Small Town Summer: "In the Dark Woods, the House Underground" (2024)

This week saw the solstice, the official beginning of summer in Viscauga, and everywhere else, for that matter. But in Viscauga, it’s palpable. In fact, if you’re one of the travelers who see the exit for this tiny town on the Interstate, and take the exit ramp for a quick pit stop at Larry Venture’s Midnight Oil gas station, you can smell summer in the air. That’s because on every afternoon of every summer solstice since before even the old boys can remember, there’s been an informal convention of wood burning grills and pit bar-b-ques down at Hollis’s Landing. This is a clearing in the brush about a quarter of a mile from Larry Venture’s place, with a natural ramp of earth into the river where folks can dip in their canoes and intertubes. Yes, the smell of the meat sizzling and the pork tenderizing is so strong it overpowers the fumes of the gasoline going into your tank, and the smoke drifts by in such thick, slow streams that you can reach out and write your name in it with your finger. Nearly the whole town is welcome at the Summer Solstice Smoker, and if you wanted to add a small detour to your summer journey through Alabama and head down to Hollis’s Landing, you’d be welcome, too.

And after you’ve had your fill of bar-b-que and good company at the river bank, maybe you’ll decide to venture a little further on from the interstate, down Route Seventy-Eight, and see a little more of what this town is about in this season. In the early evening, tt welcomes you with a pristine wooden sign, complete with American flags and bunting:

VISCAUGA, USA

WELCOMES YOU!

Lionel Kirkoff, Mayor

“COME WITH NOTHING, LEAVE WITH FRIENDS”

Coming down Stanton Street, the main business thoroughfare of the town, you see that life is well, and profitable. The businesses are trafficked, but not overflowing. They are steady in their clientele, and the customers seem to know just when to exit so more can enter, and the owners inside can have plenty of time to repeat the process of good service with sincere conversation, and a smile.

You see Heady Jean Holy’s Curiosity Shop, complete with window shoppers browsing the storefront, which is cluttered with antique Schwinn bicycles, old wall-mounted rotary phones, and ancient tools of the Depression-era wife -- the washboards and butter churners, and pedal-operated Singer sewing machines. These things used to serve a live or die purpose in the household, but now the people buy them from Miss Holy for rustic decoration.

You see Bill Owens’s Hardware Store, and the old timers on the bench out front, watching the day pass into night.

You see Jamie Culliver’s Ice Palace, sitting on the corner of Stanton Street and High Boulevard, which is, in the twilight of early evening, packed with sweet tooths of all ages. The families crowd the patio, the children chase each other around, and the teenagers sit in their cars at the drive-in menus, making promises they’re sure they’ll never break. Here, at Jamie Culliver’s, you may decide to park and join them all. Even though the day is going, and you really need to be on your way, you are compelled now to play a part in this town’s nightlife. You are now a part of its history.

So you grab two scoops of Moose Tracks in a waffle cone and walk back down Stanton Street the way you came, looking in the windows and browsing the storefronts you missed on your drive in. You see the quiet interior of Doris Reynolds’s Jot Shop, a stationary store, and the madness of Eugene Lutz’s Toy and Hobby, where a tall, nervous man in glasses shouts at the kids without parents who storm the store, sampling the merchandise and dripping great gobs of ice cream from Jamie Culliver’s Ice Palace on the floor. And you see a man in a green blazer shaking the hand of a man in overalls inside a Pete Purcell’s Insurance office. A woman shuffles around behind them, turning off lights, as it must be the last policy of the day. It is all very peculiar, you may think, to be in a town where the stores are branded by the names of their owners. Where else in the world does this happen in such uniformity? It is as if Viscauga is a town not of concrete and commerce, but of ownership. If something goes wrong in one of these stores -- say, a deal is broken, or a contract is not satisfied -- one knows who to hold accountable, because it is unthinkable to conduct business any other way.

It all seems to be working. There is not an unpatronized shop that is open for business this evening to be found, and almost every storefront is complete with a sign (the owner’s name above it) and posted business hours.

Almost.

There is one vacated business on Stanton Street -- only one -- and its bare facade is foreboding in contrast to the bustling shops that surround it. If you wipe away the dust from the window and peak inside, you will see a deep, lonely blackness. Some metal shelves sit scattered and unaligned. There is a long counter that stretches the length of one of the side walls, and affixed to it are rusted, stainless steel faucets and chipped plastic soda hoses. A couple of barstools remain at the counter, long ago knocked over in careless abandon. In the back, there is a counter that rises a foot off the dirty floor, behind it empty, wooden shelves. There is no sign above the store, but from the general floor plan, you have a pretty good idea what this place once was, and taped to the bottom of the dirty window, behind a thick cobweb, is a lone newspaper clipping from many years ago, with a headline that confirms your assumption: “Hubert Callahan’s Drug and Soda Open for Business.” Below it is a black and white picture of this Hubert Callahan, a muscular man of middle age in black slacks and white lab coat, standing next to a woman and a young boy, who the caption says are his wife, Susan, and his son, David, age 8. They stand in the very spot you are standing in now, behind them the pristine pharmacy with a sign draped across its entrance, proudly announcing the “Grand Opening”. The clipping is a tiny blurb introducing the Callahans to the town, and that they are happy and proud to be a part of the Viscauga business community. There is no date on this clipping, and due to the man’s family being dressed in timeless attire of formal introduction, this picture may have been taken a year ago, or fifty years ago.

Now you must get in your car and leave Viscauga. The sun has completed another full arc on the longest day of the year, and you have miles left to go. You leave satisfied, and feel the sign that welcomed you into town was right. You left with friends. You may not know their names, but they certainly smiled at you, and welcomed you in as one of their own. They didn’t treat you as a tourist, and confine you to certain areas. Still, though, the dark place haunts you. As you wind down seventy-eight, further from the town, you think of the man and his family in the newspaper clipping -- all smiling, and long gone. What had transpired since that photo was published? Why was his pharmacy empty in a town where business was booming...in the kind of small town where most storefronts go empty, unless they are a franchise or owned by some big corporate chain? Perhaps you are haunted by the photo because as you come closer to the interstate, you realize that in just a few moments you will be just as much a piece of the town’s history as the Callahan family, a fleeting memory in the sweep of time.

As you pass Hollis’s Landing, the last vestige of life in Viscauga, you see that another Summer Solstice Smoker has passed into the record along with everything else, and the clearing is now void of all life and smoke. That is, except for one car: a Jeep with a luggage rack on top, which is empty. You remember your new friends at Hollis’s Landing telling you early in the day that this is a popular place for one to launch a canoe, and drift down the Cahaba. Sometimes, one may stay overnight, as there are plenty of good and established campsites down river. You assume this Jeep must be here for the night, and then you think nothing more of it as you once again pass Larry Venture’s Midnight Oil filling station, and enter the Interstate, the dark town behind you, perhaps for good.

The Jeep will indeed be there all night. Its occupants -- four of them -- launched their canoes from Hollis’s Landing early that afternoon, just as the early arrivers to the Summer Solstice Smoker were getting in full swing with their grills and pits. Now, several miles down river, in the dark night, in the woods, they camped, their canoes safely tied with bowline knots to pine trees, and them perched on the river bank, sitting around a campfire that crackled under mess skillets of simmering southwestern corn and breasts of chicken. And three of them, two boys and one girl in their later teenage years, listened intently, in careful silence, to another boy in his early twenties, as he spun a tale: “So the day before this guy gets married, he goes over to his fiance’s house to see her one last time before the wedding, and nobody’s there, okay? He looks all through the house, and he doesn’t see anybody, right? But then, when he comes back in the kitchen a second time looking for her, who does he see but his fiance’s hot, younger sister, you get me? And she’s, like, smoking hot, right? Like, cannons out to here!”

The guy telling the story, Grey Walker, extended his hands at full length in front of his chest, taking a breath to allow his audience to become lost in the fantasy. Across the fire, his buddy, Logan Gardner, chuckled long and loud, his fat body losing its balance and slinking off the log he sat on. Next to Logan, Mac Mix sat more restrained, with a polite smile, which thinly masked a cringy lump in his throat. He was sure he heard frogs scatter into the water, startled by Logan.

“So she’s real stacked, right?” Logan said.

“Yeah, she’s stacked,” Grey said. “Listen to what I’m saying. Big cannons out to here, long legs, short shorts, and you can see the outline of her--”

“I think we get the idea!” Cherry Prince chimed in. She was smiling and going along with it, but Mac couldn’t help but notice a deep level of disdain for this guy sitting next to her. Or maybe, it was embarrassment: a humiliated feeling she got for hyping this Grey Walker idiot up to him, saying “he’s a really sweet guy” as she begged him to come along on this safari. Sure, Cherry, if he’s such a sweet guy, then why do you need me as a buffer?

“Okay, so you get the idea,” Grey said. “So, anyway, his fiance’s hot sister is standing there in the kitchen and she says to him, ‘Sweetheart, I know you’re getting married to my sister tomorrow. I know you love her, and you’ll never leave her. But sweetie, since this is my last chance, I gotta admit to you that I’ve had the hots for you ever since we first met. And if ya want one last piece of ass before you tie the knot, then I’m gonna go on upstairs to my bedroom, and the rest is up to you.”

“‘Up to you!” Logan chuckled like an idiot. “That’s funny. It’s, like, a metaphor!”

“It’s a pun,” Mac said, but wasn’t heard. “Kind of.”

“Just a minute, assface, that’s not the joke,” Grey said, and continued. “So the sister goes upstairs, right, and the guy -- freaked the hell out -- makes a B-line for the front door, heads outside, and there he sees his fiance. And she’s not alone. She’s standing there with her whole family. Her mom, her dad, her grandparents -- everybody. And they applaud him. They say, ‘You passed the test! You are truly worthy of marrying our daughter!’ And the guy smiles, relieved. Moral of the story: always leave your condoms in the car!”

The sounds of their laughter echoed through the woods. Even Mac had to admit that was a pretty good punchline. Still, he came down from his laughter long before Logan did, and saw Cherry dismissing it along with him, and they waited for the others to join them. They waited a while.

“That’s killer,” Logan said, struggling to balance himself on the log. “Where’d you hear that one?”

“Oh, a guy at the House told me. Think it was Sal who told it at Poker night one night. Good stuff.” Grey finished off his laughter, and stirred the spatula in the skillet. “So, Mac -- it is ‘Mac’, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Mac said, even though he’d already told this asshole five times today his name was Mac, right after Cherry had told him five times also. “It’s really ‘McCord’, but everybody calls me ‘Mac’.”

“I’m sure they do,” Grey said. He brought the spatula up to his mouth and licked it for a taste test. The message wasn’t lost on Mac that this was a power move: being the first to lick the shared surface, the spoon that would touch his food. It was probably some dick move they taught you in business school, which is where this dick had come from. “So have you given any thought to pledging?”

“Pledging?” Mac said.

“Yeah, man, a fraternity. You gonna pledge in the Fall? It’s always best to do it as a freshman. By the time you’re a senior, you’re, like, a king.”

“Actually, Mac isn’t going to college,” Cherry said, beating Mac to the answer.

“Oh, sorry, bro. Couldn’t get in, huh?”

“No, it’s not that,” Cherry, again, cut in. “He’s one of the smartest people at school. He just doesn’t know what he’s gonna do yet.”

“What are you, his interpreter?” Grey said. “Let the kid speak for himself.”

Kid? Mac thought. Rather than sneer at Grey, he looked at Cherry, and frowned. Mac and Cherry knew, just by looking at each other across the flames, that this had been a mistake, and Mac couldn’t stay angry with her. He saw in her eyes a sincere apology, and he guessed he understood. What had been the alternative to this night: stay home and play video games while Cherry went by herself into the woods with these guys, or maybe one of the other guys she had just graduated with who could act as her comfort blanket in the presence of this loose cannon, Grey, and his nimrod friend from college? No, she had asked him, of all people, and now they were sharing secret glances, communicating without words. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea, after all. She looked amazing in the glow of the moon, the sparks from the fire matching and accentuating her curly red hair.

Finally Mac said, “I applied to a bunch of schools and got in, but I don’t think I want to go yet. I may take a year off.”

“You apply to Auburn?” Grey said.

“Sure. I got in, but I didn’t like their Creative Writing program.”

“I get ya, bro. But you gotta remember that going to Auburn gets you a steal on student tickets to Tigers games. You get them at something like a forty-percent discount. You know how much those things go for regular?”

Mac didn’t answer that, instead wondering what the Creative Writing program and Football had to do with each other.

The chicken and corn finished cooking, and Grey brought out plates and plastic silverware for everybody, and served them. He had taken it upon himself to do everything for them on this trip, and Mac figured that was more of his business school training coming in. At business school, he had said to Mac earlier in the day as they were meeting each other for the first time and unloading the canoes, they teach you the value of leadership. So, Grey had demonstrated this. He had told everyone what to do from the beginning: how to launch the canoes, and how to paddle them down the river, and where to row to avoid rocks, and how to secure their gear from falling out, and which knots to tie and how to hitch their boats to the bank, and he told everybody what the difference between a knot and a hitch was, even though no one had asked him. His buddy, Logan, had listened intently all the way, while Cherry went along with it, and Mac, careful not to be noticed, rolled his eyes. Business school, he considered, must be a breeding ground for authoritative douchebags.

Mac had wondered what Cherry saw in Grey, and why she hadn’t asked herself the obvious question: what does this hot sh*t college guy want with her? Sure, Cherry was cute, and charming, and to know her was to love her. But she had still been a senior in high school when Grey had met her on one of her college visits to Auburn, where he was already a student, and had plenty of girls to choose from whom he didn’t have to drive two hours to see. Obviously, he had to be a loser on campus, and desperate to identify himself as anything but a loser to anyone who didn’t know him yet. Of course, based on Logan’s idolatry of Grey Walker, he seemed to be a living, breathing God, holding court at the campfire.

“You got any more jokes, man?” Logan said, tossing his plate on the ground, which he had cleaned before Mac could even take a bite. “That last one nearly made me drop a load!”

“Gross, man,” Grey said. “There’s a lady present.”

“Actually, I was wondering if Mac could tell a ghost story.”

Mac looked up at Cherry, shocked she would nominate him.

“Mac knows all about Viscauga and its ghosts. He always had an ‘A’ in history, didn’t you, Mac?”

“Is that so?” Grey said. The smugness in his voice was not lost on Mac. “Check out the history buff!”

“My mom’s the town librarian, so a lot of it rubbed off on me, I guess.”

“Tell them the one about the guy who blinded himself. What was his name? Jim, or James?

“Jeb,” Mac said, and could see Grey gazing at him through the flames, his business school sense of psyching out competitors in full swing. “Yeah, that’s not really a ghost story. It’s something that actually happened.”

“Even better,” Cherry said.

“Sounds scary,” Grey said.

Next to Mac, Logan had pulled a bag of sunflower seeds from the leg pocket of his cargo shorts, and was smacking loudly.

“I guess it’s kind of scary,” Mac said, “when you think about the fact that the guy lived around here, in these woods. Jeb was a carpenter who used to live out here with his dad. This was about twenty or thirty years ago. They lived in an old shack that his dad had built from scratch. For work, the dad would go into town and do all this contracting. He’d help folks build their houses, or their deck additions. Any job that needed a hammer and a nail, this guy would do it, and he’d often bring Jeb with him. One day, Jeb was helping his dad build a barn. Jeb was off, constructing the frame, and his dad was working a circular saw when he suddenly had a heart attack. It was a small one, not life threatening, but the problem was that he fell on the saw, and it split his stomach wide open. He screamed for help, but by the time Jeb got to his dad, he was lying there, dead on the table.”

“Bet that was a real mess,” Grey said, and Logan spit a flurry of seeds from his mouth.

“Yeah, it was. So, Jeb was devastated. He was raised by his father, and didn’t have any family he could go live with. So, he just came back here to the woods. He lived alone in the small house his dad had built for them, hardly ever going into town at all. He trapped his own game, and virtually became a shut in. Some say he went crazy, and in his psychosis started seeing the ghost of his father, walking around the cabin, his stomach split open and entrails spilling out.”

“Gross,” Cherry said. Mac watched as Grey seized the moment to put his hand around her back, and pull her in close. Mac wondered if he was aiding and abetting her inevitable seduction, betraying his very reason for agreeing to come out here.

“Anyway, he couldn’t stand the sight of seeing his dead and brutalized father anymore, so one day he came into town, and walked right into the Hardware store. He took a knife and split open a bag of lye and tossed it in his eyes, blinding himself.”

“Holy sh*t,” Logan called out through his mouthful of sunflower seeds. “That really happened?”

“Yep,” Mac said. “It was witnessed by five or six people, written about in the paper and everything.”

“What happened to Jeb?” Cherry said.

“He was taken into custody and a judge sent him off to Bryce in Tuscaloosa. It’s a mental institution.”

“So, let me guess,” Grey said, smiling. “His father’s ghost still walks these woods at night, waiting for his son to return?”

“I don’t know,” Mac said. “I’ve never heard anything about that. But, Jeb seemed to think something was out here. He was convinced enough to blind himself.”

“Looks like we need some more wood,” Grey said, not missing a beat, or waiting for Mac to add any additional gory details. “Whose turn is it?”

“I’ll go get some,” Cherry said. She began to break away from Grey and stand up, but Grey pulled her back in close.

“Actually, buddy,” Grey said, looking through the dying campfire at Mac. “I think it’s all you this time.”

Mac was sure it wasn’t him this time. He had gathered most of the wood they had already burned through, Grey in his leadership role dictating him to do so. If anyone should get the wood, it should be the fat slob on the log next to him, munching on his sunflower seeds.

“No problem,” Mac finally said, and pulled himself up. He went to the tent behind him, unzipped the flap, and got out his flashlight.

“And make sure you zip the tent back up!” Grey called to him from his seat next to Cherry. “We don’t want any snakes getting in there, alright?”

Whatever you say, you big royal asshole.

Mac zipped the flap back up, and walked into the woods.

Whether the tent was zipped up or not, Mac was sure Grey could care less. They had brought two tents with them, and put two up. One was for Cherry as the lone girl, and the other was for the three guys. Of course, that was the arrangement they had made in town. But Mac was sure that in the woods, things would be different, and just as Grey had ordered Mac into the canoe with Logan, his excessive weight dipping the front end of the boat into the water as they rowed, Grey would surely talk his way into sleeping with Cherry in her tent, and leave the two other guys to fend for themselves. It was a scenario that had haunted Mac ever since they had shoved off from Hollis’s Landing: him in a tent with the fat tub of guts and his snoring and farting, the crude sounds only being interrupted by the sweet and slow moans of ecstasy from another reality, in a tent just ten feet away.

When Mac had gathered an armful of sticks and other dry deadfall, he returned to the camp to find only Logan, staring at the glow of the fire and chomping slowly on his seeds. “What took you so long?” he said. “Did ole Jeb get ya?”

“It’s Jeb’s dad that’s the ghost,” Mac said. “Where are the others?”

“They went for a walk. Wanted a little alone time, if you know what I mean.” And Logan began making a gesture with the pointer finger of one hand and the knuckle of his other that Mac had to look away from. Mac tossed some wood into the fire and stoked it with a long stick they had been using for stoking all night, and they sat in silence for a while, listening to the frogs croak and the mosquitoes buzz, and the plops in the river. “So you’re a senior, right?”

“Just graduated,” Mac said.

“How do you know that chick?”

“We went to high school together,” Mac said, assuming Logan meant Cherry, and also wondering where this dufus and his mind had been all day. This had been territory already well explored.

“She’s pretty hot, huh?”

“Yeah, she’s cute.”

“I’m not talking about ‘cute’, padre,” Logan said. “‘Cute’ is for your sister. She’s, like, a ‘10’ on the bone scale, know what I mean? It must suck to see her with Grey. No way you’re getting her back now. No way, bud.”

• * *

Grey had found a trail that led up a hill from their campsite at the river. It was overgrown with brush, which Grey took care of with a machete, making wide, sweeping chops while he instructed Cherry to hold the flashlight.

“Where are we going anyway?” she said as he chopped.

“No place, I guess. Or, maybe we wanna see where this trail goes. I don’t know. I just wanted to be alone for a few minutes. Hold that light steady, will ya, babe?”

They made it to the top of the hill, where Cherry pointed the light down and saw that they were standing on top of a ridge, and no more trail to guide them. The light went about fifteen feet down before it faded into an abyss of deep, bushy darkness. “That’s some ravine,” she said.

“It’s real romantic up here, right, babe?”

Cherry felt him move against her flannel, lift it up, and then there were his sweaty hands against her skin. “You think we wanna be getting back?” she said.

“Don’t you wanna be alone for a minute? You feel good.”

“It’s kind of cold.”

“You kidding me? It’s humid as sh*t. Anyway, if you’re cold, you know I can keep you warm.”

“I appreciate that. It’s just, I’m just thinking we should get back to the other guys.”

“Don’t worry about those guys. My boy’s a real outdoorsman.”

Cherry figured he was talking about Logan, the goofball who had screamed like a girl earlier when he lifted up his shirt and saw a nest of nats on his belly. She backed away from him, taking his hands in hers and giving them back to him. She tried to do it smooth and somewhat seductive, so he wouldn’t get defensive. “It’s nice tonight, isn’t it?” she said.

“Yeah, it is.” He looked around, paying his dues, looking at the sights. “I think that’s a full moon up there.”

“Too bad we can’t see it through the woods.”

“I’ll tell ya, these are good climbing trees around here. I’ll bet ya we can climb up to the top and get a good look.”

“No, I don’t think--”

Before she could finish, Grey had already taken hold of a branch and hoisted himself up. “Come on! I’ll show ya!”

“I think I’ll just wait here.”

“Your loss!” And he was off -- now, Cherry figured, consumed more with proving his own strength than getting with her. In any case, she was relieved to be past the moment of him coming on strong. She wiped the sweat from his hands off her skin, and watched him move. Grey hugged the bark of the tall pine tree and slid up, finding his footing on the occasional branch. “Sometimes I go rock climbing, so this is no big deal for me. You gotta come on up here. I’ll make sure you’re alright!”

Cherry heard the snap about a split second before she heard the gasp, and then the scream. She pointed the flashlight up, just in time to see Grey’s shadow, falling from a branch that had given way. She saw the shadow fall in front of her, screaming all the way, and tumble down the ravine, disappearing into the blackness. Then there was silence.

“Grey?” she called. “Are you alright?”

There was nothing from Grey’s side of the ridge, but on the other side, behind her, she heard footsteps coming toward her. She turned to see Mac’s flashlight, and then Mac, coming out of the dark. Behind him -- far behind him -- was the shuffling, huffing figure of Logan. “What happened?” Mac said.

“Grey fell! He’s somewhere down there. I don’t know if he’s okay!”

“Holy sh*t,” Mac said, shining his light into the ravine. “That’s steep.”

“Grey!” Cherry called once again.

There was nothing. They stood in silence, looking down, listening to the buzzing and chirping of the woods.

Then, a voice, slow and groaning, came up at them, through the wind. “Damn, that hurt!” it said.

“We’re coming down to you!” Cherry said, and began walking down the ravine in wide, measured steps. Mac began to follow, but Logan held his ground, still panting at the top of the hill.

“There could be snakes down there,” Logan said.

“There could be snakes up here, too,” Mac said. “Might as well come.”

So Logan brought it up the rear as they made their way down the hill, slowly. They followed Grey’s groans to where the hill leveled off, and found him leaning against the side of a small, random structure, which stood alone in the middle of a clearing.

“You okay, hon?” Cherry said as they approached him with their flashlights.

“I guess so. This building broke my fall.”

As Cherry knelt down in the dirt next to Grey and inspected his head, Mac panned the area with his flashlight, starting with the structure that Grey had fallen into. It was just a tiny tin shack, about the size of a modest walk-in closet. It immediately struck him as strange that it should be here. His first thought was that it was an outbuilding in someone’s backyard, but there were no houses around for it to be an outbuilding to. They were in too remote of an area. It just stood alone here, in a small clearing that had been man-made and abandoned, perhaps years ago. Mac figured all of this because of the bad landscaping. Clusters of weeds sprouted up under their shoes, and, in the far corner, just before the clearing became the woods again, a single, lone dirt mound rose up from the flat earth, covered in scattered patches of grass.

“I can’t believe you didn’t break anything in that fall,” Cherry said.

“Dude, you’re like a cat,” Logan said.

“What can I say?” Grey said, pulling himself up, and temporarily losing his balance, falling into Cherry, who caught him and then set him standing again, by himself. “I’m limber as a jackrabbit. What the hell is this building anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Mac said. “Looks like someone’s work shed.”

“It’s too small to be a work shed,” Grey said, “unless all they got in there’s a hammer.”

“Maybe it’s Jeb’s house,” Logan said. Cherry could hear the nervous choke in his throat.

Grey laughed. “You dunce. That look like a house to you? It’s got no insulation, no subfloor. Jesus, man!”

“Sorry, bro, I was just thinking out loud.”

“Well, don’t!”

Cherry watched Grey grab the back of his head, and massage the knot she had felt under his thick blonde hair. She figured he was just in pain, and didn’t mean the outburst; still, he felt bad for Logan, who backed off from Grey like a wounded puppy.

“Mac, do you know who owns this land?” Cherry said, changing the subject.

“Nobody, I don’t think. I think it belongs to the county. They annex the land within a quarter of a mile of both sides of the river. So, unless it’s some utility shack, like maybe an access panel or something, I don’t know why it should be here.”

“Access panel to what?” Grey said.

“Tunnels, maybe. Sewers? But there shouldn’t be any sewers under us. Not out here.”

“Well, there’s only one way to find out. Let’s open up the sucker.” Before any of them could tell him otherwise, Grey found the door on the other side of the tin shack and turned the knob. To everyone’s surprise, it opened, and it was probably the first time in a long time it had been opened. Grey pulled against the rusted metal with his fingers, the base of the door buried in several thick inches of hard, compacted dirt. Mac stepped forward with his light, and gasped as he saw what was inside. It was a gate, leading down into the ground. It had come detached from its top hinges, and hung leaning against the wall of the shed, creating a small, unobstructed passage into the earth.

“Of course,” Mac said. “I don’t know why I didn’t figure it before.”

“What is it?” Logan said, cowering somewhere behind him.

“It’s an old mine entrance. They used to mine coal out here, ship it out to Birmingham to be processed. I’ve heard of all the mines around town, but I’ve never been in one. They’ve been closed for years.”

“That’s some cool sh*t,” Grey said, grabbing the flashlight from Cherry and stepping up to the gate. “Like, literally, it feels crazy cool down there. Look how deep it goes! We gotta check this out.”

Logan, straggling into the shed, said, “I don’t know, man. What about cave-ins?”

“That’s in a cave, dumbass. This is a mine.”

“He’s got a point,” Mac said. “There’s no way we’re safe down there. I mean, the roof hasn’t been reinforced in forty, fifty--”

“Alright, fine,” Grey said. “Anyone who’s a wet blanket can stay up here. I’m going down. When else do you get a chance like this?”

Grey stepped up to the gate, and contorted his body to match the narrow crack between the unhinged gate and the wall of the shed. Then, he slid in, the tunnel before him.

Behind him, Cherry remembered the time just a few minutes earlier, when Grey had gone and done something without assessing the risks...and had fallen sixty feet down a steep ravine. Again she wondered who Grey was trying to impress: her, or himself? Or maybe it was that mysterious, macho, alpha-male bullsh*t where the guy wasn’t trying to impress anybody, and instead trying to prove to the universe that he was the first and only guy in human history to come along and prove that he is indestructible. She knew all about this phenomenon in these southern country boys, and, up until now, had fooled herself into believing she had cut ties with them all simply by graduating high school. But, no, here was a living, breathing macho douchebag from college before her very eyes. It was like looking into a crystal ball and seeing her college years. Guys like this wouldn’t stop until someone -- or something -- stopped them.

“Jeez, that’s a tight fit,” he said, and turned to them. “Logan, you better stay up here.”

“What are you, crazy? I’m not staying up here alone”

“There’s no way you’ll fit through there. You’re too big! How about the kid stays with you?”

“Actually, I think I’m gonna come,” Mac said.

“I think that’s a good idea,” Cherry said, searching for an excuse. “Mac knows all about the mines. We see something, he’ll be able to interpret it for us. Right, Mac?”

“Um, sure.”

“Whatever,” Grey said. “You both can come on. Logan, you stay here. We’re just gonna be right down at the bottom. Back in a flash.”

“You promise you’ll come right back?” Logan said, his voice approaching a whine.

Grey said nothing, and turned to look down the tunnel. Reluctantly, Mac handed Logan his flashlight, and then squeezed through the gate. Cherry followed him, and they all began to descend. Behind them, Logan paced nervously.

Mac counted the steps to the bottom: twenty. Twenty rusty, metal steps between the open air of the night, and the pitch blackness of the cool, drafty mine. When they all reached the floor of dusty red earth, Grey panned the flashlight to reveal that they were standing in a long, narrow tunnel that seemed to slope endlessly down, the beam of the flashlight dissipating before it hit any wall in front of them. Mac took note of the red clay that surrounded them: the floor and walls and roof. He said, “It’s iron ore, not coal.”

“What?” Grey said.

“This is an iron ore mine. It’s the key ingredient for pig iron, which makes steel.”

Grey ignored the comment, and walked further on.

As they walked, Cherry noticed tunnels to her left and right, spread out about every twenty feet or so. Grey threw the light into them as they went, and they lit up large, hollow rooms of red dirt, which seemed to sparkle in the darkness. Every so often in the walls were small holes that looked like they had been drilled long ago, and there were natural columns of the glittering red rock, which, Cherry assumed, were the only supports keeping the roof from falling down on them. “It’s like a beehive,” she said, her voice bouncing off the walls and echoing all the way down.

“I think what they did,” Mac said, “is tunnel down a bit at a time, making these rooms as they went along so they could extract the iron ore. Those holes are where they must’ve put the dynamite.”

“Sounds dangerous,” Cherry said.

Mac heard a touch of romance in her voice, and he was sure of it that Cherry was glad he was here. He had to admit that he was as impressed with himself as she maybe was of him at that moment. He was surprised how much he could tell from the mine by just looking around. He had no idea if any of his assumptions were right, but he was sure that -- right now -- he was the smartest person in this mine.

“Hey!” A voice came from the way they had come, up the steps, and before the gate. “You guys almost done down there?”

“What a wimp,” Grey said, and began to hollar back to Logan, but Mac stepped in front of him.

“Don’t!” he whispered. “You yell, and it could bring the roof down.”

Grey looked down to find that Mac, in his urgency, had put his hand on his shoulder, in a motion of stopping his next move. Then, Grey looked up, and the two locked eyes. Mac saw that Grey was not giving him a look of gratitude, but of challenge, and being slightly wounded...and the guy had no intention of breaking off his eye contact until his challenger did it first.

“You guys, look!” Cherry, next to them, had her eyes on something that the flashlight had landed on. To Grey’s satisfaction, Mac turned to her, and then they all followed the light to find a dirty, dusty “Welcome” mat, lying at the entrance to one of the antechambers, about ten feet in front of them. They stepped forward, and Mac lifted it out of the earth, where it had been encrusted by years of dirt, grime, and erosion.

“What do you suppose this is doing here?” Mac said to himself.

“Oh my God!” Cherry said behind him, and she took Grey’s hand and lifted it up, shining the flashlight on the room before them. They must have stared for a full minute with their eyes wide open -- never blinking, not to miss any of it.

Before them was a couch, covered in red dust, its fabric peeled to reveal the mildewed foam underneath. Next to the sofa was a decrepit recliner, its upholstery also ragged and scarred, and in front of both was a coffee table. It was a complete living room set -- like a Price is Right Showcase Showdown from hell, Mac thought. They walked closer in, and followed their eyes around the antechamber with the flashlight. There were bookshelves against the wall, stocked as a complete library: fiction and nonfiction, periodicals and, oddly, Cherry noticed, medical journals. There were wooden runner tables and footstools, their paint and fabric in bad to terrible condition. There was a king size bed, complete with tables on either side. In one corner, Mac saw another, smaller chair, and next to it a child’s record player, the portable kind you could close and carry around like a suitcase. It was decorated with Mickey and Goofy and other Disney characters, and it was plugged into a metal converter box, which in turn was plugged into a battery.

“This isn’t a mine,” Mac said. “It’s a house.”

On the coffee table, Cherry noticed an orgy of magazines scattered about: Cosmopolitan and Vogue, The New England Journal of Medicine, MAD Magazine -- none of them less than five years old. Her eyes took particular note of one Highlights for Children issue. It was the magazine that, up until now, Cherry had forgotten all about. She had forgotten how she used to relish Highlights, and the mazes and word searches and other activities she did with a crayon. It was the only thing that, as a kid, had made the orthodontist’s office bearable.

Grey continued scanning the flashlight around the room, to scope out any corners or objects they had yet to pick up. “Wonder where the bathroom is,” he said. Suddenly, his light caught a moving object on the roof. He focused his light, and recoiled as he saw a bat. It was sleeping, but it nevertheless made him jump back.

“Oh my God,” Mac said. “Cherry, come look at this.”

He had found something on one of the bookcases. Joining him, they saw that Mac was holding something in his hands: a picture frame. Cherry immediately brought her hands up to her mouth, as if for keeping all the breath from escaping. Mac, also, seemed to be in shock. Grey, however, stood confused by the picture, which was a black and white picture of a family, seemingly clipped out of a newspaper. The father, presumably, was dressed in black slacks and a white lab coat, and his wife and young son were respectively dressed in a dress and suit. They stood in front of a store with a sign on top that said “Callahan’s Drug and Soda.”

“It’s the Callahan family,” Mac said. “I don’t believe it.”

“Who the hell’s the Callahan family?” Grey said.

“Everybody in town knows about them,” Cherry said, and pointed to the little boy. “That’s David. Remember, Mac? He was in second grade with us before…”

“Will somebody fill me in here?” Grey said. Now, his voice was approaching a whine similar to Logan’s. He began backing up from them, taking the light off the photo and showing them that he still had some power down here, in the dark mine.

“Everybody in Viscauga knows about the Callahan’s,” Cherry said. “Hugh Callahan owned the pharmacy on Stanton Street about fifteen years ago. His son, David, went to elementary school with me and Mac, but then his dad took him out to home school him. Hugh had a reputation in town for being...”

“An asshole,” Mac said, finishing the thought.

“I was gonna say Control Freak’,” Cherry said. “But, yeah, I guess you can say that also. At first, he seemed to be alright. He moved his family to Viscauga and bought the store within the week. It started out as a really nice place. I remember my dad taking me there every Saturday to get an ice cream soda. But then, Hugh shut down the soda fountain. He said it was bad for our health, and that Americans eat too much sugar.”

“He’s got a point there,” Grey said.

“After a while, it got to the point where you couldn’t walk in the drug store without Hugh Callahan judging you for something, or shaming you. He’d scald people for buying cigarettes, or tell people they shouldn’t eat so much junk food. My mom told me once that she walked in with a prescription, and he told her the big drug companies are secretly making us all sick -- like, they’re constantly inventing new illnesses to distract us from the things that are really dangerous. She was like, ‘What business is it of yours? Just give me my stupid pills’”.

As Cherry told Grey the story that Mac had heard many times before from the people in town -- from the parents and teachers and kids around the backyard bonfire -- he used the shaky light to scan the bookshelf on which the photograph sat. He noticed that wedged in between a series of Great Illustrated Classics was a stack of spiral bound notebooks. He picked up one from the bottom of the pile, which smelled musty and felt damp. Flipping through the yellowed pages, he saw that it was a picture journal. There were no dates above any of the drawings, but Mac saw that they definitely told a chronological story. The pictures began as scribbles in a child’s hand: a mother, father, and child stick figure, standing outside a big box, which Mac assumed was Callahan’s Drug and Soda. Then the stick figures were standing outside a hole, which Mac figured was the mine. Then, the stick figures went on several daily adventures, from hunting and gathering with rifles and traps, and the mother stick figure teaching the child stick figure at a blackboard. Mac rifled through more of the journals as somewhere, seemingly far away, Cherry talked. Slowly, over time, the drawings became better and more detailed, and the child stick figure matured. It grew in size, flesh, and muscle tone. It trapped rabbits, and played in the river with its parents. And he got in trouble -- with his father most of all, from the look of it. There were plenty of drawings of the father (increasingly looking more like Hugh Callahan in the photo) with sinister features: narrow eyes and disapproving smirks, and in one drawing, devil horns sprouting from his scalp. As time and the pages flipped forward, there were less drawings of the father, and the focus seemed to be on the mother, sketched with smiles, and hugging her son. Then, in the later notebooks, nearing the top of the pile, the drawings began to depart from daily life in the mine, and instead showed beaches and sunsets, and mountaintop views that looked like they could have been pictures in a magazine. And they had probably come from a magazine, Mac assumed...one from the coffee table or bookshelf, David Callahan’s only view of what the outside world looked like.

Finally, Mac made it to the final notebook in the pile. He immediately noticed that the pages were not as yellow as the others, and the condition was more pristine. Only a few pages had been used. On the first page, Mac saw that the mother seemed to no longer be smiling. Instead, her features were pale, and her cheeks flushed. In one landscape sketch that took up both pages, the mother laid on the bed with the son by her side, and Mac saw that in a far corner of the page, in a circle that had been darkened by the furious scribble of a pencil, were two red eyes that watched them. They seemed to be watching Mac also.

And out of the scribbled blackness was a dialogue bubble: “U ONLY THINK UR SIK.”

“Anyway, the story goes that Hugh Callahan totally turned the whole town off,” Cherry was saying. “He apparently used to go to city council meetings and tell everybody they were all gonna die if they didn’t take their health more seriously. He tried to get them to ban sodas, and quarantine themselves for two weeks if they left town and came back. So, pretty soon, I guess he got to them. They stopped coming into his store and buying things from him.”

“You mean, the idiots in your town actually believed him?” Grey said, laughing.

“Not that,” Cherry said. “It’s just that nobody wanted to hear it anymore. They started going to Pell City to buy their drugs. Then, one day, people woke up and Callahan’s Food and Drug was closed. He just moved out, and left everything behind. The family disappeared. Nobody ever found out what happened to them.”

“Until now,” Mac mumbled, barely loud enough for the others to hear.

“It’s weird,” Cherry said, “but since he moved out all those years ago, no other business has ever moved into that building. Mac, do you ever remember anything else going in there?”

If he heard her, Mac didn’t show it. He flipped slowly from page to page of the final notebook of David Callahan. His sketches showed the father with an eye dropper, dropping bits of a liquid into a cup, then giving it to the mother to drink. Then there was the next page, which showed the father and son outside: the son with a rifle, presumably for hunting, but aiming it at his father. Carefully, as if slowing down time could prevent the next twist in the story that Mac was sure would come, he turned the page, and saw a dirt mount, with a makeshift wooden cross coming out of it.

“All the other stores in town do fine on Stanton Street, but they’ve never been able to fill that one,” Cherry said. “It’s like it’s cursed, or something.”

“They’re dead,” Mac said.

They looked up at him, Grey throwing the light off the notebook and spotlighting Mac’s face. They saw that he was pale, as if all the air had been sucked out of his flesh.

“What are you talking about, bro?” Grey said.

“Give me the flashlight,” Mac said.

“No way, man, it’s mine--”

But Mac was off, taking the flashlight from Grey and running out of the room. He stuffed the final notebook in his back pocket, and with his free hand, took Cherry’s. “Come on!” he said.

She ran with him down the tunnel and up the stairs. Grey ran behind them, trying to keep up. At the top of the stairs, they were greeted by Logan’s flashlight, bouncing nervously off the walls of the shed. “Thank God!” he screamed as they wedged through the gate. “What took you guys so long? You know I’m dropping loads up here waiting for you sons of guns!”

Ignoring his bitching, they followed Mac outside the shed, where he ran with his light to a single, wide mound, rising out of the weeds and bushes. Mac fell on top of it, and began to dig furiously through the dirt.

“What is it?” Cherry said.

“I thought it was weird when we first came out here,” Mac said through his huffing and panting. “Weird that a mound would just randomly be here. It’s like a cemetery, or something, which is what...it...is…”

With one last sweep of his hands, Mac leaned back from the mound, and just sat looking at what he had unearthed. The others looked with him, and saw two wooden makeshift crosses. They had been pushed over by years of wind and covered by erosion, and now they laid exposed in the dirty earth, marking the final resting places of Hugh and Susan Callahan. Mac took the notebook out of his back pocket, opened it up, and handed it to Cherry.

“He brought them down here so they wouldn’t get sick,” Mac said, catching his breath. “They never left town. They were here all along.”

“How did they die?” Cherry said.

“It’s in the notebook. His wife got sick, which is the number one thing that Hugh couldn’t deal with. I guess he didn’t want some virus or cancer killing her. If anybody was gonna kill her, he was gonna do it himself.”

“David killed his father,” Cherry said. She had found the page where David had aimed the rifle at his father, and then the next page where he buried his body. Then, she flipped to the next page, which portrayed the mother, Susan, lying on the bed, her eyes closed, and a scribbled R.I.P. above it. And that was all. The rest of the pages were blank. “He was trying to protect her from the man who was protecting them.”

“So where’s the kid?” Grey said.

“I have no idea,” Mac said. He stood up, and joined them, looking at the grave. “He’s not here anymore, that’s for sure. I guess he finally got out. He’s out there somewhere.”

They stood there with Mac in silence, listening to the crickets and frogs, the wind coming through the trees, and observing the silence of the earth. Finally, after a couple of minutes, Grey checked his watch and announced he was going back to camp, if anyone wanted to join him. He took the flashlight from Logan and Logan followed him, with much huffing, up the steep hill and back to the river.

They walked to the camp in two groups: Grey and Logan huffing through the woods, unable to get back fast enough, and Mac and Cherry far behind them, taking their time.

“So what are we gonna do?” Cherry said.

“I guess we’ll have to stay the night, and in the morning go tell Sherriff Arquette. Man, nobody’s gonna believe this.”

“They’ll believe it when they see it,” she told him.

When they reached the river, the fire was on its last flames. Logan immediately went to his tent and crawled in, plomping his fat body down in his sleeping bag and snoring within seconds. Grey went in next to him and grabbed some supplies: his toothbrush and pillow and sleeping bag. Then, he began to head for Cherry’s tent, but she stopped him. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to bed, what’s it look like?”

“Yeah, but that’s not your tent.”

“Yeah it is. I brought the damn thing.”

“But you said you were sleeping in the other tent with the guys.”

“Well, yeah,...but come on, baby.”

“‘Night, hon,” she said.

Grey turned around the way he came, but then stopped short of his sleeping quarters, and looked back at Mac. “You coming, kid?”

“No, he’s not,” Cherry said, and then she looked at Mac. “You mind?”

Mac, pretending to mull it over, said, “No, it’s no big deal. I can sleep wherever you--”

Cherry went back to the tent, leaving Mac and Grey alone. They looked at each other for a long while, Mac seeing the challenge that it was. Finally, Grey broke off contact, and turned back to his tent.

Grey fought his way around Logan’s long, wide body, which had fallen without consideration into the center of the tent, completely catatonic. He fought with his sleeping bag and pillow; fought for a long time to get comfortable. Then he covered his nose and mouth. The tent already smelled of southwestern fart. Then, in the darkness and silence of the evening, he heard a shuffling next to him, and a moaning. “That wasn’t cool, you know,” Logan mumbled.

“What are you talking about?”

“You looking back at me and not saying nothing.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Go back to sleep, fat*ss.”

“When you were down there in the mine and I asked if y’all were coming back,” Logan said. “And you just looked up at me from the bottom of the stairs and didn’t say anything back.”

“I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to yell and cause a cave-in, you dingleberry. And anyway, I wasn’t at the bottom of the steps, I was down in the tunnel.”

“No way. I saw you at the bottom of the steps. You just looked back at me. I saw your eyes. You stared at me. Then you went on without saying nothing.”

When Mac unzipped the flap in the morning to walk into the woods and pee, he noticed that the fire was still smoldering, and the other tent was gone, along with one of the canoes. He called to Cherry, who groggily moped outside, and woke up instantly when she saw that they had been left out here.

“I’m sorry he left,” Mac said. “I know you liked him.”

“No, he was trash,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to Auburn after all.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Maybe just wander the earth,” Cherry said. “See what it has to offer. Just like David Callahan.”

She went back inside the tent to get a couple of more minutes of sleep. Mac went into the woods to gather some wood and get the fire started again. Once he got a spark and saw the flames rise, he put on some coffee, and sat alone, waiting for it to perk. He admired the mist coming off the Cahaba River, and the sounds of the woodpeckers drilling the trees, and he spotted several Cardinals perching themselves on branches. He loved summer mornings like this one.

Thanks for reading this latest episode in “Small Town Summer.” Be sure to, ya know,

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