A Crooked Tree

by Una Mannion

  “Don’t you have to be twenty-one to go there?” I asked. Marie ignored me. Since Christmas, she’d been going into the city to clubs and to see bands. She told Mom that she was staying with her friend Nancy. As far as I knew, they hadn’t been friends since the tenth grade. In the school cafeteria, Marie sat alone with a book at the far end by the window. Nancy sat with other girls with long greasy hair like hers. They tended to look down at the ground or at SAT flash cards. The only friend Marie had from school that I knew of was Rae. She had graduated the previous year and was a freshman at Moore College of Art and lived in her own apartment downtown.

  This year, Marie had thrown out her tie-dye Grateful Dead T-shirts and bleached jeans in favor of black vintage clothes, fishnets, Doc Martens, and rhinestone jewelry. She’d go into Philadelphia to meet Rae and hang around South Street, Zipperhead, and the basement of Rage Records on Third, which had the best collection of punk music in the city. Over the past weeks she’d started skipping school, taking the bus into Philly after my mom dropped us off at the gates. The nuns didn’t really do anything about it. Sister Benedict brought her in one day to talk to her, but I think they were afraid of adding to my mother’s difficulties and they didn’t get along with her. Plus, Marie had the best SAT scores in her class and had been accepted into Penn on a full scholarship.

  Marie was telling Wilson about an English band, X-Ray Spex, and the lead singer, Poly Styrene. Wilson said he knew “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” Sage nudged me. Marie said that Poly Styrene had been singing against consumerism, but now she’d left the band. Wilson said it was inevitable that she’d eventually be disillusioned, even by punk.

  “Wow. You’re both a barrel of laughs,” Sage said. I knew she found conversations like this pretentious, and even though she loved Marie, she wasn’t awed by her punk-self the way I was. When Marie dyed her hair black and shaved the side of her head, I thought she was cool, that she was brave to reject what people said was beautiful. Sage said it was just another uniform.

  Wilson took out a clear plastic baggie of drugs he’d brought with him. There were tablets of different sizes and colors, pastel pinks and blues and white ones. There were small red pills.

  “My mom’s basically got a pharmacy in her medicine cabinet. She won’t miss any of this.” He stuck his hand in the bag and pulled out a very small tablet, which he put on top of our pink chest of drawers and split in half with the tip of his pocketknife. He gave Ellen half. “It’s diazepam, same as Valium.”

  “Are you sure you’re giving her the right one? They’re all mixed up in there.” I wondered if powder from other drugs like hallucinogen or something dangerous could have rubbed off on what he gave Ellen.

  “It’s diazepam, trust me,” he said. “Diazepam’s the actual drug. Valium’s a trademark.”

  “Oh, right. You’re, like, a narcotics specialist?” Sage asked.

  “Something like that,” he said.

  While Ellen swallowed her half pill with a glass of water, Wilson popped the other half into his mouth. I wanted to scream at Marie to get him out, to get him the hell out of our bedroom and our lives. She was looking at the cassette-tape cover he had made.

  Sage leaned over toward me, humming the tune to “Mother’s Little Helper.” I wondered what it was like to have a mother taking drugs. Was it because of this that Wilson was so messed up, or did she take drugs because her son was so messed up? Either way, I wanted him to get out.

  Marie started telling Wilson about a job offer she had from Rage Records. He went there, too.

  “It’s only minimum wage. My friend Rae has an apartment in West Philly, and she could use help with the rent. My room will basically be the living room couch, but it’s only until the dorms open in August.”

  “What?” I asked. “You’re leaving?”

  “Yeah. I’m not going to stay out here in the middle of nowhere. I need a job.”

  “You can get a job at the mall.”

  “I’d rather die than work at the King of Prussia mall.” Marie looked over at Sage. “Sorry, Sage, but I couldn’t do Chick-fil-A again. It’s like I would have lost my will to live.”

  “Believe me, it’s probably worse than you remember.”

  “What about us?” I felt as if I’d been slapped.

  “I’m not your mother, Libby. I was never planning to stay here for the summer.” Marie’s eighteenth birthday was in three weeks, and I realized then that no one was going to try to stop her from going.

  “How will we see you?” Ellen asked.

  “By train, dummy,” Marie said, throwing a pillow at her. Ellen flinched. “Oh shit. Sorry. You okay?” Ellen nodded.

  “Does Mom know?” I couldn’t believe Marie was telling us in front of Wilson, like it was nothing, and I resented him even more for seeing me exposed and hurt like this.

  “Yeah. She knows.” She was being so casual about leaving. She went across the room and sat next to Ellen on the upper trundle. “You’re going to have to sleep, Ellen. But before you do, Wilson wants to ask you just a few things.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Please.”

  “You don’t have to talk about what happened. It’s just to identify the guy.”

  “It’s what I said already. He had long almost-white hair, so long he was sitting on it. Blue eyes. Oh, I forgot. He had really long fingernails for a man.” Her picture gave me an involuntary chill.

  “Was it both? Did he have long fingernails on both hands?” Wilson asked.

  Ellen thought for a moment. “No. It was his right hand. The hand on my leg. Not the one on the steering wheel. And he had to sort of bend over the way he drove, like his body was too big for the car.” She paused. “I can’t think of anything else.”

  “What about the car?” Wilson asked.

  “I don’t know. It was black. It looked like the car Chicken De Martino drives, except a different color.”

  “Chicken drives a Camaro,” Wilson said. “Was it a Camaro?”

  “I don’t know,” Ellen said. “It was black on the inside.”

  “What were the seats like?”

  “They were low, like we were sitting on the ground.”

  “Bucket seats?” Wilson asked.

  Ellen shrugged. She yawned, and her hand moved to the cut under her eye. “They had furry covers, like the lid of the toilet seat in Meredith Hunter’s house.”

  “That’s shag,” I said.

  “And disgusting,” said Sage.

  “Shag,” said Ellen. “But fluffier and dark, like a purple-black.”

  “You told Libby he played a tape.” Wilson picked up the ziplock and stuffed it back in his pocket. “Do you remember what?”

  Ellen stared straight ahead for a moment. “He put in the cassette, and when he leaned over, his head knocked a rabbit’s foot hanging from the mirror. It was yellow. The song was something about being a child.” She started to hum, her hand moving to a beat. “They had a fever?”

  “‘Comfortably Numb,’” said Marie. “Pink Floyd. You’ve heard me play it too?”

  Ellen nodded. “I can’t remember anything else.” She was groggy. “I feel like I could sleep now.”

  “That girl is worn out,” Sage said, “and I have to get home.” She stood up, straightened her cutoffs, and leaned over to give Ellen a kiss on the top of her head. “See you later, munchkin. Get some sleep.”

  Ellen settled down into the pillows around her. The rest of us walked downstairs together and out to the driveway.

  “I’ll call you later, Libby,” Sage said. She walked to the back of our house to cut through the woods. Wilson, Marie, and I stood facing the street. Mr. Walker was sitting on his drive-around mower with his glass of lemonade, watching us. Everyone knew who Wilson McVay was and now Mr. Walker had seen him come out of our house when our mom wasn’t home. He didn’t talk to our mother ever, but what if he decided to call her? I stared back at Mr. Walker until he looked away.

  “Why are you guys asking her all
those questions?” I asked. “Are you going to report it to the police?”

  “No,” Marie said. “But someone’s got to get him. Wilson knows people, and if he’s from around here, it won’t be hard to find a giant blond man with hair down to his ass who drives a black Camaro. Someone’ll know him.”

  “And who plays the guitar,” said Wilson.

  “What?”

  “The fingernails on the right hand. He must keep them long for plucking.”

  I looked at the two of them. Marie was acting as if all of this was perfectly normal.

  “Do you think you’re detectives or something? What will you do if you find out who he is?”

  “Skin him alive,” Wilson said in a deadpan voice. It gave me a jolt in my stomach. I looked at him and remembered that day in the Sun Bowl when he’d passed us on the swings. He saw my face and started to laugh. “Calm down. I just want to find out who the shithead is.”

  He walked back up our driveway and into the woods, toward the trail where Sage had gone. A few seconds later we heard a motorcycle start. Wilson must have come to our house through the woods and left his bike up there. Why hadn’t Sage and I heard him when we were up in the Kingdom? He made me uncomfortable. People instinctively moved away from him. There are trees—allelopathic trees—like black walnuts that are poison to whatever is near them. They release chemicals from their roots, their decaying leaves, their bark, that starts to destroy the life around them. I thought of Wilson like that, bringing toxins and danger just by coming near us. We didn’t know anything about where he’d been. Juvenile prison, a mental institute, reform school? I blamed him for Mr. Franklin. Was a BB gun even strong enough to kill a cat? I’d been shot loads of times by a BB gun. The De Martino boys used to wait for us to pass on our way up to the Sun Bowl and shoot us. I’d been hit in the behind and got bruises, but the metal balls had never broken my skin. Maybe Wilson had done it with some other kind of air gun, or a real gun. Marie had an air gun that shot darts, a Marksman, and it could definitely hurt or even kill an animal. No one else knew about it but me. She had begged Dad for it. We took it out into the woods sometimes and kept it hidden in our bedroom closet.

  “Marie, what if Wilson killed Mr. Franklin? Why are you hanging around him?”

  “That’s just people talking. He’s not bad if you get to know him. He’s had a shit childhood.”

  “So?”

  “He’s helping us, Libby.”

  We could hear the revving of the gears on Wilson’s bike as it hit Forge Mountain Drive from the trail. He was a blur when he passed the top of our street at full throttle, the front wheel elevated in the air.

  “God, what an asshole,” I said. “Please tell me you don’t go around with him on that.”

  Marie didn’t say anything, and we stood there together for a few minutes, watching Mr. Walker cut perfect circles on his lawn.

  6

  A door clicked shut. I sat up. The room was dark. Ellen was below me, sleeping. She’d slept almost all day, and I could see Marie’s shape across the room in her bed, the soft rise and fall of her breath. Another sound came from the hallway, a creak of floorboards. I leaned forward, tense, listening. There was a low whimper. Beatrice. I heard the sound of my mother: “Shhh.” She was taking Beatrice, something she did sometimes, leaving in the middle of the night. She’d freewheel the car down to the road in the dark before turning on the engine. It was bad enough with Marie sneaking out the window and climbing down the wall, but my mother creeping out of the house with Beatrice half asleep in her arms left me with a pitching feeling, as if the house were staggering sideways into the ground, everything sliding and falling, and I couldn’t grasp anything I could hold on to. I lay back down, eyes open. When they reached the road, the lights of her car switched on and hit the trees, splaying shadows backward across the ceiling of our room and down the wall toward me. They were going to meet Bill.

  I tried to fall back asleep, willing myself to let go, but I woke with a jerk midway through falling. I never seemed capable of just floating or drifting down. I fell violently, from a bike, a branch, a building, the sudden drop jolting me awake before impact, leaving me with the sensation that the shock was still below, waiting to come. I tried counting sheep and imagining myself in a relaxing place, a forest looking skyward through the canopy. Now it was the Barbie Man whose blank face and sleek hair materialized above me. I gasped and sat up. I was sweating. We should have told my mother. She would never have left us in the middle of the night if she knew what had happened to Ellen. Not even for Bill.

  None of us had even met Bill. Only Beatrice. “That’s why Beatrice has the box room instead of me,” Marie had said. “So Mom can get her in and out of the house easier without waking the rest of us.”

  “But Beatrice doesn’t even like going. She’s told me a hundred times.”

  “So?” Marie had asked. “Mom uses her. Beatrice is her Bill pawn.”

  I’d imagined Beatrice as a chess piece on a board, being pushed around by adult fingers: her tangle of wavy hair, the freckles across her nose, her wide rosy cheeks and missing teeth, how she was always trying to please everyone, maneuvered around in a game she did not understand.

  Marie sometimes expressed things crudely. She could see things from a detached distance, she said, because she had stopped liking our mother.

  “Stop looking so shocked, Libby. It doesn’t mean I don’t love her. I don’t have to like her too. Fucking hell.”

  I can’t remember when I first knew Bill existed. He didn’t. And then he did. He was silent breathing on the phone, a pause, and then a voice that I knew but didn’t know. “Is your mother there?” Mom never denied his existence or that he might be Beatrice’s father. It must have been Marie and Thomas who explained it to me. I don’t remember. I knew not to say anything to anyone, especially my dad, even though I have no memory of anyone ever ordering this.

  At home we made fun of Bill in front of my mother. We guessed all sorts of occupations for him: trucker, plumber, milkman, traveling salesman who sold everything from Bibles to steak knives. We’d take out Thomas’s walkie-talkies and perform “Bill plays” when my mother was nearby.

  “Breaker ten-four, this is Fat Man Bill. Can you read my handle? I am so doggone fat, I just can’t get out of my truck and go see my daughter.”

  “Roger, Fat Man Bill. You sure are ugly. I hear you’re a no-good father, too.”

  We’d use hillbilly accents. Beatrice would watch and laugh with us, as if she didn’t realize it was her dad we were joking about. When we drove past storefronts with a neon Bill blinking in the dark, we’d shout, “Is that him? Is that Bill?” It could be Bill’s Carpets, Uncle Bill’s Pancake House, or Whiskey Bill’s Bar and Grill. Once we passed a billboard that read Bill Bowie for Sheriff. We asked our mother, “Is that him? Is Bill running for sheriff?” She didn’t say anything, and we took her silence as a sign. We started a campaign for his opponent, making posters and slogans for him and marching outside her bedroom door, cheering on the other guy for sheriff. Beatrice did it with us. She didn’t know if the Bill she knew was running for sheriff, but she didn’t want him to win either.

  Mostly Mom had ignored us. If we came up with a new Bill scenario, she sometimes laughed at our guesses, like when Thomas suggested that Bill was possibly the guy who took our order at McDonald’s. He’d noticed the name tag: William.

  But we didn’t guess about Bill anymore, especially in front of our mother. She seemed too tired for it. I said Bill’s name as little as possible, even to the others, because thinking about it or even acknowledging it made me feel like I was betraying my dad. He knew Beatrice wasn’t his daughter, couldn’t be his daughter, but he had never ever behaved as if she was anything but his. I knew he never suspected that we knew. Saying it out loud now, when he was gone, was like treachery.

  “I have five sprogs,” he would say. “Four strong women and a little man.” We would all straighten up a little under his proud assertion,
be it to a waitress at the diner, a customer whose lawn he cut, or a guy drinking beer at one of the Irish bars he took us to.

  Marie and Thomas said that things had been bad between Mom and Dad long before Bill existed, that they had been separated, that I was wrong to confuse what happened to Dad with Bill. Dad had kept some of his machines in our garage and collected us some mornings to take us to school, but he didn’t sleep at our house. Sometimes he washed up in the laundry room downstairs next to the garage, especially when Mom wasn’t home. He kept cakes of soap wrapped in paper towels behind the seat of the pickup. He always used Coast, a bright-blue bar of soap that smelled like him. We had a scentless Dove soap. Some evenings when I came in from being outside somewhere on the mountain, I could smell his soap in the laundry room.

  He moved around back then, and I don’t know if he always had a regular apartment or place to go back to. He bought a camper top for the pickup, and the foam mattress would still be rolled out in the mornings when we crawled in the truck to go to school. He said he’d bought the top to stop us from getting soaked and wind-lashed in the open back. Now, I wasn’t sure. I found it too hard to even say it, to ask Marie or Thomas, “Do you think he sometimes slept in his truck?”

  My mother kept Beatrice close to her and somehow separate from us. Beatrice had never come when Dad took us in the back of the pickup to Burger King for giant milkshakes or to the diner where we all drank coffee and got free refills. Beatrice had been too young to go working with him. The time we’d gone to New York to stay with him when he’d tried to start a new life there, Beatrice had been invited too, but we knew my mother would never have let her go.

  Beatrice was treated differently, but we didn’t hold this against her. We didn’t envy her being shut inside our mother’s room or being hauled out of bed to meet some man who was a stranger to the rest of us and who I couldn’t stop blaming for everything bad that had happened. When Beatrice came back from visits with Bill, she was always quiet. Even after being treated to ice cream.