Blue Bottle Tree

by Beaird Glover

  Blue Bottle Tree

  Beaird Glover

  Copyright © 2018 by The Parliament House

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Edited by David Rochelero & Shayne Leighton

  Subscribe to our newsletter!

  Created with Vellum

  Subscribe to The Parliament House Newsletter for more!

  Contents

  Night was dark…

  1. Penny Molests Her Clarinet

  2. Penny Langston Freaks Out

  3. Seven Envisions Killing A Rabid Child

  4. Whippoorwill Wish Me Luck

  5. Spirit in a Bottle

  6. Knight in Shining Armor He was Not

  7. From The Conquered Summit of the City Dump

  8. Seven Desires Penny, And Oddly, Her Mother

  9. Penny Fries A Bigger Fish

  10. The Lunchroom Lady Sighs

  11. Not Just A Narcissistic Guy

  12. My Soul? Dude, I’m Not Even Religious

  13. Seven Dies

  14. Under The Dome of a Blue Kiddie Pool

  15. A Man In The Sea of Boys

  16. Mad Dog Sings

  17. Seven Digs

  18. Chasing Penny Crazy

  19. Like A Christmas Caroler At A Black Mass Orgy

  20. A Glass That Once Held Fine Wine

  21. He Sprayed His Hoof With Glass Cleaner, Flossed Between His Toes

  22. Meow Said A Cat

  23. Ting-A-Ling, Penny

  24. Goat Made The Gumbo, But Rabbit Eats It

  25. Fly High, Thunderbird. Fly!

  26. Frog And Toad’s Revenge

  27. The Toads Forgive You

  28. If The Fields Could Talk

  29. Don’t Stir Up Dried Cowshit

  30. That Time…When I Was Dead

  SNEAK PEAK at BOOK TWO: GRAPEVINE BOULEVARD

  1. Same As It Ever Was

  About the Author

  Seven Still Needs You…

  The Parliament House

  Night was dark…

  Night was dark, but the sky was blue

  Down the alley, the ice-wagon flew

  Heard a bump, and somebody screamed

  You should have heard just what I seen

  Who do you love?

  * * *

  -Bo Diddley, 1956

  1 Penny Molests Her Clarinet

  Where are you now, whippoorwill? Wings cut the sky faster than eyes can see. It’s probably not even a whippoorwill. Probably a bat. Gone in the cave where it’s cool, where it’s dark—to get away from that clarinet music, which is not even music. It’s practice-music. It’s what high school girls play in high school band when they aren’t very good at it. Tomorrow I’m going to steal that clarinet.

  And the fact that I would have to, Penny Longstocking …the fact that it has come to this, is frankly embarrassing. For you. Would it really kill you to take a minute out of your tediously boring life to come up here and chitchat with old Seven from time to time?

  I hang out in a cave, by myself. Yes, I’m very cool and freaky like that. But that doesn’t mean a person can’t get a little lonesome now and then. It’s not like I’m desperate. You should really be a little more thankful of the respect I show by not bothering you. So considerate of your boundaries, and I’m a very nice guy who leaves you alone because you are so busy doing stupid stuff.

  I’m sure you have plenty of company at home and I know you have a whole table full of giggly girls to prattle with at lunch every day. Did you ever notice that I take my lunch outside? No? Oh, gee, Seven, I never noticed. Why do you do that? Because it’s more comfortable to eat lunch alone outside than in the lunchroom. Or with Mad Dog, which is worse. Oh, you see me now. Praise be, to all the sweet angels in heaven, for Penny Longstocking has favored me with a wave. Wait a minute. Two waves? Three? Penny, have you lost your mind?

  She’s swatting a fly. Wow, I didn’t even get the wave. I waved back and she didn’t notice. Am I invisible up here? So, you may not realize this, Penny Longstocking, but some people have to go back home to their mother who hasn’t gotten out of bed in three days. And the next time she does she’ll probably be possessed. What? Voodoo soul possession is not a thing in the Longstocking household? No? Well, it’s stuff like that, that a person likes to shoot the breeze about with a friend. Everyone can use a little company sometimes and I’m not a total recluse. Mysterious loner dude, yes. But actually I’m very friendly, as you well know.

  Okay, and now you’re leaving. Not even a nod. Soon enough I’ll go back home where my mom is either not speaking to anyone, or else raving and going totally nuts. And my grandmother will be communing with the animals.

  Whippoorwill. Whippoorwill.

  Oh, great. The bird heard me thinking. Thanks, whippoorwill. You’re in the cave. Yes, right, time for me to come back in. I heard you. Good point. If I study Penny Longstocking all day, she’s going to think I’m a perv. I’m not really alone, am I, whippoorwill? I’ve got a bird to keep me company. Most people aren’t so lucky. You don’t have to wear used clothes, do you, bird? Penny Longstocking never wears used clothes either. Her father is a lawyer. My dad was sent on a secret mission to die. My grandmother sells potions to hoodoos who come in from out of state. She’s apparently very good at it. And when they can’t afford it, she gives the stuff away. So I wear used clothes. How are you going to tell Penny Longstocking stuff like that? No, whippoorwill, we keep those things to ourselves. I feel like I want to tell her. Like we could be best friends. But for her sake, I can’t. She’d probably have a heart attack.

  And there you go again—whippoorwill, whippoorwill. Just when I was thinking about you, I hear you urging me on. Sure, whippoorwill. Tomorrow, I’ll steal that clarinet. Then she’ll have to come up here.

  I think my grandmother sent the whippoorwill. Actually, I know she did. Do you have that, Penny Longstocking? Surprise, no. Animal spirits do not abound in your vapid Penny Longstocking life.

  We could make out sometimes too, just for a change of pace. Not like nonstop—occasionally would be nice. And you will never admit it, as I know, but that time in the snow was not just the tequila talking. Sure, you had never tried tequila before, and yes it is unusual for there to be a fifteen minute blizzard on the day after Thanksgiving. It was otherworldly. It was the most real thing that had ever happened in my life and it was a careless, forgettable fling for you. Don’t lie, by saying nothing. You were melting in my arms and kissing me like you really meant it. Like you had been in love with me your whole life, and the snow, the beautiful snow on the day after Thanksgiving—that happened for us. And now you’re leaving. No, actually she’s not leaving. She’s going to molest that clarinet again, like she has nothing better to do.

  My mother used to play clarinet. She’s good. She’d say, “I’ma go Louisa Armstrong on you now—look out!” Her name is Louisa. She’d take off with a string of notes up one, two, three octaves and then back down again with a squeal and a honk. Very jazzy. She said jazz was born of Voodoo music and she knew some of those songs too.

  Our family tree is very complicated, and once I asked my grandmother why I don’t look black. All the Voodoo and we’re descended from Marie Laveau and all that, but I don’t look black. Why not? And this is the way my grandmother talks, she said the Mississippi River is made up of the whitest snow from mountain peaks and the blackest mud in the South, from clear underground springs and rain that washes smoke from the sky. Pick up a handful from that mighty river, she said, and you can see your reflect
ion in it. That’s you, you a handful. The river, that’s all of us. Why don’t you look black? Boy, you can’t see past a handful.

  Under her tree, Penny Longstocking plays the clarinet—badly. Not really terrible, but she’s a long way from being a professional. She tries. She practices nonstop because she wants to keep first clarinet. She’s in this smoldering competition with Velvet West, who is also a senior. I’m a junior. The two of them are rivals. Penny recently beat Velvet out of the first chair clarinet seat, which is a very big deal.

  So, she practices under that big magnolia, the same place and same time every day, in order to protect her place at the top. She even wears long stockings. Her name is Penny Longstocking, but she actually wears them. Today they’re white. Sometimes they’re cream colored. She picks newspapers from the trash so she can sit with her shoes off and not get the stockings dirty. Only the shoes know if the stockings have holes, I’ve heard my grandmother say. But I’ve actually seen them, and Penny Longstocking’s stockings do not have holes.

  Penny Longstocking really works hard at playing that clarinet. But despite having long fingers, she must not be able to stretch them out to all the right places because she still gets a lot of squeaks. Velvet West never gets squeaks. Her tone is as sweet and pure as an angel’s harp—a shocking contrast to her reputation. So it was a big surprise to everyone when she blew it in that audition for first clarinet. She never misses notes like that or gets screeches. She must have been nervous because she was awful. Soon the rumors started flying that Penny had sabotaged Velvet’s clarinet. That’s all bullshit. The Velvet people will say anything, but Penny’s friends know she won fair and square.

  Velvet developed earlier than the other girls, having a shape—and a very nice one—by the time she was in sixth grade. She’s pretty small, which actually makes her curves look bigger. She got into makeup earlier too, so she’s been more mature than the other girls for a while.

  Penny, incidentally, is skinny as a rail. She’s tall, but that’s it. High school boys were chasing Velvet West while she was still in junior high. But Penny’s a senior now and she never got any attention from anyone. I feel sorry for her, because she’s got a good spirit. I’ve heard her say she’s searching for joy and the meaning in life, but that’s offset by her unholy envy for Velvet West. It seems to me that people who are really serious about finding the deep and meaningful joy of life should probably not be so hung up on being first clarinet.

  Velvet always manages to stay one step ahead of the guys, picking only the best ones for dances and not sticking with any particular guy too long. She can cast off even the most popular dude with a flick and a snub. She’s a real fascination. It doesn’t hurt that she has the sexy she-devil thing going—long raven black hair, snow white skin, and an inner wickedness that would make anybody want to be bad. Sometimes you think she’s all innocent and cute, and no deeper than that. She just happens to have that perfect hourglass bod. But then she’ll cut you down, to let you know she’s not easy.

  Velvet West is somebody as far as girls in Bellin go. She turns up her nose whenever I talk to her—just walks on by. Now that she’s a senior in high school, she’s dating a guy who’s in college, of course. This irritates Penny, too. The guy is a real weirdo, the town freak. Instead of a left hand, he has a hoof. A real hoof like the cloven hoof of a goat. The doctors were amazed. Specialists came to Bellin from all over the world and none of them had ever seen anything like it. Of course that made him our most famous, and only, celebrity. He even has his own vet. Everyone calls him Hoof. It seems ridiculous, but the ladies have always liked him. He’s also rich as sin and his family owns half of Bellin. And despite that life of luxury, he’s actually a very tough guy. Athletic, a real horse of a man. Now he’s home from college, from the castle they own in Nashville, so he and Velvet are together. They ride around in his sports car cutting doughnuts in everybody’s yard.

  It’s the end of our school year so there won’t be any more chances to move up to first chair on the clarinet. I don’t know why Penny still bothers to practice. She’s playing the easiest song in the world right now, “Pomp and Circumstance,” because we’re about to have graduation. It’s crazy, because she’s graduating—which means she’ll be walking in the procession while the rest of us play the song—so there’s no real reason for her to even practice it. But that’s Penny Longstocking, practicing a song when she doesn’t even have to. Even I can play that song. I’m in band too. I play trumpet, but I never practice. If I can’t play a song, I just fake it. There are a lot of trumpets, so nobody can tell the difference. I push the buttons, take deep breaths, and act like I’m really puffing away. No one cares.

  Actually, I don’t even like trumpet—I wanted drums. I wanted to play drums for as long as I can remember. Then I got to sixth grade. I was ready to start band, but like everything else in life, they already had too many drummers. So, I had three choices: saxophone, trumpet, or trombone. I picked trumpet. Trombones have six places on the slide where you stop for the notes. You can scratch notches, but I got the feeling that would be cheating. Not like the three buttons on a trumpet. I’ve noticed they occasionally have saxophones in rock bands. They never have trumpets. Maybe I should have gone with sax.

  Two things Penny Longstocking does—plays clarinet with her shoes off sitting cross-legged under a tree on newspapers she stole from the trash, and reads National Geographic. It might be a stretch to say she steals newspapers, because she actually puts them back on the same garbage pile when she’s done with them. She only uses the ones that nobody ever opened.

  She has a subscription to National Geographic and reads it cover to cover every month. She would. She’s very focused like that. Frankly, I think National Geographic stories are awful. I’ve got to hand it to them on the photos, though—those are actually very good. Yesterday, Penny told me that thrill-seeking behavior peaks at fifteen years old, which she had learned from National Geographic. She felt compelled to tell me I was behind the curve. Ouch. But I do admire her dedication to doing boring things. There’s a stick-to-itiveness about her. I want to tell her that there’s more to life than a rivalry with Velvet West and constantly reading National Geographic, but I can’t. She couldn’t handle it.

  * * *

  My grandmother is a hoodoo from way back. Actually, more Voodoo than hoodoo. Voodoo is a religion with soul possessions and it’s very real. It’s much more serious than hoodoo, which is just the potions that don’t even work—for most of the quacks who make them. My grandmother might even be Li Grand Zombi, come back from the dead as Marie LaVey and she used to be the famous New Orleans Voodooienne Marie Laveau. Sometimes, she is. She changes. But how are you going to tell Penny Longstocking that? It bothers me that I can’t, because I want to tell her. I know where the line is. I feel like I could trust her. I feel like we could make a great team. But there’s this hurdle of my crazy family and I can’t seem to get past that. Maybe I’ve got Penny all wrong—maybe she really could handle it. For example, my name is Seven because I’m the seventh generation born of Marie Laveau. But it’s not like I just have a famous ancestor. Her spirit still comes around. I’ve never even taken anybody to our house.

  My grandmother has told me about our people from way back in New Orleans, and the man from Haiti who taught Marie Laveau. My grandmother pronounces Voodoo like vō-dün because that’s the Creole way. I remember some of the rituals from when I was a child, and I know this—if you happen to find yourself at a bonfire on Saint John’s Eve, with drums playing and a bunch of Voodoos dancing, and it all builds up and gets wilder and weirder until somebody shouts, “Papa Legba, open the gate!”—you better run. Papa Legba is the king of all Voodoo deities. He stands at the crossroads, the real one, between us and the loa, the gods. When that gate is open, gods come to us. They are not obliged to mind our laws. They are not required to mind anything. Some of them are vengeful, and shameless.

  My grandmother is wise. She’ll say, “The only stupid
question is the one you did not try to figure out yourself.” And she’s right. I feel better when I figure stuff out myself. She told me that real Voodoo isn’t the black magic everyone says it is. It’s the moment when the spirit comes into the believer, takes over, and possesses them. Like when they are dancing and go down to the ground on one foot, then come up shaking and wailing in a voice that’s not their own. Like what happens to my mom. That’s Voodoo. People go to Christian churches to speak about God, but in Voodoo they actually become God. My grandmother is keeping me out of it, but I’m still worried about getting the curse. The curse skipped my grandmother, but my mom has it. It makes her crazy, or so depressed she can’t get out of bed.

  Penny Longstocking is going to grow up to be a scientist. She’s got it all planned out. People like her have always got it all planned out. I don’t know when I’ll tell her about the bones. I haven’t told anybody. If I do tell her, she’ll probably call the police, or at least tell her mother. Her mother is Sylvia. She’s one of the good-looking mothers—you can tell where Penny gets it. But if she finds out, Sylvia will spread the news like wildfire. Then the whole town will say I’m a freak because I didn’t say anything sooner.

  I don’t really want anybody to know. At least not yet. If I tell, they’ll come up here and ruin my hideout. I’m sure they know there’s a cave. They have to know, but nobody comes here but me. It’s too far off the beaten path. It’s at the top of a hill, where it gets steep. There are two boulders that stick out like a giant’s shoulders bulging through the mountain, grinding through black dirt with a yawning mouth between them. That’s my cave. You can see Kentucky from here. They say Kentucky has blue grass. Not the banjo music. The actual grass. I was skeptical, but it’s true—it has a tint like that at sunset, not like here in Tennessee. Our grass is green in summer, brown in winter. Never blue. Bellin is tucked between hills, not mountains, and it seems very out-of-the-way from the rest of the state. Nashville is the closest city, and that’s a hundred miles away. We have all the modern stuff, but Bellin is still very much like the little town that time forgot.