Broken Branch (12 page)

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W
e went for a walk in the woods.

It doesn't make sense, I know. Nine months earlier, your mother and little sister disappear into these woods, and when your father and you need some time together, some time to get away, to decompress, to try to leave behind the sadness that has overwhelmed your lives, you choose to go for a walk in the very same woods.

What can I say other than it's complicated? Both my relationship with my father and the woods. They're tied together, the woods and my father. From the time I could walk, I followed him through the trees, wondering at the solitude and dark quietness that no other place I'd been could match. In the winter, we hunted in the woods, and in the spring, summer, and early fall, we walked a well-worn path to our special place to fish. We called it Big Creek because that's exactly what it was. There was a swift current and at its widest point, I could barely throw a rock to the other side. We never caught much more than wild creek fish, which are pretty small, but they make a good meal if you serve them with slaw and hush puppies and don't mind picking through the tiny bones.

It was where we went when we were happy. And more than anything, we wanted to be happy again.

The woods were bigger than us, massive and untamed, and they seemed like a great mystery. Each time we walked into them, dragging fishing gear or hunting rifles or skipping along the path, weighed down by nothing other than ambition, there was some hope—unspoken or otherwise—that we'd return at the end of the day with something life-changing.

Before we left that afternoon, Dad asked if I wanted to fish. “Had some rain,” he said. “Creek will be high. Might be a river gar that's got lost from the Black Warrior.”

I smiled. This was an old joke. He used to tell it to me when I was very little when I actually believed we'd catch one. I shook my head. “Why don't we just walk? I got a feeling that the river gar will probably stay in the river.”

He nodded his assent and we started off, trudging along the same path Anna and Mom had taken the day they disappeared.

In reality, I didn't enjoy fishing as much as I used to, although I still treasured any time that Dad and I had together in the woods. I wanted to go to Big Creek for a different reason. Along the banks were drifts of sand that collapsed under the weight of small animals, sucking them in. I'd seen a baby deer struggle for hours in the sand, before finally extracting his thin body and hopping feebly away. Everybody called it quicksand. It was the first thing I thought of when Mom and Anna went missing. In my mind, I saw Anna stepping into the muck, one tentative foot. I saw her thinking better of it, changing her mind, trying to pull it out, losing her balance and falling face forward. I heard Mom screaming and saw her diving in to save her daughter. Then they were both sinking, eyes upturned, struggling to glimpse the sky through the tops of the swaying trees.

According to my best friend, Cliff, quicksand was mostly a Hollywood invention and actually sinking to your death was next to impossible. Something to do with the density of the human body—I never could follow it all—but the authorities must have agreed because they made little effort to search the area, focusing most of their attention on the little cabin a couple of miles away. Whenever I tried to ask Dad about the cabin, he always shook his head and said the same thing. “Dead end.”

At Big Creek, we stood and watched the current jumping the smooth rocks, saying nothing, probably thinking the same thoughts. The day was cloudy and standing under the trees near the water made it seem much later, almost dusk. Somewhere overhead, a bird began a song and another joined in, dueling with the first. Dad picked up a rock and skipped it across the creek. He was a tall man, but he seemed hunched now, weak in the shoulders, bending in the slight breeze.

“What do you know about the two girls?” I said. My voice sounded louder than I had expected, and I tried to pull it back, ashamed suddenly of breaking the silence.

Dad picked up another rock and weighed it in his hand.

I wasn't sure if he heard me, and I was all set to let it go when he began to speak.

“It happened in the early sixties, when I was just a little kid. I don't remember any of it really, but I grew up with the stories, same as you. They wandered off or were kidnapped or killed. Hell, nobody knows. Law enforcement in this town.” He spat into the creek. “‘Frank, we're doing the best we can,'” he said, imitating Sheriff Martin's slow drawl. “‘It ain't like they left a trail of crumbs.'”

“But wasn't there something about the old cabin?”

He shrugged. “That was a separate incident. Maybe they're related, but nobody knows that either.”

“What happened?”

He threw the rock. It landed heavy, breaking the surface of the water and sinking. He turned and fixed me with a hard look. “I thought we were going to do something fun today.”

I didn't know what to say. I looked away, not wanting to meet his eyes.

“This kind of talk is for shit,” he said.

He stepped closer to the water and knelt down. He studied the stream as if reading some message in it and I took the hint. He wanted to be alone.

The quicksand was a few hundred yards upstream and I wandered that way, noticing the change in the bank as I drew closer. Gradually, it went from solid to damp to squishy. The quicksand didn't look like anything dangerous. If anything, it just looked like any other area right near the creek. The difference could not be discerned by the eye, at least not by mine. When I felt like I was getting close, I picked up a stick and poked around at the ground until I felt it give way. I tossed the stick in and it lay on the surface, too light to sink. Looking around, I found a large stone. I tossed it up in the air and it hit the quicksand with a gurgling sound and started sinking. Within seconds it was gone, disappeared from this world, as if it had never been here at all.