Dog on the Cross (17 page)

Reaching the cave's opening—about man high, three feet in width—Jonathan allowed Scoot to go in ahead. They walked inside, their eyes adjusting to the dim light, and saw that the walls were covered in spray paint—names and figures in palimpsest, numerals anticipating graduation dates, a bizarre mosaic of colors wherein Jonathan could just make out the head of an Indian chief, the town's high school mascot. They saw also that what had seemed to be the cave's rear wall was only a corner. Moving forward, they tracked across a fine dirt the consistency of powder, a floor littered with beer cans, and then, rounding the corner, stood looking into the next chamber. It was darker there, but a shaft of light fell
from a crevice high in the ceiling, illuming, to some degree, the sandstone room. They were walking farther in, their eyes still focusing, when they heard a sound—the grunt of what they took to be an animal in pain.

The boys came to a halt, listening as the noise rose steadily in volume. Then, as if snapping from a hazed background into sharper focus, they saw a form struggling on the cave floor, two forms, the shapes shifting in Jonathan's mind from one animal into another—dog to wildcat, coyote to wolf—and then coalescing, finally, into their reality: two men—one on his elbows and knees, the other behind him in a modified kneel. Both were groaning and they faced the same direction, but did not see, for their eyes were clenched. The boys stood watching them, trying to understand what it was they were doing. Something in Jonathan made him lean forward to better view the scene, a simultaneous nausea rising in his stomach, a prickling along the hairs of his arms and neck. He had begun gradually backing from the room when, in front of him, Scoot let out a long, piercing scream.

Then he was running. He did not look back to his friend, and he did not have to, for Scoot quickly passed him, the boy making for the other side of the gorge, his arms and legs a blur. Jonathan's heart pounded and he could hear the wind droning loudly in his ears, the blood rushing in concert there, and
looking ahead, saw Scoot pass the rock where J.W. sat, bewildered. Jonathan lowered his head and ran. He could hear shouting from behind him, the voices of men, though he did not understand what those voices said. Passing J.W., Jonathan managed to pant the word
hide.

Scoot had crossed the stream—splashing through the shallow creek, looking as if he were running on top of the water—and was already scrambling up the hill where they had descended an hour before. Jonathan followed, not seeming to feel his body, only a warm sensation at the crown of his head. When he reached the foot of the hill, looked up to see Scoot attain its summit and disappear from sight, he thought,
I won't be able to climb it; I was barely able to get down.
There followed a distorted period of clambering upward, scraping against rocks, the grasped end of a tree root, and the next thought Jonathan had came to him as he sprinted into the black oaks, dodging trunk and tree limb, hearing shouts in the canyon below.

Scoot was not to be seen. Jonathan continued running but after some time reduced his pace, for all he heard now were the leaves crunching under his feet. He ran slower, and then more slowly, and then was walking, his breath coming to him in gasps. He stopped, finally, and collapsed at the foot of a gnarled pine.

He sat there, trying to calm himself, to convince a
part of his mind that he was safe. His breathing had all but returned to normal when he realized he was not sure in which direction the creek lay, which direction the canyon or camp. He rose and began walking, not recognizing anything he saw. After a while he took another course, and then another. A rush of panic went through him and he began running blindly among the trees. Woods and the occasional clearing went strobing past, each more foreign than the one before it. He entered a sunlit stretch where the oaks thinned and, quickening his pace, felt his foot go down too far into a drift of leaves. His vision seemed to tumble and he fell, skidding several feet on his arm and shoulder. He lay for a few moments with his chest heaving and then grabbed for his ankle. It throbbed, already swelling. Rising up on a knee, he rested his heel on the ground and tried to stand. A tremendous pain shot from the ball of his foot to the shin, and he went to the ground, his vision swarming with translucent specks.

Jonathan rocked back and forth, rubbing his ankle and glancing nervously at the woods around him. He realized he had begun crying but made no effort to wipe his face. Using his uninjured leg, he pushed himself against the trunk of a large oak, and keeping his ankle, as best he could, clear, began to shinny up the tree. The forest floor shrank, and he ascended through branches less and less thick, coming to rest twenty feet from the ground, concealed in
the tree's fork. He straddled it, leaned his face and body against the trunk. He was beginning to wonder about J.W. and Scoot when he heard the familiar sound of leaves crunching.

Peering through the limbs, he saw two men walking toward the tree where he was hiding, talking together in hushed tones. One wore a black T-shirt, the other a green pullover. On this jersey was the number twelve, the profiled head of an Indian chief embossed in glittering white.

J
ONATHAN CLOSED HIS EYES
and pressed himself against the tree. He muttered, in his thoughts, snatches of prayers, old hymns, hearing more loudly the voices of the men, the shuffling of leaves. He began making entreaties to a God who, in his imagination, was always a strange amalgam of his grandfather and a face in the clouds, promising renewed dedication, vows of missionary work, physical hardship. He remembered, for some reason, having looked at naked women in a magazine, and he swore he would never again do this, never allow women to take his purity from him, never even take one to wife. He was straining to think of other things he might offer God when he realized that the woods had become silent. Lifting his head slowly from the tree trunk, he looked below him in all directions. The men were gone.

Hours passed, and Jonathan watched the late
summer afternoon fade into evening, a red-and-golden light dyeing the western edges of leaf and limb. All around, the forest took on a hazed look, and he glanced down at his ankle which was red and distended, swollen against his shoe. This was a time of day Jonathan had always feared. His mood seemed to decline with the sun, and now alone, away from home and family, unsure as to what might happen, this feeling was magnified. He thought of the men in the cave, and he hated them for leaving him in the woods alone and injured. And with that surge of hatred, something gave way—a surfeit of emotion, a point of absolute saturation. He lay back against the tree, closed his eyes, and in a few moments was asleep.

He awoke to the sound of someone calling his name. The woods were dim now, but not fully dark, and when he heard the voice again, he did not give a response but began immediately to clamber, descending from limb to limb, sliding along the smooth trunk. When he reached bottom he saw that it was his grandfather who was calling: his grandfather and Jude McCoin, J.W. and his grandfather's friend, Pete Cochran. Cochran led another man by the scruff of the neck—a grasp of bunched fabric as handle—and as they came closer Jonathan saw it was the man with the green jersey, the man from the cave.

Leaning his weight against the tree, Jonathan
shouted to his grandfather. The entire pack moved toward the boy, Beauford running ahead of the others, reaching Jonathan first, picking him up and carrying him some distance, asking, as he carried him, if he was hurt, interspersing his questions with thanksgiving, though to whom this was directed, the boy could not tell. He seated Jonathan on the ground and, kneeling, took him by the shoulders. The old man glanced the boy over, saw that his arms were covered with scrapes, that there was a lengthy scratch along one cheek. He turned his head.

“Pete,” he said in an urgent voice, “don't come up here. Keep that nancy back a ways.”

Cochran seized a firmer grip on the man he was leading and, pushing him to the ground, knelt with both knees in the small of the man's back. He grabbed a handful of his hair and pressed his face into dirt. “Stay put,” he said.

The man muttered something Jonathan could not make out and he saw McCoin walk calmly up and place a hand on Cochran's shoulder. He looked to be reasoning with him, but Jonathan's attention was directed back to his grandfather, his face close to his now, something in his eyes that was utterly foreign.

“Where's Scoot?” asked Jonathan. “Is he all right?”

“He's just fine,” the old man whispered. “He's with Brother Tim and the rest. They went around
the other way looking for you.” Beauford stopped, lowered his head. “They came back and told us what happened, Jon. They came and told us what you saw.”

A ruckus had broken out between Cochran and McCoin. The former swore, stood up, and pushed the sick man away. “This ain't none of your business,” he told him. “It's between Emmanuel and this—” He trailed off, delivered a kick to the man's side, and climbed back atop him.

“Listen,” Jonathan's grandfather said to him, taking the boy's face between his hands, “I want you to tell me the truth. No matter what he did to you, it's not your fault; it won't have even happened. The blood of Christ will
make
it so it will never have happened. He's a devil from Hell, and the Devil's got no power over the children of God. You just tell me, Jon.” The man's face seemed to tighten. “You tell me exactly what he did.”

Jonathan didn't understand what his grandfather was asking. He opened his mouth to tell about his ankle, how he was running and it went too far into the ground, but instead of speech, there came a sudden burst of sobbing, all the fear and anxiety of the day tumbling out in one confused spasm. He buried his face in his grandfather's chest and felt his big hand cupping the back of his head, stroking it at first, then trembling violently. His grandfather pulled away and looked at Jonathan once more. “That's all
right,” he said, faltering, his eyes gone strange. “The blood of the Savior will cleanse us both.”

Turning, he called to McCoin. “Jude,” he said in a commanding tone, “take these boys back to camp. You'll have to carry, Jon. There's something the matter with his leg.”

“Emmie,” suggested McCoin, “why don't we—”

“Do it,” Beauford ordered, rising, walking toward where Cochran knelt on the man's back. Seeing Beauford's approach, Cochran pulled the man upright so that he was genuflecting, his hands, Jonathan noticed, bound by something. McCoin attempted to step in Beauford's path, but the latter pushed him clear, took two more steps, and brought his fist against the captive's face. A spurt of black ejected into the leaves and the man pitched over onto his side. Jonathan saw the man was much younger than he had thought.

Jonathan crawled nearer, toward his grandfather and the young man he now straddled, his grandfather slapping the man's face, asking why he did it, did he know it was an abomination, did he know what they called his kind in Scripture, those who molested children and lay with others of their sex? All this time Cochran argued with McCoin, telling him to take the boys and leave, that they didn't need to witness this. McCoin would not do it: “He's going to kill that kid—don't you see?” Looking over, Jonathan saw J.W. was bent double, vomiting.

He had crawled even closer by this point, just five or six feet from where Beauford knelt atop the man, though neither they nor the others were aware of him. The young man was pleading with Beauford: he didn't know what Beauford was talking about; he hadn't hurt anyone; he was wide receiver for the Perser Football team; he'd just turned sixteen. Yes, he and his friend had been fooling around, but they had chased the boys only to scare them.

“Please,” he said, mumbling around broken teeth, “we were just afraid they might tell.”

“They told,” said Beauford, driving his fist once more into the side of the young man's head. His face recoiled from the blow, and his body gave a tremendous jerk, then began to convulse. Beauford rose, startled by this. He looked over to McCoin and Cochran. “He's going into seizure,” McCoin warned, and indeed, that looked to be the case, for the young man's body shivered as if wired to a socket. Jonathan watched him, transfixed. He was aware that his crying had stopped, and he wanted the man to stop trembling; it disturbed him the way he moved. But he continued coming closer, wanting to tell the quaking figure that his grandfather was a very strong man, that he was sorry he had hated him, but that now he would know better: he wouldn't chase children and force them to hurt their ankles and to hide, by themselves, in fear for their lives. And with this thought came another, as if traveling alongside and
then eclipsing it entirely. He understood, finally, what his grandfather had before been asking, and he began to shake his head, as if the young man's seizures were contagious—shouting
that wasn't what happened, that wasn't it at all
. And just as his protestations became their loudest, the man beside him gave one final shudder and then went still.

McCoin pushed past Cochran, past Beauford who now stood above the young man, staring down at him mutely. He laid his head to the teenager's chest for a full minute and glanced up at Beauford. When he went to speak, no words came from his mouth.

Jonathan had also fallen silent. He sat across from McCoin, realizing, somehow, he'd adopted the same posture—kneeling in the dirt with legs tucked underneath, hunching slightly, arms bracing him at the sides. He looked at McCoin, the man's appearance seeming at once to soften, his features warm and thoughtful in the day's final light. Jonathan shook his head, trying to divest himself of the strange affinity, this sudden sense of kinship. He turned and stared up at Beauford, hoping to find something to contradict these notions, some detail in his grandfather's face in which to confide. But due to the hastening darkness, he could not see the old man's expression, backlit as he was, clouded by night and the forest shade.