Читать книгу If You Go Down to the Woods: The most powerful and emotional debut thriller of 2018! - Seth Adams C. - Страница 14

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.