Boy in the Box

found a final article about Thomas Terrywile – not so much about him but about his mother, left afraid and alone. It was one of those ‘still looking after five long years’ stories, and pictured in that newspaper was Thomas’s mother. She was only thirty-seven years old but looked fifty, lips caving into her dry and withering mouth, her big, Eighties-style perm translucent in an obvious and sad attempt to cover up her hair loss. Even in the photograph, Jonathan could see her scalp. A dress from the dollar-store rack hung from her shoulders. She looked like a ghost, and her words, though printed, were the words of the dead and defeated. Reporters asked her if she was still looking. “I’ll never stop looking,” she told them. “I still get people calling me every year saying they saw him. In a crowd in the city. In a park all alone feeding some ducks. Walking through a campground in Nebraska. He’s out there somewhere, I can feel it. It’s like he’s there and gone at the same time; it just depends on when you look. I just feel like the whole world blinked and he was gone. But maybe if we all blink again, he’ll be there.”

Jonathan forced Conner to pull to the side of the road. He fell out of the back seat onto the cold asphalt and the sparse, dying grass that smelled of rubber and oil, and vomited up whatever was left in his stomach. He wished he could purge more just then – organs, blood, memories.

Michael was still drinking a beer in the passenger seat, and Conner was mumbling something to himself, his normally cool facade giving way to a brooding anger and frustration. The brothers looked down at him in a mixture of annoyance and disgust. It was an impossibility; Jonathan knew they would never believe him. He didn’t believe it himself, but he knew it was the same boy – something primeval in his mind screamed in recognition. His hands dug at the pebbles on the side of the road; his mouth sucked in cold air tinged with bile. The wind shook the trees.

Jonathan turned and looked back at them in horror.

Chapter Ten

They arrived in Pasternak a little after 5:00 p.m. with the sun inching below the western mountains and the town preternaturally dark. It was a place that seemed to grow up out of nothing, like a patch of moss on a giant rock. It was a dying place, not long for this world. Pasternak was forever losing – people, business, life. It seemed to shrink in the cold shadow of the mountains but somehow remained populated with stragglers who found ways to get by with virtually no major industry in the area. The town was originally settled in 1850 as an iron mining and timber town, but social and governmental changes ended it before it could ever really begin. The Adirondack logging industry was pursued by the government, while large and brutal corporations sought to capitalize on veins of iron that coursed through the mountains and played havoc with explorers’ compasses. The iron industry, however, never truly materialized. Only five years into opening operations and building over one hundred factory houses in Pasternak, the Witherbee-Sherman Mining Company closed up the mines and shuttered its blast furnaces. The deposits around Pasternak were too deep, the iron veins too thin to follow to their source. A small collapse, which claimed the lives of five men, finally ended operations, and Witherbee-Sherman decided to focus on their other factory towns like Mineville and Moriah. The logging industry held on for two decades before famed topographical engineer and environmental activist Verplanck Colvin issued his poetic and apocalyptic report to the state legislature, saying the Adirondack wilderness warranted preservation. The state reacted quickly and decisively, creating a state forest preserve that exists to this day. Pasternak was ruined virtually overnight, and the townspeople burnt an effigy of Colvin during a disturbing night of unrest. Old-timers, steeped in the history of the town, still sneer at the mention of his name, and the collective loathing ran as deep as the iron deposits beneath coniferous mountains, which remain untouched.

Few new houses had been built since the 1800s, and the ‘town’ consisted of Main Street and two bisecting roads that created a small square of commerce. The ‘commerce’ consisted of one gas station (there was a second by the freeway), a diner, a bar, VFW, a small supply store, and some specialty shops that sold guns and ammo, bait and tackle, musical instruments and home decor. The white steeple of a one-room church was the highest point, reaching just above the trees at the western end. The small, brick elementary school was around the corner. There were two more blocks of houses in either direction, but there wasn’t much keeping Pasternak running besides spite and a continual need to hang on to the last remnants of a forgotten life. At least an hour’s drive from any populated area that could actually give someone a career, it seemed to exist outside time and culture, a place that would probably never die but was never truly alive to begin with. If anything supplied Pasternak with lifeblood it was, in one way or the other, the wilderness itself. A river crisscrossed with small bridges ran alongside the town square. The water was low from lack of rain, shallow swirls of darkness around gray-white stones. The trees crept in from every direction. One could turn a corner and find themselves face-to-face with a vast wilderness, constantly lurking at the threshold.

Conner pulled into the parking lot of a small Piggly Wiggly, which did its best to supply everything the townspeople might need before they had to get on the highway and drive several miles south to an actual store. Pickup trucks lined the sidewalks. There were a few small cars in a Cumberland Farms parking lot. Michael was slightly drunk, Conner’s eyes bloodshot from driving, Jonathan’s face