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

“Cool dog,” Bobby said, looking my way.

“Yeah. He’s the best.”

“I’m Bobby.”

The fat kid held out a hand.

“I’m Joey,” I said, and pumped his hand up and down like a lever. “Who were those guys?” I gestured with a thumb over my shoulder in the direction the three older boys had run.

“The guy in the jacket is Dillon,” Bobby said. “The other two are Stu and Max.”

His gaze followed the direction my thumb indicated and, though they were long gone, the worry in the fat kid’s eyes was clear.

“Don’t worry,” I offered. “They won’t be coming back anytime soon. Not with Bandit here.” I punctuated this with a playful tug on my dog’s ear, and he nipped at my hand good-naturedly in return. “Why were they after you anyway?”

Bobby gave a weak little shrug and looked down at the same time.

“That’s just what they do,” he said, but his slumped, defeated posture seemed to also say this was just what he was: the kind of kid others beat on and humiliated. I couldn’t exactly argue with that, and so said nothing. “I was just walking into town,” he added. “You can cut through the woods and get there faster instead of going down the highway.”

I started back around the bend in the river to retrieve my shoes. Sitting on a rock, I pulled them on and laced them up. Bobby hurried to keep up, as if even a few yards of distance between us would put him in danger again.

“Aren’t you scared they’re going to come after you now?”

“Sure,” I said, shrugging, “a little. But I got Bandit and I know how to take care of myself.”

“I wish I was that brave,” Bobby said, hanging his head so pathetically that I wanted to slap him.

“It’s not so much about being brave.” Trying to explain, I realized as I was talking I was using pretty much the same words Dad had with me sometime back. “It’s about knowing that there’s some people, if you give them an inch they’ll take a mile. And so you learn to know these people when you see them, and not to take any shit.”

“Your dad teach you how to fight?”

Bobby raised his head, looked at me, genuinely interested.

“Some,” I nodded. “But someone else can teach you only so much. Then it’s when something actually happens, you find out if you’ve got it or not.”

“Aren’t you afraid of getting hit?”

Still sitting, I tried to think of how best to answer. Again, finding myself thinking back to the answers Dad gave me when I asked nearly the same questions.

“Sure.”

Standing, we started walking again. The sun was still high, its light shining through the trees in patches. I thought to myself how the standoff with the three older kids had seemed so long. It seemed to me as if hours should have passed. Tension will do that to you, Dad had said. Make you think time was standing still or moving too fast for you to handle or both at the same time. I thought this was important to get across to Fat Bobby, but I wasn’t quite sure how.

“You never completely get over the threat of being hit, being hurt,” I said. “If someone says they aren’t scared when it seems like there’s something bad going to happen, they’re either lying or crazy.”

I kicked a rock and sent it sailing into some bushes as I tried to gather my thoughts. A startled squirrel darted out of the brush and up a tree, chattering angrily at me when it found a safe branch. Bandit darted towards the base of the tree, looked up questioningly at the rodent. Soon, seeing his potential toy wasn’t coming down, he turned and strode away.

“You get to the point where you just try to give as much as you get,” I said, picking up where I’d left off. “It doesn’t matter if they’re bigger or older. Someone pushes you, you push back. Someone hits you, you hit back.”

“And what if you get more than you give?” Bobby said, and his constant uncertainty, his insistence on the negative, the downbeat, the altogether pussy-ness of his whole demeanor, solidified for me. Though I tried to keep my thoughts and words kind, his name for me as Fat Bobby, which also meant Weak Bobby, Sissy Bobby, Yes-I’m-A-Big-Fat-Wuss-Come-Kick-My-Ass Bobby, became fixed in my mind.

“That happens sometimes.”

I put my hands in my pockets, clenching them into fists there, then relaxing them. Trying mightily not to get mad at this fat kid who had somehow learned in life that it was okay to get stepped on, to get kicked in the ass. That maybe that’s how things were for some people, and there was nothing to be done about it.

“But you go down swinging, and really connecting with at least a few good ones, that person who knocked you down is going to have a fat lip, or a busted nose, and they’re going to wonder if it was worth it. That maybe there’s easier targets to focus on. Either way, whether you give more than you get, or you get your ass handed to you but you do it throwing punches, you’ve won.”

“That sounds like a hard thing to learn, and a lot of punches to take to learn it,” Fat Bobby said.

We’d reached the dirt road that I’d taken from home to the woods, and I stopped. Fat Bobby took a few steps more before he noticed, then he stopped too and looked back at me, his hands in his pockets, his gut bulging beneath his shirt. He stood slouched, shoulders slumped, back bowed, as if a great weight were strapped to him.

“I’d rather have a quick and early hard lesson than to live my life taking shit from assholes,” I said, and regretted it even as I said the words. I felt and heard the heat in my voice, and I saw pain and hurt in Fat Bobby’s eyes as I looked him up and down as I spoke.

It was obvious what I was looking at, and that I wanted him to know it. Him . I was looking at him: his fatness, his complete and utter defeatist attitude, his self-pity bullshit. The hurt my words caused him were immediate, his doughy face falling slack in shame and embarrassment.

“Point taken,” he said, looking away from me, looking at his feet, idly kicking at a rock. “Geez,” he added, and that was all. Not “geez, why you being such a jerk?” or “geez, don’t be an asshole” or anything else that any self-respecting person would have added.

Just “geez,” and that one-word response did more than anything else could have. It made me feel ashamed. I felt embarrassed. I felt like I was one of them. That I belonged with the three high school kids, standing with them and throwing rocks and sticks at the fat boy crying in the stream.

Bandit trotted over to Fat Bobby and pressed close against the kid’s leg. My dog looked back at me from that distance, and I saw something like condemnation in his wolfish features. Maybe I was reading too much into it. Maybe I was projecting my thoughts irrationally onto an animal. But that look from my dog—my friend, my brother—made me feel even shittier.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and now it was me with my hands in my pockets, head down, not meeting Bobby’s eyes. Kicking idly at a pebble on the ground.

Meekly, I looked up, saw Fat Bobby nod. There was a glimmer in one eye that may have been a tear, or perhaps just the reflected daylight.

“Come on,” I said, and started walking again.

I clapped him on the shoulder as I passed by, he fell in beside me, and I knew then that for better or worse we were friends.

* * *

“Your dad sounds pretty cool,” Fat Bobby said when we reached the top of the hill. The road overlooked the woods to the west, and to the north the highway led into town.

“Yeah. He isn’t bad at all.”

“I wish my dad were like him.”

“Your dad can’t be all that bad,” I said, but I remembered the fat kid in his underwear crying in the stream, doing nothing as three other guys assaulted him, and that in itself spoke volumes. That a dad would raise a son like that said more than I needed to know about the man.