I moved to Tulset County when I was four years old. My father had to change jobs, or at least that’s what I was told later on when I was old enough to wonder what led my parents to think that anyone would want to live out here. Tulset County was one of the poorest counties in the state if you didn’t count a cluster of rich families that had massive estates up in the foothills, and it was one of the richest if you did count them. Most of the people you’d run across on the street either worked a minimum wage job at a store or restaurant in town, or they worked as help at one of the big homes. But that was just in the last fifty years. I guess that even people that could buy anything are getting desperate for places to land, because this was clearly not the first stop on anyone’s list.
Back in the late 1800s everything had been lumber and coal up here. The coal vein had been weak though, and it didn’t last. After the last shaft shut down, the county began to eat itself as people struggled to find work, to find food, to live. The murder rate, practically non-existent five years earlier, skyrocketed so that for nearly a decade there averaged at least two murders a month. That’s to say nothing of the arson and the insanity. More barns burned and more people wound up in the state sanitarium during those few years than in the century that had preceded it.
People were scared and desperate, and things were getting worse with no end in sight. Then the fire happened. There are more than a couple of stories as to how it started. Lightning during the biggest thunderstorm in fifty years, moonshiners knocking over a lamp, or one of those barn-burners deciding to try something bigger. The end result was one of the largest wildfires in memory. It burned for three days straight, consuming two thousand acres of forest and a sizeable portion of the town as well.
After that, it all stopped. No more murders, no more fires. You would think it’d have gotten worse, given that the fire crippled the lumber industry in one shot, putting hundreds out of work or on half-pay. But somehow it got better. People went back to living their lives, and the world moved on.
Of course, I didn’t know any of that when I was little. When I grew up enough to question things, I still had a good ten years before I even thought about looking into the place’s history. Those younger years…even now I think of them as good years. Age tends to blur the sharp edges off of childhood memories though, so who’s to say. Maybe the good things I remember weren’t that good. I know I have the bad ones right though. The bad ones I remember just perfect.
The first time that my father left. The first time he came back. My first fight. The first time I was sent to the principal’s office. The first time I lied. The first time I took a life.
At this point, it’s all anecdotal, right? At this point, it isn’t my life, or even past reality. It’s a story that I tell myself. I shuffle across a shrouded room and peer out of the window that the past provides, knowing that it will only remind me of everything I’ve lost. Yet I keep coming back and looking out. Life is routine, after all. And all the time, even now, I hear that damned bitch whispering in my ear.
The vinyl seat stuck to my legs, my constant shifting from side to
side not helping a bit. The air conditioner wheezed out stale puffs of
lukewarm air to mingle with the cigarette smoke that swirled through the
station wagon as we rode the eight miles between school and Sara’s
house.
The front passenger seat sat bare, the three of us packed onto the back bench seat, me on one side, Everett on the other, and Sara in the middle. All of us rushing to talk at once as we chattered to Sara’s mom about what had happened that day. It’s strange, but when my parents asked how my day went, I never gave them more than a noncommittal grunt and a shrug. But with Roberta Park, all three of us would fight to spill our guts each and every day. I’ve wondered about that in the years since. Sara always talked a lot. She always had a story to tell. Everett though, he hardly talked to anybody except the two of us. I often think that he never had a friend before Sara and I met him at the fair two years before.
So there we were, all three of us, straining to top each other. To impress Sara’s mom with our stories. And why? I think it was because she listened, actually caring about our fickle interests and our miniature dramas. She kept track of our friends and our enemies. She knew what was cool. She realized that the highs and lows of our daily lives were no less developed, no less important, and no less real than those of adults. As with everyone, we were prisoners of the moment—unable to ever entirely escape the fact that we live minute by minute, with the troubles of the present always pressing closer than any thought of a better tomorrow.
Sara didn’t have a father, and her mother was a nurse. She had to work all kinds of hours, and there were times where Sara’s mom would work the night shift for months in a row. During those times, Sara would see her mother for less than half an hour a day except for her days off, and even then it was catch-as-catch-can. Sara would never say anything, but you could tell it bothered her. She would get quiet, sometimes for days, and if you caught her in an unguarded moment, you could see a lonely desperation in her eyes. That look frightened me, attracting and repulsing me at the same time. I didn’t fully understand why that was when I was younger, but now I think I know. I was seeing the same thoughts and feelings in her face that raced through my own mind and heart so often. So alone and so desperate to connect. To matter to someone, to anyone. To myself.
Everett was really no different, of course. His family was perfect—loving, warm, and genuinely kind. The middle of five children, I think he felt kind of lost in the shuffle, though I never saw any of his family ignore him or mistreat him. For whatever reason, he had a sense of disconnect from them…from everybody really. He was a spacey kid for sure, yet at the same time he could be really smart and had a wicked sense of humor once he warmed up to you.
The day that Sara and I met him, he was holding up the line at the Hurricane, the premiere attraction at the Tulset County Fair. The ride was a whirling storm of metal arms and buckets that creaked and rattled ominously as it flung out its passengers’ screams into the hot summer night. Everett was shifting from foot to foot—a nervous habit I would come to learn—trying to decide if he wanted to get on or not.
“Come on, kid. Shit or get off the pot.” The man taking tickets wore a stained baseball cap over a greasy black mullet that stood in sharp contrast to his bushy blonde mustache. Scratching his stomach, he studied the bespeckled fat kid before him with heavy-lidded contempt before shifting his gaze to the teenage couple behind him. “Keep it movin’. Tickets, tickets.” He shot Everett a half-glance. “Get out of the way, kid.”
Defeated, Everett turned and began to shuffle away, his face growing red as he hitched his pants up in the back and stuffed his tickets into his shirt pocket. Before I knew it, I was out of the line and going after him. He looked up when I stepped in his path, his face startled and wary.
“Hey, I’m Dylan. What’s your name?” Then I noticed that Sara had followed me out of line. I cocked a thumb towards her. “This is Sara.”
He looked around suspiciously, and I thought for a moment he might just bolt, but then he looked at Sara again, and after a moment, back at me. “I’m Everett.”
I nodded and smiled. “Good to meet ya. We’re fixing to go on the Hurricane, and we were looking for a third person to go with us. Interested?”
Everett looked confused for a moment and then started shaking his head, his eyebrows drawing down in a scowl as he spoke. “Look, funny joke, but why don’t you guys just…”
Sara stepped forward and put her hand on his shoulder. “Hey, we’re serious. Come ride with us.”
He looked surprised again, and began to smile uncertainly. “You sure?”
I nodded. “Sure as sure can be. Come on.”
I was eleven then. Nearly thirteen on the day of the vinyl seats. Over nineteen when we led Stellar Thompson to the cave. And yet, despite any friends I had later on, during none of those times would I have called myself extraordinarily sociable or outgoing. I wasn’t really shy, but I didn’t go out of my way to meet people either. I mean, few children are that sure of themselves, and I was no exception. Yet I reached out to Everett that night. Sara and I both did. Looking back, I sometimes still find it all strange. As if it was not just a random act of kindness, but was instead just a step along the way towards…what? I don’t think I know the real answer to that even now. Or maybe I’m just lying to myself again. I’ve grown very good at that.
Back to Roberta Parks car, with all of us scrambling to tell her about our day. Everett and I were both trying to tell her about a fight we had seen that day at lunch, while Sara was busy correcting all of the gross exaggerations we kept throwing in. Her mother listened, laughing as she drove us to their house, occasionally asking a question to clarify a point or to get some background information on one of the characters in our story.
“And then he called him a name…” Everett trailed off, his face
growing red as he looked out the window. Sara’s mom grinned in the
rearview mirror.
“What did he call him?”
I considered, re-considered, and then burst out with it. “He called him ‘a little bitch’!” Sara gasped and elbowed me hard in the arm, but her mother was cracking up like it was the best joke in the world. I was beaming with pride before she even spoke.
She looked at me in the mirror. “Is that right? Well, was…”
The truck hit our car slightly left of head-on with enough force to
spin us around three and a half times before the back of the station
wagon slammed into a tree twenty feet off the road. For a few moments
everything was chaos and screaming, surreal in its sudden intensity.
Then everything was quiet, the only sounds the quiet ticking of the dead
engine and Everett’s soft sobbing.
The front windshield was white with spiderwebbed glass, and the dash
didn’t look quite right, but otherwise everything seemed okay. I
wasn’t hurt at all except for where the seatbelt had held me in, and
that bruise went away in a few days. Sara and Everett were the same,
with Everett’s tears coming from shock and fear rather than any real
pain.
When I looked to the front seat, however, I saw that Sara’s mother
was slumped over and unmoving. Sara followed my gaze and started
screaming, fighting with her seat belt in an attempt to get loose. I
popped my own free and eased forward to look at the woman that we all
loved.
My first thought was that she was dead. Her face was covered in blood from a large cut on her forehead I later learned had come from her head striking the steering wheel. Then I saw her short, shallow breaths and I yelled that she was alive. Sara was beside me the next second, and she started trying to wake her mother up, gently stroking the woman’s hair. I looked down and saw something that confused me for a moment before understanding set in and my stomach clinched into a tight ball of ice. The dash had been pushed in at least two feet, Roberta Parks’ legs disappearing beneath it just below the knees. My mind raced for what I should do or say. How I could help. How I could keep Sara from ever seeing or knowing something like this. Then I heard the sirens approaching.
Sara’s mother was in the hospital for nearly two months, with Sara staying two towns away with her grandmother most of the time until the woman came home. By the end of that summer, Roberta Parks could walk short distances with a walker, but she was in constant pain. Sara told me once that she would wake up in the night and hear her mother crying from the pain. I always think about that if I start thinking too harshly of Sara’s part in what we did later. More than any of us, she had her reasons. Just like us, she didn’t know what she was asking for.
Summer is about freewheeling fun, lazing about in the bliss of no schedule and no rules. At least that’s what it’s about when you’re sitting in a classroom daydreaming about it. When you’re in the middle of it, summer is often about hot, sticky boredom for long stretches of time as you try to find something worthwhile to do with the pooled meager resources of three barely-teen teenagers. Of course, that’s what leads to some of your best childhood experiences I think. In the face of that desperation, you either start a project, get into trouble, or embark on a quest.
For some the quest is making money for the perfect bike, or training all summer so you can make first string in the fall. For others it’s making the world’s greatest independent film with your parents’ camcorder or making your crush turn into something more.
For the three of us, that summer was about surviving. We only got to see Sara once every couple of weekends, and even then it was usually only for a few hours. Between those visits, Everett and I spent most of our time playing board games or just walking around with no real destination or purpose in mind. We still enjoyed hanging out together, but it wasn’t the same without her there to connect us. Beyond that, we were scared to death that her mother might die or be crippled. We never talked about it, but it hung in the air all of the time, Sara’s absence acting as a constant reminder.
We were only two weeks away from school starting back when Sara’s mother came home and Sara came back to us. For the first couple of days we just gloried in being back together, but soon enough that old familiar restlessness began to set in. Sara had met us over at Everett’s house, and we were all munching on rice crispy treats that his mother had brought out to us on the back porch, sitting in companionable silence as we stared out at the slowly warming Tuesday morning. That’s when Everett said it.
“You guys ever heard of Mystery Cave?”
We both turned to look at Everett with mild interest, just the name already piquing our curiosity. He smiled slightly and nodded.
“Keith was telling me about it a few days ago. He says that it’s in the woods somewhere north of town about a mile off of an old lumber road up there.”
I turned to look at him more squarely. “So? What is it?”
Everett swallowed and blushed slightly. “Well, apparently it’s an old myth that if you go to the cave, it’ll answer your questions. It can even predict the future.”
Sara laughed. “Oh really? How does it do that?”
Everett blushed harder and shrugged. “Nevermind. It’s just a stupid story.”
Sara frowned and shook her head. “No, tell us. We want to hear.”
He looked between the two of us, chewing a bite of rice crispy for a moment before continuing on. “Well, you’re supposed to write your question on a piece of paper and tie it around a rock. Then you toss it into the cave and leave. You go back the next day and the rock will be back outside with the answer tied to it.”
Even though I knew it was impossible, I felt myself getting excited. “So who writes the answers?”
“Nobody knows.” He laughed nervously. “I guess that’s why it’s called Mystery Cave, huh?”
Sara put her plate down and leaned forward. “Well, hasn’t anyone ever hidden and watched for who brings the answers out?”
Everett shook his head. “No, I asked Keith that. He said that nobody will stay out there at night because anyone that’s ever tried has disappeared.”
At this point my mind was racing. Logically, I was old enough to know that there couldn’t be anything to it. At most, a bunch of other bored kids might be writing the answers to screw with anyone stupid enough to actually try it. But probably not even that. On the other hand, Keith was by far the nicer of Everett’s two older brothers, and he had never struck me as the kind of guy that would mess with his little brother for the hell of it. And besides, it was something to do. Sara was still questioning Everett when I broke in.
“Let’s go check it out.”
There are few images more overused to call up nostalgia for one’s childhood than the image of a group of best friends pedaling along on a bright summer day, laughing or joking together. If it’s in a movie, then the odds are better than even that a ‘50s or ‘60s song will be bopping along in the background to further convey what an idyllic and innocent time it really is.
It started raining ten minutes before we found the lumber road. We all had bikes, true enough, but the road was uneven and crooked—too treacherous in the rain for us to ride down without risking our necks. Right on cue, Everett started complaining about how we should turn around and come back later.
Sara squinted at him through the steadily increasing drizzle. “What? Are you kidding? We’re out here now. It took nearly an hour, and do you think we’ll be any drier if we go back than if we stay?” She stared at him with this look she could give that made you feel all of five years old.
“But…”
I nudged his shoulder. “No buts, short stuff. Wet is wet, right? Let’s find the cave.”
He nodded begrudgingly and we started down the road. After a quarter mile, shrubs and scrub pines had narrowed the way to barely a path, and soon this turned into an almost invisible trail. We left our bikes behind and went on, wet leaves slapping me in the face as we moved deeper into the woods. Sara was in the lead, as was so often the case in those days, and Everett stayed in the back, tripping over the roots that I didn’t remember to point out to him. It seemed like we walked for hours, but I know now it wasn’t nearly that long. Later the trips to the cave would seem to come all too quickly.
I ran into Sara’s back when she stopped suddenly, a half-muttered “Shit” barely audible above the rain patter and the tree sounds. Looking past her I saw that the trail had run out. In front of us were random bushes and a cluster of sweet gum trees. There was no sign of any way to go except for back.
“Well, fuck.”
Sara punched me in the arm with a frown. “Don’t curse.”
I started. “But you said…”
“I was just surprised, and besides, you were about to shove me over.”
I rolled my eyes but didn’t say anything else. Looking around, I sighed. Any direction was as good as another, which meant they all led to nothing. Sara looked at me expectantly, as if I was supposed to show them the way. I had no clue. I was about to suggest we give up and go back to Everett’s house when he spoke for the first time.
I turned to look at him and saw that he was squinting off into the distance to our right. I followed his gaze but still didn’t see anything. Sara asked him what he had said, but I already knew when he repeated it.
“I see the cave.”
---
Credits
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