The sun was setting behind the hills that surrounded Bellows as I gunned past Jeanette’s General Store, the Agway outlet, Charlie’s auto-repair shop, and, on the lot beyond the Baptist church, Toby’s Tavern. Soon I was skipping along the tattered forest road north. My eyes were bleary, my head was throbbing, but that didn’t stop me from keeping the pedal close to the floorboard, wanting to put as much distance as quickly as I could between me and that house, and that village of bullshit artists.
Zooming along straight strips of cracked tar and squealing around broad curves for a ton of miles, I could feel blood rushing into my face as if it were trying to keep up with my speed. The longer I drove, the dizzier I felt — the whiskey, the pot, and the speed catching up to me.
In the dimming light I spotted a kid — maybe fifteen years old — hiking along the narrow shoulder of the road, a tent and sleeping bag strapped to the frame of his backpack. My truck sank into a dip in the pavement, causing the vehicle to sway wildly a moment before I heard a thud against my right front fender: In a blink of the dying light I saw the boy sailing into the dense bramble at the edge of the woods.
Jumping on the brake, I came to a squealing halt, immediately trying to justify what had happened by telling myself the kid would’ve been hard to see even before the sun started melting away. I jerked the pickup into reverse and roared backwards, stomping the brakes and sliding in a clatter of pebbles.
Dazed, unsteady, uneasy, I lowered myself out of the truck, arms and legs shaking crazily. When I reached the spot I figured had more or less been the point of impact, I forced my way into the interlocking thicket, stiff and scratchy with the approach of winter. My chest was clanging painfully as I pushed through the growth, keeping at it until I’d reached the forest’s line of pine and deciduous. Beyond these trees the terrain rose abruptly into a large hill, almost a mountain, toward the top of which I could see the branches of silhouetted spruce stretched out as if expressing dominion over the forest below. Bumbling around for several minutes, stomping on brush, holding branches aside to get a better look, I could find no sign of the boy.
I stalled, wary of the shadows closing in around me, swiveled my head in all directions, but could detect no movement, hear no sound other than my own croaky breathing. The arms of the trees along the bordering woods poked me with their spiny fingers. Backing away from them, I cranked my knees higher to help tear through the tight thicket, gaining another fifteen or twenty feet: Still I couldn’t find him. Confused and growing discouraged, I started wandering back toward the shoulder of the road. Despite the chill, sweat was running down my spine like an icy stream. My hands were scratched and bleeding. Thwarted by the terrain, stumped by not finding the boy, I began to think the accident hadn’t really happened.
I hauled my hundred eighty pounds up into the driver’s seat of the Nissan and, except for quivering hands, sat motionless for a minute or two, trying to make sense of what had happened. When I couldn’t find any place of balance in my head, I sought comfort in the fact that I was utterly alone on this stretch of backwoods road in the central Adirondacks, a road used only sporadically, especially this late in the year. No one, with the possible exception of a curious moose, had seen what I had done.
I slipped the Altoids box out of my pocket and rolled my last pinch of grass, hands trembling so wildly I was barely able to touch the flame to its twisted tip. As I sucked on the joint, trapping the smoke in my lungs as long as I could, I peered through my smoky exhalations into the facade of tangled growth beyond the windshield. And when I still couldn’t find any sign of what I was looking for, I found myself imagining the boy would come ambling out of the bushes at any moment, shaken, bruised, but not broken. After all, judging from the sound of the impact, I couldn’t have hit him squarely, more of a glancing blow. I leaned forward over the steering wheel, closer to the windshield, focusing on a particularly dark area in the underbrush, but it turned out to be the trunk of a dead tree.
If the kid should appear, I knew what to do: hoist him carefully into the truck and drive him to the one-room clinic in Stony Ridge — up the road another ten or fifteen miles; that would be quicker and smarter than turning back to Bellows, which didn’t have a doctor in residence, much less a medical shack. I waited, watched, sucked in smoke, but the boy didn’t appear. Sprinkling into the ashtray the last crumbs of the joint, I tried to piece together a strategy for what I’d do if I couldn’t find him.
Convincing myself my pickup must’ve struck the boy farther back along the route than I’d originally thought, I twisted the ignition key. But the goddamn engine wouldn’t kick in, so I tried again, and still it wouldn’t turn over. Not until I’d punched the dashboard several times, skinning my knuckles, did the engine begin to rumble halfheartedly, blowing black smoke out its ass. Rolling backwards at five miles per hour, I crunched over debris, peering out the side window for signs of disturbance in the jagged growth at the road’s edge. Maybe two hundred feet back from where I’d been parked I stopped the truck, leaving it idling — just in case. As I climbed out of the cab, I slipped and tumbled onto the ground. Furious at my misstep, I got back up, slung a couple of curses into the forest, and began scanning this new stretch of tangled shoulder. Nothing visible from where I stood. I pushed my way into the wands of dry brush, past spikes of midget hawthorns, some of them grabbing my jeans and jacket as if trying to prevent me from going deeper into the snarled vegetation. All these weeds, I thought, and none of it could be smoked.
After maybe ten minutes of rummaging around, I could find no hint the boy was here. Anger leapt up in me like flames. I kicked at the dormant stalks, trying to flatten them, and they sprang back at me, lashing my hands and face. Tearing myself free, I stalked farther away from the truck, moving parallel with the road until I came upon a big outcrop of rocks. Circling all around them, again I came up empty. Too depressed to go any farther, I turned back toward the pickup. On the way, a bird I could not see cackled shrilly, surely laughing at me.
As I closed in on the truck I saw that my right front fender was pushed in, and I tried to remember if that damage had been picked up on some earlier misadventure — a glancing blow against a leaping deer, or maybe some drunk had backed into my truck when I was parked outside Toby’s. Though I couldn’t call up such an incident, I told myself that if I’d really hit the kid, the dent would have been much more substantial.
An image of the boy flying through the air kept replaying in my head, and it made me think I should race back to Toby’s Tavern to ask Randy or one of the other regulars to help me find the kid; if none of those jerks were willing to come up here with me — by then the forest would be in total darkness, I could drive over to my cabin, taking one last shot at finding out if Hazel had come back home; if she had, I’d grab that six-volt lantern out of the garage and ask her to drive up here with me to help search for the boy.
A Land Cruiser with a mumbling muffler rushed by, one parking light lit, and quickly disappeared around the bend. I’d had an impulse to jump into the road to wave the vehicle down, but it had appeared so unexpectedly, passed by so quickly, my arms remained frozen at my side. I wondered if that had been Charlie Grimson’s Toyota — I couldn’t make out its color in the faint light. Whoever it was, my Nissan had been spotted by a passing driver at the scene where a boy went missing.