If You Go Down to the Woods: The most powerful and emotional debut thriller of 2018!. Seth Adams C.

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СКАЧАТЬ don’t know what I expected Bobby’s dad to look like; I guess maybe I leaned towards something like Fat Bobby himself, just a larger version. A fat and lazy man with a gut like a beach ball stuffed beneath his shirt, and beer cans littered about his feet like carelessly delivered babies.

      But the man in the yard that the trailer sat on, leaning over the hood of a white Toyota pickup, wasn’t fat, and the thick cords of muscles glistened by sweat and shiny by sun showed he wasn’t lazy. He heard me approaching, stopped fidgeting with whatever part under the hood he’d been fidgeting with, and withdrew from beneath the hood to stretch to full height.

      And the height was mountainous.

      As I’ve said before, my dad was a large man. I was used to being dwarfed by the larger of my gender. But whereas Dad was lean and muscled like a fast stallion, Fat Bobby’s father was thick and solid like a bull. Mr. Templeton’s face was likewise bulbous, as if it was permanently swollen. This wasn’t a swelling by anything like a bee sting neither, but a red swelling of meanness, as if there was something on the inside of him that wouldn’t go away. Maybe a volcanic pressure, and at any moment he could explode with the force of the heat inside him. He looked at me like he was looking at a fly that had alighted on his food and taken a shit.

      He wanted to squash me, no doubt in my mind.

      Yet it wasn’t personal either. I remember thinking he wanted to squash anyone and everyone. Like the existence of other people was offensive.

      Dad was no pushover by any definition of the word, but seeing this man, in torn jeans and a faded flannel shirt like he was some lumberjack-Sasquatch hybrid, I thought of the two of them tangling, Dad and Mr. Templeton, and I didn’t think I’d want to place any bets either way.

      “What the hell you want?” he asked.

      His lips moved beneath a wild beard like a miniature wilderness. I wondered if food crumbs and bugs lived in that tangle somewhere, in a little world separate from the one we were in. Maybe there was a whole civilization of lost bits of food and beetles in there somewhere, and when he talked it was like an earthquake and the voice of God from on high to the wee beard folk.

      For a moment I thought I’d laugh.

      Then I knew if that happened, I’d die, and so I didn’t laugh.

      “I’m here to see Bobby, sir.”

      I tried sounding as respectful as I could muster. Afraid of my head being popped like a grape, I think I did pretty good. Fear’s a fabulous motivator.

      “Are you the kid he’s been hanging out with so much?” I thought about answering but he kept on talking, and so I clacked my mouth shut. “He’s been shirking his chores, the fat lazy bastard. Gone all day long, comes home late, like this is some sort of motel he can just come and go from whenever he likes.”

      He paused like maybe he wanted me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say so I continued to keep my mouth shut.

      “You shirk your chores too? Out here running around like you got nothing to do.” Silence still seemed the best option on my end. Then: “Your parents some kind of fucking hippies? Let their kids run around and shit?”

      “No, sir,” I said, not really knowing which part I was answering to.

      “Yeah right,” he said, and I didn’t know which he was referring to either. Not that it mattered, even with him talking bad about my parents in some offhand manner. I imagined myself briefly trying to stick up for my folks, flipping this guy off or something, and him coming at me, and me trying to use one of the tricky leg maneuvers that Dad had taught me. This guy just laughing as I tried to tangle his legs with mine, or kick at a kneecap like a boulder, and he just twitched a big toe or something and I busted like a little glass figurine.

      “May I see Bobby, sir?” I said, deciding politeness was still the best course of action.

      “You talk like a fruit, kid.” He smiled, and he had teeth yellow-stained by years of nicotine. As I watched he pulled a crumpled pack of Camels from a breast pocket, pulled out its last inhabitant, and lit it up with a lighter shaped like a little pistol. “‘May I?’” he mocked, murmuring around the cigarette. “‘Sir,’” he said in a high and whiny voice. “Goddamn queers everywhere nowadays.”

      At that moment the door to the trailer swung open and hit the wall it was attached to with a metallic rattle. We both turned at the sound, and there was Fat Bobby standing in the doorframe. It took a second or two for me to notice what was different about my friend. The dark ring around his right eye seemed to call my gaze to it, like the target circle of a dartboard.

      I looked back at Mr. Templeton.

      He looked at his son, then looked down at me. It was clear he knew what I’d seen but he didn’t seem much concerned. As in not at all.

      “You know what happens in another body’s family isn’t none of your concern, don’t you, fairy boy?” he asked, and immediately, obediently, I nodded. “You don’t doubt that if you caused me any sort of trouble I wouldn’t think twice about bouncing you around some, do you?”

      I shook my head. No, I didn’t doubt it one bit.

      “Good,” he said, then he looked from me back to Bobby, still standing silent and slouched in the doorway of the trailer. “Get out of my sight.”

      Turning back to the Toyota he leaned once again under the hood.

      Bobby stepped off the porch lightly, making almost no sound, which, with his girth, was a tremendous feat of skill. Slowly, he walked towards me, moving as if he were trying to avoid disturbing a beehive. When he was close, he waved for me to follow and together we walked softly away from the miserable trailer, out of the neighborhood like a Third World ghost town, and onto the highway. After several minutes of silence like a period of mourning, I finally opened my mouth and told him what I wanted to do.

      Fat Bobby smiled as I spoke, and with that smile the effect of the black eye seemed to dwindle. Though we cheered up considerably talking about what we were going to do, time and again I turned to look at my friend and that shiner and, in my mind, I saw the fist that caused it coming down like a hammer.

      * * *

      On the way to the Connolly yard, we stopped at the hill on the dirt road overlooking the woods. I immediately saw the object casting back the sunlight that I’d seen before, far out into the forest among the thick carpet of trees. Fat Bobby saw it too, and I actually heard him breathe out something like an ‘ahhhhh’ of amazement.

      “That isn’t ghost lights or a UFO,” he said.

      “No, it isn’t,” I said and looked at my watch. It was approaching noon, and I tried to think back to that day I’d first met Fat Bobby, and what time I’d been standing on this very hill. It could have been around noon. Which meant that the object down there, be it abandoned car or something else, for some reason only reflected the sun at a certain time of the day and from a certain angle.

      This was intriguing, and I was eager to get on with our plans.

      “Come on,” I said and started to walk again. Bobby lingered for a moment, as if the light down there held him by a tether and was reluctant to let go. I knew the feeling. It’s that thing СКАЧАТЬ