In comics the heroes are always in the right place at the right time to save the people that need to be saved. Oh, sure, you have the exception of the origin stories, in which almost every hero becomes a hero because of someone he or she lost. Spiderman is Spiderman because he failed to save Uncle Ben. Batman is Batman because he watched helplessly as his parents were murdered. Even Superman, before he decided to put on the cape and tights, watched his earth dad die of a heart attack. But after those early failures, the heroes always rise to the occasion. They take down the bad guys and save the world, no matter how diabolical the plot or seemingly insurmountable the odds against them.
But I wasn’t a hero, and I was about as far away from the right place as could be. I was on foot while Mr. Perrelli and Brock had the Cadillac. To further complicate this, my family and friends lay in several different directions, and who to go to first, how to prioritize the value of their lives—not knowing who Mr. Perrelli would go after first, how he’d prioritize his killing, his escalation—made for a predicament that tore at my heart and mind.
* * *
I ran the two miles home as fast as I could. My chest was heaving, my heart pumping and thudding so hard there were echoes of it in my ears. Sweat drenched my shirt like it was a wash rag by the time I turned off the shoulder of the highway and into my neighborhood.
Dad’s truck was in the driveway, and I realized he must be home for lunch with Mom, and the fact that they were together and Dad would never let anything happen to her lifted at least one responsibility off my shoulders. As I pushed through the front door and saw my parents at the dining table, I briefly thought about telling Dad everything, letting him carry the burden of figuring out how to deal with Mr. Perrelli and Brock.
Then I thought of Dad being pummeled by Mr. Templeton. That had been my fault also, and Dad had paid the price for it. I knew I might yet have to pass the burden of my troubles on to him but, before I did that, I had to get everyone together in one place.
That much at least was my responsibility.
“Joey, you alright?” Mom asked as I walked briskly past them and headed for the stairs.
“Son, you’re sweating like you’ve run a marathon,” Dad said.
“I’m … fine,” I croaked.
Taking the stairs two at a time, I glanced back, eyeing the clock hanging on the wall in the foyer. Dad must have just arrived before I had. It was only a few minutes past noon, which gave him another forty-five minutes or so for his lunch hour before he had to leave again. That would be cutting it close for what I had planned.
Very close.
I headed straight for Sarah’s room and pushed the door open. Like last time, she was planted in front of her dresser mirror, compacts like a painter’s palette in front of her, and a tube of lipstick in one hand. Again, the sudden opening of her door made her jerk, and the lipstick nearly went up her nose, leaving a red streak over her upper lip and a smear across her nostrils.
“Can’t you knock?” she barked at me.
I struggled to catch my breath. Taking my silence as defiance, she got up, fists clenched. Then reading something in my demeanor other than brotherly annoyance, she stopped short.
“What’s wrong, Joey?”
I didn’t immediately answer.
Thoughts of the dead froze me in place. The older couple that were probably putrefying in the sweltering summer heat in the closed garage. Mr. Pudge and Mr. Pimple, shot in the head and face. Sheriff Glover and his chest blooming red, like the fireworks exploding in color on the Fourth of July.
Then I thought of Mr. Templeton at the bottom of Lookout Mountain, twisted and broken. That took me even further back to the Collector and his knife at my throat. Which in turn led to the Haunted House and Dillon’s switchblade prodding me in similar fashion.
The money.
The bound body in the trunk of the Buick, and the hole in its skull.
Everything that had occurred that summer came rushing back in one great tidal wave of terror. No longer did I feel like a teenager on the brink of something greater, those mysterious years past school, summer breaks, and days spent with friends. No longer did I feel like being brave and strong as my dad had taught me to be, not taking shit as I’d told Fat Bobby that first day by the stream in the woods. The boy who’d shattered an older boy’s nose in the mirrored dark halls of a haunted house seemed far and distant.
Then and there in my sister’s room, I just felt like a kid. A kid deep over his head in things he couldn’t handle.
I realized I was trembling, tried to consciously will myself still.
“What happened?” Sarah asked, moving closer.
I told her everything. About deciding to speak with Mr. Perrelli by myself; he and Brock escorting me back to their car; the tract house in the nondescript neighborhood; the owners who were probably dead and the smell from the garage; and the shooting that left Dillon’s pals and dad dead.
“We’ve got to tell Dad!” Sarah said. “He’ll call the police!”
“And what do we tell them? How we wanted to steal ten million dollars? How we knew about a dead body and kept it a secret? How I just watched two kids and an officer murdered?” I shook my head. “We’d be stuck at the police station for who knows how long, all the while Mr. Perrelli would be out there tracking my friends down and—”
I didn’t finish that thought, but our imaginations did just fine.
“Then what do we do?” she asked, her tone taking on an edge of panic.
“We get to everyone before Perrelli does.”
“How?”
“We’ll take Mom’s car. You drive.”
“And then what? If we get to everyone before they do?”
“We bring everyone back here,” I said. I took a deep breath. Let it out slowly as if it might be the last breath I ever took and I wanted to relish it. “Then we tell Dad everything.”
“And what if Mr. Perrelli follows us back home? What’re we going to do? Have a big shoot-out?”
I said nothing after that, and Sarah looked at me as if I’d gone mad. I couldn’t argue so much with that, but wondered if it was just me or the entire world.
We decided on Jim’s first since it was the closest. Not wanting him to get hurt, but not wanting to go completely unprotected, I decided to take Bandit with us and for once Sarah didn’t complain about him. She even knelt briefly in the hallway and scratched him behind the ears. Downstairs, we headed for the door and Sarah snatched the extra pair of keys hanging from the pegboard on the wall nearby.
“I’m borrowing the car, Mom!” she called out behind us.
Mom and Dad were still at the dining table, finishing lunch, and one or both of them said something back, but we were already out the door. I threw it shut against any protestations, and we raced down the porch and across the walkway to the driveway. I loaded Bandit into the backseat of the car, then climbed in myself, Sarah getting in behind the wheel and starting the car. Pulling out with a squeal of tires and kicking up gravel, we backed out of the driveway and onto the road.
“Where’s Bobby?” I asked, just now realizing I hadn’t seen him at home.
Sarah looked at me as she turned the steering wheel.
“I think he went for a walk or something,” she said.
“You think?”
My voice rose in near hysteria at the end there.
“I don’t know!” Sarah said, almost yelling. “I think he just said he was going out! Maybe he went to Jim’s.”
Moments later we were on the highway, heading for the Connolly yard and racing against time—a force that waited for no one.
* * *
I saw the rooms that Jim and his dad called home for the first time that day. Sarah pulled up to the gate of the Connolly car yard, and I got out to open it for her. We parked in front of the garage where the working bay doors were rolled up. The lights inside were on so that it looked like a trio of huge eyes looking out on the grounds.
Walking inside I saw one of the side doors open that Fat Bobby had pointed out to me before, and my sister and I walked over to it. Our footfalls echoed like ghost footsteps on the concrete floor of the garage. We peeked through the door hesitantly like maybe we were looking in on a secret chamber. Sounds of crashes and explosions and gunfire came from inside, and the flashes cast by the television screen on the walls lent an eerie cast to things.
Inside it was startling to see, like some sort of optical illusion. It was far more spacious than I would have thought possible judging from the exterior of the garage. There was a small dining nook, complete with stove, cluttered island counter, refrigerator, and cupboards. A booth and table lined one wall, and adjacent to this was the living area, where a sofa and reclining chair sat in front of a television set atop a small wheeled stand. A VCR and a pile of movies were stacked atop the television like an electronic totem pole for some pagan techno-religion, and at the far end past all of this was a door open to another room. In this room were double bunks, a dresser, and a small desk.
Jim and his dad were on the sofa in front of the television. Seeing us, Mr. Connolly reached for the remote and muted the blaring speakers, but not before Bruce Willis yelled a “Yippie kai-yay motherfucker!” so loud it shook the walls.
“Hey, how you guys doing?” Mr. Connolly said.
We gave them little waves, Jim waved back from beside his dad, and I saw the large splint on his hand. The metal and gauze made his finger large and fat, making me think of those big foam rubber fingers at baseball games. I felt a quick surge of sickness rise up in me as I remembered Brock holding him, extending Jim’s hand, and snapping the finger back so casually like a twig he’d picked up from the ground. I was glad to see Jim and his dad okay, Mr. Perrelli and Brock nowhere about, but that left Tara and Bobby out there still unaccounted for, and that added to the sick feeling in my gut.
“Fine,” Sarah said. “We were hoping Jim could come out for awhile.”
I looked at Jim across the room, he looked back at me, and it was clear that he read something in our expressions and knew something was up. Apparently Mr. Connolly was on the same wavelength, or close to it, because his eyes swept from me to my sister, and then back again before he spoke.
“It seems you kids keep getting in trouble when you’re all together,” he said. A half grin on his face made this seem like a joke that wasn’t particularly funny the second and third time around. “Stabbings, broken fingers. I don’t know how many more lives poor Jim’s got hanging around you kids.”
Mr. Connolly’s tone, though half joking was also half serious, and it was that serious part that made me look away from him. I couldn’t meet his eyes knowing what had just happened to me that morning in the tract house in town, and what I was probably dragging Jim into. But I could think of no other way to protect my friends unless we were all together, with the exception of telling the whole truth, right now, and I wasn’t ready to do that with an adult who wasn’t much more than a stranger to me. A nice man, I had no doubt Jim’s dad was, but a stranger still.
I’d save the truth for my dad once I had all my friends with me. He’d know what to do. He always did.
“We’re just going to pick up Tara, sir,” my sister said. “Then we’re all going back to our place. Just to hang out.”
“Uh huh,” Mr. Connolly murmured, and by his tone I thought the scales were leaning towards the joking side of things. “But if my son comes back blinded, decapitated, burnt to a crisp, or otherwise crippled, dismembered, or dead, just know I’ll be sorely pissed.”
Sarah and I both nodded. Jim smiled and pushed up from the sofa, attentive of where he put his bandaged finger and the weight and pressure he put on it. He walked over to us and said goodbye to his dad. Sarah did too, but I kept walking and for some reason I felt something like daggers on my back and I knew that if I turned to look I’d see Mr. Connolly looking at me, and me alone. His eyes would shine like lanterns and he’d see through me and know what was going on inside.
The dark and hidden things all of us hide.
* * *
On the highway into town, I stared out the window and the desert to either side was like a sheet of ancient and brown parchment rolled out. Jim asked what was happening, leaning forward from the backseat so that his head was poking out like a jack-in-the-box between my sister driving and me.
I told him about meeting Perrelli at the park. Told him about being driven to the nondescript neighborhood and led into the house. The smell inside and the bloodstains. The others inside waiting: our old friends the Glovers along with Glover Junior’s pals. The shooting that followed and how I made a run for it.
“He still doesn’t believe we burned the money?” Jim asked.
I shook my head.
“What if we didn’t?” Jim said, and Sarah and I both snapped our heads towards him. Sarah had to turn hers back to the road when the car started drifting, but my gaze remained fixed on my friend.
“What’re you talking about?” I asked.
Jim eased back from between the front seats, settling into his like he was trying to get as much distance between us as possible. He even looked down and away, and he’d never looked away from me before, always looked me square in the eyes. I knew I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear.
He didn’t answer immediately, but looked out the window at the desert landscape whizzing by. Like there was something out there he wanted to see but couldn’t find it.
“Jim?” I said, with more than a hint of anger in my voice. “What the hell are you talking about?”
After a moment he looked at me again. There wasn’t shame or embarrassment in his expression, but neither was there defensive anger aimed back at me. Instead, he wore a sort of dead expression, a resignation, and somehow that was worse.
“Bobby took some of the money before we burned it,” Jim said, looking at me with that flaccid face.
“What?” Sarah exclaimed, shooting a look at Jim through the windshield rearview mirror.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I repeated.
“Before moving the money to Lookout Mountain,” Jim began flatly, like he was lecturing about the thrills of watching grass grow to an audience of rocks, “Bobby wanted to put some of the money somewhere else, in case things went wrong.”
“In case things went wrong …” I said, shaking my head, thinking that was the understatement of the year.
“Which they did,” Jim said, a tinge of emotion returning to his voice, and then it dawned on me why and I actually lowered my head into my hands.
“It wasn’t just Bobby,” I said. “You wanted the money too.”
It wasn’t a question.
Now he did meet my gaze, and a spark of that old Jim—the Jim who was raised like me and didn’t take shit from anyone—returned. His brow was furrowed and his mouth did something like a sneer or growl, as if he might bite.
“We all wanted the money,” he said. “That was the plan when we found it, and we didn’t see why it should change just because some weirdo threatened you.”
“He didn’t just threaten me, Jim!” Stretching, I leaned towards the backseat like I was on the verge of climbing back there and fighting him, which maybe I was. “He threatened all of us! And it wasn’t just threats! The Collector would’ve killed us all! Maybe keep parts of us for souvenirs and shit!”
“But he didn’t kill us!” Jim shouted back, leaning forward again so that we were nearly face to face. Spittle leapt between us like little liquid gymnasts. “We killed him and we still burnt the money! What kind of sense does that make? We were in the clear! The money was ours! And we burned it!”
“The money wasn’t ours!” I threw the words back at him, our faces close enough to kiss if I suddenly chose to go gay and wanted some hot black action. “It was never ours!”
Bandit, on the seat beside Jim, looked back and forth between us, confused.
I knew I was talking to myself as much as I was to Jim. I think he realized that too because we both almost instantly calmed, moving away from each other and settling back into our respective seats.
“How much did you guys hide?” I asked.
“Two million,” Jim said without hesitation.
Even then that number rolled around my head. It wasn’t ten million, but it was sure still a hell of a lot more than I’d probably ever see at one time if I lived to be a hundred. Divided five ways and that was four hundred thousand each. That was still a lot of comics and books and all sorts of things.
Everything in me told me these thoughts were wrong.
I tried to push them away, but they wouldn’t go.
Then something else dawned on me, and why it wasn’t the first thing on my mind after hearing Jim’s confession about the money, I didn’t know. Dad would have been deeply ashamed, and that was the clincher that helped me refocus my thoughts.
“Bobby’s the only other one that knows about the two million?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Jim said.
“Any idea where he is?”
“No,” Jim said, and his mental wheels and cogs began to move the same as mine. He again leaned forward so that he was between Sarah and me. “He’s not at your house?”
I shook my head.
“So he’s out there somewhere,” Jim said, and the vagueness of that, like Bobby was lost in a formless and directionless world, seemed somehow right and true, but that wasn’t entirely accurate either. Because out there, separated from us, Fat Bobby wasn’t truly alone. There were others out there, looking, searching, hunting. And if they found him before we did I think then he truly would be lost.
We all would.
Though she’d given me her address a while ago, I realized with a mild surprise that this was the first time I’d been to Tara’s house. That I’d kissed her and touched her, and she’d kissed and touched me, and yet I’d never seen where she’d lived seemed strange. I wondered if that meant something: two people in some ways so close, and yet keeping a certain distance.
I wondered not for the first time if the old Buick, the money and the body inside it, had tainted us in some way. Soiled us and left us stained at the deepest of levels, at the root and core, so deep maybe that you couldn’t see it. Perhaps so far down it could only be felt. Yet its effect on things was nonetheless real and acted as a force and attracted certain things and kept certain things away.
Gravities and polarities, I thought, those words coming to me from somewhere, with the beginning of a meaning I’d never attached to them before.
When we pulled into the driveway, I stepped out and strode up the walkway to the front door. Pressing the doorbell, I waited in dread. As at the Connolly yard under Mr. Connolly’s scrutinizing gaze, I felt that when the door opened my deceit would be laid bare.
I realized that I should be there on that doorstep asking Tara to a movie, or asking her out to eat somewhere.
But that’s not why I was there.
I was there to gather her up and take her somewhere where bad things would happen. The understanding that maybe this was all I could ever give her, all that I would ever have to give, brought a heavy sadness upon me.
Yet it was necessary, I told myself, clinging to that fragile and clumsy belief. The alternative—all of us apart, separate, easy pickings for those in the black Cadillac searching for us—was no alternative at all.
Her dad opened the door. Tall and lean, his sharp face again reminded me of a bird of prey looking down. His smile, no doubt intended as a pleasantry, made him look hungry. I wanted nothing more than to be away from him as soon as possible.
“Hello, Joey,” he said.
“Hi, sir. I was hoping I could see Tara.”
He looked over my shoulder at the car in his driveway. He waved. I looked back, saw my sister and friend waving in return. Bandit looked out the window like a forlorn stowaway.
“Kids have a day planned?” he said. In his uniform, the gun at his belt, he seemed not merely a park ranger, but a Gestapo ready for an interrogation.
“Nothing special,” I said. “Just board games maybe. My mom’s going to bake something. Just thought, you know, school’s getting closer and we’re not going to have much time once it starts.”
He nodded as if this all made sense. I hoped he didn’t ask why I hadn’t called beforehand. That seemed an obvious question to me, and I had no ready reply if it should become one for him too.
He didn’t have a chance to ask it.
Tara came down the stairs then and to the front door. Her dad moved aside a bit to let her in the doorway. We looked at each other and something like what had passed between me and Jim back at his place seemed to pass between her and I.
“Mind if I go out for a bit, Daddy?” she asked, looking up at her dad like Sarah had done with ours back at the fair, like Mom had done that same night to get him to let me go with my friends. The batting of eyelashes, a little tilt of the head like a puppy; kryptonite to any man, be him father or love-struck boy.
“Sure,” he said. “I don’t see why not.”
Tara and I hurried back across the lawn together to the car. I wished again that someday I could make that walk to her front door and it would be for that movie or lunch. It seemed to me the denial of this was in some ways as much a crime as clubbing a man to death and sticking him in the trunk of a Buick.
* * *
On the highway heading back home, each of us scanned the shoulders of the road looking for Bobby. I’d filled Tara in on my morning with Mr. Perrelli and Brock, and the mention of the shootings made her go a shade of white so pale that the blue of her veins stood out beneath her skin like cords. I didn’t have to hold any psychology degrees to know that my story had pulled her back to Lookout Mountain, when she’d shot the Collector. After that, no one said anything for awhile.
Until I noticed Sarah’s eyes moving again and again to the rearview mirror, her face frantic. I turned around to look out through the rear window, craning my neck side to side to see past the heads of my friends and my dog.
A black Cadillac, long and sleek, sped towards us like a torpedo zeroing in on its target. Soon, bumper to bumper with us, it hung there, straying only the merest of inches. So close, the roar of its engine behind us was like a beast. The windows were tinted, shadowed, so that there seemed no driver. Just a black ghost car rumbling down the highway.
Jim and Tara both turned to see what I was looking at, what had Sarah so frenzied. Immediately, Jim turned back, pushed forward again so he was between the front seats, a hand gripping either one, me having to move back into mine so he didn’t collide with me.
“Don’t stop!” he shouted in Sarah’s ear.
My sister hit the gas pedal and the car surged forward.
The Cadillac swerved and picked up speed also. It drew up alongside our car with ease, so close that if Sarah rolled down her window she could reach out and touch it.
It swerved towards us, striking the driver’s side and sending sparks showering about like radioactive rain. Sarah screamed; we all screamed. The impact rocked us, sending me hard into the passenger window. For a moment the steering wheel spun out of my sister’s hand and the car jerked to the right. The tires left the road and crunched gravel. Grains of it struck the undercarriage with a Morse Code-like tap tap tap tap.
Sarah caught the wheel. Pulled the car back onto the road.
Where the Cadillac again swerved and broadsided us.
More glowing sparks like hot rain; more screams; the crunch and crinkle of tortured metal. The tires left the road again. More gravel tap tap tapping underneath the car.
My sister tried to get us on the highway again, hit the gas pedal harder and tried to bring us forward, ahead, and around the Cadillac. But it was there blocking our path, black and malignant. Dark metal like a thing of shadows, a sliver of the night come alive.
The Cadillac swerved again, striking the side of our mother’s car, and insanely I thought: Well, I don’t think either of us will ever be allowed to drive again.
With this collision, the driver’s side tires were forced off the road too, and the car dipped as we hit the shoulder. Dirt plumes rose about us like we were at the base of a tornado. Sarah hit the brakes, and the car squealed to a stop.
Bandit barked from the backseat.
Jim was chanting something that sounded druidic, but I don’t think druids ever gathered around Easter Island chanting: “shitshitshitshitshit.”
Tara or Sarah was crying. Maybe both of them. Or maybe it was me.
Through the dirt clouds I saw the vague form of the Cadillac speed ahead of us, and then the shape of it lost in dusty vapors. I realized I was gripping the armrest beside me as if to secure myself against another impact.
I let go.
Opening the door, I stepped out.
Breathing in deeply, I inhaled dirt as well as air, and coughed violently like a black-lunged smoker. I waved the billows of dirt away with little effect, waited for them to settle.
Other doors opened and everyone else got out.
“Was that them?” my sister asked. No one answered. No one had to. “They’re trying to fucking kill us!”
Again, there was no need to answer.
Bandit trotted beside me, his tail hung low.
Then he was barking and, at first, I tried to shush him, until I heard what he heard and I turned to stare down the highway. Saw what he saw. I called out to everyone else, pointing.
There was a scrabble of footfalls as everyone lined up to look down the highway at what I needlessly pointed at.
I thought maybe we should have been getting back in the car, then wondered how much protection that would give us.
The shiny grill like a metal sneer preceding it, the Cadillac roared our way. It ate up the highway between us like a starving animal licking up a length of intestines. We stood where we were as if anchored to the ground, watching the car draw nearer, moving fast and yet seeming to approach us in slow motion at the same time.
The Cadillac slowed as it neared.
The rear door opened as it rolled past.
Mr. Perrelli was in the backseat. So was Bobby. Mr. Perrelli held Bobby around the throat with one arm. With the other he fished underneath his black suit jacket and pulled out a pistol.
He put it to the back of Fat Bobby’s skull.
Feeling the chill and solidity of it, Bobby’s eyes widened in shock. He reached out for us, fingers splayed.
Vincent Perrelli pulled the trigger.
Bobby’s head exploded.
Mr. Perrelli kicked out with a foot to Bobby’s back. Bobby slumped forward, did a half somersault, landed on the pavement in front of us. The top of his head was missing and some of him poured out like the contents of a capsized soup bowl.
The Cadillac continued to roll past.
I stared down at my friend. His fingers and one leg jittered and twitched as the remaining electricity in him misfired, trying to fuel life where there was none.
I realized someone was screaming again, but it was muted and distant as if I’d somehow turned off the world. I saw only my friend there, his insides on the outside, on the pavement, under the sun, dead.
Something in me loosened, fell, was lost.
I turned in the direction towards town, where the Cadillac was still rolling slowly away, taunting us with its leisurely pace. I took a step or two towards it. A wet squish as one shoe landed in something underfoot that I didn’t want to think about.
“We have the money!” I shouted, and now the world returned to life, and I heard my words above all other sounds. It was loud, angry, seemed to shake all of creation like the voice of God.
The Cadillac braked. The rear door was still open.
“My house! Midnight!”
A black-sleeved arm reached out and pulled the Cadillac door shut. The black car picked up speed and I watched it for a distance until it crested a rise, went down it and was gone, creature of ebony in the bleached desert white.
We loaded Bobby into the backseat. The others wanted to put him in the trunk, but I refused to let that happen and sat in the back with him, cradling his ruined head and looking into a face that was no longer all there, trying to remember that face. Bandit sniffed at the mess, and I let him. Maybe my dog had a way of seeing what I no longer could.
Jim was on the other end of the rear seat, pressed as far against the door as possible, not looking at what lay between us.
Tara had taken my place in the front passenger seat.
Sarah still drove.
I told her where to go, speaking softly, as if not to disturb the boy in my lap. As if he were just napping. I expected some resistance to my directions, was ready to scream it to submission, but nobody offered any.
Looking down on my dead friend, his clothes specked with his own blood, the juices of him staining my lap, I cried, I think, but it wasn’t hysterical. They were tears of shame, tears of loss. I cried at what I had done; at what I had failed to do; at the things that I could never do again.
If I cried, I like to think that my tears fell and mingled with his blood. That way a part of me is with him always. My tears, his blood, the various waters of life.
Jim had once told me about other access roads into the woods. I tried to think of the nearest one and told Sarah how to get there. We found it and turned onto it, the trees sprouted up around us out of the desert, and again I was struck by this strange land. How there was nothingness and desert, and then the green and majesty of forestry just around the bend. Life and death; color and the void; those polarities that seemed so intent on finding me, revealing themselves in all their apathetic glory.
This access road eventually met with the familiar fork that was ours. I knew if I leaned over and looked out the window I’d see the old rusted sign, fallen in the grass in the rutted road. Here we turned and kept driving, and sometime later we came to the old Buick, sitting there unmoving, immovable perhaps, waiting for us as if it belonged to us, and us to it. That it hadn’t been moved by the police, even after the incident on Lookout Mountain, didn’t seem strange at all to me then, nor does it now. Some things are monolithic in their existence, transcending all the orders of the world.
That old Buick was just such a thing. A permanent fixture upon the earth, testament to life and death and all things between.
I told my friends what I wanted to do and looks were exchanged, but no one argued which I thought was a good idea. I wouldn’t have argued with me at that moment either. Plus, I think they understood.
We were Bobby’s family. He belonged to us, and we to him. It was for us to decide what to do with him.
The Outsiders’ Club: we always watched out for each other, no matter what.
The four of us grabbed and lifted Fat Bobby, Jim and I at his arms, Tara and Sarah each at a leg, Bandit plodding along beside us like an honor guard. We carried him from our car to the Buick. The trunk was still open as it had been since that night we’d met the Collector and led him to Lookout Mountain. The old body, bound hand and foot and with a hole in its skull, gone, I thought: Out with the old, in with the new, and I had the brief and incredible urge to laugh. Then it was replaced with the urge to cry again, and we lifted Fat Bobby and hefted him into the trunk of the Buick.
For a time we all stood there and stared down at him.
His head was in shadow and you could barely make out the ruin of it and for a moment he looked almost normal. I could almost pretend as if he were just lying there, sleeping. Then reality crept in and I knew I was looking at a corpse. He was asleep alright. A sleep from which he would never awaken.
I reached up and closed the trunk lid.
“There’s a pond not too much farther down the road,” Jim said. “The stream feeds into it.”
I nodded.
“Will the car move without a key?” Tara whispered, as if she were afraid to speak.
A thought came to me then as if out of the ether. Something, in all our time with the Buick, we’d never thought of doing. Leaning in across the driver’s seat, I reached for the glove compartment, gripped the latch, and pulled it open with a brief, harsh tug.
Inside were some old yellowed papers like ancient documents, an owner’s manual, and … a set of keys. Grabbing the keys by the fob, I settled in the driver’s seat. The third key I tried fit into the ignition. Turning it, the steering wheel unlocked, and I looked out at my friends as if for affirmation.
“Put it in neutral,” Jim said, “and we’ll push it.”
I got out, and Sarah settled behind the wheel of the Buick, put it in neutral, and released the emergency brake. Jim and I got behind the car. Tara stood at the passenger side behind the open door, using the doorframe for leverage. Sarah steering, we pushed the car, turning it around slowly, the ancient tires flaking away in black drifts. I groaned and huffed with the effort, heard Jim and Tara doing the same. Then we had it facing the other direction, and going straight, the going was a bit easier.
We rolled it along beneath the intermittent shade of the overreaching forest trees—for how long I don’t know. Occasionally, deeper ruts in the road gave us problems, so that we had to heave-ho and rock the Buick rhythmically until we built momentum and could roll it out of the rut and get it moving again. Soon, I was sweating as if I’d run a mile. I could smell myself, the sour sweat and pine of the forest and the heat of the day mixing into a noxious odor.
Finally we came to it, glimpsed through a break in the trees, glimmering with the green of fallen leaves and reflected leaves and the moss beneath its surface coating the rocks like fine earthen pelts: an emerald pond, almost magical in its strange color and still, fluid face. Only just larger than the Buick itself, I wondered if it had been waiting here for the car, as the car had been waiting on the road for us.
Through the break in the trees we steered off of the road, branches snapping under the nearly tireless rims. As it rolled nearer, Sarah climbed carefully out from behind the wheel and stood and walked alongside the car, positioning herself like Tara opposite her, pushing the car ever closer to the placid green water. Then the front of the Buick dipped down and we all pushed harder, groaning and gritting our teeth, and Sarah and Tara left their positions and came around to the rear to join Jim and I. There the four of us pushed together, digging our heels into the ground with the effort.
The car rolled into the pond.
It sunk to the door handles, seemed to bob there for a moment like a child’s bathtub float toy. It rolled forward a bit more. Water cascaded into the open doors, filling the space inside, weighing it down, pulling it down.
The water of the pond bubbled as the car sank lower, and then there was just the roof of it, almost even with the surface of the pond, so that if you were to wade out and climb atop it you could probably do a good imitation of Jesus walking on water. In time that too was gone, and a gurgle of water like a faint burp seemed to announce this. Bubbles rose to the surface and popped.
A ripple followed and then that too faded, and we stood there gathered at the tiny shore of the watery grave. In our silence we felt the passing of the dead in the quiet of the woods. The light of the sun seemed muted in the tall imposing stillness of the woods and the cold, wider world beyond.