Night of Thunder

“Sometimes some fellas come in. New fellas,” he finally said. “Don’t seem no Baptists though. Seem more like hoodlums. Tough guys, don’t know where they’re from. Just show and buy up beer and Fritos and smokes and pork rinds, keeping to themselves, paying in cash, making comments about Lester’s store and how shitty it is. Don’t like ’em much.”

“Good,” said Bob. “Thanks a lot.”

“Yes sir,” said the boy.

Something reminded Bob of a certain kind of young marine, the loser kid who joins the Corps as a way to start over, to have a new life, to do something well and right. Some of ’em don’t make it, and it’s just more fuck-ups until they’re gone with a new set of grudges. But now and then you find one who gets to the top of the hill and goes on to become a real marine, and maybe has a life he couldn’t have imagined when he was fat, pimply, and sullen without friends and hated by everyone, most of all himself.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“No sir.”

“It ain’t my business, but a young fellow like you shouldn’t be cooped up in a nowhere place like this. And those guys, Baptists or not, are right about how shitty Lester’s store is.”

“Yes sir,” said the boy. “I know that.”

“Can’t you get a better job?”

“No sir. Can’t seem to get my letters straight. Didn’t do well in school, quit after two years. Don’t test out good enough to get into the service. Like to be in the Air Force, work on planes. Love planes. But can’t pass the tests. Lester’s only fella that would have me. I think he knew my daddy.”

“Maybe you got something wrong with your eyes or some little deal in your brain makes you see the letters in the wrong order. There is such a thing, you know. You should look into it.”

“Yes sir,” said the fellow.

“You should get yourself tested.”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, I can tell from the way you say it you don’t mean a word of it. Son, don’t give up. Take some free advice from an old goat with a limp who’s been around a block or two in his time on earth. Some social service deal in town or off in Bristol or wherever will test you for free and if you have a thing wrong, come up with a way to fix it up. Give it a try. You don’t need to do this shit forever.”

The boy looked at him from darkest abject misery, then smiled. It seemed nobody had ever talked to him like a human being before. The smile showed surprisingly good teeth and maybe a little brainpower in the eyes.

“I will look into it,” he said.

“Thatta boy,” said Bob.

“By the way, that Baptist place got to be the old Pioneer Children’s Camp, where I think a man hung himself when they caught him diddling little children back some years. I heard someone rented and moved in. It’s four miles up on the left, black metal gate, locked all the time. They painted it over so the black is shiny but I don’t think they changed the Pioneer sign.”

“You do know a thing or two,” said Bob.

Bob got there soon enough, and it was as the fellow had said, the gate was newly painted though the sign that read PIONEER CHILDREN’S CAMP was still shabby with age. A dirt road led off into the forest, disappearing as it wound through the dense trees in a few yards. The gate was still sticky in the August heat and it seemed a lot of bugs had landed and found their fate to be paralyzation in the thick goop someone had slopped all over. Bob looked for a way in, thought it wrong to just climb over the gate, and then saw a ’70s-style intercom relay on the gatepost.

He pushed the sci-fi plastic Speak button.

“Hello there.”

Through a rattley smear of electricity the answer was nothing more than a “Can I help you?”

“Name’s Swagger,” he said. “My daughter was the one nearly killed in an accident on 421 on Iron Mountain out of town last week. I’m looking into the circumstances and have information suggesting she stopped off here. Was wondering if I could talk about it to someone, the bossman I guess.”

The cackly soup recommenced to jabber from the speaker and Bob thought he heard a “Certainly.” A clunk of some sort announced that the lock had been sprung from afar, so he opened the gate, drove through, then closed it behind him. The road twisted through trees, then between a couple of foothills, and came finally to an open valley behind elevations that formed obstacles that were green and high but somewhere between hills and mountains. Maybe what eastern people would call mountains, but certainly not what a westerner would so label.

He saw a small, white chapel standing alone; a barn; a kind of exercise yard of pounded dirt; a schoolbus, yellow in the sun; a dormitory, and a kind of gymnasium, all of the buildings constructed with sturdy tin, tin-roofed, and a little shiny. Ballfields, basketball courts, and the crater of an old and unfilled swimming pool also used up the open space until the forest took over again, and shortly thereafter, the mountains began their skyward inclination.