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All his life he had been standing before an abyss, Hank though, wiping blood from his busted nose with the back of his hand. Everyone could see him teetering on the edge, and all they had done was place bets on just when he was going to jump.
No matter how much he pretended to belong, no matter how much he looked the part, he still caught the sideway glances trying to catch him acting out of line, the way the blame always fell on him when something went missing, the way cops looked at him more than they ever did the other boys.
“You don't wanna end up like your daddy, do you?” a cop had asked him when he'd found Hank sharing a can of beer with Harry when they had both been barely sixteen. Hadn't even looked at Harry, just went straight in for the kill, focusing his God-given lawman's faux anger on Hank.
Hank had learned early on that his daddy wasn't someone that he wanted to end up like. Even before dying drunk and penniless, Emil hadn't been a great rolemodel. He, like his father before him, was the town drunk, the resident nickel-and-dime lowlife, the Bob Ewell to Frederick Truman's Atticus Finch. That Hank and Harry had been best friends was almost laughable.
That hadn't lasted long, though, had it? Hank thought, walking down the street that led outside of Twin Peaks, towards the dark, ominous mass of the woods. He felt keyed-up, on edge, he could feel their eyes on him from behind the windows, could see the flickering blinds and curtains.
Harry had done a number on him, and of course he wasn't going to tell anyone, instead choosing to walk himself into the woods to die like a dog with a broken spine. Like he had done so long ago, as a kid, when his old man was nowhere to be found and Jolene was crying her eyes out at the kitchen table, mascara smudging and running, lipstick-stained cigarettes piling up on her ashtray.
Hank blinked away the blood dripping into his eyes from the cut above his eyebrow. He had reached the edge of the woods, and he stopped, sitting down on a felled tree, shivering slightly from the cool evening air of a spring that didn't promise any kind of summer anytime soon. The decrepit firs were inky black against the crimson sky, and Hank could feel the electric pull of life from deep within the woods call to forgotten memories. He buried his bloody face in his hands, trying not to see, not to feel too much.
Maybe it hadn't been a coincidence that he had chosen to fumble the game when he did. It had been easy to pretend to be like the boys, once, just like everything is when you're young. Their secret meetings and passwords and badges like something out of the Hardy Boys, it made Hank feel like he belonged, but as they grew up those things had faded, replaced by real life.
The second half of the sixties had brought Vietnam, and with Vietnam Hank had realized just how different he was from all of them. Of course, the boys were going to go. They were reliable, salt of the earth boys, and if they were to be called to arms they would go without blinking, like good Americans, even Hawk, whose ancestors had probably been slaughtered and infected by the fat Frenchies and Englishmen that had colonized that place, and had spawned their present leaders.
Hank had kept his mouth shut whenever they discussed the subject, because he knew what his stance would get him. His old man had been a draft dodger, had gone full-on Jesse James when he'd been drafted, robbing a local store with a pen knife, thus avoiding the programmed departure for France. It was unbearable to let them know that they had that in common as well, Emil and him, the being un-American, yellow. Hank wouldn't have done anything as dramatic as robbing a store, of course, he would simply have resisted conscription like thousands of other kids were doing. Conscientious objectors, ‘round those parts simply a euphemism for coward.
Hank was a conscientious objector, alright, and not just because of his instinct of self-preservation, but because he felt that all that pointless carnage had nothing to do with him. Their fight wasn't his fight; their fight was usually against people like his parents, people like him; he wasn't going to get mowed down by chinks for the waspy motherfuckers who had never done shit for his kind, so long and oh Johnny I hardly knew ye.
So as the months passed he and the others grew apart, and maybe Hank had done what he had done to test those now precarious bonds, or he'd finally gotten fed up with the mask he'd had to put on everyday, or maybe the people of the town had been right all along, he was a bad apple, he was simply bound to do something like that sooner or later. Ultimately the why never matters, Harry certainly hadn't thought to ask before beating him half to death.
Hank put a hand in the pocket of his leather jacket, looking for his lighter, but instead his fingers brushed against something flat and round and fabric. He got the Bookhouse Boys badge out, baring his teeth bitterly.
He had ripped the badge from his duffel bag after that last game, kept it just because. He searched his other pocket, finding the lighter. He clicked it open and put the badge above the flame, watching with grim satisfaction as it caught fire, turning black. He felt something give within him as the badge turned to dust, something that he hadn't known was there but now was too late to recover.
When he raised his gaze again, two ghostly shapes were standing amongst the trees in front of him. He wiped blood from his eyes, and they came into focus. His own unlikely crossroad devil, an old woman with a young boy.
“You came” she said, unsurprised. Hank nodded.
He followed them into the woods, and he was reminded again of when he'd been there last. He'd been around six years old, and he had run away from home, trying to get his folks' attention, maybe, or maybe because something had lured him there. It had been awful dark, and the owls had been watching him from above, millions of bright yellow eyes and red lights leading him deeper and deeper into the woods. He hadn't stopped for hours, even as it started snowing, even as he had started crying with fear.
Hank had no idea how he'd gotten back out, but he'd woken up in an hospital bed, having forgotten the best part of the day. Afterwards he started having nightmares about the woods, about red velvet and marble and things chasing him. Sometimes a white lady replaced his mother, and smiled at him with shark's teeth. He hated those dreams above all others.
They had reached a spot he remembered from his dreams, a shimmering white-rimmed pool of black amongst thin sycamore trees. He looked back to find that the woman and the boy had disappeared, leaving him to his own devices. Hank looked at the darkness until he saw the curtains part, heard the music as if it was being carried by the wind from a faraway place. He walked as corridors gave way to rooms and rooms led to halls and halls led to more corridors.
Maybe he was dreaming, still, he thought, but without much conviction. He knew what this was, he'd always known, caught glimpses of it at the corner of his eye, in the static in his dad's shitty country radio frequencies, in the flickering lightbulbs at school, in the people that appeared and disappeared without anyone noticing. He had known what was waiting for him there, and he still went.
There had been a man there, too, long-haired and crazed.
“I'm BOB, little boy”, he'd say.
“I eat little boys like you for breakfast”
Hank knew BOB was trying to scare him, and so he didn't act scared. “Go fuck yourself” he told him, and the man had laughed hysterically.
“Maybe I'll eat you some other day. You’ll come back, won’t you?”
And it was that day now. BOB smiled at him, put his nicotine-and-grease hands around his shoulders.
“My, my, how you've grown” he said, delighted.
“I was right to keep you for later”
Hank smiled, and then laughed, and laughed, and laughed.
BOB laughed with him, gripping his shoulders tighter. Then a disturbance in the air revealed another man beside BOB.
“aizobnomrag sih tnaw I .BOB ,em ewo uoY”
BOB grabbed the man by the throat and lifted him. Then a yellow substance came struggling out of the man's chest, and into BOB's waiting mouth. He swallowed, and the man screamed, and the scream became a plane crash, the end of the world.
The man faded and dissipated into nothing, leaving him and BOB alone once more.
“Do you want to live, Henry?” BOB asked, burying his nose in Hank's hair.
“Yes.”
BOB smiled, exposing rows upon rows of rotten, yellow teeth.
“So much delicious suffering, but it's not enough” he licked Hank's blood from his face like a dog, from his brow, his eyes, his mouth.
“I want your soul, Henry” he said, overexcited. “Will you give it to me?”
Hank knew without trying to break it that the grip BOB had on his arms was unbreakable, mechanic, it was that of a grizzly bear, squeezing and squeezing until its victim popped like a tube of toothpaste. Hank tasted iron that wasn't his blood.
“What do I get for the trouble?”
BOB's smile widened impossibly, grotesquely.
“Freedom”
Hank pretended to think about it, unable to keep a smile from betraying his farce, the inevitability of his acceptance of doom from making itself known.
“Alright”
It had seemed a bit unfair that he was to be asked only after the fact had happened, he thought, getting the Bookhouse Boys badge out of his pocket, finding it whole and unburnt. He almost started laughing all over again, as BOB devoured it like it wasn't fabric, like it was live tissue.
So he sold his soul, and nobody even noticed.
Only Norma, Ed's girl, when one evening they were talking at the diner, had told him “You seem happier”
Hank had smiled at her, now able to disguise all his bitterness and contempt behind a simple neighbourly façade. Big Ed was due to depart for ‘Nam in a few days, and Norma was going to be lonely for a very long time.
“It's because I'm free” he told her, playing with the domino tile he'd found in the woods.