“Okay,” I said after a time. “But you have to be quiet, and you have to do everything I tell you. No question. Got it?”
“Yeah.” He sprung upright in bed; even in the darkness I could make out the ear-to-ear grin on his round face.
“Now get your stuff.”
It is fair to say both those boys died that night. I will; I will say it. I am a testament to that. The walking dead.
—and these two brothers sneak out of the house, quiet as mice treading the floorboards of a vicarage. They enter the woods, wearing nothing but their swimming trunks and sneakers, each with a towel draped around his neck. The dark shapes of the trees crowd in all around them. They are convinced the trees are moving around them like living creatures; yet when they turn and look at them head-on, they are as still as statues... as trees. They walk swiftly beneath the cast of the moon through the wooded path, then finally down to the bank of the river. This is summer; this is grand; this is what it is all about.
Up ahead, the river opens wide as it approaches the mouth of the bay. Both boys feel the immensity of it in their guts. The older boy, the thirteen-year-old, continues quickly down the riverbank toward the looming double helix structure.
“Are the stories real?” the younger boy wants to know.
“What stories?”
“The stories Dad tells.”
The older boy, who has dark curly hair and a body like a lizard or a bird, with long arms and long legs, says, “Yes. Of course they are, stupid.” Trying to frighten his little brother. “Why would Dad lie to us?”
“I don’t know.”
“They’re real, all of them.”
“Even the Wendigo?”
“Especially the Wendigo. It’s probably out there right now, watching us.”
“No,” says the younger boy. “Stop it.”
“Stop what?” Chuckling.
“You’re just trying to scare me.”
“Will you be scared when it comes time to jump?”
“Jump where?”
The thirteen-year-old points at the threatening dinosaur shape of the double dock. “Off there. Off the top pier.”
Suddenly, the younger boy looks very frightened. All their father’s stories are real to him, the monsters and the imaginary boys who live in the woods and eat children. It is a warm night, but the little boy stands there shivering, his pale chest pimply with gooseflesh and his teeth chattering like a rattlesnake’s warning. He looks white, too white. Almost transparent. The older brother thinks, Ghost.
“Climb the stairs to the top,” instructs the older brother, “then take a deep breath, run, and jump off.”
“Jump,” parrots the younger brother, the uncertain tone of his small voice bending the word somewhere between a statement and a question.
“You’re not scared, are you?”
The younger brother shakes his head.
“Then climb up and jump. I’ll hold your towel.”
“First?”
“First what?”
“You want me to go first?”
“Unless you’re too scared. Unless you’re a chickenshit.”
“Don’t say that,” reprimands the little brother, though his voice is too weak and trembling to sound imposing. “Don’t say that word.”
“Shit,” repeats his brother. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Stop it.”
“And fuck, too,” says the older brother, lowering his voice. This is the forbidden word, the word of all words. Biblical in its mystery and strength. “Are you a fucking chicken?”
The little boy looks like he wants to cry.
“You wanted to come out here,” says the older brother. “If you’re not scared to do it, then do it.”
There is much hesitation. Paradoxically, just as the older brother is about to club him on the shoulder and tell him to sit in the weeds and be quiet, the little brother hands him his towel and takes off his sneakers.
The brazenness surprises the older brother—had the situation been reversed, he’s unsure whether or not he’d be able to summon an equal amount of courage.
The younger boy steps around the shrubs in bare feet, leaving little prints in the mud, and proceeds to climb the staircase leading to the upper pier. His climb slows midway, where he glances down at the ground, and then he continues until he reaches the top. He is just a black blur, an outline in the darkness. The moon is distant and covered by trees and clouds; the night is as dark as the basement of lost dreams, and the older brother can hardly see him.
He whispers to him, “Be careful.”
The little boy’s small, frightened voice comes back to him: “I will.” There is the sound of a deeply inhaled breath.
He’s really going to do it, the older boy thinks.
Small, hurried footfalls race along the planks of the upper dock, the sound like a distant train rattling a wooden bridge.
Wow, he’s really going to do it. I don’t believe it.
Then silence as the little boy reaches the end of the pier and leaps into space. Somewhere out there, suspended in the black.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi . . .
The older boy anticipates the splash—he can hear it and feel it before it even happens.
But it doesn’t happen.
There is no splash.
There is a sound, though—a harsh, sickening thud from the water. It reminds the older boy of baseballs slapping the hide of a catcher’s mitt. No splash. He calls his brother’s name, and there is no answer, either.
No splash. No answer. Just that sickening thud that froze his marrow and paralyzed his feet to the ground…
“All right, son,” said Detective Wren, placing a doughy hand on my thin, quaking shoulder.
Tears blurred my vision, and my chest hitched with each sob.
“It’s all right. Calm down for a minute, and we’ll keep going when you’re ready.”
A small floating dock—no bigger than a twin mattress and covered with a panel of slate two inches thick—had broken free of its moorings earlier that evening. It floated unanchored and unobserved for several hours, making its way up the river and toward the bay. By the time Kyle leaped off the upper pier of the double dock, the floating barge was directly below him, invisible in the darkness.
The sickening thud I heard was the sound of Kyle’s head opening up on the slate before he rolled, unconscious, into the river where he sank like a stone and drowned.
CHAPTER TWENTY
At seventy-seven, Earl Parsons had a face like an old bloodhound who’d been scolded one too many times for rooting around in the trash. His body was of the long-limbed variety, like an orangutan or a tree sloth, and he came packaged in pale blue polyester slacks, a checkered flannel work shirt, American flag suspenders, and a bulky nylon ski jacket with a faux fur collar that looked like something a sheriff might wear in the mountains of Colorado. His graphite-colored hair was unevenly parted and plastered to his scalp with what must have been several handfuls of camphor-scented liniment. It was my assessment he didn’t often comb his hair. Yet he arrived with such an air of genuine appreciation and country pleasantness that I couldn’t help but like him immediately.