I was trying to fit my mind around that level of awfulness when he said, “I want you to come with me. There’s something I need to show you.” He motioned for me to follow him outside, and I saw that he’d unpacked our trail bikes. They were leaning on their kickstands in the moonlight.
“It’s a bit of a ways from here,” he said.
Maybe fifteen, sixteen kilometers, as it turned out, westward, with lots of hard bends and uphill climbs. A swift night ride, the air cool and fresh. It was rare that we moved at such a pace.
We approached an old green highway sign that said “Village of Flat Rock,” and my father braked and coasted to a stop. I joined him, and we paused to drink some water.
“You caught your breath?” he asked me.
I nodded.
“Stow your bike,” he said. “We walk from here.”
We scrambled along on what had been the highway’s shoulder. I realized that the road fronted a lake; the water flickered with moonlight through what had been, in another life, a chain-link fence and a line of ornamental trees, all of them now unpruned and unwieldy. The air was thick with the smell of honeysuckle. I loved the scent before that night, and I can hardly stand it now.
We could see light ahead. Not just a light, mind you. A haze of lights, many bleeding together, and it wasn’t long after we saw them that the noise reached us, first a uniform murmur, like the ocean; then, as we drew closer, the noises expanded, separated, became distinct. Engine noise. Human noise—their shouts, their laughs. Music. Acoustic guitars, harmonica, drums.
When the trees on the lakeside ran out, Daddy stopped me by putting his hand on my arm. He looked up and down the road, and we both listened, but all I could hear was the noise ahead. “Let’s cross,” Daddy said, “and then we’re going to get up into the woods and out of sight. Got it?”
I said I did.
“Then go now,” is what he said, and we went. We scurried across the road and climbed uphill into the woods. At some point a motorcycle passed. It bore two riders, the back one a woman whose hair streamed out light-colored and long behind her. And I remember thinking, Well, what’s ahead can’t be too bad if a woman’s part of it. Lord, you have to laugh. But I was young.
Now’s a good time for another shot. Go ahead, Vic, send it around again. This story goes down better with whiskey.
Twenty, thirty minutes later, we were in sight of it.
“Now you listen to me,” Daddy said. “If you make a peep at the wrong moment, you’ll get us killed. Or worse. So don’t talk. Hear me?”
I nodded at him. My heart was beating like crazy.
“Stay behind me,” is what he told me. “Go where I go,” he said. “I want to get you a look and then I want to get out of here.”
The woods ended where a driveway curved up from the highway. And where the drive led was up to a broad, graveled expanse that abutted the edge of the lakeshore. Tall pine trees reached up at regular intervals, and among them were hundreds of RVs and campers and motorcycles, many of them parked beside pitched tents, and outside these tents and vehicles sat people, mostly men—but not all—some of them in folding chairs, others lounging on couches that had been dragged outside, or on pickup tailgates, or at wooden picnic tables set up next to charcoal grills. Mouthwatering smells rose up from those grills. I hadn’t had supper that night, and my stomach growled, and Daddy gave me a stern look as if I could help it. They were drinking, most of them. Maybe eight meters from me, a man was tilting a frosty bottle back to his mouth, and his feet were extended in front of him and propped up on a cooler. Relaxed like I’d never seen the likes of. I could make out the beads of condensation on that bottle. I could see the tread on his new-looking hiking boots. He had a paper plate balanced on his knee, and he set the bottle down to pick it up and lift a hot dog to his mouth.
Daddy crooked a finger to say, Come on. We started making our way around the perimeter of the campgrounds at a not quite run, keeping to the shadows and hiding behind trees when there was one to hide behind. We stopped on a little wooded rise on the far side of the camp. The disintegrated remains of an old outbuilding were overrun with creepers, more honeysuckle, and its perfume wafted around me on the cool mountain breeze. Following Daddy’s lead, I settled down on my belly, propped up on my elbows. The nearest camper was just down the rise from us, fifteen meters away, maybe. A group of men were congregated in front of it. Laughing. Passing around a bottle. Smoking home-rolleds, the sweet smoke tickling my nostrils.
Daddy pressed something into my hand. His fold-up binoculars. I put them up to my eyes, adjusted the lenses, and looked at the men. They were about my father’s age, a couple maybe a handful of years younger. I guess, if there was something to notice about them, the first thing was that they were all big men—tall, broad, strong-looking. Like they lifted weights or did hard labor. The white guys had leathery skin that had seen too much sun, ruddy faces, deep creases around their laughing eyes. Stamp scars. But they all had on clean, new-looking clothes, button-down shirts, lightweight tan trousers, glints of gold on their wrists and fingers, around a couple of necks. I’d say now—now that I’ve seen more of the world, or learned more of it online—that they looked like men going out together on the town, barhopping.
Something else came into the frame suddenly. I wiped sweat out of my eyes. I took a long breath to try to steady my shaking hands. I adjusted the lenses again, but she was still there. A girl. A teenager. Lanky, knees knobby as a calf’s, hair long and dark and carefully brushed out around her shoulders. She was wearing a little cotton dress cut like a slip. Spaghetti straps. Cheap little rubber flip-flops on her feet, and her toenails painted bright orange. The men had formed a half circle around her. What I could hear of their conversation, from my perch above their campsite, was unintelligible. Through my binoculars, it was a dumb show. But I gathered what was happening. The men jostled one another. Teased. One rubbed his chin, as if deliberating. Two of them checked the contents of their wallets. Finally one of the men stepped forward, raising a hand with some bills tweezed between his index and middle fingers. I noticed activity at the edge of my view and lowered my binoculars. A small person emerged from a large RV, which I could now see was idling nearby, and scampered to the man. Plucked the bills from his grasp and just as quickly ran away. I lifted the binoculars again in time to see the girl, a thin red smile carved into her sallow face, follow the man into the camper. His group of friends lifted their drinks. Cheered.