back?” Barry asked.
“We’ll walk,” Sarah said. “It isn’t far.”
Barry’s expression said he didn’t like that idea at all, and he took a moment to look around, peering at the wall of trees and the night sky outside the car. I knew what he was thinking. The silence save the breeze and the bobbing and swaying of the trees, the dark and shadows: anything could be out there. Though your mind on the verge of adulthood or something close to it insisted there was nothing more dangerous out here at night than there was in the day, another part of your mind, perhaps some primitive genetic remainders of distant and long dead ancestors, told you otherwise. This voice warned you to remain near the fire, stay in the light.
“I don’t know about this,” Barry said. “I think maybe I should wait for you. I can give you guys a ride back after … you do whatever it is you’re doing out here.”
I looked at the time on the digital clock set into the dashboard, saw it was almost ten thirty. We had to find Jim and the others and get set up before midnight. I opened the door and stepped out, started walking towards the woods.
“Joey!” my sister called after me. “Wait!”
“We don’t have much time,” I said, turning to look back at her.
She got out, then leaned back in the open door and said: “Fine, wait, but I can’t say how long this will be.”
Sarah closed the door and jogged awkwardly in her skirt and sandals to catch up, her purse slapping against her side like a riding crop. The headlights of Barry’s car spotlighted us as we stepped through the trees and into the forest. This gave us some light to see by for the first several yards before dwindling out and leaving us in near pitch-dark.
The zip of Sarah opening her purse sounded serpentine in the night. When the beam of the flashlight she’d stowed in there blinked on, I was relieved.
“Let’s go,” she said, and we followed the small light into the greater darkness.
* * *
We met Jim and Tara at the bend in the stream where not so long ago a fat kid had been pelted by rocks and sticks by three older guys who’d later held us at knife point in a mockup haunted house. Jim was wearing a heavy dark sweater that billowed out and made him look heavier than he was, with a backpack slung across one shoulder. Tara was wearing jeans and a sweater too, though her top didn’t make her look fat at all, but clung to her in places that I would’ve liked to investigate closer if we’d been alone.
“Where’s Bobby?” I asked, fearing the worst, knowing that the worst in my head was probably fairly accurate.
“He didn’t show up,” Jim said, his eyes set in his dark face like little bright stars dangling in the night.
I recapped for them what had happened at our place the day before, the fight between my dad and Mr. Templeton. We looked about ourselves and at each other for a few anxious moments, wondering how this affected things, thinking about our friend. I knew we were all wondering if he was curled in a ball right now, somewhere in that little trailer of his, being whipped or pummeled and whimpering for his dad to stop. Or worse, maybe not whimpering or begging at all, because maybe his dad had gone too far this time, seeing my dad, seeing Bandit, seeing me as he brought the belt or fists down on his son.
I resolved then and there that I had to find out about my friend, even if I had to go to the trailer by myself. But first was this business tonight.
“Okay,” I said, “so we make do without him.”
The words out of my mouth made me feel like the most callous asshole ever, but there was nothing to be done about it. Not tonight anyway. Though I’d met him only once, I knew the Collector wasn’t going away until he got what he wanted. You got that message loud and clear when he was holding a big bowie knife to your throat and tossing severed fingers around like jacks or marbles.
“You guys got everything?” I asked Jim and Tara, and Jim stepped closer to me, shrugging the backpack off his shoulder and kneeling to unzip it. Sarah, Tara, and I knelt too, looking into the depths of the pack as he opened it, seeing what was there, staring at it, then staring at each other.
The look that passed among us spoke of things beyond our years, things we weren’t ready for. Things that once done could never be undone and would stay with us for the rest of our days.
“Good,” I said, giving the contents of the backpack one last lingering look, then standing. Tara and Sarah stood as well, and Jim zipped up the pack again and hefted it back over his shoulder. I looked at my sister and my friends again. I was suddenly afraid. I wished Bandit were with me. “We all know what to do?”
They nodded.
“Then let’s get started,” I said.
I wondered with a stark realization if this would be the night that I saw some or all of them for the last time. That realization—that things could go wrong, that we were ill-equipped players in a game far greater than us—made me want to run and hide.
And I almost did. Then and there, I almost turned and ran.
The moving waters of the stream whispered secrets in the night; tantalizing, urgent, frightening. But also alluring, seductive, and mysterious. I didn’t run.
Instead, we, the members of the Outsiders’ Club, looked at each other one last time. Some of us nodded slightly. Some of us offered weak, half smiles.
Then we parted, my sister and I going west, Tara and Jim east, and Bobby out there somewhere, directionless, lost to us for the time, lost to us perhaps forever. Or maybe all of us were lost, and we just didn’t know it yet.
The rutted and pitted access road, overgrown with weeds and detritus, looked like the abandoned road of some old pagan city long gone to ruin. With every pop and snap of a twig, there was the expectation that something would dart from the shadows; something with a wide-brimmed fedora and long flowing trench coat. Something wielding a large, gleaming knife. It would grab and snatch at us, pull one or perhaps both of us into the shadows and feast upon us with its lone long, sharp tooth.
I knew he was out there, the Collector. I could feel him, waiting, watching. Watching from within the shadows of his upturned collar and fedora.
In front of us, the car came into view, catching the moonlight in its windows and headlights and patches of body yet untouched by the skin of rust spreading upon it like a cancer. The doors were open as before, like wings. The old bent grill and bumper grinned at us.
And from the shadows, as if stepping out from another dimension, a portal from darkness to darkness, the Collector arrived. He stopped in front of the old dead car, his collar upturned and the hat pulled low. Like last time, nothing of his face could be seen but a pale blur and the whites of eyes looking at us.
It was time.
I remembered his words, his dark poetry.
This is the night. These are the times.
No words had ever seemed truer to me for some reason. They rang in my head like the grim tolling of a despondent church tower bell.
“The money,” he said, his voice like the voice of a poet too. Casual, fluidic, underscored with restrained passions. Passions of pain and violence. Blood passions.
I couldn’t speak. I knew I had to, but it seemed as if my voice had left me for greener, and safer, pastures. Somehow Sarah found hers, though, and again I was filled with an appreciation and love for my sister that I’d rarely consciously felt.
“We have it,” she said, and turned to point behind us. “It’s up on a small hill down the road, past the stream.”
The Collector’s hands moved to his pockets. They shuffled in there, and I remembered with stark clarity what had been in those recesses last time. What I had no doubt was in there this time as well. Just a casual motion, as if he were turning about a set of keys or a pile of change.
His shadowed visage moved the slightest of degrees, looking at Sarah, looking at the road beyond her.
“No tricks,” he said, not a question, not a request.
Sarah shook her head, the beam of the flashlight playing on the ground between us and him. Still he didn’t move. I think he could see through us, see our thoughts and our deceits. In the shadows of his upturned collar and wide-brimmed hat, that small cave of lightlessness, was something altogether inhuman. Something that could see things we couldn’t, that processed ideas and thoughts and feelings we’d never understand. A way of perceiving that was impossible for us.
He doubted us.
He sensed our intentions.
The knife came out: a flick of the wrist, a dance of fingers. The twirl of the blade like a pirouette. A flash of metal.
He didn’t believe us, and now came the cutting. Unless we could regain his trust in our fear. I remembered what had made him believe me two nights ago when he held the knife to my throat. The thing that had probably saved my life.
I did what I had to.
For the second time that summer, I pissed my pants.
The warmth of it spreading across the front of my jeans was startling in the cool night. Trickles of it ran down my legs. The smell of it; tart, astringent.
The Collector saw it. The vaguest sense of motion in that cave of shadows: a smile. He knew the fear. We all did. Its bitter smell filled the distance between us.
“Be afraid, little boy,” he said, and the knife spun again in his long and dexterous fingers. “But not of death, not this night. Not if I get what I came to collect.”
I nodded, swallowing a lump in my throat the size of a basketball.
“There will be a death,” he said. “We all owe one. But show me what I want and yours will be for another day. That I promise.”
I nodded again. Tears threatened at the corners of my eyes. A knot in my stomach twisted, squirmed. My heart bucked and thumped a primal, tribal beat.
The Collector motioned with his knife, and I knew the command: Walk.
I turned, and with Sarah at my side we started back the way we came.
For awhile, save for the sound of our footfalls, the crunching of leaves and twigs underfoot sounding like the snapping of small and brittle bones, we walked in silence. Silence and darkness don’t go well together, not for me. The darkness, the inability to see things more than a few feet around you, is unsettling by itself. But with silence, and no idea what is out there and no sounds to identify it, the feeling of helplessness and vulnerability is intensified a thousandfold.
Then the Collector began to speak, and I wished for the silence to return.
“I once collected from a woman and her family,” he began. “She owed to my employer at the time and refused to pay. She said the contract was null and void. She hadn’t the authority to make that determination. And so I was sent to collect.”
He paused briefly as if to let it sink in, to make sure we were paying attention.
“I collected from the woman and from her husband, and from their two daughters,” he said. He said this all as if recounting a particularly fond familial memory. Maybe a barbecue with Uncle Ned, or the graduation of a favorite nephew. “There is collecting, and then there is collecting. Sometimes it’s only business, and sometimes there’s the opportunity for gratification. That night I was intensely gratified.”
That last hung in the air, undefined, unexplained, and for that I was grateful.
“That was long ago,” the Collector said. “It was winter, it was cold, not at all like these warm summer months we’re in now. But that night I was warm and the winter didn’t touch me. Do you understand?”
I understood nothing of what the fucking nutjob was saying. I only knew this whole thing had been a bad idea, the fucking king of all bad ideas, and I wished that I could hop into a time machine, reverse myself a couple of days, and tell my dad about this freak. Dad would take care of it, or he’d call the police and they would. Then I thought of Sheriff Glover, and didn’t know if that last was true or not.
I understood nothing of what the Collector said, but I nodded.
Or maybe I understood only too well, and was afraid of that knowledge.
“Once, in Mexico,” the Collector said as we continued walking, the swell of the mountain seen rising above the tree line ahead of us, “there was this rich hombre who lived in this beautiful private villa. He had something of importance to a man in Brazil. This something of importance wasn’t rightfully the Mexican’s. He had stolen it. I was sent to collect this item and return it to the Brazilian.”
I wanted nothing of his collection stories. I snuck a glance at my sister from the corner of my eye. Saw her looking back at me with the same look of disgust and fear. I wanted to reach out and hold her hand. Smelling of piss, scared, I wanted to hold my sister’s hand.
Yet I feared the consequences of the slightest movement. The Collector had told me to walk, nothing else, and I didn’t want to give him any reason to collect from me.
“The Mexican’s estate was large and had many guards,” the Collector said. “To move with shadows, though, is a talent I learned long ago, out of necessity. I moved through the Mexican’s estate with ease, unseen. I came upon the Mexican in a lush and silken bedroom making use of a little niña. The kind of youth only money can buy. He didn’t notice me until I was at his bedside, and when I asked for the item owed he reached for the nightstand and the gun inside. He was fat and slow. The girl screamed, and I silenced her, and then I made the Mexican tell me where the item was. In time, he told me. I collected the item, and then I collected more, from him, for myself. Do you understand?”
Standing beneath the rise of Lookout Mountain, its shade over us like a blanket, I nodded. Up there, somewhere, were Tara and Jim, and I wanted to scream for them to run, to forget the whole thing. To run and get the police, to run and get my dad, but I knew I’d die from the teeth of the knife before the first word was even out.
Sensing my hesitancy, the Collector felt compelled to extol upon us one last treatise on collecting.
“I have collected for many individuals, for many years. My employers are numerous, but the outcome is always the same. They get what they want, as do I. I have never failed, and I never will. My present employer will get what is his, as well. That is my reputation, as collector, and reputation is everything. Do you understand?”
I did indeed understand more of the Collector now. He had been doing this for a long time, probably longer than I’d been alive. He was a man, but during the course of his life, the pursuits of his profession, he had become something more. Something of this world, and beyond it. Something malignant; something poisonous. I felt sullied and tainted just by his presence.
I nodded my understanding.
“It’s … up there,” I said, somehow finding my voice. “All of it.”
“Let’s go,” he said, and my sister and I started up the rocky incline.
I had to fight the urge to race up the hill. Each foothold and handhold I placed with a determined and consciously feigned care, as if I were unfamiliar with the climb. Eagerness to get to the top might betray mere fear and alert the Collector to something else.
I took an opportunity with one difficult foothold to look down, and I saw the Collector still there, yards away, at the bottom. The bowie knife flashed in his hands like lightning, and yet it was an idle motion almost without thought. He was standing there, looking up, but not looking at me or even at the top of the mountain. Maybe he was looking at the sky and the moon, and maybe the strange gears of his mind were in the middle of some dark and alien purpose I’d never comprehend. That I’d never want to comprehend.
This is the night. These are the times.
I realized he was made for the night, and the night for him.
Then he looked at me looking at him. The pale blur of his face in the dimness. A smear of off-white and the faintest hint of eyes and mouth.
He started up after us, and I turned and continued climbing.
We made it to the top before him, and Sarah and I stood at the peak and looked about. At first I didn’t see my friends, and then my eyes roamed up the wall of stone and there they were lying flat atop it, staring down at us, vague in the moonlight like wispy spirits.
Except for the gun in Jim’s hands, the metal gleaming in the night. On his belly atop the upright stone, he held the pistol in both hands, aimed in our general direction.
I heard the approach of the Collector from behind us. The tumble of dislodged stones and pebbles, tiny avalanches, as he scaled Lookout Mountain. Turning, I thought of kicking him as he rose to join us, sending him sprawling back down the rocky hill. But he was right there, hands clasping the edge and pulling himself up, and the knife, the knife in the moonlight, silver streaks across the blade like wicked smiles.
I turned back towards the peak of the small mountain, and the upright stone like a large tombstone. Jim, atop it, motioned us with a nod to move aside. Sarah did, but I was too slow, and then the Collector was standing behind me, one arm wrapping around me like the first time, the knife at my throat.
The Collector saw them immediately.
The blade pressed dangerously against my flesh.
“No tricks,” he said, his voice still calm and stoic even with a gun pointed at him. “That was the deal.”
“You’re a liar,” I said, my voice little more than a wheeze with a knife at my throat, and the smell of piss permeating the air like a strong and stringent perfume. “You … would have killed us … anyway.”
“Perhaps,” he said in his silken poet’s tone. “Perhaps not. Now you’ll never know.”
“We … we don’t want to hurt you!” Jim said from his perch, his voice tremulous and high. Not at all like the confident kid I’d met not so long ago. “Just leave my friend alone! Go away and leave us alone!”
“I’m afraid that, my dear boy,” the Collector replied, his minty breath puffing against my cheek, “is not an option.”
I knew it was coming then, the end, the end of me, the end of it all. There was going to be a lot of collecting, a harvest of collecting. I doubted Jim could shoot a man, even in self-defense. Shooting cans off a stump in your backyard, and shooting a human being, were worlds apart. Even if Jim did take a shot, I doubted he could kill this man, this thing, the Collector, in one shot once he slit my throat and went for the others. I doubted if bullets, if anything, could kill this creature that held me. It was over, all of it, and I’d only just met these friends, who in such a few short weeks were the best friends I’d ever had. Worst of all, one kiss, and one kiss only, from the most beautiful girl I’d ever known.
A slight sense of motion as the Collector’s fingers tightened their grip on the knife. The tensing of movement to come. The cutting.
A sound below us.
The stomping of feet. Heavy, thunderous as they grew closer. Shouts. Panting. The crackle and snap of branches.
The Collector relaxed his hold on me so that he could turn and look down. Acting before thinking, I slipped down against him, under his loose arms and the guillotine blade, fell to the ground and rolled away, towards my sister and the upright stone and my friends with the gun above me. The Collector looked at us, then looked back down the slope of the mountain to whatever was coming.
Something heavy hit the incline and scrabbled up, kicking loose cascades of pebbles and dirt. Heavy breathing could be heard even from this distance. Shouts pursued the climber, the voice violent and familiar, and more footfalls close behind.
The Collector turned again towards us and then looked down once more, uncertain.
“Don’t move,” Jim said to him in little more than a whisper, and the Collector faced us and the gun pointed at him. His motions were lithe and casual and unbothered. He seemed a lazy and complacent audience member watching a boring play on a lackluster stage.
The second set of footfalls below and out of sight at the bottom of the mountain slowed, then started up the incline also, kicking and stomping footholds into the face of it. Shouting still, wordless grunts and noises of intended violence carried up to us. Almost at the top now and I knew who was coming, both of them, pursued and pursuer, by the shouts of the second and the promise of pain he brought with him.
“Bobby!” I yelled. “Don’t come up!”
But there he was, clawing up over the edge now, meaty hands grasping and pulling and him rolling over the top. He didn’t see the Collector until the man was grabbing at him and pulling him up and wrapping an arm around his throat and bringing the knife up, sliding it between two rolls of chin.
Bobby’s face was frantic and confused. He looked at us across the peak of the mountain, saw Sarah and I standing and Tara and Jim on top of the rock with the gun. His eyes tried to roll down and to the side at the sound of his dad’s ascent, kicking and slapping stone and dirt for purchase. The size of the man, the mountain of him, came over the edge and arose, like a leviathan from the ocean of night and shadow.
The Collector stepped aside as Mr. Templeton rose to full height.
Bobby’s father, streaked with sweat and glimmering in the night, looked about. He saw the Collector holding his son, and the knife in the shadowy man’s hands. He saw us and the gun, and his gaze narrowed on me and Sarah, and he smiled. His face was bandaged and purple with bruises, and his smile was gapped in places by missing teeth.
In the arms of the Collector, Fat Bobby was likewise streaked with sweat and reminded me of a large and wet Thanksgiving turkey. His face was bruised as well, his mouth bloody, and a knot the size of a golf ball perched atop his forehead. I wondered how many other bruises, or worse, were hidden underneath Bobby’s clothing.
Images of him huddled in his bedroom, or what served as a room in their trailer, the belt and fists and kicks raining down, came to me. The pain, the resigned horror at what had always been endured, the hopelessness. The blows still coming and nothing you could do about it.
Such an existence made no sense to me.
I hated the bull man before me all the more.
“That’s my son,” Mr. Templeton said, facing the Collector now and pointing as if for emphasis in case the other man didn’t know what he was talking about. “Give me my son.”
“I’m afraid that can’t be done,” the Collector said, his voice like soft music from the darkness about his face. “These children have something of mine.”
“Let Bobby go or I’ll fucking blow your head off!”
Jim’s voice from above was sudden and loud and made me jump.
The Collector ignored him and focused on Bobby’s father.
“There is money here,” he said in his lilting tone. “Lots of it. Help me collect it from these children, and perhaps you can walk away with a bit of it.”
“Money, huh?” Mr. Templeton said and his ruined face showed interest. Fat Bobby jiggled and quivered in stark terror in the iron grasp of the Collector. He watched his dad as if seeing an alien creature. “And where is this money?”
“I was just about to acquire that information,” the Collector said. “But there was the little problem of a gun …” he said and then his arm shot out like he was casting dice. The arc of the blade flashed through the space between us.
I thought it was coming for me. Rooted as I was by fear, I waited for the blade to find me, pierce my heart and bleed my life away.
But the air parted above me as it passed, and a yelp of pain from Jim followed its passing. The pistol discharged and a thunder close to my ear drowned out the rest of the world.
I slumped back against the stone in pain, cupping the side of my head. The world around me spun in kaleidoscopic swirls and rollercoaster tilts and loops.
Bobby was cast aside like a fat and doughy rag doll by the Collector. His face collided with rock and he remained on the ground, unmoving.
Mr. Templeton charged across the small space and met the Collector with a thud. The momentum carried them both down and over the side of the mountain. The tumbling and smacks and thumps of their descent were like drumbeats.
A brief rustle of motion as I felt more than saw Jim’s form roll off the stone above and thump down beside me. He moved and groaned in pain, and though I was glad to see him alive my eyes fixed on what dropped along with him.
The gun clattered against the stone floor beneath me with a metallic clacking. I saw in blurs and whorls and tried to grab it. The world tilted again as I moved and I vomited hot and steaming chunks that splattered the ground like a gruesome rain.
Tara jumped down from above, knelt before me, found the gun, snatched it up. She strode the few yards to the edge and peered over. Sarah crab-walk shuffled on her knees between me, Jim, and Fat Bobby, her hands coming away from each of us bloody. The scarlet wetness alight by the moon was very red.
I’d never seen so much blood before. I wondered how much of it was mine, how much that of my friends.
The thunder of gunshots clapped atop our little mountain, startlingly loud even through the ringing in my head. I jumped with each explosion, my hands to my ears, and looked to their source.
Tara stood at the precipice of the hill, her arm outstretched over the brink and pointing down. The pistol in her grip issued a curl of smoke from the muzzle, like a ghost snake rising.
The drumming in my ears faded and I brought my hands away and there was blood there, but I could hear, and I heard rocks and dirt sliding down the hillside. Thumps and grunts. I crawled over to Tara with the smoking gun, and at the edge I looked down and there was Mr. Templeton looking back up at us far below.
But his head was backwards, the rest of his body belly down against the forest floor. His arms and legs were bent at weird and impossible angles, like an action figure in broken poses.
A few feet from Mr. Templeton, the Collector lay sprawled in the bushes, his fedora still on his head even after falling so far so that I thought maybe it was part of him, attached to him like a strange organ. His coat spread out from beneath him, wide and open like the wings of an insect.
Near his right shoulder two holes like eyes stared back at me, though these eyes bled. The cloth of his black shirt was torn about the holes.
Holes in cloth, holes in flesh.
Seeing these, I wished for a hole of another sort, to bury myself in and hide from all that had transpired.
The Collector, motionless, collecting nothing, yet still I feared him and looked away. Only to see the other bodies strewn about, those of my friends, and I buried my face in my hands so I saw nothing.
Barry, having heard the gunshots, came minutes later, rushing through the trees like a would-be hero, too late in the last reel of a movie. Meeting him at the bottom of the hill, we looked at him, saw him take in the bodies of Mr. Templeton and the Collector, and the horror on his face was what we all felt inside.
Jim, a hand pressed tightly to the nasty gash on his shoulder, wanted to check on the Collector. He took a step in that direction before Barry stopped him. Told him that we shouldn’t disturb anything. This was a crime scene and the police would take care of everything. None of us put up much of a fight against this proclamation.
I least of all. I just wanted out of there.
Barry told us to follow him back to the car and he’d take us all over to the hospital and call the police. Once, as we started away, I looked over my shoulder back at where Mr. Templeton and the Collector lay sprawled. Whether it was a trick of the moonlight, shadow, or wind I thought I saw the merest twitch from beneath that fedora and high collar.
Trick of the light or not, I quickened my pace.
At Barry’s car we loaded ourselves in, and on the dark roads in the heavy night, only the headlights shining through the bleakness about us, it seemed the world had vanished, abandoning us.
We drove into town and arrived at the hospital and its comforting world of white.
* * *
A trip to the police station was unnecessary, as they came to us at the hospital. As did our parents. With a little protesting, Jim, Bobby and I got to stay in the same room. Jim was stitched up at the shoulder where the Collector’s knife had stuck him; Bobby’s face was cleaned and patched up; and various things were stuck in my ear as the doctor snapped his fingers a couple times to make sure I could hear.
Like a small band or tribe, our parents stood outside the room and came in after the doctor was done. They were all in robes and flannels and slippers like maybe that was the traditional garb of their culture. Mr. Connolly tall and thin and dark; Tara’s dad, wiry and gawky and with the hawkish face, her mom moving around Tara like a guard setting a perimeter; Mom and Dad, staring at me and Sarah, sending us those private telepathies that said there was a lot to answer for, and we would, oh, by God, those looks told us, we would.
I couldn’t help but notice that Bobby, save for us his friends, had no family and was alone, and I wondered what that felt like. Even if you hated your dad, as I was pretty sure he did, there must be something inside that was different when he was no longer around. Something gone and maybe a hole where it had been.
Sheriff Glover showed up but Mom and Dad refused to allow him to be the one to interview us, and so things were on hold until other officers arrived. The police questioned us with our parents present and it was Fat Bobby who spoke first and we listened and got the gist of what he was saying and so formulated our story around that. He told the police how we had a club and we met at this abandoned car on one of the forest access roads and just talked about stuff and played games and such. We had agreed to get together at night sometime, thinking it would be cool and spooky, and so we had set it up. But then his dad found out and wouldn’t let him go and started to beat him. Sarah and I picked it up from there and we were as honest as could be and told how Sarah had asked her boyfriend to sneak me and her out at night to take us out to the woods where we’d meet the others. Jim and Tara told how they’d arrived together and met us and how the four of us had waited a couple minutes for Bobby, but when he didn’t show up we went on by ourselves.
At the old Buick we found someone else there. Someone in a wide-brimmed hat and a long coat, and it was here that our story necessarily spiraled into lies again. This strange man asked us to take off our clothes, I told the deputies. We said no and he took out a large knife. We ran, and he ran after us.
We ran to the mountain and climbed up it, the strange man in the coat and hat still chasing us. Here Bobby picked up the story again, saying how he tried sneaking out of the trailer so that he could still meet us, and how his dad caught him and started to hit him again. So Bobby had started to run and his dad, drunk and slow, followed him. Bobby went to the old Buick on the access road first, and when he didn’t find us there he headed on to the mountain. There he saw us and climbed up to us and his dad followed.
Barry started to speak for the first time and that was when his parents arrived at the hospital. Seeing them in their silk pajamas I realized again that he wasn’t anything like Sarah’s greaseball in California, but Barry and his family weren’t like us either. And I think maybe that’s why Sarah liked him so much. He was from a different world than ours, and had money and was polite and well mannered, and maybe those things were appealing to a girl.
Then I wondered why Tara liked me because I didn’t have any of that. I wasn’t too well mannered; I’d almost gotten us killed a few times; and what money I may have had was blood money. But Barry’s story interrupted this train of thought, and I listened as he told the police how he’d heard some gunshots and left the car to come find us. His disheveled yet still dignified parents coddled him and engulfed him in hugs at this revelation.
Gunshots? one of the deputies said, and so looking down, avoiding his father’s gaze, Jim told how he’d snuck out one of his father’s guns and brought it with him. He thought maybe it’d be cool to show us all and maybe shoot a few cans or bottles off some stumps or something. Mr. Connolly’s face filled with a fire then, and I knew Jim’s lies for our sake was costing him dearly, that the downcast of his eyes and shame in his face was genuine and he wasn’t at that moment lying about anything. His father had had a deep trust in him and Jim had broken it. Intentionally and for good purpose to protect us against the Collector, but that neither the police nor our parents could know about.
There’d been a struggle between Mr. Templeton and the strange man in the coat and hat. During this melee the man in the coat had thrown his knife. Hitting Jim, the gun had discharged and Jim had dropped it. In the course of their brawl, Mr. Templeton and the other man went over the side of the mountain. Tara had picked up the gun and walked to the edge. Both men were right there, she said, just a few feet down on a small ledge of rock, fighting, and then they’d both seen her and reached for her and she’d pulled the trigger.
She wasn’t sure if she’d hit either or both of them, Tara said through the sobs that shook her as she took up the narrative. But both men stumbled backwards, fell again, and tumbled all the way down.
The story told, or at least a version of it, we stood or sat there in the hospital room and waited for what would befall us. By the faces of the police and our parents, a great shit storm was a-blowing.
The story was in the local paper for weeks.
Jim’s father was fined heavily for his gun finding its way into the hands of minors and all his firearms were confiscated from his home. Bobby was put into a group home for a few days until my mom and dad did some heavy and persistent legwork, after which he was placed in our home until his case could be further reviewed by Child Protective Services and the state. For having shot a man, Tara’s parents were required to provide her with counseling, and I didn’t see her for over a week. Sarah and I were restricted to the house, and so I really didn’t see much of anything.
Then another week passed and finally I saw the light of day again.
I met my friends at Lookout Mountain after calling them all, and we stood there not looking at each other but looking at the upright stone and the top of it. Finally Jim walked over and boosted himself up. He peered down inside and then looked back at us.
“It’s still there,” he said, and we exchanged glances.
My sister was with us, indelibly part of the club now, having seen what she’d seen, been through what she had, what we all had. I looked at her, she looked at me, and though the day was warm and bright it somehow seemed as dark as the night it had all happened. Jim reached inside the fissure between the stones and started pulling the sacks out one by one and tossing them down among us. When he was done he jumped back down and we made a circle around the sacks of money.
“Are we sure we want to do this?” he said. “After all we’ve been through?”
Tara held up the box of matches and we all leaned forward and took a couple out.
“I guess that answers that,” Jim said, rolling his own matches between his fingers.
With scratches and hisses we all struck the heads of our matches in turn and knelt and applied the small flames to the bundles of money. We watched the flames grow and lick the air, and we wondered how long before someone noticed the smoke. The smoke wasn’t thick, but it was gray and black and conspicuous against the blue sky. With my feet I kicked stray bundles closer to the center of the blaze. Seeing what I was doing everyone else followed suit. Soon, the whole mound was ablaze, and the heat wafting off of it was palpable and uncomfortable.
“Millions of dollars,” Jim said, “up in smoke.”
But his heart wasn’t in the words, and I knew he wasn’t terribly disappointed. Neither was I, and I don’t think any of us were. Mr. Templeton looking up at me from the bottom of Lookout Mountain, crooked and broken like a toy was what I was thinking about, and other thoughts like it. The bound and rotted skeleton in the trunk of the Buick with the hole in its skull; the Collector’s knife at my throat, then at Bobby’s; Tara at the precipice, gun in hand, the flashes of it firing.
The Collector …
When the police had gone to search the access road and then the mountain, they’d found everything as we’d said, except for one thing. There were spent bullet casings, and a knife, and at the bottom of the hill, crumpled and broken, Mr. Templeton.
But no man in a coat and hat, though they’d found a crushed bush where he’d landed, and footprints leading off into the woods. Blood presumably from bullet wounds made another trail along with the prints. Lots of blood. The police assured us he couldn’t have gotten far after losing so much blood.
But we knew differently.
He’d obviously made it far enough. They didn’t find him.
I tried to pretend it was over, as I and the rest of the Outsiders’ Club stood atop Lookout Mountain and watched the money burn and the ashes carried away, some in the breeze, some down the slopes and mixed into the grass and trees. I told myself that maybe wild animals, like coyotes or bobcats, had collected the Collector when he’d finally collapsed from exhaustion and blood loss.
I tried to tell myself many things, but none of them brought the slightest comfort.
Because I think I understood him now. I remembered his poetry and it echoed in my mind whenever the silence allowed the memories to stir.
This is the night. These are the times.
Life itself is on loan, a price that must ultimately be collected.