First Digital Edition
Under the Overtree © 2012, 2000 by James A. Moore
Artwork © 2012 by Alan M. Clark
Published by Morning Star
An imprint of DarkFuse
Morning Star
P.O. Box 338
North Webster, IN 46555
www.darkfuse.com/morning-star
Copyediting by Leigh Haig
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the author.
For Inge Moore, my mother.
For Bonnie Moore, my beloved wife.
For my siblings, Andrea, Nela Kurt, Steve and Ro.
For Rick Hautala, thanks for the scares.
For my friends, you know who you are, thanks for everything.
This is the first book that I wrote. There are awkward sentences and phrases that I would dearly love to change. It has entire sections I’d gleefully rewrite. That said, it is still my baby and has been left unchanged save for a few edits to repair grammatical damages. All blemishes have been left intact, because when I wrote Under the Overtree the story meant a great deal to me and to change it now would be to alter the story I was telling back then. It is what it is, and I will leave it that way despite the temptations. Thanks to Larry Roberts and his crew of editors for carving their way through this beast to make it readable.
—James A. Moore
PROLOGUE
(Excerpt from the unpublished autobiography of Phillip James Sanderson)
It was a long time ago that I first learned the meaning of life; perhaps it would be better to say that I learned one of the meanings of life, the meaning of life’s end. Death. I was a great deal younger then, and thirty-five years more innocent. I would gladly have sacrificed the youth, but the innocence I would snatch back to me greedily, if only I could. I’d like to think that the world was a simpler place to live in back then, but it wasn’t really and I try not to lie, not even to myself.
If I must tell the truth, and in my eyes to do otherwise is possibly the worst of all sins, the town of Summitville was almost the same back then as it is now. Only the faces have changed, and not all of those are so different today. I feel it safe to say that the biggest apparent changes came from within, from somewhere in my heart and soul. Back then, I had friends.
Not many, mind you, less than a hand full of people I could call anything but buddies. If you haven’t learned the difference between friends and buddies by now, there is nothing that I can do to help you. Even the music that lived on the radio in those days was somehow more friendly than most I have heard in the last decade. The music spoke of love, friendship, and just how cool it was to be true to your school. Today, the music seems to be about pain, the lack of jobs on the market, and the best sex a person has experienced to date. I know it’s just the ramblings of a man past his prime to most of you, but to me that says it isn’t just me that has lost the magic of innocence; to me that says the whole world has grown too old for its own good.
I was fourteen when I met the boy who would change my world for the worse and, like so many of my contemporaries, I had just started to notice that girls had a way of looking at you that could stop a truck trying to beat the sun on a thousand mile race. I like to think of myself as a knight in shining armor, someone that was always for the right way of life, just like my parents had taught me. But in truth, I was one of the people who had it all made.
I was well on my way to being “Mister Popularity” back then, I had an easy smile, and I had a way with words. Naturally enough, there were more than a few who resented those meager gifts. One of them was Charlie Hanson. Charlie was from the area of Summitville we all referred to as the Slums, not because the area was in horrible shape, but because the people there were not quite as well off as in the rest of the town. The Slums was an area with nice enough houses that weren’t quite as nice as those peppering the rest of town, the part of town where roofs in need of repair were normally patched with ply-wood instead of with shingles. Somehow, by the time I had reached the age of fourteen, that fact seemed important. It made me better than someone like Charlie by the simple virtue of how much money my father made.
Charlie and I had been the best of friends only a few years earlier, playing football and baseball together, and even fighting side by side when some of the older kids would decide it was time to smear the queers and then elect us to be the queers. I wish I knew just when that had changed. I wish I could have stopped it from happening. Charlie was bigger than me—by almost half a foot, but it was just one of those things you do your best to ignore—back then.
I guess what finally drove the final nail into our separation as friends was the arrival in town of Alex Harris. Alex came to Summitville from San Diego, California; but in Summitville he was received as if he had come from another world. Then like now, Summitville was a fairly secular town, less receptive of strangers than any other place I have lived. He moved into town with his family in the last days of summer, in 1958.
I keep trying to imagine what that must have been like, moving from your life-long home to another part of the country, from the flat shoreline near the Pacific ocean, to an isolated town surrounded by mountains on all sides. I haven’t a clue as to what he and his family must have felt; my imagination simply isn’t that powerful. Whatever it was, resentment, awe, or even fear, Alex Harris hid it well.
Alex came to school for the first time on the same day that the rest of Summitville’s youths attended their first day, the day after Labor Day. Most of our town simply ignored him, having never met the boy before, and having no love of strangers, we simply went on about our business as if he didn’t exist. Charlie Hanson wasn’t most people, he took the appearance of the new kid as a personal insult, an affront on his good small town sensibilities. On the first day of school, he did his very best to start a fight with Alex. Alex ignored him. Charlie took that even more personally than he did the boy’s appearance, but he did nothing about it at that time.
Alex managed to fade from existence for most of us, just another shadow on the wall when we walked down the long hallways to our next class in the eternal school day. That seemed to suit Alex just fine, he seemed no more interested in becoming our friends than we did in him becoming ours. Summitville’s just like that, even today. I would have probably never even come to know Alex, if it hadn’t been for Charlie Hanson’s hatred of him.
I should explain a little more about the both of them, I suppose, just to help you understand the hatred that I can now look back on and see so clearly. Charlie was a big kid, like I’ve already told you. But he was a fairly good one for the most part. Charlie would have stopped on the side of the road to help you in a heartbeat, even if it would mean being late for work and possibly getting fired because he had already stopped to help others on the road that week. He was just that kind of guy. But Charlie would have only stopped to do so if you were a local. Summitville is the only town I know of in Colorado that hates the very idea of tourists. When other places with similar slopes on the nearby mountains were preparing to open ski lodges and were starting to make money from the winter tourists, Summitville was still doing its best to forget that the rest of the world even existed. Summitville had gotten on most of its hundred and twenty years without need of strangers, and it intended to keep on doing the same thing for the rest of its life. Charlie was like that, only more so. Charlie never liked strangers, it brought out the worst in him to see one lost and asking for directions. At the age of twelve, he happened upon a woman whose car had broken down near the farm that he and his folks ran. When she called out to him, he ignored her salutations for about ten minutes, until she speculated out loud that he must be re
tarded. After that, he screamed a blue streak of profanities at her, and actually tossed a couple of cow patties from the field at her. The woman called him a young hooligan or the likes and Charlie flattened her tires with a pitchfork for her troubles. Charlie’s mom came from the house then, and swatted him across his head with one of her ham hock hands for his behavior, and then called her husband Emmett over to help the poor woman with her car. I’d have never heard about that at all, even in a town as small as Summitville, but Charlie told me about it later, explaining that his father had told him he’d had his heart in the right place, but the best way to get rid of a stranger was to help them along their way out of town. Had almost anyone else in town done what he had done that day, they would have lost a few layers of skin from their butts. Not Charlie; his father gave him a beer for his troubles.
Charlie was always big for his age, and with his brown hair and brown eyes on top of a tan from working the fields after school, he looked rather like an Indian in one of the old Technicolor westerns that came a few years after my tale. Even back then, more as a term of endearment than as an insult, people called him Chief.
Alex looked almost nothing like Charlie, except that he was male, and even that would have been debated by a few of the people in town. Where Charlie was broad across the shoulders and chest, Alex was lean, almost scrawny by comparison, but still athletic in build. Where Charlie had a lantern jaw that would have easily fitted a bull, Alex’s face was long and narrow. Where Charlie’s face was strong and wide, Alex’s was almost heart-shaped, bordering on being girlish. Alex was one of the most beautiful men I ever saw. Not handsome, beautiful.
Alex was also darker in hair and lighter in skin than Charlie. His hair was the color of the darkest night, and his eyes the same shade of blue as a winter sky when the sun is out and the clouds are just a memory. His eyes seemed like the promises of childhood, deeper than the threat of death or pain and as shallow as the concept of Santa Claus when you’ve turned sixteen. I could have gotten lost in his eyes, had I but noticed them in those early days.
In those days, I was head over heels in lust with my sister Antoinette’s best friend, Susan Hailey. Susan was a pretty girl, the kind you think of as the girl next door, but only if the girl next door is extremely chesty and likes to tease the older brother of her best friend. Anita knew how I felt about Susan, and that meant that Susan knew as well. Both of them took full advantage of this knowledge for endless hours of fun at my expense. What I would have given to kiss her only once in those days…
It was on a day when Susan was over that I heard about the troubles between Alex and Charlie, and it was Susan’s anger at Charlie that drove me to interfere. Susan was talking with Anita about the horrible way Charlie kept trying to pick a fight with the new kid, and I was in the same room as my sister and my heart’s desire, pretending to do my homework, while I listened to an angel’s voice. A wiser young man might have picked up the underlying desire in Susan’s voice to be closer to Alex, in the same way that I wanted to be closer to Susan, but I was far from wise in those days, and in truth I still can’t tell you what a woman is thinking from moment to moment. All I knew for certain was that the sandy-haired beauty that I so loved was in need of a knight in shining armor, and in my own eyes, I fit that bill. Too many comic books when I was a kid, I guess. I made a silent promise to Susan, to watch over the new kid from that moment on. It was made without a word being spoken, but I still wanted desperately to believe that she had heard me all the same. Now and then I still like to think that she did, because after all of her talking about poor Alex, she looked over my way for just a brief second, and smiled. It was on the strength of that perfect, summer day smile, that I became an enemy of Charlie Hanson.
A few days passed, with me pricking my ears every time that I heard Charlie’s voice, before I had my chance to be the hero. I finally raced for the glory on a Friday afternoon, just as the school bell was ringing the final release from prison for another weekend. With a quick smile at Mrs. Carpenter, the most beautiful ninth grade teacher any school ever had, I grabbed my books and rushed into the hallway that smelled sweeter for being a hallway in a school on a Friday afternoon. As I spun the combination on my battleship gray locker, I heard the sounds of Charlie’s voice, raised in outrage.
To my left, not a hundred feet from where I was standing, stood Alex Harris and Charlie Hanson, looking ready to take on the world and each other over the books that Charlie had just knocked from Alex’s hands. Loose papers fluttered to the ground, sifting aimlessly and spilling like the sad insides of some jackrabbit just a little too slow when it came to crossing the street out near the road out of town. The look on Alex’s face said all that needed saying, without a word being spoken; Charlie had just pushed him too far, once too often.
Charlie looked a little nervous about the whole situation, and that struck me as funny in an odd sort of way. Funny and a little sad as well; you come to expect a certain attitude from the people you know, and seeing him looking worried about taking this kid down after wanting to for so long…Well, that was almost like finding out that Jesus was just human, it didn’t fit with the way the world was supposed to be.
I was just as eager as the next person to see how this would turn out. Like every fourteen year old I have ever met, the promise of a good fight was enough to make me forget about my silent vow to Susan, especially if I could watch all of the action and not have to feel any of the pain. I would have been perfectly content to just watch, even then, if I hadn’t been able to see Susan, standing with Antoinette and another of her friends, Anita, looking at me, silently begging me to stop all of this before it went too far. I think I hated Susan in that one moment: she was stealing from me the right to simply enjoy the show and be a face in the crowd, a right that I had always enjoyed to the fullest extent. I was never much of a fighter, I had other things to do, like pine away over Susan, and read about other people’s fights. I never had a chance. Even as I was starting to hate Susan, I was achingly in love with her; her wish was my command. I knew it and I suspect that she knew it as well.
I stepped up to the two opponents, and stared my once close friend Charlie in the eyes. “Charlie, leave him alone. He hasn’t done anything to you, c’mon.” I wanted to sound authoritative, like a man who had a plan, but I sounded like what I was, a fourteen year old kid with a serious case of the “I’m gonna get my head stomped in” blues. I guess I was lucky anyway, Charlie took my words pretty seriously as he looked down into my eyes.
“It ain’t nothin’ to do with you, Philly. Get on away from here. This is between me an’ him.” The words were serious, I had done my part, I had tried to stop him, and I was relieved of my duty as peacemaker.
Except.
Except that I could feel Susan’s eyes boring into the back of my head, I could feel her wanting me to stop this before Alex got hurt. I think that was the first time I knew she liked him, and wanted to be with him. I think that was when I knew I would never have a chance with her. But hope springs eternal as they say, and I had already gone this far for her…I couldn’t simply stop myself and walk away. I had to do this as much for my own pride as for sweet Susan’s new love. “Charlie, leave it be, the teachers are gonna be here in a second. They’ll make you stay after. Leave it be.”
Charlie shook his head once, twice, a third time. As he reached out towards me, I felt something break inside, and I saw it break in his eyes too. He shoved me hard out of his way, and in the process, he broke the last strands of what had been our childhood friendship. It hurt me more to realize that what we had once had was finally over, than it hurt me to bounce off of the lockers when I landed.
I cried out in that brief instant, part of it was fear of having Charlie hurt me, but most of it, I think, came from the knowledge that he already had hurt me. I think I realized that the money our folks made had driven a wedge between us in some senseless way, and I knew that I had somehow hammered that wedge home, by standing up for a stranger.
It hurt my heart a lot to realize my loss. I would never again be able to go fishing at Lake Overtree with my old chum, I would never again tell stories to frighten or stories about old ghosts with Charlie as we camped in the pasture out in back of his family’s farm. What had been a trial separation had become a complete divorce of our feelings for each other, and those feelings could never be the same again. I didn’t think of it in those words, but I felt it in those ways. Our friendship was gone forever in that one stupid moment, and I cried out at the loss.
I cried out, and Alex Harris hit Charlie with a right hook that staggered him backwards. I had never paid attention to the quiet new kid, but even in my sudden loss, I knew what it was to be in the presence of a god. I had never seen anyone move so fast, and I never thought I would. He only hit Charlie once, but it was enough to take the wind out of Charlie’s sails. I like to think it was the feelings of loss in Charlie that stopped the fighting, I don’t like to think that Alex was simply too tough for him, but it didn’t seem that way. Charlie staggered around like a drunk on the fifth day of a four-day binge after he got hit, he held his stomach with both hands, and moved away from the crowd as if the floor was tilting madly under him. Everybody had wanted to see a fight; nobody had wanted to see anyone hurt, least of all Charlie. He was too good a person for that.
I watched him walk away for what seemed like hours, and only then did I notice the hand that was being held out for me. It was the new kid, Alex Harris. Until that second I hadn’t even realized I was sitting on the ground. As I accepted the offered hand, Coach Braddock reached the both of us, grabbing a handful of each of our arms, and escorted us to the Principal’s office.
In all of my time in school, I had never been to the Principal’s office. I had never done anything to deserve it. I felt like a man on death row, ready to hang for his crimes against his fellow man. Principal Hagen had that effect on everyone. We were given two weeks detention, it would have been less but old man Hagen knew we were lying when we said I had fallen down and Alex was just helping me up. That’s the way it was back then, you never narked on a friend, even one who isn’t a friend any longer, or in Alex’s case even a friend who never was. We accepted the punishment, and I was grounded for two weeks as a result of being given detention. My dad was never the type to be satisfied with the penalties placed by someone else, he always had to be in on the sentence himself. Dad had fought in Korea and in WWII. He wasn’t going to let me off easy just because I was young. He was going to work my butt into the ground because I wasn’t old. I suppose there was logic to those words when he spoke them, but they never have made sense to me since then.
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