Spirit in Black
by Jon Worley
It was a lazy, asshole Sunday afternoon. Mike picked me up in his car--a piece of shit Subaru. Better than my Citation, which was so decrepit it couldn't possibly make the trip with me to college.
As soon as we were on the highway, he lit up a battered joint, took a hit and offered it to me.
"No, thanks," I said.
"No smoke?" he asked.
"Nah," I said.
"That's cool."
I had no idea where we were headed, which was about how our Sunday outings usually happened. He'd drop by the house, I'd scam my way out of work and we'd head off in his car. We never did much, and we never talked much. We just kinda co-existed. Sometimes we had beer.
"You been to the circle of trees?" he asked.
"Nope," I said. "That where we're going?"
"If I can find it."
"What is it?" I asked, begging the obvious.
"A circle of trees," he said, laughing. But he quickly sobered up and spoke in a somewhat reverential voice. "It's where witches do black magic."
The idea of witches in Clovis induced a snort from me.
"You don't believe in witches, man?" he asked.
"No," I said with derision. "What do they do, drag up a few stray cats, hack them up and drink the blood?"
"You have been there!" he exclaimed.
"Lucky guess," I said.
"Well, anyway, they do sacrifices and black masses and all that shit," he said. "I never been there when they do it, but when you go there during the day there's this weird feeling you get. Like something else is there. Something malevolent."
Mike didn't use 25-cent words very often, even though he was well-acquainted with a few. So I knew by his tone of voice and use of vocabulary that he was being deadly serious. I decided to get in the mood a bit.
"Find bones or any of that shit?" I asked.
"Naw," he said. "But it sure does feel weird just standing there. You get a chill. Way too much for just bullshit."
He took another hit, squelched the joint, turned up the Ozzy and hit the gas.
We were out of town, barking at the daylight moon.
The circle of trees was more of a clump of tall bushes, but as any growth more than five feet tall in eastern New Mexico qualified as a landmark, I felt no need to quibble. We pulled off the highway and onto a dirt road. As we approached the circle, he slowed down and finally stopped a good quarter-mile from the grouping.
"Why not pull up there?" I asked.
"I don't want to get stuck in the sand," he said. "This road gets really bad right up close." He paused and looked at me. "Your dad ever tell you about the day he pulled me and Darryl out of the mud?"
"Nope," I said.
"Well, me and Darryl were fucking around in his truck in that empty land out by your house, right?" he said. "And this was right after that snow in January, see, and the slush was making everything real muddy. Great for doughnuts, but it didn't take too long for us to get stuck.
"So we got out and tried to figure out how to get the damned thing out of the mud. We used sticks, a few boards and other stuff. Nothing worked. Then we saw this guy walking out towards us. Like he owned the land or something. It looked like he had a shotgun in his hand. We were shitting pretty hard, man."
"I bet," I said.
"Then I recognized him. It was your dad. He was just carrying a walking stick to make sure he didn't slip. He was real nice about everything. He went and got your Suburban, put the thing in 4-wheel, winched a rope around his axle and ours and pulled us out in no time.
"The cool thing about it, though, was that he didn't tell our parents. I mean, you know my dad, right?"
"Yeah," I said.
"He would've shit. Shit like taken my car away and sent me back to military school, even though Nimmi had blackballed us for stealing that golf cart and destroying the seventeenth hole."
"That or worse," I said, concurring.
"Or worse," he said, nodding. "But your dad was cool. He never squealed." Mike shook his head in admiration. "He never even told you."
I thought about this a minute. It didn't make sense. My dad didn't like people messing around in the land around our house, even the parcels that we didn't own. We had set up tomato cages and other contraptions to keep bikers off our land. One kid got his bike fucked up in one of the traps, but he couldn't even think of suing because he was trespassing when he crashed. Judges in New Mexico don't truck with trespassers. My dad has an even lower esteem for that sort of silliness.
But he got Mike and Darryl out of the mud without yelling at them or even mentioning it to me. This was a tolerance that I sure as hell didn't see at home.
"You're lucky," Mike continued. "I mean, you're really going somewhere."
"Yeah," I said. "I'm going to Missouri after I graduate."
"That's not what I mean," he said. "You're smart. You're one of those people who becomes a scientist or computer genius or something like that."
"I'm going to be a TV reporter," I said, trying to deflate his thesis.
"Same difference. You're gonna be somebody. Remember that guy we studied in history. The King dude?"
"Martin Luther King, Jr."
"Yeah. You know how he went, 'I am...somebody!"
"I don't think that was Martin Luther King."
"It was some black dude, though."
"That's true..."
"Well, you're gonna be...somebody! You see?"
"So are you," I said with reasonable conviction.
"Not the same," he said, violently shaking his head. "Not the same at all. My dad gives me this shit all time. Why can't I be like my sister, why can't some of your shit rub off on me? Why can't I be...somebody!"
"But you've got that job at the machine shop, right?"
"Yeah."
"That's good work. Pays better than a TV reporter."
"That blonde chick on Sixty Minutes makes a million dollars. No tool and die man makes that much."
"Alright, famous TV reporters make a lot of money. But the average ones don't."
"Yeah, yeah," he said.
"Listen, man, I've been hearing the same stuff from my teachers, guidance counselors and everyone else. They think I should be a scientist, or computer genius or something like what you said."
"So why aren't you going to do that?"
"I don't want to."
"Why do you want to be a TV reporter?"
"Because it sounds interesting. Plus I want to be on TV, and that seems the most likely way for me to get there."
"No way," he said. "You're gonna be a reporter for pussy?"
"Why not?" I said, laughing.
We had just reached the circle. It lay across the culvert from the dirt road. I could see where there was a clearing in the middle of the bushes, though I couldn't much else.
"Are we going in?" I asked.
"Fuck no," he said. "You're not getting me in there."
"Why did we come here?" I asked.
"I just thought you should see it."
"See what?"
"See this. Understand that there is evil out there." He paused for a moment, staring past the circle. "You've got all the shit, man. Grades, cash, college, all the stuff you need to really go somewhere." He glazed over again, and then his eyes picked something up. "You see that?"
"What?"
"The bushes, man, the bushes. That's what I have to fight through just to get where you are. I have to get past my dad calling me a loser, a fuck-up. I have to get past all the foggy mornings after. Going to the clinic for a shot. You never faced any of that stuff, have you?"
"Nope." Though I wouldn't have minded the preliminaries for the VD shot, to be sure.
"Never gotten any, neither," he said with a smirk, which cleared quickly. "But don't worry, you will. When all of us have done drunk ourselves to death, you'll be scoring the freshest 'tang in the country." He shook his head.
I didn't understand right away. But I felt the chill he had talked about earlier. It rang my backbone like a bell. I had nothing to say.
After another minute, he turned back toward the car.
"Come on. We've got to get back to town."
"What for?" I asked.
"You don't want to be late for youth group, do you?"
We had skipped youth group a lot my senior year, often wandering to one house or another for a couple beers. One night we shoe-polished vulgarities all over a much-disliked teacher's classroom windows at the high school. The youth director called us Satanic influences, and we didn't really think it was worth countering the claim. And now he was walking away, refuting all the time we had spent together.
Renouncing me. My potential success had become too big a burden for him to bear.
We drove back pretty much in silence, the Ozzy turned up a little louder. Mike didn't bother to partake of his joint again, and we pulled into the church parking lot a couple minutes before youth group.
"So what now?" I asked.
"Fuck it, man. Let's go in. Anything to get out of going home. I'm not in the mood to face reality right now."
I couldn't have agreed more.
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