DEAD MAN’S ISLAND / John Joseph Ryan

Prologue: The Man in the Woods

The other children were too squeamish to handle snakes themselves, but not Mimi. She eventually persuaded them to touch the tail of the juvenile garter snake that writhed contentedly through her fingers. However, when the animal turned to taste the air around the children’s hesitant taps, they squealed and backed away. Mimi’s two brothers, always in competition even though they were still in their single digits, dared each other to stroke the snake’s head. Will seemed to master his trepidation. As he tentatively stretched forth his fingers, a yellow-bellied racer, spooked from its hiding place in the shade of an exposed tree root, darted across his bare foot. He issued a guttural aggh that quickly evolved into a scream. His younger brother, Jerr, joined in as soon as he saw the snake live up to its name and part the tall grass in a hurry.

“It’s not harmful!” Mimi yelled as Will held onto his transgressed foot and began hopping around, crying out. Mimi’s cousin, Margot, who had surprised the yellow-bellied racer, watched hopefully for signs of blood.

“It’s not venomous,” Mimi said. “It didn’t even bite you, Will.”

“Yeah, Will,” Margot joined in, disappointed in the absence of puncture wounds, “it’s more scared of you than you are of it.” She looked up at Mimi for approval. Mimi frowned.

“You guys, stop being such cowards. Gosh,” Mimi said. She deposited the garter snake safely out of the way of Will’s histrionic hopping. With a flick of its tongue the snake sampled the atmosphere of the tall grass idly before departing deeper into it. Will, doubling down on his imagined hurt, continued to hold his foot, tears in his pleading eyes. Mimi relented.

“Here, let me see it,” she said to her younger brother. She cupped her hands together, and Will lay his dirty heel into them. Mimi studied the top of his foot. “Nothing,” she said, followed by, “Eww, your foot is nasty.” Jerr laughed at his brother’s expense. Momentarily forgetting his reptilian encounter, Will yanked his foot out of Mimi’s cupped hands and tried to hit his younger brother. As Jerr took off running up the trail towards the cabin where their parents and their aunt and uncle were gathered around a fire pit, Will followed close behind, bare feet be damned.

“Boys,” Margot declared with a sigh, shaking her head sagely in perfect mimicry of her mother. Mimi said nothing for a moment as her brothers disappeared around a bend in the trail.

“I’m going to see if I can find that racer,” she finally said.

“I think we’re doing s’mores soon,” Margot replied.

“Go on ahead. I want a look at that racer.”

“All right,” Margot said, “but hurry up. Don’t stay out too long.”

You’re not my mother, Mimi thought, turning her back on her cousin and stepping off the trail in the direction the speedy snake had taken.

The overripe peach color of the setting sun suffused the few open spaces among the dense trees. The old growth had been logged over a century ago, and the haphazard regrowth had been neglected by subsequent owners. Though prairie grass and wildflowers dotted the narrow border of the packed dirt trail, uncontrolled cedars and bird-shit-spawned weed trees competed with taller pin oaks for light. At ground level, the shadows pooled coolly. The snake, Mimi surmised, would not have gone far.

Mimi brushed the last of the tall grass back and looked across the monochromatic patchwork of dead leaves that lay under the tangle of bushes and trees. Nothing unusual interrupted the figure-ground of nature’s stillness. Then, right there. What was that?

The racer’s head jutted upright a good foot off the ground, exposing its stiffened yellow underside in profile against the dying orange light. The rest of its body merged with the rising gloom. Mimi knew it would spook easily, so she took a slow step towards it, waited, then took another. If the snake were aware of her, it gave no sign. But it was alert to something, its tongue just a visible flicker in the dusk. As Mimi continued her stealthy progress, she nonetheless could not help but crunch leaves underfoot. The snake’s head swiveled on its taut, upright body. In the fading light it assumed a cobra-like menace.

Mimi felt nothing but curiosity and a little compassion for the wary reptile. She took two more careful steps, but the deepening leafmeal amplified the sound. The snake lunged forward and slithered away. She watched as a tussle of surface leaves marked its passage, then all was still again.

“Darn,” she muttered. Looking around, she said, “Damn.” With no adults in earshot and no siblings or officious cousin to tattle, she added, “Shit,” aspirating the satisfying ‘t’ at the end of her new favorite curse word. She really should head back now, but she was savoring this private moment in the woods. There was still enough light to pursue the snake’s course for a few more minutes.

Mimi stepped confidently over to the spot where she had seen the last leaves tremble from the racer’s passage. Ahead of her the gentle hill sloped abruptly downward towards the stream that trickled through the woods. She didn’t know if the snake would have any interest in going that far but knew its kind did not hunt at night.

In June the stream rose high enough to wade in. Mimi and her brothers and Margot had added stones along a tiny waterfall, focusing its flow into a shower above the natural pool below. She should be able to hear it by now. But it was early October and no rain had fallen for several weeks. The weak trickle of water barely registered in her ears. In the rising darkness, Mimi knew she could find it by muscle memory. She stepped over a rotting tree trunk and brushed a spider web away from her face. Just to be sure, she looked back the way she had come and found a landmark—a dead cedar the color of a muskrat. Then she pressed on.

In the hollow through which the stream flowed, bits of limestone lay luminous in the vestiges of sunlight. Lulled by the golden hour, Mimi considered giving up on the snake. She would go as far as the waterfall before hurrying back to the cabin. She eased past the springy stems of a red twig dogwood and looked upstream to the jutting shelf of stone that produced the diminutive cascade.

There was a man there. He was reclining in the shadowy cleft of limestone beneath the fall, his arms pressed stiffly to his sides, one leg extended and the other folded underneath him. He stared straight at Mimi, as though he had been waiting for her. His mouth was open, his lips peeled back to reveal an unsettling grin. Mimi returned his bold stare though every impulse told her to run. For several moments neither of them moved. Then Mimi noticed that the water from the fall dripped onto his head before sliding down the side of his face to saturate the sleeve of his left arm. Why was he sitting under the water like that? she wondered. It was too chilly for a swim. Was he taking a bath? Suddenly, she felt as though she were the intruder—even though she was still very much on her parents’ land. She could leave him be just as she did all the snakes she handled and released. He continued to stare openly, unblinking. Then the water shifted slightly, or acquired a temporary increase in volume, and poured down over his face. As it coursed over his eyes, they remained open. It drizzled across his exposed teeth, his smile unwavering. Mimi felt the first chill of the advancing, damp night. Then she understood.

She ran almost straight through the dead cedar that was her landmark, a shower of brittle needles landing in her hair. She sprinted along the path without feeling the ground beneath her, and when she turned her ankle on a rock it was as though her own foot became a flywheel releasing an extra burst of speed. She could see the dance of flames through the final bend in the trail, then hear her brothers taunting, haranguing, and her father and aunt and uncle laughing without concern. Only her mother was on her feet, looking anxiously towards the trail.

“Mimi?” her mother called to the shape fleeing towards her.

Mimi ran directly at her, almost knocking her down, her voice shaping inarticulate words.

“What is it? Mimi, I can’t understand you. Slow down. Mimi!”

Her mother held her shoulders and pushed her back, looking into her eyes.

“Mimi, what’s wrong? Honey, what is it? What’s wrong?”

Mimi continued her garbled recitation as the other adults hurried their way.

“Mimi?” her father asked. “What’s wrong with her?”

Her mother was stroking the sides of Mimi’s face now. Mimi’s eyes popped wide, her mouth murmuring almost without perceptible movement. Her mother leaned closer, looking from eye to startled eye, straining to hear what her daughter was saying. Finally, she said calmly, soothingly, “Honey, take a breath. Breathe with me. C’mon, breathe in. Take a breath. That’s it. Breathe. Okay, take another. That’s it, honey. Okay, okay. That’s it. Now, what—”

“There’s a man in the woods,” Mimi said, as clearly as the bright fall day that had now darkened into night.

Chapter 1: The Naturalist

“Anyway, that first meeting with death stays with you your whole life.”

- Time Shelter, Georgi Gospodinov (Angela Rodel, trans.)

Across the water from where William stood, the Lewis and Clark Confluence Tower soared nearly two-hundred feet above Hartford, Illinois, an erstwhile company town like its neighbor, Granite City. Looking like an inverted three-legged Art Deco stool, the slim concrete tower boasted three viewing decks and marked the approximate spot where the Corps of Discovery camped before sailing off into history up the Missouri River. William never had the courage to climb up it, both because he was leery of heights and because he didn’t trust who he might meet once he got up there. He felt most comfortable in open spaces, two feet planted firmly on the ground.

William resumed his survey of the desolate landscape nearer to him through his binoculars. He scanned steadily from left to right, paying special attention to the wasted, dry tops of thousands of sunflowers in hopes of catching a bright flash from a goldfinch. The flower stalks, many still upright as though belief in some horticultural afterlife might make it immanent, others bent in genuflection to the coming winter, jostled and swayed and quivered in the light breeze. No more yellow among the wizened heads. No more seeds. No songbirds. William continued to pan, away from the Mississippi side of the Confluence and back towards the Missouri side. A great blue heron flew into view, and he adjusted the lenses to sharpen the image of it. The bird’s enormous wing spread and the directness of its arrowed body brought to William’s mind a mid-century seaplane: bulky but aerodynamic, stronger and sturdier than one might guess. Its long, spindly legs tucked beneath it, the heron cleaved the air with a champion swimmer’s effortless perfection. An underrated bird, William always thought; if it were endangered, it would be front and center of every save-the-wildlife tote bag. The heron’s body rose at an angle, neck stretching forth, legs deploying like articulated stilts, as its wings began to flap in deceleration while it maintained lift. Then it plunged from view below the western edge of the sunflowers into the shallows of the marsh.

William swung the binoculars northwest, across the marsh where, at its deepest point, ripples mirrored the few unhurried cumulus, peach-tinted and edged with flayed salmon tones. A copse of mature cottonwoods dangled their remaining leaves like taunts while a killdeer piped its diminutive banshee cry, waited, then sounded it again. William continued his survey of the wide, open landscape, sweeping the binoculars northward across the gravel road alongside of which his aging Rav4 was parked. In the distance, the lovely Clark Bridge carried its suspended freight of headlights and taillights across the Mississippi; high above the road bed, its massive twin pylons seemed to spray their wrapped cables omnidirectionally like massive showerheads. William lowered his binoculars momentarily, then brought them back up to his eyes again. He focused more nearly on the prairie grass. Amid its tawny stillness, something pink stood out. He was accustomed to seeing all kinds of junk in the Bottoms, the flotsam and jetsam of seasonal flooding and illegal dumping, during his watching expeditions. He concentrated more closely on the object. It seemed to be an article of clothing. Not so unusual. People took advantage of peak sunflower blooming to pose for social media photos, and some of them got frisky and shed their shirts or pants and covered up like prude yet provocative renderings of Venus on the half shell. But surely they got dressed again afterwards. And the other explanation, that the object was flood-borne, was complicated by its seeming cleanliness at a distance. Maybe a child’s coat stripped off and left behind? William felt a chill pass through him. Well, the Bottoms closed one half-hour after sunset, and he had better start heading back. It would be a short detour away from his car to inspect the object more closely before he left.

As his boots crunched gravel, William’s thoughts wandered inevitably back to that day in the woods forty years ago. As he and Mimi had matured and grown apart, the morbid thread that connected them to their brother, Jerry, and their cousin, Margot, reached a kind of humming intensity as autumn deepened. Not an October went by that he didn’t reach out to Mimi to see how she was doing. Sometimes they texted, sometimes he called her, and always they danced around the subject. Well, he danced. Mimi insisted that she had long ago gotten over her encounter with the dead body. Whether or not she had—or ever really could—she appreciated William’s effort to stay in touch. And Jerry in his own way kept tabs on her each year as well. But he was always more direct, starting the conversation as though addressing her well-being on that inauspicious anniversary were the preamble to a long list full of more important items. Once she assured him she was doing all right, he would abandon the subject to ask about her work at the zoo or, more often than not, bore her with details of his law practice that made him justifiably proud. She would always be Will and Jerr’s big sister. They still sought her approval.

William passed his Rav4, dusted in its wheel wells from the gravel road, and veered through late-season goldenrod towards the prairie grass. Some kind of machine had scalped a whole acre of it—for what purpose, he could not tell. The shorn stalks stood up about ankle-high in the soft rose light of sunset. He thought of Keats’ stubble-field as he negotiated the stumps, his eyes on the pink fabric, unnaturally bright now. He felt his focus soften.

Once everyone around the fire pit understood that Mimi did not mean a live man in the woods, there was no sense of relief. William recalled the woods seemed instantly darker, cooler, menacing. He found himself drawn to his mother, still clutching Mimi, who was beginning to tremble and could not speak any further.

Their father grabbed their uncle’s arm. “C’mon, Phil, let’s go see what this is about.”

“Oh, sure, the women can just wait here with the children,” said Phil’s wife, Tabitha. Though Phil had said nothing, and was still seated, in fact, Tabitha glared at him as though it were his suggestion.

“No, no, I’ll go,” said Mimi’s mother. She tried to draw away from Mimi, but she might as well have been trying to dislodge a tick with fireplace tongs. “Honey, it’s all right. Do you—do you want to come with me?” It seemed like an absurd suggestion, but their mother did not know the woods as well as the children. Now that it was dark, she could literally beat around the bushes for hours. Mimi looked up at her and, unexpectedly, nodded, tight-lipped. “Jim?”

Their father looked at the bonded female pair, Jerr nosing in like a runt pig.

“Sure, Sue,” he said. “Um, we’re going to need some lights. And, uh, also, just to be safe….”

In the firelight, Sue nodded her understanding.

Uncle Phil looked relieved. He had not done much more than lean forward in concern, his mouth rounding, lipless beneath his full beard. Now he sat back, looking over at his wife sheepishly.

“We can watch the kids,” he said.

Jim had already opened the door of the cabin. He looked back at his wife meaningfully, then flicked his eyes at Tabitha’s back.

“Okay,” said Sue.

Will watched his father enter the cabin. Part of him wanted to follow, insist on accompanying Mom and Dad and Mimi back into the woods. Part of him envied his seated uncle, and he felt the familiar measure of security he always drew from this shy, bookish man. But he disliked his aunt, even at the tender age of nine, in some way he could not articulate until much later in life. When his father reemerged from the cabin, he burst out, “I’ll come with you!”

Jim, holding a flashlight in each hand, said to his son, “No, Will, it’s not safe. I need you and your brother to stay here with your aunt and uncle.” Sue studied her husband’s figure, guessing that the .40 was in his back waistband.

“But Dad!”

“No.”

“But Mimi—”

“Your sister is coming to help us to the spot. We won’t be gone long. I need you to look after your brother. That’s final.”

Will pouted, mostly for show. “C’mon, Jerr, let’s go inside.” Jerr spent a few moments pleading softly with his mother to be allowed to stay with her, but she succeeded in prying him off her leg and commanded him to stay.

That whole time, cousin Margot was uncharacteristically quiet. She had slowly moved closer to her mother, eventually half-sitting atop her knees. Her father reached a tentative, gentle hand over to stroke her long hair.

“We’ll find out what this is all about,” Jim told Phil and Tabitha. “We’ll be back soon—ten minutes tops.”

It was the pre-cell phone era. And though the cabin had electricity, it had no phone line. That was a point of pride for Sue and Jim. Now Jim chided himself for not having so much as a CB radio as he handed one of the flashlights to Sue and then took Mimi’s hand. With their daughter in between them, they set off after the bouncing twin beams of light back along the trail.

Inside the cabin, Jerr was sullen, but he brightened when Will beckoned him to join him at the cabin’s back door, which gave onto a small deck with stairs leading down to an untended rear area.

“We’ll sneak around the other path above the creek and see what’s there, okay?”

Jerr nodded eagerly. Will put his finger to his lips and eased the back door open. Out front, his aunt and uncle spoke in soft, reassuring tones to Margot, who still refrained from speaking. The logs crackled, sizzled, and spit boiling sap.

The brothers descended the stairs with exaggerated stealth. Now that they were taking some action, Jerr no longer felt left out. Will was proud to assume the mantle of older sibling since Mimi was off with their parents. He led the way to the edge of the woods. The trail there, less utilized and narrower than the main one, appeared as a dim parting of the tall screen of native plants that bordered the trees. But it was easy to follow, even at night, as it made a long, gradual bend through the property, eventually curving to intercept the main trail above the falls. Will had no exact plan. He felt his trusting brother behind him like a goad. Just the excitement of their quiet jog along the path awakened the animal senses in each of them.

As they circled upstream, something crashed through the undergrowth several yards away from them. Jerr jumped.

“What was that, Will?”

“Probably just a deer. Don’t worry about it. C’mon, keep going.”

“I’m scared, Will.”

“There’s nothing to be scared of.”

A whippoorwill sounded somewhere and everywhere, its forlorn song arising eerily from ground level to permeate the air.

“That’s just your bird, right, Will?”

“That’s right. Just a whippoorwill. Let’s keep going. We’re getting close.”

“What if it’s just someone pretending?”

“Who would be pretending?”

“I don’t know.” Jerr hesitated. “A murderer.”

It was a big word for Jerr, a big word for their young comprehension. But now the thought that there was a murderer in the woods took hold of Will as well.

“Do you think there’s a murderer?”

“I want to go back,” Jerr whined, his supposition validated by his older brother’s question. “I don’t want to go anymore.”

“You have to. We have to keep going.”

“You go. I don’t want to.”

“You have to stay with me.”

“I’m going back.”

“Jerr, no. It’s not safe. I’m in charge. You have to—”

“No, I don’t!”

And with that, Jerr turned and ran back along the path. Will thought of giving chase, but the enticement of seeing an actual dead body overwhelmed brotherly concern. He called Jerr Baby under his breath and kept going.

By the time Will reached the junction with the main trail, some thirty or so yards above the falls, Jerr had scrambled to the top of the deck stairs and yanked the door open as though some nightmare creature were right at his heels. Shuddering, he plunged through the doorway and back into the cabin.

“There you are!” his Aunt Tabitha called out. “Dammit, Jerr, where did you go?”

“I was just outside with Will.”

“You didn’t ask permission, did you? Where is Will?”

“Um, still outside.”

Tabitha muttered as she strode past Jerr towards the back door. Jerr thought it best to keep moving away from his irascible aunt. When he got out front again, he found his mother and Mimi had returned without his father. Timid Uncle Phil was on his feet, conversing in low tones with Sue.

“Mom!” Jerr called out. At the same time, from behind the cabin, they all heard Tabitha’s voice call Will’s name.

“Where’s your brother?” asked Sue, her brow furrowing at Jerr.

“He’s out back.”

“Where out back?” Sue’s eyes narrowed. “Jerr?”

“He’s in the woods.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sakes.”

“Will!” they heard again.

“Stay here,” Sue commanded. “I mean it. Stay right here with Uncle Phil and Margot. You, too, Mimi.”

“But, Mom—”

“Stay, both of you!” Sue pointed at them as if they were puppies who had piddled on the carpet. As she set off around the downhill side of the cabin, she began calling her son’s name.

Will crouched near the edge of the creek. He was afraid to go down into it for fear of falling in the darkness. As he looked downstream, he could see his father’s flashlight beam playing over the bushes, freeing erratic, fluttering shadows. Then the beam paused, holding steady directly underneath the little limestone drop-off that created the falls. From his vantage point, Will couldn’t see what his father was looking at, nor could he see his father’s face. He thought of calling out, but knowing he was supposed to have remained behind restrained him. Instead, he took a step forward in hopes of improving his view. When he did so, he stepped on a springy length of grapevine, old and stout enough to have grown up a nearby tree. The vine’s upper reaches shook the tree’s leaves, causing a rustle. Will’s father directed the light up the stream and into the tree top, then slowly brought it down the trunk. Will held still. The beam slowly panned over a bend in the stream where erosion exposed a tangle of the tree’s roots, just a few feet away from Will’s hiding place. The beam came to rest there.

It disclosed a bundle of clothing.

A much smaller one.

In the shape of a child.

Will’s scream carried all the way back to his aunt and mother, just having begun their search for him along the trail behind the cabin. The wailing in his own ears overwhelmed the sound of his father’s boots hitting the dry gravel bed of the stream.

Breathing hard, William found himself standing at the edge of the unshorn tallgrass, clutching the pink fabric—a child’s coat, new from the looks of it. He stroked its sleeve, full of foreboding over a memory.

Next Chapter: Chapter Two: The Eccentric