Ghouljaw and Other Stories (11 page)

“Well, well, Mr. Brewster,” Maggie Boyd had said (it would only be a few more days before Lewis insisted she begin addressing him by his first name). Her voice was distinctively hoarse and seductively husky. “Hell of a surprise to see you here.”

Two years earlier as a senior, Maggie Boyd had been precocious and, more often than not, difficult to discipline and unceasingly argumentative, but had a trenchant independence that Lewis found compelling. He’d vaguely suspected that there existed some difficulty in her home life outside of school that fostered her peculiar maturity. In that unexpected moment in the coffee shop, as Lewis extended his hand to shake hers, the thirty-year-old divorcée found himself quickly calculating their age difference—ten years, give or take—and registered a sense of unease about being seen in public with a former student. His unease wouldn’t last long.

She hadn’t changed much. The tongue ring was new. Her eyeliner and makeup were what Lewis would have described as “Goth lite.” She had darkened her hair and fashioned it into a punky, pixy thing. Maggie was wearing a Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt and her Bettie-Page bangs tickled the top of her eyebrows as she spoke and gesticulated. Maggie Boyd had a stout body and chest—a mix between farmer’s daughter and roller-derby chick.

It was a surprise—during the second week of these coordinated encounters, which increased with frequency, eventually culminating at Lewis’s house—to discover Maggie’s nipple rings and a slender tattoo of intricate script on her pale stretch of torso. The single line of song lyrics was apparently from a band called Dashboard Confessional. (As with most of Maggie’s day-to-day playlists, Lewis was unfamiliar with this particular band.) A few nights after glimpsing the tattoo, Maggie had used her new tongue ring on him with a fascinating, dark-gaze proficiency. They quickly achieved a sophisticatedly tacit variety of sexual stasis (Lewis’s students would have slangily classified the arrangement as “friends with benefits”).

“A surprise, huh?” Lewis leaned back in the recliner and fingered the slats of the blinds. Though the ember-orange sunset was visually comforting, a swollen expanse of pigeon-colored clouds were gathering in the southwest. “Can you give me a hint?”

“I just did,” she said. “God, don’t be dull as dishwater. Put on some warm clothes and I’ll pick you up.”

Lewis thought about it for a second. “I’m wiped out, kiddo.” Then he thought about her pale torso in contrast with his dark bed sheets. “But you could stop by in a little while if you want.”

Maggie made a dismissive noise. “Have you been drinking?” Though she rarely discussed it at length, Lewis had gathered—among other anecdotes about her immediate family—that Maggie’s father was not only bound to a wheelchair but was also a ferocious alcoholic.

“Not really.”

“Whatever. Come on, be spontaneous.” Notwithstanding her lusty and limber contortions in the bedroom, Lewis had grown weary of Maggie’s spontaneity. “Put on a sweater and some boots.”

Lewis slowly stretched his neck. “Are you bringing Zooey?”

“Yep.”

Of course. Maggie brought her dog, a hyperactive black lab, everywhere it was allowed on a leash. She even began leaving one of the worn, leather leashes at Lewis’s house. “What time are you picking me up?”

“Like an hour or something. Just be ready.” Maggie claimed to be an only child. Her old man had clearly spoiled her.

That was a Friday night. And how had Nabokov put it?—that Friday everything went wrong.

Maggie drove a 1987 Jeep Wagoneer with faux wood-grain paneling. It had been passed down by her father and she’d freely received the vehicle four years earlier when she turned sixteen. Maggie had no job but was a full-time student at a neighboring university. The only thing he could figure was that Maggie’s “daddy” (never
dad
on the rare occasions when she mentioned him) paid for everything.

Night now. Maggie was behind the wheel and they were slowly coursing along snow-coated country roads. Delicate flakes of snow had just started drifting through the yellow shafts of the old Jeep’s headlights. Sitting in the passenger seat, Lewis twisted around to glance past the panting, tail-wagging dog to study the two snow sleds stacked in the back—antique-looking, wooden slats with red, metal runners. Lewis cocked his head toward Maggie and in low whisper rasped,
“Rosebud.”

Maggie’s face screwed up with smile. “Huh?”

Lewis shook his head.
“Citizen Kane,”
he said at last. Maggie merely raised her eyebrows, clearly anticipating an explanation. Lewis waved a hand. “Never mind.”

Despite the frequent disparity in pop-culture references, Maggie was sharp; she’d even caught Lewis off-guard once or twice. For instance: her dog’s name, Zooey. Shortly after purchasing the animal last autumn from a classified ad (which we’ll come back to shortly), Maggie explained the name choice—a Salinger novella. The title had been lost on Lewis, but he feigned recollection, nodding his head as if retrieving the tale from some great distance.

Lewis found the dog to be mind-numbingly irritating: hyper, obnoxiously eager to please, and desperate for attention. Once, when Lewis and Maggie had been preoccupied in the shower, Zooey discovered Lewis’s watch on the dresser and used the leather strap as a gnawing novelty. But Lewis tolerated the animal, certain that as long as he did so, his bucolic concubine would remain as biddable to him as servant to master.

Maggie had chosen a leisurely route through the back roads, and Lewis surmised that she was taking him to Southeastway Park.
Of course—Hatcher Hill,
thought Lewis. “Where’d you get the sleds?”

Maggie was quiet for a several seconds. “They were my parents’.” So like the Jeep, the sleds were a hand-me-down from her father.

Maggie rarely talked about her father and divulged even less information about her mother. Drugs, other sorts of substance abuse had been vaguely hinted at.

One Sunday evening months before, Lewis and Maggie had just finished and were lying naked on the living room floor. “I don’t even like thinking about that fucking bitch,” said Maggie, her cheek resting on Lewis’s chest.

Lewis—relaxed, eyes narrowed to slits—shrugged. “You’re not on trial here, kiddo.” But he was curious now. “What about the rest of your family?”

When it came to discussing her family Maggie’s responses unpredictably pendulumed anywhere between the cryptically Delphic to the downright defensive. Maggie had lain quietly, breathing softly. Finally she propped her chin on Lewis’s chest and waited for him to look at her. “Let’s put it this way,” she murmured. “My cousins are sort of like my half-siblings, okay?”

Lewis twitched a frown. “You mean like—” He made a quick calculation—
So your mom has kids from your dad
and
his brother?
—“Okay.” He tried to conceal his dismay and failed. Maggie stared at Lewis for a stretch, her expression registering shame, disappointment, and something else—confirmation perhaps—before nimbly sliding away and slipping back into her jeans.

Now, with the question of the sleds, Lewis was aware that he should give the subject of her parents a wide berth. “So,” Lewis placed his hand on Maggie’s leg, clawing at it playfully. “Southeastway Park, huh?”

Maggie smiled but kept her eyes on the road. “It was probably never a shocker, was it?”

Southeastway was a two-hundred-acre park managed under the state of Indiana, and as such was closed after dusk. Lewis could not suppress his didacticism, nor could he avoid sounding like an overcautious candyass. “You know we’ll be trespassing after dark, right?”

Maggie’s face, softly lit by the diffuse candlight from the dashboard, wrinkled with mischief. “I know.”

Maggie knew about a horse trail on the cornfield fringes of the park’s property. She slowed the Jeep and steered sharply onto a rutted, tree-lined lane that Lewis had never noticed in his decades of living in New Bethel. Maggie cut the headlights and, after several minutes of jouncing over frozen, snow-filled ruts, the vehicle emerged from under the low ceiling of tree limbs just outside an open, snow-cushioned meadow. From time to time, a ragged break in the clouds allowed enough moonlight to cause the wide expanse of snow to glow. Maggie twisted the key from the ignition. “Okay, handsome.” The interior light popped on as she shoved open the driver’s side door. “You grab the sleds, I’ll grab the dog.”

Hatcher Hill was insipidly called “Sledding Hill” by park officials and unimaginative locals who had either outgrown the folk story or were too young to comprehend the original legend. But for those like Lewis who had grown up with the story—and for those who had helped perpetuate and alter the details of the tale—this steep, tree-topped slope would always be Hatcher Hill.

Lewis hadn’t been here for ages, probably since high school, and knew that the truth behind the nickname had been sadly simple: one afternoon back in the early ’80s, a high-school kid named Toby Hatcher had been sledding with some friends and somehow managed to veer off course and into the wooded shoulder at the bottom of the hill. Hatcher sped headlong into a tree trunk, fracturing his skull. His friends rushed to the guard station, an ambulance arrived from nearby New Bethel.

Following the funeral, kids around town (Lewis included) began reproducing the story, embellishing it with macabre adornments. One of Lewis’s favorites permutations was this: Hatcher had overturned and been decapitated by one of metal runners on his sled (not true; it was a flat, cheap, plastic thing) and that sometimes—
on a frigid winter night . . . just like tonight
—Hatcher’s headless body could be seen sledding down the hill, the torso leaving a dark streak in its wake as the pale, floating orb of his disembodied head unblinkingly watched from the nearby woods.

Lewis did not believe in hauntings any more than he believed in luck or love or prayer or the vows he exchanged in front of that ghastly pastor eighteen months earlier. People haunted their own houses, bewitched their own woods. People, if they were careless, were apt to make the real unreal (or vice versa).

Nevertheless, for an indulgent moment as he and Maggie postholed their way through the snow, and with Zooey eagerly loping and tugging at her leash, Lewis briefly entertained himself by surveying the woods and conjuring the unlikely image of Toby Hatcher’s blue, blood-drained head gliding within the stilted screen of trees.

Maggie had tied Zooey’s leash to a tree at the top of the hill. Down below, Lewis and Maggie, peppered with flecks of white, caught their breath following an impromptu snowball fight. “Hey,” said Maggie as she wiped snow away from her pink nose and cheeks, her breath visible in short-lived bursts. “I want to show you something.”

Lewis sniffed. “More surprises, huh?”

From her puffy coat Maggie produced a small flashlight, which she clicked on. “Come on,” she said and started walking toward the tree line.

Lewis took a few steps but looked over his shoulder, up toward the hill. Zooey was still visible, her skinny body bouncing and tugging at the generous length of her leash. “What about the dog?”

Maggie didn’t slow. “Zooey will be okay. Besides,” she said, jiggling the flashlight’s beam at Lewis, “this is something special. Just for you and me.” Lewis followed Maggie into the shadow-latticed mouth of the woods.

Twigs snapped and snow crunched under their boots. They hiked for twenty minutes through an overgrown warren that could hardly be considered an honest trail. Yet Maggie clearly knew where she was going. But just when Lewis was about to ask how much farther they had to go, Maggie clicked off the flashlight and stopped. “We’re here,” she said.

Lewis frowned, but his eyes acclimated quickly. Up ahead through the trees was a small stone footbridge. Lewis, wide-eyed, adjusted his knit cap and shuffled forward. “How’d you find this?”

Maggie shrugged. “I think it’s been here forever.” She giggled at that. “Kidding. I think it’s like a relic or something from the old Pentecostal campground.”

Up close Lewis saw that the bridge and its waist-high railing had been constructed with large cobblestones with a crooked maze of mortar holding them together; several boulder-size rocks served as walkway markers at either end. Beneath the bridge ran a skinny creek, frozen over and sheeted with snow, and the distance between the banks allowed a narrow gap between the overarching tree branches. Now and again a breach in the clouds allowed for ragged shafts of moonlight to fall over the bridge.

Almost reverently, Lewis and Maggie stepped onto the footbridge, both leaning over the railing. Maggie gave Lewis a searching look. “What do you think?”

Lewis smiled, sincere when he said, “Amazing.”

Then Maggie looked down, scanning the walkway. She crouched and picked up an errant stone, which she clutched to her chest. Lewis watched as Maggie shut her eyes for several long seconds before opening them and lobbing the rock out onto the frozen creek. The stone clinked off the frozen surface, creating an uncanny echo that reverberated into the woods, giving Lewis an unexpected chill and eliciting a shudder.

“Okay,” said Maggie. “Your turn.”

Lewis hesitated before acquiescing, searching the snow-dusted bridge and eventually finding a baseball-sized stone. He briefly imitated Maggie’s silent mantra before rearing back to throw, but paused when Maggie said, “Don’t forget to make a wish.” Lewis pitched the rock out across the creek. There came a glassy shattering and splash as the stone broke through the surface of the ice.

The two looked at each other and began laughing. Lewis finally said, “So what’s that mean?”

“It means you still get your wish.” Maggie slowly inched in on Lewis. “You know, you can be a lame old man sometimes, but you’ve got potential.” Then Maggie slid her arms around Lewis and pressed her chest against his midsection. Lewis leaned down and kissed her. Maggie’s upper lip was moist with perspiration from the hike. Once the moment had concluded, Lewis began to pull away, but Maggie tightened her grip.