A Crooked Tree

by Una Mannion

  “I knew you were a bad influence, Gallagher.”

  “Me the bad influence? You’re older. You practically pushed me over the fence. You gave me beer.”

  We were standing there dripping wet in the dark, facing each other. Jack went quiet. He took a strand of my hair that was stuck to my cheek and pushed it behind my ear. He sat on a deck chair and pulled me down to lie next to him, his arm around me. I reached up to his shoulder. I was touching his skin. The kiss was slow and hesitant at first, nothing like the urgent tongue-flicking, mouth-to-mouth-resuscitation-type kisses I’d had before. I was lying back, and all of his bare body was touching mine. I had a sensation of falling. Then he stopped and sat up. We stayed quiet.

  “Tell me a good tree fact.”

  “What?”

  “What’s a good fact about trees?”

  I sat up and for the first time that night felt uncomfortable in my body. I pulled my knees to my chest.

  “A good fact about trees is that they breathe in pollution and breathe out oxygen.”

  “Like us.”

  “No. We inhale oxygen and exhale pollution. Trees draw in toxins and light through a thousand little mouths in the leaves and then breathe out oxygen.”

  “Stomata.”

  “What?”

  “Stomata, from the Greek for mouth.”

  “I almost forgot what a geek you are,” I said.

  I thought he might kiss me again, but instead he stood up. “We should get out of here.” I nodded and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

  We scaled the fence on the woods side and fumbled around in the dark for a moment, looking for our trees.

  Jack laughed. “I think it’s your clothes they got. Mine are here.”

  “Oh shit.” At the base of my tree there was one sneaker, the one with a hole in the toe. Everything else was gone.

  “Here,” said Jack, handing me his T-shirt. It only came down to the top of my thighs.

  As we followed the path down into the Sun Bowl, Sage came running toward us.

  “Libby? Where’ve you been?”

  “They took my clothes.”

  “Who?”

  “The police.”

  “Whose shirt?”

  I looked down at the black T-shirt and my bare legs and pointed to Jack shirtless beside me. Why was she asking?

  “Ah, Jack—always a gentleman.” There was a pause. Then she said, “Looking after his friend’s little sister.”

  We all went quiet, and Sage stood there, hands on her hips, looking at us. I didn’t know why she’d mentioned Thomas.

  “I’ve got to go. See you,” Jack said.

  We watched him walk off into the dark.

  “Libby, what the hell’s going on?”

  “Sage, oh my God. We were in the pool when the police came. We had to hide behind the ladder in the deep end and go under the water when they searched there. And we kissed. And when we did, everything seemed to spin.”

  “You’re being dramatic.”

  “No. I’m serious. The whole world was spinning.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. Trust me.”

  “Sage. I felt like I was falling.”

  Sage held my shoulders. “Shut your eyes right now.”

  I did.

  “Is everything spinning?”

  I had the same sensation as earlier, as if the ground were pitching. I opened my eyes. Sage was looking at me.

  “Well?”

  “It actually is,” I said.

  “See, sweetheart, you’re drunk. You just shut your eyes when you kissed him.”

  I was suddenly cold. A car crawled up Horseshoe Trail Road toward the Sun Bowl, and everything I’d managed to put away from earlier in the night rushed in: Wilson, Pottstown, Barbie Man, Ellen. Both Sage and I instinctively stepped backward into shadow.

  9

  Sage’s J. C. Penney’s waitressing uniform was a checked peach cotton dress with a ruffled white collar and a white apron with a frilled edge. She wore white nylons with her Converse high-tops, carrying her white waitressing shoes in her hands.

  “You look like a maid,” I said when I met her at the corner to walk her down the trail to the ARCO station.

  Sage looked down at her outfit. “That’s the point. Make us look as servile as possible so men feel good when we wait on them with their coffee and slice of pie.”

  I hadn’t thought about this before. How almost all waitresses, especially in diners, wore outfits that looked like maids’ uniforms, except in bright colors. That customers wanted this.

  “It’s hotter than Hades,” Sage said when we reached the mouth of the trail. It was the kind of thing Charlotte would say. “Oh why, oh why, did I put on the pantyhose?” She reached under her skirt and started to roll them down, unlacing her sneakers and slipping them off only when the hose were round her ankles. She used my arm to balance. The temperature had already reached the nineties, even though it was only early afternoon.

  We walked along the narrow section of the trail in single file, Sage in front. It didn’t feel any cooler in the shade. The air was so heavy I felt like I couldn’t get a deep breath. Sage had now slung her waitressing shoes over her shoulder by the laces. She’d wanted to talk but not on the phone, and I was waiting for her to start.

  “You know Tony De Martino started working at the diner as a dishwasher?”

  Tony De Martino was the youngest. He was Thomas’s age and always out front working on engines. I wondered if he’d also taken potshots at us with his BB gun. I didn’t know he was working with Sage.

  “Well, he has, and last night we were sitting in the break room, just smoking and talking. He said he’d heard something about Wilson McVay beating up some guy.” I stopped walking behind her and she stopped, too, and turned around. “Tony said he heard Wilson beat someone so bad he might be dead. But he heard it was about a girl from Valley Forge Elementary who got attacked after getting off the school bus.”

  “Wilson killed him?” I had an ache deep in my chest, like the time I had pneumonia and it hurt to breathe in.

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. I mean, they have other stuff wrong, like the school bus.”

  “But the other night you said they were talking about a girl from the mountain.”

  “Well, now they think somewhere else, which is a good thing, right?”

  “How did Tony hear?”

  “Danny Shields. But you know what he’s like.” Danny was known to exaggerate. Once Sage had a timed ten-second kiss with Danny in a game of spin-the-bottle. He’d bragged for months about an all-nighter. He bragged about everything.

  “But he went up there with Wilson?”

  “I don’t know who Wilson took.”

  “Did you tell Tony anything?”

  “No.”

  We had started walking again; the path had widened, and we were side by side.

  “Why’s Wilson doing this to us?”

  “Wilson’s just doing what he thinks is right, crazy as it is. You need to tell your mom now. Or we tell Grady and get him to tell her.”

  “No.”

  “You have to. It’s way bigger than us now.”

  “No. We can’t.”

  The humidity weighed me down as if I were carrying a heavy load, my legs sluggish beneath it.

  We walked in silence for a few minutes until Sage spoke. “Do you still have Jack’s T-shirt?”

  “Yeah.” It was only five days since the pool but it seemed so far away now.

  “It’s probably got Hall and Oates on it, or some lame group like that.”

  “It’s just a plain T-shirt. What’ve you got against him, anyway?”

  Sage shrugged. “Nothing. I don’t have anything against him, exactly. It’s just how . . . I don’t know.” She stopped as if she wasn’t going to say any more, and then started again in an angry burst. “It’s how he cares so much about what people think of him, how he’s like all things to all people. Science nerd with Thomas, lacrosse star at
Conestoga, bong hits in the Sun Bowl, girlfriends with frosted hair and Fair Isles. Why does he have to pick on you?”

  It felt like a body blow to the very center of me because I knew what Sage wasn’t saying. She was trying not to hurt me. She saw him at school, and she knew another side of him around girls, and there was no way he’d be interested in me. I felt rotten and small.

  The weird thing was that the things Sage said about Jack, you could almost say about her, too. How she was popular at Conestoga, knew how to talk to adults, and like Jack worked hard on her credibility on the mountain. Both their families did things like skiing and “going to the shore.” It occurred to me that both Jack and Sage had made people in my family their best friends. Slumming it, Marie would say. I didn’t want to think about Jack. My head was pounding. What had Wilson done up in Pottstown?

  We crossed Oakwood at the bottom of the trail, and below us was Route 23. The sky had darkened, and the trees above us had started to move in a wind we couldn’t feel yet on the ground.

  “I’m gonna head back now,” I said. We’d both gone quiet. What she’d said wedged between us.

  “Aw. Pleeease walk me down. I look so stupid in this uniform.” Sage made a funny face, and I knew she was trying to fix things.

  I walked down the street, kicking a stone in front of me. The delicatessen next to the ARCO station was empty. I could see Big Betsy, the only waitress who worked there, wiping the counters and arranging the laminated menus. The ARCO station was quiet, too. A mechanic sat on a chair outside and considered the sky. “Looks like rain,” he called over to us.

  “Sure does,” Sage shouted back in a wide drawl. Sometimes she spoke like she was from the deepest part of the South. “Can’t help it,” she’d say if I teased her. “The Charlotte and Grady effect.”

  From the west, I could see the King of Prussia 102 lumbering toward us up Route 23. The big silver bus had a rounded front and reminded me of films from the 1950s and ’60s. I couldn’t see anything through the tinted windows except single silhouettes of other passengers. The bus made a hiss as it came to a full stop, and the doors unfolded.

  “Well, someone has to pour coffee for the blue-haired brigade.”

  “And someone has to get rained on,” I said. We both looked at the sky.

  “Damn, it’s dark,” Sage said. A high-stacked dirty cloud with a purple-black underbelly hung above us. Sage climbed the steps of the bus, raised her shoes in a half-wave as the doors folded shut and she disappeared.

  I set off back up the hill, walking fast. I didn’t mind rain, but lightning terrified me. I entered the woods. It wasn’t a safe place for lightning storms, but neither were open fields; I couldn’t remember which was safer. I started to run. This time of year the trail got overgrown in parts, and I pushed through, turning my face away from stray branches and thorns. I heard a rumble and wasn’t sure if it was distant thunder or a tractor trailer down on the highway. The air smelled like electricity, metallic and acrid; the temperature was falling and the wind had started. Bundles of treetops swayed high in the canopy. I saw a flash and a few seconds later heard a roll of thunder. I kept running. On the next flash I counted the seconds between it and the thunder. Five seconds equaled one mile. It was close.

  I heard the rain above me hitting leaves before I felt it. The sky opened then, not small drops but big, heavy ones, raining sideways. In less than a minute my T-shirt was soaked through. Another flash forked through the darkened sky, followed by a clap of thunder—two seconds. It was right on top of me. I came to a bend and looked down into the ravine, at the old bottling factory, and remembered the cavern beneath the steps. I’d go in there for shelter until the lightning passed. I stumbled down the hill toward the stone ruin, grabbing on to saplings and laurel clumps to slow myself down. The creek had turned light brown and was capped white in the rushing water, thunder crashing and heavy rain sounding through the woods. Searching for a narrow place to cross, I moved toward the thicket of black locust trees in front of me. Then I remembered about black locusts—lightning strikes that tree more than any other. Why had I moved toward them? The creek seemed louder than it should. There was something else. I turned. A motorcycle was plowing toward me, descending the hill I’d just come down. It skidded and zigzagged, revved and choked, the driver putting his foot to the ground to stop from rolling over. The visor was down and black. How could he see? It was so dark. I panicked. It must be a Hells Angel, Pagan, or Warlock coming for me. I thought of the Manson Family, but they were young women. He was shouting at me. I looked at the dark ground, the fallen locust flowers. The locust flower closes itself in rain. I had to hide. I had to run and hide. My legs felt powerless. I tried to move across the creek but couldn’t decide—everywhere was too wide. The motorcycle was coming straight for me. I stopped. I knelt down on the ground, the locust petals all around me. Giving up. I heard my name shouted and looked up. The rain beat against my face. I could hardly see. I heard my name again. The biker. He lifted the visor and gestured toward me.

  It was Wilson McVay. I froze. This frightened me more than if it had been a total stranger. He was yelling, “Get on!” I was kneeling, shaking my head no. I wanted him to go away. I’d rather be hit by lightning.

  He rolled the bike toward me through the rain. “Get on the bike!” he roared. He was leaning forward, and through the veil of rain I saw his big hands gripping the bike’s handles, bruised purple and swollen across the knuckles. Both hands.

  “Get on now!” he shouted. And I did. I stood and went to the bike and sat behind him. I had resigned myself to something terrible. It didn’t matter anyway. The air was heavy with ozone and the scent of locust flowers. I gripped the sides of the seat. The motorcycle accelerated forward, and in a sickening moment I understood that he was going to go back up the hill. It was like climbing a vertical wall. I shut my eyes and leaned forward. Several times Wilson had to balance the bike with his feet as we swerved or stalled.

  Then we hit the trail at speed and raced up the path, the heavy droplets drumming against my skin. Wasn’t it more dangerous to be sitting on top of metal? I used to think that the rubber tires grounded the electricity, but on a school trip to the Benjamin Franklin Museum we’d learned that that wasn’t the case. The reason you were safe in a car was because of the metal shell you were in, which drew the currents to the ground. The motorcycle was a magnet for lightning. We came off the trail at the bottom of my street and revved up the road and into our driveway. Wilson pulled right up to the back door.

  Lightning and thunder crashed together as I slid off the bike and lunged for the back door, trying to turn the wet handle. I pushed it open and went to shut it, but Wilson was right behind me. He put his foot against the door and stepped inside. I crossed my arms and looked at the ground.

  Wilson took off his helmet as Marie came down the stairs.

  “Well, look what the cat dragged in.” I wasn’t sure who Marie was referring to.

  I looked at him: his smile, his bruised hands, the puddle of water forming at his feet. I’d left the trail. I couldn’t figure out how he’d found me down there. Had he been following me and Sage?

  Thunder exploded in the room. The lights flickered a few times and went out.

  “There goes the electricity,” said Marie.

  “How’s Ellen?” he asked.

  “She’s good. Still stiff and bruised, but she’s back to herself. Sullen and sketching.”

  “It wasn’t hard to find the guy,” Wilson said.

  I hadn’t told Marie what Sage had heard about Pottstown. I felt cold to the bone and, looking down, saw that my arms were goose-bumped, hairs on end.

  “You found him? Who is he?”

  “Some lowlife from Pottstown.”

  “Isn’t that like a hundred miles away?” Marie said. “How’d you find him?”

  “The Camaro. A friend of mine in Reading sells Camaros, and I described the guy. He said he thought he knew of a guy like that, and he called his friend up
there. Anyway . . . he won’t be bothering little girls again.” He said it with this serious look on his face and a voice like he was Kojak or Columbo. He really was crazy.

  “Shit, Wilson. What did you do?” Marie was trying to sound calm, but I could tell that this information disturbed her. She must have seen his hands then. “Oh God. Did you do something to him?” she asked.

  “I had some help. Here, I brought some presents.” He reached into his motorcycle boot and pulled out a long piece of chrome. For a moment I thought it was a knife, but it was too bulky. He handed it to Marie, Camaro in metal. “I got his fender emblem.” Wilson sounded proud, as if we would be impressed.

  “How’d you take it?” Marie said, turning it over in her hands.

  “With a hammer.”

  He’d had a hammer. Had he used it on Barbie Man?

  He reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a ziplock bag. “Here, this is for you.” He threw it at me, and I caught it without thinking. It was so light, I thought it was going to be more drugs, but it felt empty. Inside was something silvery white. I opened it and pulled out long threads. Long white-blond strands. A clump of human hair, just like Ellen had described.

  “Oh my God.” I threw the bag back at him. I felt as if I’d touched something dead. “What have you done?” I was shaking.

  “I told you I’d scalp him,” Wilson said, looking straight at me. I looked back at him in horror.

  “Come off it, Wilson. What’d you do?” Marie asked.

  “He got a haircut.”

  Ellen came into the rec room as he said it. “Hi, Wilson. Who got a haircut?”

  Wilson stuffed the sandwich bag into his pocket. “Look who it is: Evel Ellen Knievel, daredevil herself. Did you come down here to do some more stunts?”

  Ellen smiled up at him. “Who got a haircut?”

  “My dog. Samson. And just like the Samson in the Bible, he didn’t like it. But the heat was getting to him, so I gave him a good trim.”

  Ellen seemed to accept the explanation. “Marie, the power’s out,” she said. The house was dark, even though it was only the middle of the afternoon. Rain was battering the windows. We could see sheet lightning in the distance, illuminating the dark trees.