The End in All Beginnings

by John F. D. Taff

  “So, did you read Spider-Man last night?” he asked, practically gasping out the words.

  Unconsciously, I slowed my pace a little, literally gave him some room to breathe.

  “Nah,” I said, swinging my lunch bag before me.

  “Nah? Nah? How can you not have read it? It’s the final part of the story, Brian! I mean, jeez, the Green Goblin’s high on drugs and you don’t read it?”

  I shrugged. Charlie gave me his comics when he was finished reading them and re-reading them. I had to hide them under my bed like dirty magazines. My mom didn’t like me reading them. Said they rotted my mind.

  I think she was really angry because she knew Charlie had given them to me. I think it made her mad to be confronted by the knowledge that my happiness could be had for something as simple as a 15-cent comic book.

  She couldn’t afford even that.

  Charlie stopped walking, turned to me.

  “Well, then how’re we gonna talk about it today?” he said, exasperated. “I’ll tell you how. We won’t be able to, that’s how.”

  “Sorry. I fell asleep. I’ll read it tonight and we can talk about it tomorrow.”

  “But what about today?”

  “I said I’m sorry, Charles. I’ll have a full book report for ya tomorrow. Jeez.”

  “Screw you,” he muttered, hesitantly making sure no adults were around to hear what his mother called “such language.”

  “And don’t call me Charles,” he pouted.

  Also a mother thing.

  “Don’t get your undies in a bunch,” I said, suddenly feeling the good-Charlieness of the day slipping away.

  I punched him lightly on the shoulder. Not light enough, I saw later.

  “Hey, I promise I’ll read it tonight. Promise. Now, c’mon, let’s get to the pond and grab a few frogs.”

  Charlie’s frown clung to life for a few moments, then curled into a wry smile.

  “Okay, then I’ll give you the Superman comic my mom bought me yesterday and you can read that, instead. You’ll love it.”

  “Supergay? No way. I hear he’s your favorite, though.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said as we started walking again. “It’s yours. That’s why I’m giving it to you.”

  We were Marvel guys, not DC. You either get that or you don’t.

  * * *

  The woods.

  They’re gone now, lost, as the best chunks of America seem to be these days. Ground out, mowed down by the subdivisions and strip malls, gas stations and banks, McDonald’s and Starbucks spit up in their places. At one time, the woods stretched from my little neighborhood to the Missouri River, miles and miles away. It was a terrific, dark, Germanic storybook of a forest, seemingly endless, though I suppose now that it wasn’t nearly as big as my memory of it.

  I will never know because I can’t go back and walk its tree-canopied paths, jump across its narrow, high-banked streams or cross through wide, hilly fields where birds flew up from the ground like startled phantoms, or arm-thick black snakes sunned themselves atop abandoned wooden fence posts. There’s only a narrow strip of my old woods left, encircling my old subdivision like a fringe of hair around an aging man’s head.

  The woods as I remember them exist now only in my memory, I suppose, and the memory of those who grew up near them. And the older I get, the more distant that memory becomes, almost illusory now, as if I’ve created it in the comfort of my middle years to give my sharp-edged childhood something soft, something to cushion it.

  I believed it was, and even now want it to be, something that was bigger than me, yet didn’t seem to be against me.

  Too many things that were bigger than me seemed to be against me.

  Isn’t that the way of the world when we’re young?

  Does it ever really change?

  The entrance to the woods was at the rear of our compact, ranch home subdivision. Here, the neighborhood ended in a broad arc. Two empty lots stood out, missing teeth in an otherwise blandly perfect smile. These lots formed a grassy bowl that sloped gradually down into a hollow.

  From here, the dark, dense bulk of the woods rose, spread out before us. Entering here was dramatic, like slipping through the subdivision’s gaping smile into the mouth of the forest, then down its dark, dangerous throat.

  Inside, behind that moist, green curtain, were trees we had no names for, mysterious plants, the danger of snakes and snapping turtles, raccoons and possums, bees and wasps.

  Inside, there was life that took almost no notice of us.

  Inside, there was the known and the unknown.

  Inside, we were the little gods of a little universe.

  * * *

  “Let’s see if he’s there,” I said, trotting ahead, down the slope of the bowl. A creek twisted and gouged its way along the edges, where it flowed into a man-made storm drain, then disappeared into the side of the hill.

  Across this creek, an ancient tree had collapsed, probably decades before we were born. It was huge, five or six feet in diameter, and it stretched from one crooked, slanting bank to the other.

  Its wood was old and crumbly, like moist chalk, and many things made their lives under it, on it, inside it. Mushrooms sprouted from dark, damp holes. Clinging vines and nettles grew around it. Peel back a chunk of its flesh to reveal a dark scramble of beetles, pill bugs and spiders.

  On most days, most sunny days that is, there would be at least one reptile sunning itself on the tree’s wide back—maybe a black snake.

  Or maybe the skink.

  My skink.

  I’d seen him for the first time a year earlier. At least, I thought he was the same one. Every time I passed this way, I stopped to see if he was there. Sometimes, he wasn’t. More often, though, he was.

  Today he was.

  He was a broadhead skink, one of the larger varieties. We saw plenty of smaller skinks in our yards, blue racers we called them. These were small, sleek creatures, whip thin and just as fast. Their tails were a deep electric blue—the kind you usually don’t see outside a science fiction movie. They’d snap off when you caught them, wriggling disturbingly for an hour or so afterward. Great for grossing girls out.

  My skink was about seven or eight inches long and aerodynamically plump. His shiny, polished scales glittered a copper-brown in the morning sun. His head was a brilliant burst of orangey-red.

  He watched me with his dark, tiny eyes as I approached the fallen trunk, gauging how close he would allow me to come before darting into the underbrush. We’d played this game before, many times, but today I was content to just stand and watch him.

  To admire him.

  I didn’t move, didn’t step onto the log. I just stood there and noted the funny way his rear legs splayed out and backward. The quizzical tilt of his head. The slow fade of red down his back, shining like a new penny.

  He was the first thing in my world that I unabashedly acknowledged as beautiful.

  I hadn’t heard Charlie approach, but I heard him now, wheezing in my ear, could smell Cocoa Puffs on each breath blatted my way.

  “It’s just getting a tan, I guess.”

  “I guess.”

  “I don’t know why you just don’t grab it,” he said. “Keep it in an aquarium in your room. That’d be cool.”

  As if hearing this, my skink flicked his head to the left, gave a dismissive, disappointed little twitch of his tail, and scampered away down the length of the log, then off below.

  I turned to Charlie, frowning.

  “No, that’d suck.”

  Truth was, though, I’d thought that very thing. I lay awake some nights when the air in my cramped little bedroom was still and heavy, not even stirring the model space ships hung from the ceiling with fishing line. I thought about catching him, bringing him here to live with me in my room, in some enclosure where I could watch him whenever I wanted.

  But something struck me as awfully wrong about that plan, about that desire, and I never acted on it—at that
point, at least.

  It occurred to me that it wouldn’t be the same in my room. My bedroom lamp wouldn’t shine on his penny scales like the sun. His eyes might not look back at me with lively awareness through aquarium glass. His back legs might not splay out in such relaxation were he lying on a handful of grass wrenched from my yard.

  No, it wouldn’t be the same.

  We wouldn’t be the same.

  Something told me that owning his beauty wouldn’t be the same as appreciating it, would never match its benefits.

  I knew that both the skink and I would lose something were I to capture him and bring him home. That something, as intangible as it seemed to me, I knew I would miss.

  “I wish I was him…sometimes,” Charlie said, his voice hushed, almost as if speaking to himself.

  “Huh?”

  “He’s got the perfect life, you know,” Charlie said, moving away, back up the hill. “No doctors, no hospitals, no being sick, no bossy moms.”

  I frowned behind his back. I didn’t like it when he spoke like this.

  I followed him, clapped him smartly on the back, collapsing his thin shoulder blades around my hand.

  “Nope, not perfect.”

  “Ouch!” he yelped, turning toward me with a questioning look.

  “He’s got no comic books.”

  That said, we entered the woods.

  * * *

  Every story, all real stories, begin when you enter the deep, dark woods.

  And so.

  Once upon a time…

  * * *

  “Hey, wanna know what’s funny? I watched The Monkees on TV yesterday afternoon and Planet of the Apes last night.”

  “Huh?” I asked, something I did a lot to Charlie’s seemingly unconnected blurts of consciousness.

  “The movie? Planet of the Apes. It was on TV last night.”

  “What about it?”

  We’d made it to the creek by then, the main creek for which the one at the entrance to the woods was just a thin feeder. We sat on its banks while Charlie rested, caught his breath.

  He let out a long, dramatic sigh.

  “Hey, dillweed, are you even listening to me?”

  “I’m listening.” It was a lie. I was tying a knot in a long blade of grass, cooling my bare feet in the cold, flowing water of the creek.

  And I was thinking, of all things, of my family, such as it was.

  I dropped the knotted grass and picked the frail, white bloom of one of the innumerable trilliums that covered the hill and most of the ground under the trees. The plant, a trio of broad, limp, heart-shaped leaves atop a short, slender stalk, held onto the flower for a moment, then released it, snapped back. Its leaves seemed to droop a little lower at the theft of its flower.

  “You’re listening, huh?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I contemplated the torn bloom, twirled it between my fingers, smelled its no-scent.

  “Good,” Charlie said, as if from a distance. “I’m dying.”

  The flower fell from fingers that suddenly felt numb.

  My heart stopped beating.

  My blood refused to flow.

  “What?” I asked, facing him.

  “I said, dude, you’re lying.”

  I heard it again, not what he said, but what I thought he said.

  “What? What’s up with you all of a sudden?”

  “What did you say?” The rest of my body went as cold as my toes in the water.

  “I said you were lying. Yeah, you’re really listening.”

  “Oh,” was the only word my throat would allow, and it was more a gulped syllable than a word.

  “What’d you think I said?” he asked, his dark, bruised eyes narrowing, his pale, thin lips compressing into a slit, as if he were waiting for a specific response from me.

  “Nothing.” I pulled my feet from the creek, kicked the water from them before sliding into my battered Keds. “Ready to go?”

  He nodded uncertainly, as if still waiting for something, surprised that it hadn’t occurred.

  “Yup,” he said after a minute. “Let’s go.”

  I got to my feet, offered him my hand. He let me pull him up, and I had to turn away once he was on his feet. I walked a few paces down the path ahead of him.

  I couldn’t risk even wiping the tears away without revealing them.

  When I helped him to his feet, it was like lifting a twig, a feather.

  When he came up beside me, he couldn’t meet my eyes, either.

  He knew I knew.

  It was what he had been waiting for.

  * * *

  The pond was a flat, green glass, reflecting the sky and drifting clouds as if mirrored in an emerald. It was about an acre in size, shaped roughly like a comma or a comic book text balloon, a fat oval with a short, curved tail.

  I crested the small rise that sloped up from the path, giving us a full view of the pond and the surrounding landscape. Its broadest curve spread directly beneath us, and the tail swooped out from the opposite shore and to the left. A farmer’s field to the right was cordoned off from the pond by a rickety barb wire fence. Corn was just beginning to stand up in the field.

  The path we were on hugged the right-hand shore of the pond, between it and the field. From here, this same path traveled deeper into the woods, to other sites. To an abandoned and derelict mill, with a small, crumbling concrete dam. To a deeply banked creek where a tree anchored a series of long vines that allowed you, if you were as crazy as we were, to swing out and over the creek, from one bank to the other, at least 20 feet in the air. To a strange junk pile made up of what looked like the complete, carefully arranged remains of a house—from an ancient television to a bathtub—minus the actual house.

  Today, though, the pond was our destination. Charlie just didn’t have the stamina to go farther into the woods.

  He stood beside me, and we both surveyed the pond.

  “Well, what’re we waiting for? Those frogs aren’t going to catch themselves.”

  He stumbled down the path, and I followed.

  Where the trail came to the edge of the pond, curved right, there was what, on a map or a much larger body of water, would be a bay. This small, protected harbor held some unidentified animal that, when it heard us approach, would emit an aggrieved squeal and splash into the water. We thought it might have been something cool, like a beaver or an otter. It was, in all probability, just a pissed-off muskrat.

  Today, though, no splash. It must have been sleeping or off on an errand. There was only the multiple, smaller splashes of the frogs and toads.

  Charlie wasted no time, not even to take off his shoes. He waded ankle deep into the pond, bowed at the waist like one of those toy glass birds filled with red water.

  “Dude, your mom’s gonna kill you,” I said with some surprise. Charlie usually followed each of his mom’s very many rules scrupulously, no matter how silly they seemed.

  He got that faraway look again, as if seeing mountains on the distant horizon. “Sometimes, you know, I wish she were dead. Both my parents, really. I wish I could kill them, so that they wouldn’t look at me like I’m already…”

  My eyebrows shot up and my mouth dropped. “Charlie…”

  “Just sometimes, you know…so they wouldn’t have to see me…wouldn’t have to…well, you know.”

  He shot his hand into the water, hauled out our first catch of the day, a good-sized leopard frog.

  “I’ll hose my shoes off at your house.”

  His face, usually so set and hollow, filled, shone like the sun.

  I stood up, left my own shoes on, and joined him.

  * * *

  We ate lunch shirtless and shoeless on a rise overlooking the pond. The former hung from a nearby tree branch, dripping brown water; the latter scattered across the top of the hill where they’d landed after we’d kicked them off.

  Charlie lay stretched flat, feeding pretzel sticks into his mouth like lumber into a sawmill. He stared
unblinking into the sky. I took the last mouthful of warm grape Kool-Aid from my Boy Scout canteen. It was weak—my mom never used enough sugar—and metallic tasting, but I gulped it greedily.

  Then, I lay back, too, feeling the solid hill beneath me, the downy grass under my sweaty, grimy head.

  “It’s kind of weird when it’s out during the day.”

  Halfway up the sky was the pale sketch of the moon.

  “Yeah. That is weird.”

  Charlie turned to me quizzically, expecting, I guess, my usual “What?” He eyed me with some surprise, then resettled his head, looking straight up.

  “The next Apollo mission is going up soon. Apollo 17. They say it might be the last one.”

  I grunted noncommittally.

  “Remember what I told you when we watched Apollo 11 land on the moon?”

  “You still want to be an astronaut?”

  He nodded.

  I didn’t laugh this time. He smiled, I think in gratitude, turned back to the sky.

  “I hope it’s not the last one. I want to walk on the moon.”

  I saw the shadow of a bruise on his upper forearm, where I’d lightly punched him earlier.

  “I need to train, I guess,” he said, interrupting my solemnity. “Train. Practice. You know, like the astronauts.”

  “Hmm,” I replied, nodding yet having no clear idea what he meant.

  Then, he sat bolt upright, back rigid, eyes wide.

  “What’s the matter?” I yelped, sitting up, too.

  “Experiments,” he said. “We need to experiment. To see what kind of stresses my body will have to take.”

  He didn’t even wait for my “Huh?”

  “Frogs. We’ll experiment with frogs.” He rubbed the side of his head absently. His breathing was rapid, shallow and sharp, and I really did begin to worry.

  “Okay,” I said, still not completely following him. “Let’s go get some frogs, then.”

  “We don’t have anything to put them in. How’ll we get them home?”

  “No problem. We’ll come back tomorrow and…”

  Like a delicate bubble, his excitement popped. His narrow, ashen chest caved in, his shoulders, red and indented from the ground beneath them, slumped.