Boneyard

Boneyard

It wasn’t until the final scattered crumbs of my mother’s carrot cake had been pinched and eaten that I came to believe the bold heading that spread across the front page of The Baxton Herald. I placed the newspaper down on the table where I first found it then pressed my fingers over my lips that were still warm from the tea I had been sipping, then let my breath escape my chest at a rapid pace.
Time was a gel that I found myself a prisoner of; I can’t remember exactly how long I sat in the lounge sofa of my living room, but I’m sure that by the time I rose to my feet the shadows that invaded had stretched and grown deeper. I felt as if I had aged 50 years or so in the past hour; the nerves had completely drained from my waste down.


I remember Cloud River. The words rolled over and over through my mind in monotone repetition. I remember Cloud River. I tried to say it aloud but found my mind wouldn’t allow it, instead by palm covered my mouth again as my eyes prickled with hot tears.
The newspaper was folded in half reviling the first part of the headline: GIRLS VANISH. It was true. The past seven years I had created a lie so ingrown that I gave it a wholesome belief, yet now I believed that it was all true.
I remember Lisa Bird, I remember 13th avenue, I remember Cloud River.


Summer was never my season. Most people could make that assumption just by looking at me. In 1997 I was 14 and tall for my age. It’s funny when I look back to that time, I think of my mother introducing me to the residences in the neighborhood by saying “He’s only 14 but tall for his age.” She’d always have a half smile cut on her face that was almost patronizing. Sometimes she’s even slip in a wink at me. I hated that.


My parents divorced when I was 5 and I couldn’t remember much of my dad. Mum always told me that I wasn’t missing out on much, and then she was silent on the issue.
My mother’s job always wrapped her social life in a tight knot, so I was surprised when she started brining home a middle aged man most afternoons. Kent Ranford would always show up at our balcony wearing what must have seemed to him as reasonable attire. It was quite obvious that he was in the same single boat as mum because his blue collar shirts were always lined with deep creases or parts that were shabbily ironed. I found it quite strange and even pathetic on some level, but mum seemed to find it amusing. Perhaps that’s what she was looking for; just a laugh from a man instead of a formal relationship. Either way, Kent seemed genuine enough and made mum happy, so I was happy for both of them. He would sit at the edge of a brick paling that lined the balcony and click his heels on the wall, normally in rhythm to a song that sometimes he’d hum along to. His face was a maze of thick lines and his flat expression was cast in stone. His mouth was small and thin that would sometimes wriggle out a laugh or a snarl while talking to my mother. I wouldn’t say that Kent Ranford would spark an ordinary man’s attention due to the fact that he himself was just so plain ordinary, yet there was a feature of this man that seemed to snare my interest: his hands. Carpenters hands, I would categorize them. The meat that hung of his wide hands were strong and riddled with purple veins that seemed to throb like worms. Slithers of paint and grit decorated the skin and fingers, representing the days work at Miller Paint Co. My mother never discussed the exact details, but I believe she met him while doing reception work at a hotel on the outskirts of the suburb. The manager was away on long service leave and the employees thought they’d made a surprise thrill by painting the lobby.

From what I heard, the manager arrived early on a pre-flight and almost burst both lungs in fury at the attempted welcome wagon paint job. When Kent told this story, he would snap his stubby neck backwards and jolt out a smoker’s laugh that cracked and shuddered in his chest. Mum offered a clumsy smile and scratched her upper lip below her nostrils, an irritation habit that I have since picked up.
Not long after Kent Ranford started to make regular appearances on out brick balcony that the summer struck.
Normally, at the start of different seasons, the atmosphere gives certain warnings to oncoming climates with tropical storms or moist air, but the summer of 97’ just snuck up and hit with savage heat. Lester Avenue where we lived was still littered with crumpled leaves from spring that crunched under my steel cap shoes on the way home from school. My fringe would flop side to side, stinging my eyes with its greasy tips, and my tongue felt like a dusty slug in my mouth. The high school I attended was only about a block and a half from my house, but by the time I scampered up the stairs onto the balcony, my leg tendons screamed with protest and the hot air would make my lungs throb.
It was, as it happened, one of these sweltering afternoons where the sun would cast an off beat tinge and make the surroundings seem distorted, that fate’s strange sense of humor would play foul on me. Kent was sitting at the edge of the balcony drumming his feet against the wall and inhaling from an unfiltered cigarette when I clambered drearily behind him. He spun around sharply and exhaled a long jet of white smoke towards the garden.

“Door’s locked,” he said, “gonna have to go around the front to get in. Your mum isn’t home yet.” His face glistened with perspiration and his ran his enormous hands through his hair.

“So what are you doing here?” I asked, knowing full well he had nothing else to do with his time.

“I thought you’d be home around three so I’d pop over to say hello.” His tone was firm and almost questioning. He rummaged through the pocket of his paint streaked jeans and pulled out a Camel packet.

“Hi.” I said, managing a feeble grin. Beads of sweat dripped into the corners of my mouth and I tasted oil and salt.

“I got my van here, it’s parked out front. I’ll drop you at Cloud River if you want. Your mum should be home when I get back.” He sparked a match and puffed a few times, looking at me through narrow eyes. I trusted him, but for some reason unbeknown to me Kent Ranford seemed alien that day. At the time this didn’t really mean anything to me, certainly not enough to refuse such an offer. Bolts of excitement shot through my body at the very thought of Cloud River.
I shrugged of my bag that jittered with brand new science text books, tore of my school shirt that had moist circles over the arm pits and threw it aside then headed out.

Out of all the subjects in high school, science was one I most stood out in. My mind was always that of strict facts and calculations that add up without question. After that day at Cloud River, the very body of science and all that was supposed to make "sense" in the name of it was torn inside out, and I failed the subject at the end of the semester. It would be accurate to say now that back then, that summer day in 97,' I was stripped of all reality and replaced with illusions poisoned by nightmares.

By car, it takes only at Nortford to 13th avenue in Belton grove, that is if you abide by the speed limit and road precautions. This was not the case with Kent Ranford. His van shook and rattled, and at one stage felt as if it were about to launch into flight as we hurdled down into Park terrace. The radio was as loud as the volume knob would allow, and "Rebel Rebel" crackled through its speakers. Kent mumbled most of the lyrics but shouted the chorus and banged his hands on the steering wheel in pace. My hair flapped in the fast air that carried purity and sweetness that relieved the thick cloud of heat. Above us, the afternoon sun touched the rivers long, soft ripples with brass highlights. We were approaching Cloud River and I could already make out some other kids in the form of silhouettes, splashing and diving and yelling and swearing. My lips peeled back revealing a chalk white smile.
Brett Bramble's goofy laugh bellowed from the shore that he lied on, Pete Jed threw balls of mud and seaweed at the middle of the river as if attempting to strike a ghost, and Lisa Bird sat on her crossed legs, just out of reach of the thin curls of wave licking the damp sand.

"You should have brought your rod." Kent said as the van's engine stuttered to a halt on the shoulder of the road. The car was parked but his eyes stayed straight ahead. They were wet and seemed to flicker.

"No chance," I said as I jutted open the door. I heard Brett howl in pain as Pete's mud ball found its target. "No chance of catching anything in there."
Kent shrugged and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

"Never know" he mumbled and switched the engine back into life. "It'll be dark soon, your mum will get all cranky if you’re still down here by then. You gonna get a ride home with one of your mate's folks?"

"Yeah" I said, barely noticing the question. "Thanks for the lift."
He shrugged again and swung his van back onto the road.

The next time I saw Kent his face had warped into a twisted mask of shock and his eyes were sunken and darting. Yet overall what stood out on the man whose expression was infected with disbelief, was his hands. They looks weak and almost child like. They made him look vulnerable.

* * *
There were two incidents that occurred about a month between each other and several weeks prior to the disappearance of Lisa Bird that summer afternoon. The pain of hindsight convinces me that these unusual happenings were some kind of warning, as strange as that may be. Religion has never been part of my life, yet I firmly believe that there was a sort of para-normal flare that fired through my Unconsciousness to alert me of the events to come. At the time of course, such things were given no attention and dismissed as “hiccups on the imagination” by my mother. I find myself thinking of these two warnings more and more often, cursing the blind eye I have them.

The first took place on evening in early July. After finishing dinner and skimming though some old newspapers for an English essay, my enthusiasm for study turned stale so I decided to lie in my bed for a while and finish the remaining chapters of 1984. It was around 8:15 by this time, so my mother had already boarded the pillow and sheet express so the house was covered in hollow silence. Once I had settled myself into bed and began reading, I found that my eyes skipped and hopped thought the sentences, rather than glide, which made the text jumbled and confusing. After resigning myself to the fact that I couldn’t hold my concentration on the text, I closed my eyes and eaves dropped on the whispered conversation of the breeze rattled trees outside, and it wasn’t long before my mind slipped into the depths of dream.

I awoke some hours later with a sharp gasp of startled breath, covered in a thin layer of sticky sweat. I still hold no doubt that the state of mind I was in for that short period of time was nothing short of insanity. Fear’s cold hand throttled me as I tumbled out of bed and onto the hard floor in frantic bewilderment.
For no apparent reason, my thoughts were plagued by memories of a cat our family owned when I was 8 years old. A black Persian pure bread who mum named Casper. She hobbled into our garage on night in the midst of a storm and I found her the next morning in a saturated heap underneath my pushbike. Her glazed eyes flashed like two large sauces in confused caution. I gave mum a solemn promise that I would feed her if we kept it, at least until lost notices began appearing of telephone poles. I kept my promise, and no notices were issued to my knowledge. In the afternoons after school, I would leave clumps of leftover scraps from the previous night’s meal in her bowl next to my bike. By the time I had returned from my ride over to Ben Kneps’s house down the block, Casper’s plate was empty. This was the routine that took place every day up to her demise. I rode home and parked my BMX in the garage where I first met Casper, and there was her plate still piled with a generous helping of casserole and rice (I often gave her my serve if I didn’t care much for the dish), and there it remained until I concluded that she had decided to leave our household for good. Even thought I expressed little remorse towards the issue at the time, as I sprawled across my bedroom floor in a tangle of sweat dampened sheets, my mind was racked with utter certainty that something terrible had happened to her and I was helpless to have stopped it.
So certain of this, I made a stumbled dash down the long dark hallway towards my mother’s bedroom, barking distorted cries of frustration. She woke up immediately and started at me with hazy eyes.

“Where is she?” I demanded. “Where did she go?”

“Where did who go?” mum responded through lips that were half closed.

“Casper!” I cried, as if interrogating her. My voice had taken on a watery tone, and I was suddenly aware that I sounded like a young child during a tantrum. I sounded as if I was 8 again.

“Who? What on earth are you talking about?” Her voice was changing from tired-grumpy to plain aggravated quickly. My index finger jabbed through the air in her direction.

“Our cat, Casper! Why did she leave? Why did she vanish like she did?”
Mum’s lips twisted in a knot and her eyebrows rose. She later told me that she thought her only son had blown a fiddle string and would wind up in the mad house for the rest of his days.

“Here,” she soothed, patting the crumpled dooner next to her. “Sit down.”

My nose and throat were clogged and I could feel lines of warm tears trickle down my cheeks. I sat beside her and breathed in heavily for about 20 minutes, and by 2:30am I assured her I was fully composed, yet unsure on an explanation of my bizarre behaviour.
We didn’t discuss it the following day, week or month, until time and memory safely buried it from our conscious thought.

Brenton Bramble dribbled water down his chin as he emerged from the surface of Cloud River. His eyes were squinted from the bite of salt water, and a mop of seaweed hung off his shoulder.

“You comin in Brett?” He shouted in no particular direction. Before I could answer he had ducked under again and was performing a series of slow summersaults. I trampled through small patches of shrub and branches that whipped at my ankles and scraped at my face, yet the pain was un-noticed. I took a small leap of a jutting rock that overlapped the river’s deep shore and in a second my body was engulfed in its cool blue atmosphere. Millions of tiny blue bubbles dances around my eyes then raced to the brim.
There was another abrupt splash just next to me; it seemed as if the stillness of the water had been punctured by a tangle of arms and legs moving in slow motion.
Lisa and I made brief eye contact and we both let out giant bubbles of muffled laughter
before gliding our way to the top. The sun hit my eyes with violent force; a blood red globe that poisoned the sky with its pungent colour.

“How are you, Miss Mermaid?” I sputtered, heaving large quantities of breath. She responded in a vibrant giggle that lit up her face.

“Good thank ye, cap’n!” She raised her arm and saluted me, wide grin displaying a set of large gapped teeth. “What brings you to these waters?”

“I heard tales of ancient lass who dwelled in them, a beauty that would treat the eye of any man.” I struggled to hold back laughter. “And I wanted to see if it were true!”

“Tis I!” She screamed and flung both her hands into the air before letting herself sink into the water again.
We were friends, but I wanted more. Maybe every guy at that age does. She showed no obvious interest but did offer the occasional flirt in the form of a tongue poke or pat on the behind.
I Brea stroked to the shore and staggered out, shaking my hair furiously and feeling the warm breeze wrap around me. Pete and Brent soon accompanied.

“Bout time you got here assface, you sure as hell need all the sun you can get.” Pete gloated and Brenton chuckled in agreement.

“Take a ride, fag boy, you’re body sure isn’t brown as a bell neither.” I said, and flicked a pebble at him with poor accuracy.
He simply grunted at this remark and said: “Good thing you’re here anyway man, coz I got something to show ya.” At that, he bounded off towards his and Brent’s bags that leaned against each other near thick bush. They were surrounded with discarded school clothing. After quickly rifling through his own, he returned with a smirk of triumph across his face that could only mean trouble.

“Check this out,” he said, producing three cigarettes and a Zippo flip lighter in the palm of his hand. “Stole em from my dad.” He gave one of the small orange and white sticks to Brent who willingly accepted, then offered me one before lighting his own.

“Thanks.” I said, and let the filter sit loosely between my lips.
Before the flame touched the tip of my smoke, I saw Lisa approaching at the tail of my eye with careful stealth, as if intending to scare us. Just as I opened my mouth to say something, she sprung behind Pete and delivered a cracking slap at the his lower back that was almost ear piercing.
His cigarette flew out of his mouth, flipped a few times in mid-air, then landed cherry first into the sand and fizzled out immediately.

“Busted!” Lisa shrieked. Pete’s face blazed with fury.

“What the fuck was that for, you dumb bitch!” he cried, wincing in pain. His fingers curled into a tight fist. “You wasted it!”

“Hey!” I started, “don’t even think about it. Have mine if you’re so damn keen on cancer.”
He snapped the smoke out of my hand and glared at Lisa, who now hunched back with rigidness.

“Stupid assholes,” he muttered, “let’s rip this joint Brent.”

Poor old Brent Bramble, whose face was a raw mess of acne, simply nodded and continued to bum-puff clouds of smoke while he followed his partner in crime to the bikes that lay flat beside their bags.

“Good riddance.” Lisa blurted, and produced her middle finger to their bare backs. She turned to me. “And shame on you, young man.” Her blonde hair in soaked strings covered a large portion of her face, only her lips were visible. I imagined what they would have felt like on mine: cold and wet and soft. “Now, swim with me, Cap’n.” She spun around and skipped back the way she came with an energetic bound.

***
My second caution from the unknown fell upon a school day no more than three weeks after my near mental breakdown concerning the departed cat. Tuesday would be an appropriate guess, as this was the scheduled day for Religious Education.
As I mentioned earlier, religion and I were never close companions, but that particular lesson in psalm theory I found myself oddly attached to the information the pastor was giving the class, who all shared similar interest.
He was a short man with a shiny scalp and flabby cheeks that were flushed with purple blotches. His eyes bulged with rich enthusiasm that snared everyone’s attention. As he spoke, his feet would tap on the floor rapidly and his hands would thrust and wave as if this would emphasize his point.

“Materialistic fantasies and dreams that hold no spiritual essence make up the very fiber of society’s fabric!” he bellowed. “Fear has possessed such a majority of people that it has turned the honest minority into the enemy! And what is fear, you may ask yourself, is it that of failed school reports or careers, broken hearts and family friction? Is that all I have to be afraid of during the course of my life?” He paused and caught his breath. “No. I can assure you that is not the case. What the world has convinced you to be afraid of isn’t what you should be afraid of at all. It is merely an ant to an elephant. The devil is a crow that has a nest in every man’s soul. The truth of the matter is, my friends, that every person who walks upon the soil of earth will one day awaken in a boneyard, and it is there that they will have to answer to the question of their sin. It is there they will discover the true meaning of fear.”
Pete Jed who sat opposite me rolled his eyes and scribbled something in his note pad.
After the pastor had collected his books and left, the classroom resumed its regular hassled flow throughout the afternoon, except there was a slight atmosphere of unease that loomed above the air.
From what I remember, I remained silent for the rest of the day.

***
A crow perched on a branch uttered a gawking cry that made me flinch. I looked up to see it, a large beast with dirty ruffled feathers, and as I did it peered directly at me, cocking its head to the left in curiosity. It took a sharp nose dive off the branch then skimmed along the dark surface of Cloud River before flapping away.

“I wish I could fly.” Moaned Lisa, who was now at least 15 feet from the shore edge where I stood. “Lucky pigeon.”

I was struck with sudden shock at what she had said.

“It was a crow.” I called to her.

“A crow? Are you blind?”

“It looked straight at it, trust me, it was a crow.”

“Well excuse me, Mr. Birdwatcher, but I know a pigeon when I see one. Besides, it made that funny little whistle sound.” She intimidated the sound then laughed. “Come in for one more swim?”

It was the second after she finished that sentence that I saw what has played in my mind over and over for the past 7 years, balancing my own sanity on the right rope of reality and twisted illusion.
There was a movement, only a small flicker, no more than a meter from where Lisa paddled. It was as if someone at the bottom of the river had turned a flashlight on and off.
That’s gigantic I thought as small needles of shock began sinking in, how on earth could that fit in the river?
What that was I am still today completely unsure of, but it looked like some kind of enormous fin or tail, but with legs attached. My imagination took great pleasure in playing games with me, designing a giant underwater centipede or spider. I pushed these thoughts out of my mind and desperately looked over the water to see any more sign on the creature. There was nothing but inky reflections of trees and circles of ripple that Lisa produced.

“Forget about it. It’s cold in here. I think I might hop out.” She said, and she dived under the water. I stood there stunned, wanting to say something but completely paralyzed with an emotion I could only compare to raw panic.
She dived under the water, and I never saw her again. My feet were melted into the ground, unable to take a single step forward or back. The claw shaped branches were black against the purple sky.
Get her out! My mind screamed. She might be drowning! She might have hit her head!
My head spun with a million questions and ideas but I knew the overall answer. She had been taken away by something that no one would ever see. She had been disconnected from the rotating planet that was the home of a crows nest in every man’s soul.
It was 2 hours before a van’s headlights pierced the darkness and I snapped out of my frozen state of sheer nothingness by Kent Ranford’s booming voice.

“Where are you? Brett! Where are you?” he called repeatedly, his hands formed into a megaphone. “Where are you?”

I didn’t answer him. I didn’t answer because I didn’t really know.

***

The following days were experienced in a haze of dream like texture that gave me a sense of pleasure and relief. Everything I did appeared normal; I answered questions that the police fired at me, I answered questions that people from newspaper and television crews fired at me, I spoke to my mother and Kent and explained to them that Lisa had simply wandered off into the bushes and hadn’t returned. When asked why I didn’t follow her, I replied that I couldn’t remember. I knew with absolute certainty that groups of men wearing bright orange uniforms or scuba-diving gear would never find even a single trace of Lisa Bird, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was racked with the overwhelming weight of guilt. Yet my mind was only partial to reality.
Two weeks after Lisa had disappeared forever, I received a phone call from her mother, Jennifer Bird. She asked me, in a tone that was calm but cracked by many nights of tears, why I had let Lisa go. They were her exact words: Why did you let Lisa go. My initial response was a jumbled stutter of words that didn’t string an audible sentence, then I just broke down in a crying fit that resulted in a vicious migraine headache that stayed with me for the rest of the week. It was impossible to explain the situation I had fallen into and expect someone to actually believe it.
My sleep was haunted by vague images of Cloud River and the flicker of beast that dared to show itself to me. It was as if it were teasing me, giving me a taste of what it was, knowing full well that if my eyes were to lay upon it in full, my very persona would collapse in terror.
As I picked up the newspaper that sat at the edge of my coffee table early this afternoon, the same feeling of uncontrollable panic gripped me and my breath ceased.
GIRLS VANISH AT LOCAL RIVER. And in smaller text below the headline: RESIDENCE OF BELTON GROVE FEAR THE WORST.
Kent decided to leave our family, and I don’t blame him. Mum was upset at first but recovered well in time. We left Belton and moved to a tiny village north of the state and I continued my schooling and attempted to proceed with life until the fragments of Cloud River became distant. Eventually, I turned all memories of the incident into a lie that I made force fed myself.
She walked off into the bush, and never came back. I didn’t follow her because I didn’t think I should. It was cold and scary.

I wake up some nights, with a spike of fear through my heart. Outside I hear a distant cry, like that of a frightened animal.
Perhaps a cat, but I try not to think so.