F. Wilson - Secret Histories

They discovered the body on a rainy afternoon.

“Aren’t we there yet?” Eddie said, puffing behind him.

Jack glanced over his shoulder to where Eddie Connel labored through the sandy

soil on his bike. His face was red and beaded with perspiration;

sweat soaked through his red Police T-shirt, darkening Sting’s face. Chunky

Eddie wasn’t built for speed. He wore his sandy hair shorter than most, which tended to make him look even heavier than he was. Eddie’s idea of exercise was

a day on the couch playing PolePosition on his new Atari 5200. Jack

envied that machine. He was stuck with a 2600.

“Only Weezy knows,” Jack said.

He wasn’t sweating like Eddie, but he felt clammy al over. With good reason. The

August heat was stifling here in the Pine Barrens, and the humidity

made it worse. Whatever breeze existed out there couldn’t penetrate the

close-packed, spindly trees.

They were fol owing Eddie’s older sister, Weezy—real y Louise, but no one ever

cal ed her that. She liked to remind people that she’d been “Weezy”

long before TheJeffersons ever showed up on the tube.

She was pedaling her banana-seat Schwinn along one of the firebreak trails that

crisscrossed the mil ion-plus acres of mostly uninhabited woodland

known as the Jersey Pine Barrens. A potential y dangerous place if you didn’t

know what you were doing or where you were going. Every year hunters wandered in, looking for deer, and were never seen again. Locals would wink

and say the Jersey Devil snagged another one. But Jack knew the JD was just a folktale. Wel , he was pretty sure. Truth was, the missing hunters were

usual y amateurs who came il equipped and got lost, wandering around in circles until they died of thirst and starvation.

At least that was what people said. Though that didn’t explain why so few of the

bodies were ever found.

But the Barrens didn’t scare Jack and Eddie and Weezy. At least not during the

day. They’d grown up on the edge of the pinelands and knew this

section of it like the backs of their hands. Couldn’t know al of it, of course. The

Barrens hid places no human eye had ever seen.

Yet as familiar as he was with the area, Jack stil got a creepy sensation when

riding into the trees and seeing the forty-foot scrub pines get thicker and thicker, crowding the edges of the path, and then leaning over with their

crooked, scraggly branches seeming to reach for him. He could almost believe they were shuffling off the path ahead of him and then moving back in to close it

off behind.

“See that sign?” Eddie said, pointing to a tree they passed. “Maybe we should

listen.”

Jack glanced at the orange letters blaring from glossy black tin:

NO FISHING

NO HUNTING

NO TRAPPING

NO TRESPASSING

No big deal. The signs dotted just about every other tree on Old Man Foster’s

land, so common they became part of the scenery.

“Wel ,” he said, “we’re not doing the first three.”

“But we’re doing the fourth.”

“Criminals is what we are!” Jack raised a fist. “Criminals!”

“Easy with that.” Eddie looked around. “Old Man Foster might hear you.” Jack cal ed to the girl riding twenty feet ahead of them. “Hey, Weez! When do

we get there?”

She usual y kept her shoulder-length dark hair down but she’d tied it back in a

ponytail for the trip. She wore a black-and-white—mostly black

—Bauhaus T-shirt and black jeans. Jack and Eddie wore jeans too, but theirs

were faded blue and cut off above the knees. Weezy’s were ful length. Jack couldn’t remember if he’d ever seen her bare legs. Probably white as snow. “Not much farther now,” she cal ed without looking around.

“Sounds like Papa Smurf,” Eddie grumbled. “This is stupidacious.” Jack turned back to Eddie. “Want to trade bikes?”

Jack rode his BMX. He’d let some air out of the tires for better grip in the sand

and they were doing pretty wel .

“Nah.” Eddie patted the handlebars of his slim-tired English street bike. “I’m al

right.”

“Whoa!” Jack heard Weezy say.

He looked around and saw she’d stopped. He had to jam on his brakes to keep

from running into her. Eddie flew past both of them and stopped ahead of his sister.

“Is this it, Smurfette?” he said.

Weezy shook her head. “Almost.”

She had eyes almost as dark as her hair, and a round face, normal y milk pale,

made paler by the dark eyeliner she wore. But she was flushed now with heat and excitement. The color looked good on her. Made her look almost …

healthy, a look Weezy did not pursue.

Jack liked Weezy. She was only four months older, but his January birthday had

landed him a year behind her in school. Come next month they’d both

be in Southern Burlington County Regional High, just a couple of miles away. But

she’d be a soph and he a lowly frosh. Maybe they’d be able to spend

more time together. And then again, maybe not. Did sophs hang with freshmen?

Were they al owed?

She wasn’t pretty by most standards. Skinny, almost boyish, although her hips

seemed to be flaring a little now. Back in grammar school a lot of the kids had cal ed her “Wednesday Addams” because of her round face and perpetual y

dark clothes. If she ever decided to wear her hair in pigtails, the

resemblance would be scary.

But whatever her looks, Jack thought she was the most interesting girl—no,

make that most interesting person he’d ever met. She read things no one else read, and viewed the world in a light different from anyone else. She pointed to their right. “What on Earth’s going on there?”

Jack saw a smal clearing with a low wet spot known in these parts as a spong.

But around the rim of the spong stood about a dozen sticks of odd

shapes and sizes, leaning this way and that.

“Who cares?” Eddie said. “If this isn’t what you dragged us out here to see, let’s

keep going.”

After hopping off her bike, she leaned it against a tree and started for the

clearing.

“Just give me a minute.”

His curiosity piqued, Jack leaned his bike against hers and fol owed. The

knee-high grass slapped against his sweaty lower legs, making them itch. A glance back showed Eddie sitting on the sand in the shade of a pine. Jack caught

up to Weezy as they neared the spong.

“They just look like dead branches someone’s stuck in the sand.” “But why?” Weezy said.

“For nothing better to do?”

She looked at him with that tolerant smile—the smile she showed a world that just didn’t get it. At least not in her terms.

“Everything that happens out here happens for a reason,” she said in the ooh-spooky tone she used whenever she talked about the Barrens.

He knew Weezy loved the Barrens. She studied them, knew everything about them, and had been delighted back in 1979, at the tender age of eleven,

when the state passed a conservation act to preserve them.

She gestured at the sticks, not a dozen feet away now. “Can you imagine anyone coming out here just to poke sticks into the ground for no reason at