If You Go Down to the Woods: The most powerful and emotional debut thriller of 2018!. Seth Adams C.
goop girls used.
That made me smile.
That smile made my mom frown.
It wasn’t one of her vaguely comical-puzzled frowns, either, that asked “How did this happen?” Rather, it was one of her dangerous and angry frowns that said: “What the hell is your problem?” and sometimes ended with her whapping me upside the head. In moments, under that reproachful gaze, my smile dwindled and then faded altogether.
“Why are you and your sister so mean to each other?”
I shrugged. Looked down and away from her disappointment.
“You know someday it’ll just be you and her,” Mom said. “Your dad and I won’t be around forever.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I murmured.
“Someday you’ll need each other.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I muttered, really thinking: Yeah, right, like I need a rash on my sack.
“She’s growing up, Joey. Jokes like that aren’t so funny anymore. She needs to feel good about herself.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, head still hung low.
“You might not understand now, but someday you’ll meet a girl and want to say nice things to her. Then maybe you’ll think back to now and the things you said to your sister.”
I thought of Tara. I thought of the things I wanted to say to her. I thought of her in her dress at the bookstore. The shape of her. How the lights caught in the swirls of her hair. Her smile and her skin like velvet.
Suddenly, the things I’d said to my sister indeed didn’t seem so funny. But I wouldn’t—couldn’t—admit as much to my mom. So I settled with another “Yes, ma’am”, and then my mother was moving upstairs, trailing after my sister, and me and Fat Bobby were free and so we headed outside. Bandit trotted along beside us.
“Why are you so mean to your sister?” Fat Bobby asked after we were across my yard and back on the dirt road.
“Because she’s a dork,” I said, as if that explained it all.
“She’s kind of pretty.”
I looked at him like he said the sky was falling, and I saw his face was red. I remembered how I’d felt around Tara, and I thought to myself, horrified and wanting to laugh at the same time, Fat Bobby is sweet on Sarah!
But rather than laugh at him I just kept walking, adding these words in response:
“If by pretty you mean pretty stupid, then you got a point.”
4.
Back at the Connolly yard we slid through the large sliding gate again and picked our way through the rusted heaps of automobiles and parts and piles of parts. From a distance we saw Mr. Connolly and Jim lying on rolling boards slid under an old Chevy in the garage. A clang and scuffle of metal on metal from beneath the car preceded the emergence of father and son when they heard our approach. Oil and grease-stained, the duo waved at us instead of shaking hands. We pulled Jim aside and started to tell him the conclusions I’d come to and what we wanted to do. Pretty soon he was nodding along to our words and one of his flashy white smiles spread across his face.
Although we stood grouped together in a corner of the garage and kept our voices low, Mr. Connolly lingered nearby wiping his hands on a towel. I knew he’d overheard some of what we were saying. He didn’t make any objections, but instead smiled one of his own bright smiles, as if he wished he were a boy again and could come along with us.
“If you boys are going down to the woods, stick together. Have fun and be safe,” was the closest he came to any admonishment, and then: “I have some calls to make and other office work. Be home for dinner, Jim.”
With that Jim’s dad opened a side door and disappeared into the room beyond. Jim walked to a small refrigerator humming along one wall, opened it, and fished out three bottles of water. Handing one each to me and Fat Bobby, he led the way out back, across the rear of the yard, and opened the small gate at the end of the walkway. Side by side, with Bandit doing his ghost impersonation padding along silently about us, we walked to the barricaded access road, stepped around the barrier and into the dense forest beyond.
* * *
Shadows and light passed upon us and the earth as the sun stabbed through the branches overhead in intermittent fashion. Green-heavy limbs and thick brown trunks rose all around us, so that walking the access road through these I felt as if I’d entered some fantasy world; a deep woods in which some wily wizard or wrinkled witch holed up in an old shack cast spells and charms. Looking in either direction off the road, visibility lasted only feet or a few yards at best, and then it became like a wall, the trees and the branches and the bushes obscuring things.
Deep in the woods the quiet around us was startling, so that we talked to each other just to break the silence. I thought that this far in the forest there would be sounds: birds twittering and things moving in the trees and bushes. Maybe the rustle of leaves and branches as a breeze sidled through like someone in a crowd. But this was as if only a painting of a forest, just colors and shapes, with no real life to it.
“Why is it so quiet?” I asked, my voice loud in the otherwise vast silence.
“Most of the animals around here are migratory,” Jim said. “They’re always moving and sometimes all of them are moving at once, so they’re gone for awhile and you get this.”
He made a vague gesture to indicate the silent world around us.
“Kind of creepy,” Fat Bobby said, looking about nervously with little jerks of his head, as if he were trying to watch all directions at once.
“Not really,” Jim said. “I think it’s kind of peaceful.”
Initially, I felt inclined to agree with Fat Bobby, thinking the silence and stillness of the forest was sort of spooky. I could imagine things out there in the trees or hiding in the bushes, watching us, biding their time. Creatures with fangs and claws, and holes where they dragged their prey kicking and screaming into subterranean dens. But as we continued to walk along the access road, the quiet began to lose some of its macabre atmosphere.
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