The Woods by Nick Hilbourn

    John Brighenti CC



The Woods


     The woods were just there.  Like the retired couple across the street.  Like the standing grill that seemed soldered to their carport.  Like the trees in our front yard.  Quiet aspects of topography.  Fixtures intended to be taken for granted. Although I was only nine, I knew most things and you couldn’t fool me.  The ditch that guarded our front lawn.  Beyond it was Stevens Street, which rolled out in front of us every morning, originating deep in our throats.  All we had to do was open our mouths and the whole world fell out.  My church on Main Street ten minutes away was where God lived on Sunday.  When not there, God didn’t say anything except when it thundered or rained.  Everything about God was known except the woods down the street from my house.  Not much was known about this part of God.
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    It's not like I didn’t know anything about the woods.  I could see them from my front yard, brooding at the end of Pinewood Street (a short road that separated the retired couple from me).  The asphalt ended in a sudden sprawl of leaves and soil.  Stepping beyond that you would enter them.  When I first learned to ride my bike, I would try to peddle as fast and as quickly as I could on Pinewood and stop just before my bike touched the woods, fanning my tires out like I’d seen cars do on TV.  There were no gates or fences in front of the woods, but I’d never felt invited to enter.  There was a thick musk of age that came from them.  My father had, indirectly, forbid me from going into them.  He told me that “thieves” had come from the woods and taken his tackle box when we’d first moved in.  He’d explained that the theft was why he’d never taken me fishing.  My bicycle was locked up in our storage room because of “thieves”.  My three-wheeler was never left outside for the same reason.  The woods were thick.  They gave little away.  Anything could hide in them, anything could come from them and I, as a result, should have little interest in exploring them.  I was too scared to go in by myself anyway.  I preferred fanning my bike in front of them, studying the faint structures I thought I saw behind the trees.  With one foot on a pedal and the other on the road, I would lean forward and squint my eyes to see if I could make out what was behind the woods.  It was the Garden of Eden.  Adam and Eve had already been thrown out and I didn’t want to test God’s patience too far. 

                                                                                                                                    ***


     At the opposite end of Pinewood was an abandoned baseball field.  No bases or dugouts or fences.  Only the dusty scrape of infield rupturing the wild grass. Across from that baseball field was Chuck’s house.   I don’t know how we met.  It wasn’t just school or after school activities or even our proximity to each other.  There was some other catalyst behind our companionship, but memory forsakes me or prefers mystery in this case.  Many parts of my life are like this.  The past is a milky membrane and different figures and experiences emerge sui generis out of it.  Sometimes I can form some sort of casual relationship to a previous event, but often people just appear.  Chuck just happened.  He emerged out of a milky membrane at full speed.  Friends from the very beginning.  The assumption of a past in his wake.  When I was a child, I followed its movement, but it seems eerie to me now.   Where did everything come from?  I think deeply about it now: friendship.  I invest it with much more responsibility.  It has become a philosophy to me, an ontology.  My assumption is that, in some ways, I should be infinite.  To be an extension of God.  Chuck and I came together too quickly with no origin story.  He appeared in the pockets of childhood, where people and places easily disintegrate if not called to the forefront.  If not possessive of some sharp corner that catches in the clothing. 
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     Chuck’s parents were older.  He was their second child after a daughter, Jessica, who was in high school at that time.  Chuck could push buttons, stretch privileges.  He knew the angles and his parents seemed too tired to confront him. He was a master at superseding boundaries.  I worshipped him.  I had yelled at my parents before, hit (even bit) my sisters and thrown tremendous tantrums – I’d gained nothing but a spanking.  But Chuck opened my eyes.  He taught me to antagonize in new way.  Raw, unfettered and with specific demands.  What you wanted you deserved, but you needed to be specific.  What exactly did you want to take?  How much?  I just had to take one look at the crowded shelves of Chuck’s room to know it worked.  

     I was not a rebellious child.  I had my moments, but I kowtowed to authority quickly. Chuck pushed relentlessly until the thing he wanted appeared.  He was clever.  He knew where the soft spots were and leaned on them.  I longed for these kinds of intuitive capabilities.  I was not a rebellious child – unless Chuck was next to me, egging me on.  I once tried his discourse on for size one Friday night, rebuking my mother harshly on the phone when she asked me to come home.  Parroting Chuck’s suggestions, I said that I was not going to come home and that I was staying at Chuck’s house to watch Three Ninjas, where we would eat pizza (his mom would order) and spy on his sister Jessica and her boyfriend David (I didn’t say that part out loud).  This ended with my father pulling up in the station wagon and ordering me home.  I obediently crept into his vehicle.  My father was an imposing man, terrifying when he needed to be.  I was ashamed of my frivolous courage, ashamed to have displayed my cowardice in front of Chuck.  He was the first person I felt I needed to prove myself to.  
     It was Chuck, one Saturday, who said we should walk into the woods.  I would have never gone in there without him.  I would have never thought to even step foot in there. 

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     The road to the woods ran as if it was originally meant to go farther.  It looked as if public works had run out of money and walked away in the middle of the job.  The asphalt tapered off into a spongy bed of soil and ground moss.  A threshold of trash where the road ended, and the forest floor began.  A viscera of cigarette butts and beer cans.  I picked up one of the beer cans and smelled it.  My body quivered.  There was something adult about the scent, something final about it.  Chuck asked me why I’d smelled the beer can and I shrugged, trying to look nonchalant about the whole thing.  I didn’t know why I’d done it either.

     Chuck tapped my shoulder and said that we should walk farther.  

     Up ahead was a small clearing and stack of cardboard boxes.  At first, I thought that it was more trash, but there was an order to it.  A pattern.  A shape.  This was intentional.   It was an encampment of some sort.  The thick musk I’d previously noted at the woods’ edge now filled my nostrils.  This deep into the woods the view was much clearer.  I saw houses through the latticework of bare branches.  I couldn’t tell how far back they were, but I knew that there was a civilization beyond these woods.  Structures beyond tesseracts of branches.  I was right – but what kind of people live there?   I thought of Indians, pioneers, hunter-gathers of all sorts.  They’d all disappeared from history.  The memory kept alive by ancient sketches in my social studies books.   I wondered if they’d been living behind the woods at the end of my street the whole time.  If the road stopped for this reason: to keep them all secret, so we could talk about them in social studies as if they didn’t exist anymore.  I remember wondering if that thick musk was what history smelled like.

     Chuck motioned for me to follow him.  We walked around the small structure.  The cardboard was a little damp but looked sturdy.  It looked like a castle in a putt-putt golf course.  A large opening on one side.  It reminded me of a royal court.  Chuck and I walked inside.  For a moment, both of us seemed unsure of why we’d come.  As if we’d sleepwalked here.  I was listless, unclear what we should do now.  Chuck pointed to one of the corners of the royal court: there were some toy guns on top of a blanket soiled by the elements.  Its colors, once red and blue, were now a muddy brown.  The guns were black, plastic and shaped like machine pistols.  Chuck and I looked at each other and came to an unspoken agreement.  We were going to take those guns.  Why?  That was not a question for now.  (After all, I still didn’t know why I’d smelled the beer can.)  This had become, or maybe always was in our minds, a quest.  If those were Indians living in the outlines of roofs I’d seen, then we were doing something mythical, American even.  I took one of the guns and so did he.  

     Then, I heard voices.  High-pitched voices in the woods.  Sounds coming from the ether, condensing from the autumn air.  Gradually, they took a more defined form, became words.  Separated from each other, modulated into sentences. There was more than one and they were coming closer.  Chuck told me to run, but I was already sprinting through the woods.  The voices of the approaching strangers mixed with the frantic scuffling of leaves.  I wasn’t sure if it was us and our feet making that sound or the mysterious others.  The “thieves”, I’d thought.  The ones who stole my father’s tackle box.  They were real.  

     We didn’t stop until we’d reached the opening of Pinewood Street.  We walked calmly, hiding the guns in our shirts as we casually strolled back to my house.  We heard no other voices.  No one came out of the woods.  Saturday was quiet in the suburbs.  If you weren’t too loud, it would wash over everything for you.  And we’d escaped.  The thieves hadn’t caught us.  The woods were still.  Nothing clung to us.  Everything was erased.  The suburbs crowded around us and we were clean.  I could hear the breath of traffic on Main Street.  I opened my mouth and yawned… downtown there was a dress shop, a Christian bookstore, a butcher shop, supermarket, three gas stations and dozens of churches – the whole world.  But Chuck and I were standing at a portal to another one.  No one had ever spoken of this other place, but we’d crossed it briefly and survived.  

     We held onto the guns for a few hours, hanging out in my bedroom with the door closed.  The guns were laid on the floor and we sat cross-legged around them.  Marveling over our deed, reflecting on a chase that never happened.  The guns remained on the floor dormant behind us while we played video games.  Evening set in.  Chuck went home for dinner and took his gun.  I could smell food cooking in our kitchen.  I looked at my gun after he’d left and left it on the floor when my mother called me for dinner.  From there, it folds into the milky membrane.  We thought we’d risked our lives for those guns; yet, we never spoke of them again.  Hours after taking them, I wondered why I’d ever wanted them in the first place.  Another pocket in childhood.  

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     On Monday a girl in my class named April approached me.  She was a small black girl with a round face.  Always smiling, always on the verge of giggling.  We were pretty good friends at school.  Sitting together in the cafeteria sometimes and playing at recess, although we never saw each other outside school.    “Nick,” she said.  “We saw you in our playhouse.”  She had a playful tone to her voice, but I froze.  I’d never imagined kids our age, in our class, owned the castle in the woods.  Not a castle, I thought, a “playhouse”.  Not disembodied echoes, but April. 

     “You saw us?”

     I worried that she’d want the guns back.  I didn’t know where mine was.  Somewhere in my room, but I certainly didn’t know where.  I worried that she would tell others.  The thieves in the woods.  What if they were her guardians?  April never told anyone as far as I know.  In fact, the whole situation was funny to her – but maybe that’s the way it had to be.  Her face, her body language said some battles are not worth fighting.  Some people have to learn that earlier than others.  

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     I knew most things.  Not everything.  I know, at least, where I lived, what belonged to me.  People who lived their lives beyond the woods were not part of life as my mother and father and grandparents were.  They could be taken for granted like a myth.  Something glossed over broadly in school and, subsequently, forgotten.  Less a subject and more of a thick fog that you accidentally walk through from time to time.  Rooms of fog and shadow.  If you want something from the shadows, then you take it.  That’s the trick: whatever is around you has your name on it somewhere.  Shadows, myths have no claim.  Your name is eventually on everything.  Ownership by any other means is precarious.  After all, how long until the road pushes through the woods to the other side?  In fact, it already has by now.

     April didn’t say anything else.  She turned around, taking her smile with her.  Class began and I found my desk.  April was already sitting, looking at the chalkboard.  I stared nervously at her until the teacher called us to attention.  April never said another word to me about what happened in the woods, but I’ve never forgotten it.  Chuck and I had entered into some sort of procession when we took those guns, some sort of tradition that we couldn’t enunciate but knew how to fulfill, nonetheless. As if something had whispered our lines to us. 

​     The thieves, I’d thought, where were the thieves?  

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​Nick Hilbourn's work has appeared in Maudlin House, HyperText and A Minor.  He blogs (largethingslargerthings.tumblr.com) and tweets (@nhilbourn).
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