‘Ready?’ he said and we nodded. ‘No mercy!’
We barrelled down the hill into the valley, Rudy hollering out his war cry like some mad general, me right behind, branch up and catching on the trees, the girls behind me screaming.
We charged to the Fort, expecting intruders to leap out and flee in terror or put up a fight at least, but the Roost was empty. Rudy stopped dead and I crashed into him, knocking us both into the dirt. A moment, a beat, while we realised we were alone and unhurt and had just yelled our throats sore at nothing, then we all four collapsed into howling laughter. We frightened nobody but the birds.
‘Check it out,’ Gloria said, the first to get up, dust herself off, and look around.
The Fort’s roof was bent, our door swung on one hinge. Inside was strewn with leaves and muck, the blanket we often sat on snagged on a nail and ripped. Someone had been here. Suddenly the laughter vanished and my chest tightened. But who knew about this place? Maybe a bum? One of those hobos who rides the rails and sleeps under trees like in the movies? Or some other kids from school, maybe Patrick Hodges or the Lyle boys, thinking this was unclaimed land? Did the fuckers wreck the place when they realised it was already taken?
It was a violation and we all felt it. The unrelenting, unending heat wasn’t enough, the world wanted us punished more. Maybe it was taking revenge on Rudy for stealing a pack of cigarettes from his father, or Gloria for skipping her piano lesson and making the teacher wait, maybe on Jenny and me for not being better at washing linens or placating Momma when she was in one of her tempers.
‘We should repair it,’ Rudy said, kicking a board over, insects fleeing in the light. ‘Soon as. Pick that up, clear it out and go get a rock to beat out the dents. It’ll look stellar again in no time.’
Everything was stellar to Rudy. Didi’s blueberry pie was stellar. Clint Eastwood, man, him and Telly were stellar. Swimming in Barks reservoir, now that’s stellar. Rudy was the oldest by four months and that was enough to make him our leader. A flash of his straight-as-a-die teeth and a flick of his sandy blond hair, cut like a movie star’s, and you can’t say no.
I picked up the board he’d kicked. One from the post office. It was heavy, covered in mud, and he bent down to help. To most in Larson, Rudy was the bad kid, the prankster, the you-won’t-amount-to-anything boy from the Buchanan family of cons and thieves, but to me and Jenny and Gloria, he was goodness made bone and skin.
The girls set about tidying the inside, repairing the blanket, setting the cobbled-together table and mismatched chairs and tree stumps right. I found a heavy rock for knocking the dents out of the roof.
‘We’ll need more nails, and a hammer,’ I said.
‘I’ll get some from McKinnon’s hardware,’ Rudy said. ‘Got a few bucks saved up from cutting his grass last summer.’
Rudy hoarded money, his Larson escape fund. Even Jenny had a few nickels under her pillow. Seemed like every kid had one, except me. I had money saved up but it wasn’t for a bus ticket, it was for old man Briggs’ second tractor. He’d promised to sell it to me when I had the cash and could reach the pedals. I was one-for-two but that kind of money is hard to come by around here. I’d have it though, one day, you can bet your weekly on it.
We straightened up the roof and rehung the door and by that point, the sun and heat had eased and we’d forgotten that anyone else had ever been here.
Rudy and Gloria were over by the lake when Jenny came out the Fort saying she was hungry.
‘I’m craving some fishes, Johnny.’
I smiled at the way she said ‘fishes’, the way her mouth puckered up at the sh sound.
‘Get the poles,’ I said. ‘Perch’ll be running about now.’
Jenny jumped and clapped and rushed back in the Fort to get the poles. They were nothing much, just saplings and line, but they were ours and they kept us fed. Friday meant Momma would be in Larson, at Gum’s Roadhouse, shooting pool and tequila. No dinner on the table. No one looking for us. Sometimes we stayed out here all night, lit a fire, slept in the Fort, watched the sunrise over the fields.
Summer before last we’d dammed and diverted the river a few hundred yards upstream from the Fort where the land dipped in a natural, deep curve. It was Rudy’s idea. Everything was Rudy’s idea and no matter how sky-high crazy, they always felt like good ones. It’ll be our own private swimming pool, Johnny, he’d said, ten times better than Barks because it’ll be all ours. And it was up to me to make it work. I’d read a bunch of library books to make sure we got it right. It’d taken us months, all over that winter. Even when our hands were frozen and we had to dig out the planks and rocks from under a foot of snow, we kept building. By last summer it was full and we called it Big Lake. The water was clear and you could see all the details of the forest floor, like you were looking at a carpet through a glass table. In winter it froze solid and we’d ice skate and try to play hockey and fail. It was a thing of beauty, I always said. A place trapped in time, like when they flooded whole towns to build their hydro-dams. Houses and streets and rusted-up cars, all held as they were before the water came.
Last year, Rudy and me hung a rope on a strong laurel branch. Shame on us but we were too chicken to swing into the water, too stuck to run and fly and let go then get that sickening moment of falling and splash. What if there were rocks we hadn’t seen? Or sticking up branches that’d skewer us dead? I wasn’t the best swimmer in the world and everyone knew it so never expected me to go first, but even Rudy was afraid, though he joked it off. Jenny stood close by me, said she didn’t want to get her dress wet and, despite the heat, despite the cloying, sweating hotness of the world, all we did was dip a toe.
Except Gloria.
None of us were looking for her to be the bravest, the first. We took it as certain that she would go last, she was a girly girl, rich family type. But before Rudy could turn around and tease her for it, Gloria was sprinting. A blur of red dress and red hair as she ran for the rope, kicking up brown leaves, sending them skimming the water. I remembered her swinging high, letting go, shrieking and disappearing into the lake, then popping up like a mermaid, hair dark red and stuck to her head, laughing and calling us all sissies. From that day on Rudy said you can never be sure with Gloria. Momma thought the same when I told her the story. She’ll grow up to be a quicksand woman, Momma said. Careful of that one, John Royal, she’ll have you running circles you don’t even know about. Be the death of you, she will.
Gloria always did what nobody expected.
So that Friday when we were fishing for perch in Big Lake, it was Gloria, wandering, not fishing because she thought it was boring, who found it. Tangled in the roots of a ripped-up sycamore, half-sunk in the flooded wood.
‘Come look,’ she shouted, stick in her hand for prodding. ‘Get over here the lot of you.’
Rudy, on the other side of the lake, ran.
Jenny trailed behind me. ‘But the fish, Johnny.’
‘It’ll just take a minute. Hook’s in the water anyways.’
Gloria pointed with her stick. It was just out of arm’s reach, the thing in the roots. But it wasn’t a thing. The closer I got the clearer I saw. Rudy stopped running. He saw it too. Gloria’s face was frowning and pale. Rudy looked back at me with hard eyes that said, keep Jenny back. It wasn’t real, it couldn’t be, not here. It was grey skin and hair once blonde like Rudy’s. It was bloated but not unrecognisable. Gloria’s stick left impressions in the skin.
It was a woman and she was dead.
We didn’t tell anyone about the body, at least not at first. A mixture of fear and fascination silenced us. It fizzed inside us, this knowledge, this secret, so colossal and strange we thought it would crush