He paused and reached up to touch the side of his face, brushing his fingers against his cheek. His grin remained, but it had turned hard, an expression of perplexed bittersweet nostalgia. He ran his fingers from his temple down to the curve of his lips. His touch was light, as if he were exploring a brittle ceramic mask, something ready to crack and crumble and fall away.
After a moment, his eyes looked up and found me, locking on my face for a second before swiveling back to the cellar door.
“We lived in Santa Cruz at the time, and my friends and I had this little place in the woods, just off 17, near the base of the foothills. It was just a little clearing where we hung out, drank and smoked. Where we talked about boarding and tried to hook up with the skater chicks that were always hanging around. There was a fire pit out there, and most nights we had it burning. It wasn’t far off the road; it was just a little country lane type of thing, branching off of the highway. And the clearing was so close, if you stood on the shoulder, you could see the fire sparking down in the mess of trees and brush, just down an incline and a hundred yards away. Fuck, I’m surprised we didn’t burn down all of California with those fires.” He paused and was lost in thought for a moment. “But anyway, I took him there a couple times. Not a lot. Not often. And I didn’t let him drink or anything. Just… we’d just be hanging out there with all of my friends, and that was something he really loved.
“He was just trying to be close to me. I know that. The kid fucking idolized me. And I humored him. I looked out for him. I tried to include him. That was my job. I figured it was my duty. But it was more than that, I guess. I guess it was something I loved. I was his big brother, man, and I loved being his big brother. I loved that look in his eyes, that simple adoration.” Floyd’s smile widened, and for a brief moment it didn’t seem quite so creepy.
“And then… one night—this was in late September—he got in a fight with my mom. It was all your typical teenage bullshit. He was concentrating too much on skating, and his grades were starting to slip, yadda yadda yadda—spending too much time out on his board or daydreaming about his board and not enough time studying. My mom was smart. She’d seen it all before—it was the exact same thing that happened to me—and she didn’t want that for him. She didn’t want him dropping out of school and wasting every last cell inside that thick teenage skull of his. So she grounded him. He bitched and moaned and kicked and screamed, and really, like I said, it was all your typical whiny teenage bullshit. But he knew I was going out with my friends, so he snuck out and tried to join us. But… he never made it there.”
Floyd paused. The mask cracked a bit, and there was a flicker of movement in the corner of that horrible grin. His eyes were glassy and brimming with tears.
“Have you ever heard a mountain lion scream?” he asked. I had a hard time parsing the question. It seemed like such a non sequitur, just random words strung together. “It’s a type of mating call that the females make—a shrill, yowling sound. And in the dark, it can sound like a human scream or a baby crying. Well, I heard some that night, out by the fire, and it was like an omen. It set my teeth on edge and had my arm hair standing up straight. I turned and mentioned it to one of the girls we were with—how creepy it was, how scary—and she just laughed and called me a pussy. But there was another scream right then, shrill and labored, and that shut her up real fast. It was a very, very creepy sound, just this loud yodeling howl out there in the woods, all pain and horror. After a while, though, we managed to laugh it off, and we went back to our drinking and bullshitting. Mountain lions are pretty common in Santa Cruz, after all, and we knew that as long as we stayed by the fire, we’d be fine… no matter how scary they might sound, screaming out there in the dark.
“Byron didn’t show up that night, and I had no reason to think there was anything wrong. The world felt the same to me, even though it had changed, even though it had become something fundamentally different. There was no thunder in the sky, no proclamations, no buildings crashing down around my head. But things had changed. I just didn’t know it yet; I couldn’t know it. Not then. I just went back home and crashed. I didn’t even know he was gone until the next morning, when my mom woke me up. She was pissed off, and she started calling around to all of his friends. She grilled me—like I might have something to do with it—she tried to pump me for information. She thought—we both thought—that he’d just run away, that he was hiding somewhere with his friends, that he’d make his way back home any minute now.
“We didn’t report him missing for three days. Jesus! Three fucking days! What kind of monsters are we?” he asked. Then, without skipping a beat, he went on with his story. “It was raining pretty hard by then, and we were both getting nervous. His friends hadn’t seen him. Nobody had seen him.”
Floyd paused. His mouth opened and closed, and it looked like he was having trouble picking out the right words.
“I… I…” He paused again and then changed tack. “The police released information, and there were blurbs on the local news. Someone reported seeing a kid hiking along the shoulder of 17, and the police organized a search of the woods. We found him almost immediately. I was in the dragnet. I heard the yells and came running. He was right near the clearing, right near the fire pit—this place that I’d fucking shown him, this place where he knew I would be!” The edge of Floyd’s mouth was quivering now, and emotion was starting to leak through. “He was maybe a dozen feet off the path, at the bottom of the hill. He’d fallen in the dark, and he must have hit the ground just horribly wrong, just the worst possible way. His arm was shattered, and when I got there, I could see the bone sticking out—the fucking thing had torn through his long-sleeved shirt. His leg was bent backward, and there was a massive hole in his chest. The cloth around it had dried into a rain-washed red… He was dead, of course. He’d been dead for days. A fucking stick had punctured his abdomen. After the fall, he managed to pull it out—it was still there, clenched in his hand—but he’d bled to death in less than an hour.”