Jonathan wanted to leave something behind, something good. He wanted to recover what was lost when they stared into the awful reality of life, a reality in which a random bullet strikes a random child and the world fractures into a million tiny reflections of what could have been.
How far had they truly wandered that night? His memory was flashes of a remembered nightmare. It was only a fiction at this point.
The only truth was a boy buried in a box somewhere in Coombs’ Gulch.
“I don’t remember it being this far,” Michael said. “And I had gone back for the shovels. It wasn’t this far; there’s no way.”
“It’s kind of sloping that way, toward the east,” Conner said. “Everything’s grown over. We had a trail that night.”
Jonathan offered no opinion. They had been hiking for an hour at this point, and he was already growing tired from the overburdened backpack. The brothers’ history of being strangely good at nearly everything they tried seemed to mean little in finding their way through the Gulch.
Conner took out his map. “There’s no way we were this far north. The stream is closer than this. We head due east and we’ll pick it up.”
They walked into the sun as it blared between the peaks of the eastern ridge. The light shone down in rare patches. The sky was a deep, cold blue. The temperature climbed from its nighttime low of twenty. The ground was still soft.
The land sloped imperceptibly toward the lowest point of the Gulch. The forest appeared to open up briefly, the trees spaced apart and the shrubs became larger, taking in sunlight. They passed through dying wild grass; the sun warmed their faces. Suddenly Jonathan felt so far from home and lonely. He thought of Mary and Jacob and was scared. He checked his cell phone, but there was no signal, no way to reach them.
The three of them were silent and Jonathan realized he missed the Braddick brothers and Gene, as well. They had grown up on the same block together during a time when mothers weren’t terrified to let their children disappear for a whole day. A neighborhood riddled with small, ramshackle ranch houses that appeared out of the heavy forested greenery at odd intervals. It was a community pieced together over a century and kept cheap, meant to house tradesmen. Their friendship seemed inevitable, four kids roughly the same age living on the same block. They pressured their tired fathers with calloused hands into buying Daisy BB rifles and ducked into the woods that bordered the neighborhood and descended toward swamplands that puddled in the depressions between rolling New England hills. It smelled of muck and rot. Reeds and willows grew fast and far and crowded the ground. They shot at birds, occasionally knocking a small swallow out of a tree or annoying the crows. A tinge of boyhood guilt came with their first kill – a small chickadee that fell dead to the ground. They poked and prodded it with sticks before finally trudging home and lying awake in their beds, thinking suddenly on life and death with a nausea in their stomachs. On summer evenings they gathered at a cul-de-sac of their neighborhood that was devoid of houses and near an old gravel pit. Surrounded by high trees, they tried shooting the bats as they flapped across darkening skies. It was an impossible task; the bats sensed the BBs coming and in their blindness avoided death.
Michael and Conner were the first to take up hunting. Their uncle took them on a trip for pheasant. They were fifteen and sixteen at the time and returned with two fat, brown birds to eat that night. The uncle took them again and again – for deer, turkey, anything that walked or crawled across the face of the earth that was legal to shoot. The uncle had no children and a lot of money, and he wanted to pass on his love of hunting to his nephews.
Even when they left for college and Gene stayed in town, they returned during weekends and holiday breaks, woke early in the morning, shivering in the cold, and ventured into the old and well-worn hunting grounds together.
It all seemed so far away Jonathan could barely recall it, but he felt he was still that boy, young and afraid. He feared then the life he had now – one of separation and solitude, distance from the camaraderie of youth. He worked at a desk and grew fat and soft. Years slipped by without a true word spoken, with nothing shared. All that existed was work and schedules and a family that he felt incapable of supporting. At some point there had been a trade, one made without his knowledge that left him trapped, painted into a corner by expectations and desperation. Like a creature whose base instinct lures it into a cage baited with food, their lives would have progressed quietly and quickly into adulthood – but for the boy buried in the woods.
His childhood fears had been replaced with something different, and now he fought for the trap; he struggled into the woods to keep the only life he knew. It was all he had, and for that reason he loved it. It was a strange dichotomy, which tore at him.
Michael and Conner were ahead in the distance now, dressed in their camouflaged hunting gear. He strained to see them. The black, gray and white of their jumpsuits blended with the trees. They seemed to melt into the forest, revealed only by their motion. They slipped in and out of their surroundings like ghosts.
He heard the fast-moving water of the brook that bifurcated the Gulch up ahead. The sun reached down through a break in the trees and touched them
