PANIC (6 page)

In the 1800’s, way back before anyone alive could remember, a coal fire ran out of control and destroyed every building in town except for the brick mills. It would become the only character the town had, aside from the broad, rolling hills forming the perimeter of the community like a huge cul-de-sac. Everything else was fiberglass and concrete and glass blocks and stucco; a visitor would have no idea why this place existed.

Joining the main road out of town was an eight lane grey vein, I-25. There lay the mall, as silent as the mills and the mine.

Whenever his mom wants to go shopping, she gets on the highway and drives across the county to the outlet stores. She doesn't even pretend that eyesore exists. Once, when Danny was six, he asked what the big building was, since they passed it every Saturday and Sunday, returning from the flea market or the movies or visiting Grandma.

"A mistake," was her sarcastic reply.

The boys pedal on their mountain bikes in formation, taking up the whole oncoming lane. There’s never too much traffic in town, anyway.

THEY RIDE PAST City Hall, the square where the town fathers used to hold public hangings. The practice died down in the 19th century, but abolished when it was denounced as cruel. It was revived in the early 20th under the clandestine direction of Koenigsmann Bituminous Coal Co. The last unfortunate two hanged were in 1919, a Polish husband and wife named Wodjek. These two were accused and convicted as co-conspirators in a plot to bomb the mine to cause a collapse and draw attention to deplorable working conditions and encourage fellow miners to agitate against the company. There was no trial.

Private detectives surrounded their flat, removed them bodily and hanged them with burlap sacks on their heads on an early Sunday morning, while most people in the town were rising for Mass. No one in the town showed to watch this summary execution and the bodies hanged there for ten days. A month later, the mayor was angrily ousted by a mob for his inaction during the crisis. For a while, the minehead was guarded at gunpoint.

It looks benign now, a faded, off white mock Roman forum. The municipal plaza holds a fountain now, a generic design commissioned by a town council on a budget.

THEY RIDE PAST Galloway Auto Body, crossing northeast to a rise in the valley. This is where most of the houses in town were, all low, one story on wide streets with rounded curbs.

In 1956, it used to be adjacent to a junkyard, where the guys could work on cars in peace. Some of the older people in town remember the day they found Molly Stone sitting on the curb in front of Galloway’s, her pumps, stockings and felt skirt stained with fresh blood. It was already the color of rust by the time they arrived. They all just stood and stared like that.

Everyone looked for Old Man Galloway to speak first, it being his shop and all.

“Well now, girly,” he said, flabbergasted. “Just what in hell happened here?”

She just sat there muttering and mumbling through blubbery tears, not looking up at the crowd gathering around her.

Officer Duncan and the new guy pushed through the crowd to find her. They took her into the shop and shut the blinds, keeping their voices low. After a while, the new guy went out to the back, round the junkyard. A hydraulic jack lay splayed out, as if knocked loose by a sledgehammer. Sure enough, a gas pipe as thick as a two by four peeked out from the grass nearby, recently employed. A ‘48 Commodore lay flat on the ground, lacking its wheels.

The brain failed to register it right away, the gravel around the human figure was soaked through, cranberry red. All he could see were legs, like the Wicked Witch. They were already stiff and purple with blood. They bulged in the hot summer sun. The poor son of a bitch didn’t have a chance.

It was that foreign girl, the one who spoke softly because her English was bad. She came to turn over the house sometimes, even though Molly was perfectly capable of doing it herself. She’d stopped coming around because she’d gotten pregnant.

She never said who but her eyes couldn’t lie.

Now, it was a playground like so many former junkyards and landfills and wellsites.

THEY REACH THE outer perimeter of town and start up the hill, standing up on their bikes to pump their legs to maintain speed. This hill overlooking the valley is where the Koenigsmann mansion used to be. The hill is now home to a new development, with its rows and rows of identical townhouses, garages, lawns and most extravagantly, pools.

John Koenigsmann III had an indoor spa built in his father’s manse on the the first floor. In the 30’s, everybody who was anybody in the county either knew the Koenigsmanns or worked for them and regularly attended parties thrown by his wife, Marta. His workers fondly called him “Major” because of his stoic attitude and neat style of dress.

At first, they were the star of the town, which used to be named for John’s grandfather. Soon, it became apparent that her lavish balls and parties were just an excuse for her increasingly constant indulgence. He was always away on business and could never keep an eye on her. A man so disciplined and upright couldn’t conceive of her illness but he bore up anyway.

He had forbidden her drinking after their son was born and, dutifully, she kept right on. She’d reek not ten minutes after she was awake, favoring white wine and brandy.

John Koenigsmann IV had been born with a sunken skull and a heart murmur, the two were no doubt related.

Until he was six, John would bathe with his son in the spa, thinking it would purify his mind and soul and make him whole. He held him underwater as long as it took until life left his limbs and took him up again, hugging the boy tenderly. He finally realized his son would never be another John Koenigsmann, no matter how much he loved him.

He’d had Marta committed in Philadelphia and moved shortly thereafter to Switzerland with a few trunks of luggage and his favorite maid, a Mennonite girl named Miriam.

Marta died in the state sanitarium two years later on the same day a boiler fire destroyed part of the abandoned mansion.

There wasn’t even a plaque to mark the spot, just more ancient history the boys didn’t know. Just another featureless hill to plop pre-fab houses down on.

F
OUR

ON THE WESTERN slope of the hill was an unmarked trail. Everybody knew it, you just walked through the dead end, past the first treeline then into the forest. There was little undergrowth near this edge, where deer would graze undisturbed. Danny had heard there were mountain lions in the hills the higher up you got, but he’d never seen one outside of a zoo.

Where they stood, at the dead end in the unfinished subdivision, there was a line of hardwoods, the tops high enough to sway in the breeze. They were alive with stray bird calls, probably squirrels, too. The tall trees pulled with the wind at the top, side by side, sounding like a calmly rushing river.

All three boys looked up at them, formidable but not foreboding. At eye level, the ground in front of the tree line was dry and marked with stakes here and there, as if drawing out a grid. Each stake had a small, day-glo orange flag on it, all pulling stiffly to the north. Some of the trees had orange day-glo spray paint on their trunks, possibly singling them out for removal for their out of control roots.

Jerry was humming along with some metal song, imitating the driving instruments with his mouth. It sounded faint in the breeze, which had picked up. Ben had just finished his Milky Way and thrown the wrapper on the ground and the wind pulled it until it caught in a sewer grate.

“I’m not leaving my bike here,” announced Danny, looking around the subdivision, which was little more than a rolling construction site with roads paved all over it. Only a few of the houses were complete and the site just looked flat, dusty and unfinished. Anybody who wanted to come along and steal a bike would be welcome to it by the looks of it.

They all assented.

They walk their bikes a ways in and lay them to rest in the underbrush, in a row. The bikes don’t catch the light, being duct taped, scuffed and well-ridden. They walk in the shade together, crunching last year’s leaves and twigs underfoot.

Jerry smiles to himself, enjoying the way the sunset light plays through the trees.

The path has been beaten by human feet, evidenced by empty plastic and metal and glass containers strewn here and there. It seems like a good dump site for a body, except not, it’s just a pass in the woods where people come to light illegal bonfires or hike to the stream or god knows what else.

They cross through a glade with high grass, mostly up to their shoulders. The ground here is soft and rich. Long ago, this place was probably cut by wildfire and only grass grew now. Here might be a stump where mountain witches held their night sabbath, or where bootleggers lay under the stars sampling their own moonshine. This is where a mountain lion or bobcat might crouch, stalking through the stiff vegetation like an oversized shag carpet. At night, it would hunt but like Danny’s dad said, during the day you’d be much more likely to find one sleeping in a tree. The boys push through, more worried about allergies than forest predators.

“...Rob’s gonna let me hold his copy of Mortal Kombat...”

Jerry hears snatches of the conversation between his older brother and Danny, but isn’t really listening. He imagines himself like a commando, tracking some fugitive through a jungle hellhole and that his two older friends were other specialists in his squad. Ben would be the gunner, the wild man who held a machine gun in each hand. Danny, who he really looked up to, would be the sniper.

“...video is going to be so awesome when we upload it...”

He wished they had walkie talkies for their mission. The sun seems brighter, higher up on the hill, and less gloomy. The buzzing of the insects almost sounds electronic.

“...see Jenny this year? She’s got boobs almost as big as her sister now...”

They reach the crest of the hill, past the grassy bald spot facing the setting sun.

Behind them, the town lay low, nothing really remarkable about it except the spires of the two neighborhood churches - one Eastern Orthodox and the other Presbyterian. The supermarket’s roof was wide and flat and discolored by taking on rain and snow year after year.

Stretched out in front of them is I-25, bisecting the valley that comprises the whole county. A few hundred yards alongside the gently curving road is pylon after pylon of sturdy metal towers with their thick power cables sagging. Just below the highway, outside of town, is a concrete basin - a huge, manmade island of grey amidst all that lush green. The gray was all pitted and cracked in jagged slabs, like a dry lake bed.

Jerry and Ben’s grandad was a lifer of the town and remembered when that basin used to be the county’s dirt race track, later paved over for a year-round flea market and stock car track. In its heyday, you could go see a traveling carnival, or a monster truck rally, or even an exhibition race by a great like Ramo Stott. People used to come from a long way away to the Raceway but at some point it dried up, just like the baked asphalt of the parking lot laying there in ugly chunks.

It lay there for a decade, then a developer from the eastern part of the state bought the land for a song and invested a couple million in the Galeria. It was shaped like a trapezoid, very 80’s, the facade faux polished granite. It was huge, foolishly so. It still had its grand opening banner, as if to tie a bow on the folly.

It was a squat, ugly building, reminiscent of some ancient earthen mound built as a holy site for the people that lived here before Europeans settled it. The exterior was completed, the track redone as a parking lot, studded with tall, dark floodlights with concrete bases. The interior was mostly done, but the public never got to see because the developer got wiped out. No other outfit was willing to take a bath on the massive property so it just lay there, dormant, for twenty years. It would’ve been an amazing squat for train jumpers and junkies but people just sort of stayed away, perhaps instinctively. It certainly looked ominous enough, like the tomb of some hillbilly pharaoh; Karnak for Iroquois.

It seemed weird that it just sat there with no one taking responsibility for it. It was a blank spot on the map of the area. It was a speckled, stone grey tumor on the valley.

Beware. There’s a curse on the Raceway Galeria, said no one ever.

F
IVE

THEY PEER OVER the ridge together. It’s steep, but doable. They could even get back up clambering over rocks that line a path down the incline, like a natural staircase or a foothold for goats. To their young eyes, it seems a real far way off.

Danny’s relieved he doesn’t have to do any real climbing. He’s sure they’ll all just call it off after getting this close.

“Is this it, Jer?”

Jerry doesn’t need to come closer to the edge to know. He has an innate sense of direction but more importantly, a fear of heights.

The breeze now is enough to ripple their shirts and Jerry imagines the wind howling in his ears as he tries to surmount the cold and bitter pass. It’s really just a dirt slope broken up by twisted roots and a hard, eroded rock face but to Jerry it seems like K2.

Ben breaks in. “Jer?”

“Oh...oh yeah, this is it.” He forces himself to get closer. “See?”

He points to the section of the fence where the ridge of the hill slopes directly into it. There’s a big, ugly hole in it, blown inward just as the younger boy said - just like a car ran through it driving full speed down this natural ramp. Something seemed to tear the fence like tinfoil, though there was no indication of what might’ve done it. There were no tire tracks, no overturned shopping cart, no gunpowder residue or stag deer corpse or anything like that.

It was a cyclone fence, oddly, like you might see surrounding a prison. There was the fence, sandwiched between huge, neat coils of barbed wire stacked on both sides, horizontally. It was unusually threatening for security to a ratty old building nobody was interested in, anyway. The fence ringed the entire perimeter of the property, from the defunct access road in the back to the off-ramp, blocked now by concrete road barriers. It must’ve been a mile square around, in all.