STEPHEN HEBERT - SMOKE SIGNALS

Stephen Hebert is a native of Houston, Texas, and a graduate of both the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University where he studied Religion, Classical Civilization, and Literature. By day, he teaches courses in American Literature, Writing, Short Fiction, Poetry, Philosophy, Ethics, Early Christian History, Greek, and Mysticism. By night, however, he works at his notebooks and keyboards and typewriters, creating short fiction and novels as he sips whiskey and craft beer. He recently earned Honorable Mention at the NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge for his story “Heaven and Hell on the METRORail.”

​SMOKE SIGNALS
 

​ 
Ridley does his thing and I use a stick to fling it off the path and into the woods. He stands at my side when we’re out here, leash or no. Yellow labs, well-trained, do that. The good ones at least. Ridley’s one of the good ones. I give him a pat on the side and Good Boy him before we walk back down the muddy path to the house.
The western sky, visible through the trees, is bright pink and orange. I imagine that I find the house on fire, but when I get to the little place in the woods—our little escape, as Mom calls it—the porch light glows blue-white and it’s only the sky that's on fire with the setting sun.
Ridley goes in first and rubs his damp fur against Mom’s leg.
Dammit, she says.
It’s not Ridley’s fault. She’s standing at the stove stirring some kinda soup. He’s interested.
Let it simmer, she tells me and then she heads toward her bedroom. I gotta go change my pants before Stan gets here.
I nod and grab the wooden spoon sticking out of the pot. I give it a stir and a whirl of spices—cumin and cayenne—wafts up. Chicken Tortilla Soup. Good on one of these stupid cold days in April when there’s still a little snow left on the ground. I like it hot, so I turn up the heat.
There’s a knock at the door. I hear Mom say Shit and then come bounding out of her room exclaiming that she’ll get it, but I’m already at the door.
So, you’re Stan, I say to the guy who knocked. He smiles. Handsome. Figures. In spite of all the shit that Dad did to her, Mom is still a pretty woman, even if she is almost forty. This guy’s handsome. Rugged. Flannel and jeans like the bearded guy on the paper towels package, but no beard and he’s got some horn-rimmed glasses. They’ve been on a few dates. I know that, but Mom’s tried to keep these things from me. It’s all new. I get it.
You must be Henry, he says.
Come in, Mom says. I’m almost ready.
Stan comes in, but he doesn’t get far. Ridley’s at my side giving this lumberjack a good sniff.
This is Ridley.
May I?
Sure.
He reaches down to pet him. Ridley accepts, but keeps his eyes on Mr. Flannel. Good boy.
Stan launches into a whole joke about how he’s gonna have her back by midnight, sir, as if I’m my mom’s father. I imagine Mom would find this is cute, but I just think it’s weird, awkward as hell, and a little sad. But he’s trying, so I gotta give him that.
I won’t be too late, Mom says and she kisses me on the cheek and she’s gone.
Ridley and I stare out the door. The headlights of Stan’s red Chevy Nova shine in through the window and then move on. The sky darkens.
Crap.
The soup.
It’s boiled over. I turn off the gas and the boil begins to slow, but the smell of burning spices from the broth that has formed a blackened crust in the foil-covered bowl beneath the burner fills the kitchen. Ridley finds a little broth that leaked down the front of the stove and on to the sad linoleum, and he laps it up with giant licks of his pink tongue. He snorts a little as he does it. When he’s done, he looks up at me, hoping for more. I give him a pat on the head, but he should know better by now. Truth is, he does.
Mom’s gone. I can feed Ridley whatever I want, can’t I? No dumb distinction between dog food and people food. Something swells inside me. Pride. Pride at my rebellion. I’m thirteen, I tell Ridley. Isn’t it time I start living by my rules?
Ridley gives no response except for the slight cocking of his head to one side. It looks to me like he’s confused, so I try to explain. He doesn’t seem to get it.
You’ll see, I tell him.
I ladle out two bowls and drop some tortilla chips into one. The other I set by Ridley’s bowls on the floor. He goes to work on it. His snout and tongue move the bowl and it collides with his other dishes, clinking and clanking.
I sit down at the kitchen table and place my bowl on the green and white checkered vinyl tablecloth. The steam rises up into my face and I lean over to breathe it in.
What would happen, I wonder, if I choked? Mom’s left me all alone here. Ridley surely doesn’t know the Heimlich. I’d be dead, right? Would Mom get in trouble for that? I suppose I should eat this carefully so that I don’t die and Mom doesn’t end up in prison for failure to take care of a minor.
Mom was different tonight. She ran from her room to the door when Stan showed up. She ran. Energetic. She also smiled as she walked out the door. She’s prettier when she smiles. Safer too. That doesn’t seem like the right word—safer—but it’s how it makes me feel anyway. I like it when she smiles. Smiles can fool me into thinking that everything doesn’t suck.
I slurp down some soup, careful to chew the chunks of chicken well, hunting for bones that could be the end of me. It’s spicy and good. I look at the fridge and wonder if Mom has kept track of the number of Cokes left. I had one earlier today, but a second would taste really good with this soup. Sweet and spicy.
Stan, I guess, makes Mom smile. It’s odd to think this, but I know it’s true. She’s only mentioned him a few times, but she always had a look, right? That look, yeah? Yeah. Stan makes Mom smile. That’s good, I guess.
The Coke burns a little as it fizzes down my throat. I’ll take the trash out later so Mom doesn’t notice the empty Coke can lying in there.
No Coke for you, I tell Ridley. He’s sitting next to my chair, a sad yet hopeful look in his big brown eyes. I don’t think it’s good for pups, I tell him. He cocks his head to the side, this time in disbelief.
I finish the soup and put the bowl in the sink. I rinse it out and watch the little strainer in the drain catch spare bits of onion and soggy tortilla chip. The phone rings and I walk over to it, but I don’t pick it up because something’s caught my eye. Mom has changed the little piece of paper tacked there next to the phone. Same paper with the emergency numbers scribbled—fire, police, regional hospital—but she’s made a change. Scribbled in at the bottom, squished and barely readable, is Stan’s phone number.
Stan’s number. Right there.
Fire. Police. Hospital. Stan.
I try to imagine a situation in which needing to call Stan constituted an emergency.
Dad’s number wasn’t there. Never had been. I have it memorized, of course, because that’s my number, and Dad still lives in the house on the cul-de-sac, the house where Mom had been miserable but where everything looked okay because her Chrysler New Yorker was newish and no one talks about the demons that lurk behind suburban doors. Dragons breathe fire and I’m not supposed to see Dad without a court-appointed somebody. He doesn’t even know where we live, I think, but I know where he is: in the house—my house, really—with the big backyard and cable.
The phone has stopped ringing.
Fire. Police. Hospital. Stan.
I put the lid on the big pot on the stove. Ridley pays close attention. I touch the outside of the pot. Still too hot to put into the fridge. I leave it there and go into the living room. Nothing to do and the rabbit ears on the television don’t help. Everything’s always fuzzy.
C’mon, Ridley, I say, and we head back to my bedroom. The window is cracked and the room feels like a refrigerator. The Star Wars toys hung from the ceiling with fishing line—an X-Wing chasing a TIE Fighter—sway slightly in the breeze. It’s chilly in there, but so are the dark reaches of space where I hope Han Solo and his Millennium Falcon are on the way to save my day. But I know they aren’t. Han and Chewie, all of my action figures really, perished in a fire back in August, but I don’t wanna think about that right now.
The desk in my room has a big pad of drawing paper and special drawing pencils that I got for my birthday.  My best friend, Sam, didn’t even know that there was anything other than #2. Sam is such a goof.
I miss him.
I reach down and pet Ridley. He’s found a spot down by my feet at the desk.
I pretend that I miss Sam because we’ve moved, but that’s not really the case. Sam and I used to spend every weekend together. We’d scheme different ways to get our parents to let us stay at each other’s houses. I might ask in front of my parents—a strategy that Dad really hated—or I’d accidentally find myself at Sam’s house as the sun was going down. My parents didn’t like me riding my bike in the dark, so they’d let me stay there if it was alright with Sam’s parents. It was always alright with Sam’s parents.
Sometimes, I’d come home, planning to ask Mom—always best to ask Mom—if Sam could come over, but then I’d open the door and know better. The house on the cul-de-sac always smelled faintly of cigarette smoke, so it wasn’t the smell. Still, there was something in the air. Something thick. It choked you, made it hard to breathe and hard to speak, hard to ask. Dad would be there, rocking in his easy chair, a Marlboro Red in his right hand, a faint stream of smoke lit up by the television. He’d watch the cable in total silence except for the occasional clearing of junk from his throat and the rattle of ice against the walls of his glass. Mom would be back in their bedroom, always messing with her makeup. Better not to ask, so I’d creep to my bedroom, close the door, and draw pictures until I thought they’d gone to bed. When I got older, I did things a little differently. If I opened the door and felt that thick, choking air, I’d just quietly close it and ride over to Sam’s. Mrs. Easton would call Mom for me. Her conversation was always very short and cheerful—We’d just love for Henry to stay—but her eyes always looked worried and sad.
You can stay the night, she’d say and then rub the hair on the top of my head. Sam would get excited and pump his fist in the air, imitating the pilots who celebrated when the first transport escaped the rebel base on the icy planet Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. Then we’d go play and argue, often exploring the woods behind his house, pretending we were in the jungles of Vietnam or that we were rescuing top secret agents from the clutches of the Soviet Union.
Everything was a war.
Still would be, but that’s finished now. Not so much because we moved, but that helps. I still see Sam because Mom drives a morning bus route for the district, so I get to ride that bus every day with her, her face looking up into that gigantic mirror to check on me after every single turn. So, I still see Sam, but other stuff’s changed. At the beginning of the school year, Sam signed up for football. By mid-September, he was the starting running back. For some reason, this meant that his weekends were busier. Also, at lunch, he ate with Cheryl Greenwood, the cheerleader with the blonde, curly hair. She’s beautiful and she’s in eighth grade and I’m not invited.
Spider-Man is swinging between buildings in pursuit of the Green Goblin. I put my pencil down and look at the picture. I chew the callous on my right middle finger where the pencil always rubs and I use my left forefinger to lightly smudge parts of the drawing, shading in Spidey’s muscles to make his body look real. It mostly works. His thighs are way too big.
It’s hard to keep things in proportion.
I don’t want to blame Sam. I don’t want to glare at him or gossip or hurt him. Except that I do. Not because I hate him. I don’t. I also don’t blame him. Except that I do. I’ve seen Cheryl. I know what I’m up against.
I draw in the buildings in the background, some New York avenue disappearing into the distance. I’ve never seen it, never been there, but I can imagine.
Does Cheryl really know Sam? Does she know just how dweeby the real Sam Easton is?
The day before we started junior high, Sam and I decided that we needed to perform a rite of passage, something that would mark our entrance into manhood. We were going into seventh grade, half of our required education behind us, so we needed something to mark the occasion.
My hand cramps up a little, so I put the pencil down on top of the drawing and shake my hand out.
We spent most of that summer exploring the woods behind Sam’s house. If you pushed far enough into those woods—and you did have to push on account of the small trees that Mom calls “trash trees” because they drop little green berries, hard and round, all over the lawn—eventually you’d come to a little creek. We’d walked up and down there looking for places to hide, places to hangout, places to gather stones and try to skip them the fifteen or twenty yards across the slow moving water. In one of those spots where the trees parted but the ground was too stony and packed with hard clay for grass to grow, we’d made a round fire pit with river rocks big as baseballs. There we’d practiced lighting fires, first with some dried leaves and a magnifying glass, but later with the help of a Zippo that Sam had stolen from his brother’s sock drawer. Reid Easton wasn’t supposed to have it, but he also wasn’t supposed to have those Playboys or that little marble pipe that went with the lighter. Sam’s parents didn’t know anything about all of that. Sam had tried to blackmail Reid, hoping to get Reid to give us a ride to Noah’s Arcade one afternoon, but Reid threatened to rain down pain if Sam ever revealed the contents of the drawer. Then Reid told Sam that he should start doing his own laundry so that he could build his own collection and Mrs. Easton wouldn’t find it when she put away his underwear and socks and stuff. Sam and I decided that was dumb. Why do our own laundry when we could easily just raid Reid’s collection? Reid might be a senior, but he wasn’t very smart.
It’s getting late. I move over to my bed and lie down. Ridley joins me. I stare at the stack of books on my nightstand. I don’t feel like reading. I don’t feel like drawing. I turn the lamp off and remain on top of the blankets. The door is open, so light from the lamp in the living room still comes in—orange by the lampshade and the fake wood paneling on the living room walls. I flick on the radio next to my bed.
Up next is Del Shannon with ‘Runaway,’ part of our non-stop block of Good Times and Great Oldies.
#
That day before the first day of seventh grade, Sam and I loaded up our backpacks with supplies. I poured an entire box of chewy granola bars into my backpack as well as a bunch of juice boxes and a can of Mom’s hairspray. I also brought a small sketch pad, my pencil pouch, and Reid’s lighter. Sam’s backpack was full of action figures that he’d gathered at both of our houses and a spiral notebook.
We hoisted our heavy backpacks over our shoulders and crossed through the gate in his backyard into the wild once more. We’d worn a path in the forest floor that summer, a very clear trail to the creek, through the oaks and pines and pecans. Our feet crunched through the path, leaves and grass and sticks and dirt and stones and roots, all the things too dense to float in the ocean of the atmosphere and, therefore, fell to the bottom. My breath joined the rhythm of that crunch as we headed toward the creek and toward the sun which had begun to shine orange afternoon light on the leaves.
Without talking, we agreed to remain in silence. Sam loved to argue, and so did I. We’d temporarily ended the friendship earlier that year over a difference in the interpretation of the rules for Knee-Basketball, a rainy day game we’d invented using the basketball hoop hung on the back of his bedroom door.
You can’t get up on the bed, he said.
Why not?
Because it’s not part of the court. It’s out-of-bounds.
Since when?
Since forever.
Forever? We invented this game like a month ago.
You know what I mean.
No, I don’t.
Yes, you do.
…
But now, now we were silent on our march to the holy place where we would leave our childhoods behind and those dumb arguments would be a thing of the past.
When we had reached the bank of the creek and the spot where the stone circle had been arranged, we prepared the site. Someone or something had messed up the rocks, so I placed them back into a circle while Sam used a stick to stir up the dirt and ash inside of it. He pulled the dirt to the sides of the circle and formed a shallow hole, a small dent in the middle. I picked out leaves and acorns and other debris so that the circle was clear and ready for use, pure and acceptable before the Gods of Growing Up. We both stood back and looked for any imperfections that might be fixed. We stared for long enough and then I went to the backpacks where I pulled out the lighter and the bottle of Aquanet hairspray I’d taken from Mom’s bathroom. I set the lighter and the hairspray by the circle and then Sam handed me the spiral notebook from his bag and I read.
The Initiates will now disrobe so that the Gods of Growing Up may bless the bodies.
We both stripped down to our underwear. Sam piled his clothes near his backpack. I folded mine and set them on top of my shoes to keep them from getting too dirty. I picked up the beat-up, red spiral again and continued.
Samuel Honeywell Easton, I said and motioned toward the ground.
Sam got down on his knees and then leaned forward. He stretched out, face down on the hard, packed clay and dirt on the bank of the creek, and buried his face in his elbow.
You entered this sacred place, this holy space, a child burdened by nothing but your own happiness. Now, you choose to go through initiation into the Cult of Adult.
I stepped up on to his back. He groaned and shifted. I lost my balance and planted the toes of my right foot on the ground.
Be still, I said.
Keeping his face in his elbow, he nodded.
I stepped back up on his back and felt the air slip out of his chest. Sweat formed on my forehead as the summer sun skirted the trees and hit us full force. Melting in the sun, lying flat on that baked-out slab, Sam Easton, I noticed, had muscles. We were just boys at the beginning of the summer, but something had happened to Sam—something that didn’t seem to be happening to me—and he had changed. Looking back on it, with more than half of seventh grade behind us now, Sam Easton’s muscles were the first sign that we were different. As I stood on his back, my chicken legs quivering to keep balance and his back muscles flexing under the strain, I felt a need to focus all of my attention on the way those muscles felt against the bottom of my feet. Hard and round like rolling pins under the thin blanket of his tan skin.
Keep going, he said into his elbow.
I looked back at the spiral and tried to find my spot, but the ink had started to run as my sweat dripped on to the pages.
The hell are you two faggots doing?
The voice came from the creek.
#
The tyrannosaurus claws of the pecan tree just outside my room scrape against the window, waking me up. Ridley is still there, balled up against my hips, motionless except for the rising and falling tides of his breath, the movement of the North American Plate and the constant rotation of the earth around its axis, around the sun, and around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. We never stop moving, but I feel like I’m being left behind.
The man on the radio tells how much snow fell last night, and then he moves into the laid back sounds of Otis Redding who is sittin’ in the morning sun.
Ridley snorts a little after I shift my position on the bed. I wonder what Sam is up to right now. I wonder what time Mom got home. I wonder about those muscles and whether I will ever have something like that.
The early morning light comes through the cracks in the shade over my window. Ridley takes his cue and crawls up along my body and positions his head right next to mine. Between the tiniest whimpers, I can feel his warm breath on my nose. I groan as I consider getting up. The bed is warm and I can tell that the air is not.
Sometimes, getting up is the hardest thing, especially in the cold with Ridley working as a little space heater on the bed. But he’s gotta go out.
I slide out from under the covers and feel the cool air sting my skin. Ridley slips off the bed and just looks at me while I rub my eyes. Door’s open and the lamp in the living room is still on.
Even the carpet feels cool on my feet. I walk down the hall to Mom’s bedroom door which is cracked open just a bit. I stand next to it and listen. Ridley stands behind me. What if Stan is in there? What if he spent the night? Would Mom do that? I shudder a bit at that thought. Mom would’ve closed the door all the way, right? Of course, she may have had too much to drink, but she’s not much of a drinker, so that would be odd.
I push the door open slightly so that I can see half of the bed. It’s made perfectly and the light on the nightstand is on, casting a warm glow on the perfect corners and folds of the blankets.
Mom, I say.
The cool air gives no response.
I repeat myself a little bit louder.
…
I push the door open all the way. The air in the room hangs dead and undisturbed. Ridley does a little shuffle behind me.
Alright, I say, and we head toward the backdoor where his leash hangs. Maybe Mom’s up and in the kitchen or maybe she called and I just slept through it. Stuff it down and don’t sweat it. Time to take Ridley out.
#
I lost my balance and stumbled off of Sam’s back. He craned his head up and we both saw a large man, broad shouldered and Santa Claus complexion with gray and white beard, standing chest-deep in the water looking up at me and Sam, our skins all exposed except what our underwear covered.
Seriously, you two queers or something?
The words strained and filtered through the tight, smoke-blocked box of his throat, sounding more like a broken harmonica than a human voice. He began to wade toward the bank. Drops of water fell from the shaggy and graying wilds of his chest hair and on to his slick paunch where they streaked past his navel and on to his Hawaiian-print swimming shorts. His eyes stared at me like shark eyes—cold and dead—over the cratered and craggy bulb of his red and peeling nose.
Go on, go on, he said. Don’t let me disturb your kink-fest.
Then he laughed, but he also continued toward the bank.
But I can tell ya that you’re doin’ it all wrong, he said and cackled like a carousel losing its rhythm.
Sam broke our silence.
What the fuck do you want?
The word shocked me. I’d never heard Sam say it except for those times when I’d spent the night at his house and we’d stayed up late and dared each other to say all the words that we knew we weren’t supposed to say.
The man continued his hearty, harmonica laugh, phlegmy and strange. Sam rolled to one side and stood up tall, his golden skin offset by the dingy white of his underwear which had been soiled by my dirty feet. Sam had become tall. His arms were not just skinny, nondescript tubes of bone and flesh like mine, but they had depth and definition, not so much like Batman, not brawny, but strong like Robin in the Teen Titans comics.
I asked you a question, asshole.
I see, said the man, The little fag wants to prove he’s a man. Look at you, standing tall and all naked but the whites. C’mon down here, boy, and I’ll show you how a man does.
#
A mixture of snow and sticks and decaying leaves squishes and crunches beneath my rubber boots as Ridley pulls me out onto our typical path. I had slipped the boots on, drawing them up over my pajama pants, and my winter coat up over my pajama shirt because I didn’t feel like getting dressed so early in the morning. The sky is a flat gray, a lifeless backdrop to the branches, bare and bones, that jut this way and that overhead.
Ridley lopes along at a good pace, his head craned forward to give him better access to the ground. He’s not a hound or a terrier but he sure loves to sniff. I try to imagine what he finds, what he sees, with that nose of his. What nocturnal scavenger might have have made its way through here last night in search of a meal? What did it find and take? What did it leave behind? Pee and poop. Maybe bits of hair and tiny scraps of its prey that dripped from its grim beard. Ridley sees all this and follows, but why? Say we come across some skunk, some raccoon, or even some misplaced hyena escaped from owners who had brought it all the way back from Africa, what would he do then? Knowing Ridley, he’d probably make friends.
Ridley picks up his pace and the tug on the leash tightens against my palm and knuckles. My bones creak and my muscles hope to loosen as his pace forces me from a walk to a half-jog. It’s early and my eyes are still bleary. The trees blur past, a water color smear of brown beneath a sky of light and lifeless gray.
#
I ran as hard as I could, my vision locked on the trail; trees and rocks passed on either side, unnoticed. But, whenever I want to—and I never really want to—I can go back to that place and see every little detail, unblurred as if some special goggles made it all clear.
Down.
I ended up on the ground, dirt smeared across my face, my left foot throbbing from the tree root that had tackled me.
Get your ass up, I said. Go back there. Go back to your friend. But the bottoms of my feet burned and bled now that the fall had drained the adrenaline away. Small pebbles dug into the skin, embedded like little jewels in a necklace, and they had to be removed before I could think about heading back.
My mind raced; it painted pictures of what that bloated rat clown was doing to Sam right then. The thought of it paralyzed me.
A tear dripped from my cheek onto my forearm and woke me from my trance. I went to work on my feet. Most of the damage was just on the surface, small scrapes and scratches. A few pebbles had cut like shards of a broken bottle and burrowed into my skin. They came out, but brought a little blood with them. I slipped my underwear off and wiped the blood. It streaked red stripes, specks and smears of dirt and blood. I slipped my underwear back on and then stood up to test my foot.
It hurt.
I looked back down the path where I had come and I knew that I had to go back there. I wished I had Spidey’s powers or Wolverine’s.
I didn’t move. I stood frozen, thinking about my feet, thinking about my underwear and the clammy cold that had overtaken my skin and the strange, guilty feeling that I’d gotten away. Maybe Sam had too. Maybe he ran like I did, just in a different direction.
#
Ridley snaps and runs off, pulling the leash and wrapping my wrist around a tree. His yellow body streaks into the bare limbs and branches as his bark fades.
I stand, stunned; he’s never done this before. Ridley’s a good one. What the heck is he doing just taking the heck off like that?
Wrist’s gonna bruise up. I can tell that much.
I look around me. Alone. No sounds except for the faint hum of cars from some distant highway that lay somewhere through the woods in any direction.
I look back down the path that Ridley had gone. Frozen in the cold, too amazed to take action. He’d come back, right? Of course.
And if he doesn’t?
#
One night I rode my bike over there to Sam’s house. Maybe it was to be normal again, to go back to where we used to be, to see his parents. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because Mom had gone off with Stan and there was daylight and I wanted to get out of the woods and into civilization. Whatever the case, it’s not a short ride like it used to be, but I do it anyway, all ten or twelve miles.
The driveway was empty, but I knocked on the door. Not the front door, of course, even the pizza guy knew not to go there, but the door on the side of the house right next to the driveway, the door that led into the kitchen. No one answered, so I knocked a few more times, but the place was dark.
Still, I really wanted to see Sam, but to see him on terms that we both understood. He’d begun his new life at school. He sat with a different group at lunch and he’d laughed at me when I’d been shoved against some lockers in the hall. So, I stashed my bike on the side of the garage and went around to the backyard. I looked in the windows along the back of the house. The house was dark, no sign of life other than the lazy motion of the ceiling fan in the living room and the blinking colon on the display of the VCR that showed the time.
I turned around and thought about my options. Make the long ride back before dark or wait around a bit. What would I say? If Sam came home alone, riding his bike up the drive, then that would be fine. But what if he was with his parents? They’d be horrified that I had biked all this way so close to sunset. They’d make a big deal about it even though it’s really not. After all, I’d rubberbanded a flashlight to the front of my bike so that I could see in the dark.
The gate was open. The gate at the back of the yard, the gate that led out into the woods and toward the creek, to the spot where I’d left Sam alone. That gate, the boundary between the perfectly maintained lawn and the wild place with the harmonica-voiced man, stood open.
I don’t know what led me back into the woods that evening. Curiosity? The need to be with Sam again? The strange desire to relive something that hurts like that urge to poke and prod an aching tooth? Maybe I just wanted to play war again.
I walked through the gate, leaving it open as I’d found it, and onto the path that Sam and I had worn into those woods with our repeated adventures. To my surprise, the path didn’t look the same as it had a couple of months ago. The electric sunshine of summer had yielded to the cool of evening fall light, yet the woods and the brush and the poison ivy had continued to grow. They choked the trail and squeezed it. Deadfall, at times, totally obscured it—deadfall from that crazy storm a few weeks earlier—and I could only make my way by trying to remember the trees, the pattern of the trunks. My mind flashed to that run, the tunnel vision that had seared a map of those woods into my brain. The only way to go forward was to go back, to relive that flight from the Graybeard—that’s the comic book villain name I’d invented for him—and reconstruct the trail in my mind.
So, I tried to remember.
#
I jogged through the woods in my underwear back to the spot where I’d left Sam. My lungs and legs burned and so did my eyes welling with tears. The woods were silent except for the sound of the creek and the occasional rustling of leaves and my faltering breath. Cicadas too. Sam lay face down on the hard pan, his head buried in the crook of his arm, his chest laboring up and down. He looked up at me and the sight of his reddened, stained cheeks and the fury in his eyes caused tears to erupt from mine.
Don’t cry, he said.
I stood still, trying to hold it back. I didn’t move. Sam wiped his eyes and stood up. He had some scratches on his body that hadn’t been there before.
C’mon, he said. Get on with it.
I snorted back my snot and tears and then went to the backpack full of our ritual supplies which seemed somehow juvenile and silly now. Thankfully, it gave me an excuse to look away. I dumped out the backpack—a collection of just about every action figure the two of us owned: Han Solo, Destro, He-Man and Skeletor. Yesterday, these were toys. An hour ago, they were symbols of the childhood we sought to leave behind. Now, they were just pieces of plastic that gave us something to do. Events change objects. Everything changes, I guess, and all the time too.
In silence, we stacked the action figures in the middle of the fire pit, like little blocks of wood for a tiny, ceremonial bonfire. We placed them two-by-two to build a tall rectangular structure. When the stack reached a point where it started to feel unstable, we started another one right next to it. For a good fifteen minutes or so, we stacked those figures, Sam and I, not a word between us, picking up the pile when it fell and reworking it until we had three tall towers of action figures. I avoided looking at him as much as I could. That took effort, though. I really had to force myself not to gape at him. I was drawn to him, like the way you can’t help but look at a traffic accident in the messed up hopes of seeing some awful tragedy like a bit of blood or a finger or worse. I stole some glances but they gave me nothing. Sam was stone, head and heart, his expression chiseled, firm, and vacant in diamond hardness. Nothing.
#
But on that fall day when I’d wormed my way down the overgrown path and back to that spot by the creek for the first time since the day before the first day of school, I did not find two kids sitting in their underwear next to a circle of stones. Instead, I found two kids playing at being grown-ups.
I stayed in the woods, in one of the low spots that we’d use as a foxhole when the Reds were coming to rob us of our freedom, because I could see he wasn’t alone. He was shirtless and through the trees I could see a small, pale hand with chipped purple nail polish digging into his back. He sat upright with his back to me. A second hand held the back of his head, fingers tangled up in his long hair. Two legs, knobby-kneed, spidered around him, capped not with socks but with clear jellies that pressed against his back and butt. They tilted their heads back and forth in opposite directions and I could see the unmistakable, sandy blonde curls of Cheryl Greenwood as she sucked at Sam Easton’s face, seeming to want to pull his whole body into her impossible mouth.
I hate Cheryl Greenwood. I do now and I did then too.
I have every good reason to hate her. She makes a point of flaunting herself in front of all the boys in the seventh grade. She hit puberty earlier than we did, of course, but even earlier than any of the other girls, anyone in the universe probably, so she’s got boobs. Why does she always have to wear those tank tops so that we can see the butt that they make with that little mole at the top of the right one? Proof of her imperfection: a boob mole! Yet, she walks around as if she’s perfect. Even if she flirted with me, I wouldn’t flirt back.
As I watched them go at it, I couldn’t help but feel sad: two little kids, thinking themselves so grown-up, so perfect, but Cheryl had her chest mole—there was a hair coming out of it, if you looked close enough you could see it—and her obvious need for attention. Sam, of course, had been a less than perfect friend, such a jerk since football and Cheryl and all of that. Here they were, Cheryl all over Sam, Sam slipping his hands up her tank top, like two wrongs struggling to make a right.
I couldn’t stop watching my best friend embarrass himself.
He felt her up, but it didn’t look like it did in the movies. It was amateur.
They stopped for a moment. Cheryl craned her head around his and looked in my direction. My breath stopped and I knew that she had seen me, that I’d been caught. She narrowed her eyes and then smiled and then went back to work on Sam’s face.
#
A scream? No. Something weird and wild echoes through the trees, a screeching, screaming sort of noise, and a thud.
I call for Ridley, but Ridley doesn’t come. I’ve been calling for Ridley for a while. Don’t know how long. This hasn’t happened before. It’s new. I have a feeling in my gut, but I don’t know how to describe it, don’t know what it is.
The forest is silent when I don’t call.
I’m there.
Breathing.
I imagine that I have giant elephant ears ready to capture the slightest sound from so far away, the sound of Ridley heading back to me. C’mon, boy.
But I don’t have giant ears.
My wrist really hurts, but Ridley’s absence distracts me from that.
Snow starts to fall and I look up through the trees and see the individual flakes as they float down and weave their way through and land on my face.
I call for Ridley again, but I’m losing his tracks in the new snow. It comes up to about mid-calf at some points and the going is tough.
I don’t want to be out here.
#
The stacks of action figures finished, Sam sat back and I held my hands around the stacks, making sure they were steady and not about to fall.
C’mon, Sam said, Get the goddam spray.
I obeyed and grabbed the big can of Aquanet from the pile of supplies. My mom used the stuff all the time, especially on her bangs, holding them in place with a round hairbrush or pinching them in place with her fingers. She’d unleash the can on those bangs until they were frozen, until they came straight up out of her head, curled around and then dipped back down like some ocean wave made out of hay that stopped abruptly just in front of her thick eyebrows. The spray would dry and they’d be so hard and crackly. Sometimes I wondered if I would break them if I bent them too much.
I brought the can over to the stacks and began spraying them. The hairspray hit the top ones leaving a layer of tiny droplets on the plastic as the rest of the spray puffed up in a white cloud. I wanted to coat them evenly, wanted to make sure that they all got a little bit. I kept spraying and spraying and spraying until the entire can was empty. The action figures dripped with the clear liquid and a fog of the stuff settled inside the rock ring and in between the towers and the figures.
Sam was back by the stacks now. He’d gotten up to get the Zippo which he lit and held close to his face several feet away from the stacks.
Out with the old, he said.
He angled the lighter toward the action figures and extended his arm. A flash of light erupted in front of our faces as the fumes of the spray caught fire. I turned my head away and fell back with my forearms in front of my face.
Holy crap, I yelled.
Fuck, I heard Sam say.
I sat up to see what was going on. The action figures were on fire but Sam was still down on his back. The smell of burning hairspray and plastic filled my nose mixed with some other smell that I couldn’t quite figure.
Sam sat up and looked at me. We both smiled and laughed.
What are you laughing at?
You, he said.
Me?
Yeah, he said, What are you laughing at?
Your face, I said.
Sam no longer had eyebrows and much of the front of his hair had been burned right off.
You burned off your dang eyebrows, he said.
So did you!
We both reached up to feel our bald brows.
Shoot, he said. Panic replaced the laughter on his face, but I continued to laugh.
It’s not funny, Henry, he said.
I continued to laugh.
Sam stood up. His hands wondered up to his hair where the fire had taken a bite out of the front of his forehead, leaving it bare and red.
I fell back on my elbow and watched the action figures like a hodgepodge of candles thrust into the fire together, melting over one another and forming new and strange combinations of characters. Parts of Luke Skywalker were now melting into the face of Captain Kirk, and Spider-Man had become one with Wonder Woman. They looked like those guys at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark: liquid and fake and terrifying.
Still pawing at his face, Sam sat back down.
Got my ‘stache too, he said.
Your ‘stache?
Yeah.
What ‘stache?
I had a mustache coming in, man.
Oh, I said, Sure you did, Sammy.
I did!
He sidearmed a rock at me and it nailed the left side of my chest. It hurt. I shut up.
We sat in silence then and stared at the melting towers until they became a globby puddle mixing in with the dirt. Sam seemed far away. I thought I knew what he was thinking.
First day of school tomorrow, I said.
He nodded.
And, I added, it’s Picture Day too.
He reached up to feel his bald, burned face. Then he covered his eyes and tried not to cry.
#
I don’t know how long I’ve been out here in the woods and the snow, but I’m tired now. The sun, still low, is hidden by a blanket of clouds that shroud the sky; it keeps things dark. The snow is absolutely clean and fresh. I’ve always thought that was pretty, much as I hate the snow when I’m trying to walk Ridley.
My legs burn. Surely Ridley will just come back. Where are you?
I stop and lean back against a tree. My heels dig into the snow and sink a little farther. My breathing slows up. When I look up into the tree branches, the sky seems to go backwards, moving farther away from me, like those crazy shots in horror movies where the slasher’s victim stays still but somehow the background moves farther back. Back the sky goes, back and back, farther and farther, like the clouds are being sucked up into outer space to join those astronauts that died on the Challenger a few months ago.
I listen to the forest and expect to hear those far off cars again from that unknown highway, but I don’t hear that at all. Instead, I hear something in time, something in rhythm, something like the pounding of feet into the snow.
Or paws.
I pull myself up off the tree, rub my bruising wrist, and look around, but I don’t see anything. Still, I hear that sound, but it doesn’t seem to be getting any closer. I try to figure out which way its coming from and start off in that direction. Maybe Ridley’s somewhere over there, digging in the snow for a dead mouse or something.
#
I watched Sam and Cheryl go at it for a while on the banks of the creek in the spot where Sam and I had burned and melted our childhood.
Then Cheryl stood up with her feet on either side of Sam. She took off her tank top. She wore a simple white bra underneath with a little bit of lace just around the edge on the top. I’d seen the top of that before sticking up out of her shirt. She kicked off her jellies and then unbuttoned her jean shorts. She slid them down and kicked them off her right foot and stood over Sam in her peach panties. He reached up and rubbed the outsides of her thighs. She laughed and turned and ran and jumped into the creek. Sam stood up and took off his shorts. He was wearing boxers underneath. He ran after Cheryl.
From my little foxhole, protected from their attention, I’d seen enough.
#
Without Ridley, I’ve decided to figure out where I am. I’ve worked my way back toward the county road. I’ve ridden my bike that way down that road so many times back in the summer and fall, but I haven’t been on foot here and certainly not in the winter, so the trees are unfamiliar and the layer of snow makes everything look different anyway. At this point, Ridley has probably turned back and headed home. I’ve given up calling for him. I’m glad to see the road. I’ll just get on it and walk at a much easier pace, no snow to slow me, back to the house and I’m sure I will find Ridley there. Maybe Mom will be home by then too. God, I hope so.
As I get closer to the road, I see a pair of lights, low to the ground, dodging in and out of the tree trunks, cutting through the falling snow. Then a person, doubled over, taking deep breaths in and out as if he’s just run a race, comes into focus, but the morning light, scattered by the bare branches, is still not quite enough to make out any details. I pause and lean forward against a tree, quiet because something—I don’t know what—inside me tells me to do that. The man stands up tall and leans his head back and takes a deep breath with his hands resting on his hips. He exhales a cloud of steam backlit by the lights. He looks strong, but the hazy morning light refuses to give up anymore details. He takes off a coat and throws it away from him, into the snow, and continues to labor to breathe. He bends over at the waste and goes to work on something down in the snow, pulling and yanking with his hands, grunting in his effort.
I am still.
I am quiet.
He works at the snow for a bit, but then stands up tall again and begins trudging back toward the road, away from me, toward those lights. He disappears near them, hidden by the trunks of trees.
A strange smell, at least strange for the middle of the woods, finds me. It’s not unfamiliar, just unexpected, the faint smell of burnt rubber and burning wood, a warm, sickening, chemical smell. How long has it been here? I’m not sure. It isn’t new, I realize. It’s been here for a while, but I’ve just noticed it.
A faint ringing sound. Repetitive. Familiar, but I can’t really tell what it is, and the man is back. He’s walking backwards, carrying something heavy, no dragging something, through the snow. He’s struggling and I can hear the grunts and groans as he drags this weight through the snow. He stops and steadies himself and then turns his body hard to the right, throwing the unwieldy object into the snow. The weight and force of the toss cause him to stumble a bit. He catches his balance and then stands up, his shoulders square to the spot where he threw the thing and square to me some fifty or sixty yards off, standing behind a tree, looking directly at him.
He is still. He is staring. Staring, yes. Staring at me.
The little ringing, faint and repetitive, continues, its heartbeat steady as my own quickens. I can feel the blood in my ears warming and rushing in strong, quick rhythm, far outpacing that little chime in the distance. I know I don’t actually have a Spidey-sense, but I feel it just the same, and so I’m frozen against this tree. My breaths are short and shallow; they dry out my mouth and my head feels light.
The figure in the distance just stares right at me, fixed and tall and strong.
#
When I ended up all alone after school one day waiting for a ride because Mom was getting off her other job at the pharmacy late and I’d accidentally missed the bus, Cheryl Greenwood, fresh out of cheer practice, bundled up in her puffy coat, sat down on the bench next to me and said hi. I didn’t mean to say the things that I said, but I did just the same. Mom always said that if you can’t say anything nice then you shouldn’t say anything at all, but if you don’t say anything at all then that could lead to terrible awful silence especially when it means that the two of you have absolutely nothing to say there.
She smiled a courtesy smile at me.
What’s it like to screw Sam Easton? I said. He ever tell you what happened down by the creek? He ever tell you about the Graybeard?
Cheryl turned toward me, her perfect blond hair, gathered back in its baby blue bow, swinging behind her. I looked into those eyes and saw her for the first time. I saw that she was a person, not some monster, not some treacherous, boy-crazed fiend who had taken my best friend away. Instead, I saw the face of a girl and I recognized in her eyes the same light that I could see in my own mother’s eyes, the light of a human and all that that brings. I could imagine her in heartbreak and tragedy, Sam breaking up with her, but I could also see in her some kind of joy or love. One day she would be a mother or a friend or a college graduate or anything really. Just a person.
Her lips tightened into a narrow band and her eyes did the same. Then she unleashed a ferocious slap followed by a torrent of words that I didn’t really hear because my head was ringing and my face stinging with pain.
At just that moment, I heard a car door open and I looked up to see my mother’s golden Chrysler stopped right in front of us. My mother stood up out of the car.
Did you just hit my boy?
My stomach sank into a bottomless pit and my insides turned to acid. I looked over at Cheryl. Her eyes were red and she’d begun to cry. She stared at Mom, silent and tense.
Henry get in the car, Mom said.
I did as I was told and watched from inside the car, the warm air of the heat blowing on me, as Mom walked around the hood and toward Cheryl who stood up as she approached. Mom lit into Cheryl Greenwood for slapping her boy, and I knew that any possibility of friendship with Sam Easton was over and that Cheryl didn’t deserve anything that I’d done to her or even thought about her because she was no different than any other kid I knew.
Mom walked back around the hood of the car and I looked up again to see Cheryl staring at me.
Mom slid into the car.
You okay?
Yes, ma’am, I said.
But I didn’t stop staring at Cheryl Greenwood until the car pulled away.
#
The man steps over the thing that he just chunked into the snow. His head is locked on me; he pays no attention to what’s on the ground, what he’s stepping over and through. He just walks.
I hug the tree with my chest. I want to run. My legs feel weary from trudging through snow all morning, but I know that if I just bolt, if I just let it out, that adrenaline will whip them into shape and I’ll be off like the Flash.
But I don’t.
I stand still as the man gets closer and closer, and I hold on to the tree more tightly and clench my toes inside of my rubber boots which causes them to squeak ever so slightly against the snow.
I can make out features now, not the face, but the clothes: flannel and horn-rimmed glasses.
He stops just thirty feet from me.
What are you doing out here, Henry?
His voice dances on the edge of a knife, like a man trying to be kind and calm, like he’s overcoming his impatience, taking hold of his temper.
Henry, he says.
He’s got my attention. I don’t know why he needs to repeat my name.
He takes a few steps closer and I can see his eyes through those lenses. They are tired and sad; they say I’m sorry.
Where’s Mom?
I press against the tree because I didn’t want to ask this question and I already know the answer.
I wish you hadn’t come out here, Henry, he says. It was an accident. It really was. He pleads. You shouldn’t be here, he says. I wanted to just get out of here without you seeing, he says, without you knowing.
I push off the tree and I’m flying, running in the opposite direction, into the forest, away from Stan, away from the car, and away from the hole in the snow where I’m sure he had left Mom.
But I’m not the Flash.
He catches up with me, grabs my shoulders, and throws me to the side.
#
My hands broke my fall and scratched and scraped against the pavement, stinging like heck and embedding little bits of rocks into my palms.
What the hell did you do that for?
Sam Easton loomed over me, a gray sky behind him receded and receded and receded until it seemed like he was the only thing in the universe.
I said nothing.
Screwing? Graybeard? What do you know about any of it? You ran away!
Like a bull staring down a fighter, he breathed through his nose so loudly and so intently that I could hear it over my own breath. The tip of my nose began to sting and my chest filled up like a balloon so that I could hardly breathe.
Answer me, he said. Say something.
But I didn’t. I wouldn’t.
So he kicked me hard three times in the stomach. I curled up on my side and cried and tried to stifle any moaning wails that wanted to get out. They did. They wanted to get out. They wanted to tell Sam that he’d been a jerk, that he’d abandoned me, and that what I’d said to his girlfriend was really just me being jealous and angry and sad.
But I didn’t. I wouldn’t.
#
My face presses into the snow and I know that I’m dead. I don’t look up. I just clench my whole body. Stan’s hands are strong. I turn over to kick him off me, but he curls his fingers around my neck while I try to scream and kick and claw. I’m thirteen and he’s a grown-up. I look up, opening my eyes but I see no eyes. Perched above his nose—which sits on the shadow of his square jaw, clenched but otherwise without expression—are his vacant horn-rimmed glasses, black and plastic and massive, with lenses completely fogged, hiding his eyes from mine. If I could see his eyes, I wonder what they would say, what expression they would hold. Would they be the cold, dead shark eyes that I’ve seen before? Or would they be angry? Maybe even sad? Maybe he’s sad that he has to do what he’s doing to cover up for the accident. But I don’t get to know. I try to breathe in, but all I get is a whiff of his dad breath, a smell that I could never forget amidst the cartons of cigarettes and the empty bottles from the house on the cul-de-sac. I can’t breathe and I’m losing the ability to fight back, one of the nails on my right hand has ripped away from the nail bed as I try to claw at the flannel monster. It stings and my cries and wails are silenced by the grown-up hands. But the fogged, eyeless glasses show no emotion. They are dead.
I close my eyes and try to remember some of those prayers that you’re supposed to say before bed—now I lay me down to sleep and all that—but that’s all I get because this is only the sort of thing I’d do at Sam’s house, certainly not at mine.
Stan yells something that sounds like fuck.
I breathe and the sharp intake of air burns my throat. I open my eyes to see the tangled branches silhouetted against the gray sky, thin twiggy limbs spreading out like blood vessels in the lungs that I’ve seen in the health filmstrips at school. I grab for my throat, hardly believing that Stan’s hands are no longer wrapped around it. I sit up to see Ridley barking and biting at Stan who is struggling to his feet. I’ve never heard Ridley like this, the vicious growls stuffed deep down by generations of breeding, the inner wolf set loose to protect a member of his pack.
Ridley claws at Stan as Stan makes it to his feet. He kicks Ridley squarely in the ribs with a deafening, stomach-turning thud. Ridley yelps and stumbles back in the snow, but immediately recovers and comes back at Stan who lets loose a series of curses as he tries to scramble away, but he falls in the snow and I run, heading for the lights shining between the trunks of the trees—the headlights of Stan’s Chevy Nova. I run right through the hole that Stan had created in the snow and I trip trying to come out of it. The hole goes down beneath the snow to the forest floor itself. For a moment, all I can hear is the sound of my own breath and the rhythm of my heartbeat as blood rushes through my ears. Then the rest of the world comes into view—the friendly ringing of the Nova with the key in the ignition, the sounds of Ridley, yelp and growl, punctuated by Stan’s cursing and his pleas for me to come back. I struggle up and out of the hole and turn to look back. I can’t see Ridley, but I hear his growls turned to whimpers and I see Stan on his knees, gripping Ridley hard by the neck, and I know Ridley is done.
I look down in the hole and see the face of an angel, bloodied and bruised, her forehead cracked, but her red-streaked face serene. Her eyes are closed and I think goodbye as her face melts away like those plastic action figures in that ring of fire on the bank of the creek the day Sam and me died too.
I stagger my way to the Nova, its front-end partially buried in a tree after the accident, but it starts. I pull the gear shift down into reverse and back into the road. Stan still sits on his knees, yellow in the headlights and his arms at his sides now, his glasses gone. He breathes heavily as he stares at the yellow and red fur beneath him.
I hate him like I’ve never hated anything before. More than Cheryl Greenwood.
I shift the car into drive and head toward the house. I’m driving. I’ve never done this before and I know that Sam hasn’t either. I’m breaking new ground here. I’m flying and I’m flying fast, as fast as I can without feeling like I’m going to lose control. I’ve never driven before except go-carts and I wish Sam could see me now. When I get to our little house, our little escape in the woods—that’s what Mom had called it—I hit the brakes, but the car slams into Mom’s Chrysler, and I vomit all over the passenger seat. It’s gross, but I continue to lie there for a while, doubled over the armrest, bits of bile dripping from my mouth. I feel like liquid is coming from every hole in my head—bile and spit and tears and snot.
I’m afraid I’m going to be sick again, so I look away from the soupy mess in the passenger seat and sit up. The whole car smells like sick and I gotta get outta here, so I open the door and the cold air rushes in; it feels good against my clammy forehead. My sweat turns to ice and my throat burns, but I muster the strength to get out of the car. I slide my weak and wobbly legs out and with them my big rubber boots drag some of the trash that Stan had left on the floorboards. The glass of the bottles make little tinkling sounds against the gravel driveway. I bury my chin in my chest as I stand up and I look at that trash—tiny bottles with labels I recognize from back when we lived together with Dad in the house on the cul-de-sac. I kick the bottles and go into the kitchen door.
The door creaks as it always does. I close it and lock it. Everything looks just as I left it. Covered soup not put int he fridge, leftovers in the metal strainer in the sink, trash with he guilty Coke can that I’d never taken out. Quiet kitchen. Orange light from the living room. Darkness down the hallway toward the bedrooms where Spider-Man still swings through New York City, the buildings of Manhattan vanishing in the distance behind him, and the X-Wing forever pursues the TIE Fighter. The oldies station echoes down the hall and all through the little house—you say you gonna leave me, you know it’s a lie—but I can barely hear it.
I go over to the phone. My clothes are damp with melted snow. The light from the lamp on the side table in the living room combines with the gray morning light spilling in through the kitchen windows so that I can read the little card next to it.
Fire. Police. Hospital. Stan.
I pick up the phone and dial.