One of them gave him water, and the wild boy whispered “thank you.”
The breathless descriptions from unnamed sources go on and on. The wild boy’s amazing beauty. The wild boy’s strength. Speculation about his age—about twenty seems to have been the consensus—and how he would have survived. Background on other wild kids—the ones from Siberia, two from France, another from Africa. Anonymous interviews from medical staff that he can talk, that he wants to get out. A few anonymous campers come forward with tales about fucking the wild boy.
Just like Agent Hancock said, the paparazzi feeding frenzy exploded overnight, and half the story was coverage about the coverage. Everybody waiting for the first pictures of the wild boy like he was the royal baby. There were bounties for those pictures until it was declared a hoax.
I hit theRhone River Tribunea little harder. I pay my two bucks to get behind the paywall and into the archives. Nothing. I try other area papers. Same. Nothing.
Screw that. I grew up in small-town Idaho. I worked summers on the local paper. Something happened out there. They erased the coverage, but people know. I scroll to the bylines of the townie stories from a year ago. Reporter Maxwell Barnes was the main guy covering the area.
I flip to the paper today. He’s still there. Still writing.
I pull up a map. An hour away. My head is spinning. It might be hunger. I have no money and nothing but rice in the kitchen. Rice takes forty minutes. And I need 34’s story now. I remember a pack of Gummi Bears in the bottom of my airline bag. I grab it and get out.
Second problem: I have enough gas to get to Rhone River, but not back.
I run back into my ugly 1970s piece-of-shit building and head into the boiler room, which is full of tools and junk. I find a bunch of tubing. I pull my car to a shaded corner of the lot and siphon some extra gas from the neighbor below me. It’s an asshole move, but he plays his stereo loud in the middle of the night. So now we’re both assholes.
I twist the cap closed, spitting to get the taste out of my mouth. I throw the tube in my trunk and take off.
The only person at theRhone River Tribuneoffice is the production person. I tell her I’m doing aStormlinestory that relates to an area incident. She gives me Maxwell Barnes’s cellphone number without too much trouble. We journalists help each other out. He agrees to meet. He gives me his address and tells me to come on over.
Barnes is raking leaves in front of a small bungalow that sits on a road that runs like a zipper through the forest. He’s thickset, maybe forty, with a genuine smile and wire-rimmed glasses. I like him instantly.
I thank him for meeting me.
“Stormline,” he says with a squint. He knows it, and he’s not judgmental about it. “Is this off something I reported on?”
“It’s more something you didn’t report on,” I say. “Halloween weekend last year.”
His eyes twinkle. He knows exactly what I’m talking about.
I do him the courtesy of giving him what I have. “There was an incident. There was a police report filed, but it went classified. I looked to theRhone River Trib, and nothing’s there. I came up on theBeckerton County Reporterjust a ways out of Boise. A house gets egged, and we’d do a story. Someone sneezes, and we’d do the story.”
He smiles wistfully. The smile of somebody who’s been stymied.
“This is just between us, but in the course of working one story, I’ve run into an institutionalized John Doe. Heavily sedated. Things feel off.”
Maxwell nods.
I’m taking a risk giving him this much, but sometimes you give a story to get a story. “I’m supposed to be researching something completely different, but everything about how this guy is being held is wrong.”
“He’s institutionalized.”
“Yeah.”
He grunts. “We had something happen…this is off the record, okay? But you can get it from other people around here as easy as you can from me.”
Meaning he’s prevented from talking about it, but if I need a source, I can go find one. “Sure.”
“I signed something,” he says. He’s trusting me here.
“Got it,” I say. “Absolutely never talked to you.”
“Southwest of here, you have part of the reservation, and then a lot of hunting land. There was this guy, Pinder, who’s got a no-trespassing posted parcel, or had one. But it was odd, because he wasn’t using it for hunting. He seemed to live in his cabin. He came into town. He said he was a researcher. Kept to himself.”
Maxwell shrugs and continues, “He was in and out for years. Then one day, some hunters hear yelling. Some guy, yelling for help. They follow the voice, and it’s like something out of one of those shows—there’s a man in a cage in there, and from the looks of things, he’s been in there a while. Kept like a wild animal. Metal bars, plexiglas panels—for soundproofing, the cops thought. There’s a body on the ground. Dead. It’s Pinder. Holding a guy in a cage and nobody knew. You know how much I wanted to tell that story?”
“I can only imagine,” I say.