Scenes from the Secret History (The Secret History of the World) (14 page)

“Who knows?  Some reporter said it was like Pearl Harbor – a sneak attack at dawn on a Sunday morning.  But the Japs had the decency to declare war first.  And they had a country and an army and a navy we could strike back at.  Some group called Islamic Jihad is taking credit for this.  Who the hell are they?  No one seems to know a thing about them, except they also claimed credit for that US Embassy bomb back in April.”

Jack had heard about that but had been only peripherally aware of it.  This seemed different, and was so much worse.  He could tell from his father’s expression and tone that he was steamed.

He remembered the Iran hostage crisis of a few years ago, now these suicide bombings.  What was going on in the Middle East?  Had they all gone insane?

Mom coaxed Dad away from the tube with a promise of sausage and eggs.  An almost funereal breakfast followed, the silence broken only by Mom’s futile attempts at conversation and Dad’s muttered remarks about the “inexcusable lack of security” at the barracks.

Jack couldn’t remember ever seeing his father like this.  He was a Korean War vet who never had anything good to say about the army.  He’d always made it very clear that he didn’t want either of his sons anywhere near the armed services.  But he seemed deeply shaken by the deaths of so many US soldiers.  Maybe he made a distinction between servicemen and the armed services.  Maybe some automatic brotherhood sprouted between guys who had been to war.  Like at the local VFW post.

After breakfast he went right back to the TV, and Jack headed for his bike.

2

He beat her to the Old Town bridge, a narrow, one-lane wooden span over Quaker Lake, which wasn't really a lake, just a good-size pond.  It finally had returned to its normal level after all the rains last month. 

He sat on his BMX and wiped an arm across his sweaty forehead.  A hot day, despite the clouds, and despite it being late October.  The 1983
Farmer’s Almanac
had predicted a cool fall for the area.  In Jack’s experience that meant keep the swimming trunks handy.

He looked around at the place where he’d spent all his fourteen years:
Johnson, New Jersey, a small town in Burlington County.  It began on the west side of Route 206 and ended where it abutted the western edge of the Jersey Pine Barrens.  Nobody knew exactly when the town was settled, but it had changed its name from Quakertown to Johnson after President Andrew Johnson spent the night here sometime in the 1860s.

He saw Weezy round the corner off
North Franklin and roll his way along Quakerton Road on her banana-seat Schwinn.  Louise “Weezy” Connell was probably the best of the few friends Jack had, but he hadn't seen much of her in the weeks since the Cody Bockman fiasco.  Though only four months older – she’d just turned fifteen, while he’d have to wait till January – she was a full year ahead of him in school.  He was a lowly frosh, while she was an experienced sophomore.

She wore – surprise! – black jeans, a black T-shirt, and black sneakers.  Her dark, shoulder-length hair was pulled into a ponytail that swung back and forth as she pedaled. 

When she got close enough to see her face, he knew something was wrong.  First off, no eye liner – the only makeup she ever wore.  This was the first time in the past year he could remember seeing her without it.  Her expression was strange. 

“You okay?” he said when she reached him.

“No.”  She rolled past onto the bridge.  “Talk to you in the woods.”

He followed her into
Old Town, the original settlement, which Weezy said was much, much older than anyone thought, part of what she called the Secret History of the World.  They passed the boxy structure of the Septimus Lodge and skirted the filled-in sink holes from last month’s underground flood.  A dozen or better pocked the pavement and some of the yards.

As they neared the end of
Quakerton Road, where Old Town petered out and the pines began, Jack spotted Lester Appleton’s pickup, parked in its usual spot next to the Lightning Tree.  That was the applejack spot.  Depending on the day of the week, you could find either Lester or Gus Sooy there, ready to sell their moonshine.  A couple of men stood by the tailgate, watching as Lester filled their whiskey bottles from a large ceramic jug. 

The
Appletons were an old piney family, supposedly inbred.  If anyone had a doubt about that, one look at Lester was pretty convincing.  Skinny, with his left eye always pointed toward his nose and tufts of wild-looking hair shooting off his scalp in all directions, he wore overalls worn through at the knees, and sneakers with no socks.  His hands and his ankles were gray with grime. His back was bent and twisted, which made him lean forward and to the right.  He kept licking his lips with a big red tongue.

Some people said he made the best applejack in the Pines – a secret he learned from his father, Jacob – while others preferred Gus Sooy’s.  All strictly illegal, but nobody complained.  Applejack was a part of life in and around the
Pine Barrens.

“Where we headed?” Jack called as he followed Weezy onto one of the firebreak trails that cut through the trees.

“You'll see,” she said without turning.

No matter how many times he entered the Barrens – and he'd been doing it most of his life – Jack never failed to feel a little uneasy as the gnarled, forty-foot scrub pines leaned their scraggly branches over the path as if looking for a chance to grab him.  The place seemed alive. 

“Want to talk now?”

“When we get there.”

They moved deeper into the Barrens, the million or so acres of woods smack in the center of the state that hid places no human had ever seen.  Every year a few people walked in and never came out. 

The familiar
No Fishing / No Hunting / No Trapping / No Trespassing
signs tacked up everywhere were a sure sign they were on Old Man Foster’s land. They passed the spong where a cantankerous piney kept putting out leg-hold traps and Mrs. Clevenger kept springing them.  Looked like she’d been here recently because all the traps had sticks stuck in their sprung jaws.   

Weezy led him deeper into Foster’s land until she turned off the trail onto a path that consisted of two ruts with a grassy ridge between.  Jack had never been this way but Weezy probably had.  She loved to explore the Barrens.

Finally she came to a stop near a small open area where a sturdy old oak stood tall and wide among the more spindly pines.  

She turned to Jack and said, “This is where it happened.”

He looked around.  “Where what happened?”

Her face screwed up and her eyes filled with tears.  “Where
Carson attacked me!”

Before Jack knew it, he was off his bike and in her face.

“He
what
?  Carson Toliver attacked you?”

Suddenly Weezy's arms were around him and her face was pressed against his chest.

“Yes!  I thought he was going to… you know!”

As she sobbed against him, Jack raised his arms, unsure of what to do with them.  Finally he slipped them around Weezy's back and gently held her.  He tried to think of something to say but came up blank.  All he could think of was murder.

Carson Toliver, a big, studly senior, the captain and quarterback of the Burlington Badgers, and the heartthrob of South Burlington County Regional High.  When he'd first shown some interest in Weezy during the summer, her IQ had immediately lost eighty points.  Jack had assumed it was because of her notoriety as co-discoverer of a ritually mutilated corpse in the Barrens.  He’d seen him sniffing around a few times since then, but hadn't seen any signs that it had progressed beyond that.

Apparently it had.

Weezy sobbed a couple more times then pushed away, head down as she wiped her eyes. 

“Sorry.  I guess I’ve been holding it in too long.”

“Have you told your folks?”

Her head snapped up and he saw a wild, frightened look in her eyes.  “No!  No way!  And you can't say anything!  They don't even know I was out with him!  They think I was at your house!”

“Swell.”  He remained baffled.  “What… how…?”

“He asked me to go out with him.  Said it was so cool, you know, about the body we found, and about Cody, and he wanted to hear all about it.”

Jack made a face.  “And your brain turned into a big Gummy Bear.”

She looked offended.  “Did not.”

“I've seen it happen before.”

“Well, okay, when the hottest guy in school is interested in you… you wouldn’t understand.”

“Got that right.”

“Anyway, I told him my folks would never let me go out with a senior, especially a guy with a car.”

Toliver’s car…a cool Mustang GLX convertible. Jack wouldn’t mind a ride in that himself.

“So he told you not to tell them.”

She cocked her head.  “How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

“So anyway, last night I walked over to Old Town and he picked me up and drove us into the Pines.”

“Weren’t you a little worried about that?”

She frowned.  “Looking back, yeah, I should have been, but we were talking about the body and how it had been mutilated and about Cody and about how mysterious the Pines are and he said he’d found a cool place he didn’t think anyone else knew about and would I like to see it and of course I said yes.”

“Of course.”

Telling Weezy about a cool new place in the Pines was like dangling a wriggling goldfish before a cat.

“So we stopped here and instead of showing me anything, suddenly he’s grabbing me.”  She blinked.  “I told him to stop but he wouldn’t.  His hands were all over me and I kept pushing him away but he kept on.  He even tried to unbutton my blouse. Finally I hit him and he lost it.  He started screaming and cursing about how ‘you goth chicks are always easy’ and I got so scared I jumped out of the car.  But even that didn’t stop him.  He came after me and grabbed me and ripped my blouse but I got away and ran.”

“You outran Carson Toliver?”  The guy was an ace athlete.   

“I got into the trees and hid.  He couldn’t find me, so he just stood there and screamed.  Maybe because he’s who he is and lots of girls are easy with him he expected me to be too, but he was…”  She raised trembling hands to her face.  “Jack, I was
so
scared.  It was like he’d gone insane.  Finally he left.”

“He left you to walk home?” The urge to kill rose again.  “You’ve got to report him.”

“I can’t!  I just want it to go away.”

“He attacked you.  That’s assault or battery or both.  That’s a crime.  You should tell the cops.”

“Ohmygod, no!  If I report it I’ll be in trouble with my folks and he can just say I’m crazy and that we were never together and I can’t prove that we were and everyone will side with him because he’s popular and I’m a nobody, and besides, who’ll believe he’d ask me out anyway, and I’m already known as a weirdo, so just think of what they’ll be saying about me if I say he attacked me.”

When she stopped for air, Jack jumped in.

“So…you want me to do something?”

She looked at him as if he’d just spoken Swahili.  “Do something?  No.  And anyway, what can you do?”

He had a flash vision of himself as some kind of Galahad defending Weezy’s honor by challenging Toliver to a fight… and being stomped into the dirt.

Jack wasn’t following.  “Then why are you telling me all this if you don’t want my help?”

Why else would you tell someone a problem?

“I had to tell
someone
.  I couldn’t tell my folks, and not Eddie of all people.  And the girls at school – forget them.  You’re the only one I can trust.  And just being able to tell someone helps, don’t you see?”

Jack didn’t, but that didn’t matter.
You’re the only one I can trust
rang through his head, leaving a warm echo.

“So you’re just going to give him a pass?”

“I’m just going to keep my distance and pretend this never happened.”

“Tell the cops, Weez.”

“No way!  I’ll just make things worse for myself.  It’s over and done.  I’m okay.  And I’ve learned something.”

“About what?”

“About getting into a car with a guy I don’t know all that well.”  She took a deep breath and looked around.  “There.  I feel better already.”

“Weez, a few minutes ago you were crying.”

“That’s because it was all bottled up.  Now that I’ve let it out”–she gave him a weak smile and a pointed look–”now that I’ve
told
someone, I feel a hundred percent better.”

Still baffled, Jack shook his head.  “You’re crazy.”

Her wavering smile faded.  “Don’t call me that, Jack.  Please.  Not you.”

Her intensity took him aback.  She was awful sensitive about the word.

“Okay.  Sure.”  He smiled.  “How about ‘goth chick’?  Can I call you that?”

She batted him on the arm.  “I’m not goth!”

“No?  Let’s see…you dress in black and you love Bauhaus and Siouxsie.  Like my father likes to say–”