Free The Duration by Dave Fromm Page B

Berkshires again.
    As for the rhino, those stable-hands who had accompanied Guy into the rolling woodlands were usually too drunk to be reliable, especially after they lost their jobs, but one or two spoke of following the rhino’s tracks, and, where the tracks were faint, of following a break in the undergrowth the size of a train tunnel, until they’d found the beast. They spoke of a fast march across hard earth, and then a short shale drop that opened onto the soft swamp below. They spoke of half a ton of animal at the bottom, upturned and fearful, already part buried, its eyes foggy and its chest rattling. They spoke of oaths and recriminations and curses, and, finally, of shots fired by the master of the house.

We knew all this because we’d put it into our reports for Ms. Flemmy and Chief Winston, which wound up being probably just about the best goddamn reports you’ve ever read, probably. Got an A from the former and a paternal pat on the shoulders from the latter. We dropped in big block quotes from Florence Banish, pages at a time, the prose both flowery and square. The master of the house. The leveled muskets. Only thing missing was someone getting the vapors.
    “It was never seen again,” Florence Banish said, in the quote we ended on. “The beast of the wood, a secret locked away forever.”
    Far as I was concerned, that was the end of it. Good story, but once we turned in the reports I was ready to leave it behind.
    Chick wasn’t, though.
    These were the months after the Trivette stuff came out, and we’d been upping our time in isolation. The trails, the practice courts. We hiked Monument, found the West Normanton quarry. Chick started talking about his time with the bears. It was just easier to be out of town, I guess. Nobody giving us the look. Nobody changing the dynamics. Eventually, the next scandal would drop and we could return. So we shot threes and poked through the ruins of our environment, trying to find something else to process. A new identity, a cause. And then Ms. Bitz and good old Florence Banish came through.
    Once the weather warmed up and school ended, Chick took our report and began directing forays into the woods off of Bramble, expecting to stumble right onto the body of the rhino. Jimmer and Unsie came twice and then bailed. I stuck it out initially. First few times, nothing—looking for a shale cliff and a big lump of earth in those woods was like looking for a rotting tree. They were everywhere. The fourth time, a site felt promising and we lugged a couple of shovels through the woods from my dad’s shed, but all we hit was the rusted frame of a VW Bug.
    After that, I lost interest pretty quick. Shaunda Schoenstein was working concessions down at Tanglewood, and I was too busy trying to charm my way into her apron to want to waste more time in the woods. Plus, there was poison ivy back there, and no matter how many times you tell a girl it’s not contagious, she never believes you.
    Chick stuck with it. He had a little map that he’d worked on with Florence Banish, and he was checking off quadrants. We found the Bug here, he’d say, marking a spot with an
x
. We radiate out from that.
    “This is dumb, Chick,” I said one day, as I was urinating against a maple tree and eying a nearby vine suspiciously. Its leaves were shiny and triplicate and a little too close for comfort. “We are never going to find it.”
    Chick was shuffling around, looking at his map. “It’s okay,” he said. “You can go.”
    I put my junk away carefully, without touching it, by lifting the waistband of my sweats out and back. Go into the woods, brush up against a plant, put a hand down your pants—just to scratch your balls, for example—and presto, poison ivy on your dick. Happened to Mark Pacheco. More than once, I think. He was a weird kid.
    “Come on,” I said.
    Chick looked at me and shrugged. “What?”
    “Come with me.”
    He shook his head.
    “Can’t,” he said, smiling.