Jack slouches down next to Savannah, with a nonchalance that must be practiced. Either that or he’s already stoned stupid. He moves slow and liquid. Doesn’t say anything, just pulls a joint out of his pocket, lights it up. I can’t help but look at the muscles shifting under his skin. Savannah’s looking too. Danger. He takes a hit and then passes the joint.
Normally I don’t smoke, cigarettes or anything else, a holdover from my middle school track days when our coach told us that he didn’t give a shit if we all wanted to die of cancer, but he could guarantee that smoking would cut our running times in half. Tonight, though, when Henry holds out the joint, I take it, letting our fingers brush on purpose. I feel silly immediately for that. It’s the sort of move Savannah would pull. The smoke catches in my throat and I feel a cough coming. I hold my breath, force it down.
Pastor Jones, I think, eat your heart out. I picture a whole herd of little broken-legged lambs, limping along on their own.
After the joint goes around a few times, Jack and Savannah start doing that thing where they blow smoke into each other’s mouths. The sun drips down toward the trees.
Henry puts his hand on my knee. We both just sit there for a while, staring straight ahead, and then he takes his hand back.
But I can still feel a pressure there, like the ghost of a hand, like the way I feel my sister, even when she isn’t with me.
“What was that?” asks Savannah, sitting up abruptly.
“What was what?” says Jack, sounding unconcerned, his voice as languid as his movements.
“I saw something move, there.” She points toward the woods that back up to Henry’s house. The trees are dark and thick and I know from experience that they keep on going for a long, long way. The national forest covers more than three thousand square miles and even with all the time I’ve spent out there, I’m sure I’ve seen only a fraction of it.
“Probably a squirrel,” says Henry.
“No, it was bigger than that.” Savannah sounds genuinely frightened. I wonder if she’s putting it on. She’s started doing that kind of thing more and more lately. Acting sillier than she really is, stupider, more fragile. I hate it. I wish she’d act like Savannah. The real one. The one I’ve always known.
“Deer, then,” says Henry.
“It looked like a person,” says Savannah.
My heart twists and I strain my eyes, focusing on the tree line. It couldn’t be her, right? She’d never come this close to town, to people. All I see is dark.
“Bet it’s a ghost,” says Jack.
“Nah,” says Henry, uncertainly. “Probably just a deer.”
“You don’t know shit, little brother,” says Jack. “A lot of people died around here. Hell, right there in our yard a guy shot himself in the head once.”
“Really?” asks Savannah, eyes wide.
“Sure,” says Jack, grinning at her, leaning forward. “They were picking brains out of the bushes for days.”
I snort. “Yeah, right.”
“It’s true,” says Jack, though he doesn’t look at me. He’s focused on Savannah. “You probably haven’t heard about it because it was a long time ago, before any of us were born. This guy Richard Hornbeam shot himself in the head with a .357 pistol. And the worst part is he didn’t die right away. You’d think you couldn’t mess that up, shooting yourself in the head. But this poor bastard did. He died in the hospital later, but he was alive for hours first.”
Jack is making this up, I’m pretty sure, to scare us little freshmen, because I’ve never heard about it and we get every story down at the bar, no matter how old. But I’ve got to admit he’s a good liar. Even I kind of want to believe him. Savannah has scooted closer to Jack, her eyes wide with exaggerated fright.
Jack takes a long hit off the joint, lets the smoke out slow.
“Some nights,” he says, “real late, when nobody in their right mind would be hunting, we hear gunshots. Out behind the house. It’s that same poor bastard and he’s shooting himself in the head, over and over, trying to get it right.”
“We do hear gunshots,” admits Henry. If someone is actually shooting guns in their backyard late at night, I bet it’s their dad. I’ll need to warn my sister to stay far, far away.
She probably already knows.
“Sure do,” says Jack. He’s having too much fun with this, grinning wildly. He puts his arm around Savannah, pulls her against his side. I feel a pang of something. Concern, maybe. Jealousy. “And that’s not even the worst thing we hear.”
CHAPTER THREE
About twenty minutes later we’re all in Jack’s car, on our way to Crybaby Bridge. Jack told us the story, back on the porch. Years ago a young woman came at midnight and threw her baby off the bridge into the water and then threw herself off too and if you stand in the right place you can hear the baby crying to this day. Jack said he and Henry have both heard it.
I know Jack didn’t make this story up, because I’ve actually heard it before, from an out-of-towner who came to the bar once. He was traveling across Ohio, hitting up every haunted place in the state. Lester made his list because of the No. 5 Mine disaster site, where a tunnel collapsed and crushed fifty men. The out-of-towner said there are half a dozen Crybaby Bridges in Ohio. He’d been to four of them so far and hadn’t heard a thing.
Henry’s driving, though he only has a learner’s permit. We’re going down a winding gravel road, which makes the car bump and rattle and sends bits of rock shooting up from under the tires. There are no houses out this way, no people, just trees.
Henry is biting his bottom lip, squinting at the road, clutching the wheel hard enough that his fingers are white. The beer and the joint are giving me this dreamy feeling, like we’ve crossed over into a different reality. The normal rules don’t apply here. Tonight is magic. Tonight doesn’t really count.
In the backseat, Savannah has the straps of her tank top down around her shoulders and Jack’s nuzzling against her chest like a cat. He’s got a Mountain Dew bottle, which he takes sips from and sometimes hands to Savannah. I watch them in the side mirror until Henry pulls the car up short along the side of the road.
“Here we are,” he says, and Savannah pulls her straps up and she and Jack tumble out the side door.
There are no streetlights here. But the moon is out. It would be a good night for running. The upturned faces of the leaves catch the moonlight like mirrors and everything is bathed in shades of silver. If only we had names for all those shades, maybe more people would notice them, would appreciate how bright and alive they can be. I want to point this out to Henry or Savannah, but they’d only laugh at me.