FOURTEEN
There were two rickety gates that opened up like giant batwing doors from an old saloon, leading into the alley-when they were unlocked. A Master's pad-lock kept them shut and denied access to all except city workers and those of us able to scale a six-foot fence. Steve helped me over by lacing his fingers together to form a footstep.
The three of us, on the other side, walked in between the Maherrin’s and the Pharris’s houses. Cinder block walls on each side separated their back yards from where we strolled. Steve carried his rifle over his shoulder like a confederate soldier going off to battle.
The water distribution unit was housed in a large shed in the middle of the dirt lot at the end of the alley. After that, there was an eighteen-inch-high block wall that bordered Dead Grove. We hopped over it and made our way onto the dirt path that led in. At the far end of the path, Magnolia could be seen, and an open field lay beyond that.
A third of the way down and two rows from where we’d hang a right onto a trail that led through the decimated and decrepit trees, Cory turned to Steve and said, “So, are you going to tell us what you sent Jason over here to look for?”
Steve looked at him with a lopsided grin and answered, “Just wait, you’ll find out.”
“Come on man, I’m dying to know.”
“Let’s just say,” Steve said brushing a hand through his long feathery hair, “that it’s something really cool that we’re all going to enjoy looking at. Unless you’re queer. You’re… not queer are you, Dayborne?”
“Hell no,” Cory said quickly, insulted at the suggestion. He punched Steve on the arm and ran up the trail toward the fort and Jason.
“Asshole,” Steve called after him, rubbing his arm. “Watch this, Ricky.”
He loaded a BB into his gun, pumped it a couple of times and then waited until Cory was about thirty feet away, took aim, and fired.
Whap!
It took a second for the projectile to reach its mark, but it was a perfect shot, hitting Cory on the left butt cheek.
“Ow.” Cory yelled, and turned and flipped Steve off, still running and rubbing his backside. It wasn’t enough to break the skin, but for those of us who’ve been shot by a BB gun before, it must have stung like a bitch.
I started cracking up on the spot, doubling over.
“Good shot.”
He grabbed me by the back of the neck, gave it a squeeze, and said, “Come on,” and started jogging up the trail himself.
I followed at a slower pace, taking in the surroundings. For a place so devoid of live plant life, it always seemed oddly beautiful to me. Tumbleweeds had grown, died, and been blown about in all directions looking like skeletons from some alien planet. The orange trees were bare and leafless, the bark brown, the skin beneath, a light yellow where it had peeled away from the trunks. Brown dirt, brown weeds, and old discarded boards and boxes littered the area making it a bland landscape set in sepia tones. The only thing that gave it any color and broke the dullness was the blue sky above.
Ground squirrels darted here and there, giving some life to this dead forest. Our mother sometimes took Jason and Susan and me for walks on the dirt path that ran around Dead Grove. She would load our pockets with peanuts and sunflower seeds, treats for the small fury creatures that lived within.
I caught up to the guys at the Fort.
The Fort was an area of about seven feet by seven feet. It had been cleared out, the trash and debris having been pushed to the sides in between the deceased orange trees. I can’t exactly remember how we had found it-probably just out exploring one day-but we had been claiming it as our own for a couple of years by that time. Cries of ‘Look at this one’ and ‘Whoa, check out the set on her’ followed by laughter filled the air as I approached. A murder of crows cawed back and forth to one another at the east end of the grove.
“So what is it?” I asked. “What did you find, Jason?”
Sitting on discarded crates, the guys flipped over the magazines they’d been sifting through, and showed me the find. Women with legs splayed and mouths open as if crying out, filled the pages.
“Whoa. Let me see,” I said.
Steve reached down and tossed me an old bowling ball bag. I sat down on a flattened cardboard box and opened it to reveal about ten magazines inside. Some with names like Swank and Hustler and Cherry, the girls on the covers looked back as if they wanted something, begged for it.
I had a little bit of an idea of what sex was. Jason and Cory had explained it to me-to the best of their knowledge anyway-about a year before in Cory’s playhouse.
“Guys have dicks, and girls have pussies,” Jason had said.
“Yeah, and the guy takes his dick and puts it in the girls pussy. And that’s how they make a baby,” Cory finished.
It was a rough explanation of how the ‘Deed’ was done, but in the end I got and understood the process. I knew that boys and girls private parts were different, although the concept of the two coming together that way was lost on me until those two had shed some light on the subject.
Now, pulling out a magazine at random, with the name Busty on it, I flipped it open to the middle section and looked at a woman with colossal sized breasts. I grew hard almost instantly and was a little embarrassed at the thought of the other guys finding out. But after seeing them pushing down on the crotch of their own shorts, I knew the same thing was happening to them as well and I relaxed a bit.
A moment later, Cory, tapping a centerfold with his knuckle said, “Man, I’d do her in a second.” He turned the picture around to Jason, who, wide eyed, nodded his agreement.
“Cory,” Steve broke in, “You wouldn’t know what to do with a naked girl.” And then picked up a dirt clod and whipped it at him.
Cory was fast though. He lifted the magazine to block Steve’s throw and the clod exploded in a puff of dust on a naked brunette’s ass, the whole time the squirrels ran back and forth collecting what little food they could find and the crows kept at their council a hundred yards away.
We all looked through the dirty magazines for a half an hour or more, switching off with each other and pulling more porn out of the green bag as we went along. There was talk of what one of us would do to a girl and how we’d do it. Snide remarks like ‘I bet you couldn’t even get it up,’ were exchanged along with lots of laughter.
“Hey, Jason,” I said holding up a picture of a blonde; “she looks a little like Amber, doesn’t she?”
With angry eyes and a serious look on his face, he shook his head furiously, as if to tell me to keep my mouth shut.
Steve put his smut mag on his lap, looked at Jason and asked, “Who’s Amber?”
“No one,” he said quickly and went on looking through the photos.
“It’s his girlfriend from Mrs. Simmons’s class,” Cory answered.
“Is not. Shut up, both of you!” Jason snapped.
Steve being the oldest and the leader was never easily brushed off and never let anything go that he wanted heard. He rolled the magazine up and pointed it at Jason. “Come on, Sinfield. Out with it.”
Jason rolled his eyes and then closed them. “She’s just this girl from class. Amber Nelson.”
“Is she your girlfriend?” Steve asked.
“No.”
“Do you want her to be?”
A second of silence from Jason, then he quietly said, “Maybe.”
I started in with, “Jason’s got a crush. Jason’s got a crush,” as Cory made kissing sounds.
Steve seemed irritated. “Knock it off, you two.” Then, to Jason, he said, “There’s nothing wrong with that. I happen to like girls too. Unlike these two fags,” and hooked his thumb in our directions.
“Hey, I like girls,” Cory rebutted.
“So do I,” I said. “Except the ones with cooties.”
Steve laughed and we all dropped the subject of Jason and his classroom crush and went back to the dirty photos. It was more pornography than I’d ever seen before in my life. Jason a
nd I had gone into our parents closet once and found two Playboy magazines that belong to our father. Those pictures had shown women baring it all too, but in a more glamorous way. The girls were beautiful in those glossy pages, showing their breasts and butt in much more subtle poses.
In the magazines Steve had, they showed girls with their legs fully spread apart. You could see everything a girl had to offer a man in those pictures. In some there were men with huge penises halfway inside the girls, a look of sinful ecstasy on both their faces. In others, girls with other girls, kissing and playing, using fingers instead of penises. It was sick. It was immoral.
It was awesome.
“So where did you find all these, anyway?” Jason asked.
Steve, done looking at the photos, picked up the magazines on the ground in front of him and shoved them back into the bag and said, “In the trashcan on the side of my house. I think my mom must have found them in Jacob's room and thrown them out. I took them and hid them over here a couple of days ago. You guys can’t tell anyone about them, okay.”
At once, my brother and I said, “Okay.”
“Who would we tell anyway?” Cory followed.
And then seeming to think something over, Steve said, “I don’t know.” He was quiet for a time before he spoke again. “Hey, listen. I was thinking of something though; that Amy Garret girl, the one from the newspaper article that got killed the other day.”
“Ah oh, detective Hanel’s at it again, I can feel it,” Cory said in a smartass tone.
“What about her?” Jason asked and handed a copy of Legal Gal back to him.
Steve grabbed it and the one Cory was reading and put them away. I got up, covering the front of my shorts with my hand, and put mine in the bag as Steve said, “Well, there’s one girl dead and another girl missing. And in the newspaper the cops said they didn’t think that the two were related.”
“So. What are you getting at Sherlock? You going to solve the case of the dead girls,” Cory mocked.
“Dead girl, dickweed,” Steve corrected. “The other one’s just missing. She could have just run away from home.”
“Is that what you think?” I asked him.
“No,” he said with a sigh. “But I’ll bet whoever kidnapped Amy Garret, kidnapped the other girl too.”
“You think she’s dead?” Jason questioned.
Steve looked at him for a second and said, “I hope not. But more than likely, if the same person kidnapped her, she is.” He looked at each of us in turn and then went on. “You guys know what a serial killer is?”
Jason and Cory nodded.
I said, “You mean like breakfast cereal?” not even trying to be funny.
“No,” Steve said to me with a chuckle. “Serial, with an ‘S’, I think. Anyway,” he was now looking at me, “a serial killer is someone who goes on like a killing spree. Murders a bunch of people and gets a kick out of it. Like Ted Bundy or Son of Sam.” Now he turned back to Jason and Cory. “What if it’s a serial killer that got those two girls? Wouldn’t that be nuts? A serial killer in Corona.”
The three of us thought over Steve’s question in silence for a few seconds. A crow flew over and cawed three or four times in the afternoon sky just before the twig snapped.
Looking at the three of us, Steve asked, “Did you hear that?”
“What, the crow?” Cory said a little too loud.
“No, no,” Steve waved a hand for him to shut up, and in a whispered voice, said, “it sounded like a footstep.”
A moment of silence went by that seemed to take an hour and we all strained to hear any sound at all, but Dead Grove was silent.
Then another twig.
Snap.
The four of us looked at each other with wide eyes and scanned our surroundings. There wasn’t much to see, though. Tumbleweeds, trash and other junk blocked most of the rows of trees and made it almost impossible to get a look at anything beyond a twenty-foot radius. The crows had ceased their banter and the squirrels had all retreated back to their holes. It was as quiet as a tomb.
“Maybe it’s the killer,” Cory said, and made sounds like a ghost. “Wooooooh.”
Snapping his fingers, Steve made a shushing sound, which shut Cory right up. “Someone’s over there,” he mouthed and pointed to his right.”
A shuffling noise, then another twig.
Sweesh.
Crack.
“Jason, I’m scared,” I said.
“It’s alright,” he told me. But as he said it, we all saw movement behind a massive pile of tumbleweeds.
It wasn’t until a ghastly inhuman head rose up from behind an old rusting refrigerator, fifteen feet behind Cory, that I started to scream.