They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel

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16 A The first place I chose was the woods where I was young and my brother used to chase after me and my friends, set off small firecrackers he’d gotten somewhere illegally. The ground snapped and dead leaves flew. There was smoke and we screamed. He laughed and laughed. The woods were endless. Toads among the leaves, snakeskins. Deer and trees the bucks rubbed raw in fall. A hawk screaming, five-toed print of a fisher fresh in the mud, I could picture him hooking the fish in that stream, near the rock slide, near the crayfish, my childhood. Sara thought I was being sentimental, telling these stories. Or worse, that I said all this just to impress F, leaned my head against the wall and talked about the wet rustle of that forest, the moss thick and slippery on the rocks we hopped over, hiding from the hunters and their spoor of Bud Light cans. We left the woods holding armfuls of beer cans to our chests, fresh and still smelling or old and slug-covered. But I spent every afternoon there—if you can’t feel something for that, can’t be 17 bothered to care for where your life was lived, its freshest hours, what hope is there? I asked Sara this. She had her stern look. F and I planned everything. I was surprised by his willingness . This is where we’d go, all the neighborhood kids, I said. I thought he’d laugh; it seemed laughable. But on the map the green of the park stretched—only chopped into by the town’s thrusting spur—all the way to the mountains. A wildlife corridor , a kingdom. They were draining the swamp outside my old town to build a development. Hacking at my woods and even the woods more distant, which we only ventured into that time that girl was lost and all the kids in town went to look for her, though we could have gotten lost too, we were barely older, and above us a helicopter throbbed, and we were in parts of the woods we’d never seen, and the crickets sang thickly and the bullfrogs and the sounds pressed in on us and the air. We were scared and we sweated. We raced each other back out. They found her after ten hours and she was fine. So one night we went there, F and I, drove through the old town and into the development. I hadn’t been for years and my old neighborhood was more ramshackle than I’d realized. It had looked different against the tangle of trees on the outskirts of town than when the new houses went up, their pools and basketball-court driveways. I couldn’t see the rocks and wild grapes of my childhood. We could just smell the grapevines near the field they’d cleared for the development, where dead wood bowed. Okay, F said. We were wearing all black, and I felt stupid, but we were hard to see in the night, slipping in mud among the backhoes. Among the frames of houses, the concrete basements where an entertainment center might be someday, or an unused tool bench, or stacks of things that in the end no one 18 wanted. We laid out our little bundles, started their timers, and left. In the morning in the papers the beams were singed and ugly, in places sagging or split, in others fallen completely. The beams would have to be cracked from their joints and replaced, or the whole pulled down, I didn’t know how they’d do it. The pictures in the newspaper were hard to make out, newsprint and the black of burned wood. I could smell the wood and hear the snaps and thuds of the fire. In that moment I was happy. We were gone in the morning and we were scared but no one ever thought of us. No one thought of the kids who had played there years past, who they were now. We didn’t do any good: the woods had already been cleared, the land bought up years ago. But something in the dark, in the rush of it. I kept looking down at the mud, at the foundation, trying not to fall. We didn’t have flashlights. The backhoes shone, mud on the shovels. I remember the smell of my woods...