Adam's Woods Read Free Page B

Eric had never believed that and still didn’t. It was if Hell had opened up, disgorged a monster to tear away his brother’s life, and then swallowed it back down into the depths without leaving a trace.
     
    The horror writer in him imagined his brother’s body in the coffin, tiny and desiccated and skeletal, but he quickly shut it off and instead thought of him living, his mischievous smile and the plans that got both of them into trouble that his parents always assumed originated with Eric. He was small for his age but afraid of nothing. He would have made the jump into the creek that same day or even before Eric, if their father hadn’t said he was too young and threatened punishment that would fall with the certainty of sunrise if invited. But living always circled back round to dead, and he felt the memory stir of that day. Sometimes it threatened to surface at the oddest times. At the grocery store, while brushing his teeth, and even once while making out on his couch with Mandy. He always refused it, beat it back down into the hole in his mind in which it lived. But today, so close to where it happened, to where it even now seemed to hang low and heavy in the air like an unseen fog, he couldn’t stop it. And he didn’t know if he wanted to. The stories didn’t seem to be venting enough of the pressure anymore. And so he remembered.
     

Chapter 3

     
    “ Eric, you’ve got to come out to the cabin. I just got a whole stack of new comic books for us to read.” John Thomas winked at him, its meaning ambiguous, although he suspected it wasn’t comic books JT had. The older boy didn’t like to be called JT, but Eric thought his name that way and usually said it the other.
     
    “ Mom, can I go out for a while with John Thomas?”
     
    “ Only if you take your brother. He needs to turn off that television and get outside.“
     
    His mother’s voice drifted from the kitchen along with the scent of baking cinnamon rolls to the front porch that housed their bicycles and a porch swing. The porch was enclosed all around by windows, and Eric stood at its screen door in his sock feet, shoulders slumping at the condition of bringing Adam.
     
    He usually didn’t mind when his little brother came along, but when JT showed up with a wink Eric knew it was something that Adam shouldn’t know about. Most of the time it was something he‘d be better off without, like the cigarettes or the quarter can of beer left on a coffee table and smuggled out to the cabin. The cigarette had made him puke, and the beer tasted like someone had peed into the can, but he was always game up to a point. Once JT had pulled out his father’s pistol and Eric had immediately left. He didn’t tell anyone, but that was going too far. He had avoided John Thomas for a few days until the older boy apologized and swore he wouldn’t do it again. So far he’d kept his word.
     
    If Tony and Jeff Fisk weren’t in Erie at the mall shopping for school clothes, he probably would have suggested that they get a game of two-on-two football going with Adam as all time running back. He almost said no anyway, but JT must have seen the change of heart coming and said, “Come on, Eric. It’s something really good...but not dangerous. Adam can wait outside while I show you, and then we’ll all go fishing or something.”
     
    Fishing sounded good to Eric, so decided he’d indulge his friend to get a chance at the palomino trout in the hole behind the lumber yard, a wily fish at least twenty inches long that had turned up its nose so far at every bait tossed in to tempt it. His mother wouldn’t let him go alone.
     
    Adam came to the door whining about missing the end of Scooby-Doo, although to Eric they were all the same, the villain just someone dressed up in a costume. He could never understand why they still ran away at first, that experience should have taught them something by now. It was mid-August, a Saturday, still hot but the days growing