SOMETHING WAITS (13 page)

On Thursday at lunch he called his wife from a bar.

“I can’t stand it, Jean. I mean it. I’m going crazy!”

“I don’t understand this, John,” she sighed patiently, “what’s gotten into you?”

“This job! Our friends!
Everything
! I’m miserable! How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Look, John. Dear. In three weeks your vacation is due, we’ll take—“

“Damn it, that’s not the point! Don’t you understand? I don’t ever want to come back here again!”

She was silent a moment. Then, less compassionately: “So, what exactly are you proposing?
Quitting
the agency? Jobs like that don’t grow on trees! Can you spell recession?”

He sighed miserably into his phone. “I don’t know…I just don’t know. I keep thinking how great it used to be as a kid. Remember? No jobs, no worries. There was a grade school in Louisiana I went to—“

“Yes, I’ve heard all about it. I’ve got to get back to work if I’m going to finish early tonight. Bill and Alice are dropping over, remember? Can we discuss this later? John? Hello?”

“I’m here.”

“I said, can’t we discuss this later?”

“Sure. Later than you think.”

“What?”

“Never mind. See you tonight.”

At dinner he sat with their guests like a man outside himself. He saw them talking, watched their mouths work, but heard nothing. He watched in silence, ears bombarded by the meaningless drone, hands unconsciously clenching and unclenching under the tablecloth, a voice building inside him, aching to scream above the din:
GET OUT! GET OUT!

When at last they’d gone, he drank himself sleepy, came exhausted to bed, head pounding, unaware of the carpet beneath his feet. In a matter of moments he was lost in the sanctuary of sleep…of dreams…

He was in the meadow again with Mary Ellen, surrounded by that sea of yellow flowers. Near them lurked the tangled labyrinth of the hollow with its dark mysteries and hidden fears.

But someone else stood with them now, and for the first time in his childhood memories he knew discomfort, resentment. For the first time he remembered someone from those days he’d hated.

Mary Ellen was laughing, that high, wonderfully musical laugh of hers: “You both say you love me. But which of you loves me the most?”

“I do,” her young suitors answered in tandem.

John eyed his rival with unbridled malice, the heat of jealousy flooding him.

It was Kenny Watkins, a new boy from out of town, some place called Newport Beach. John hated him from the day he’d arrived; hated his tallness, his good looks, his worldly ways, his parent’s wealth. He’d avoided Kenny from the first, distrusting his snobbish airs, the way he looked at everyone from Louisiana as if they lived in a dirty swamp. He even succeeded in convincing most of his friends to join him in his hatred.

All but Mary Ellen.

“You both have to prove how much you love me,” she insisted with sly innocence. “Whoever proves it best, I’ll let kiss me. Maybe even on the mouth.”

“What do you want me to do?” Kenny snorted, “beat him up?”

“That’s not fair!” John quaked, “He’s bigger than me, he’s got an unfair advantage. Besides, it wouldn’t prove anything.”

“Just say the word,” Kenny told her, arms folded aloofly, and he spit out the side of his mouth as if to show how effortless the act of beating up John Richardson would be.

John stood his ground, knees trembling.

Mary Ellen placed a thoughtful finger to her chin, accessed the situation with canted head like a spring robin. “No, John’s right. It must be something equal. I won’t love a man just for his muscles. There’s something wonderfully romantic about John, like a poet, don’t you think, Kenny?”

“A faggot poet.”

Mary Ellen brightened suddenly. “I know! What are you both afraid of the most?” Kenny looked surprised. Then sneered, spit. “Nothing.”

To which John was obliged to quickly agree, “Me either!”

Mary Ellen turned indifferently to look behind them. “Even the hollow?”

John felt a wave of dread clutch his heart. He gazed beyond her to the sinister forest of foreboding swampland past the bright meadow, whose tangled depths and high canopy of trees allowed no sun to penetrate, revealing its terrible secrets.

The hollow was taboo to all the school children, had been as long as John could remember. Parents and faculty alike had made strict rules about entering its treacherous reaches, its snakes and poisonous plants, bogs and unforgiving quicksand.
“A kid could get lost in there for days wandering in that maze of brambles and sink holes,”
his father had told him on more than one occasion. But such parental warnings were unnecessary; the hollow’s legend was a far more potent deterrent for most kids. It was long rumored that something far more odious than snakes and gators lurked there…a wild man inhabited the hollow, a crazy old hermit, beady eyed and gibbering, who lived on berries and rats, and seized any child foolish enough to wander into the hollow’s dark recesses.

“No,” John said. “It’s dangerous in there, Mary Ellen.”

Mary Ellen smirked a shrug. “So you are afraid, John.”

Kenny turned toward the tangled darkness arrogantly. “How far do I have to go in?” he demanded.

Mary Ellen tilted her head bird-like again, considered carefully. “Until we can’t see you anymore.”

The tall boy stood quietly for a moment, chewing his lower lip. “All right,” he finally nodded. “All right.”

John felt his heart quicken as the other boy approached the hollow. “You’d better not!” he warned. “There’s copperheads and cottonmouths in there!”

Kenny waved him off, not breaking stride. “How would you know, chicken-shit?”

“Your aren’t from around here!” John called. “There’s a crazy man in there! He waits in the thicket at the edge of the woods to grab kids who come too close!”

Kenny slowed, hesitated.

“And he eats ‘em!
Raw
!”

Kenny stopped. Considered. He turned. “How do you know, Richardson?”

“I saw him!”

Kenny made a wry face. “Yeah? Where?”

“In…in a dream!”

Both the other children laughed.

“Go on,” Mary Ellen called to Kenny, “John’s just a scaredy-cat.”

She was right about that. John watched with tightening insides as Kenny entered the hollow. Nothing would ever give him the courage to go in there. He looked askance at Mary Ellen watching the other boy with excited anticipation. Was she crazy? Worse: would he lose her now?

Kenny stepped gingerly over the first gnarled root and proceeded cautiously into the lattice of shadows. The marsh seemed to swallow him. His silhouette dimmed; soon the sound of his crunching sneakers across the undergrowth was all that identified him.

Then there was silence.

Mary Ellen looked at John.

He’s dead!
John prayed silently.
A snake got him, or maybe even the wild man! Oh, please let him be dead!

A voice from deep shadows. “Can you see me?”

Mary Ellen yelled back gleefully. “No!”

There came a sound of loud crashing and Kenny Watkins charged from the hollow, breathing hard. His right arm was scrapped, his jeans trailing foxtails. “I win,” he gasped. “I win!”

“Why were you running so fast?” Mary Ellen wondered admiringly.

Kenny looked back over his shoulder, frowned vague concern. “Thought I heard something in there.”

“You were scared!” John exclaimed.

Kenny turned on him. “Was not!”

“We’re so!”

Kenny returned a smug look. “Maybe, but I went in. I get the kiss.”

He turned to the girl.

“Not here,” she giggled and nodded in John’s direction. “Somewhere we can be alone.”

John watched them walk off across the bright meadow, his heart breaking.

* * *

The doorbell rang the next morning at John Richardson’s house. His wife shut off the vacuum with irritation and answered it.

Her husband stood in the doorway staring vacantly at her.

“What? Forget your keys?”

“I couldn’t find it,” he told her.

She leaned on one hip with slow weariness. “What?”

“The office. My job. I forgot where it is.”

He just stood there at the lintel staring stupidly at her. She finally pulled him in by the front of his shirt and slammed the door.

“I looked all over,” he confided, “but I couldn’t find the building. Do you think they might have moved it?”

She took his coat, avoiding his eyes, not wanting him to see the desperation in her own. “Sit down, John.”

He sank into the sofa. “I couldn’t remember the name of the place…all I could see was that red building…”

Jean watched him, expressionless. “Red building?”

“The red brick schoolhouse. In Louisiana. And…the little girl…”

Jean put a hand to her head, closed her eyes a moment. “I’m going to call a doctor, John.”

He looked up. “A doctor? What for?”

“I want you to lie down there on the sofa, honey.” She pushed him back gently. “You’ve been at it too hard. I should have seen this coming.” She shoved a throw under his head. “Now you just relax and rest. The doctor will be here in a minute, give you a nice sedative.”

He grabbed her arm before she could leave. “I want to go back, Jean. I want to see the school again.”

She nodded a smile, patted his hand maternally. “All right, all right. We’ll see what the doctor says.”

She moved to the hallway, picked up the landline phone. She punched in numbers. Ran a shaky hand through her hair as the number began to ring. Before anyone answered, she heard the car start out in the garage. “John?” She dropped the receiver and ran through the living room. “John?”

The sofa was empty.

* * *

He drove all night, stopping only for gas. It was six hundred miles to Louisiana, another seventy-five to his hometown. He stopped once in the morning for a sandwich, then drove on all day without stopping again.

It was mid-afternoon when he reached the town of his childhood. Except for the road signs announcing its name he never would have recognized it. He hadn’t been back since he was twelve. A deep emptiness found his stomach as he passed unfamiliar tracks of houses in what once were wide fields of chickweed and saw grass. Strange buildings and businesses rose up around him, new bridges and flat, monotonous strip malls with familiar corporate logos. Maybe he was in the wrong town, could that be it? He became lost, panicked. He had to ask at a filling station where the center of town was. If he could find that, he reasoned, he could locate the road to the old school.

Only a handful of buildings looked familiar when he finally reached Main Street. It took nearly half an hour to find the street that led past his school; it had been widened, festooned with yet more strip malls, used car lots, McDonald’s. Acrid factory smoke assailed him on the road he once raced his Schwinn. Once scattered-apart homes were now butted together in a continuous line of bland conformity. In desperation he realized the old school might no longer be there. What if it had been razed like so much else of the town, replaced by the hideous lines and angles of progress? He began to feel sick inside. His hand trembled on the wheel and beginning tears brimmed sleep-starved eyes;
please, God, let it be there…I won’t ask you for another thing…

The Lexus climbed a step grade, leveled off and suddenly the maddening rows of houses thinned. He recognized an old gas station on his left, the same green pumps, movement behind sun-glared windows. His heart quickened.

He breasted the next hill and stopped. He looked down in wonder. In awe.

It was there below him. All of it. More beautiful even than he remembered. The school.

And the playground, the bike rack and best of all the meadow of yellow flowers, shifting and nodding like a restless sea in the afternoon breeze. “They left it,” he whispered as if in a cathedral. “They left it just as it was, didn’t change a thing, an inch of ground…”

The ground. And suddenly he had the answer. Of course! The ground! The whole school, this whole section of town was built on the edge of a marsh! No contractor in his right mind would touch this property, or any property for acres around it! It was like a preservation!

He put the car in gear jubilantly and shot down the hill, throwing gravel as he entered the school parking lot. He braked near the old bike rack and climbed out.

He froze.

The bike rack was empty. Where were the kids? Was the school closed? Awaiting the wrecking ball?