Bag

The summer before I left my home town for the first of my tries at college, I was in love. That seems important to say—maybe because it never got said at the time, twenty-some years ago. On instinct, we shied away from the word love, which other people, older people, used in a maybe too measured way, as means of supporting some bargain.

I want to say that we mistrusted our elders, Meera and I. That we felt we could read their whole lives in their eyes—which were flat and abandoned (Meera’s dad’s), or firm and impassive (my Mom’s), or shrewd and probing, or wild and destitute, alive with silent need. I want to say that, but in fact I’m not sure if we thought about older people enough to mistrust them. They were different from us, is how things were. They had their world, we had ours.

We were out in the woods. On the day I will tell about now. South of town. We had been to the waterfall. Our shorts were damp above our suits, which we’d shed for some minutes of quickfire sex behind the misty scrim of the downpour since nobody else was there. On the hike back up from the pool at the fall, I was sometimes holding Meera’s hand and sometimes thinking of how her neck had tasted faintly of bug repellent.

A third of the way to the Tennessee State Park outpost, where Meera’s car was parked, we ran into an acquaintance of ours, McKinney. That was his last name. His first name was Tom, but nobody called him that. Not even his better acquaintances. McKinney had lots of acquaintances, and what sealed this marginal relationship was our taking up use of his last name.

We saw McKinney after we’d left the main trail for the bike trail. McKinney was traveling by bike. He slowed and got off and then backtracked, walking the bike, so he could tell us things. I probably couldn’t have remembered what McKinney said if I’d tried the next afternoon. I certainly can’t now. But he talked in a steady way, without stress or modulation. Pretty much without stopping. He talked about things he knew or had heard, and we climbed, listening to him. The timbre and flow of his voice might have been on the soundtrack for that part of my life.

What happened next is that we saw the kid, the child—the one this story is about, or sort of. The kid came out of some trees on a rise moving strangely, in a way I’d seen certain dogs move, half sideways, thin legs carrying him on a slant through the leaves on the hill. The kid lugged a bag. A newspaper carrier bag, official. News-Sentinel, it read. The bag was of canvas, off-white but darkened with filth, and he wore its wide strap on one shoulder. Its load bounced and twirled at the opposite hip.

We might have succeeded in learning more if other things hadn’t started happening then. As it is, I’ve got too many blanks to fill in to write anything other than fiction. 

We slowed to absorb the sum of all this. When he saw us, the kid stopped entirely.

“Hey there,” McKinney said to him.

The kid didn’t move.

“Are you all right?” Meera asked. 

I could see what Meera was seeing: He looked maybe dazed. His narrow chest lifted, fell. The nook of his throat flashed damp with sweat, and the freckles that blurred at the tops of his cheeks read like fever.

“We’ve got water,” I thought to say, and offered the bottle.

This animated the boy. He came forward, eyes on the bottle, which I handed him.

He drank.

“Go ahead,” I said when he lowered the bottle.

But he hadn’t been going for mannerliness. He’d stopped only to catch his breath.

***

Before we get much further, I should say: I don’t have fail-safe answers for every question that’s going to arise. Who was he? What was he doing in the woods? I know some of it. I can support guesses, or try. But some of the ends will never get tied. I feel like it would be wrong to extend too far from the truth of what happened. 

His name was Avel, and he was eleven years old. He was lost, as we suspected. This was confirmed when McKinney asked him where he was headed. 

“How do you get out of here?” blurted the kid. “Do you know?”

Yes, Meera told him, we knew the way back. He could come with us. “But where …” she began. “Do you have parents?”

The kid had a markedly odd response. He held still, and didn’t move his eyes, didn’t even blink. It was like he thought he could exit time, and in that way lose or eradicate the moment in which the question was lodged.

Meera crouched and reached for him, placed one hand on his arm. “Avel?” she said. 

“Not right now,” he said.

McKinney laughed. “He doesn’t have parents right now.” 

Meera shot him a wound-making look. 

It’s possible that what Avel meant was that he was a ward of the Tennessee foster-care system. It’s also possible he meant something else. That his parents couldn’t be parents, maybe. Due to trouble like sickness, like prison or death. I tend to speculate this way on account of what was in the bag.

***

The reason we followed the bike trail: There was an unmarked place where you could split off and make for the state-park lot from the other side and save some time.

Meera explained this carefully, like she was Avel’s teacher. The trip involved one actual climb, of a crevice, Meera told him, and though it wasn’t very hard, at least she didn’t think so, if Avel wasn’t comfortable—

“I can do it,” Avel said.

When we reached that spot—where McKinney would have turn back, since he was with bike—I went first. I gave the play-by-play, showing the kid the rock footholds. Meera went next. She held back a hand for Avel to grasp. 

“I can do it,” he said.

“All right,” replied Meera.

Which is when things got crazy. 

McKinney offered to hold the kid’s bag while he climbed. 

Avel shouted at him. 

“What?” said McKinney. “What’s in there?”

“Don’t!”

“You little motherfucker. Don’t you swing, you don’t want to get swung at.”

“McKinney’s motherfuckering me. Meera!”

“Woah now!”

“Give it!”

“McKinney!” Meera shouted.

“How about that!” cried McKinney. 

From within the canvas News-Sentinel bag, McKinney had taken—to raise like a flag—what looked to be a banded stack of hundred-dollar bills.

“McKinney!” Meera shouted again.

Coasting side-saddle, McKinney was gone.

***

After Tom McKinney left, it seemed like we moved through the folds of the woods more slowly. Avel lugged his bag. Meera and I could feel the press of questions. First and largest: how the rest of them should be asked.

Meera went with a statement. “You’ve got money in there.”

Avel didn’t acknowledge this.

“Where’s it from?” She took a dramatic tone, as if the subject might be considered fascinating and fun.

“It’s mine.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“It’s for me.”

“Did somebody—give it to you, Avel? Who?”

The kid stopped walking and looked at her. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to answer or trying to keep from answering. I thought I could see a pressure building inside him, of something like tears.

“Whose was it?” asked Meera. “Before it was yours—before then?”

“It’s mine,” he whispered.

“I know.”

“It’s mine! You’re not listening! It’s nobody’s! It’s mine!”

After that outburst, he sat on a rock. I took the sudden move as a show of protest, and maybe it started that way. The kid was looking dizzy, though. He sank sideways. Meera was there right away—to catch him, break his fall.

***

We might have succeeded in learning more if other things hadn’t started happening then. As it is, I’ve got too many blanks to fill in to write anything other than fiction. 

Six months later, when I was single again, I learned that a man had been found in these woods that autumn, dead from gunshot infection, or that was the going belief. A man in his forties. He’d set up secret camp, with tent and rope and cookware. Was this Avel’s father? Had the money been stolen? Had the man taken flight with his eleven-year-old child? 

Possible. Maybe. 

But again, who knows.

Maybe Avel just found it, the bag. Maybe he couldn’t believe what he’d found. So much money: He lost his way.

***

After the kid collapsed, we took a breather. I sat against the trunk of an oak. I’d hidden my hands in brown leaves that were hissy-crisp, weightless.
Meera sat on the rock, which was shaped like a locket and patched with dry moss. The kid lay over her legs, in her lap. He was sleeping, we understood.

Would things have been different? If we had ceded no space to that silence and whatever it grew? 

The day was so mild. People say that of days—that they’re mild—as if from some lack whatever might make them more vivid, more hardcore and real. But the mildness was real. This vibrant quality. I could feel the warmth of the sun where it fell on a log with reddish bark. I could feel the cool also. Of ferns. Of bergamot mint. Of air in the green of the canopy, which conveyed the low flutings of birds. 

I looked at Meera. 

Meera was looking at me, with a child asleep in her lap.

***

And next?

I’ll just say it: I took some cash. Stashed some in my front pockets.

The kid was asleep. The bag was just sitting there. I peeked, I wanted to see.

Meera didn’t say anything until I’d withdrawn the two stacks.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

She didn’t want to wake the kid. 

I gave her a mime show: bugging my eyes at the amount—the hundreds we could see—then doing mock bewilderment as my hands took charge and buried the stacks down deep, one in each pocket.

Not funny, Meera mouthed at me.

I could have undone what I’d done, since I hadn’t done it—not really, not yet. I was only playacting. 

But then the kid stirred in her lap. 

And I did it—as maybe I’d known I would: let the money just stay where it was. Left it to cool in my pockets.

***

The first and most simple end of this story: We got to the car in the state-park lot and gave the kid a ride to the four-lane near the ramps to the interstate: a glaring place, vehicle-thick, sky all tangled with power lines. The kid thanked us. He opened his door and got out with the bag, which we never saw again, or heard tell of. It was almost like the bag was a dream that Meera and I had somehow conspired in having. It was almost like that.

***

When the kid left, when we were alone in the car and could speak again in private, we chose not to do that. 

I didn’t make the choice. But I didn’t not make it either.

There were things I could have said. 

I could have talked about what we both expected to happen now in our lives. We expected that I would leave for college, as I had arranged by applying, then accepting admission—which I had done, in a way, because this, too, was expected. We expected that Meera would stay and finish school. She was a year younger, a junior.

What if I stay? I could have said.

In my head, undoing my plans—staying home—had won the lush colors of fantasy. It would be easy: call the college, or write. Get a delay on admittance. Or not. Who cared. It could be arranged in just a few minutes’ time.

The problem: As soon as I did it, stayed, I knew that things would change. I’d lose whatever kept everyone from looking my way and thinking about me, coming to some conclusion. I’d seem different, maybe even in my own eyes. And maybe to Meera.

The cash? 

It was power. I felt the cash. 

The cash was like some magic that could warp all the rules, reformulate them however one might want. This was my feeling. 

It didn’t make perfect sense. I had no way to say it.

***

Like others before us had done, we gave distance a try. We didn’t break up, though I had left town and we were apart. Also like others before us: We were apart-apart by Christmas. 

It was over. Some arc had completed itself; I think we’d both known for some time.

People say, It happens. As if it’s naïve to think that a bond conceived by teenagers could last. I’m not sure I agree. But I have no basis, really, for taking the other side.

Could it be that we never once discussed the cash? That’s my memory. In the woods, I took from a dirty canvas bag a lot of money, thousands of dollars. In the car, I said nothing. I said only, “Well.” A single word of commentary, on all that the day now contained. Meera said only how tired she was. Totally completely, she said.

Maybe I felt in part as if I had lucked out, not to have to explain myself. But like a flipped coin—airborne, spinning—luck has more than one side.

Would things have been different? If we had ceded no space to that silence and whatever it grew? 

People say, It happens.

It does. Life happens to you.

I gave Meera a peridot necklace for her birthday, on August 9th. A week later, I said goodbye and left for school in a fresh-washed black Ford Ranger, for which I’d paid in full.