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  Mr. Goddard made a huge impression on Phil, and I guess it was no surprise that Phil decided to become a teacher. He helped Phil go through the proper channels and red tape involved in getting a scholarship to Andrews College, a private school which happened to be Goddard’s alma mater.

  So Phil was on his way up and out. And lucky me, I was staying. After all the worry I used to put in on whether or not Phil would carve a decent future for himself, I was the one left behind.

  It felt more than a little scary.

  And without Rick, life would be lonely, as well. I had my family and I had Valerie and I had other friends, but I got something from Rick and Phil that I couldn’t get anyplace else. And now, one down, one to go.

  Aaron got home late that afternoon, tired but excited because that night he had a first date with some girl from work. Shortly after his shower, he came into my room so I could inspect him and give him my stamp of approval. Which I did, providing that he put his shoes on the correct feet. A minor problem.

  Aaron checked my nightstand clock. He had some time to kill, and sat on my bed.

  “Mom says you had to go to the sheriff’s this afternoon.” He spoke as though he were walking on thin ice.

  “Yeah. It wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs.”

  “I bet.” He peered down at his shoes, now on the proper feet. Double-checking?

  “Once, the cop I talked to started making like Rick skipped town, and we came in with that story to cover for him. What a crock.”

  “Damn.” Aaron shook his head. “Where’d he think Rick would go?”

  “Who knows? New York, L.A., Nashville. Any place he could break into the music scene.”

  Aaron stared thoughtfully at the ceiling. “If I was screwed up enough to run away, I couldn’t handle anywhere like that. Too many people. I’d go nuts.”

  “Where, then?”

  “I don’t know. Just someplace where I could be alone.” His forehead creased and he thought for a moment. “Okay, I know. Remember that time years ago when Mom and Dad took us down for the day into Shawnee National Forest, and whichever state park that was?”

  I began flipping through a mental file of weekend trips from childhood. “Giant City? Garden of the Gods?”

  “Giant City, that’s the one. Remember that cave we found up in the hills?” Clearly, his memory was better than mine.

  “Vaguely.”

  It was a hazy memory, but growing clearer. I began to remember us skipping church one Sunday. I might’ve been twelve, Aaron ten. And I remembered the two of us charging along a streambed, and up and down various trails, acting obnoxious as hell, barely acknowledging that we’d heard Mom’s repeated pleas for us to be careful and stay clear of the edges of the cliffs. And I finally remembered us coming across a cave, its entrance five feet tall and obscured by summer weeds. We followed it back into its cool recesses until it angled left and plunged into sudden and perfect darkness.

  “Okay, I remember. Think you could find it after all this time?”

  “Maybe. I think so.”

  I sighed, then rose from the floor and pulled out my desk chair to sit even with Aaron. “I want you to promise me something. Okay?”

  He looked momentarily confused, but nodded.

  “I want you to stay away from Tri-Lakes. I know I built it up as this great place to go, but now … just steer clear, you understand?”

  He nodded again. “If you say so.”

  An awkward moment passed during which I felt oddly like a paranoid father. Finally Aaron cleared his throat and looked at my clock. Time for him to leave. Today’s girl of his dreams was waiting.

  “Have fun tonight,” I said. “Where are you taking her?”

  “The movies. What else is there in this town?”

  As I watched him leave, I wished there were some sensible way I could bar the door and keep him in and keep him safe from everything in the world that bites to draw first blood. For the love of a brother knows no limits.

  Chapter 15

  To the guys of the county highway department, quitting time was the finest moment of the day. Lunchtime ranked a close second. When the midday break came, all work was forgotten and relinquished in favor of paper bags and thermos bottles and lunch pails. We clustered in groups away from the work site, eating in the shade or around the private vehicles driven out for the day.

  Only one man was known to break tradition and refuse to relax: White Trash Joe Morgan.

  On the Monday following Rick’s disappearance, I sat on the tailgate of Joe’s truck, slowly putting down a peanut butter sandwich. I was alone, since Phil had called in sick. Probably over Rick. I knew the feeling.

  There wasn’t a lot to look at out this far. The only evidence of civilization besides ourselves was the chuckholed road and the parallel line of power poles. So I watched as White Trash Joe did business across the road and down a ways. He was dickering with some fat guy in shades who’d driven up in a dust-caked LTD missing a couple of wheel covers. Their voices weren’t carrying well, but I could see they were haggling over the price of a shotgun in Joe’s hands. They’d be at it awhile. Joe didn’t bend easily.

  I finished the sandwich and chugged the rest of the milk from my thermos. It lay like a sour ball in my stomach as I leaned back into the truck, shirtless and legs dangling over the tailgate. I shut my eyes for a moment and soaked in the sun’s comforting warmth.

  The fat man, whose curly fringe of hair stuck out from beneath his cap like steel wool, shook his head violently. Mouthed the words Way too fuckin’ much.

  White Trash Joe, one of the boniest men I’d ever seen, jumped up and offered the shotgun toward the man, gesturing toward it lovingly. He gently ran a finger along the barrel. Patted the stock. Sighted in on a nearby tree, suddenly jerking back as if the gun had gone off. Without the audio it all could’ve been a comical sight, but I didn’t feel much like laughing.

  The fat guy’s protests grew progressively weaker. Finally cash was exchanged for the gun, then a handshake. The fat guy drove off in his dusty LTD, happy with his new toy, and White Trash Joe came strutting my way with his new windfall. He whipped the tractor cap from his head and stuck the wad of cash into a little pocket crudely sewn in behind the bill.

  “Repeat customer,” Joe explained. “I tried not to clip him too bad.”

  “You got a heart of gold,” I said.

  He bowed and popped the cap back on. “Wish I could find me a flamethrower. That fat boy’d dearly love to have one.”

  “A flamethrower? What the hell for?”

  White Trash Joe shook his head as if mine were the densest he’d ever encountered. “He’s a survivalist, son. Stocking up for the big breakdown. When the Russkies come over or the economy busts or whatever else he’s scared of happens.” Joe pulled out a pouch of chewing tobacco and dug around in it and stuffed an enormous wad into his cheek. “Do me a favor, will you? Take a little walk with me?”

  I looked at him curiously, and when he put his hand on my shoulder and gently pulled me from the tailgate, I followed. We ambled along the roadside away from the vehicles. Heat shimmered up from the crumbling blacktop, and the air offered no relief. Our feet kicked up wisps of dust. Things had been bone dry lately.

  “I heard about your friend,” he said, then fired a stream of tobacco juice at the side of the road.

  I frowned. “How’d you hear about that? It won’t be out until tonight’s paper.”

  “Friends in high places. The sheriff’s department.” He looked proud of that. “I don’t suppose you know this, but a few years ago I used to work for Little Egypt Asphalt.”

  “Is that supposed to mean anything to me?”

  “I don’t guess so. But we laid down the road up at Pleasant Hills. And let me tell you, son, that sure as shit some freaky stuff went down back then.” He found a rock to kick at, and kept it bouncing along in front of us. “I worked on a crew about like this one. Sometimes we’d give each other some hell, but when it came
down to it, we were tight. Good friends, don’t you know. But once we’d started in up there, things got rocky in a hurry. We were finding all sorts of excuses to get into arguments. One day a fellow name of Ernie Frehley gets into a little scrape with another fellow, and pretty soon old Ernie’s after him with a bottle

  (Gimme a bottle, Roy! Gimme a bottle!)

  and does a royal job trouncing him with it. Not long after that, one lunch hour some fellow gets off fartin’ around and starts climbing this big old tree. Next thing we know he’s on the ground and there’s blood all over him. I know for a fact that a tree limb don’t grow sharp enough to lay a man’s arm open to the bone. But that’s just what happened. He damn near bled to death right there.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was still thinking about Wendell screaming for a bottle. Surely he hadn’t been so drunk he couldn’t remember what he’d been drinking from.

  “We finally got her laid down up there, but damned if I know how. Then it was time for the builders to come in. I knew one of ‘em, and he kept me up on what was going on with ‘em before the deal got scrapped.”

  Joe shot more tobacco juice at a horsefly sitting at the side of the road and nailed it.

  “Things just went from bad to worse, ‘til one day this boy up and hangs himself off in the trees. They couldn’t find him, and a little later he turns up dangling from a limb with a rope around his neck.”

  I swallowed a lump that was threatening to choke me.

  “It didn’t take long for a lot of the other guys to get to feeling like maybe they’d be better off somewhere else. Lot of ‘em said they’d come down with summer flu. Some of ‘em flat-out quit, said no two ways about it, they weren’t goin’ back.”

  Joe and I stopped, nearly a hundred yards from our trucks. We started on the hot, dusty walk back.

  “Now, I don’t know if any of that bears on what happened with you. But I just wanted to tell you.”

  Oh, it applied even more than he could guess. Joe still hadn’t heard anything about the details of my fight with Wendell, or the peculiar vibes I’d gotten while standing before the largest tree in the grove. Right then I would’ve bet my summer’s wages that it was the same tree that had injured Joe’s friend, and had been used for the suicide.

  “Anyhow, that’s all I know.” He laughed, but no humor could be found there. “So far I thought I’d done a fine job of forgettin’ all that. I can forget anything if I set my mind to it. Just ask my wife.” He pulled off his cap, tugged out a red and white bandana, swabbed it around his head. “But when I heard about you and Phil and your friend, I thought, ‘Aw shit, just when I figured I’d heard the last of that place.’ And I’m sorry, I truly am.”

  I spat dust from my mouth and squinted at him. “Joe? What do you think it is? What’s wrong with that place?”

  Joe stopped in his tracks and simply stared into the dirt and weeds at the roadside. He slapped his cap against his thigh a couple times. “I don’t know, Chris. I don’t think I even want to. But I do know that there’s shit what goes on in this world that ain’t nobody’s got any explanations for. They can have all the facts they want, but when she comes down to it, they got no explanations.”

  “Think so?”

  He bobbed his head. “I know so. Do you believe it?”

  We walked several yards before I answered. “I guess I’m starting to. Don’t have much choice anymore, it seems.”

  “No choice?” He gave that short, humorless laugh again, so unlike the White Trash Joe I’d come to know. “Does any of us?”

  Chapter 16

  Rick had been gone a week, and every day had seemed like ten. By conservative estimates. If you want to really increase the time on your hands, drag it out, just lose one of your best friends. Not knowing what had happened was the absolute worst of it … torture by ignorance. If only we’d known, could’ve filled in the blanks, we would’ve at least had something concrete to cope with. In most cases, the imagination is more than proficient in speculating the details. But without validation, it’s only that much more torture.

  Phil and I hadn’t given him up for dead, not yet. A little glimmer of hope, however naive, remained. We’d drive around when we could, quiet and frustrated and brooding, the festivities associated with cruising all trampled into the dirt. We’d scout the country roads north of town, eyes peeled for some movement or glimpse of the last things we’d seen Rick wearing. And we turned up one big goose egg.

  After the weekend, the night after White Trash Joe had given me the background on Tri-Lakes, Phil and I went to see Rick’s parents. Treading up their walk was one of the hardest treks I’d ever made, in some ways even worse than walking into the grove after Rick had screamed. Because this time, I knew all too well what I’d find within … a couple of people whose eyes looked every bit as empty as I felt inside. Soulmates, as if somebody had skewered us with straws and drained away all the joy, all the spark, all the animation. Leaving behind only a few shells of humans who looked to one another for answers and then looked away disappointed. My mom had already been over, but you couldn’t tell it. In her own subtle way, I’m sure she wanted to help, to counsel, but she didn’t even know what the hell to counsel them for. And so we all sat. We talked sporadically. We stared into iced glasses of Pepsi. We shared the silence. And then, hugs dispensed one to another, we parted company. Without feeling any better. It only felt as if Phil and I had exercised some obligation. I didn’t know whether to congratulate myself on being able to manage that much, or hate myself because that was all I’d managed.

  But life goes on. That’s what all the grief counselors say, in essence. And after a week had gone by, I was starting to make an attempt at returning to a more or less normal mode of life. I didn’t feel normal, but appearances were a start, if nothing else.

  Valerie and I went out that Friday night. Big mistake. The night was rotten from the beginning, and before it was over, things had gotten a whole lot worse.

  None of which was her fault. She wanted to make the evening work, and I couldn’t blame her for trying, even if she tried too hard. She started by getting rid of her parents and cooking dinner for me. Chicken crepes, green beans in a cream sauce, French bread. I repaid her thoughtfulness by spending more time with the family dog, a malamute named Kodiak, than I did with her. Kodiak and I had always been pals, and he never demanded much in the way of pleasant conversation, and I sat on the family room floor holding him while answering Val’s questions with monosyllables, and in a couple of instances, very snappy remarks. I remember thinking that she was either the town’s biggest victim who didn’t mind occasional footprints on her psyche, or else she had the patience of Mother Theresa.

  Maybe it’s too soon, I thought while she cleared the table, sans compliments from me about the food. Maybe I still need to hole up awhile longer before trying this routine.

  Next we went to see Danny DeVito’s latest cinematic comedy triumph. I laughed maybe a half dozen times. Of course, I had other things on my mind…

  Because in the lobby, my heart had given a sudden lurch when, in line at the concession stand, I saw someone who was a dead ringer for Rick from the back. Slight stature, shoulder-length sandy brown hair. Sure! It made sense. Rick would come here because he was a big DeVito fan. Short guys unite, and all that. I almost reached for him, to spin him around, but then the kid turned on his own.

  Not Rick, of course. This kid was junior high age, or maybe a freshman-to-be, with vacuous eyes and braces, and for an instant I felt like pitching the little bastard back to the counter so he could stock up on more Milk Duds. Found guilty of impersonating Rick.

  “I’m being a real shit tonight, aren’t I?” I asked Valerie once we were back in the car and ready to leave. Merely a statement of fact, not an apology.

  “Quite,” she said with straight-faced righteousness, then laughed. “But I can deal with that. I’ve put up with you sloppy drunk, and of the two, I’d say this is better.”

  “At least
sloppy drunk helps you forget,” I said. And it’s more fun, too. “Listen, if you want to call the night a loss and quit while you’re not too far behind, I can run you home now.”

  She nodded. “Okay. Home it is. But once we get there, you don’t need to be in any big hurry to leave.”

  We’ll see, I thought. Truth be told, I didn’t foresee being able to salvage much of the night. The one-week anniversary of Rick’s disappearing act. The Week of a Thousand Days. On the ride to Val’s, I noticed that I kept the stereo volume lower than normal, almost as if I expected to hear Rick picking his guitar along with the songs. Come on, man, play for me just one more time. Please?

  Please?

  I expected to see Val’s parents’ car in the drive when I pulled in. But it was as empty as when we’d left after dinner.

  “You see, Chris,” she said, “they had tickets to the theater in St. Louis. It was an eight-thirty show, so they shouldn’t be home until way after midnight.” She winked at me.

  So that’s what this is all about, huh? Oooh, what timing. I didn’t say anything, though. Just sat holding the steering wheel with both hands, staring not quite at her but past her. At trees.

  “Well?” She arched her eyebrows. “Will you come in?”

  I switched off the engine. What the hell.

  She led, I followed. We paused at the front door while she unlocked it, and then we were back where we’d started. Kodiak came bounding up to greet us, but she pushed him away and took me by the hand. And pulled me along upstairs to her room. Moonlight pooled through the windows, shading the unlit house in a dusky blue gloom, and my eyes gradually became accustomed to the absence of light. Val’s half-shadowed face began to look enchanting, otherworldly. Would mine?