At first he saw no one. The canyon appeared to be deserted. Then a voice began to speak, and he jumped.
Emerging from his den in springtime after winters’ thaw
The animal extends its snout, and then a timid paw
What will be there to greet him; perhaps reverence and awe?
More likely an accosting by a most rapacious claw…
“And hello to you too,” Tad said. Stitch was seated a few feet ahead of him, on a kind of naturally occurring perch where two logs crossed each other, having fallen so that each was leaning on a different side of a large boulder; the effect was that at the top they made a sort of X. Stitch was nestled in the crux, with his thick bare legs dangling down, and his arms resting on the branches. He had on his usual attire, the faded jean shorts and stained undershirt, with the addition this afternoon of a pair of heavy hiking boots. He looked quite comfortable. Tad wondered how long he’d been sitting there.
“It’s good to see you,” Stitch said, sounding sincere. He straightened his back and wiped sweat from his huge bald head. Now that Tad was outside again he felt the change in temperature too, although he supposed that the shade provided by the trees around the canyon’s edge and the proximity to the water made it better than on the higher ground. “We’ve missed you the past couple of days. It gets a little lonely there by ourselves, as you might expect, isolated as we are.”
“I’d expect,” Tad said. “But you guys do have that party coming up in a couple of days, don’t you. I’m sure you’ll have plenty of chance to socialize there.” Trying to keep his voice casual.
Stitch looked about him, and Tad did the same, taking the hint. They seemed to be alone. “Actually,” he said, “It’s about that very thing that I came here to speak to you, since you were kind enough to bring it up.” He paused, but when Tad did not speak, keeping his face expressionless, he went on. “I’ll speak to you simply now, and plainly, if you’ll allow me. I count it a rare thing, in life, to be able to speak openly…perhaps you’ll agree.” Again he paused, and this time he did not go on until Tad made a motion with his hand, a sort of obliging half wave. Nodding almost imperceptibly, Stitch continued. “I thought perhaps, just by chance, you might have gotten it into your head to put in an appearance at Decadence.”
Tad looked up as a host of shadows flitted across the rock in front of him. He could see a flock of birds, what kind he did not know, flying very high above. A few clouds were drifting in from the north, a mild breeze with them. “And if I had?”
“I would hope very much, my lad,” Stitch said. “That you count me among your friends. Do you?”
He asked it very pointedly, putting emphasis on the word do. If it had been Daddy asking the question, then Tad would doubtless have given him a smartass answer. But Stitch didn’t quite share Daddy’s sense of humor, and besides, he could see that the man was deadly serious. It was obvious what answer he was hoping for. Still, Tad was enjoying this. He seemed to be in a position of power over someone, for once, rather than the other way around, and it felt good to be able to toy with that power a little. Being around Daddy has given me bad habits. “I will allow,” he said. “As to how we are friendly toward each other.”
“And I’ve never steered you false, then?”
“Not to my knowledge,” was Tad’s response.
“Then I’d like to ask a favor of you. Don’t come to the house on Sunday. Stay away.”
Tad looked at him. He wished very much to know what Stitch was thinking. He could see the large man’s hands making a twiddling motion that he recognized; he was knitting, out of habit, though his hands were empty. He appeared, again, very sincere. But was he? There could be no way to know. Other than instinct. He speaks from the heart. He doesn’t want me to come. “Why do you not want me there?”
“It would be,” Stitch said, “a very bad idea, for all concerned. Trust me on that.”
“Why? Why would it be a bad idea?”
“Why must you ask such questions?” Stitch yelled at him, and Tad jumped as if struck, the smile vanishing from his face. “Why can you not just take me at my word?”
“It’s you,” Tad spat at him, his voice rising also, “that suggested we speak openly. But you won’t reveal to me what’s in your mind. I believe you speak the truth when you say you don’t want me there, but then you refuse to tell me why.” They stood glaring at each other. It was Stitch’s face that softened first. Tad spoke, lowering his voice again to a conversational tone. “There’s such a narrowly defined circumscription in your life, and in his life, about what can and can’t be said. And don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. If you want me to trust you completely, then you have to confide in me. That’s what friends are supposed to do.”
“I can’t.”
“Very well. Then I won’t say for certain that I will be there, and I won’t say for certain that I won’t. You have my answer.”
Stitch did not reply, but looked out over Tad’s head, back up the streambed. He sighed, nodding his head slowly, his fingers jerking restlessly. “So be it,” he said softly, as if to himself. There was a long silence, during which time Tad stepped out from under the overhang and moved forward until he was standing just a couple of feet from Stitch’s perch. He turned and faced the same direction, squinting against the sudden flood of sunlight.
“I guess now I ought to figure the best way to climb out of here,” he grunted. “I don’t suppose you have any suggestions, do…” but as he turned to finish the sentence he trailed off, for he found himself once again alone.
Decadence
Sunday arrived, the seventh day of July. Tad had done very little for the past two days. When he’d returned to meet back up with the rest of the family on the afternoon of the fourth following his encounter with Stitch, his father had immediately laid into him about being gone for hours and his irresponsibility, while Casey had stood in the background and smirked. Tad had taken the abuse without comment. He could have ratted Casey out, but he knew his brother would just deny it, and probably give him a resounding beating the next chance he got. So he just stood there seething, while everyone around looked on with interest at the spectacle of his public dressing down, his mother turned away to deal with the lunchtime cleanup, and Daisy sat stone faced nearby with her book held open on her lap. The fireworks display when the sun had gone down was especially good this year, but he was too angry to do more than glance at it.
Now it was the morning of the fateful day, and he went down to breakfast with a feeling of almost otherworldly calm. He’d thought, after the encounter with Stitch and his various misgivings, that he would be in a frenzy of excitement now that the event was so close, but strangely, that was not the case. His mind was clear, his thoughts neatly composed. He was actually having seconds on his cereal when the phone rang. His father answered. “Hello,” he said, “Hello!” Then he slammed the receiver down. “God damn it!” Marta looked over at him disapprovingly, and he held his hands up. “I swear to Christ, some people don’t have nothin’ better to do…”
“Than call you and hang up?” Tad finished. The words were out before he could help it, and he gave a chuckle.
His father looked at him suspiciously. “Hey,” he said. “Son, you know who it is keeps on callin’ the house?”
“No sir.”
“Do you?”
“No sir.”
“He’s lying, Pa,” Casey said.
“You’d better not be,” Walt said. “I’m serious, now. I’m gettin’ mighty tired of my house being disrespected.”
“What we ought to do,” Marta said, “is get one of those boxes tells you who’s calling.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Walt said, his mouth full of sausage. “Not a bad idea at all.” With breakfast finished, Tad returned to his room. There seemed to be little to do but wait for the coming of night. It was true, he had found himself giving the matter some additional thought since speaking to Stitch. For the past two night
s, lying awake, he’d replayed their conversation in his mind. It’s not too late to forget the whole thing and back out. All his prior thoughts and fears had resurfaced again, the lengthy list of reasons why staying away would be the smartest, safest move. But as before, he knew all the while that it wasn’t really a viable option. He would be there. Oh yes, he would be there. His curiosity, his need to know made it inevitable.
He forced himself to doze for much of the afternoon. The heat made the job easier. He took his time with dinner, and the onset of evening found him sitting placidly on the back porch looking out toward the field’s edge with a few bats winging their way through the last of the rose colored light to seek a meal along the hidden paths of the nighttime forest. And then, as the last band of light shimmered and vanished with the sudden speed of a window slamming shut, and the field turned before his eyes from pre-dark gray to black, he began to feel something approaching, not excitement exactly but an unsettling of the stomach, and the thought was in his mind, am I really doing this? And then he was unable to wipe the grin off his face, and he hurried back upstairs into his room before another member of the family could see him and start asking questions. He didn’t know if he would be able to lie convincingly, in his current mood. He lay on the bed with the overhead light on, listening to the noises of the household through the walls, and savoring the anticipation. He didn’t pretend to know what to expect, or how literally to take any of what Daddy had said concerning the upcoming event, but of one thing he was confident- it would be unlike anything he’d ever experienced. As the minutes ticked away, he closed his eyes and tried to center himself, not thinking of anything in particular. And as he did so, he began to be aware of activity, of movement, somewhere in the outer reaches, the fringes of his perception. The guests are arriving, he thought. We shall have guests who have spent the past seven years tunneling through prison walls with dull spoons; the princesses shall come down from their ivory towers, the trolls shall emerge from under their bridges. And I’ll be right there in the thick of it. He could feel them converging, hurrying through the dark, glad to be nearing the end of their long journeys, and surely, their excitement he could feel; even from this far away it was palpable. They were like points of light streaking across the sky. But what would happen when they were all gathered together? Would the strength of their combined light be so great that he would be able to see its glowing beacon from a mile away? Or would the house, which tonight for the first time in seven years would be completely awakened from its slumber, suck them in like a black hole, one and all, and spit out the bones to the delight of its demented occupant? He stood, crossed the room, and switched off the light.
It seemed like forever till the house began to quiet, but eventually he heard Casey, who had elected not to go out with his friends that evening, finish his grooming and retire to his room. He knew that he would have to be extremely careful taking his leave, and he wanted to be as sure as he could that his parents were safely out of the way before he made his move. The night would be over before it began if he managed to get caught on the way out. He could hear occasional slight creaks as Daisy went about her activities above. Had he been able to see what she up to, he might have been a little more interested; it had been many days since he’d been up to visit her, and in that time, the undersea mural that covered one wall had climbed its way up to the ceiling. Toward the top of the wall, where previously the decoration had terminated with a series of shadows meant to indicate waves, now there were the creeping, serpentine vines of a rather complex root system, the beginning of a mass of vegetation that was fanning out across the slanted underside of the roof as if intent on eventually reaching the peak, and perhaps bursting through it. In order to reach these heights, Daisy had at some point requisitioned a step ladder from the loft of the recently cleaned garage and smuggled it through the house without the rest of the family noticing. There were some advantages to being one of the forgotten children; it made things easier to get away with. One might think that the transition between the motifs from the oceanic to the vegetative might have been displeasing to the eye, but that was not the case. Such was Daisy’s skill with light and shadow and choice of color that it seemed as though the cresting waves were spawning the root system, which thickened and grew more imposing (and threatening), the further they reached; the result was that the aquatic throwbacks with the human features standing on guard below had a jungle rapidly taking shape above their heads.
There was no conceivable way for Daisy to be comfortable while working on this new portion of the project, but she didn’t care. During these moments that Tad was downstairs, patiently awaiting his opportunity to make a break for it, she was perched on top of the ladder, seated with a paint tray on her lap, hastening to finish the blossoms of a fiery hibiscus that her mind’s eye had just discovered growing at the end of one of the vines. The tip of her tongue was jutting out of the corner of her mouth, her eyes were focused so hard they were practically crossed, and her arms and face were once again smeared with paint. She couldn’t have cared less about any of it. A notable detail is that she too was aware of the goings on, the gathering nearby of a great many souls to one central locale, a sort of bastion that on this evening was sending out a pulse like a signal flair, but where Tad had to consciously reach for it, she was picking it up on more or less of a mental default setting, and she was applying all of that trickledown energy to her work. It was probably best, on this particular evening, that none of the other family members were foolish enough to disturb her, though, as we have seen, the likelihood of that was always extremely minimal. So Daisy continued with her painting, and was able to avoid the debacle in which the middle child was about to embroil himself.
After waiting what felt like a suitable time, Tad rose and dressed. There was no denying his excitement now. It owned him like a rat in a cage. He zipped up his jeans, laced his sneakers, and fastened the chain of the silver watch securely to his belt; the watch he slipped into his pocket. He had it in his mind to watch the time carefully, for above all, whatever else happened tonight, he must be back in bed before his mother rose for breakfast and his father to prepare for work. He was about to open the door from his room, when he stopped and walked over to his closet instead. He opened it and looked briefly over the pile of dirty clothes decorating the floor and the few clean ones hung on hangers. Then he reached up to the top shelf and rummaged around in the dark. His fingers came in contact with what he was searching for, and he lifted it down and brushed it off. It was a hat that he’d won at a shooting gallery at the state fair two summers ago, a floppy sort of top hat, reversible, with one side white polka dots on a blue background, and the other narrow red and white vertical stripes like a strip of ugly wallpaper. He turned it to the side with the polka dots and put it on his head without pausing to think about it, and then he left the room, closing the door softly behind him. Out, down the stairs, through the back door, and, with no more trouble than that, into the inky claws of night.
And what a night it was! He paused on the back porch long enough to fill his lungs with it; he crouched down, sniffing the boards under his feet like a dog searching for a scent, he made a fantastic leap out into the grass, and fell to rolling around in it, laughing a laugh that sounded honest and musical to his ears. The hat came off his head, and his rolling body passed over it and crushed it flat, but it was unharmed. It had been made for this sort of rough treatment. When the impulse that had gripped him had passed away, he stood, shaking himself, brushed off the hat and set it back on his head, and quite literally dashed headlong into the forest, laughing as he came. The trees opened their arms and welcomed him like a long lost son, returning to his ancestral home after too long spent astray. All was forgiven. All would be well. He made his way west and north, but not consciously, for tonight he knew he would have no trouble finding the place that sometimes liked to elude him. Tonight it would not be coy. All paths led to the house in the field, and he felt it calling to him, calling, call
ing, calling. There will be hangings and christenings. We shall drown in our tears and burst our sides with laughter. Dancing now through the trees like a mad sprite, sometimes stumbling, but ever joyful.The night was like a pocket of cool air in which he was deliciously caught, like a boy in a bubble. Everything around him alive, humming, groping, seeking, swaying. Up hills and through the loam, pounding down the slopes while the sky tilted above him, stars winking through the boughs. The wind of his passing causing the hat to be nearly pulled from his head, and he ran with one hand clasping it to his skull, his vision obscured by the floppy brim. He could not keep up that pace forever, and at last he collapsed on the ground, gasping, still half-laughing, his heart pounding, so good did it feel to be out in the dark and the wild, alone and unmistakably himself, and about to take part in an event, one, he was sure, where his presence was expected and even anticipated. He pulled himself up to a seated position against a handy trunk, and sat there while his body and mind quieted.
It was the perfect temperature, dark all around, but he could feel in the soil the remembrance of the long days’ heat yet retained. He had again that feeling that he got sometimes, that deep sense of connection that only came to him when he was alone in this natural element that he loved so well, when he and it were on the same wavelength together, as they were tonight. He sensed no hostility, but only gladness, and he felt reluctant, for this moment only, that he had to move on and be in the company of others, when he could just lie here forever instead, taking root and thinking the deep and drowsy thoughts of the trees, the earthy thoughts of the soil. But he stood and moved on again, feeling no fear as he moved further from the safety of his home, the home that he wondered vaguely if he would ever see again, and the family to which he was related but that he did not relate to. But when those thoughts of the house that he had left and the other Surreys left his mind this time, in truth they did not enter it again for the rest of the night, for very shortly Tad’s mind was to be occupied with far more pressing matters.
Woods Page 19
