Haven Kimmel - Something Rising

“Hark!” the boy called out, waving at the three who were crossing the river on the old log, arms out for balance.

“That’s them,” Leroy said from somewhere behind Cassie.

“What the hell is a hark?” Misty asked, and then made a harkhark-hark sound.

Bobby Puck was chubby everywhere, even his ankles and wrists and knees. He had a moon face and fine, wavy mouse-brown hair brushed up into a cloud over his head. Cassie could see a mother’s hand in that hair. When he smiled, his chubby cheeks rose up and nearly covered his eyes.

Cassie stepped off the log and looked at the two new kids. The river wasn’t on Poppy’s property, and she had found the shack by accident, but Jimmy would say there are in-alien-able rights that govern territory. Years she had been watching her father, sometimes in shadow, and there was plenty she knew about a gambler’s face, the reading—like lightning—of options. It all came down, she’d decided, to the size of the stake. How much you could afford to lose.

The boy on the bucket asked, “Are you Miss Cassie?” She nodded. He pointed at the girl in the water. “That’s Emmy.”

Still floating, Emmy said, “Hey, girl,” in an accent with a curve like Buena Vista’s, it gave Cassie a cold jolt. She tilted up her chin, waited a full beat.

“Hey.” Cassie turned away and headed for the shack; it had been put up and abandoned by hunters at about the time Buena Vista died, and in those two years a lot of stuff had been added to it. Cassie fairly owned it during the summer days, but at night it belonged to teenagers. Someone had dragged an old recliner in, and someone else had brought a mattress. There were pictures tacked to the wall (an elephant being hung in a town square; a toothless woman in sunglasses; a monkey scratching its butt), and lately people had started to bring in books and leave them, old paperbacks creased and dog-eared. Cassie suspected there was more to the books than the plain desire to share literature, since as a group the teenagers weren’t what her teachers would call readers .

She took off her pack, got out the hammer and nails, and walked around the outside of the shack, hammering down boards that had popped up in the last rain. The hunters hadn’t taken the time to make sure the lone cockeyed window actually fit the hole cut for it, so Cassie had chinked in the gaps with river mud. They hadn’t put up a doore either, just left a hole for one and hung a sheet of Visqueen in it. When the plastic came down, Cassie cut a new piece and hung it herself, using small tacks that didn’t tear. It was important, she thought, to keep the plastic up, to acknowledge the difference between inside and out, else what use was a doorway?

“Light the small sticks, Emmy, we don’t have a lot of matches. Did you have these in your pocket when you were swimming?”

“Ooooh, I’m cold now I’m out of the water. The water’s warm.”

“There’s—I tell you, you have to light the small—”

“Did anybody bring a jacket?”

“Emmy’s asking did anybody bring a jacket or whatnot?”

Cassie stepped back and looked at the roof. It hadn’t been done the way Jimmy would have recommended. Just boards and tar paper. She tried to imagine making the walk back here with a ladder (unlikely), then tried to think of some way to bring a ladder on her bike, but there was no road, only the fields and tree line, and the corn was growing higher. A ladder, a tool belt, some shingles.

Inside, someone had straightened up the books and stacked the empty Mountain Dew cans into a pyramid. A big red candle had been added. Cassie stared at it a moment. The big red candle in the shack was a mistake, as any thinking person could see, and she imagined herself flinging it hard into the river. But taking it away smacked of something Laura preached against, which was Getting Too Thick Into Events. One Never Knows, and sometimes the thing that burns is meant to burn and might be interesting to watch. This set up a jangle in Cassie, truth be told, because no one could say that the shack burnt down was a desirable outcome, or even the shack on fire, interesting as it might be. She walked around inside, periodically stooping down to pound in a nail. A puzzle, the way the nails wanted out of the wood.

“All hail Miss Misty, bringer of fire!”

“Shut up, Bobby Puck, you homo.”

“I’m not watching you kill the frogs, Leroy, I’m going over here and also be quiet about it.”

Misty said, rrrbit, rrrbit .

The book on top of the stack was called Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones . The cover was a photograph, out of focus, of a boy and girl kissing, only one of them was upside down. Mrs. Bo Jo Jones’s nose was on Mr.’s chin and vice versa. Taken in profile. She’s sixteen, he’s seventeen, a pregnant bride, and her bewildered groom … playing a grown-up game with adult consequences . Cassie picked up the red candle and sat it square on the book; this was surely nothing more than treading the edge of events. She walked outside and around back to take a look at the flat platform she’d built between two gnarled-up trees: it was the first project she’d ever finished on her own. She’d built it in case a flash flood came while they were in the shack, and she’d nailed boards into the tree trunk to make a ladder. The platform was about seven feet off the ground—it couldn’t be a biblical sort of flood. She’d come out here and measured and even drawn a diagram in a notebook, then gone back and had Poppy help her cut some tongue-and-groove boards she’d found in the corner of the garage. She climbed up the ladder and stepped on the platform, then jumped up and down. Solid. She knelt down and checked the nails, but they were all snug in, and then she ran her hands over the edge she’d sanded smooth. From here she could see the river slowly moving, and on the shoreline flashes of a white T-shirt. There was a fundamental difference between the shack and this platform, and it could be felt simply by sitting first in one and then on the other, and whatever the discrepancy was made her wonder if maybe she ought not skip putting a new roof on the shack. Below her the fire was just getting going and it smelled good; whatever kind of wood they were using smelled good. A blood scent filled the air.

“You own any guns?” she heard Leroy ask.

Bobby Puck said, “Guns? Are you talking to me?”

Sitting up here, Cassie was waiting for Jimmy but also not waiting, she had let go some. Her own house could be on fire, this was a thing she often considered, and she wouldn’t know it until she made the walk back and found the thing in ruins, the trucks and smoke and neighbors watching. She would have no first thought but many at once. Did Jimmy come home, did Laura stay planted where she was, refusing to leave, did Poppy get the dogs out, was Belle out floating around, weeping in the yard in her white nightgown? Beyond that Cassie didn’t care, there was nothing she would mourn. Who set this fire?

“Cassie?” Puck was looking up at her from the ground, she hadn’t heard him approach. “Can I come up there with you?” He had a very high voice, like a little girl’s. As he climbed the ladder, his green T-shirt came out of his shorts, and Cassie could see a white stripe of skin. She looked away. “Oh, this is rather high up,” he said, looking over the edge of the platform. “I hope it doesn’t make me dizzy. If we were at the tops of these trees we could see my house, it’s over yonder as Leroy would say, the opposite side of the river from your house, we could see my dad’s blue station wagon in the driveway and my mom’s marigolds, my dad has diabetes. He is a diabetic and never leaves the house anymore, one of his legs is gone and he is now blind.” Puck leaned forward and whispered the last word in Cassie’s ear. She turned and looked at him. Mostly she couldn’t abide people who talked too much, and under normal conditions she might have gone ahead and whaled on him. But something in him raised up a loneliness that settled over Cassie like a cloud. “At the Granger School,” he continued, holding Cassie’s eye, “I was assaulted on a regular basis by ruffians. You remind me of them. When I start at your school in the fall, I’m going to be perfectly silent, in class and everywhere else, so I just thought I’d tell you some things now, that my mom is an aide at the nursing home, and about my dad and whatnot. I don’t like sports, I’ve never gone hunting, I prefer comic books and snacks.”