Page 83 of The Bright Lands
Half an hour passed. Joel couldn’t pretend to be surprised. Troy was always late.
Sounds played funny against the walls of the gully: the whisper of the leaves at his feet echoed with every fresh breeze. He looked at his watch, buried his numb hand back in his underwear, then wrenched it out, sensing suddenly that he wasn’t alone. He squinted at the thicket of brambles and thorns a few yards away. That thicket was as tall as a person and tangled tight as a wall. There was no way anyone could conceal themselves in that overgrowth, Joel told himself. There was no way a person could be down here watching him, whatever the hairs on the back of his arms might say.
He sure was having to tell himself a lot this evening.
With a warm flood of relief, Joel heard the sound of tires creaking over the blacktop above him. But when the light of the car’s headlamps spilled, briefly, down into the gully, all that relief drained out of him. He held in a scream. He felt his knees struggle to hold him upright. He saw in those brambles at the end of the gully something he spent years telling himself he’d never seen.
He saw a pair of glassy black eyes watching him between the thorns and creeper. Saw them shine in the light with the ancient smug intelligence of an iguana, of a creature from the dark deep dreaming its way up to the surface, hungry for a show. Joel would have sworn—if his mind hadn’t teetered right on the absolute edge of oblivion—that those eyes, thosebigeyes had a smile in their shine.
And then something else registered in his panicking brain. The car above him had come to a stop but the engine hadn’t cut out.
That wasn’t Troy’s engine.
The car door swung open. Footsteps on the gravel. The headlights dimmed as someone passed in front of them. A pause. The person started down the steps.
It wasn’t Troy. The person was wheezy with the effort of the stairs, and by the time they were halfway down the side of the gully Joel was eyeing the sheer walls around him for handholds, sturdy roots, any possible escape.
There was none. Just as Joel decided to take his chances with the thicket, he saw those black eyes watching him again, saw them blink (imissedyou) and the thorns rattled in a shudder: the thing inside was stirring, settling itself in. Joel caught a smell of rot on the breeze, felt his bladder threaten to fail.
A large man, bald-headed and thick-necked, stopped at the bottom of the stairs. The man jingled with keys and some other metal sound Joel couldn’t place. Then he saw the handcuffs.
It was Sheriff’s Deputy Grissom, a man so corrupt he was practically a town joke. He had no neck, and a head all out of proportion with his body—long and narrow and raw with eczema—so that his face resembled nothing so much as a red pushpin pressed into fold upon dark fold of sweaty khaki. You could always avoid a ticket from Grissom, joked folks at the Egg House, if you just paid him in cash half of what the county would cite you. When Joel had started driving, Paulette had even given him a few twenties to keep in the glove box of his car, just in case, she said—“Better to grease the deputy than have the points on your license.”
Joel realized with a shiver that he’d spent that money weeks ago.
Grissom burped into his fist, rubbed the backs of his hands together in some weird private gesture, peered into the brambles that blocked the northern end of the gully as if he knew precisely what he was looking for. He reached for the flashlight on his belt.
Joel held his breath.
The deputy took a few heavy steps through the leaves, playing the beam of his flashlight ahead of him through the overgrowth, but there was nothing there. Where had those eyes gone? How could something so big—it would have to be big: those eyes had been the size of hubcaps, those thorns had been quaking—how could it have just slithered away without a sound?
But no, they weren’t gone. Joel felt that scrutiny, that hungry smile, watching him as his knees shook, as a single tear ran down his cheek. He had never been so afraid in his life, had never been so ashamed—of the stupidity and the hunger and the desperate love that had brought him here—and now, as he suspected that all of the summer’s happiness might be about to ruin him, Joel felt he had no one to blame but himself.
Those eyes, wherever they’d gotten to, were enjoying this.
Deputy Grissom swung around on his heel. Joel pressed himself against the rocky wall, squeezed his eyes shut. He was trapped.
There was a high whine of delight in Grissom’s voice when the beam settled on Joel. “Well—ain’t this a sight.”
Joel couldn’t speak.
“Don’t you know the park closes at dark, son?”
Grissom lowered the flashlight. Joel saw that the man was standing between him and the stairs, blocking him in.
“I didn’t see a sign, sir.” Joel’s teeth were chattering. “I’m sorry.”
“If only ignorance was an excuse. The hell are you doing out here anyway?” (And here, with a cold jolt, Joel remembered something else he’d forgotten for a decade.) “Why ain’t you out there with the other boys?”
“I was taking a walk, sir.”
Above them, another car pulled into the park. Grissom heard it too. He flicked off the light.
It was Troy. At last. Joel had spent enough hours in that truck to know the sound of its engine even with panic ringing in his ears. The truck rumbled to a stop above them, idled for a moment—just long enough, Joel later thought, for Troy to recognize what was happening in the gully beneath his headlights—and turned away.
The noise of the truck’s tires seemed to recede for an age.
The deputy clicked on the light again and laughed. “You must be solonelyout here all on your own.”
