The Summer I Died

CHAPTER 9

It was a woman. It was desperate. And it came from all around. We stopped moving and scanned the treetops like a couple of dogs sniffing out a trashcan. It sounded as if it came from everywhere at once, and even shifting our focus about we still couldn’t place the location. Then it stopped, the echo died away and all was silent again. Tentatively, the cicadas took up their buzzing once more; the ancient tree limbs went back to creaking like haunted house doors. A few mosquitoes tried to nest in my ear and I batted them away.

“Okay then,” Tooth said, and started to get in the car.

The scream came again, its urgency plain as day, and I knew somebody was hurt or at least needed some big time assistance. The hairs on my forearms stood on end, something that hadn’t happened to me in a while.

“What the fuck is that?” Tooth asked. A sudden fear wrinkled into his brow.

“I don’t know,” I replied, my heart beginning to race. “Sounds like it’s coming from over there but I can’t be sure. Wait, did you hear that?”

But before he could answer, the scream came again, and this time there was an unmistakable plea for help. But it was all run together so it sounded like “helpmepleasehelpme!” Then it stopped and we stood still, not knowing what to do, Tooth with his hand on the car door, me looking into the woods, my stoned brain replaying scenes from slasher films. The forest was on mute, every creature silent in the face of the unknown.

“Sounds like she’s hurt,” Tooth said.

“Probably hiking through the forest and fell or something,” I offered, “whoever she is. You don’t think there are any bears or anything in there?”

“Wolves maybe, but I don’t think they’re brave enough to attack a person.”

“What if she’s trapped under a rock or something?”

“I suppose they’d attack her if that were the case.”

“That’s not what I meant. I mean maybe she needs help. Maybe her leg’s broken or something.”

Tooth’s mocking stare told me how dumb my last statement was so I shut up. He cocked his head to listen for any further noises but there were none. He shuffled his foot in the dirt and took out his keys, jingled them in his hand like he was using them to think. He put them back in his pocket and looked at me but I already knew what he was going to say.

“Let’s go look.”

Son of a bitch. I should have walked away, should have taken the keys and driven us right out of there. But I didn’t. Instead, here we were, in the middle of frigging nowhere, surrounded by nothing but woods, with someone screaming for help, and we were about to go investigate. Every bad horror movie I’d ever seen rushed back to me.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’ve seen this movie before,” I told Tooth. “We’ll walk in there and the psycho with the ax will split my head in half.”

“Movies aren’t real. She is. We can’t just leave her if she needs help.”

Tooth was right, what else could we do? It was a half-hour ride to Bobtail, and even farther the other way. By the time we reached anyone who could help, whoever was screaming might be dead.

There was also another reason-aside from playing Good Samaritan-that I felt compelled to find this person: simple curiosity. Somebody screaming from the woods could only turn out interesting. Perhaps a camper who’d fallen off a cliff, maybe a hiker who’d twisted their ankle, or maybe even someone fending off a wolf, though I hoped it wasn’t the latter.

I was apprehensive and mesmerized all at once. Or to put it another way, I was just stoned.

When I saw Tooth take the gun and reload it I felt a little better.

“C’mon,” he said, and started walking into the trees.

I ran around the car and got beside him, followed him like a puppy following its mother. We ducked under some low branches and stopped short a little ways in.

“Which way?” Tooth asked.

“Not sure. Thought it came from over there,” I said, pointing off to my left. The woods went on forever. Tooth broke some branches blocking our way and began blazing a trail in the direction I’d suggested. We went another hundred feet before Tooth stopped abruptly and I walked right into him. He turned around, gun pointing directly at my belly.

“I must be high,” he said, and stormed past me back the way we’d come. Utterly confused, I ran after him, snapping twigs and running through a spider web that had me wiping my face like I was on fire. When I emerged from the trees I found Tooth reaching into the car. He pulled out a cell phone.

Man, we really were stoned.

He made a face as if he was the village idiot and started dialing. Three numbers could only mean 9-1-1. With the phone to his ear, he waited for a minute then said, “Shit,” and stared pacing back and forth. The trees crossing over us formed a big tunnel and offered little in the way of clear reception so Tooth walked all the way down to the main road. I watched him shrink into a dot, spinning around in an effort to connect to a satellite. Ironically, I prayed someone would drive by and see him holding the gun and report it, if not stop and ask if we needed help.

While he spun and swore, I leaned against the car, wondering if our mystery woman was okay, who she was and would she be hot and, please God, naked.

After a few three-sixties, Tooth came back up and slammed his palm on the trunk. “There’s no reception here,” he said.

I was about to suggest driving a little ways down the road and trying the phone there when she screamed again and I nearly jumped out of my pants. Just three little words but they scared the living shit out of me: “Oh, God, no!”

Then there was nothing.

“She’s in trouble,” Tooth said, running back toward the tree line. I stood where I was, paralyzed, as if my body and brain were at odds. Tooth looked back at me and yelled, “Don’t wuss out on me. Move!”

I sprinted forward and crashed through the trees with him, smashing my knee on a low limb and grabbing his shoulder for support. We dodged more limbs and stumbled over boulders as we pushed further into the woods. The sun began to fade away to shadow the further we went, and the moist underbelly of the forest gave rise to slithering insects and small rodents that dashed out of our way in a frenzy. In front of me, Tooth used the gun to hack through some thick foliage. I took a look around me and realized I wasn’t sure which way led back to the car anymore, since we’d been twisting and skirting around so many obstacles. A few minutes later, we emerged into a little clearing where a couple small trees had been knocked over, probably by a storm. Up to my left I could see the mountain clearing we’d been up on earlier when we’d shot the beer cans.

“Why don’t we go back up there and look out and see if we see anything?” I said.

“We already looked out all afternoon.”

“Not really, just shot the shit over the scenery.”

“We won’t be able to see through the tree canopy.”

“But we can’t see two feet in front of us now.”

He seemed to consider this but I could tell he wanted to keep going the way we were headed. Reluctantly, he said, “Okay. Maybe I can get reception up there.”

We trekked over to where the mountain began to slope upward and climbed up by grabbing tree limbs and hauling ourselves forward, almost like doing chin-ups. Probably it would have been easier to go around the base of the slope and find a path but I didn’t think of it until we were a ways up. The mosquitoes came back in full force, and since we couldn’t cover our faces they attacked like hungry vampires. They bit through my shirt and into my neck, my cheek, my elbows, all over. I made an attempt to swat at them at one point and nearly fell down the mountain.

Tooth was first to reach the lip and get on top. He covered his face with his shirt, put the gun in his waistband, and pulled me up. From there it was about twenty feet to the clearing. I stepped over one of the beer cans we’d murdered earlier and recognized my own work. Tooth started dialing but again got no service. “Motherfucker!” he yelled. “See, this is why we need to move. Nothing here works.”

I walked back to the edge we’d just come up from and looked out over the valley. I couldn’t see anything but treetops-a vast sea of green. Tooth had been right and I felt like sitting down and giving up. The whole Mighty Mouse routine was a bad idea from the start. I don’t know what we thought we were going to accomplish tramping through a mountain stoned out of our gourd. Hell, Tooth looked high enough to see God. We were going about this all wrong. I started to say this to Tooth but when I turned around he was gone.

I found him on the other side of the clearing, looking toward the direction of Bobtail. He was squinting. “You see that?” he asked.

“I’m not going to California,” I said.

“No, dipshit, over there. You see that rock cliff?”

In the distance, across a small valley of pines, was a sheer rock face.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, now see that?” He pointed off to his left, toward Bobtail. I followed his finger and squinted, clueless as to what he wanted me to see. Then the trees swayed and I saw what he was looking at. I was stunned. It was sort of the way you feel when you find Waldo in one of those cartoons. Once you see him you can’t believe you didn’t notice him earlier. What I mean was, there was a house. I could see it through the treetops as they blew side to side, could make out its log cabin walls and a beat up blue pickup truck parked on the side. There was also something moving under the canopy near the house, but I couldn’t tell what it was. Shadowy and large, it swam beneath the trees. A bear, I wondered.

As if in answer, we heard a dog bark. Only it didn’t come from the house, it came from the rock wall.

“It’s bouncing off the cliff,” Tooth said. “That’s why we’re having a hard time pinpointing it. It’s echoing off everything.”

“This is messed up,” was all I could reply. Then, “What the hell is a house doing in the mountains? Aren’t there zoning laws and shit?”

“Probably it’s further toward the road than we think. Look, the road goes around the mountain toward the house. With a long enough driveway, that would put the house back toward the edge of the woods but not necessarily in them. We’re not really that far in ourselves.”

“Okay, so if that’s where the woman is she must have a phone.”

“Maybe you were right, maybe something fell on her. Maybe she was working on her truck and the jack broke.”

“She’d be nothing but mush by now.”

“Well, we can’t leave her if she’s still alive.”

“Yes, we can. Tooth, I don’t feel good about this. Nobody even knows we’re out here.”

“Chill out, Wolverine. When we get there the first thing we’ll do is call the cops from her phone.”

“But what if she’s dead by then?”

“Then call Japan and ask for sucky fucky. They like that.”

I looked at the house and listened to the barking coming at me from the other direction. There was a pang of shame in my gut because I knew I was being a wimp about the whole situation. I was like a squirrel who couldn’t decide whether or not to cross the road when traffic was coming, while Tooth was already on the other side safe and sound. I must have looked worried because he pulled up his shirt and showed me the gun.

“Besides, we’ve got a little backup of our own,” he said. As I spun around to go back down the mountain trail, he grabbed my shirt and added, “Let’s go down over here. It’ll be faster than having to walk back around.”

“We should get the car.”

“It’ll be there when we get back.”

“But what if we need it to get help, to rush her to the hospital or something.”

“We’ll take her truck. C’mon.”

“But what if it broke when the jack broke?”

“What if I punch you in the boys for being a pussy? Look, it’s gonna take us twice as long to go down and get the car and then drive around than if we just run down right here.”

Shit. He was right.

We started climbing down the mountain again, breaking limbs and sending rocks rolling down the slope. Going down a mountain is always harder than going up because your body naturally leans forward. That coupled with gravity makes downhill hiking a bitch. The damn dog wasn’t helping my nerves either, and when a moment later I heard the first rumble of thunder in the distance, I knew this was going to be a stressful night.

If I’d only known what was going to happen next I would have taken the gun from Tooth and put bullets in both our brains.