How old is the earth? Four billion years. My important time? Twenty years ago. Not even a speck. I’ll be thirty-four tomorrow, not old, not young, just alive.
I’ve learned a lot. Things happen and lives are frail.
So frail.
Including mine.
I work in construction. I’ve worked most of those precious twenty years west of the Mississippi River. Till recently I worked in Las Vegas digging a foundation for a new casino. I mean with shovels mostly and sweat, a hundred and ten in the shade and there was no shade. I was neck deep when the ditch collapsed. Choking sand filled my mouth, not able to scream, just my left-hand left sticking out.
That saved me. One hand. They dug me in two minutes, a billion years for me.
Very frail.
It wasn’t the first time, a single bit of luck.
I worked in the bull gangs all over the West. I had no education beyond the eighth grade. Why didn’t I do better? Couldn’t I figure it out?
Oh, yes.
Life was not my own, true for lots of folks.
Things are left undone. Can’t be forgotten.
Those things.
While in the hospital I got some money from my employer. It didn’t help, though. My head pounded and pounded.
A busy doctor appeared at breakfast.
He asked my name. When I told him the right one, he said, “You almost bought the farm, friend. But you got lucky. A lot of people were hanging around nearby. There’s so much soft sand around here. We see way too many of these premature burials. Not many survive. Do you get what I’m saying?”
I felt my heart pound.
“You bet,” I answered.
“Especially considering your line of work. Want to live? Anything left undone? You better start sooner than later. Just the harsh facts of reality.”
He winked and hurried out.
I left the hospital that day.
I didn’t always have a car, of course. I started out on my own when I was fourteen. For the first few years I hiked and begged. After six months on the road a family let me work in their restaurant, even gave me old clothes and shoes and a place to sleep. For two years I saved my money and tried to figure things out. By then I had made it fifty miles beyond Greenock, Missouri, where I started and where everything happened.
I learned one thing on a Saturday night.
I hadn’t gone far enough.
A hot Saturday night. A full restaurant, lots of noise and people laughing and joking. I was busing tables. Not waiting. That fact saved me. I didn’t come face to face.
Instead, I saw him at the front door. Some men I didn’t know laughed with him. Not his brothers. I wouldn’t have lasted the night. He was bald and heavy. He wore a yellow golf shirt. I saw a flat, thick nose.
I turned away and ran out of the restaurant. I grabbed my backpack out of the back house where I lived and kept going, hard as I could, deep into the pine woods. I didn’t have time for a single word to the people who’d been my family for a long time.
I stumbled and ran farther and farther into the woods, through the briars and brush until I came to a lonely railroad line.
A train rumbled by at dawn. I ran alongside the railcars as the train slowed for a curve. As the cars growled and squeaked, I leapt and rolled into a dusty boxcar.
I lay down and hide for that day and the next.
Eventually the train slowed. Outside, I saw a tangle of steel railways. A grey-white city rose on the horizon. I jumped out of the boxcar and headed for the city. When I reached a city street, I grabbed a woman by the arm.
“Where am I?” I demanded.
She jerked her arm away.
“Denver.” She hurried away, searching for a cop, I was sure.
I ran in the other direction.
Eventually I slowed and walked the streets. I’d always loved geography at school. I knew where exactly where Denver was – high in the cold mountains. A huge continent waited before me, vast mountain forest and deserts, where I could hide forever.
I was safe.
For now, I remind myself.
I worked in construction for the next twenty years. I paid cash wherever I lived as I moved from job to job and city to city – Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Seattle, Salt Lake, Boise, wherever.
I worked my way up to be a supervisor for a crew of four or five. Most of the time the pay was pretty good. I had friends, girlfriends, a little extra money most of the time, decent clothes for after work. I ate out a lot, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone.
Alone.
At night I never forgot to glance over my shoulder.
Years slipped by, just like the old people say they do. I felt tired and stiff in the afternoon after a day of hard work. It got be a regular thing. The day I got out of the hospital, with my head still bandaged, what the doctor said ran through my head over and over. I told myself: You will live only so long. Maybe next week, maybe tomorrow. Don’t pretend. Once you’re gone, who wins? They win. Can you see their faces?
I wandered back to my apartment. I sat in the dark for a long time. I felt my heart beat harder and harder. When I was a kid, I jumped off the cliffs of the river below town, just to feel the fear and see if I could win. I never exactly wanted to do it, but I never stopped myself either.
Sooner than later.
Isn’t that what the doc said?
Isn’t that what you’ve known for years and years and years?
I tore up the apartment. I stopped when someone began banging on the floor below me. I was trying to breathe. I collapsed on the floor. When I woke a yellow dawn was coming up.
Sooner than later.
I slept a while on the floor. I woke up and packed my clothes and threw away the other stuff I owned. My hands shook. I wanted things to be right. More than just wanted. I never forgot about it. Every day I thought about it. Twenty years didn’t help. I could imagine the last few minutes of my life and knowing things were never set right – that was worse than fear.
I drove back to Greenock in thirty hours.
I had no plans.
I knew where Greenock was. That’s all I knew.
I drove slowly through town in the mid-morning. Greenock wasn’t a booming city. The town had changed slowly, one life after another. The fields remain unchanged. Same for the dense woods that surrounded the town.
The woods shaded a graveyard south of town close by the river.
I didn’t go there. I couldn’t. I didn’t announce myself to those who still might know me. They were mostly cousins I’d grown up with. I was sure most were married with their own children. After all, they were like everybody else. They couldn’t be involved. They didn’t know.
They never would.
They knew that three men lived somewhere in town. Twenty years ago, the men lived on the edge of town, close to the woods. Some might say they were old men now. I was grown, too, with a head that might explode any second.
My hands were sweating. I felt a stone in my chest. Maybe my heart would explode first.
I stopped by the library and got their newest address. Easy to do, a modern world, a small town.
The first house. The eldest brother. The leader. I saw a rectangular brick house with a wide porch. I parked up the street, walked to the front door, and banged on it. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. Everything began to seem distant.
I didn’t know if I could control myself.
I couldn’t stop myself either.
A woman answered the door. Pleasant, about fifty years old, she was wiping her hands on a small towel.
I managed to speak. “Excuse me, I need to speak to Reese.”
She smiled. “Did you come by to see about the land? You saw the ad? It’s ten acres, good for a little farm. He bought it years ago, never did anything with it. But I’m sorry to tell you – he’s not here. You might look down by the river. It’s his fishing day. Go talk to him. Maybe you two can do business. You know the old railroad bridge? But you’re not local, are you? You don’t sound like one of us. I don’t mean a thing…anyway, two miles down this road you’ll see it. Park on the grass. Follow a little trail down to the bank. He’ll be there. There’s always a little crowd this time of the day. Wait. I almost forgot my manners. My name’s Miriam. Want me to phone him?”
“No. Please.”
I hurried away. Of course, I knew the old railroad bridge. I drove fast. I knew where people fished off a rotting pier. I’d known it all my life.
I parked. I ran the car high onto the grass. A group of people lazed around the pier.
I saw him. He wore a white cowboy hat, blue jeans and a white shirt. He’d gained thirty pounds in twenty years.
He glanced over his shoulder. He caught me in the open, almost completely down the grassy bank and some ten yards from his person. I saw fear. He knew me, twenty years or not.
There’s a special thing about me. On my face, a port-wine stain slashed across my left cheek. I was born with it.
He sprinted for the railroad bridge. The river trapped him. I ran after him. His face was red already. His legs pumped up and down.
But I was catching him. I was running him down. Then what? Clarity, I suppose. He reached the bridge. Many of the old railroad ties were missing. A barrier warned people not to climb on the ruined bridge.
He leapt over the barrier.
He made it a dozen yards, hopping from one railroad tie to the next.
I never heard him cry out.
He vanished instantly. There, then gone.
He missed one of the ties.
I stopped.
People on the pier scrambled off their perches, howling and screaming, rushing for the bridge with its heavy pilings planted in the slow river. He didn’t splash in the river, a forty-foot fall. I reached the railroad bridge and stepped gingerly until I reached the open spot where he’d disappeared.
The open hole framed him far below. He lay crumpled like a ragdoll on the grass bank near the river. He lay utterly still in that special way.
He seemed to stare directly at me.
People from the pier began pointing. Police and ambulances had already begun rushing and shrieking from the town across the river. Some people from the pier must have recognized me, even though I was gone twenty years. The ruby-red bar on my face called me out for those old enough to remember. They all knew the story: my mother died that way long ago.
I was the boy who vanished.
My mother’s story. They thought they knew.
They knew nothing.
The first officer on the scene ordered me to stand in the grass. The medics worked on what was below. Some people on the pier began pointing and yelling at me. Some knew me, some didn’t. The cops escorted me to the city police station across the river.
I was put in a concrete room with a cheap table and three plastic chairs. A deputy waited with me and fiddled with his phone. He never said a word. I felt as though gravity was going to crush me. A sentence ran though my head without stopping : It is done.
Eventually a blond-haired woman about forty wearing the chief’s uniform opened the rusty door and stepped inside. Her eyes grew wide when she saw me.
“You really are Joan Toomer’s boy, aren’t you? Jack, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Been a long, long time,” she sighed. She shuffled papers in her hand. “Look here. I’m holding a missing person’s report old as the hills. You were fourteen. You vanished the day after your mother’s funeral. Your mother’s sister and her husband filed the report. I have a note here that they’ve passed away.
“Long ago,” I said.
“Amazing,” she said quietly. “I’m going to be direct. A puzzling situation. Not so much should happen on a weekday afternoon. That’s reserved for weekends. The deceased, Reese Whitlow, age fifty, resided in this town his entire life, and died by a fall off the Second Avenue bridge. You are involved somehow. At least a dozen people swear that they saw you chasing him. Quite a quandary…A man vanishes at age fourteen, then shows up out of the blue after twenty years and chases this man, who flees in such fear that he loses all caution and pays with his life. I was forced to send officers on the dismal task of informing his wife and two brothers of his passing. You weren’t armed during this incident…that’s saved you so far. But only to a certain point. Now I want you to talk to me. Don’t lie. Don’t even try. Before you speak, one curious fact. Both wives have since reported that their husbands, once informed of their brother’s fate at this hour, took off for points unknown. Not a hint of explanation. Just gone.”
She focused her eyes squarely on me. “You don’t seem the type to threaten three grown men to irrational fear. Not unless you’re something wholly different than I see. Murder, by the way, ruins many lives…as it could yours, friend. I want to hear the truth from you before we discover it on our own. Before then, mercy is possible. Afterward, forget it. That’s the feeling people have nowadays.”
She narrowed her eyes.
I was angry, too.
You want the truth? Let me ruin your day.
“Could I have a glass of water?” I asked.
A jailer appeared with a chilled plastic bottle and set it on the table. I unscrewed the cap and took a long drink.
You won’t believe me.
I almost said it aloud.
I didn’t, though.
“Do you remember my mother’s funeral?”
“Sorry. I was out of state then.”
“Can you give me a minute to collect my thoughts?”
“All the time you need.”
I took another drink, long and slow.
August 19, those twenty years ago. I learned of her death from a heart attack in the middle of the street. My aunt told me. She came to school to fetch me. Sobbing. A death out of the blue…ten years before my father died in a farming accident. I don’t think my mother ever got over it. She died of heartbreak let’s say…The misfortune goes farther. A few generations earlier my mother’s family were quite something. They held a thousand acres of fertile land. The downturn of the Great Depression destroyed the family’s wealth. My mother and her sister received what was left of the family inheritance, jewelry of the first order, some diamonds, rubies and the like, from their mother. My mother never considered selling her beloved mother’s gift, no matter how hard she had to work. Mother, in her will, insisted that those jewels be buried with her. And so, in her narrow casket, I saw those spangled jewels decorating her neck.
Other people noticed them, too. During the funeral I didn’t pay that much attention at first…many people filed past her casket. She was still young and loved. Three big, heavy men arrive in ordinary clothes, people I’d never seen around her. The eldest, Reese, paused at my mother’s open coffin. He turned around to face his brothers. I’ll never forget the look on his face. He caught looking at him. He turned away and gathered his brothers. They disappeared outside the church.
The funeral finished at the graveyard. I followed with my aunt and uncle. Nobody told me what to feel, what I should say, nor how I was to keep going. I was staring into nowhere most of the time. I blame that awkwardness for what happened next. If I were older, I wouldn’t have done it. I would have stayed in my bed that night and lived the rest of my life in peace in this town. And I’d be buried here. My burial would have taken place in Riverview Cemetery, where my mother is buried. I’d be one among the hundreds of graves.
It’s not going to happen now.
My mother’s grave you’ll find on the outskirts of the graveyard near the dense woods.
That first night in my aunt and uncle’s house I couldn’t sleep. In fact, I never really slept there. Long into that night I listened to my aunt crying at the far end of the house. Eventually she fell silent. I saw mother’s new grave in my mind’s eye over and over. I knew what I had to do. I dressed and slipped out of the house. The stars and a half-moon gave me a thin light. At some point I plunged into the woods and worked my way south until I reached the cemetery.
I intended to stay by the grave through the night. Just be by the fresh headstone still sunrise. Just be with her. She wouldn’t be alone.
I climbed the low hill at the entrance to the cemetery. I worked to where I remembered my mother’s grave. By then there were clouds, and the moon wasn’t strong. I heard them first, the urgent, angry and muted arguing of three men and the rushed scraping of metal shovels against the earth.
I saw as I crept closer. Three men clustered around my mother’s grave. I saw enough. I saw the man Reese, the one that I’d watch pass by my mother’s coffin.
I saw that black coffin pulled out of the ground and lying awkwardly on a pile of recently twice- dug earth. I saw the coffin lid forced open. I saw in the hammy fists of this man Reese a glittering skein of jewels.
I must have cried out. The men whirled around, wild-eyed. I’d caught them in the exact instant. In another hurried half hour or so I would have found a restored pile of fresh earth and kept my lonely vigil. And the world would never have known, not until it fell into the sun.
Instead, they went after me. I bounded down the hill.
I veered into the woods. The youngest brother caught me. I grabbed his shovel before he could swing at me and jabbed him in the ribs. He screamed and writhed on the ground. I plunged deeper and deeper into the woods. I ran gasping and ripping at the branches that tried to stop me. I heard the men calling to each other for hours through the night. Sometimes they were close, sometimes farther away. But they never came close enough.
By the early dawn I was shivering and terrified. I crouched low in the heavy brush. I tried to think. I figured that the adult world would never believe me. If they were smart and returned the jewels, I would be branded a liar. One day the lying kid would disappear. A blow to the back of the head maybe. Sooner or later. The dark river ran for hundreds of miles. What could be more inevitable?
I kept running. One day, I told myself then, I’d make things right one way or the other. And for decades I’ve waited…almost being buried myself in the desert city compelled me. I’ve been compelled once before.
I drank the water dry.
I put the bottle down and said to the sheriff, “It was all about land.”
“Pardon?”
“I’ve been gone for years and years. I read in the paper that this man Reese has land to sale. I don’t need much, just enough for a small house.”
“You can prove this?”
“Ask the wife.”
“We certainly will.”
I was looking directly at the sheriff. I wasn’t exactly afraid anymore. I had no place to run.
She shuffled her pile of papers. “I don’t want you to leave town. Not till we finish talking to everybody.” She studied me a long time. “Situations like this, so very personal. I fear we’ll never know the truth unless you cleanse your soul. How many times I’ve heard people do exactly that from where you’re sitting? Keep that in mind.”
I didn’t move a fraction.
“And sometimes not,” she said.
“How many days do I have to hang around?”
“I thought you were coming home forever.
I shrugged.
She sighed. “ Give us a few days.”
“May I leave now.”
“Sure, sure. Let us know where you’re staying. Or we’ll come looking for you.”
I slipped away from the table. Her eyes followed me every second till I stepped outside.
I walked in the sun a while, recovered my car and found a room in a motel on the edge of town. I sat in the room watching television. I thought about the two brothers. I had an idea where they might have gone to ground – hiding in their family hunting camps deep in the bear-infested woods. Everybody had such camps around here.
Maybe, I told myself, you’ll go up there and see what you find. They’ll be waiting. They’ll always be waiting till you show up. Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, till they’re dead and buried.
Maybe that’ll be enough.
I let myself feel it for a long time.
I figure I’ll leave tomorrow morning, no matter what the sheriff says. I’ll be heading out west. Denver in the autumn is something to see. I belong there. I know this far south that I’ll wake to a still late summer dawn, sometimes mysteriously apple green. Maybe that will be enough. At least enough to lead me forward, out where I might still have some time.
[Image Credit : Photo by Johannes Kopf on Unsplash ]
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