The Wildman (5 page)

As stunned as everyone else, he looked at his friends, all seated around the table. A feeling of desperate sadness all but overwhelmed him. He locked eyes with Evan for a moment and felt compelled to say something, but he had no idea what he would say or even if he’d be able to speak.

The thought that his friends … every single one of them—Evan and Fred and Tyler and Mike … even himself—were going to die froze his voice in his throat. He barely had control of his eyes as he shifted them back and forth from friend to friend and tried to comprehend this horrible thought. The coldness that had gripped him all afternoon settled deeper into his stomach, sending tendrils into his chest.

He wondered if this feeling of dread would ever go away.

In that instant, something fundamental had changed in him.

This was the moment he first realized that life is all too real, and we’re all going to die some day. Even then, he knew it was something he would never be able to ignore or forget.

“Oh my God,” one of the counselors at a table behind him said in a hushed, broken voice. “I can’t
believe
it.”

When Jeff turned to see who had spoken, all he could see was a sea of pale, shocked faces with wide-open eyes and mouths that gaped open in stunned amazement and horror.

Mr. Farnham was still talking. Jeff realized he had been talking all along, and he hadn’t heard a thing he said. He was going on about how he would have to contact all of their parents and ask them to come and pick them up as soon as possible. The camp season was over.

This was the last day of summer.

As soon as what Farnham was saying registered on Jeff, he glanced at Fred and saw a glaze of tears in his eyes. He suspected Fred was thinking, not about Jimmy being dead, but about how horrible his life was going to be as soon as he got back home.

Mr. Farnham acknowledged that closing camp early would cause problems for many of the campers, since there were still four days left in the session, but he assured them that he would make arrangements for anyone who had to stay the full time. Otherwise, tomorrow morning, he would begin making phone calls to their homes, and they should start packing.

“Man, this sucks,” Evan said, leaning close to Jeff.

Jeff couldn’t look at his friend. He was only dimly aware that he was crying.

When he turned and looked away, his gaze shifted to the windows facing the lake. The sun had dropped behind the mountains to the west, and long shadows stretched across the campgrounds. Blue light suddenly flashed so fast Jeff’s first thought was a bolt of lightning had struck somewhere nearby. He stared at the gathering darkness, waiting for the clap of thunder to come. Instead, a split second later, another flash lit up the darkening landscape.

Jeff’s next thought was that someone was outside taking photographs, and their flashbulbs were lighting up the area. But as he stared out the window, more flashes came until he saw they were in a regular pattern. It was the flash of police emergency lights.

Jeff suddenly knew exactly what was going on.

The police and probably an ambulance boat from the mainland were here to pick up Jimmy’s body.

Mr. Farnham was making such a big deal in front of the campers because he wanted to divert their attention from what was going on outside so they wouldn’t see what was happening.

Jeff shifted his eyes back to Mr. Farnham and then, without a word, slid his chair back and stood up.

“Where you going?” Ferggie, the counselor seated at their table, asked.

“I—uh, I have to go to the bathroom.” Jeff kept his voice low because Mr. Farnham was still detailing their plans for tomorrow.

“Make it quick,” Ferggie said, scowling.

Jeff nodded and, ducking low so he wouldn’t draw attention to himself, wove his way between the tables down the short corridor to the bathroom. A few steps past the bathroom door on the left was an exit.

With a quick look to see if anyone was watching him, Jeff pushed the screen door open and stepped out onto the small porch. He eased the door back carefully so the spring wouldn’t snap it back too fast and make it slam. After another glance to make sure no counselors had noticed what he was doing, he jumped off the landing and started running toward the beach and the flashing blue lights.

As he got closer, he slowed down and, keeping to the darkest shadows of the pine trees that lined the beach, approached the scene with caution. As Jeff had expected, a police boat was pulling up to one of the docks that defined the beginner’s swimming area. Two other boats had stopped and were waiting further out. It looked like the entire police force of Arden, the nearest town, was here along with several volunteers.

What caught his attention was the group of people gathered on the beach. The searchlight from the police boat was directed on the beach, illuminating four men who were struggling with a stretcher with a sheet draped over it. The sheet had a slight bulge in the middle that had a sharply defined shadow, cast by the harsh glare of the searchlight.

Jeff knew exactly what was making that bulge.

“Oh my God,” he whispered, trying to comprehend that Jimmy was under that white sheet.

Jeff’s knees had turned to jelly, and he had to lean against a pine tree to keep from falling down.

The men struggled a bit in the sand as they made their way with the stretcher to the dock. They were going to load it and its burden onto the ambulance boat and leave. After that, he would never see his friend Jimmy Foster again.

No … This can’t be happening,
he thought as he stared in stunned amazement at the activity on the beach.

He glanced over his shoulder at the dining hall and the row of cabins that lined the pathway behind it. Everything looked so ordinary … so quiet … so safe, but then the sound of someone speaking over the police radio on the boat snapped his attention back to what was happening on the beach. Pressing the side of his face against the pine tree, he watched the men as they approached the water’s edge with their burden. One of the policemen in the boat got out and walked down the dock toward them.

Without making a conscious decision, Jeff pushed off from the tree and, moving mechanically, like a robot, started walking toward them. The muscles in his legs were trembling violently as he headed in a straight line that would intersect the men before the reached the dock. Everyone on the scene was focused on what they were doing, so they didn’t notice Jeff until he was less than twenty feet away from the men carrying the stretcher.

“Hey! Kid! You ain’t supposed to be here,” one of the men shouted.

Jeff looked at him with a blank stare. The town cop was moving toward him, so he broke into a run.

“He was my friend,” Jeff said in a high, strangled voice. Tears streamed from his eyes, blurring his vision and turning the late afternoon light him into a smear of shadows and darkness, pierced by the blue flashing light.

Another man who was closer to Jeff reached out and snagged him by the arm, but Jeff twisted out of his grasp and kept running without breaking stride.

“He was my friend,” he said again before his voice climbed into a wild, ragged scream. Once he was close to the stretcher, he lunged forward. Before any of the men could react, he grabbed the sheet and tore it away.

What he saw staggered him.

He let out a loud, barking bray that echoed from the nearby forest.

Jimmy was lying on his back with his eyes wide open. Unblinking. The glassy surface reflected the flashing police light with an unnatural brilliance. His head was turned to one side, probably from the men trying to move away from Jeff as he ran toward them. Jimmy’s thin, dark hair was wet and plastered to his skull in tiny curlicues. Except for the dark bruises under his eyes, his skin was as white as the sheet that covered him. It looked like someone had smudged his face with soot from a campfire. His arms and legs looked like sun-bleached sticks with tiny blue lines under the skin, but it was his throat that caught and held Jeff’s attention.

That night and years later Jeff tried hard to convince himself it had just been a shadow cast by the police lights … or maybe some water weeds still clung to his skin because it was obvious Jimmy had been pulled from the lake.

Whatever the cause, there was a dark slash that angled across Jimmy’s throat just below his jaw line.

“Come on, kid,” one of the volunteer firemen said. “Get the hell outta here.”

The man didn’t sound all that angry, and when Jeff looked at him, there was an expression of sadness in his eyes.

“He …” Jeff started to say, but he had to stop and take a watery breath. “He was one of my friends.”

There was no way he could absorb what he was seeing, but one of the men quickly covered up Jimmy’s body again, and they stepped up onto the dock.

Taking Jeff gently by the arm, the volunteer fireman led him up from the beach. The feeling of abandoning his friend overwhelmed Jeff. All he could think was, he couldn’t let them do this. He had to stop them from taking Jimmy away. They shouldn’t be putting him on that ambulance boat and leaving. He and Jimmy were best friends.

They were B.F.F.

He should stay with him so Jimmy—who always got scared when Mark told them a scary story at night—wouldn’t be alone.

“There’s nothing more you can do, son,” the man said, his voice low and comforting.

Jeff knew he was right, but he couldn’t stop stammering, “But he’s my best … he’s my best—” until—finally—his voice choked off.

A heavy wave of darkness spread across his sight as he looked up at the sky. High overhead, the first few stars glittered. A crescent moon shined down on the beach, its reflection rippling like white ribbons in the dark water. The pine trees were all leaning inward. The dark slashes of branches looked like widening cracks in the sky. Jeff was afraid that—any second now—pieces of the sky were going to break off and come crashing down on him.

“You okay there kid?” the man beside him asked. His hand rested lightly on Jeff’s shoulder, but his voice seemed to be coming from someplace far, far away.

Jeff turned and looked at him, but it felt as though his head didn’t stop moving. It kept turning, spinning around on his neck like a child’s top. The world became a kaleidoscope of flashing blue light, smeared faces, dark figures of people moving around him, and tall, black trees that writhed like snakes around him. Shimmering pools of bright yellow and white light dazzled his vision. And then, with a loud whooshing roar, everything went black.

* * *

Some time later—he had no idea when—Jeff regained consciousness.

He was lying on something soft, but he knew it wasn’t his bunk in the tent or his bed back at home. When his vision cleared a bit, he found himself looking up at Mr. Farnham’s face. He was bending over him with an expression of genuine concern.

“Hello there,” Farnham said in a whisper. “How are you feeling?”

Jeff licked his lips to answer but couldn’t. His mouth was dry, and when he tried to speak, the only sound that came out was a strangled croak.

“Would you like a sip of water?”

This was a woman’s voice, and Jeff finally realized he was in the camp infirmary. Mrs. Stott, the camp nurse, appeared at the bedside and held a glass with a straw up to his mouth. Jeff pursed his lips and sucked, amazed at how refreshing the tiny sip of water was on his parched throat.

“Whoa. Not too much,” Mrs. Stott said. She slipped the straw out of his mouth before he could protest.

“Wha—what happened?” Jeff asked.

“You fainted,” Farnham said. For an instant, his expression hardened, but then he sighed and rubbed his forehead, wincing as though suffering some deep, internal pain.

“You know,” Farnham continued, “you shouldn’t have gone out there. I was hoping the police would take care of things so you campers wouldn’t have to see what was going on.”

“What
was
going on?” Jeff asked. He was surprised that he would actually challenge an adult—the camp director, no less. “What happened to Jimmy?”

Mr. Farnham looked away and shook his head slowly from side to side.

“That’s up to the authorities to determine,” he said. “My responsibility is to protect my campers.”

Protect us like you did Jimmy?
Jeff wanted to ask, but he remained silent. It frightened him to see the obvious confusion and hurt in Mr. Farnham’s expression.

“I have a lot of phone calls to make tonight and tomorrow so you boys can go home.” Farnham paused and took a breath. When swallowed, his throat made a funny gulping sound. “This has been a terrible, a
terrible
thing, but we can all pull together and get through it. Right?”

Not entirely sure why Mr. Farnham needed his reassurance, Jeff nodded slightly. The slight motion sent a blaze of pain through his neck.

“Mrs. Stott will take good care of you, Jeff. I have a lot of things to attend to.” Farnham reached down and patted Jeff on the shoulder before turning to leave.

Raising himself up and supporting himself on his elbows, Jeff watched Farnham walk out of the infirmary. The spring on the screen door made a loud
twang
as it stretched out and then pulled the door back, slamming it shut with a bang as loud as a gun.