The Invisibles (24 page)

Brad stood, rethinking their predicament. He looked helpless, still shirtless, his arms folded, like a young faun still learning about the forest. His mouth was wider than his eyes. He held his light on the gray-green leaves. “These weren't here before,” he said. He pressed his lips small and colorless, and glowered. It was as if he was tormented by the thought that they had been growing here all along. He shrugged and said, “We'll have to just go through them.”

Erik was about to protest when Brad plunged into them, shouting in pain and surprise. The flashlight revealed only thrashing shrubbery and the unconscious swaying of upper branches. Brad's cries became steadier, louder, more determined. The bush continued to thrash. This seemed like the right time to turn back, Erik decided. Not to see the cabin would be a disappointment, but he preferred the cozy backseat of his father's car to going any further. He waited for Brad to reappear, bleeding and vanquished. He heard zany laughter.

“I'm here!” Brad shouted from the far side of the bush. “Rad! Come on, man! Do it!”

With great reluctance Erik faced a cruel fact about this universe,
how never getting to a place prevented you from knowing whether it was, finally, just as you'd imagined it. Brad knew this, too, which was why they had come out here. He closed his eyes, crossed his hands before his face, and charged into the brush. Long thorns lodged in his arms and tore his clothes. It was as if he had fallen into a carpenter's laundry. All over his body the points of intolerable pain were too many to count, and his desire to go back drowned in his fear that he was closer to the other side. He growled and squealed and fought through the bushes until, gurgling, he stumbled out, nearly running into Brad.

The other boy wore the smile of an idiot who promotes leaping out of airplanes. He gestured at a small log cabin sitting atop a knoll covered in high grass. “Here we are,” said Brad. “Ghost central.”

The brutal feeling vanished as Erik shone his light over the dark windows. Fallen leaves and branches covered the roof. Patches of wood showed where shingles had fallen away. It was the perfect clubhouse, a place to live apart from your lunatic family, close enough so you could still go home for rations. He would have moved his stuff out here years ago.

“Let's go in,” he said. He started through the grass, leaving Brad behind him. At the windows he held his flashlight against the warped glass. His elbows cooled on the stone ledge. Inside, a wooden table stood bare beside a short, stout icebox. In one corner a thin mattress lay on a rusty bed frame. It was a perfect villain's hideout. He could see himself, living here, sitting at the table, keeping a journal of animal sightings. Occasionally he would be visited by other outlaws who needed his advice. None of them would have been so well established as to have a cabin, and they would naturally look up to him. The police would come and question him, and he would shrug off their questions, let the rustic
accoutrements of his simple existence do the talking. He felt Brad standing behind him. “I bet criminals stay here all the time. Ever see any?”

“What?” Brad stood quietly, his flashlight pointed into the long grass that reached past the cuffs of his khaki cut-offs. He seemed to be thinking. “Um,” he said. “Once my dad found a family of raccoons inside.”

“Let's go in,” said Erik. He was struck by the possibility that the ghost of a pioneer inhabited this structure, that if he lived here he could lie in bed at night and watch canned goods float around the room. The ghost of the pioneer would write in his own journal, nostalgic for the days when Indians visited the cabin, instead of common lawbreakers.

“We can't go in,” said Brad. “It's locked. The ghosts are out here. My brothers both saw them. Look out.”

Erik stared at this shadowed boy in disbelief. He saw how a little brother could be the composite copy of older ones. There Brad was, trapped by the lies he could not make work in his own words. Without his circle of young adults, he was barely more than animal. Erik would have said all this if he'd thought that it would do any good, but he suspected Brad had never been disobedient in a way his brothers had not. The owl called again.

“Did you hear that?” said Brad.

“That was an owl,” said Erik.

“How do you know?” Brad sounded annoyed. “Can you see it? Point it out. Prove it's not a ghost.”

Erik walked around to the cabin door and felt gravel beneath his shoes. He turned and shone the light toward what appeared to be a lawn with large maples spaced out by a landscaper. Saplings grew up all around them. “Where does this path go?” he asked.

“Don't change the subject,” said Brad. “It goes to the street. Where do you think it goes?”

“No, seriously,” he said. “I just heard something. There was someone here.”

“No there wasn't,” Brad said. “Shut up. Did you really hear someone?”

“Listen, you can hear his footsteps.” Erik shone his light over the high grass and young trees, then swung the beam across the trunk of a large ash tree. “There he is,” he whispered.

Brad came up beside him, heat and the smell of deodorant rolling off his torso, breathing softly through his mouth. “Who is it?”

“It might be that guy from the party,” Erik whispered. “The one with your brother's girlfriend. Maybe she's out here, too.”

“No way. My brothers will kick his ass.” Brad went forward into the yard, shining his own light around, over grass and bushes, trees and sky. He jerked to face one way and then the other, as if he expected whatever presence awaited him in the darkness to attack. “Come out, whoever you are,” he called. “We're not afraid; there's a whole bunch of guys real close who are going to kick your ass.”

Erik turned off his light and padded up the gravel, concentrating on Brad's back, the muscles knotting each time the boy shouted. He seemed so intent on watching the air in front of him that he had lost all sense of what lay behind him. Erik stood with his dark hands raised, feeling like a magician, and when he could no longer contain the giggling sensation deep in his stomach he leapt forward and grabbed Brad's bare shoulders.

Brad screamed, dropped his flashlight in the gravel, and began to thrash. The sound only lasted a moment, but the experience electrified Erik, for it was not a cry or a shout or a girlish shriek, but demonic, belonging in another world. He immediately let go of Brad's shoulders and jumped back, terrified and numb in the chest, unsure of whether to burst into laughter or run for the cover of adults.

Brad flailed his arms, scrubbing imaginary hands from his skin, and turned, gasping for breath, staring through the darkness at Erik. He made his hands into fists and punched Erik in both shoulders at once, pushing him back. “Motherfucker,” he barked. “Give me my flashlight! I'm going to kill you! Give me my flashlight!'

Erik stood dazed as the boy snatched the flashlight from his hand, picked up the other from the grass, and took off in a dead sprint up the gravel path in the direction of what he had already said was the road. He plunged into the darkness of the trees and, a moment later, his voice echoing from the road, shouted, “Let's see you get back by yourself, asshole!” Then came the sound of his rubber soles pounding the pavement, and a moment later he was gone.

The sound of crickets closed in as Erik considered the boy's challenge and shrugged it off, accepted that it was as stupid as it sounded. There was only one road through this park, his father had told him, and he had only to follow it back. He did not move just yet. He felt friendly with the night. He thought of Brad's scream again and imagined him now, racing back to his house, too embarrassed and ashamed to see that he would soon decide against telling anyone what had happened out here, and then, gradually, so afraid of being alone in the dark that he wanted nothing more than to be back in the safety of his brightly lighted house. Slowly, and with more regret than he had ever expected, Erik began to laugh.

His mother drove home. His father had drunk too much beer. Wide awake, Erik sat in the back. The scratches on his shins hurt him the most, but he could nearly forget them in his search for the landmarks they had passed on the way here. The night had
put them away. In the morning they would be set out for him to examine.

His father reminisced about high school and compared the party to the last reunion. “So Gerald and Donna got married and went into hiding in the woods. Weirdos.”

His mother had rolled down her window to help her ignore the monologue. Erik smiled to himself, cocking an ear to listen to his father.

“You know, Erik,” he said, “at one time I was engaged to Donna Dravinski, back when she was Donna Kelley. Way before I met your mother.” Erik thought he saw his mother smile. “Yeah, I dumped her. Dumb hippie. Then she started seeing Gerald, and they both avoided me. It was like we weren't adults. They used to leave parties when I arrived.” He chortled.

Erik's mother frowned. Erik leaned over the seat between his parents. His father turned to him, grinning, his breath full of beer. Large and jovial, he was a mad king, soaked in his happiness. Laughter bubbled up steadily from him. “Yeah, old Gerald, scared I was going to steal his woman! Scared everyone would! He moved to the woods. For safety!”

“Peter,” said Erik's mother. “Come on.” Fighting back laughter, she frowned.

In the morning they would be themselves. Erik received the promise of Monday's light, which missed the other side of the world. The pitted road swept beneath the car with its billion unimportant details. They were going home, where he still slept with the windows open. Each night, he listened for the first bird to wake up lost and call out to others, to let them know it was there, and to hear them call back.

When the park service truck pulled up, I was in the bathhouse office, penciling water temperatures in the logbook. The hum of the running engine gave me a nauseated kind of relief. Ranger Chuck jogged in, kid face showing through red beard, soda bottle full of dip spit in hand. “You heard, right?” he said, meaning the radio traffic about the drowning in Volusia County.

The question made me flinch, though all day I'd kept the radio to my ear, hanging on each fuzzy word, while gray waves tossed fetid black seaweed onto the deserted beach. This guy must have been drunk, ignored repeated warnings, and wound up tangled and dead in the surf. The townies up north were blaming him, which probably seemed fair to about everyone but the bereaved.

“I was thinking we could go up there and get a peek at the body.” Chuck looked at the bathhouse's collapsed sofa and the tide chart on the wall, growing uncertain as he translated his plan into words. “I've never even seen a body.”

He tapped fingers on the thighs of his khaki pants like a boy anticipating something sweet. I tried not to be offended. He didn't know what happened with Elise back in Colorado. I hadn't told anyone in Cape Canaveral. Limiting my response to a frown, I shut the logbook and considered the tobacco shreds stuck in his yellow teeth.

Okay, I thought. Let's get you a peek.

The drive was thirty miles through the mosquito-infested palm forest and then across the causeway to a coastal plain disappearing
under beach houses and commercial sprawl. Preferring the one-night-stand towns south of the monument, I never went up there, and so I ignored the dead armadillos on the road and the bugs collecting on the windshield and watched the shifting, iron-colored ocean go in and out of sight between the grassy dunes. Chuck sang along with Kenny Rogers and looked over at me from time to time.

The public wasn't allowed past the morgue's reception area, but Chuck knew the secretary, a plump, pretty young woman who burst into laughter when she saw him in his officer's uniform. It must have been the way she remembered him from high school, because he wasn't so much funny looking as young. By the way he toed the linoleum floor, I gathered people knew he was the kind of cop who confiscated tourist marijuana to smoke with the women he met at my bathhouse after hours.

“Don't let the gun and badge trick you,” she said, toying with her large diamond engagement ring. “He's the biggest criminal out here.”

“She thinks you're worthy of a superlative,” I said.

Chuck shrugged. “Best reason to be a cop is you can break rules.”

He grew solemn under the fluorescent lights, looking down on the clay-colored naked body of a young man. The blue eyes were open and staring, the pupils oblong and different sizes. There should have been some rule against leaving them open, and I would have shut them myself, but when I glanced up, the coroner's assistant, who begrudgingly tolerated our presence, was watching.

“It isn't what I expected,” Chuck said. “I wish I could have done something.”

He'd told me many times not to count on his help during a rescue. He never touched the sea, fearing jellyfish and sharks and all the other things it hid from you, though maybe he would have
turned heroic in a time of need. I guess you never know what you can do until you're tested.

It was sad, seeing the dead guy. His swollen face was nicked up from the ocean floor, and he couldn't have been older than twenty-five. When Elise's car went down the ravine, her face was one thing that was spared in all the wreckage. For some shallow reason I had been comforted by this news, until I saw her and hardly recognized her with the facial muscles gone slack. She looked like some stranger wearing Elise's face.

I didn't know this guy before he died, though I was still sorry for him. You can't help but imagine what the person must have been like. The attendant was watching, but I placed quarters over his eyes anyway. Fuck it, I thought. Throw me out.

Chuck approved with a nod and long, sentimental sniff.

That night I met a woman in a dance club on the beach. I'd come home to see the night get down to business in the park. Cicadas and darkness owned the palm forest. White-bellied lizards crossed my windows, hunting palmetto bugs and mosquitoes. It was one of those occasions I found myself suspecting that I shouldn't have sold my car when I moved here. Down in Cocoa Beach, people were drinking in the clubs under the glowing walls of Ron Jon's Surf Shop, getting naked on the dark beaches. Feeling great pressure to join in, I called a taxi.