“Okay.”
Most of the day was already, inexplicably gone. The two of us had gone round and round about what we knew, what we thought we knew, and what we were still completely clueless about. We were holed up in his room, long enough for me to get accustomed to the stuffy, slightly stinky smell of older brother. I sat on the edge of the bed while he lay flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling. He was shredding an empty bag of chips, ripping the metallic paper into ever-smaller pieces as I sketched away on my notepad.
“Okay. Okay.”
His eyes were darting side to side, his mind clearly racing. The desperation of hours before, when he realized some of his earliest possessions were missing, had faded into something more like dazed panic. The weight of this strange, inexplicable situation was only now hitting him fully, and he didn’t really know what to do. It was easy for me to recognize that feeling because I had been there myself just a week before. In the years since, I also think that being a few years younger helped immensely in this situation. I might have been stepping into something resembling adulthood, but I still had one foot firmly planted in the world of children. Part of me – probably a larger part than I would have admitted – believed completely that monsters were real. The fact that they might steal toys was just a detail at that point.
“What do you think we should do?” I asked when I couldn’t stand to hear the paper rip one more time.
“Okay,” he said, staring up at the ceiling, apparently not hearing a word I said. I leaned over and snatched the bag from his hand and tossed it on the floor.
“Snap out of it,” I demanded.
“What do you want from me?” he said, leaning up on one elbow. “I mean… what the hell are we supposed to do?”
He was scratching at his lower back without even thinking about it, and when he realized what he was doing, he recoiled in disgust.
“What can we do?”
There weren’t many options. We both knew it.
“One thing or the other,” I replied.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Offense or defense.”
Andy hated football, but it was something that Dad and I watched whenever the mood struck us on lazy Sunday afternoons. Even so, my brother still got the point.
“Defense didn’t work so good last time,” he replied.
I sneered at him, but I couldn’t argue that he was wrong. My planning, such as it was, had been undone by nothing more out of the ordinary than a nap.
“So? The two of us together might do a better job.” My voice was pitifully unconvincing, and it trailed off at the end. Andy picked up on this instantly, and he could have used it to attack, to break me down, to force me to see things his way. It’s exactly what I would have done. Instead, he seemed to carefully consider the idea, and even if he was just humoring me, I felt better.
“Maybe we could. If we came up with some kind of plan to keep it out. Changing the locks or something.”
“That won’t do it,” I told him. “I saw him pick the lock on my desk. It took him all of two seconds. He’s got all these little tools… I bet that’s what he does, just going from house to house, taking things while people are sleeping. You can’t hear him. He moves so fast you can barely see him. I mean, this thing could have been walking on our faces while we slept and we wouldn’t know it.”
He shuddered and scratched at his back.
“Then we tell Dad.”
Again, the years between us from kid to teen began to shine.
“No,” I said bluntly.
“Why not? I mean, he could help us. Give us an idea of what to do.”
“You really think he would believe us?” I asked.
“No,” he replied as he cast his eyes down on the floor. “I barely believe it and I saw the thing.”
I was corralling him now, leading him down the only path I knew to take. I was already there; I just needed him to get on board, and the only way he ever would was if he got there himself.
“So what’s left?” he asked.
“I think you know.”
“Offense,” he replied softly.
“Offense.”
There was a sudden change in him. I saw it in his eyes as he raised them to meet my own. They were gray eyes, like my mother’s. They could be, in his younger days, wonderfully sweet, but there was also an icy coldness to them, a frozen glare that spoke of the ability to go much farther than I would ever dream of. My gaze was fire that burned on the surface, hot but not nearly as dangerous as it looked. His was an ember, hidden inside, boiling, hot enough to melt the world.
“Then we kill it,” he said plainly. “No traps. No tricks. Just dead.”
I think I must have shuddered when he said it, but I didn’t disagree, not when he had me locked in those frozen eyes.
“But first,” he added, “we have to find it.”
As I thumb through this, I realize I’ve probably been a little too hard on Dad. I’m not the most mature person in the world, even knocking on the door of thirty, and I feel like I’ve only just started to really look at myself in an honest way. Writing all this down, even if no one ever reads it, is part of that. Dad might not have been the perfect guy to be stuck with two kids by himself, but he did the best he could, and he did teach us a lot of things I wouldn’t have picked up otherwise.
Some families went skiing.
Some families played sports.
We went camping.
First off, I don’t want to make it sound any grander than it really is. We didn’t own a camper. We didn’t know anyone who had a cabin. What we did own was a tent, just big enough for the three of us. Dad had to lie in the middle, because the sides were too narrow for him to squeeze up against without bringing the roof down on us.
No matter what time of year we went, the first part of the first day was usually the same. Andy and I would stroll around, gathering whatever sticks we could find, working our way up from small to large, with plenty of dry kindling like Dad had shown us. Meanwhile, back at our campsite, Dad would spend an hour, sometimes two, cussing and kicking at the dirt as he fought to get the tent assembled and up in one piece. Before night started drifting down on us, we would gather around the pit and take turns trying to start the fire. Dad smoked in those days, but he never let us use his lighter. He had a long rectangle of steel, and he’d pick up chunks of flint from military supply stores. It wasn’t that he was some kind of survivalist. Hell, we had a cooler full of Yoo-Hoos sitting three feet away. It was just that he wanted to teach us something.
Sometimes, we’d bring rods and reels and take them down to the lake. Whatever we caught, we’d lop its head off then and there and take turns slitting open the belly and sliding a finger through the hole. I can still remember the slightly gaggy feeling I got whenever I glanced down at the string of entrails, but I did it all the same. Andy didn’t seem to mind at all, and it was clear that he was simply better at this outdoors stuff than me. More in tune, you might say. Regardless of whether it was bluegill, catfish, even the occasional bass, we would take it back to the fire and roast it on a spit. Usually, there wasn’t enough for more than a few bites, but everyone got to taste it whether they really wanted to or not. A bite or two of half-burned fish, followed by a premade bologna sandwich. Something like heaven.
Sometimes we stayed out there for one night, sometimes for two. We never bathed, because where would you bathe? We pissed and shit in the woods and brushed our teeth with water from Igloo coolers. When it rained, we wore ponchos and didn’t mind when our feet began peeling in our tennis shoes. We ate out of coolers or bits of whatever we found, skinned, cleaned. It wasn’t surviving, not exactly, but it was closer than most of my friends ever got. We grew to understand that being dirty, being grungy, was part of being human.