But what if he could make the body disappear? That boy’s life was over. He hadn’t meant to kill him, but he was dead now. But why should Paul’s life be over, too? He didn’t want to lose his life, he realized. It hadn’t seemed very good to him an hour ago but right now he wanted it back more than anything.
He picked up Tommy’s body and carried it to the well. It was lighter than he’d thought it would be and it was easy to tumble it over into the brackish water. He heard it splash. He looked at the dirt where the boy had been but there was no blood there at all or any sign that anything had happened. He stood there, next to the well, breathing heavily, trying to get his head on straight. It was done, he thought. It was over. It had never happened. He had never met up with the boy. He heard himself breathing and the barking of the dog way down the road and then he heard a splashing noise and something that sounded like a voice.
It was the boy. Tommy. Calling out. He wasn’t dead. He was alive, in the well, at least some part of him was. Maybe he was dying in there. Probably he was almost dead. He’d die any second.
The voice was hoarse and feeble, calling out for help from at least twenty feet down. He could hear the splish-splash as he tread water in the well.
Paul couldn’t bring himself to look down or to answer. The voice was wrapping itself tightly around his throat. He ran around, looking for a vine or a rope or something to pull him out with but there was nothing, no way to get someone out of something that deep, much less a person who was probably dying of a gunshot wound. He could run for help, but they were half a mile from any houses, and by the time help got there the boy would probably be dead already, and then how would he explain himself? Tommy shot himself and then threw himself down the well? He stood there, trying to figure out what he would say, what he should do, all these thoughts running through him, all the time listening to that voice that felt like it was coming from inside of his own body saying, “Help me, Pauly! Help me! Lemme out! Lemme out! Lemme out!” and then just “Mama! Mama! Mama!” and then, finally—nothing.
It was over. After a long time had passed he peered into the well and saw the same dark green dirty water that had always been there. The sun was still shining. He picked up his father’s rifle and the bullets and ran back through the woods and down the road between the cornfields and kept running, past Tommy’s bike, until he got to his own house. He put his dad’s gun back in its box and slid it under the bed, drank another one of his dad’s beers, and watched TV. It’s over, he thought.
By night the police were knocking on every door in the neighborhood, and his mother went out with the others looking through the fields and the woods. By the next morning he was seeing Tommy’s face grinning at him on every pole and storefront downtown. They drained the swimming pond on the other side of the fields. There was a sighting of Tommy in Kentucky, but it was nothing. They took the computer teacher at the elementary school in for questioning, but he came back to work. Paul waited for them to find Tommy in the well, but nothing happened.
Only nothing wasn’t nothing. The nothing had crawled inside of him like those parasites he’d read about in biology class, like that worm in Africa that crawled into your toe when you were swimming and before you knew it had eaten you whole. Every time he heard Tommy’s name or saw his face, every day at first and then less and less as the months and years went on, he’d feel that worm gnawing away at another piece of him. It rotted his brain so that he couldn’t focus in school anymore. Once when he was really fucked-up he saw Tommy’s face on a poster and thought it was his own dead face smiling at him. That’s what the nothing was like.
Until today, when he had heard Tommy’s words coming out of the little white kid.
The people were moving closer now. He could hear them rustling through the brush. He should be running. He lay still, listening to his own steady, easy breaths. Staring up at all the stars. This must be what it feels like to lose your mind, he thought, but he felt clearer than he had been in a long time. He had wanted to be a good person once, or at least not a bad one, but then he had shot Tommy Crawford and he had been so afraid that he’d let him die in the well. He hadn’t wanted to do it, but he had done it just the same.
The flashlights’ beams crossed the dirt and the tree roots and moved up to his face. He blinked into the blinding lights. It was the police. He’d know their flat robot voices anywhere.
He closed his eyes and saw the stars again. All the pressure in his mind was loosening; he breathed it out into the sky. He had held on to the words for so long (it was me; I did it) and now he could release them. All he had to do was speak.
Thirty-Five