Seth Adams - If You Go Down to the Woods - The most powerful and emotional debut thriller of 2018!

I was a simple kid to please. All I needed for contentment and happiness were a good book, some comics, and horror movies, and with Dad a manager at a Barnes & Noble I’d have those things in spades. A whole summer of lazy afternoons, curled in my bed in my room or on a chair on the porch or sprawled on the grass of the lawn, seemed like the superfluous joys of heaven.

The new house didn’t let me down in that regard. I’d seen pictures of it my parents had taken on a trip they’d made earlier in the year to see the property, but the still images didn’t do the majesty of the place justice.

As Dad turned the station wagon off the highway and onto a country residential sprawl of a road, I found myself leaning forward in anticipation. When we turned the last bend, and I recognized the house from the pictures, I alternately gripped the seat and wiped my palms on my jeans.

It sat on two acres of well-manicured land, carpeted by grass the green of emerald dreams. The whole place was fenced by chain-link, which to some might have made it seem vaguely white-trashy in nature, but to my boy’s mind made it seem a secluded fort of a kind. The porch had an overhanging awning and was enclosed by a screen mesh that let you see out but made it hard for others to see in, so all they saw were dark shadows and silhouettes. There was a pool in the back, dry and mossy in places, the cement lining cracked in others, that Dad promised to have repaired and filled soon.

Apple trees dotted the yard, and in the summer the branches were in full bloom and heavy with their juicy burden. The lawn was speckled with the fallen fruit, and as soon as the car braked to a stop with a little cloud of dust, I leapt out, dashed across the grass, scooped up an apple and let it fly. Perhaps thinking I’d filched one of his tennis balls from the trunk without him seeing, Bandit darted out of the car behind me, and charged after the green sphere. Finding it among the litter of others, he spun around in a frenzy, confused and smiling and uncertain by the mass of apples. To his dog’s brain, they must have seemed the sweet, multitudinous edible balls of some canine paradise.

“Come on, Joey,” Dad called after us, stepping out from behind the wheel and stretching. “There’ll be time for that later. We got work to do.”

The moving trucks arrived well before us, and the sweat-drenched men had our boxes ready, piled high in totem-like stacks along the porch. Motioning for Bandit to follow, we bounded up the porch steps together. I found the growing stack of boxes with my name written on them in large Sharpie marker letters and began taking them to my new room.

The work went on for hours, and Dad had a cooler set out on the porch, along with plastic chairs, and we all took breaks when we felt like it. Pop open a soda, cram one of Mom’s sandwiches in my mouth, and for me it was relaxing. Work, yes, but also fun in a way as I looked out across the desert town in the distance. At times my gaze would drift over to the faraway woods bordering the township, and that dense, mysterious greenery seemed to call to me and Bandit.

Slowly, afternoon crawled into the first evening, purple-black over our new home. My bed set up, having unloaded several boxes of books with many more to go, I sat in bed, the window beside it open. The cool desert breeze drifted in and stirred things with a whisper. A volume of Ray Bradbury stories was open in my lap, propped up by a pillow. Bandit was at my feet, large and furry and kicking his feet occasionally with rabbit filled doggie dreams.

The act of reading usually soothing, I had trouble keeping my mind on the pages before me. My gaze kept drifting to the walls and contours of the room. Realizing I’d spent the last fifteen minutes or so on the same page, I finally gave up and set the book aside.

The room was painted an earthy brown and seemed spacious and snug at the same time. I had my own TV, a gift from last Christmas, and I knew exactly where I wanted it to go. Mom promised she’d call the cable company “tomorrow,” and I dreamt of late-night horror marathons. I had boxes of books and comic books yet to be unpacked, and imagined the bookshelves that would line the walls like sentinel soldiers.

There were the other magazines that I had also, buried among my books and filed secretly in between the comics. Magazines of a certain nature all boys must look through at some point, cracking the covers open ever so slightly, ever so slowly, as if lifting the lid to a treasure chest. Treasures they were, too, and I thought of being able to look at these at my leisure in the privacy of my new room.

Then the door to my room swung open and there she was, that rash that wouldn’t go away, a look of demented sisterly pleasure on her face.

“You know what I’m here for,” she said.

And I said: “Yeah, but I’m all out of Ugly-Be-Gone.”

When she charged across the room, I scooped up the book to try and defend myself, and the Queen of Noogies sent me to sleep with bruises and one bastard of a headache.

And the tired realization that some things would never change.

I met Fat Bobby first. His real name was Bobby Templeton, but fat he was and knew it, seemed to despondently accept it, and so Fat Bobby he became.

Now I don’t know about God or anything like that. I guess I’ve asked myself the Big Questions like just about anyone else has in their life at some point or another, but I guess my brain is too small for the Big Answers. There isn’t much in this life that makes sense to me, but one thing I’m pretty sure of is that there isn’t any such thing as coincidence. It seems that how one thing leads to another and that to another, so that there’s a whole series of events that gain momentum and become inevitable, is a natural consequence of cause and effect, and there isn’t anything coincidental or accidental about it.

I think Fat Bobby was the first in just such a chain of events. I think on how it all ended, the pain and the loss and the misery, and wonder how it all would have been different if I had just passed on by that fat kid in the woods.

But then there wouldn’t have come the other things: the friendship, the trust, the laughter.

All things good in this haphazard mess we call life.

* * *

On Dad’s first day at the store, I woke up early, thinking I’d cut through the woods and walk into town, maybe check out the local comic book shop, perhaps pay Dad a visit. Lazily excited, I rolled out of bed and stumbled my way to the bathroom across the hall, Bandit following. Starting the water in the shower stall, I waited for it to warm, stripped, and climbed in. Bandit watched with a perplexed expression from the throw rug in the center of the bathroom’s tiled floor, as if he wondered why he was excluded from this splashy fun.

After throwing on jeans and a T-shirt, hair still wet from the shower, I raced downstairs. Mom was preparing breakfast, something sizzling tantalizingly in a pan atop the stove. She asked if I wanted some bacon and eggs, and though I was sorely tempted by the smells, I told her my plans and said I’d have Dad get me something from the bookstore cafe. A mild scowl told me what she thought of the nutritional value of a cafe breakfast, but Mom didn’t object.

“Just make sure if you’re going down to the woods,” she said, “don’t go alone. Take Bandit with you.”

I hardly needed her advice on this, and neither did Bandit, prancing so close behind me that if I stopped abruptly he’d end up nose first in my backside. Out on the porch, Bandit at my heels, Mom called after me and asked when I’d be back. Down the porch and into the yard, I yelled back an “ I don’t know! ” and continued down the road.

Our dirt road led to the highway, which in turn led into Payne proper, but as I walked my eyes drifted to the nearby woods. I remembered Dad telling me that a stream ran through the forest and eventually into town. I figured I’d head that way, find the stream, and maybe idle away some time there with Bandit, leisurely making my way to civilization.