“What do you expect me to do about it?”
I looked at him in disgust. It was obvious he’d about reached the limits of what little courage he had. I strode forward purposefully and pulled the top out of the way so that I could see. A stench rolled out of the car at me and I jumped back so fast that I landed on my ass. The pain in my leg woke up and let it be known that it wasn’t happy about it.
“What happened, Duke? What’d you see?” Barrett called from ten feet back. He didn’t move an inch closer to help me.
I didn’t answer him. Didn’t even hear him, honestly. I got back to my knees, barely, wincing at the pain in my thigh. I had eyes only for what I’d seen in the car. I was still on my knees as I reached in, using the hand holding the flashlight to pull aside the flaps and the other to reach inside the darkness. I could hear Barrett behind me whimpering and whispering my name. It was like a small buzz at the back of my head.
My reaching hand slid across the wet seat, grasping for what I’d seen. It was getting wet and covered with the slime that was on the seat. Reaching inside that car, that maw of darkness, was like putting a hand into Hell itself. I kept expecting something to grab my hand and pull me in. I’d fight heroically but in the end it would get me and I’d disappear into the car and never be seen again. My fate would be whispered around the Acres in spooky little campfire tales.
But my hand finally touched the edge of the fabric. I went forward a little more to get a better grip on it and gave it a firm tug, saying a quick prayer of thanks to God that nothing tugged back. It slid across the seat toward me and I slowly got it out of the car, keeping it at arm’s length. I stood up and took it back to Barrett, gripping it in my fist and holding it in front of me. We looked at it silently and I dropped it to the ground. My arm from my elbow to my fingers was coated in cold blood. The smell of copper filled the air and I could veritably taste the blood in the back of my throat.
Barrett turned to the side and violently threw up on the ground. I turned my head quickly. I can’t stand puke. If I watched him do it I was likely to do it, too. It was hard enough keeping my dinner down as it was. I grabbed a towel off of mom’s clothesline and cleaned my arm off as best I could. Yes, we had a clothesline in the front yard. Stuff it.
He stopped and the smell of bile now filled the air, combining with the blood to create just an
“Do you recognize it?” He asked me.
I gave him a look of disgust. “Of course I do, dumbass. Don’t tell me you don’t?”
“No,” he shook his head vehemently. Then he sighed. “I do. How’d that get here? What’s going on, Duke?”
I didn’t answer him. Lying in its own pool of blood in front of us on the ground was a letterman’s jacket from Litchville High. The Litchville Lions logo was prominent on the sleeve and on the front was a last name written in script. Even though it was a common name there was only one of them on our football team. He was the quarterback. The jacket was soaked in blood and the white lettering looked red in the light of my flashlight, but it was still very easy to read.
The name stitched on the jacket was Smith.
5.
We sat in the small yard by the trailer staring at the jacket on the ground a few feet away from us. Neither of us could take our eyes off it for very long. We sat on the patio chairs that mom had strewn haphazardly in the yard on the edge of the road. She occasionally liked to get drunk and stumble out here and throw stuff at passing kids. The neighbors had gotten tired of calling the cops on her so most days if mom was out here everyone knew not to walk by. Except for that stupid Marsters kid.
I’d been smacked from a few of her rocks myself, so I could see why we weren’t liked in the neighborhood.
Barrett kept opening his mouth to say something but nothing ever came out. I think he was trying for something witty but the well had evidently run dry. I’d turned off the flashlight and we were sitting there in near total darkness. Which was a little unnerving. Occasionally the moon would escape the cloud cover and give us a little bit of light but that almost made the darkness worse.
Finally I could stand the silence no longer. “He was dead, Barrett. No doubt about that. We all saw it.”
“Maybe he wasn’t,” he said. “We didn’t check for a pulse. He could have still been alive.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Barrett. He was dead. His neck was broken and his head was bleeding like crazy. You could tell from his eyes, he was dead.”
He waved toward the jacket. “Then how do you explain that? And my car? Someone beat the shit out of my car and wiped blood everywhere and threw a dead man’s jacket in there.”
“The only explanation I can think of is that there was someone else there and they saw what happened and they’re screwing with us.” I shook my head. “That’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Barrett laughed bitterly. “That doesn’t make sense. If someone had seen us they’d have called the cops. Not gone to all the trouble to strip a body down, come all the way over here and do this and then throw the jacket in my back seat. Hell, one of the arms is inside out like Mason took it off himself.”
I looked at him, suddenly feeling much older than my 16 years. I could feel the vise of the trailer park closing in around me. I’d never get out of this place.
“Then what’s your suggestion, Barrett? How’d this happen?”
“I don’t know,” he shook his head. “But it’s three in the morning and any ideas I can think of are too scary to even think about.”
I scoffed. “You’ve watched too many horrors movies.”
He leaned forward and looked me in the eye. “Yeah. Exactly.”
A scraping of slow footsteps on gravel reached us. It was coming from the direction of my neighbor’s trailer. We both whipped our heads around to look, but of course couldn’t see anything. It was dark, after all. I flipped on
