The Hike (12 page)

“What happens to me for ten years, Crab?”

“I've probably told you too much already. And you promised to keep going.”

“I can't. Ten
years,
Crab. Ten years and you can't even tell me if I get home.”

“There's no point in doubting. It'll only slow you down.”

“Did you find the Producer?”

“Still looking, kid.”

“Why didn't you tell me all this before?”

“Because you wouldn't have made it this far if I had.”

“How can you know we won't be on this path forever?”

“Does it matter? How long would you walk to see them again?”

“Forever.”

“Exactly. There's no other way.”

Ben stood up. “I'm coming with you. I'm going to the left.”

“No. No, you're not. I didn't put in over a decade of suffering just to watch you short-circuit all of it.”

“You can't stop me.”

Ben charged to the left and bashed against an invisible barrier that kept him from continuing down the path. He smashed against the wall again and again but it wouldn't budge. And there was no going around it either, unless he wanted to leave the path and get himself killed. Now he was slamming against it out of anger, trying to
hurt
the bubble.

“It isn't easy to accept,” said Crab. “I know that.”

“You go to hell.”

“This is where Crab left me back when I was your age. There's a certain way this has to play out, which means you can't take any shortcuts. Whatever you find down that road will prepare you for what's next.”

Ben grew angry. “How do you know that at all?” he spat. “How do you know that following this little infinite loop serves me well? For all I know, you did this all fucking wrong. Look at you! You're a crab!”

“It's not all bad.”

“How the fuck can you say that?”

“There are things I can do that other crabs can't.”

“Like what?”

“You see me talking here, right? Ben, I believe in the path because I have no other choice. Like you told me, right? Remember, on the beach? You said the same thing. I have to have faith in it, even though I am now very much its prisoner, Ben. I have doubts every second but all I can do is move forward. And now
you
have to believe in the path, even more than you did before.”

“What if I just run back to that house and hug our son and let death come? Why wouldn't I do that?”

“Because it's not real, and you know it. When I get to the end of this thing—and I will get to the end of it—I will see Peter again. Flora, Rudy, Peter, Teresa: I'll see them all. And it'll be real. I won't have to go looking over my shoulder, waiting for the hammer to fall. That will be
my
eternal salvation, and yours.”

Ben began to cry. “Please don't leave me here. Don't leave me all alone. I have no one.”

“You won't always be alone. You'll have company.”

“Who?”

“You'll find out. But the first thing you'll need to do is go back to the giant.”

“What? Why?”

“She can help you.”

“She tried to kill us.”

“Eh, you learn to forgive. Besides, there are ways of dealing with her. Take out the seed bag.”

Ben did as he was told. Two hard brown seeds remained.

“Throw one of them down the next time you see Fermona,” ordered Crab. “It won't grow if you do it now.”

“What does it turn into?”

“That's a surprise. It'll make managing the giant a bit easier for you. You can always use the gun on her, too, if you have to do her in for good.”

“I won't go back to her.”

“Well, you don't have to do it
now.
You can have a snack first, if you really want.”

“That doesn't make it any better.”

“You can bargain with Fermona. Fun fact: She's only ever eaten humans.”

“So?”

“Just think about it, and then you'll have your strategy.”

Ben looked to the fork in the road. “Do I have to kill more people up ahead?” he asked Crab.

“Yes.”

“I can't do that,” said Ben.

“Yes, you can. You've already killed one man. You'll kill again. It's a slow burn.”

He crawled up on Ben's shoulder a final time.

“Like I said, it's not all bad,” he whispered.

“How can you say that?” Ben asked.

“I adjusted. You can adjust to anything if you're willing to live on. There's a tent lying to the side of the road a mile down or so. You'll see a castle past that, but you won't be able to get in it without going back to the giant first. When you need a break, just spend the night in the tent. You'll have your work cut out for you, but you can beat him.”

“Who's him?”

“That's another surprise. But you can beat anything. I promise you.”

He hopped down and waved a pincer at Ben.

“Do you want to take anything?” Ben asked him.

“I don't need anything. One day, you won't need anything either.”

And then Crab passed through the invisible barrier like it was nothing, and scurried down the road that Ben would hopefully travel down himself a decade from
now.

B
en sat on the path and watched Crab fade into the soft waves of buffalo grass.
What does it feel like to be a crab? Does it hurt? Will my brain get shrunk down to nothing? Will I stay a crab forever after that? I don't wanna stay a crab forever. Don't do that to me, God. Don't leave me that way.

He was draining. He could stay there on the road until all the blood and fluid leaked out of his body, until he was flat as a pancake, and then his skin would slowly biodegrade, and he would become like shreds of an old paper towel: little bits that the wind could pick up and scatter about.

The peak of Fermona's mountain was still visible behind him. The walk back would take hours. And what about the house? What if Peter was outside again, playing on the stoop? If Ben saw Peter again, he would jump over that fence and be ready to die. He couldn't bear to go back. Not yet.

So he decided to sleep on it. Like Crab told him, there was no need to rush.

It took twenty minutes to walk down the gentle slope to the right
and see the red tent collapsed on the side of the path. To the right of the tent was a small duck pond. In the distance, Ben saw the forked path carve out great big loops up a
second
mountain (another one?), across a series of natural arches, to a tall, black castle. The sun was setting now, and in the purple twilight, the castle's façade took on a menacing appearance: all sharp spires and peaked arches, as if it were made entirely out of fangs.

Suddenly, he heard a piercing scream come from the castle, like the sound of a man tortured. He looked up and saw the wings of a great and terrible creature unfurl from atop one of the sinister, barbed turrets. It was too far to make out its face or body. All he could see were those devilish black wings, stretching out wider than a house. They began to flap, kicking up a cyclonic wind behind them. Soon the creature, carrying something large in its hands, vanished behind the castle.

He felt an immediate need for shelter
.

Once Ben had the tent staked and zipped open, he ducked past the loose flap and discovered that it opened into a library with cathedral ceilings reaching twenty feet high. Thousands of leather-bound volumes lined the dark-stained oak shelves. There was a small desk over in the corner, with a stained-glass lamp and a gold pen and legal pad arranged neatly on top of a green felt desk pad. Next to the desk was a king-sized sleigh bed with a white duvet. The duvet was fat and poofy, like a dollop of marshmallow fluff. The whole chamber looked like the library of an 1890s robber baron. Ben could smell the glue from the old book bindings lingering in the air.

He walked over to the desk and grabbed the yellow legal pad. His handwriting was garbage. Teresa always wrote the thank-you notes in the house, because his handwriting made everything look like a ransom note. But there were no laptops or tablets to use in this library, as
far as he could tell. He took one of the pens from the slot in the desk pad and began writing as neatly as he could:

Dear Teresa,

I don't know if you got my last note, but all I can tell you is that I've been imprisoned and I may stay imprisoned for a very long time. I don't quite know how to explain what has happened.

Ben paused in the draft.
What would you think if you got a letter like that? You would think your husband ran off.
He threw the pen against the wall. Then he went back and retrieved it. Ben did this a lot with inanimate objects: throwing them or kicking them, and then trying to make it up to the object by fixing it or picking it back up and setting it gently back down. He was a serial object beater.

Dear Teresa,

You aren't going to get this letter, but I'm going to write this to you anyway for the sake of my own sanity because something awful has happened. Just know that I love you. This terrible thing that's keeping us apart may keep us apart for a very long time. I know that
you
know, deep in your heart, it's not something I chose. I haven't fled. I haven't lost my mind. The path I stumbled onto accidentally is now holding me hostage in a faraway land. But I would never be away from you if I could help it. Never. Not for a day. Not for an hour.

I will come back. Stay where you are and hold on, because I will come back. I love you.

—Ben

He drank a bottle of water in one gulp and stuffed the letter inside. When he walked out of the tent with the bottle, a nearby crow snatched it up from his hand and absconded with it.
Really? A crow?
The crow was probably delivering the letter to Satan incarnate. He went back inside, ripped off a sheet from the legal pad, and wrote DAYS at the top. Then he made fourteen marks. Tomorrow night, he would mark the fifteenth. Off came the boots and socks and pants and shirt. Ben set them by the bed and then slipped under the soft duvet, which swallowed him up and seemed to heal all of his superficial pains. He was resting inside a fog of opiates. Quickly his eyelids went limp and there was nothing but sweet, thick blackness.

 • • • 

He felt a nudge on his shoulder.

“Ben. Ben. You awake?”

Was that Tony? Tony Watts? That's what Tony Watts always said anytime you slept over at his house. You'd just trade “You awakes?” until the morning broke and you hadn't slept at all. But that was twenty-five years ago . . . no wait, twenty years . . . no wait, five . . . no wait, what were we talking about? It's Saturday, right? You've been looking forward to this sleepover all week.

Ben woke up in a tight, red sleeping bag. He was wearing striped boxers and a loose black Metallica T-shirt. They were in a basement. Not some magical tent library, but Tony Watts's mother's basement. Burnsville, Minnesota.

1990. Yes, the year was 1990. That sounded right. Ben felt around his body. He was younger. Softer.
No wait, you were always this young and soft.
No scar on his face.
But why would you have a scar on your face?
He turned and there was Tony, with the floppy black bangs, lying right beside him in a bag of his own.

“You awake?” he asked Ben again.

“Yeah,” Ben said. “You?”

“Yeah. My old lady's asleep now. I gotta show you something.”

Tony stood up and shook off the sleeping bag. This was how any thirteen-year-old exited one: They never zipped down and stepped out. They just stood up and walked out of the thing, like popping out of a shopping bag.

Mrs. Watts's basement was unfinished except for the small guest room the boys could use anytime Ben slept over. The guest room had everything they needed: two sleeping bags, a tape deck (Tony had the best tape collection. . . . Ben liked to crack open the cases and study the clear plastic cassettes, memorizing track times), a crappy TV, and a Nintendo console. Mrs. Watts let them bring down pizza and snacks and pop if they wanted, because she was cool like that. Tony's dad was always away, maybe for good. Tony said his dad was in the Middle East, inventing a new kind of Coke can that had a special insert that would turn the Coke ice cold the second you opened it. No refrigeration necessary. Ben thought that would be awesome.

Outside the guest room was a typical utility space, lined with a workbench and all of Mr. Watts's tools, which went unused for long stretches. There was also an old pinball machine over in the corner. They played it for hours at a time, so focused on the game that Mrs. Watts often didn't even bother to bid them goodnight during sleepovers. She would just leave them in their gaming trances.

But on this night, Tony wasn't interested in the pinball. He led Ben up the shaggy carpeted stairs and into the living room, over to Mr. Watts's liquor cabinet. Then he bent down and grabbed a bottle of clear liquor out of it.

“Peach schnapps,” he said triumphantly.

“Whoa.”

“That's not all.” He reached in deeper and pulled out a flimsy plastic shopping bag, then held it open for Ben to see. “Check it out.”

Black cats and bottle rockets. A whole
shitload
of them. They could blow up a car with that much ammo.

“We can't use them close to the house because my old lady will wake up,” Tony said. “But we can go to the park.”

“Shit, yeah.”

Their sweatpants were still on the living-room floor, right where they left them. Mrs. Watts had been too tired to pick them up or to nag the boys to do likewise. They quickly got dressed and slipped on their sneakers (always pre-tied—the back of Ben's sneakers were ripped apart because he kept smashing them with his heel, trying to wedge his feet in without bothering to untie the laces) and Windbreakers.

“Do you wanna hold the booze?” Tony asked. It was an important question. The
most
important question.

“I'll hold the fireworks,” Ben said. “You hold the booze.”

“Don't drop the fireworks, yo. The ground's probably wet.”

“I won't. Swear to God.”

“All right. Shhhhhhh!”

They cracked open the front door. The Watts family cat didn't make a scene of it. Then they slipped out into the seemingly endless subdivisions of Burnsville. It was a utilitarian suburb. The rich asshole kids didn't live here. This hood was for the average white kids, and it went on for miles. You could walk block after block without ever hitting a highway or major boulevard. In this neighborhood, late at night, everything felt possible, especially to a thirteen-year-old.

At the end of Cobble Drive was a small playground shielded by a tiny creek and some woods. It would give them just enough cover. Along the way, Tony paused at a random house and ripped some flowers out of the ground.

“Watch this.”

He stuffed the flowers into the mailbox and the two of them ran like hell down the hill toward the park.

“Dude!” Ben whispered. “That was fucking crazy.”

“You gotta try it. It's fucking sweet.”

So Ben did. Right before the park, he uprooted some more flowers and then threw them on the hood of a BMW parked outside a house. They couldn't stop giggling.

“Oh, man,” Tony said. “That car is totally
shit on
now.”

“Yeah.”

At the park, Tony opened the bottle of schnapps. “You wanna sip first?”

“Nah, man,” Ben said. “Your booze. You get the honors.”

Tony stared at the bottle. “I dunno, man. My old lady will freak out if she notices.”

“Don't be a puss. Drink it!”

“All right! All right! But when I give it to you, don't drink, like,
too
much. Like, my mom shouldn't be able to tell any was gone.”

“Are you gonna drink it or not?”

Tony took a sip and made a face. “It's not bad!” he lied.

“Wow, you really drank it.”

Tony passed the bottle to Ben. He hesitated.

“Do it, bro,” Tony said.

“This is crazy, man.”

“Who's the puss now? You gotta drink.”

Ben took a swig. As first liquors go, it wasn't so terrible. He had sniffed his old man's vodka once and recoiled. But
this . . .
At least someone tried to give the liquor some flavor, you know? It really did taste like peaches. Now Ben was feeling mellow and loose.

“Dude, I think I'm fucked up,” Ben said.

“Dude, me, too.”

“This is so awesome.”

Ben took a really big swig from the bottle. A Mrs.-Watts-will-notice swig.

“YO!” Tony shouted, grabbing at the bottle.

Ben was cracking up. “What? I just wanted a little more.”

“You fucker.”

“Pour some water in it. Your mom won't know.”

“My ass, she won't. I'll have to pour some booze into it from another bottle.” He swiped the bottle back from Ben and took a big swig of his own. Off to the side of the playground, there was an empty Coke can lying on the ground. Tony went over and picked it up.

“Is it time to fuck some shit up?” he asked Ben.

“Oh, yeah.”

They loaded a dozen bottle rockets into the mouth of the can and twisted the fuses together. Then Tony took out a small cardboard matchbook that he had snagged from a complimentary basket at the local Perkins. He tried lighting three matches in a row, failing on every attempt.

“Shit, man.”

“Lemme try,” said Ben. He grabbed one of the matches and flicked it against his thumbnail. It blazed up instantly. Tony was in awe.

“Dude, how did you do that?”

“It's my little secret.” He handed the match to Tony, who lit the megafuse. It burned bright and metallic and now the rockets were flying out of the can, whistling up into the trees and out into the field. They didn't expect the fireworks to be quite so loud. Thirteen-year-olds are poor planners that way.

Tony screamed out, “Holy shit!” and fled up the hill, with Ben close behind. They couldn't stop laughing. Ben looked back at the exploding
can and could have sworn he saw a living-room light go on. They turned down a new street and the explosions died down. Then Tony took out the black cats, all neatly packaged together in one bundle, ready to light. They found a tin mailbox with nothing inside it.

“You do the honors this time,” Tony said. So Ben did the thumb trick (he'd learned it from his old man), and then threw the lit bundle into the box, cracking up as they sprinted away from it. When it blew, it sounded like someone had dropped fifty pots off the side of a building. They were dying laughing now. Ben could barely run with his stomach muscles pulling double duty.

And then . . .
sirens
. They heard them and saw the flashing lights reflecting off the cheap aluminum siding off one of the houses at the top of the hill. Now they panicked.

“Oh,
fuck,
” Tony said. “RUN!”

The sirens grew louder as the boys zigzagged through the hood, aiming for the darkest lanes to duck into. The cops were hunting them. At one point, Ben turned and saw the headlights of the cop car shining on him, boring into him like a pair of all-seeing devil eyes. Ben and Tony made one sharp turn and then another and then ducked between two small ranch-style houses on a darkened Lafayette Road and ran deep into the trees, deep enough to get Lyme disease five times over. They huddled behind a huge maple and sat there for minutes as the sirens grew closer and then more distant and then closer and then more distant again, with the occasional flash of red and blue light coming off the leaves. But after a while, everything calmed back down. The cops were gone.