Chapter One
(I sense something divine in you)
Something divine in you (yes I do) Oooh-hoo-hoo
In December 1666, the Chevalier de Terlon plucked a finger from the skeletal hand of the great mathematician René Descartes. When caught, de Terlon defended his theft as being worthy for, after all, it was the “instrument of the defunct's immortal writings". As documented in several of my favorite encyclopedias, Descartes was the father of modern philosophy and a key figure in the Scientific Revolution. No doubt he deserves respect, but I believe the finger theft a fitting tribute.
Descartes was a real A-hole. He called animals automata, basically flesh robots, and thought them without souls. How horrid to think of him dissecting living dogs – doing so only to learn how their hearts beat. A post-mortem finger bone appears minor when one considers all those lives he stole, but still, he is my greatest hero and possibly, when I turn thirteen next year, I’ll care less for dogs. Most adults seem uninterested in animals.
I wish my neighbor, Mr. Sutkin, merely felt apathy toward his dog. He appears to hate Mister Scratch. Why own a dog you hate? Each time I see him hit Mister Scratch, I wish someone would steal Mr. Sutkin’s fingers, pre-mortem.
From my back porch, I watched Mister Scratch sniffing for a discreet bowel relief location. Mr. Sutkin would beat him if he crapped in his own yard, or if he found him on the obsolete train tracks that ran behind our houses. For options it left only our property or on the banks leading down to the tracks. Crapping on a slope was no easy feat, so he preferred our yard. I tried to signal about the locale next to the clothesline, neither Mr. Sutkin nor Pigpie (my aunt) could see him there, and I could take care of his pile, but he was too busy sniffing to notice me.
I dodged between the drying sheets to retreat from the breeze, pausing to smell the flowery detergent and experience the secret passageway feeling that standing between sheets can give. Leaves flittered above and the sheets started to whip against me. I considered sneaking a quick trip to the tree before my lawn mowing duties. The weather felt well suited for tree climbing.
Mister Scratch finished up his business and came over to sniff me as I started toward the tracks. His scent reached me first. If you eat what you smell, which we all do, and you are what you eat, then part of me is Mister Scratch - while most would find that a disquieting fact, I breathe deeply when he’s near. He’s a bent-tailed mutt who’s mostly beagle with conceivably some German shepherd, and he follows me all over the yard whenever we’re outside. He stopped at the slope, as he always does, and I waved to him as I climbed down.
A dirt trail detoured off the main path and wound through dense weeds and brushwood. Few, especially not heavyset individuals, could navigate it. One had to keep alert to each root, rock, and thorny twig, but the path ended at the worthy destination: a giant old sycamore with a slat ladder nailed to the trunk.
At the seventh slat, I knew AC/DC Rocks and followed the directions to Keep Going!! At the eleventh, my heart doubted the truth that Alan heart Lisa and they had True Luv Always. At the seventeenth slat, the writing on the board unnecessarily tipped me to being high in the sky with a little marijuana leaf drawn next to it. It was somewhat frightening to climb this far above the ground into such an old tree, but I always focused on the ladder words until I rested in her huge limbs. The gold and still greenish leaves enveloped me as I dug my fingernails into the bark. After five minutes of careful climbing the branches went rubbery, a stoplight signaling to go no further. I did a quick scan for anyone who might see me.
Last May 19th 1981, when I first climbed the tree, Mr. Sutkin with his overgrown mustache and gray greasy hair roared at me, "Get down here, that's too high." I listened, of course. A couple of limbs hung over part of his property, but since the tree didn't actually grow on it, I knew he didn’t have final say. I could take a shortcut across Mr. Sutkin's property to get to the tree, but Mr. Sutkin is a bit of a neighborhood busybody and I don't like having to answer his questions if I don't have to. What he does for a living remains a mystery, as does why he knows so much about trees. If the information he shared wasn’t neighborhood gossip, it was often about trees. I’ve meant to research its veracity since he told me how tree roots mirror the tree's crown, that is, the roots grow down as deep as trees grow tall. It doubles the monumental quality of their size when you think of them that way and created tree fractions for me, the earth dividing numerator limbs from denominator roots. Occasionally I torture myself imagining what it’d feel like standing in my mirrored position, breathing in cold earth and worms on those denominators far below the forest floor.
In the blustery fall wind high above it all, you can feel the earth pulling and the blue sky pulling and you are free. Mr. Sutkin also told me a sycamore this size pushes about a hundred gallons of water per day from its roots to its leaves, where it helps with photosynthesis and promptly evaporates. The tree swayed as I rested my chin in a V of two limbs and tried to see if I could feel the rushing water. I counted yellow leaves for a while and forcefully began hurling breezes with my eyelashes, propelling clouds to slide shadows on top of Pigpie’s roof. I drove small flocks of starlings from a telephone line to mess with Mister Scratch’s nap, and, without any effort, unintentionally summoned Russell.
Russell Ghety wove down Overbrook Road on his three-speed Huffy, dumped it at our secret spot, and ran to the sycamore. The leaves and wind were creating so much noise I couldn’t make out what he repeatedly sang until he arrived at the branches beneath me.
"Whip it baby, whip it right, whip it baby, whip it rye-right!"
"Uh you sang, you sang the wrong words," I said.
"Hey Apple, what?"
"It’s ahh, It’s all night not, uh, rye right."
"It’s in my head going round and round." Russell looked at me with slight annoyance and continued singing, "Something divine in you, oooh-hoo-hoo!"
He could maybe compete with ravens in the mellifluous voice department.
Maybe.
Russell is so dumb he’d probably try to put M&Ms in alphabetical order, but could sniff me out even if I only had a couple of hours to spend. I’m not being an A-hole, honestly. His stupidity is all genetics, nothing to blame him for. Russell flunked the fifth grade and took a late bus home from his school because he got extra tutoring. It was the first thing he told me about himself when we met. He also mentioned his propensity for producing spittle. The latter he attributed to having an incredibly powerful tongue, which I considered commendable, a positive twist on the substantial derision I'd witnessed him absorb for the globs that formed on the corners of his mouth. I've since found the spittle occurs mainly, but not only, when he’s nervous or upset.
"Feel that breeze, man oh, we might get knocked down doncha think?" Russell hugged the branch his thin frame hardly bent, and looked out over the trees.
No I didn’t think, but I nodded anyway.
"Didja see it?" Russell asked, referring to the fort we’d been searching for since the Fourth of July. We’d overheard Kevin Groter’s sister, Gwen, mention it at the fairgrounds.
"Nope."
“Next week for the mansion right?”
He’s been talking about going to the abandoned Pierson mansion “next week” since I met him but we never have. The neighborhood mythology surrounding it, and the murders that took place there, is quite compelling and I will likely explore it one day, with or without him.
"Okay you ready? I’m ready. Go!" Russell shouted without prompting - the start to our normal game. His fingers went to his temples and he stared intently at me. Russell was a dreadful looking individual with a pinched face made even worse by his almost black Russian-politician eyebrows, massive and hairy. He’s likely doomed to inherit his father's full-blown brow shrubs before his 20s.
The game's rules were simple: we had to stay quiet and try to read each others’ mind. One of us would say done, wait for the other to say done and exchange what we’d mystically extracted, which ended the game. Usually it lasted closer to three minutes, but Russell immediately started swaying the branches, impatient to tell me whatever it was he wanted me to read in his mind.
"Done," Russell shouted.
He always said ‘done’ first.
"Done.”
"You were thinking about Mr. Suckin right?" Russell enjoyed the altered pronunciation.
I shook my head no.
"Your turn, what am I thinkin’?"
I looked at his Adam’s apple, "Food?"
"Shit no. Try again."
"Uhhh, okay, okay TV. Mork and Mindy, Mork and Mindy."
"No, time's up, I was thinking about how I heard they’re putting in an arcade where the old Laundromat used to be."
I glanced at the leaves that suddenly started whooshing next to us again.
"You wanna go see if it’s true?" Russell asked.
I wished we could be better friends but mostly he's just another person my age to spend time with. I listen to him talk and he listens to me, but it’s like the time I told him, "To you 5329 is just a five, a three, a two and a nine, but I say hi, seventy-three squared." He responded with, "I hate Paul Lynde he’s such a gaybird, circle gets a square!" Having watched many episodes of the comedy gameshow Hollywood Squares when I lived with my first foster family the Dersteins, I had to disagree. I loved Paul Lynde. He's one of the best comedians on the show, a real "gutbuster" as Mrs. Derstein used to say but on the one occasion she called him and Jim Nabors very feminine so possibly Russell was on to something.
“Well, you wanna go or do you want to stare at fuckin' bark all day?” Russell asked again.
"Let's go," I said with a clap for emphasis.
Half way down the tree the calls started. Russell ignored them until we both got to the ground and he shouted back with irate force. "Commmminnnnggg"
And again his mother shouted - hanging on the last ‘L’ from his name long enough for the neighborhood to take notice. Russell adjusted his heavily faded Darth Vader T-shirt and shouted, "Coming I said!" And added "Fuck me shit," in a forced whisper with his nose scrunched. "Take the bike and check it out if you want, but call me later about what you find." He karate punched towards the tree with both fists before wiping his mouth and starting home.
It immediately occurred to me, I still needed to mow the lawn, and had lucked out with Russell’s mother calling. I glanced at my watch and worried that Pigpie would be ready with some punishment for not having started already.