DUST GIVES IN
Mason followed his brother through the woods, asking questions he knew were irritating.
“Why do octopuses need eight legs when squid get by with six?”
“What happens to the tide during a lunar eclipse?”
“Why do kids say ‘olly olly oxen free’ when it’s safe to come out from hide and seek? Is it like the oxen are free to leave? Or does it mean someone is giving oxen away for free?”
“They also say it for capture the flag,” Daniel said. “And freeze tag.”
“What about regular tag?”
“That too. All kinds of tag.”
“But why?”
Daniel was fifteen. Mason was twelve. Daniel answered some of Mason’s questions and ignored others. This was fine with Mason. He wasn’t asking because he needed answers. He was asking because he needed to hear his own voice.
They were walking along a trail that led to a creek. The creek was deep in the woods. No homes there, just trees and rocks and mud. A half dozen clapboard shacks sat on the bank of the creek, abandoned.
Daniel carried a paper grocery bag full of fireworks. Somewhere in his pants pockets was a lighter. When they reached the creek, Daniel was going to use the lighter to ignite the bag, setting off all the fireworks inside at once. Mason knew this was what would happen because he’d watched his brother do the same thing each July 5th for the last three years. Daniel called his bag of fireworks “Danger Bag,” and Mason agreed it was an appropriate name.
Mason needed to hear his own voice because if he did not, he would hear another voice. And sometimes that other voice compelled him to speak for it. He did not care for this.
“Did Stonewall Jackson’s mom really name him Stonewall?” Mason asked. “Or was it a nickname?”
Once a Danger Bag had been lit, it was important to get out of the way quickly. This was obvious to Mason now. But it hadn’t been, the first time, when he’d stood and watched as sparks and small debris flew from the bag in all directions and Daniel had to grab him by the arm and pull him behind a tree, saying, “You fucking idiot, you have to duck.” Then the second time, Mason had ducked on his own, but there was still a close call when a chuck of molten plastic landed in his lap. He jumped around to get it off himself while Daniel laughed. The third year was uneventful and Daniel had seemed a little disappointed, like maybe he regretted ever having told Mason to duck in the first place.
When he wasn’t asking questions, Mason repeated the phrase like a mantra as he walked.“Danger Bag Danger Bag Danger Bag. Bag of danger.”
“Stop that,” Daniel said.
The fireworks in the Danger Bag were leftovers from the night before. Mason and Daniel’s parents hosted a party each July 4th. All the neighbors were invited. Their mom barbequed and served cocktails. Their dad handled the explosives.
“What’s the quadratic equation?” Mason asked.
“A squared plus B squared equals C squared,” Daniel said.
“That’s Pythagoras. I learned it in school already.”
“Well, it’s an equation.”
“There’s more than one equation in the world.”
Daniel also heard the voice, but he wasn’t bothered by it. It never spoke with Daniel’s mouth or threaten to control him the way it did Mason.
A week earlier, Mason’s dad had taken Mason with him to buy fireworks for the party. They’d driven across the state line to a stripmall in Ohio. Inside the store, he’d watched as his dad scrutinized brightly packaged pyrotechnics.
“Go pick out one you want, okay?” his dad said, and even though Mason didn’t want pick a firework, he knew to take a kind gesture from the man when he could get it.
The firework Mason chose was called The Gnarly Cat. Its box had a cartoon of a very surprised cat with the tip of its tail in flames, its eyes and ears exuding sparks. Mason liked the name and repeated it over and over as he held the box, even though the voice hadn’t followed him to Ohio. It could not leave the woods. His dad looked The Gnarly Cat over and nodded. “Yeah, cool. Let’s get two of these.” Then he handed Mason a basket and sent him to the sparkler bins.
Mason, knowing this was the material that would make up the Danger Bag later, stuck with poppers and snakes. But when his dad rifled through the basket, he said, “Come on, Mason, we can do better than this,” and with his long arms swept boxes of roman candles and M80s into the basket.
Mason wasn’t hiding his problem with the voice. He’d asked for help. When he told his teacher at school, she’d nodded and said, “Puberty can be a confusing time.” When he told his pediatrician, he’d said Mason was a little young for the onset of significant mental illness and asked if maybe he was just having a hard time telling between imaginative fantasies and reality.
“Is the Danube blue?” Mason asked. “Or is that just something people say to make it sound fancy? Is it really just the color of the creek?”
“The Danube’s a river. It’s probably nothing at all like the creek,” Daniel said.
At the 4th of July party, no one wanted to play with the M80s or Roman Candles or the poppers. The Millard twins, who were supposedly cool, had proclaimed fireworks lame and “for babies,” and after that none of the other kids would touch them either.
“So what do you guys want to do, then?” Daniel asked.
The Millard twins said they were going into the woods to look for the ghost instead. But neither Mason nor Daniel followed.
“Looking for the ghost is lame too,” Daniel said and Mason nodded in agreement.
Besides, it wasn’t a ghost. It was an apparition.
Ghosts are people who were once alive, but Mason knew the apparition had never been alive. Whatever it was now, that’s what it had always been. It stayed near the creek, mostly sitting or standing on rocks and tree stumps. “Perched” was the word for it. The apparition was almost always perched. Though once Mason had seen it crouched over the body of a deer, like it was eating, its translucent fingers probing the carcass, passing through it back and forth in a rhythmic sort of way.
The apparition was the source of the voice. And in Mason’s quiet moments, it filled his mind with ideas he did not want. “You can’t stay here.” “You are not of this place.” “You don’t belong with them; you belong with me.” “I love you.” “I own you.” “I am you.” “You are not a boy. You are glass and sand and dust. Don’t you want to be dust again? Don’t you miss being dust?”
And sometimes it took control of his throat and tongue too, and its voice, tinny and strained, came from his mouth. “Stop playing,” his mother said when she heard him making such sounds. The voice demanded actions as well, but Mason did not heed it.
“Do perch perch?” Mason asked. “The fish, I mean. Is that why they’re called perch? Because they perch?”
They were at the creek now, the water brackish and low in the summer heat.
“The Danube Blue,” Mason said. He said it over and over.
Back at the party, Daniel had tried to dissuade the Millard twins. “All you’re going to find in the woods at night is meth heads,” he’d said.
He meant in the shacks by the creek. They were boarded up, but the boards had been pried open. Their dad said it wasn’t for meth. “You can smell meth cooking,” he told the boys once. “It’s probably just high schoolers smoking weed,” and then he’d elbowed Daniel in the ribs. Still, no one Mason knew went into the shacks. Not Daniel, not the Millard twins. Not even when they were acting tough, looking for the ghost.
The party was bad all around. Some families were on vacation or just didn’t show up. “Fuck them,” Mason had heard his dad say when his mom asked about the absence of their closest neighbors, whose lights could be seen through the trees so everyone knew they were home. The grill wouldn’t start. His mom had to drag the camp stove out from the garage and it was dark by the time they ate. The fireworks were okay until The Gnarly Cat, which didn’t work right and shot back at Mason’s dad, who had to dive out of the way like he was in an action movie. Like he was out in the woods with the Danger Bag, Mason thought. But when his dad picked himself up off the lawn, he’d proclaimed the show and, in fact, the whole party, over.
When Mason told his mom about the voice, she said, “Oh sweetie, I just don’t have time for this right now.” When he told Daniel, his brother punched him in the arm and said to man up.
“It can’t hurt you,” he said. “It’s all talk.”
The one person Mason never told was his dad because he could guess well enough what he might say.
Mason and Daniel were at the creek now. Daniel set the Danger Bag on a rock and flicked his lighter to test it. Sitting in a tree nearby was the apparition. It had no eyes, but Mason knew it was looking at him. Mason had been silent too long. No use asking questions now. He wouldn’t be able to keep it out.
“Come with me,” the apparition said.
“No thank you,” Mason said.
“Come with me. There is nothing here for you. Why stay when there is nothing? Your ambivalent parents? Your moronic neighbors? Your brother who is okay now, but will only bring trouble later? Be done with them and come with me.”
“Why does it always say that? Why does it always try to get me to do things?”
“Because it thinks you’re weak,” Daniel said. “Just ignore it.”
Across the creek were the shacks. Mason wondered if the apparition ever went into them, if it might know what was inside. Or if even it avoided them.
“Big bag this year,” Daniel said, readying his materials. That’s how little he cared what the apparition said. It couldn’t distract him from his task, even a stupid task like lighting a Danger Bag. Mason wished for the same power, but knew he’d never get it.
“Can I have a ten-second head start?” Mason asked.
“No,” Daniel said, and set the lighter to the bag.
Both boys ran, taking up positions behind trees. Mason felt strongly that he should keep running. But if he did, his brother would call him a coward. He stayed put and ducked like he’d been told, pulling his face behind his tree as flaming matter whistled from the Danger Bag. The bag turned colors in its chemical heat. Daniel was laughing like he knew something Mason didn’t.
The explosion was very loud. Like a real bomb. Mason’s ears rang. He couldn’t focus on anything. He looked to Daniel, who was still laughing, out from behind his tree now, but also rubbing his own ears.
The apparition, however, was unfazed. It moved beside Mason. Its breath was cold and smelled like diesel fuel.
The explosion was the second Gnarly Cat. Their dad hadn’t used it at the party after the first one failed. So Daniel had put it in the Danger Bag. They’d never had a big firework in the Danger Bag before.
“That was cool,” Mason saw his brother mouth. But he couldn’t hear him.
He heard another voice though. Not the apparition’s this time, either. This one belonged to a human man, a stranger.
“What the hell?” this man was saying. “What the fucking hell?” He must have been shouting this, Mason thought, to be heard over the ringing sound.
The shouting man was across the creek, standing in the doorway of one of the shacks. He was tall with a beard and thick hair to his shoulders. He wore jeans and boots, a black apron and no shirt.
“What the fucking hell?” he said again. Then he was coming through the creek, boots splashing in the brown water.
“Now there’s going to be trouble,” the apparition said. Its neck was twice as long as a real person’s. Its voice was high and clear.
The man from the shack moved fast. He was out of the creek and reaching for Daniel. He grabbed Mason’s brother by his collar and pulled him close. The ringing in Mason’s ears got louder and he couldn’t hear what the man was saying anymore. He didn’t know what he should do.
“You don’t have to do anything,” the apparition reassured him.
The man had Daniel by the wrists. “You’re working for me now,” his lips said, and he began to pull him back toward the creek.
Daniel’s lips formed Mason’s name.
“I told you this would happen,” the apparition said. “Be done with all this and come with me.”
The ringing got louder. Mason couldn’t hear anything beyond the apparition’s voice. It was inside his skull, of course. His ears had stopped working entirely.
“Come with me come with me come with me come with me come with me come with me,” it said.
Mason wanted to help his brother. He wanted to run for his parents. He wanted to plunge his whole head into the creek and let the foul water wash through into his mouth and eyes. His face burned and he smelled smoke. He wondered if something in the forest was on fire. He tried to think of mantras to push the apparition out of his head. He tried to think of questions.
“Ok, I’ll go with you,” he said. Though he didn’t wish to say it and hadn’t meant to. They were the only words he could find.
