I don’t know why I said it, but I did: “Maybe the Lady can help you.”
“How? Throw a few bones for me? Burn a candle and incense?”
“No sir. Just talk,” I said.
He looked at the floor. He drew a deep breath and slowly freed it. Then he said, “I’ve gotta get some rest,” and he walked to the door.
“Dad?”
He paused.
“Do you want me to tear the story up?”
He didn’t answer, and I thought he wasn’t going to. His gaze flickered back and forth from me to the two sheets of paper. “No,” he said at last. “No, it’s a good story. It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes sir.”
“It’s the best you can do?”
“Yes sir.”
He looked around at the pictures of monsters taped on the walls, and his eyes came to me. “You’re sure you wouldn’t rather write about ghosts, or men from Mars?” he inquired with a hint of a smile.
“Not this time,” I told him.
He nodded, chewing on his lower lip. “Go ahead, then. Enter it in the contest,” he said, and he left me alone.
On the following morning, I put my story in a manila envelope and rode Rocket to the public library on Merchants Street, near the courthouse. In the library’s cool, stately confines, where fans whispered at the ceiling and sunlight streamed through blinds at tall arched windows, I handed my contest entry—marked “Short Story” on the envelope in Crayola burnt umber—to Mrs. Evelyn Prathmore at the front desk. “And what little tale might we have here?” Mrs. Prathmore asked, smiling sweetly.
“It’s about a murder,” I said. Her smile fractured. “Who’s judgin’ the contest this year?”
“Myself, Mr. Grover Dean, Mr. Lyle Redmond from the English department at Adams Valley High School, Mayor Swope, our well-known published poet Mrs. Teresa Abercrombie, and Mr. James Connahaute, the copy editor at the
Journal
.” She picked up my entry with two fingers, as if it were a smelly fish. “It’s about a
murder
, you say?” She peered at me over the pearly rims of her eyeglasses.
“Yes ma’am.”
“What’s a nice, polite young man like you writin’ about
murder
for? Couldn’t you write about a happier subject? Like… your dog, or your best friend, or—” She frowned, at her wit’s end. “Somethin’ that would enlighten and entertain?”
“No ma’am,” I said. “I had to write about the man at the bottom of Saxon’s Lake.”
“Oh.” Mrs. Prathmore looked at the manila envelope again. “I see. Do your parents know you’re enterin’ this in the contest, Cory?”
“Yes ma’am. My dad read it last night.”
Mrs. Prathmore picked up a ball-point pen and wrote my name on the envelope. “What’s your telephone number?” she asked, and when I told her she wrote that underneath my name. “All right, Cory,” she said, and she summoned up a cool smile, “I’ll see that this gets where it needs to go.”
I thanked her, and I turned around and walked toward the front door. Before I got out, I glanced back at Mrs. Prathmore. She was bending the envelope’s clasp back to unseal it, and when she saw me looking she stopped. I took this as a good sign, that she was eager to read my entry. I went on out into the sunlight, unchained Rocket from a park bench, and pedaled home.
No doubt about it, summer was on the wane.
The mornings seemed a shade cooler. The nights were hungry, and ate more daylight. The cicadas sounded tired, their whirring wings slowing to a dull buzz. From our front porch you could look almost due east and see a single Judas tree up in the forested hills; its leaves had turned crimson almost overnight, a shock amid all that green. And the worst—the very worst for those of us who loved the freedom of summer’s days—was that the television and radio trumpeted back-to-school sales with depressing fervor.
Time was running out. So one evening at supper I broached the subject. Bit the bullet. Took the bull by the horns. Jumped in headfirst.
“Can I go campin’ overnight with the guys?” was the question that brought silence to the table.
Mom looked at Dad. Dad looked at Mom. Neither of them looked at me. “You said I could if I went to Granddaddy Jaybird’s for a week,” I reminded them.
Dad cleared his throat and swirled his fork in his mashed potatoes. “Well,” he said, “I don’t see why not. Sure. You guys can pitch a tent in the back and make a campfire.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean campin’ out. Like out in the woods.”
“There are woods behind the house,” he said. “That’s woods enough.”
“No sir,” I said, and my heart was beating harder because for me this was really being daring. “I mean way out in the woods. Out where you can’t see Zephyr or any lights. Like real campin’.”
“Oh, my,” Mom fretted.
Dad grunted and put his fork down. He folded his fingers together, and the thought lines deepened into grooves between his eyes. All this was, I knew from past experience, the first signs of the word “no” being born. “Way out in the woods,” he repeated. “Like how far out?”
“I don’t know. I thought we could hike somewhere, spend the night, and then come back in the mornin’. We’d take a compass, and sandwiches, and Kool-Aid, and we’d take knapsacks and stuff.”
“And what would happen if one of you boys broke an ankle?” Mom asked. “Or got bitten by a rattlesnake? Or fell down in poison ivy, and Lord knows that’s everywhere this summer.” I hung on; she was working up to full speed. “What would happen if you got attacked by a bobcat? Lord, a hundred things could happen to you in the woods, and none of them good!”
“We’d be all right, Mom,” I said. “We’re not little kids anymore.”
“You’re not grown up enough to go wanderin’ around out in the woods by yourselves, either! What if you got out there at night two miles from home and a storm blew up? What if it started lightnin’ and thunderin’? What if you or one of the others got sick to your stomach? You know, you can’t just find a phone and call home out there. Tell him it’s a bad idea, Tom.”
He made a face; the dirty jobs always fell to the father.
“Go on,” Mom urged. “Tell him he can wait until he’s thirteen.”
“You said last year I could wait until I was twelve,” I reminded her.
“Don’t talk smart, now! Tom, tell him.”
I awaited the firm, resolute “no.” It came as a real surprise, then, when my dad asked, “Where would you get the compass?”
Mom looked at him in horror. I felt a spark of hope leap within me. “From Davy Ray’s dad,” I said. “He uses it when he goes huntin’.”
“Compasses can break!” Mom insisted. “Can’t they?” she asked Dad.
My father kept his attention on me, his expression solid and serious. “Goin’ out on an overnight hike isn’t any game for children. I know plenty of men who’ve gotten lost in the woods, and they’ll tell you right off what it feels like to be without a bed or a bathroom, have to sleep on wet leaves and scratch skeeter bites all night. That sound like fun to you?”
“I’d like to go,” I said.
“You talk to the other guys about this?”
“Yes sir. They all said they’d like to go, too, if their folks’ll let ’em.”
“Tom, he’s too young!” Mom said. “Maybe next year!”
“No,” my father answered, “he’s not too young.” My mother wore a stricken look; she started to speak again, but Dad put a finger to her lips. “I made a deal with him,” he told her. “In this house, a man stands on his word.” His gaze swung back to me again. “Call ’em. If their parents say all right, it’s all right with us, too. But we’ll talk about how far you can go, and when we expect you back, and if you’re not back by the time we agree on, you’ll have a tough time sittin’ down for a week. Okay?”
“Okay!” I said, and I started to go for the phone but Dad said, “Hold on. Finish your supper first.”
After this, events gained momentum. Ben’s parents gave their approval. Davy Ray’s folks said okay. Johnny, however, could not go with us, though he pleaded for my dad to talk to his. Dad did what he could, but the judgment was already passed. Because of Johnny’s dizzy spells, his parents were afraid for him to be out in the woods overnight. Once again the Branlins had robbed him.
And so, on a sunny Friday afternoon, laden with knapsacks, sandwiches, canteens of water, mosquito repellent, snakebite kits, matches, flashlights, and county maps we’d gotten from the courthouse, Davy Ray, Ben, and I struck out from my house into the beckoning forest. All our good-byes had been said, our dogs locked up, our bicycles porched and chained. Davy carried his father’s compass, and he wore a camouflage-print hunting cap. We all wore long pants, to guard our shins against thorns and snake fangs, and our winter boots. We were in it for the long haul, and we set our faces against the sun like pioneers entering the forest primeval. Before we reached the woods, though, my mother the constant worrier called from the back porch, “Cory! Have you got enough toilet paper?”
I said I did. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine Daniel Boone’s mother asking him that question.
We climbed the hill and crossed the clearing from where we had flown on the first day of summer. Beyond it the serious woods began, a green domain that might’ve given Tarzan pause. I looked back at Zephyr lying below us, and Ben stopped and then so did Davy Ray. Everything seemed so orderly: the streets, the roofs, the mowed lawns, the sidewalks, the flowerbeds. What we were about to enter was a wild entanglement, a dangerous realm that offered neither comfort nor safety; in other words, in that one moment I realized exactly what I’d gotten myself into.
“Well,” Davy Ray said at last, “I guess we’d better get movin’.”
“Yeah,” Ben murmured. “Get movin’.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
We stood there, the breeze on our faces and sweat on our necks. Behind us, the forest rustled. I thought of the hydra’s heads, swaying and hissing, in
Jason and the Argonauts
.
“I’m goin’,” Davy Ray said, and he started off. I turned away from Zephyr and followed him, because he was the guy with the compass. Ben hitched his knapsack’s straps in a notch tighter, the tail of his shirt already beginning to wander out of his pants, and he said, “Hold up!” and came on as fast as he could.
The forest, which had been waiting a hundred years for three boys just like us, let us in and then closed its limbs and leaves at our backs. Now we had set foot in the wilderness, and we were on our own.
Pretty soon we were drenched with sweat. Going up and down wooded ridges in the heavy August heat was no easy task, and Ben started puffing and asking Davy Ray to slow down. “Snake hole!” Davy Ray shouted, pointing at an imaginary hole at Ben’s feet, and that got Ben moving lickety-split again. We traveled through a green kingdom of sun and shadow, and we found honeysuckle boiling in sweet profusion and blackberries growing wild and of course we had to stop for a while and take a taste. Then we were on the march again, following the compass and the sun, masters of our destinies. Atop a hill we found a huge boulder to sit on, and we discovered what appeared to be Indian symbols carved into the stone. Alas, though, we weren’t the first to make this find, because nearby was a Moon Pie wrapper and a broken 7-Up bottle. We went on, deeper into the forest, determined to find a place where no human foot had ever marked the dirt. We came to a dried-up streambed and followed it, the stones crunching under our boots. A dead possum, swarming with flies, snared our attention for a few minutes. Davy Ray threatened to pick up the possum’s carcass and throw it at Ben, but I talked him out of such a grisly display and Ben shuddered with relief. Farther ahead, at a place where the trees thinned and white rocks jutted from the earth like dinosaur ribs, Davy Ray stopped and bent down. He came up holding a black arrowhead, almost perfectly formed, which he put in his pocket for Johnny’s collection.
The sun was falling. We were sweaty and dusty, and gnats spun around our heads and darted at our eyeballs. I have never understood the attraction of gnats to eyeballs, but I believe it’s the equivalent of moths to flames; in any case, we spent a lot of time digging the little dead things out of our watering orbs. But as the sun settled and the air cooled, the gnats went away. We began to wonder where we might find a place to spend the night, and it was right about then that the truth of the matter came clear.
There were no mothers and fathers around to make our suppers. There were no televisions, no radios, no bathtubs, no beds, and no lights, which we began to fully realize as the sky darkened to the east. How far we were from home we didn’t know, but for the last two hours we’d seen no mark of civilization. “We’d better stop here,” I told Davy Ray, and I indicated a clearing, but he said, “Ah, we can go on a little farther,” and I knew his curiosity about what lay over the next ridge was pulling him onward. Ben and I kept up with him; as I’ve said before, he was the guy with the compass.