Suicide Woods Read online

  SUICIDE WOODS

  Also by Benjamin Percy

  The Dark Net

  Thrill Me

  The Dead Lands

  Red Moon

  The Wilding

  Refresh, Refresh

  The Language of Elk

  Suicide Woods

  STORIES

  ..

  Benjamin Percy

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2019 by Benjamin Percy

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, locales, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-64445-006-2

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-64445-105-2

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2019

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931353

  Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

  Cover art: © Anirut Kongsorn / Getty Images

  For Lisa

  Contents

  The Cold Boy

  Suspect Zero

  The Dummy

  Heart of a Bear

  Dial Tone

  The Mud Man

  Writs of Possession

  The Balloon

  Suicide Woods

  The Uncharted

  SUICIDE WOODS

  The Cold Boy

  The forest is hardwood, and the branches of the oaks and sycamores are bare except for the crows, hundreds of them, all huddled like little men in black jackets. Together they make a strange music—muttering to one another in rusty voices as they click their beaks and rustle their feathers and claw at the bark—that can be heard a quarter mile away, across a snowy cornfield, where Ray stands on a frozen pond.

  The stubs of last year’s cornstalks fang through the snow, and two sets of footprints lead like a rough blue stream from his house to the pond. Two sets of footprints, yet he is alone on the ice. The cold rises through the soles of his boots, creeping up his legs, into his chest, so that his heart feels frosted with tiny white crystals.

  The pond is big, close to two acres, with three holes melted into its ice from the warm springs beneath. The holes are big enough to drive a car through, the ice at their rims gradually thinning into a gray sliver that gives way to the dark water at their centers.

  His house, a ranch with a black roof and tan siding, sits fifty yards away. Next to it, a red pole barn, where he stores his johnboat and runs his taxidermy business. From where Ray stands, he can see his shop window, a square cut into the corrugated metal— and from there, he could have seen his nephew leave the house and crunch through the calf-deep snow, heading toward the pond, probably with his arms held out like wings to keep his balance. Had Ray only looked up from his work—a rack-mount job, a deer shot by Jacob Henderson—there would have been time to lift the window and yell, to scramble out the side door and through the snow and grab the boy by the coat and give him a shake and say, What the hell are you doing? Had he only looked up, he wouldn’t be standing here now, where the footprints concluded, at the edge of a hole as black and reflective as the glass eye he’d nudged into the deer’s empty socket minutes ago.

  The boy was supposed to be watching cartoons. The boy, seven years old—or was it six?—with his fair skin, his hair so blond it is nearly white. Ray hardly knows him, sees him only on holidays and when his sister drives down from Saint Paul to visit. The boy rarely speaks, and when he does, his voice comes out in a high whisper. His eyes are the blue-black color of the dirty snow piled at the edges of the highway.

  And now the boy is trapped beneath the ice, his tiny body floating there, turning around and around in what must look like a cave with three columns of light streaming from the holes punched in its roof.

  Ray doesn’t know what to do. Call his sister or call the police. There is no rush—the boy is dead, has to be—but Ray feels a horrible need to act, even if that means stepping forward, as if through a trapdoor, allowing the cold water to squeeze the breath from him. It would be better than facing his sister, the hate he imagines twisting her face.

  In this moment—on the pond, in the middle of the snow-scalloped cornfield—Ray feels mixed-up with anger and regret and sadness. Every stupid protest cycles through his head: “I wish I could trade places with the boy,” “I wish I could turn back time,” and so on.

  Then, as if summoned, the boy’s body appears below him. One moment water sucks and plops at the edges of the hole—and the next, the boy is there, his face a white smear rising out of the darkness.

  At first Ray does nothing, dazed and blinking. Even when he wants to move, a second later, his joints feel rusted and his boots rooted to the ice. How long has he been standing here—ten minutes, twenty? He staggers forward, and the ice moans, and cracks spread beneath him, thin black creeks that threaten to open up and swallow him. He gets down on his knees, slowly, out of stiffness and caution, and then goes flat, bellies up to the ice to distribute his weight.

  He can’t see from this angle, his cheek resting against the ice. He slides forward and reaches out blindly for the hole, his fingers splashing at the edge of it. The slushy perimeter crumbles, and his arm drops into the water up to his elbow. His curse is cut short when he feels something catch hold of him. At first he thinks some starved fish has risen from the depths to bite at his fingers, mistaking them for nightcrawlers. But when he yanks back his arm, he feels the tug of weight and sees the small white hand clamped onto his.

  Later, he will wonder at the impossibility. He will remember stories from Sunday school and late-night television about miracles, about cold-water survival. He will read on the Internet about the girl from Utah who fell through the ice when skating and survived after more than an hour underwater. And about the man in Indiana who spiraled his Jeep off a bridge and into a frozen river, trapped below for thirty minutes. “There has never been a drug more effective or mysterious than the cold,” reads a quote from a doctor. Ray will read about cryogenics, about Walt Disney’s head preserved in a deep-freeze storage locker somewhere, awaiting resurrection. He will think of everything, and then nothing, concentrating only on the relief he feels.

  Because it is impossible to think. He acts—pure reflex. Crying out to the boy, telling him, “Hold on! I’ve got you!” Ray scrabbles backward, drawing the body from the water, some of the ice giving way, the hole opening wider as if reluctant to give up its quarry. The boy is laid out on his back. He wears a red jacket, blue jeans, black boots, all of them bleeding water. Ray picks him up and strangles him into a hug. The day is so cold that the pondwater on his skin freezes almost instantly, a glassy sheath. Ray tries roughly t
o rub some warmth into the boy, and against his hand the ice cracks and falls away in shards.

  The boy’s eyes are open, but he is not breathing. Ray imagines the water inside him hardening into spikes that stab through his lungs. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but he’s seen enough movies and television shows to make a go of it, when he sets the boy down and presses his chest—once, twice, three times—and then brings their mouths together and breathes into the boy and thinks, “Please, please.” After three minutes of this, of Ray alternately pounding and blowing and calling down favors from a god he doesn’t believe in, the boy convulses and gags. Ray turns him on his side so that he can more easily cough out the pinkish water mixed up with bile, the remnants of the bowl of Froot Loops he ate that morning in front of the television.

  “Are you all right?” Ray says.

  The boy sits up and rubs his eye and looks at Ray and Ray looks at the boy and neither of them says anything.

  A county highway runs along the edge of the cornfield, and beyond it rises the forest. An old Chevy pickup comes rattling along, and when it stutters in its progress, and backfires, the crows cackle madly and take to the air and leave the trees as naked as skeletons.

  Two weeks earlier his sister, Helen, had called him to beg a favor. Some man—there was always some man, Ray couldn’t keep track of them all—wanted to take her on a cruise. “The Bahamas,” she said. “At this time of year. My God! And he’s paying for everything. All you can eat, all you can drink. I really, really want to do this,” she said.

  “So do it.”

  “That’s the thing.” She needed him to watch the boy. “I’d owe you big-time. I’d even pay you.”

  Ray said he wasn’t sure. This was a busy time of year, his storage locker full of trophies from hunting season. Plus, he hardly knew the boy. What would they talk about? What would they do? And Helen said, “That’s exactly why this would be so great.” This would be his chance to get to know him, to be a good uncle.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said. “He’s no trouble.”

  In the living room, he lays the boy down and strips off his jacket, his clothes, tosses them aside in a sodden pile that darkens the carpet. Ray is hopped-up on adrenaline that chatters his teeth and sends shivers through his body, but the boy is as still as a sculpture. Even when stripped naked, he remains silent and motionless, his skin white, blue around the edges, like some icewater mollusk scraped from its shell. Ray wraps him in heavy blankets. A smell comes off him—the smell of the pond, of mud and algae and fish.

  Ray says, “Shit, shit, shit” under his breath when he charges through the house. He cranks the thermostat to eighty. He starts a hot bath. He peels off the lid of a can of beef stew and slops it in a bowl to throw in the microwave.

  When he returns to the living room, the boy has shrugged off the blankets. He is watching cartoons with his legs folded beneath his knees, the watery light of the television playing across his body.

  Ray thinks about taking the boy to the hospital. But then he imagines all the problems that will follow. His sister works as a secretary—no, that isn’t the term she uses, administrative assistant—at the auto parts dealer, and she regularly grouses about her insurance: the copays, the sky-high deductibles, the denied coverage. He would have to call her to get her policy info. She left him an emergency contact number for the cruise ship. He isn’t so much concerned about ruining her trip as he is about getting an earful after she learns what happened. The doctors would no doubt run tests, would keep the boy overnight for observation, and in the end Ray knows he would foot the bill. He wonders if the police would get involved. Maybe it was neglectful, even illegal, for him to have left the boy alone. How should he know? And then there would be the reporters. He imagines them gathering at the end of his driveway, their cameras like shotguns trained at his house, the pond—all of them eager to tell the story of the miracle boy and his deadbeat uncle.

  There’s no reason to make a lot of trouble out of nothing, not when everything is fine. The boy is fine.

  Except that Ray can’t seem to warm him up, his skin the color and feel of sunlit snow. The few times that Ray touches the boy, leading him from the television to the kitchen table, from the bathroom to the guest room, he startles at the cold, clammy skin and yanks back his hand.

  Nor will the boy eat. Ray tries soups, hot cocoa, grilled cheese sandwiches oozing with Velveeta. The boy takes the occasional sip or nibble, but otherwise he simply stares at the food, not saying anything, even when Ray throws up his hands and says, “Well, what do you want, then? You’ve got to eat something.”

  Later, he catches the boy in the kitchen. The freezer door is open and the cold is blasting from it and the boy is scooping chocolate ripple ice cream from the carton into his mouth. Ray lets the boy eat as much as he wants, and the boy wants it all. He chews the ice cream, big spoonfuls of it, his mouth a smacking mess. When his spoon scrapes the bottom of the carton, the boy drops the carton to the floor, where it blurps out a tongue of chocolate on the linoleum. The boy looks to Ray expectantly, and Ray stutters out a few apologies, says he doesn’t have any more ice cream, says they can pick some up at the Fareway later. Then he gets an idea and says he’ll be right back and pulls a bowl from the cupboard and throws on a coat and heads outside.

  A gasp of cold greets him. The wind has shaped the snow into drifts, like the sluggish waves of some frozen ocean. The day is sunny, but the yard is dark and rippling with shadows, and Ray feels momentarily unbalanced as he staggers off the front step. The crows are overhead, hundreds of them, a circling black eddy that blots out the sun.

  He keeps an eye on them—as if at any moment they might descend and carry him off—when he kneels to fill the bowl with snow. It is only minutes later, after he pours maple syrup over the snow and sets the treat on the kitchen table, after the boy begins to carve his spoon into it, that Ray notices a bit of black mixed up in all that white. A feather. He grabs the boy by the wrist, stops the spoon inches from his open mouth. Slowly the boy turns his head to stare at Ray and tightens face into a hateful expression, hissing.

  Ray wakes shivering in the night. The window next to his bed is open. The wind moans through it, and the curtains breathe inward, green and trembling like seaweed. He jumps out of bed and slams shut the window. The curtains settle, but the moaning only shifts to another part of the house. He grabs a sweatshirt from the dirty laundry in the corner and pulls it on when he staggers into the hallway, where the wind blows and the carpet fibers feel like frozen blades of grass.

  He finds every window in the house open, an invitation to the severe wind that flutters newspaper pages across his living room, that ruffles the bear pelt hanging from the wall, that knocks over a plastic gas station cup and freezes the milk in a half-eaten bowl of cereal. He rushes to close them all, to stop the wind from coming in, while also chasing the sense that something might escape him, the boy.

  There are two bedrooms in the house—one belongs to him and the other to a futon and a garage-sale bench press and a wobbly desk, on top of which perches an old IBM computer in a nest of receipts. He finds the boy asleep on the futon. He has kicked off his covers and lies there with his legs and arms splayed, as if he is floating.

  When Ray closes this final window, a hush falls over the house. He can hear the rasp of the boy’s breath—and something else—a faint cackling from outside. The window is already steaming over, and he wipes a hand through the condensation to reveal the moon, a full yellow moon darkened by what appears to be a cloud scudding across it. But the cloud moves too fast. And when Ray looks closer he sees the cloud for what it is, a seething mass of crows.

  In the morning the boy’s sheets are wet. A damp oval in the shape of him. It does not smell like urine or sweat. It smells like pondwater.

  Ray is stripping the sheets off the futon when the phone rings. He goes to the kitchen and for a long time stares at it—the black snail of a unit hanging next to the fridge—before pickin
g it up.

  “Why did you take so long to answer?” his sister says.

  “I was busy.”

  He imagines her bringing her hand to her heart, like she always does, when she says, “I thought something was wrong.”

  No, nothing is wrong. Nothing at all.

  “Are you two getting along?”

  Yes.

  “That’s good. That’s what I want to hear. You know why? Because I feel happy as shit right now, and I’m not looking to spoil that feeling.” The cruise is amazing. The food is amazing. She has an amazing tan. She has made amazing friends. While they are in Nassau, she is going to get her hair braided and then maybe go parasailing and play some blackjack at the casino.

  Ray thinks he can hear calypso music in the background, a steel drum. He fades out the buzz of her voice, startling when she yells, “I said, what’s my boy up to?”

  The phone feels like a brick pressed against his ear. He is watching the boy, and the boy is watching cartoons, is turning his head to observe Ray with eyes that look more black than blue.

  “Watching some TV.”

  “Don’t bother him, then. Tell him I love him, the little shit.” She laughs her throaty laugh, and Ray imagines a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Tell him I’ll see him soon enough.”

  “I’ll tell him that. I will.”

  The walls of the house are pine paneled and studded with dead animals. A twelve-point buck, its antlers a thorned basket. Three quail suspended in flight. An opossum clambering up a log and showing its needled teeth. A bobcat pawing playfully at a largemouth bass. The skin of a black bear, its legs splayed in an X, so that it appears to have been hurled and flattened against the wall.

  The smell of formaldehyde hangs like an ammonia cloud in the house and in the pole barn, and it puffs off his clothes, his hands and hair. He doesn’t notice it, but others do. His buddies say he smells like he rolled around in a funeral parlor. When his sister visits—with her big hair and her long purple fingernails—she waves a hand in front of her face and says, “Pee-you.” And when he sometimes goes out to dinner at Dangerous Curves, a gentlemen’s club with a buffet supper, the women will dance for him, will smile and snake around him, but when they lean close, their powdered breasts brushing against his cheeks, he notices how their noses crinkle, some of them asking about his cologne.