A Crooked Tree

by Una Mannion

  “Bless her,” said Charlotte, gesturing at Diana on the television, all bashful, looking at the camera from under her hair. “So sweet. But him . . . Prince or no prince, he’s got a face only a mother could love.”

  It was the kind of thing I’d have repeated to my father. He loved to hear Charlotte’s irreverence and her Southern sayings. “I’m as full as a tick,” she’d say, leaning back after a dinner she’d hardly touched, or “She’s so stuck-up she’d drown in a rainstorm,” turns of phrase he thought weren’t that different from the Irish—“He’s enough neck for two heads.” And he loved anything said against the British monarchy. When talking about the royal family, he referred to them as “a bad clique,” which made me and Marie laugh, the monarchy reduced to a petty in-group.

  “I feel like we haven’t seen you in so long,” Charlotte said. “Where’ve you been all this summer?”

  I was about to say “Oh, I saw Dr. Adams the other night,” but something stopped me, and I didn’t want to ask Grady about the deer either. He was sitting there, focused on the TV, not looking at me. Sage hadn’t mentioned it on the phone either. Maybe he didn’t want them to know he’d killed something beautiful, or that he had been so rattled by it.

  “Sage is in her room,” Charlotte said. “Go on ahead down.”

  “Wild Horses,” Sage’s very favorite song, reverberated down the hallway from her room. It was supposed to be about Marianne Faithfull waking up for the first time after an overdose and saying those lines to Mick Jagger when she opened her eyes. But there was another story that it was Keith Richards who had written it. We didn’t know which one was true. Sage couldn’t say why it was her favorite, except that its emotion caught her, forgiving and still loving someone even when they’ve really hurt you or left you.

  We’d both read Up and Down with the Rolling Stones that spring. Sage had started to dress like Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg, tops with billowing sleeves, hip-huggers, and feathers. But for me, the book was terrifying. Brian Jones, warlocks, drugs, black magic, Gram Parsons dying in a hotel room and his friends stealing his body and trying to cremate him; it said to me that chaotic and dark forces were spinning around us, one foot wrong and you’d be sucked into the vortex.

  I knocked three times on the door and went in. Sage sat up on her bed and reached over to the stereo to turn it down.

  “Libby, finally. Come on, we’re going up to the towers.” Sage was wearing a red tube top and faded denim cutoffs frayed to white threads in places. Silver earrings dangled to below her chin, the layers of silver leaves making a small rippling sound. I looked at my Converse, at my legs, covered with scabs, bruises, and scratches from the woods. I had still never shaven them. Marie had said that once I started, the hair would turn black and become like stubble. Sister Benedict wore nude pantyhose, and her leg hair was so wiry that it poked through the sheer nylon. Her legs looked like a mass of spiders squished against mesh. It put me off letting a razor anywhere near my legs. I looked at Sage’s; even her thighs were smooth.

  I didn’t want to go to the towers. I’d thought Sage and I would stay in her room, talk and work things out. I wanted to tell her I was sorry, not just for the phone call, but for everything.

  “Come on,” she said, grabbing my wrist and pulling me toward the door. “Someone’s getting kegs. Loads of people will be up there.”

  I shook off her hand and stopped to look at myself in her mirror. My hair wasn’t washed or brushed. I ran my fingers through it to straighten it. In front of the mirror Sage had jewelry and makeup arranged in little baskets. I took a tub of lip gloss, dipped my finger in, and leaned forward, close to the mirror, spreading its clear shimmer across my lips. It tasted like strawberries. I stood back. I had on one of Marie’s T-shirts she’d left behind—Talking Heads, Remain in Light. She had worn it so often that the red masks across the four faces had bled pink across the white. My hair had grown so long it reached the bottom of the shirt now, and strands of it around my face had been lightened by the sun.

  “You look beautiful, Libby. Wild and sleek. Like one of those mountain cats. What is it? A bobcat.” Sage was able to say these things, to compliment; Charlotte did it, too. In my family we didn’t know how to do that, saying those good things to each other. I think our faces would have contorted and our sentences fallen apart if we’d tried. It was hard for me to imagine my mother saying “You look beautiful in that.” I’d thought Sage looked stunning when I walked in, but I hadn’t said it, and if I did now, it would seem as if I was only saying it because she’d said something nice to me. Instead I said, “You always make me feel good, even when I know I look like a feral racoon.”

  When we reached the top of her driveway, Sage stopped me and held my wrist. “Libby—I didn’t tell Grady anything about Ellen. You have to believe me.”

  “Okay,” I said. I didn’t want to bring it all up again. I missed her.

  “The other day, I went back to Space Port. I meant to tell you.”

  “Why? He’d notice you and remember. In there with your waitress uniform.”

  “I know the manager. He’s a regular in the diner. I stood there talking to him for a bit. Barbie Man was playing some of the games, but mostly he was looking around, like he was looking for someone.”

  “Maybe because teenagers from the mountain might hang out there if they went to the mall, because he might recognize one of them?”

  “That’s what I thought. But it was only Upper Merion kids in there anyway. I left before he did. Poor Ellen. I can’t stop thinking about her in the car with him. The way he looks.”

  As we came through the woods toward the tower lot, we could hear laughing and cheering. Sage and I stood for a moment at the mouth of the trail, taking it all in. Across the clearing they had made five or six small fires, which they were feeding from a mountain of branches and sticks at the edge of the lot by the woods. One of the De Martino brothers was standing on top of it, hurling down branches to others waiting below, who were dragging them to the fires, dried pine exploding in sparks through the air. Three boys were rolling kegs across loose stones; there was one already tapped along the water tower’s perimeter fence on the eastern side, farthest from the road. Groups of teenagers were gathered around the scattered fires.

  Abbey came toward us, holding a plastic cup of beer. “You’re here. I thought you might not come.” She kissed Sage on the cheek, then looked at me and touched my shoulder. “Hey, Gallagher, you out in the world again?”

  I nodded half-heartedly and realized I was practically standing behind Sage, like a shy child with its mother. I stepped out and tried to hold myself tall and not cross my arms, a dead giveaway that leads to unfavorable shifts of power, according to Marie.

  They had blocked the service road with a huge barrier made from branches and tires. Police cars wouldn’t be able to drive down, Abbey said.

  “It’ll take them a long, long time to move it, and by then we’ll all be spirited into the woods. Like ghosts.” Abbey made a motion with her hand to show how we would all vanish into the dark. “That’s us. Shwoop. Gone. Like that.” She stared at us for a moment for effect. She looked wasted. I wanted to ask her what was stopping the cops from just getting out of their squad cars and walking around the heap and up the trail like everyone else.

  “You won’t be vanishing anywhere fast if you keep going like that,” said Sage. “You’ll just be sitting on your ass in the dirt, legs useless in front of you, waiting for the kind policeman to take you home.”

  Abbey laughed and pushed Sage. “Go get beers. There’s plenty for everyone.” She gestured toward the kegs. “And then come sit by that campfire.” She pointed to the farthest one, closest to the service road, and wove her way back toward it. Sage and I went down to the keg at the fence.

  Older boys were standing around in groups. Sage filled her cup first, and a guy with greasy lank hair started singing “You Shook Me All Night Long,” apparently to her, but he only knew fragments of a line
about thighs and kept singing them over and over. I tried to fill my cup, but just foam came out. I opened and closed the lever, opened it again, but nothing. Someone leaned over from a group behind Sage and the AC/DC guy and pumped the keg.

  “It just needs more pressure,” he said. “Hold your cup lower.”

  I knew before I looked up that it was Jack Griffith.

  “Once in a lifetime,” he said.

  “What?” I looked at him. Up here, in the middle of the Valley Forge Mountain crowd, he looked clean-cut and tidy, while most of the other teenagers had Harley badges and wore denim or army jackets with cutoff arms, their hair long and wild. I had no idea what he was talking about. It sounded deep, like something I should understand.

  He pointed at my shirt and I looked down.

  “Oh. Oh, yeah. Talking Heads. It’s not mine, it’s Marie’s.” My cup was full, and I took a clumsy mouthful and coughed because I had swallowed too much. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

  Sage was watching us. “Come on, Libby,” she said. “Abbey’s waiting.”

  “See ya,” I said to Jack, and walked toward the black line of trees on the other side of the clearing, the tower lights intermittently blinking red across all the gathered faces.

  19

  Sparks from the burning branches leapt and floated in the night air, and the lights from the towers flashed in steady rhythm; above us, in the open sky, the absence of moonlight magnified the endless stars. Someone had taken out a guitar, and the tune drifted across the tower lot. I was conscious of Jack at another fire, people from his high school sitting around it, kids Thomas used to hang out with. At our fire, Tony De Martino was playing Boy Scout, hauling over branches and logs and making skewers for us with a knife. I was baffled. I only ever saw him with a greasy rag, working on Honda 50s and lawn mowers or cleaning the barrels of BB guns. I didn’t know what we were going to skewer on our sticks, but we all held them at the fire. Sage had brought me another cup of beer.

  “Does anyone have a ghost story?” Abbey asked. “Like the haunted house on High Point?”

  “Oh, don’t tell that one,” Sage said. “We have to walk home that way later.” There was a house that everyone said was haunted, and even before I’d heard the stories, I’d always had a bad feeling when I passed it. Coming off the trail from the tower lot, it was the first house, a standard 1950s shingle-clad one, no different from any others. Except it was different. I had never seen anyone in it, and even on Halloween none of us dared ring the bell. There was one story that a man had killed his wife in the house, another that a man had kept women in the basement as prisoners; they were never found until after he died, and a new person bought it and discovered a false wall. On the other side were the dusty remains of five women. My mother had said there was no truth in these stories, that they were just tall tales told because the house had been owned by a man who was a recluse. “Like Boo Radley,” Marie had said. “You can’t choose to be alone or quiet up here without being turned into a monster.” (I would look for trees with knotholes when passing, imagining I was Scout down there in Alabama, wondering if someone inside was desperate to make a connection but didn’t want to be seen.) The house’s windows were always dark; a house that could only look out. The grass, like ours, stayed uncut. It sat on a plot that the sun never seemed to hit, the woods shadowing it from every angle.

  “You guys know this mountain was a sacred site to the Indians.” Abbey was storytelling. “It was their graveyard for the dead, a holy place.” I had heard this before, how our houses were on top of ancient burial sites. People on the mountain had reported unusual noises and blinking lights in the woods, and some people heard screaming voices. “Then, about a hundred years ago, white men came and started mining and quarrying and building houses. They were drilling and bulldozing into the ancient underworld, upsetting the spirits and pushing them out of their resting places.”

  Abbey was drunk, but the effect improved the telling. The words came slow off her tongue, she took her time and spoke low. We were all leaning in to listen, our faces lit and shadowed by the fire, which snapped and sparked into the night air.

  “You know how there’s quartz all over the mountain? That’s probably why the Indians brought their dead here. You know how it sparkles? It was to help the dead find their way, and also to light a trail for the living so they could return and visit their dead. But then white men came and started to dig the quartz out of the earth, blinding the spirits, who could no longer see their way through the underworld.”

  Abbey paused and looked at all of us sitting by the fire. “See, Sage, that’s why on your stretch of road the electricity is always going out. The spirits are lost and are interfering with everything.” On that side of the mountain people said that there was some kind of electrical field that caused lightning to hit repeatedly. Sage’s family always had candles ready in the summer for when the lights went out. “And Tony, where you live, almost every family has someone who’s a little sick in the head.” Abbey didn’t try to say it in a polite way, and she didn’t hold back. I thought maybe she was going too far, because it was true. On the De Martinos’ road there were only about seven houses, and around the same number of psychiatric cases. One of Tony’s brothers was damaged forever from a heroin overdose, but people said he’d heard voices before he ever started taking drugs, it was why he took them in the first place. Tony just nodded at Abbey, like he was agreeing with her.

  I shivered. Please don’t let her say anything about us, about our road.

  “Did you hear that?” Tony De Martino stood up, alert, looking toward the woods where they’d built the blockade. There was a growl and a crashing sound in the thicket. Both Sage and I screamed without knowing what we were screaming at. Everyone around the fire stood up.

  “Shhh,” Tony said.

  “What is it?” someone whispered.

  “The cops?”

  We stayed silent. The singing at the other fire near us stopped, and they stood, too, and stared at us looking into the dark woods. I saw the flicker of lights blinking through the trees. I was about to turn and run—some already had. There was a light weaving through the woods toward us.

  “Fuck, you scared me,” said Tony as Wilson appeared pushing the Yamaha through the understory. He had on the suede leather-fringe jacket and black jeans and boots. “Why didn’t you just come up the trail, man?”

  “It’s blocked,” said Wilson.

  “Yeah, to keep out cars. You could’ve just gone around it on the bike. Not sneaking up on us like this.”

  There was a group of people who’d come forward. Jack was with them.

  “Your boyfriend checking up on you, Libby?”

  I looked at Abbey. She meant Wilson. Why would she say something like that in front of everyone? Why would she say something like that at all? “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I hated Wilson all over again. That his name was even associated with me. I hated that she’d said it in front of Jack. Had Sage said something to Abbey about Wilson hanging around?

  “I’m just messing,” Abbey said.

  I pushed through the people gathered around and headed down toward the other end of the lot. I found an empty cup on the ground, swilled some beer around to clean it, then filled it. I moved a few yards down from the keg and sat on the gravel, my back against the chain link. Tony De Martino and his brothers were back at the woodpile, conducting and orchestrating the delivery of branches to fires. My cheeks were burning. I hated what Abbey had said, and I hated that Wilson was here. That afternoon when he was in our house during the thunderstorm, I’d told Marie how it bothered me that Wilson hung around teenagers way younger than himself, showing up at parties, being awkward. Marie said there was an obvious reason. I didn’t get what she meant. She looked at me like I was dense.

  “He sells,” she said.

  “Wilson actually sells drugs?”

  “Clearly.”

  Abbey had implied that people on the m
ountain knew Wilson was hanging around us. And that bothered me, not only because he was a psycho who sold drugs but because I didn’t want any of us to be associated with him when he was on a hit list.

  A few yards away, the third keg had been tapped. One of Abbey’s older brothers was standing on it, making a war cry and pounding his bare chest. He was even older than Wilson. He was nearly thirty. He’d been to Vietnam and in and out of prison ever since. He always wore his army tags around his neck and his army jacket with the arms cut off and nothing underneath. He had shoulder-length brown hair that girls would envy. Marie said he was the image of Jackson Browne. But something had happened to his left eye when he was on his tour of duty so that the pupil was always dilated, like David Bowie’s, except on Abbey’s brother it looked crazy instead of interesting.

  “Libby!” Sage was standing at the corner of the fence, shouting down to me. “Libby! Come back.” I could see the shadows of the others as I walked toward them: Wilson standing there on the margins instead of sitting like a normal person; Tony De Martino like a fire god, dancing around, pushing in branches; Abbey stoned and storytelling. Jack was there now, too. Sage sat near where Wilson was standing. The only place left was between Jack and Sage.

  “Abbey’s still on her ghost stories, how we’re living on Indian graveyards,” Sage said.

  “Like the Amityville Horror,” Tony said.

  “That wasn’t about an Indian graveyard, was it?” I whispered to Sage. “Wasn’t it because there were people murdered in the house?” Sage had the book and had seen the movie.

  “It was a family that got murdered,” Wilson said. “One twelve Ocean Avenue, Amityville, on Long Island. Six of them. Mother, father, two brothers and two sisters. All murdered by their twenty-three-year-old brother. Ronald DeFeo Jr.”

  “Why do you have to creep us out by knowing information like that?” I blurted it out because it bothered me that other people, especially Jack, would think he was a freak, memorizing those kinds of details.