“I don’t understand,” I said. “If you can get in that room through the window, then what do you need this key for?”
“I don’t need it for shit,” Jason said. “You do. That’s the key to his safe.”
I held the key between my thumb and index finger as if it was a lit match and I knew that Mr. Landry, if he hadn’t already, would check the window of his private room soon. I knew the match would not have long to burn. Then, through one of the cut-out windows in Jason’s fort, I saw something I never expected to see. Across the woods from us, maybe half a mile away, sat the Perkins School. I understood it was close, of course. I’d walked or biked to it thousands of times, but always on the sidewalks, always on the prescribed paths. And even though I’d ventured this deep into the woods before, I’d never achieved this particular vantage point. Yet there it was, glowing like a city in the darkness. The school buildings I knew so intimately were now rendered strange to me by their security lights and the grand old oaks of its quad were up-lit and beautiful. The football field and track were also lit, as if it was homecoming weekend, but the place was deserted. The sudden order of the manicured campus seemed a bizarre affront to the madness of the woods, and the school looked, from this angle, less like a school than a brochure for the school. It seemed an ad campaign for unattainable progress and it surprised me that Jason chose this view for his window.
More surprising, perhaps, was that I began to understand something important about humans and trees at that moment. I began to understand our shared history. To look at the world from a tree, as I had done so often in those years, is a fundamentally different way of seeing. It is contemplative and detached and the objects one studies from that height are rendered, at the same time, both majestic and small. A generally commonplace item, in other words, may stir admiration and mystery when viewed from that vantage point. Or, at worst, it may breed jealousy, desire, and contempt. It all depends on the viewer. And so, I have to wonder, what kind of viewer was I? What was that, exactly, up in the oak trees of Woodland Hills? An animal? Some sort of Peeping Tom? A sensitive boy racked with love and guilt?
Maybe.
My point is that climbing a tree to look at the world is primal. It is ancestral. So, as I imagine it now, the eyes in my head on that night were as dark and unreadable as an ape’s. This may not have been the case, of course. I may have been only a nervous kid with a key in his hand. Still, it makes me wonder. Where is that missing link in our human history? Isn’t it strange we can’t find it? Australopithecus? Homo erectus? What was the exact moment we hopped down from the branches? When we said Enough with all this looking and became emotionally engaged with the world? When we became vulnerable? What dream were we so compelled to pursue? What was the prize? What was the hope? What was the goal?
“Hey,” Jason said. “Come back down here. I need you to help me bury something.”
31.
The soil of the Earth is made of horizons.
Beneath our feet, intricate layers of matter lead down to the core. The first layer is known as the O Horizon and is where most of your visible activity takes place. This is the domain of the earthworm and mole, of rotting leaves and flower root. It is called the O Horizon because it consists of primarily organic material, all of it still closely connected to the living or dead. Lean down and muss this stuff with your hand, kick it around with your feet, it is of little consequence. There is so much life traffic here that your tracks will be covered in no time. Below this is the A Horizon. This is the place where hardy trees and perennials tap and grow and go dormant and then wake again the next year, a place the weakest vine and weed roots never reach. It is settled and weathered and dark and rich and so long established that it will forever be a part of this ecosystem. Drop a geologist out of an airplane and, rather than orient themselves with the stars, they will dig for the A Horizon. It is so abundant with life-giving energies that even the falling rain, I’d imagine, is hoping to settle there. Below this is the B Horizon, where only trace elements of life still remain. The stuff of this place is ancient and cool and so entirely leached of desirable nutrients that it has collapsed upon itself and become too dense to scoop or sift by hand. It is instead thick like earthen clay and, once excavated, must be molded, formed, and often cooked in hot ovens for long periods of time to become something that we can once again recognize: a bowl, a plate, a human face.
Beneath this is solid bedrock, where no shovels go.
All to say that it is only by digging through the many horizons of my memory that I’ve come to understand how this particular night of my youth evolved into the one in which it all went down. It has taken me a while, in other words, to understand how a day that started so benevolently—with my genuine interest in the welfare of Lindy Simpson and Chris Garrett—could turn into a night in which I stood in the dark woods with Jason Landry, looking down at a corpse.
The fork-eared dog had been shot through the head in a manner I would later hear described as execution-style. As it lay on its side, the one eye visible to us was sheared of its lid and made it seem as if the dog were in perpetual amazement, perhaps witnessing some miracle ahead of us in the woods. Its dark tongue had bloated and fallen through the bottom of its jaw, which was gone, and the onset of rigor mortis had stiffened the legs to make it look as if it was stretching for a nap. It looked healthier, in a strange way, than the only other time I had seen it, which was when Jason fed and chased it away from his house those years ago.
Still, it broke my heart like life does.
“Jason,” I said, “who did this?”
“Damn,” he said. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
I didn’t.
Of all the permutations in my head on that occasion, none conjured the scene that I later learned to be true: that of my mother with a pair of gardening shears in her hand, a bucket full of clippings at her feet. And on a hot day in the yard while her son was at school for orientation, when she had perhaps paused to sip from a glass of lemonade on the wrought-iron table near the swimming pool, she heard the strange sound of a whimpering. Another sound, then, of a man’s voice. And it was only a casual curiosity that led her to the fence of our yard, where she pushed aside the branches of the althea and azaleas that had grown so strong in that light. And once there, she saw through the chain-link fence the enormous body of her neighbor, Jacques Landry, dragging a dog by the scruff of its neck to the woods behind their properties. And wherein as soon as she recognized this dog as the fearful stray she’d stumbled across on occasion, one she’d felt a torn sympathy for, toggling between calling Animal Control or perhaps bringing it into her own home to share with her son and surviving daughter who could use some cheering up themselves, she saw her neighbor straddle the dog between his legs, pull a pistol from his belt, and shoot it in the head. And as she was still so stunned by what she had seen, still held motionless, the moment her neighbor with a bandaged hand made his way up the hill and glanced casually in her direction, meeting her eyes with his own, she was unable to keep yet another small part of her once hopeful nature from dying. And so she backed away from the fence and ran into her house, where the only remaining space left to retreat was inside of her mind. And this is where she found me, I suppose, in her memory, mentioning a dark room full of pictures in that large neighbor’s house.
I didn’t know any of this then. I only knew that my mom had been frightened that day and that Mr. Landry was frightening. I also knew that Jason Landry was old enough to be working in a convenience store, to be venturing out in life, and yet there he was pissing his blankets at night, sleeping alone in a childish fort. I knew that he had scars on his back shaped like dimes because I had seen them. I also knew there was a part of me that believed Jason himself could have killed the dog. And so, now that he had chosen me to confide in, to team up with, I also knew that our views of the world were so wildly disparate that the fond way I thought about Randy Stiller, my pal, my best friend in the good old days, was likely the way Jason Landry thought about me. Over all the other mounting evidence, it may have been this strange idea, that I was possibly the closest friend Jason Landry had, that convinced me of his father’s guilt.
Jason handed me a shovel.
“Do you pray?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. “Not in a long time.”
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll do it.” Jason stuck the blade of his shovel in the ground and squeezed the hilt like a microphone. “Dear Whatever,” he said. “Please let my dog get lots of horny bitches in heaven. Or, if not that, let him come back to Earth infested with rabies and finish the job that he started when he was just trying to protect me from that asshole who is probably your biggest mistake. Or maybe just go back in time and switch life around so that my dad is the one that gets hunted for years and locked in a shed and then shot in the face by my dog. I’m good with any of these options. Okay, then. Fuck you very much. Amen.”
“Amen,” I said. We began to dig.
I like to think now that I was biting my tongue as we dug that hole, trying not to ask Jason for more details about his obviously horrible personal life. Or that I was trying to skillfully negotiate a way to offer some help without insulting him. I think the truth, though, is that I was already envisioning myself as some sort of local hero. The more we labored and sweat and slapped at the mosquitoes on our arms in the darkness, the more I imagined what Lindy might say if I crawled out of the Landrys’ window with handfuls of evidence. I had no idea what that evidence could be, other than perhaps some more photos, but if I could find something to link Mr. Landry to the crime, something to put Lindy and her family at ease, something that would allow us all to move on and let me assuage my guilt without ever having to tell her about what I had done and seen while sitting in the branches of her water oak, then that would be nice. I imagined holding this evidence up like a trophy while my parents congratulated me. The Perkins School might even throw some sort of catered reception and invite Lindy back to the track team, give her a standing ovation. And by the time my fantasy had evolved into a vision of me traipsing across the stage to accept my Medal of Honor, Jason and I were covered in dirt.
“I think that’s deep enough,” he said, and he was right.
After we covered the hole back up, Jason encircled the grave with random junk as if to mark it: a rusty toaster, an elbow of PVC pipe, a birdcage, a broken speaker. It looked like the crown of some buried and monstrous king. He then gathered the bottles he’d filled with fuel, wrapped them loosely in a T-shirt, and put them in a backpack he slung over his shoulders.
“I guess that’s it,” he said. “Just make sure you’re out of the house in an hour. Don’t start whacking off in there.”
“Aren’t you coming with me?” I asked.
“Fuck no,” he said. He then looked past me toward the neighborhood, as if he could see straight through the woods and up the hill and into the living room of the home he’d fled from. “I’m never going back inside that house.”
“Should we meet back here, then?” I asked him.
“Don’t ever come back here,” he told me. “I’m serious. Someone could follow you. This place is sacred ground now.”
Jason tightened the straps on his shoulders and walked in the opposite direction of our neighborhood. I felt a quiet sadness that he was leaving, like we should shake hands or something. I suppose part of me knew I might not see him again.
“Jason,” I asked him, “where are you going?”
“To the prom,” he said. “You’ll thank me later.”