Jeff McLaughlin
Safe
There was the writing spider poised ominously over the back door. There was the textured, colorless snakeskin coiled beside the front sidewalk, papery to the touch, it rasped against your foot. There were haunting noises that drifted from shadowy depths, emerging from thick trees that choked the floodplain. There was the tan creek, silent, mottled by occasional boils of darker silt, agitated by unseen forces. There was the thick, clinging scent of decay, of the stagnant mud that even on dry days lined the shallows. There were the rotting steps nailed onto an enormous tree, progressing to a great height, stopping only after they reached a decomposing platform, loose planks nailed over two limbs. There were the writing spiders, their enigmatic signatures woven into their webs. There were the poison berries, beautiful red, rich red, that bloomed when you crushed them between your fingers. Not the color of blood, but a deeper, denser color that left durable stains.
“We’re going back,” your dad says. “The stars have aligned to carry us home.”
But it was not home for you. You had never before left that county. Never crossed the state line, certainly never gone nine hundred miles farther south.
“But this is home,” you insist.
“Ah, it’s all the same big country, kiddo,” he says. His skin was fair, so fair that individual freckles made precise points upon it. You stare at his one discolored bicuspid as he talks. “You’ll love it soon enough,” he tells you.
It is not one big country. It is dozens of little countries crowded and interlocked. It is towns within those counties, and tribes within those towns. And you know no one there, and no one there knows you.
“He’s a shy kid,” you hear your mother say, later. “Not like you, who just jumps into things. It takes him a while to make friends. He’ll need some time. But he’ll come around eventually.”
It is not a matter of being able to make new friends. It is the matter of being forced to desert the old ones. You can not put this into words, precisely, you are only a boy, but you feel it. In those days you felt things more deeply. Now knowledge suppresses feelings.
You sit centered in the back seat as your friends, your former friends, form a reverse gauntlet and wave, wave, wave goodbye. You are centered within people you have known your entire life. Your father shunks the gearshift on the steering column from R to D and eases off the brake.
You blink, you blink, you blink, to make this go away, to wake up, to disperse the sight, to combat the tears. And yet the bright orange hood of the car consumes the black road before you, and yet the neat lawns on both sides of the road slip behind you.
At the last possible minute, as the car turns, you whip your head back to study all those you leave behind. Not a single person still looks your way. They are already returning themselves to their familiar lives. None of them reflect your sadness. They remain content together, you are already separate. Then the windshield swings left and you watch the flat, four-lane road narrow and dwindle behind you.
“It will be fine,” your mother says. She has twisted around to see your face. Your father glances up in the rearview mirror. You can see only his eyes, his eyebrows, the narrow bridge of his nose. His eyes crinkle when he smiles. There is a tear in your mother’s eye, poised just for a moment before she wipes it away.
You glide first into a new county, then drift smoothly into a new state. You pass its enormous welcome sign without stopping. The fields, broad, clean, disciplined, remain the same. You fall asleep.
Dusk falls as you awake. Rich, warm, auburn sunlight drapes its color across the east side of the road and makes shadows beneath everything on the west. The front tires thud over the metal seam that sutures bridge to concrete and then hum on the grooved surface. The sun glints from the swollen river, sharp and bright beneath the darkening sky. Thick trees cover the shore ahead, so green as to appear black. Through it the road carves a deep channel. As the car enters this canyon everything falls into gloom, your father pulls on the headlights, two yellow blooms smear the road, and you feel you are chasing something you will never catch.
The new house is not a house, but six rooms on two floors stacked between identical condominiums, so you worry that you will forget which door is yours, since the grass is uniform, the shrubs uniformly trimmed, very little distinguishes one doorway from the next, the small numbers on the doors, the windowshades, the doormats, things that might not be noticed until too late.
Day two, venturing outside, noticing that the summer here has greater weight, it hangs upon your shoulders, it settles into your lungs, humidity collects upon your face. The sidewalk, marked with rust stains all spreading in the same direction, ends abruptly, just beyond the last door, only several yards before the earth itself descends into a choked floodplain. A small crevasse through the snarled grass suggests a path into the layered shadows, but you cannot see deeply enough to consider entry. Restless waves of insect noises swell and recede in a languid cadence, even at noon, even in the brightest sun.
Inside. You hear kids’ voices rise over the grinding air conditioner. You curl the windowshade up an inch, no more, just enough to peer out, to peer down, to see some of them. They crouch around some central object. Their bodies shield it, this principal thing, all of them wearing stained shorts, faded blue and green and yellow t-shirts. Bronze-colored clay has stained their bare feet, even their pale arches, later, you will see, even up under the curls of their toes. You consider their voices, their lethargic accents, until they fall silent, their bodies still, enraptured by something pending, some unseen mystery. Then they break, scattering, and you see one of them carries a magnifying glass. Behind them a small flame flares white but soon smokes gray, burrowed into the green weeds. Before dinner you venture out to study the charred place.
Your father comes home from work. “You get outside today?” he asks.
“Not really,” you say. The air conditioning blows across your left cheek and makes you think of home, of winter.
“Your mom says there are lots of kids around,” he says. “You should get out and meet them.”
“I don’t want to get to know those kids. I didn’t want to move.”
“We had to move,” your father says. “We didn’t have lots of choices. This is close to where I grew up. It’s a good job.”
“I want to go home.”
“This is home, now.”
“This isn’t even a house,” you say.
“Gentle,” your mother says to him, and sets her small hand on his forearm. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” she says to you. “This is tough on all of us.”
You stare at them, looking from one to another. They do not look as unhappy as you feel, nor as scared, nor as lonely. They have each other. You have no one. Or perhaps you only have these new kids with their stained feet.
Day three, three kids wander down the sidewalk. They continue past its end, single file, moving down into the gap in the grass so quickly the shadows seem to blink them gone. You run outside through the front door, down the walkway, stopping at its edge. Their voices squeak through layers of leaves, occasional words, syllables, and then the shush of trees sifts over them like blown sand concealing a glass shard. You imagine all that could exist in there, dark snakes, vines looping between dark limbs, bats dangling overhead, heads down, indistinguishable from plants. Later you will discover that all these things are real, and nearly exactly as you have conjured them.
You return to your doorway, the mat a patriotic red, white, and blue, two men and a boy striding over a battlefield, two of them drumming, one of them playing a fife, marching before an American flag partially concealed by smoke. The Bicentennial has just passed. You crouch to study the weave and proximity blurs the image. You notice a hard, shining black spider poised on its corner, its front two legs lifted, like fangs themselves, as if it might strike. You lurch away, then take another step back.
“What is it?” a boy’s voice asks from behind you. To look at him would require losing sight of the spider, arched between you and safety. You point. “Yeah,” the boy says. “That’s a good one. Black widow.”
“Is it poisonous?” you ask.
“Sure. It’ll get you sick. It don’t jump, though.” The boy rustles through the bushes until he finds a long cutting from some previous season’s trimming, leaves gone gray. He draws it through the flat space between his squeezed thumb and forefinger. Brittle brown fragments drift and fall like dirty snow and leave behind a clean stick. He steps beside you and crouches, then slides the stick towards the attentive spider.
“Are you serious?” you ask.
“Sure,” he whispers. “Watch.” At the last second he stabs beneath the spider and flicks it onto its back, its paired legs executing silent quatrains of futility over the scarlet hourglass painting its abdomen. The boy chuckles knowingly, stands, and tosses the stick back into the bushes. “Female. That one’ll kill you.”
The spider’s flailing makes it spin, and when a back leg catches on the mat it grasps and flips itself over, the red vanishing, and the black body scurries from sight into the shadows beneath the bushes. You exhale.
“You the new kid?”
“Yes,” you admit. You study this boy, bare feet, blackened toenails, one knee skinned, threads dangling from cutoff pants, a pale shirt emblazoned with this state’s flag, and large brown eyes, given extra depth by his short pale hair.
“Yankee.”
“What?”
“From up north?”
“Yes.”
“Yankee,” he said. “It’s ok with me, though.”
“My dad’s from around here.”
“That so?”
“Yes,” you say, again, you cannot think of questions, kids vanishing into shadows, deadly spiders crouched close to your feet, this strange world, everything is strange, strange, and despite the presence of this boy, isolating.
“Awright. You comin’?” he asks, and pokes his thumb towards the woods.
“No,” you say. “Not today.”
“Tomorrow, then. We got a fort and treehouse and everything back in there. We’re close to getting the safe down. We come right by here every day. Watch for us.”
“Ok,” you say.
Then he, too, is gone, vanished in that falling shadowed way, without a sound.
That evening, dinner. “So you met some boys today,” your father says.
“Yes,” you say.
“And?
“They want me to go play in the woods,” you say.
“Seems like what boys should be doing.”
“Is it safe?” your mother asks.
“Safer than what?” your father asks.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Snakes and whatnot. It’s a floodplain, they told us, there’s a creek down there, even river-sized, I think.”
“Yeah, stay out of the creek,” your father says, between bites. “As for snakes, I spent my whole growing up running around in woods just like these and barely saw a one. They don’t much care for people, and boys aren’t quiet, so they’ll clear out of the way.”
“Are you sure?” you ask.
“Well, it’s not like we read stories about kids getting killed by snakes every day. It isn’t Africa or somewhere crazy. So, yes, I’m sure enough. The most dangerous thing in those woods would be people.”
“Good heavens,” your mother says. “Why would you go and say that?”
“And again,” your father says. “It’s not like they’re dragging dead kids out of there on a regular basis. I’m teasing,” he says, and he looks at you. “Don’t worry about it. Go and make some friends and have fun.”
You lie awake that night, trying to determine the difference between the looming woods barely twenty-five yards away and the pictures of jungle Amazon you have seen and with the exception of flat-faced natives crowding the latter they seem identical. You roll over and squint through your window. Moonlight reflects silver from the leaves and a vague wind jostles the limbs wider and narrower, making gaping shadows like enormous mouths. You look away. Eventually you go to sleep.
Day four. After breakfast, you glance through the front windows. They are waiting, five of them. You recognize the boy you met yesterday. They occasionally look at your front door, your window. Perhaps they see you, perhaps they see only their own reflections, or perhaps they only see the uniform shrubs and bricks and siding.
“It looks like you have some new friends,” your mother says.
“Maybe,” you hedge.
“Go on out. You’ll have fun.”
“Now? They want to go into the woods.”
“Well, like your dad said, if they’re in there playing all the time it can’t be too bad. Go on.”
You put on shoes. She smiles as you go out the front door.
“See?” says the boy from yesterday. “I told you he was here. Let’s go.”
You follow them down onto the flood plain, and take the path’s lurch to the right, as it tracks a smaller stream that trickles into the river. A gray pipe suspended by black cables lurches up out of the ground, crosses the river, and then plunges into the earth of the opposing shore. Together you scramble down the sandy, clay-stained bank to throw dirt clods into the moving water, and to break bamboo staves, working them back and forth, back and forth, until their stubborn fibers finally give way. The others use these as swords, smacking them together until they are beaten ragged and limp. Tossed onto the current, some spin further out, drawn into the center, some get tangled close to shore. You breathe in the thick rotting scent of fallen limbs in stagnant water. Time flies, it is hot, eventually you get thirsty, hungry, but they all do, as well, so you disperse home.
“I heard you came home filthy dirty,” your father says.
“Sorry,” you say.
“No, no. It’s good,” he says. “Boys are supposed to be out doing stuff like that. You’ll be stuck on some assembly line soon enough. Besides, I grew up doing the exact same thing, and I turned out fine. I do remember one time we had a kid move out from the city. Someone told him that the sounds he heard weren’t tree frogs but rattlesnakes. My God, he was terrified,” your father says, and laughs.
“Why?” your mother asks.
“Why what?”
“Why tell him that?” she asks.
He shrugs. “Kids,” he says, “people, this is what they do. What you know makes you who you are. If you know the same things you’ll be in the same group. You’ll see. As you get to know these kids you’ll get to be one of them,” he tells you. “Soon enough.”
Day five, the other boys are late, late enough that you think perhaps they will not arrive but when they do one of them is carrying an axe and they explain they had to wait for the right parent to go to work so it could be liberated.
“So what could be liberated?” you ask.
“Wait and see, wait and see,” they say, and soon enough you are jogging through the woods, past an enormous tree. You pause. The earth surrounding its base has been packed flat, its roots are visible, and uneven lengths of two by fours nailed to its trunk form a makeshift ladder. Overhead, higher than many of the other trees, a platform has been assembled between two branches.
One of the other boys comes back, looks where you are looking and says, “Yeah, it’s pretty cool up there. We’ll be back. Now come on.”
So you continue along the path, the trail narrowing, until you go up the opposite slope, a slight surprise since you had not previously considered that there was any end to the floodplain, it had seemed infinitely deep. You see where they are headed, a small house, but a real one, standing alone, though half its roof has collapsed. A fallen beam obstructs the doorless entry, so you enter one at a time, crawling beneath it, and move up the rotting stairs to the exposed second story.
“See here,” one of them says. “A big storm came though, huge storm, and ripped down that wall, like, two weeks ago? We’d been up in here a hundred times. But now there’s that. We did all we could with a shovel.”
He points at a small safe, black metal, solid and looking cold in the middle of the damp, crumbling plaster.
“The axe. Give it.”
They chop, one after another, gouging the wall, hacking a ragged hole around the safe, attempting to dislodge it, blooms of white dust and gray wet chunks of plaster thumping out with each blow. The studs, once exposed, are dark, made amber by age, and each crack upon them sends shivers through the floorboard upon which you stand. You get your turn to swing. The blade sticks in the wood and it is difficult to wrench it free. After a few tries the next boy takes over, smashing around this metal pinata, which, when it wobbles detached, holds balanced, then surprises you all by falling outside, landing on its corner.
You are the last one to reach it, and by the time you arrive you can see why they are disappointed. The door has broken open, revealing absolute emptiness.
“Man, damn,” one of them says. “I knew for sure there was a million bucks in there. Who has a safe with nothing in it?”
They are already drifting away. Just before you turn you catch sight of something, your own image, you realize, reflected in a piece of broken window glass, stabbing jagged like a lower tooth. It shows only your mouth and chin, as if your face has been severed, an ominous feeling, you shiver despite the heat, then hurry after them as they vanish back into the woods.
They stop at the enormous tree, considering the steps, which you try to count, losing track at eighteen. Sunlight shows through holes in the platform high above. They are talking about being up there, seeing the whole town.
“Go on up. You’re light. You can make it all the way, I bet,” one of them says to you.
You shake your head.
“You scared of that?” one of them asks. “None of us are.” Though in your presence none of them go higher than the fifth or sixth step, the slippery, mold-blackened wood twisting beneath their weight, pivoting around the nails that anchor it, so you think one will rip from the tree and a kid will fall and be seriously hurt, but each scampers back down safely.
“My brother said he used to be up there all the time, back when he was my age.”
“He put those steps in?”
“Naw, he didn’t. He said they were there even before he ever came down here. Up top, though, he says you can see like for miles. You can see over the creek to the big houses that way.”
“None of you have been up there, then?” you ask.
They snicker. “No, no. No one is that dumb, not anymore.”
And somehow this comment, that they are not dumb, that somehow they are smarter than you, who they just tried to coerce into climbing those steps, this unexpectedly wounds you.
“Lookit that,” one of them says, and you ease in close beside him to peer at what he has seen. A broad web stretches between two trees. A yellow and black spider waits at its edge, sequentially moving each sharpened leg, as if testing, or preparing to strike.
“What is it?” you ask.
One of them points at a denser white knot, akin to script, knitted into the invisible strands. “Jesus H Christ,” another one of them says. “A writing spider.”
“A what?” you ask.
“Writin’ spider. You see that? If it says your name you’re as good as dead. You read your own name you die in twenty-four hours, guaranteed.”
You squint. You cannot read cursive. You do not want to get too close, since the spider is right there, just there. “No way,” you say.
Behind him one boy shoves another. “Holy shit,” he says, “it’s your name. Look there. It’s your name.”
The other boy, the named boy, his face blanches. You step back as he looks more closely. “Aw hell no it ain’t my name,” he says, but his tone does not match his words, there is no confidence in his pronouncement, only fear, as the dappled yellow light wavers across his face and makes everything uncertain.
“Good as dead. As good as dead.”
The condemned boy looks around, and finds a branch, rotten, brown bark hanging and revealing the sepia wood beneath, and throws it, end over end, through the web, carrying it away entirely, web, script, and perhaps spider, now all absorbed by deeper shadows. “So see that?” he demands. “No more writing. No more bad luck.”
It is mid-afternoon before your hunger starts to gnaw at you. They pause at a dense tangle of honeysuckle and teach you how to pinch the end of the bloom and draw forth a single drop of nectar. Each one leaves a tiny glimmer of sweetness on your tongue but does nothing to satiate your deeper hunger. Soon enough you drift back along the path and out of the woods. Every one of the back porches is stained red, but it was not until it rained that you witnessed the source of the color, falling drops smashing into bare earth to splatter rusty ink across cinder blocks and mortar and beam alike.
You realize, later that night, that no one thought to carry out the axe, and you know some kid is going to be in trouble, and you are grateful it won’t be you and perhaps a little glad it will be one of those others.
Day six, Saturday, your father stays home, but wakes early to help finish unpacking, to move furniture into its permanent place, to break down the boxes in which your worldly possessions have been carried, to fix you into this not house, not home. The doorbell rings, later than you had expected, and you listen to him talking and think he is not really of this place, despite what he says, he could not be, pale as he is, his crisp voice so unlike the boys’ sluggish, somnolent cadence. You hear your name called and you know what he will say so you go downstairs ready to be forced outside.
“You boys have fun,” he calls, as you collectively move towards the woods.
“Yes, sir,” one of them calls back. “We will. For sure we will.”
Then you slap down the sidewalk, onto the packed trail, drop into the floodplain, and within fifteen steps the dense green trees seal you away from civilization. Your tennis shoes are caked in mud, clay fills every small indentation on their soles.
They gather around the enormous tree, looking up at the treehouse. “So?” one of them asks the condemned boy.
“What?” you ask.
“He was talking all kinds of shit this morning. Not being scared, spiders can’t write. Well let’s see. Let’s see. Climb it.”
“No,” the condemned boy says. “I don’t have to.”
“I guess you’ll die some other way.”
“Fine. I’ll show you,” he says, belatedly defiant. “It’s nothing but a stupid spider is all.” He glances around at each of their faces, and yours, and then shoves his way to the tree. He starts, face skyward, legs shaking slightly, but still he climbs, even as the steps sag to one side or another beneath his weight, higher than anyone had gone the day before, though still barely more than a third of the way to the top.
One of the other boys suddenly grabs you by the arm, distracting you, holy crap, look at that, and tangled in the briars is a long shed snakeskin, scrunched at one end, but from a frighteningly large serpent, the scales ghostly pale within the dark underbrush.
From behind you there is a rushing noise, followed by a thud and a scream, and by the time you turn the condemned boy writhes on his back, fallen from the tree, one arm covered in blood, head thrown back, neck also swathed with a dull low red, and the other boys have backed away. You offer an immediate prayer, instinctive, that this boy be saved. Then the combination of slow fear, from the snakeskin and from the curse, and immediate panic, from seeing this disaster, makes you sick, you turn and retch into the underbrush, leaving pale yellow phlegm dripping from a tangle of vines.
You look back, wiping your mouth. They are all staring at you. The fallen boy is seated, now, eyes open, watching, surprised.
“Holy crap. He puked.”
“What?” you ask.
“You puked.”
“Did you think he’d do that?” one asks.
“No, no,” and then they start to laugh, even as you are wiping your nose and eyes with your hand and then with your shirt.
“You’re dead,” you choke, barely able to speak, pointing.
“No, it’s a joke, a joke.”
“All the blood,” you say.
“No, no, no it’s not blood. It’s berries. These berries.” They show their hands, covered in the smeared residue of purple fruit, made red as it thinned. It was spread on their clothes, their faces, too.
“Jesus,” you say, in unconscious imitation of your father.
They laugh some more, the trick complete.
“Oh good lord, his face, look at his face.” Laughter upon laughter, each single voice only soft amusement, but the collective sound is hard cruelty.
So you run, you run, you run out the path which allowed you in, and you can hear them calling your name, and the laughter stops, not out of fear but resignation, and you know as well as they that you will be forced together again, you have been initiated, you know what they know, you are stuck in this tribe.
Day seven. Your first time at that church, tall, bright columns support a high ceiling, various shades of white, reminiscent of clouds and angels and cherubim and seraphim and you are distracted, your thoughts drifting up through the colorless, pale light, singing without thinking about the words, listening enough to suggest to your parents that you are attentive.
Then in the sermon the preacher says “pure as the driven snow,” in reference to what, you do not know, but the word snow, in that white space, recalls something different, something better, something clean. So when it comes time for prayers, there you are, pleading for winter to come, a real winter, a harsh, relentless winter that will kill everything, to scour everything clear, to dry all the leaves, kill the snakes and spiders, for ice to fell the enormous tree, to freeze the river, to make everything bare, plainly apparent, to make the land white and the river white and the trees black and to therefore expose everything, defined and clear, to render this fecund, haunted place pale and sharp and just like home. But even as you offer this up this prayer you know it will never be answered. This world remains dense and heavy and secretive beneath the airy transparent expanse of the heavens. You will not be returned to a place where you see everything, where you know everything, where you feel safe. That precise world is long gone.
Jeff McLaughlin was born in Nebraska, grew up in the Carolinas, went to school in Minnesota, and now lives there with his wife and two children. He’s been fortunate enough to place a few stories here and there, most notably in the Kenyon Review, december magazine, and the Southern Humanities Review, and most recently in the Louisville Review. Alongside querying his first novel, he serves as an assistant fiction editor for the Raleigh Review.