The Year of the Storm (6 page)

W
e didn't sleep.

There was too much to get our minds around. We spent the rest of the evening sitting up in chairs in front of Cliff's big-screen television. Only we didn't watch the TV. Instead, we stared at our own dark reflections in the mute screen and tried to make sense of it.

By the time the sun came up over the cotton fields, I'd come to two possible conclusions. One, the man was a crazy fool. He'd come to town and heard about Mom and Anna and decided to cause trouble. Two, he might have actually had something to do with their disappearances, a conclusion that—considering the timing of his appearance—seemed harder and harder to ignore. He was in the cabin, which seemed enough to suggest a connection. This second option made me feel sick to my stomach to think about, so I didn't. By the time I got around to articulating my thoughts to Cliff, I was thoroughly pissed because as bad as the second option was, the first wasn't much better.

“That's it,” I said. “Neither one is worth a damn.”

“No,” Cliff said, “there's another one. Maybe, somehow, he knows where they are. I mean, he just knows. Like he didn't put them there, so he's not responsible, right? He just knows and he wants to tell you so you can help them.”

I nodded. It seemed very unlikely, but I tried to ignore that and focus on the idea anyway. I think I had dismissed it simply because it held too much hope, and I'd learned that hope could sometimes be a dangerous thing.

The sunlight streamed in through the windows behind the TV now, causing me to shield my eyes and yawn. “I'm going to sleep for a couple of hours. When I wake up, I'm going to the cabin.” I left the statement hanging there. I wanted him to volunteer to go with me, but I wasn't going to ask. He'd already done a lot for me, and I would understand if he didn't want to do any more.

“You know I'll go with you,” Cliff said.

“Don't worry about it. That guy could be a nut.”

Cliff walked over to his bed and fell on top of it heavily. “Could be? He
is
a nut. That's why you're not going alone.”

That made me smile a little. Then I stretched out in the recliner and fell asleep.

—

O
ne of the great heartaches I have known in my life is losing touch with Cliff Banks. I last saw him when I was twenty-seven in New York City. We'd both gone to colleges up north. Mine was the University of Massachusetts. His was Harvard. We'd had plans of meeting once a week in downtown Boston for a beer. I even remember calling him once, it must have been the first weekend I was on campus, to set up a time to get together.

“I'm already swamped,” he said. “Physics is going to kill me.”

“No problem. We'll do it another weekend.”

“Sounds good, Dan. I'll call you.”

I was about to hang up when he said, “Wait.”

“Yeah?”

“What happened when we were fourteen. That summer. Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember. It was—”

“It scares me.”

“Sometimes it scares me too.”

“The things you said . . .”

“It really happened.” I paused. “I think.”

“Yeah, well, you always seemed like a reasonable kid, which is why it surprised me when you let that old man—”

“Don't,” I said. “Just don't.”

“Sure, Danny. I understand.”

“No, you don't.” It was a mean thing to say. And worse, I wondered if it was a hypocritical statement because the truth was, I didn't understand either. Not really. Not enough.

“Here's the thing, Danny. With physics . . .” He paused. “I've learned a lot about the world, the nature of things. You know, I took that class last summer. It doesn't compute. What happened, or what you say happened—”

“You heard the story too. Tell me he was lying.”

“He may not have been lying. Insane people tell the truth, Dan.”

I said nothing. It was a place I didn't want to go.

“Besides, it's all so vague now. Even if I believed every word he said, I didn't experience it like you did. I didn't . . .” I could hear his desire to say the word and not say it at the same time. I could hear it in the silence over the phone line.

So I said it for him. “Slip. You didn't slip. Whether you believe it or not, I did.”

“Listen,” he said. “This is tough for me. It was always tough for me. There's a term, maybe you've heard of it: willful amnesia. I'm starting to think it might not be a bad idea.”

Willful amnesia.
How many times had I repeated that phrase inside my head over the years?

“I'll call you,” he said, and it was clear that he couldn't bear to talk about this any longer. “We'll get together this weekend. I'll call.”

He never did.

—

W
hen I ran into him in New York, it was as a stranger. He was sitting three seats down from me at a bar. By then, the clash between what happened to me when I was fourteen and the rational adult world I had known since was beginning to exercise a hold on my life. Some nights, I couldn't sleep for worrying about how much of it really happened. See, you start growing up, moving faster, doing more things, occupying your mind with one thing or another of little or great consequence, and you begin to lose sight of the things you once held dear: the ideals and the truths that you had clung to in your interior life because the interior life is whittled away by scratches on a calendar, obligations, and all the damned little things that make you old.

I saw him and at first, I didn't recognize him. No, that's wrong. I recognized him immediately, but I didn't place him. Seeing his face spiked something in my subconscious and put me in mind of the past. I knew I knew him. I felt dizzy with it. Then I heard him speak, saw him gesture with his hand, and I had it. Cliff. I leaned forward intending to call out his name, but at that instant, someone tapped him on the shoulder. Greetings were exchanged, beers bought amid uproarious laughter. I was left with a sense of loss so profound I immediately got up and exited the bar. Even now, I struggle to explain it. Maybe I just didn't want to make him revisit those events that obviously had caused him so much pain. More likely, I believed it would be easier to simply walk away than to confront a person from my past with whom I had shared the greatest enigma of my life.

I think one of the reasons I decided to write all of this down is because of that encounter with Cliff. It's too easy to forget. And it's even easier to pretend that you are just an ordinary person instead of that young boy who not only witnessed magic, but embraced it, reshaping the very world around him so that it lined up right and true.

C
liff woke me at ten thirty. For a brief second, I felt disoriented. I thought I was at Gran's and I'd fallen asleep in her big chair. In my reverie, Mom and Anna were still with us, and I almost called out Anna's name, somehow mistaking Cliff for her, before realizing where and
when
I was.

“I figured it was time,” Cliff said.

My neck was stiff and I had a dull headache, the kind I got sometimes when I'd been overstimulated. I nodded at him. “Good call. We need to get moving.”

We grabbed a box of snack cakes to eat as we walked, and I wolfed down three of them before the highway.

The day was already hot, something you got used to in Alabama, but there were no clouds that morning and the sun seemed particularly bright on my skin. I angled for a stand of pear trees in order to get out of its harsh glare.

As we slid into the dim light of the woods, I saw the remnants from the tornado. Whole segments of the forest had been decimated, making it tough going because of all the deadfall. I remembered seeing Anna, the way she had seemed to beckon to me, as if she understood something about my fate that I couldn't even begin to fathom. I was about to tell Cliff, when I thought better of it and decided to keep it to myself.

I did want to find the shelter again, to show Cliff, but for some reason I couldn't locate it. The woods looked so different now, devastated by the storm. I would be doing good just to find the old cabin again, much less the storm shelter where I'd seen Anna. Besides, I still wasn't sure what to make of that whole day anyway. Like the night I'd seen Anna near the quicksand, the time in the storm shelter seemed more like a dream than reality.

A few minutes later, we stood on top of a steep embankment, looking down at the little shack. It looked almost the same as the last time I was here, when I'd watched the police coming in and out behind yellow tape. A rutted, dirt road served as a driveway to connect the place with another similar road that wound out to the highway. You could drive back here—the man obviously had—but most people wouldn't want to put their cars through it. I noticed his mud-splattered truck, an old F-250 parked in the shade just off the makeshift drive. The yard was littered with junk, although it was evident he'd been trying to clean it up some because it had been much worse the last time I was here. A busted generator, spare tires, and the scraps of at least three push mowers sulked among the overgrown weeds and kudzu. The shack itself seemed to have sprouted vines. The kudzu fell off the roof like shaggy hair, tangling over on itself, thickening, closing off the cabin from sight. Except for the very front, where the old man had obviously cleared enough vines away to go inside. Now, the door stood open, thumping very gently in the breeze.

I looked at Cliff. “You up for this?”

“Not really.”

“Me either.”

We stood there a moment. I don't know about Cliff, but I was scared. You grow up in a place, taking certain things for granted. One of those things was that this cabin was a dark, brooding entity, an almost living and breathing thing that kept its secrets deep within. Watching that door thump in the breeze, almost like an invitation, didn't help either.

Yet . . .

I was here. The man said he knew where my mother and sister were. I had to go in. I just had to.

I started down the embankment, ignoring the way my insides were twisted in knots. I reached the bottom and turned back around. Cliff was still standing there. “Well?”

He shrugged, slid down the embankment, and followed me inside.

—

W
e found him on the floor beside his bed and facedown in a pool of his own vomit. The smell hit me the moment we walked in, a kind of pungent aroma that suggested raw meat. We pushed through a darkened hallway to a single room in the back. A bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon lay on the floor beside him, its amber contents seeping out and mingling with what appeared to be yellow puke.

I never assumed he was dead. Somehow that seemed out of the question. Maybe it was just my nature to always think people would survive. I certainly believed that Mom and Anna had. Still, it was alarming to see him like that, a man who had literally drunk himself into a stupor.

I picked up the man's arm gently. It was like a lead weight.

“Is he alive?” Cliff asked, his voice cracking into a whisper.

“I think so. He's just passed out.” I looked around. “I wonder if this place has running water.”

“Not likely,” Cliff said.

I wanted to get a damp cloth and place it on his forehead. Not sure why, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Before I had a chance to move, he stirred, lifted the same arm I'd picked up, and used it to shoo me away. I stepped back and waited as he pushed himself up from his vomit. The side of his face was covered in it, the yellow semisolid stuff peppering his beard like ornaments in a bush. He reached for the blanket on his bed and used it to wipe his face before righting the bottle of Wild Turkey, preserving the very last bit. He contemplated the bottle, as if trying to decide if he should drink it, but ended up shaking his head, placing the bottle upright on a nightstand, and falling back onto his mattress.

“What's your name?” he said, his dirty T-shirt riding up past his belly and exposing a long scar that bisected his lower abdomen and curved downward beneath his blue jeans. I looked at his glass eye—it had to be glass, didn't it?—and the scar that ran down his face. The two wounds were similar, as if done by the same blade. All of these thoughts were running through my head, so much so that I didn't even give him an answer.

His good eye cut in my direction. “You got a name, don't you?” His voice was guttural, more like the moaning of a bear than the words of a person.

“Yeah,” I said, and my voice sounded foreign to me, a strange instrument that had grown dull and almost useless. “Danny.”

He lifted his hand from the mattress and pointed across the room. “Danny, go get me that tank.”

I turned and saw the oxygen tank on wheels leaning against an antique-looking dresser. I started for it when he said, “And a pack of smokes from the top drawer, would you?”

—

H
is name was Pike. Walter Pike.

He spoke in a deep, ancient, whiskey-stained voice. His dead eye never looked at me, and I always found myself wanting to look over my shoulder to see what it was watching. Sometimes he muttered to himself, and when he did, his eyes went distant, and he didn't seem to be in the same place as we were. It scared me, and only when he'd refocus and light another cigarette did the fear dissipate.

“I didn't think you'd come.”

“You know about my mother and Anna?”

He closed one eye. The dead one stayed open and I realized whatever injury he'd suffered there must have not only taken his eye but also severed whatever nerves were needed to control the eyelid.

“Know about them? I believe I might, but it's probably not as clear-cut as you think.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Pike ran a liver-spotted hand through his hair. “I don't hardly know myself.”

I could feel Cliff's eyes watching me. I didn't look at him because once I did, I knew I'd see the skepticism there and I'd be less able to push my own away.

I shook my head, trying to make sense of it. “How can you hardly know?”

Cliff interrupted me. “Mister, if you're just blowing smoke up our asses, please stop. This is real serious stuff to Danny. We're talking about his family.”

Surprisingly Pike nodded at this and dislodged a cigarette from his half-empty soft pack. “Let's go outside,” he said. “It stinks in here.”

—

P
ike had us bring out wrought-iron chairs from what served as his den and set them in a half circle out in the yard. We sat in the half-light of the woods, Cliff and I shifting uneasily, while Pike alternately smoked Marlboros and took hits from his oxygen tank. Occasionally, he did that thing where he stopped and looked off in the distance. Once he even nodded as if he were hearing a voice that we couldn't.

“It's a long story. I think I'll have to tell it from the beginning for you to believe it. And even then, I'm afraid there'll be no guarantee.”

I wanted to tell him to just get on with it. Spit it out and let me decide for myself.

“The hard part is deciding where the beginning begins. I think with Seth. Seth's dead now. But I'm not sure that even matters. Maybe it does. There's so much I don't know.”

It was maddening. The way he'd start to say something meaningful before detouring to begin some other thought. He was hungover, probably still groggy. I chalked it up to that.

“The reason,” he continued, “I've been hanging around your house at night is that I was trying to get up the courage to talk to you, to somebody, but I think it is better you than your father. Adults, they don't believe. I've been selfish for waiting this long, but I'm afraid . . .” He trailed off, looking around anxiously, maybe for a bottle of something hard. He even shifted in his chair like he wanted to rise, to go back inside, surely for the remains of the Wild Turkey by his bedside. “I'm afraid I'm losing my mind.” He beat the palm of his hand against his forehead. “Oh, if only Seth could tell you.” He looked out into the woods. “You always understood it better than me,” he said, and I actually turned to look for who he might be talking to. There was nothing but trees swaying in the afternoon breeze.

I looked at Cliff. Cliff gave me a look back. The guy was nuts. Still, I felt a fascination, a deep need to get at what was going on, why he was nuts, why he felt the need to inflict his madness on my family.

I spoke slowly, calmly. “Can you please just tell us what you know about my mother and sister?”

He nodded at me, his good eye fixing me with a look I couldn't read. “Yes, you deserve to hear it. Your mother and sister have vanished from this world, but they're not dead, at least I don't think they are. They've simply . . .” He paused here, as if trying to come up with just the right words. “They've simply disappeared from this world.”

I was about to respond, maybe even laugh, when I heard a vehicle coming down the rutted road that led to Pike's shack.

For an instant, I thought the truck was Dad's, but then the red Silverado rounded the bend and I realized it belonged to Cliff's father.

Mr. Banks never came out here. I shot a look at Cliff. He didn't meet my eyes.

“Did you tell your dad we were coming out here?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly? What does that mean?”

The truck slid to a stop on the dry gravel. “It means I just mentioned we were going to be exploring over by the old cabin today.”

I gave him a nasty look.

“It was the safe thing to do.” He glanced at Pike, who was taking all of this in passively. “He might be a crazy man for all we know.”

Pike chuckled. “You got that right.”

Mr. Banks unfolded his long frame from the driver's seat and quickly headed toward us. I glanced at Pike. He was watching the man with his head tilted to the side, a look of perplexed agitation on his face.

“Get in the car, boys,” he said.

“Help you?” Pike said gruffly.

Mr. Banks barely looked at him. Instead, he focused all his intensity on me, which was disconcerting to say the least, considering all the time I had spent at Cliff's over the years when he'd barely acknowledged my existence.

This obviously rubbed Pike the wrong way. He stood up and positioned himself between Cliff's father and me. He cleared his throat. “Is there something I can help you with?”

Cliff's dad shot him a withering look. “You've got some nerve coming back here.”

“I grew up in these woods. Nerve ain't what I'd call it.”

“What would you call it?”

Pike thought for a minute. “The right thing to do.”

“What would you know about that?”

Pike seemed to consider this. “Plenty more than you know about good manners, it seems.”

Cliff's dad laughed. “Manners? This is my son. He and the other boy are coming with me, and unless you want the police out here faster than you can count to five, old man, you'll stay the hell away from him.”

Pike just stared at him but made no further argument.

Mr. Banks met his glare, mumbled something under his breath, and pushed his way past until he stood over me.

“Daniel,” he said. “They've arrested your father.”

—

T
alking to one's father in jail for the first time is not something that's easy to forget. It was the first time I can remember feeling like our situation was spinning out of control. It seemed beyond bad luck, beyond the curves that life throws you. I felt at that moment like our family was laboring under a vicious curse and once I heard what my father had to say, the feeling grew stronger.

I took his call at Cliff's house, where I would be staying indefinitely. Dad's court-appointed attorney had already been in touch with Mr. Banks.

“Danny?” His voice was clear and loud in my ear. Somewhere in the background I heard a cell door clanging shut with an eerie finality that made me shudder.

“Hey,” I said. My lips felt dry, my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. “What's happening?”

There was a pause. I imagined Dad's eyes roaming over the empty cell, the cot, the plain gray walls, the floors stained with piss and blood. “Danny, I—” He faltered. “I'm sorry.”

“For what?”

“For what I did.”

I felt cold fingers on my spine. What had he done? I had to resist the urge to hang up the phone.

“What was it?” I said at last.

“Mr. Banks didn't tell you?”

I could hardly speak now. “No, sir.”