Adam's Woods (29 page)

"I have to go, Mr. Fisk." he said, and began pulling the door handle. Fisk's arm shot across the space and his hand closed on JT's, crushing his fingers. His shoulder pinned him to his seat. He could smell his aftershave and stale breath and the peppermint mint eaten to try and cover it up.

"You listen to me, Groves. If you go ahead with this story, who do you think everyone's going to believe? Paul Myers helped Isaac pack up his things, and got a letter from California postmarked two weeks ago. Pastor Burroughs knows he left. I was there when he drove away. You think they're going to believe you over us? You're nothing but trash, Groves. And you know what else? I think you did it and are making up this story to hide it, but you're too stupid to know Isaac's been gone. Killed Adam because even he was better than you. Better than your whole damn family. Leaving you and your mother was the first smart thing your daddy ever did."

JT felt hot tears leak from his eyes, wished for strength just long enough to kick the shit out of Arnie Fisk. "It was Isaac." he said, no longer sure, but defying Fisk in the only way he could.

He gasped when Arnie grabbed his shirt in two fists and pulled him close, felt the thin and worn garment tear under the armpits, tried to look away, but Arnie let go with one hand and grabbed his face, squeezing his cheeks and forcing his eyes to his. He almost spit in his face, but knew if he did, there might be another dead kid in Lincoln Corners.

"You little piece of shit. I could snap your neck and toss you into the weeds, and who would miss you? Your momma? I doubt it. She's too busy sleeping with every man who will buy her a beer. I know cause I bought her a drink once, but turned her down, didn't want to bring those diseases home to my wife. I'm only going to say this one more time, Groves. Isaac is gone. Now if you try to spread lies to hurt Pastor Burroughs, I will personally see to it that you suffer. You might have fooled the police, but unless they catch someone else and we both know they won't, I'll know it was you. Now get out of my car. I've got to go see the Kane's. And don't you ever come around looking for my boys again."

JT felt sweat staining his shirt, could smell the foul stench of his own fear. He couldn't move. Suddenly, Arnie let go, reached past him again, and opened the door. He paused to glance around, then put a thick hand on his shoulder and shoved him from the car.

JT fell into the dirt, which stuck to his sweaty body, creating a gritty paste. He tried to hold back the sobs but failed, had never known such pain and such hatred, and most of all hated himself for the inability to strike back. He wanted to shout something obscene, but he also had never felt so afraid. Arnie pulled away and left him on his knees in the parking lot, crying in a way he thought left far behind him in childhood.

When the sobs had given way to erratic hitches, JT got up and walked the half-mile to his house with his head hung low. Inside, he stripped off his filthy clothes and ran the shower. At least they still had hot water. As the grime slid from his body to disappear down the drain, the images came again. Isaac. No, he told himself. Not Isaac. And again. Eventually, the face blurred enough to become indistinct, and he could finally start to believe the lie.

For a time after, he lay awake in fear that the killer would find him, the only eye-witness, and cut him open too. He might have found comfort in knowing that Eric lay awake, sharing his vigil. But he never spoke to Eric again before he moved away.

He kept to himself that year, glad Eric went to elementary school and so avoided seeing the impromptu meetings and whispers that would begin a dozen paces behind wherever Eric walked. He had already received extra attention from kids that had never spoken to him before, wanting to know details. The excited gleam in their eyes disgusted him, and he wished he still had Adam's blood on his hands to smear on cheerleader uniforms and jean jackets and polo shirts and scream
There, how does that feel?
He punched one kid in the mouth that wouldn't let it go and received a three-day suspension. But the rest took notice and left him alone after that.

About a week after the murder, with uncharacteristic tenderness, his mother had stood in his bedroom doorway and asked if he was okay. He wanted to tell her everything, but all he could see was a whore on a barstool bought and paid for with a Budweiser and said yes and rolled over to face the wall.

He began to take long walks in the woods. Not Adam's Woods, but the large woods behind where a lost boy could lose himself even further. Even in winter he sometimes hiked as far as he dared. He enjoyed the solitude; the security of knowing that Lincoln Corners safely contained Arnie Fisk. He turned fifteen, and celebrated alone by drinking two thirds of a six-pack his mother had left out on the table. When he woke up the next day on the couch, still alone, he saw his father in the empty cans on the floor and the damp spot on the carpet from the last, unfinished beer and felt an inescapable pull towards a course laid out for him that he didn't possess the will to fight anymore.

In the spring he hitched a ride to Drake City and smoked pot with an acquaintance, reveled in how it reduced Arnie Fisk and Isaac Burroughs and Adam Kane to characters in a story that he could close and put on a shelf. He realized his teachers had it right from the start. And perhaps it wasn't so bad to simply live up to expectations. There were those destined to become doctors and those destined to become inmates, and who could say if any of them ever had a choice? He started keeping a bag of marijuana hidden in his bedroom. The following summer, a few months before his sixteenth birthday, he discovered he did have a choice, after all.

He wanted a car as soon as he could drive, to escape Lincoln Corners, and got a job helping Paul Myers on his farm. Paul had seemed reluctant at first, but JT's size and persistence won him over. He enjoyed being away from town, appreciated the fact that Paul hardly ever spoke, and never about the murder. He only saw Arnie Fisk there once, shortly after he started. He peered through a filthy barn window as Fisk parked his car in Paul's driveway. Myers went out to meet him, and an argument ensued. He couldn't hear, but Arnie's face was the shade of his mother's red Saturday night lipstick, and he expected the row to turn physical. He willed Paul to break some bones, but the big man waited impassively for the storm to blow out, and then said a few words. Arnie screamed again, and this time JT heard his own name. Paul shook his head and walked away, was close enough now for him to hear, "He's a damn good worker Arnie, and I need him. Are you going to come take his place?" Arnie kicked his own car, denting the door, and then spun his tires on the dirt road to leave a cloud of dust behind.

He tried not to think about Fisk most of the time, but now felt his hatred as a hard solid mass in his guts that had metastasized since their meeting and the threats delivered in his car. But it kept close company with the fear, pulsating and alive. He began to entertain fantasies of setting fire to the lumberyard.

Paul had cut his hay, and JT and two other men from another town that didn't know he had seen Adam Kane die picked up the bales from the field and stacked them in a wagon, and then later threw them into the hayloft and stacked them again. The stirring of his hatred and fear pushed him to work as two men, and won him the first respect from other men that he had known. As they sat around later drinking water to replace the gallons sweated out, Paul casually remarked that he should go out for the football team. Before he quit to start training camp, JT found a discreet way to ask Paul about Isaac Burroughs, and learned that he had left for California when Fisk said he had, still lived there, and still wrote occasionally. Paul wasn't anything like Arnie, and he couldn't come up with any reason for Paul to lie.

Football changed everything for JT. The hatred, his increasing size, and the muscle from farm labor got him a starting job as linebacker. He was only a freshman. His name and photograph showed up often in the papers, frozen brutality rarely seen at the high school level. He bought a weight set, ran instead of walked the trails in the woods, quit smoking pot and moved through the halls projecting a menace that refused his peers access to their newfound idol. They loved him even more. Before every game, JT stood on the sideline facing the home crowd until he found Arnie Fisk. Fisk tried to stare him down once, but finally drew his eyes away in a show of pointing out something to his wife. And after that, even though he wouldn't make eye contact, JT let him feel the weight of his stare until he fidgeted in his seat or got up to get a drink or use the bathroom. The crowd loved JT. Fisk's son Tony, his teammate, loved him. The girls loved him. This revenge satisfied more than any midnight conflagration of the lumberyard. The murder of Adam Kane still haunted him, as did the face of Isaac Burroughs in his dreams, where his deeper self refused to participate in the deception.

He found the buried children the spring before graduation and transition from High School to Penn State. The town still talked about Joe Paterno coming to Lincoln Corners. He had welcomed the legendary coach into his mother's house without shame or apology, taking an unexpected pride in his humble origins. He wanted Paterno to see the near squalor, inwardly dared him to comment. JT had colleges begging shamelessly for the privilege of giving him a free education in return for his services, and Joe would boogie right on back to Happy Valley empty-handed with a boot up his ass for any show of disrespect. But even if he had any such thoughts, Joe was no fool and said nothing. JT wondered if he even saw the house. He felt like a draft horse on the auction block.

He had hiked by the tree before, the enormous oak that sheltered the cemetery, and even sat down to rest and think in the same shade. But never when the foliage was so thin. He saw the ribs, dug up the skull, threw up and cried. He sat next to the graves until the slanting rays of the sun announced that dark would come soon. And no matter what courage he displayed on the football field, he didn't want to be here in the night with them. But they followed him home and shared the darkness anyway.

Everything he would tell Eric later was true, except the timeframe. JT mistrusted the police or anyone in authority, held in contempt their inability to solve Adam's murder. He reasoned that bringing news of the bodies would amount to a confession of his guilt to some, would put him in the papers again, but for reasons that he didn't want running ahead of him to a new life. At Penn State, no one knew anything about him. In Lincoln Corners he alternated shifts as part time football hero and part time witness and suspect to a murder. He had served his sentence and played his part as whipping boy. The bodies, at least the one he had partially dug up, were skeletons. The graves weren't fresh, the killer likely long gone. Maybe to California. But he had to do something.

He decided on an anonymous note. He chose Paul, one of the few that he could call a friend. He left it in his mailbox the night before leaving for State College, then watched the news and the papers after practice for the story to break. Nothing. He imagined the mailman grabbing the unmarked, sealed envelope as outgoing mail and later eyeing it with helpless confusion, Paul dropping it from a larger bundle of letters and the wind pushing it away through the fields or Paul tossing it into the garbage stuck to a solicitation for a credit card. Or something worse, loose thoughts he didn't dare allow to congeal.

He agonized over a further course of action, finally decided that perhaps the dead only wanted peace, and that the living should try to find their own small measure. Maybe it was just an old cemetery, children of forgotten settlers. Wasn't all of the dirt walked on everyday just one giant boneyard anyway? But as he rose to national fame, as the NFL scouts started showing up in Beaver Stadium, a part of him always sat beneath the great oak or next to a dark swamp back in Lincoln Corners.

After the accident, pain and self-pity drowned out the childrens’ voices for a time. He returned to Lincoln Corners to be with his mother, at her request and devoid of any other place to go. She had gotten “saved” and baptized and went to church now. His skepticism of her claim to have changed lessened as she cared for him with a determination and tenderness his childhood had lacked. And while JT wanted nothing to do with any organization that could accept Arnie Fisk into its fold, he did grant her the forgiveness she begged him for and even considered God in his own fashion.

But he never forgot the woods, and when he felt strong enough he went again, paying dearly for it, barely making it home and setting his progress back a month. They still lay in the ground, but for the one exposed. And no new graves, which had been his greatest fear.

And he finally let the loose thoughts congeal. From a man's perspective, a proven warrior that no longer feared Arnie Fisk, he saw the threats as something more. He saw the fear in Arnie's face now, in the car before he so naively climbed inside. He considered that the envelope had been opened and read by Paul. He could take his suspicions to the police, but their presence in the town asking questions, and the lack of concrete evidence, would allow the killer, possibly Arnie himself, to go to ground. He would live his life as it was, and watch, and wait. A man could do worse things with his life than catch a child-killer.