Inherit the Bones

Chapter Thirty-seven

It took an hour for Mrs. Kirshbaum to tell her story, and by the end I was an emotional wasteland. She paused early on, listening to the heavy steps of Canyon as he made his way up the stairs and down the hall and into her room. He set the tray down and gave us each a glass of iced tea. Then he sat in the corner, watching his mother, and at some point he joined in the story, adding details that only he would have known. In a way it was that much worse, hearing the two of them tell their sad tale, a nice enough mother and an accomplished son so intrinsically linked to Cedar Valley’s most notorious mystery.

The tale itself was straightforward enough.

But Sylvia Kirshbaum wasn’t just telling me a story; she was reliving the past, one excruciating memory at a time. And in my mind, I could see her: prim and proper, with her hair done up, and her dress hemmed to hit just about midpoint on her knees, and her pumps, sensible one-inch heels. This was 1985, after all.

Canyon was inconsolable that afternoon.

It was early July, one of those perfect, warm days that occur a handful of times between late spring and early fall, when the air is hot and the sky is blue and the world seems bursting with life and color.

Canyon was a delicate child, not yet showing the body type he inherited from his late grandmother, she of the narrow shoulders and the wide buttocks. Seven years old, skinny as a twig, with a nose that ran constantly from allergies and wet eyes that were red-rimmed and sensitive to bright lights.

“But why?” he asked and it sounded like “bud way.”

Sylvia Kirshbaum wiped her son’s nose again-the rate this child went through hankies!-and gripped his fingers around the cup of tea. His were pale, thin fingers that were longer than they should have been for his age and size, like a piano player’s fingers or a surgeon’s.

“Because, my dear heart, you’ll catch your death. Now, you must rest here while Mama goes to work, and when I get back, we’ll make a surprise for Daddy. How does that sound?” she asked.

If she was late again, Mr. McGuckin would call her into his office and make her sit there on the black leather sofa and he would stare at her over those horn-rimmed eyeglasses and scold her. Scold her, a grown woman, for punching in her time card one minute past her expected return from lunch.

There were no words. Canyon simply wailed as she checked her handbag, fished out her heavy brass key ring with the funny owl tchotchke, and locked the door behind her.

For one hour, he was safe and sound, inside the house.

Every minute of that hour represented an opportunity for something, anything, to occur to prevent him from going outside and setting into motion the terrible events of that summer.

But the clock went tick and tock and Canyon occupied himself, with no idea that Fate waited patiently just outside.

The familiar squeal of the postman’s truck brought Canyon to the door and gingerly down the front steps. He snatched the new issue of Boy’s Life from the tin box, leaving the Sears catalog and two slender envelopes behind. Back inside, in the kitchen, he poured a big glass of milk from the bottle in the icebox, and then checked the pantry again, in case his mother had managed to hide a box of cookies. But she hadn’t, so he contented himself with the glass of milk and a slice of cold pie. It was cherry, though, and slimy as snot, and he dumped half of it into the sink.

He whispered shitpie as he watched it slide down into the drain and then giggled and said it again.

Shitpie!

In the living room, Canyon lay on the floor on his stomach, his body carefully angled to catch a single ray of sunlight. He read the magazine, wiping his nose every few minutes on the back of his hand. He sneezed and pretended not to see the wet spots that appeared on the page in front of him. Instead he focused on the newest clue in the Mars Attacks! Mystery. With his tongue between the gap in his front teeth, he carefully penciled in the code and added it to the notebook he kept in his back pocket.

Movement outside the living-room window caught his eye. He peeked out and saw something very interesting. The Kirshbaums lived at the end of a cul-de-sac, just beyond which was a big meadow filled with pines and aspens and a trail that led down the creek and deep into the wooded open space. Making their way down the trail were two blond, older boys. Canyon recognized them from the middle school that adjoined his elementary school.

It was 2:15 p.m.

Moving fast, he pulled off his pajamas and left them in a heap on his bedroom floor, and yanked on a pair of cotton shorts and a dirty old shirt his mother kept trying to toss. By the time he got outside, the boys were almost to the end of the trail. By the time he caught up to them, he was out of breath and snot caked his upper lip. The boys turned as they heard him approach.

“Hey, guys, whatcha doing?” Canyon asked.

It took a minute for them to understand what he had said, and he blushed at the congestion and stutter that turned his words into indecipherable mush.

“He’s showing me a secret,” the younger of the two boys said, pointing to the older, taller boy.

“A secret, huh?” Canyon said. “Can I come?”

They looked skeptical. “I don’t know. You’re just a baby. A sick baby.”

“Please? I’m not a baby.”

One of them asked, “How old are you?”

“Nine,” Canyon lied. The older boy scoffed. “Okay, eight but almost nine. I’m just small for my age. Jeez.”

The two boys went off to the side of the trail and conferred in whispers. After what seemed an eternity, the older one beckoned to Canyon with his finger.

“You can come but you got to keep your mouth shut, okay? This is my secret lair and I don’t want a bunch of babies finding out about it.”

They went off the trail and walked along the creek for a ways until they came to a little hill. Just beyond the crest of the hill was a bramble of bushes, thick with berries and thorns. Canyon had never ventured this far in the woods and the bramble looked menacing and dangerous, like something out of the fairy-tale books his mother read to him.

The younger boy noticed Canyon’s pause. “C’mon, he’s not going to wait for us.”

In fact, ahead of them, the older boy had disappeared. Laughing, the younger one hurried to catch up to him. Canyon wiped his nose on his shirt. The bush swallowed up the older kids, and the sound of laughter sounded far away.

And then all of a sudden it was quiet, and Canyon stood in the sunlight, alone.

He wiped his nose again and took a deep breath and pushed into the thicket. The leaves and branches weren’t too thorny, after all, and he caught sight of the boys squatting in a small meadow, passing something between them. It was small, about the size of a cigarette, but it smelled different, sweeter.

“What’s that?” Canyon asked.

The blond boys looked at each other knowingly.

The younger one said, “Weed. Want some?”

Canyon shook his head.

“Come on, Canyon. Live a little,” the older boy said. He put the funny-looking cigarette to his mouth and inhaled, holding the smoke in as long as he could and then exhaling it in one big breath. He started coughing and hacking, his face turning beet red. The younger boy laughed but Canyon didn’t dare. He’d seen that big kid wallop too many boys at school.

Over the sound of the coughing and the songs of the birds in the meadow, Canyon heard the low rumble of a diesel truck.

“You guys, shh. Someone’s coming.”

The older boy quickly ground out the cigarette under the heel of his boot. “Oh, shit. We’re royally fucked if we get caught with this. I stole it from my mom’s jewelry box.”

“What do we do?” the younger boy said. He was in a panic. His dad was twice as mean as the older boy’s dad.

“Quick, up there,” the older boy said, and pointed up a small hill. “We can hide.”

The boys took off running toward the hill. Canyon quickly fell behind, his breathing labored, his nose more stuffed up than ever. He felt too hot and he wondered if he had a fever. Stupid idiots. He should have known better than to follow a couple of losers like them into the woods.

He reached them finally, and found them lying flat on their bellies, on the backside of the small hill.

“Wha-” he started to say, and then the older boy was grabbing him and pulling him down on the hill and wrapping a hand across his mouth that smelled of tuna fish salad and motor oil. Canyon struggled against the big kid and then stopped when he saw what they were looking at, down at the creek below them.

Canyon’s eyes grew wide as saucers. He watched, afraid to look away, afraid that if he did, the man would move and maybe make his way across the creek and up the hill to them.

The man wore a dark shirt, and blue jeans, and a ball cap pulled low against the sun. The woman wore a red dress, fitted at the waist and collar, like the one Canyon’s mother wore to dinner with his father sometimes. A pickup truck was parked in the shade, under a tree. Someone sat in the passenger seat, hidden in the shadows, a cowboy hat pulled low.

The woman lay on the sandy bank of the creek, and the man tugged at her arm, pulling her toward the water, but she was stuck, caught on something. He cursed, loudly, and gave a mighty heave, and the woman’s head flopped back so that her eyes stared up at the children.

But they were beyond seeing a thing, those eyes, and Canyon felt a slow trickle make its way through his jockey shorts and down his legs. The older boy felt the wetness and pulled away from Canyon and then realized he still had his hand over the boy’s mouth, so he pulled that away, too.

The man got the woman’s body to the edge of the water. He whispered something and paused, brushing his hands on the seat of his pants.

And then Canyon sneezed, a great honking noise that filled the air like a flock of geese.

The man’s head jerked up, so fast the kids never had a chance. The man looked across the creek and up over a small hill and saw two boys staring at him, their eyes filled with horror. The top of a third head, Canyon’s, was bowed, the aftereffect of his sneeze, and by the time Canyon got his eyes back up, the man was knee-deep in the river, crossing over to them.

“Run,” the older boy shouted. He and the younger boy took off toward the trail while Canyon panicked. He rolled down the hill and landed in a thicket, under thorny brambles and deep foliage. He heard the sound of a car door slam and he froze. He knew the passenger in the truck was joining the chase.

The hunt.

Canyon tucked his head down and curled into a tight ball and closed his eyes. He stayed there for hours it seemed, until finally he heard doors open and slam again, and the diesel truck’s throaty engine start up and peel out of the woods on the old lumber road that led back into town.

Canyon Kirshbaum paused, took a deep breath, and wiped at the tears that streaked his cheeks.

His mother tsked-tsked from her spot in the bed. “When I came home from work, I found him in his bedroom, his clothes soaked in dirt and urine. He was in shock. I got enough out of him to piece together what had happened, and then I put him in a hot bath and we never spoke of it again.”

I stared at her in disbelief. “You never went to the police, even after news of the missing boys hit the next day?”

The old woman shook her head. “Canyon never told me who he was with. He just said it was some kids from school, some older kids. I didn’t know it was those boys. Besides, those cops would never have believed a word I said. And I couldn’t risk it, for Canyon’s sake. I just couldn’t.”

Finn swore. He stood in the doorway of the bedroom, a look of disgust on his face. “And you, Canyon, you never saw the man again?”

Canyon shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Misery filled the big man’s eyes, prompting a fresh round of tears. “That’s the damnable shame of it all. We never saw his face, none of us. He saw the cousins’, but we never saw his goddamn face. That hat blocked everything. If only he’d known he was safe. I don’t know if he even knew I was there. Otherwise, they’d have kept hunting.”

I couldn’t believe it. The woman in the red dress had to be Rose Noonan, whose body had been found downstream a month after the boys disappeared. The Woodsman had killed the McKenzie boys, thinking they could identify him as her killer.

And Canyon had lived, simply because the man hadn’t seen his face. Unbelievable. The universe was filled with enough mystery that sooner or later, you stopped questioning it and started seeing the perfect, the goddamn perfect, sense of it all.

Beneath me, the bedsprings shook and then settled. Mrs. Kirshbaum was pale but dry-eyed. She stared at me. “I suppose you think I’m contemptible, don’t you? You’ll see, once you have that baby. You’ll see.”

“See what?” Canyon demanded. “All I know is that you had an opportunity to help those kids, and you didn’t. You let me-no, you made me-forget what I’d seen. Like it never even happened. All those years, all those nightmares I had growing up… You kept telling me none of it was real, that I’d just imagined all of it. My God. To think that a part of me knew, that a part of me remembered all this time what happened to those poor little boys.”

Canyon pulled a tissue from the box in the windowsill and blew his nose. He continued. “When you started talking about that afternoon, it felt like I was drowning and your words were an arm, reaching down to me, pulling me up and out of a big, black fog. I remember. I remember everything. And I’ll remember until the day I die, long after you’re gone. You were wrong not to go to the police, and you were wrong to let me think those years of nightmares were the result of a naughty, overactive imagination.”

“You’ll see. A mother’s love doesn’t know right or wrong. A mother’s love just… is,” Mrs. Kirshbaum whispered, and closed her eyes. “What should I have done? Gone to the police and told them my son thinks he saw a dead woman about to be disposed of? That he and some kids were doing drugs-drugs!-in the woods? They’d never have believed me. And if it was true-if it was true-well, then Canyon would have been in danger.”

Understanding bloomed. “You had a record, didn’t you? That’s why you were afraid the cops wouldn’t believe you.”

Her eyes still closed, the old woman lifted a hand to her sagging breast and rubbed at it. Her hand traveled to her throat and she began to scratch at something on her skin.

“I never stole a dime from anyone. I cleaned that woman’s house for ten years and she blames me when her silver goes missing. Not the Mexican gardener or the black plumber. Me, the Jew whore. She turned everyone in town against me. It was only by the grace of God that Mr. McGuckin was so desperate for help that he gave me a job. But he watched me like a hawk, you bet he did.”

Canyon sighed. “Mother-”

“Canyon, I know you want to see the good in everyone but the world doesn’t work that way. The cops were the worst. Sworn officers, give me a break. They put their hands on me. I was driving home, late, after work, and they pulled me over, two cars with lights and sirens and badges that entitled them to act like animals. There were four men. They made me stand against the car and then they took turns, patting me down, patting me up, patting me every which way they wanted. And then one of them, a big man who by the light of day tipped his hat to me at the grocery store and called me ma’am, he squeezed my breast and said ‘Jew whores don’t feel any different than regular whores, do they, boys?’ and then he laughed. He laughed, Canyon, and I knew I would die before I put trust in a system that broken.”

Canyon stood and crossed the room and bending over, took his mother’s hand from her chest and replaced it in her lap. He kissed her on the forehead and whispered, “Mommy, hush now.”

Mrs. Kirshbaum stared up at her son with eyes full of horror and grief and pain.

“I couldn’t go to them, Canyon, I couldn’t. Not after that.”