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But that Friday, the branches were thrown aside.
‘Did we …’ Gloria started, no doubt meaning to say, ‘Did we cover the entrance the other day?’ but we all knew we had.
‘You think someone …’ Jenny trailed off too.
Gloria picked up a branch, held it like a baseball bat. ‘Do you think they’re still down there?’
‘I can’t hear anything,’ I said, and found a stick too.
Rudy picked up a branch shaped like a club and rested it on his shoulder.
‘Jenny, you stay up here.’
My sister scoffed and grabbed a stick of her own. ‘Hell to that. I’m coming too.’
Rudy grinned and saluted, knocking his heels together like he was in front of the Queen of England.
Rudy tested out the weight of his club, swiping at nettle heads until he cut one clean off.
‘Ready?’ he said and we nodded. ‘No mercy!’
We barrelled down the hill into the valley, Rudy hollering out his war cry like some mad general, me right behind, branch up and catching on the trees, the girls behind me screaming.
We charged to the Fort, expecting intruders to leap out and flee in terror or put up a fight at least, but the Roost was empty. Rudy stopped dead and I crashed into him, knocking us both into the dirt. A moment, a beat, while we realised we were alone and unhurt and had just yelled our throats sore at nothing, then we all four collapsed into howling laughter. We frightened nobody but the birds.
‘Check it out,’ Gloria said, the first to get up, dust herself off, and look around.
The Fort’s roof was bent, our door swung on one hinge. Inside was strewn with leaves and muck, the blanket we often sat on snagged on a nail and ripped. Someone had been here. Suddenly the laughter vanished and my chest tightened. But who knew about this place? Maybe a bum? One of those hobos who rides the rails and sleeps under trees like in the movies? Or some other kids from school, maybe Patrick Hodges or the Lyle boys, thinking this was unclaimed land? Did the fuckers wreck the place when they realised it was already taken?
It was a violation and we all felt it. The unrelenting, unending heat wasn’t enough, the world wanted us punished more. Maybe it was taking revenge on Rudy for stealing a pack of cigarettes from his father, or Gloria for skipping her piano lesson and making the teacher wait, maybe on Jenny and me for not being better at washing linens or placating Momma when she was in one of her tempers.
‘We should repair it,’ Rudy said, kicking a board over, insects fleeing in the light. ‘Soon as. Pick that up, clear it out and go get a rock to beat out the dents. It’ll look stellar again in no time.’
Everything was stellar to Rudy. Didi’s blueberry pie was stellar. Clint Eastwood, man, him and Telly were stellar. Swimming in Barks reservoir, now that’s stellar. Rudy was the oldest by four months and that was enough to make him our leader. A flash of his straight-as-a-die teeth and a flick of his sandy blond hair, cut like a movie star’s, and you can’t say no.
I picked up the board he’d kicked. One from the post office. It was heavy, covered in mud, and he bent down to help. To most in Larson, Rudy was the bad kid, the prankster, the you-won’t-amount-to-anything boy from the Buchanan family of cons and thieves, but to me and Jenny and Gloria, he was goodness made bone and skin.
The girls set about tidying the inside, repairing the blanket, setting the cobbled-together table and mismatched chairs and tree stumps right. I found a heavy rock for knocking the dents out of the roof.
‘We’ll need more nails, and a hammer,’ I said.
‘I’ll get some from McKinnon’s hardware,’ Rudy said. ‘Got a few bucks saved up from cutting his grass last summer.’
Rudy hoarded money, his Larson escape fund. Even Jenny had a few nickels under her pillow. Seemed like every kid had one, except me. I had money saved up but it wasn’t for a bus ticket, it was for old man Briggs’ second tractor. He’d promised to sell it to me when I had the cash and could reach the pedals. I was one-for-two but that kind of money is hard to come by around here. I’d have it though, one day, you can bet your weekly on it.
We straightened up the roof and rehung the door and by that point, the sun and heat had eased and we’d forgotten that anyone else had ever been here.
Rudy and Gloria were over by the lake when Jenny came out the Fort saying she was hungry.
‘I’m craving some fishes, Johnny.’
I smiled at the way she said ‘fishes’, the way her mouth puckered up at the sh sound.
‘Get the poles,’ I said. ‘Perch’ll be running about now.’
Jenny jumped and clapped and rushed back in the Fort to get the poles. They were nothing much, just saplings and line, but they were ours and they kept us fed. Friday meant Momma would be in Larson, at Gum’s Roadhouse, shooting pool and tequila. No dinner on the table. No one looking for us. Sometimes we stayed out here all night, lit a fire, slept in the Fort, watched the sunrise over the fields.
Summer before last we’d dammed and diverted the river a few hundred yards upstream from the Fort where the land dipped in a natural, deep curve. It was Rudy’s idea. Everything was Rudy’s idea and no matter how sky-high crazy, they always felt like good ones. It’ll be our own private swimming pool, Johnny, he’d said, ten times better than Barks because it’ll be all ours. And it was up to me to make it work. I’d read a bunch of library books to make sure we got it right. It’d taken us months, all over that winter. Even when our hands were frozen and we had to dig out the planks and rocks from under a foot of snow, we kept building. By last summer it was full and we called it Big Lake. The water was clear and you could see all the details of the forest floor, like you were looking at a carpet through a glass table. In winter it froze solid and we’d ice skate and try to play hockey and fail. It was a thing of beauty, I always said. A place trapped in time, like when they flooded whole towns to build their hydro-dams. Houses and streets and rusted-up cars, all held as they were before the water came.
Last year, Rudy and me hung a rope on a strong laurel branch. Shame on us but we were too chicken to swing into the water, too stuck to run and fly and let go then get that sickening moment of falling and splash. What if there were rocks we hadn’t seen? Or sticking up branches that’d skewer us dead? I wasn’t the best swimmer in the world and everyone knew it so never expected me to go first, but even Rudy was afraid, though he joked it off. Jenny stood close by me, said she didn’t want to get her dress wet and, despite the heat, despite the cloying, sweating hotness of the world, all we did was dip a toe.
Except Gloria.
None of us were looking for her to be the bravest, the first. We took it as certain that she would go last, she was a girly girl, rich family type. But before Rudy could turn around and tease her for it, Gloria was sprinting. A blur of red dress and red hair as she ran for the rope, kicking up brown leaves, sending them skimming the water. I remembered her swinging high, letting go, shrieking and disappearing into the lake, then popping up like a mermaid, hair dark red and stuck to her head, laughing and calling us all sissies. From that day on Rudy said you can never be sure with Gloria. Momma thought the same when I told her the story. She’ll grow up to be a quicksand woman, Momma said. Careful of that one, John Royal, she’ll have you running circles you don’t even know about. Be the death of you, she will.
Gloria always did what nobody expected.
So that Friday when we were fishing for perch in Big Lake, it was Gloria, wandering, not fishing because she thought it was boring, who found it. Tangled in the roots of a ripped-up sycamore, half-sunk in the flooded wood.
‘Come look,’ she shouted, stick in her hand for prodding. ‘Get over here the lot of you.’
Rudy, on the other side of the lake, ran.
Jenny trailed behind me. ‘But the fish, Johnny.’
‘It’ll just take a minute. Hook’s in the water anyways.’
Gloria pointed with her stick. It was just out of arm’s reach, the thing in the roots. But it wasn’t a thing. The closer I got the clearer I saw. Rudy stopped running. He saw it too. Gloria’s face was frowning and pale. Rudy looked back at me with hard eyes that said, keep Jenny back. It wasn’t real, it couldn’t be, not here. It was grey skin and hair once blonde like Rudy’s. It was bloated but not unrecognisable. Gloria’s stick left impressions in the skin.
It was a woman and she was dead.
2 (#u295ebc36-b17e-5497-a43a-22cf1b066097)
We didn’t tell anyone about the body, at least not at first. A mixture of fear and fascination silenced us. It fizzed inside us, this knowledge, this secret, so colossal and strange we thought it would crush us if we put one toe wrong, one word in the wrong ear.
The four of us stood silent and staring for I don’t know how long. Just as dusk was settling and the starlings began their wheel, we decided to pull the woman out of the water and roots and lay her alongside a fallen tree trunk. We thought it kinder, to have something at her back, some comfort.
The woman, in my head I named her Mora, for the sycamore tree, was the first I’d seen naked. Mora’s were the first breasts, the first swatch of hair between the legs, the first bullet hole.
Gloria couldn’t look at her. Jenny couldn’t stop.
Rudy swore in a whisper and leaned into me. ‘What do we do?’
But I didn’t have an answer.
‘Who do you think she is?’ Jenny said but nobody wanted to guess.
‘We should tell Sheriff Samuels,’ Gloria said and I heard a tremor in her voice. Usually so steady, her tone, rich like knocking on oak, shook at the sight of death. Rudy was quiet, a deep frown clouding his eyes, as if were he to concentrate hard enough, he would bring a storm rolling across the cornfields.
‘Not yet,’ I said. It was a terrible secret, I realised. One that could change everything, and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to run home, to Momma. She’d know how to handle it, what to say, she always knew best, but I was rooted. Momma wouldn’t be home this time on a Friday night and, besides, how could I explain it?
Jenny stepped closer, looked at Mora as if she’d come upon a rat snake taking in the neighbour’s dog. The serpent’s jaw dislocating and reshaping itself so unnaturally. Something that small ingesting something far too big, you can’t help but watch, a jumble of curiosity, revulsion, an urge to help surpassed by a want to know if it would succeed in its swallowing. I’d never seen that expression on Jenny’s face before. Something happened to her that day. Changed her from the girl who would lazily kick her feet in the river, breathing in the sun and scent of evening primrose, to a girl who couldn’t sit still, as if she had electricity running through her, twitching her muscles, itching beneath her skin.
‘Why’s she naked?’ Jenny asked.
‘Maybe she was swimming,’ Rudy said.
‘Swimming and then got shot,’ I said.
Maybe they didn’t see the bullet hole. Maybe they thought it was something else, something innocent, and this poor woman had simply drowned while taking relief from the sun. Maybe it was and I saw a gunshot where really there was a hole made by a branch after she was already dead.
I bent down and lifted a lock of hair from Mora’s face. Everything about her was grey. Her hair, between my fingers, was wet and coarse, grainy with silt. It didn’t have the softness of living hair, it hung wrong, it looked wrong. She was deflated, absent of rushing blood and air. It was human as I’ve never seen human.
‘Johnny,’ my sister’s voice, a frantic beat. ‘Johnny, look.’
The dead woman’s chest moved.
I yelped, stumbled backward, hit my elbow on a rock. Gloria gasped and Rudy swore and Jenny’s eyes widened.
A spike of fear pressed against my stomach. Same place on my gut as the hole in hers.
‘She’s alive, she’s alive, oh God oh God, do something,’ Gloria said, tugging on Rudy’s arm, backing away.
Mora’s chest rose then fell in a strange breath. Her eyes didn’t open. Her hands didn’t move.
‘We have to tell someone,’ Rudy almost shouted. ‘We have to get help.’
Her chest rose again but lower, not high beneath the rib cage. A bulge formed at the top of her abdomen, it shifted, squirmed. The breath was not a breath.
I pressed my back against the fallen tree, scrambled up.
‘Jenny, get back,’ I said.
But she’d bent over, put her face inches closer to the movement.
A shape formed in Mora’s skin, defining itself against the weight of her flesh like an arm stretching out beneath a heavy blanket. My pulse echoed in my ears and chest, drowned out everything but the soft squelching sound of the body. Nobody moved. Gloria still clutched at Rudy’s arm and he at hers. Jenny still stared, bent slightly at the waist, her top lip hooked up in pleasured disgust. I backed up, moss and bark flakes sticking to the sweat on my t-shirt, resisting the urge to grab Jenny and run.
The pink edging the inside of the hole in Mora’s stomach pushed and turned outward, a black something appeared. Wet and shining, it forced itself free, a thin sinuous tube. I felt sick, I wanted to hurl up my breakfast, my lunch, those few biscuits I’d eaten after class, I wanted to be empty. My head told me it was an eel or catfish, my eyes said demon, devil, alien.
Jenny backed away as the creature wriggled free of the hole and flopped, writhing and slick, on Mora’s stomach.
‘Kill it! Kill it!’ Gloria screamed.
‘Quiet,’ I said, harder than I should have. She was so loud, so shrill, I feared her call would bring parents and police down on us and we’d have to explain all this.
The eel spasmed and jerked and fell into the leaf litter inches from my feet. I jumped onto the log, Rudy and Gloria cried out, ran halfway to the Fort, Jenny shuffled backward but she was slow. The eel flicked itself, landed on her bare foot. She shrieked as if stung, the spell of the body broken, and kicked out.
I lunged for her, pulled her close to me, wrapped my arms around her shoulders. The eel landed far from the water, then as if sensing its distance, increased its convulsion.
We all looked to Rudy but he was up on a tree stump, squealing worse than Jenny.
The eel flicked toward us and Jenny and Gloria screamed afresh.
‘Kill it!’ they yelled.
Do something, Johnny boy, get your head together and goddamn do something.
I grabbed a stick, hooked it beneath the eel’s body and flicked it in a long, squirming arch into Big Lake.
A breath. A beat. A splash.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Rudy said, finally climbing down from his perch.
I looked at him, big brave Rudy Buchanan, shaking like a sissy with a spider on his hand. Rudy would take down a bully in a single punch but he was quaking in his shorts at a fish? I tried not to laugh.
‘It’s just an eel. What are you so afraid of?’
He glared at me. ‘It came out of a dead body.’
‘Johnny, come on,’ Jenny said. ‘We should be getting home.’
We shouldn’t. We didn’t have a curfew and Momma wouldn’t be wringing her hands for us. But when I looked around at my friends, my sister, I saw them all shaken. In truth, I was shaken too but one of us had to keep it together or we’d all be screaming on tree stumps.
I’d gotten rid of the eel but the body, the girl, she lay where we’d dragged her and all humour drained from my mind. It changed the day. Turned the blazing sun cold. Jenny’s face showed raw confusion at what we’d found, what it meant. I saw the same in Rudy’s eyes, in Gloria’s. Hooked lips and frowns.
I usually had the answers but today, I was as lost as them.
The four of us left the Fort in shuffling silence. We emerged from the trees and the sticky evening heat pressed against us. I suddenly missed the cool, sheltered air of the Roost but couldn’t face going back down there. Not now, maybe not ever.
‘We have to tell the sheriff,’ Gloria said. ‘They have to find out who she is and who did that to her.’
‘Cops won’t do anything,’ Rudy said. ‘There’s all sorts going on in this town they don’t know about. Shit, if they did, Samuels would have a heart attack.’
Gloria scowled at him. ‘I think a murder is a little more important than your dad’s chop shop.’
Rudy sneered and mimicked her voice. Gloria punched him in the arm.
‘What will they do to her?’ Jenny asked, looking back toward the trees, toward the valley and our lake.
‘Take her away,’ Rudy said. ‘Put her in a morgue. Find her parents, I suppose.’
‘I’m going to tell the sheriff,’ Gloria said.
‘We’ll get in trouble,’ I said, a knot forming in my chest. ‘We moved her.’
‘Yeah, we will,’ Rudy said, his finger bouncing in the air. ‘He’s right. We moved her. They’ll think we did it.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’ Gloria’s scowl deepened.
