by M. O. Walsh
“Jesus,” he said, and began cutting the sheet into strips. “What did you do, stop to jack off a couple of times?”
I got up and surveyed the area, which was lit dimly by a fading clamp light Jason had hooked to a car battery. The place looked like a hoarder’s paradise, like a beach after a storm. I saw buckets, bottles, dirty towels, stacks of lumber, Playboy magazines, fishing poles, lawn equipment, chairs, and a bicycle. Then I saw more peculiar things like a shovel, a long-poled net to clean swimming pools, and a remote- control car, all made the more peculiar because they were mine. I also recognized Randy’s tackle box, noticed a pair of shears with the name “Kern” on the handle, and saw a miniature trampoline that Artsy Julie used to jump on. The webbing of the trampoline was broken and most of the springs had been removed, and so Jason Landry, I understood, like the opossums and coons, had been visiting our trash while we slept. He had pilfered our open garages and carports, taken advantage of our presumed safety, and hauled away cartloads of our forgettables in the night. Yet I saw no blatant purpose to the items he’d chosen. A box of chlorine pellets, a rusty watering can, a bag of golf clubs. I walked around as if at a yard sale. And then, in the middle of this clearing, I saw Jason’s shanty home in the branches.
“Not too bad, huh?” he said. “Is that how you pictured it?”
That this was the same tree Jason and I scouted those years ago uncorked a new sadness in me. The thousands of hours I had spent since that time falling in and out of things like love and mourning, Jason had likely spent by himself in these woods, bringing our childish vision to haphazard fruition. I walked around the base of the tree and studied it. Cradled between two of the strongest-looking branches, about ten feet off the ground, was a rickety shelter. It had plywood walls and a slanted wooden floor and was held together by nails, duct tape, and rope. It looked like it could fall at any moment. The roof was made of blue tarpaulin and sagged with enough stagnant rainwater to birth generations of mosquitoes. On each wall, crude circles had been cut through the plywood with hand tools and Jason had spray-painted phrases like “Fuck All!” and “No Survivors!” beneath them. Yet I didn’t see a ladder leading up to it. I didn’t even see an entrance.
“How do you get up there?” I asked.
Jason was now kneeling in the dirt, a small flashlight tucked beneath his arm, twisting the strips of bedsheet he had cut into what looked like small sections of rope with a knot on each end. He kept referring to a black book on the ground next to him, and in his diligence it was easy to imagine Jason earning a living one day, having a productive life in suburban America. But this would never happen.
“You’ve got to be skinny,” he said. “And you’ve got to be able to climb. It’s fat-ass-proof.”
I walked beneath the fort and looked up. There was a space in the floor near the trunk, barely a foot wide. As thin as I was, I’d have to hold my breath to get through. And on the trunk itself, I could see where the bark had been scored, maybe knocked a couple times with a hatchet, and I fit one of my hands into the grooves. Jason opened up a box sitting next to him. It was full of brown glass bottles, the same kind Old Man Casemore used to bring to our Fourth of July parties, the kind that he would fill with home-brewed stuff like strawberry- and molasses-flavored beer, and it felt to me a strange breach of etiquette for Jason to steal from someone so old and benevolent. I suppose I was naïve in this way. I watched Jason carefully remove the bottles, one by one, and drop a piece of handmade rope into their mouths.
“They don’t teach you how to do this in your bullshit high school, do they?” Jason said.
“How to do what?” I asked, but he didn’t answer me.
I looked up at the fort.
“Mind if I go up there?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Just don’t whack off all over the place.”
I put my hands and feet in the trunk’s hatching and made my way up to the fort. It wasn’t easy, as this particular tree was not meant to be climbed. It didn’t offer itself up in the way the knotty water oak by Lindy’s driveway did and, because of this, I understood that Jason had chosen well. Plus, I was a different guy now than the kid who used to own these trees back in the days of moss, and the act of climbing a new tree felt as unnatural to me as anything I’d ever done. My shoes kept slipping out of the grooves. My hands hurt. A chain on my rock-and-roll jeans got stuck on a nub in the bark, and by the time I was able to grab hold of the opening in the floor and pull myself through it, I was breathing hard and sweating.
I sat in the fort with my feet dangling out of the opening and was immediately overcome by the heat of the place. It was so stifling and focused that it made me forget why I had come out there. I felt a quick desire to take off my shirt and go crazy in the old woods, to wipe my face with mud, to pour water all over my head. I began to have truly outlandish thoughts and felt nauseated and confused until I realized what was causing it all—the overwhelming smell of gasoline. I picked up a flashlight sitting by the entrance and looked around the dark and spare fort. I saw a pillow and yellowed blanket on the floor. In one of the corners, I saw stacks of instructional and pornographic magazines like Popular Mechanics and Hustler. Next to those, nearly half a dozen dismantled flashlights. And there, lining the far wall, a series of oil cartons and gasoline cans. The cans were gallon-sized, with ribbed spouts, striped red and yellow and made of metal in those days. I recognized them immediately, as I had seen every inhabitant of our block lugging them around at some point in my youth. The oil was primarily the two-stroke type, used for small engines, and the cardboard cartons they were sold in were already soiled and greasy near their mouths. I thought back to the last time I had heard a lawn mower in the neighborhood, the last time I’d heard a leaf blower. How could they run, I wondered, when all of the fuel of Piney Creek Road had been stolen? What did our neighborhood even look like anymore? How far had we let it go?
I noticed our own gas can along the wall as well. It was dented and scratched along its side from where I had accidentally dropped it, years ago, while bringing it out to my dad as he mowed the largest part of our property. The cap had popped off when it hit the ground and quickly spilled enough gas to soak and eventually kill a large swath of grass by the driveway. I was young, maybe eight years old, and upset with myself. I just stood around, watching the gas pour out. My dad saw me standing there and got off his riding mower to approach me. He put his hand on the back of my neck as we watched the last bit of it soak into the ground and he said, Now, if we only had some salt, we could finish the whole yard off. He was trying to be kind, but I was inconsolable. Later that night, after a few drinks from a Styrofoam cup, he came into my room and stood in the doorway as I flipped through some comics. You’re going to have a hard time in life if you let every little mistake bother you, he said. Life is good, son. Enjoy it.
Okay, I said.
He was gone two years later. And it is hard for me not to wonder what he had already done at that point, when he told me how good life was. Was he already cheating on us? Was he with other women before Laura? Was he waiting until we all went to bed to make some clandestine phone call? If so, then did he mean that the good life, the life like he was living, was a life without virtue? Was that his advice? Or, as I like to think now, whenever we are together as men, was he just being honest? Was he possibly still in love with our family alone, but then life changed without his permission? I mean, was he saying that we should enjoy what we have because nobody, not even a person in love, knows what’s coming? What was he telling me? What was I learning?
Down below, Jason asked if I could pass him the gas cans.
I’d almost forgotten where I was.
“Try not to breathe too much up there, man,” he said. “Those fumes will mess you up. I thought I saw a fucking unicorn last night.”
So I pulled my shirt up over my mouth and carefully dropped the cans through the hole in the floor to where Jaso
n was standing. None of them were full, and as I pictured the shelf in our garage where my can should have been, I felt some strange guilt that it was empty. What else from my past could be missing? I wondered. What else were people just taking from me?
I watched Jason consolidate the gas into one master can.
“What are you doing with all this stuff?” I asked him.
“It’s a science project,” he said. “I want to keep up my grades so Mom and Dad will let me take Buffy to the prom.”
He was joking, but neither of us laughed. Jason had been missing from home for at least a week. I’d no idea how long he’d been missing from school, nor did I know how many schools he’d attended since he got kicked out of Perkins in the eighth grade. I knew so little about him at that time, so little about anyone, really. It stuns me, now, the limited information kids operate with. I watched as Jason began to mix the oil and gas in specific proportions outlined for him in his book and I began to feel an accomplice to something. “Jason,” I said, “why did you bring me out here?”
“Two reasons,” he said. “The first is in a blue envelope in the corner. Take a look.”
I set down the flashlight and walked toward the corner of the small fort, where a blue envelope sat on a stack of magazines and spiral-bound notebooks. I picked it up, lifted the flap, and shook out a small key. And although there were hundreds of possibilities in that square mile, thousands of locks in our lives, I knew what that key was for as soon as I saw it. It was the key to Mr. Landry’s private room, it had to be, and the immediate danger that it represented, the possibilities it created, twisted my stomach.
“I snatched it the night I split,” Jason said. “My dad passed out with the door open. I almost smashed up the fucking place, I was so pissed. But what good would that have done? I just unlocked the window instead. Now we can open it from the outside so it doesn’t matter how many combo locks he puts on that stupid door. I just wish I could have opened the shed.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “If you can get in that room through the window, then what do you need this key for?”
“I don’t need it for shit,” Jason said. “You do. That’s the key to his safe.”
I held the key between my thumb and index finger as if it was a lit match and I knew that Mr. Landry, if he hadn’t already, would check the window of his private room soon. I knew the match would not have long to burn. Then, through one of the cut-out windows in Jason’s fort, I saw something I never expected to see. Across the woods from us, maybe half a mile away, sat the Perkins School. I understood it was close, of course. I’d walked or biked to it thousands of times, but always on the sidewalks, always on the prescribed paths. And even though I’d ventured this deep into the woods before, I’d never achieved this particular vantage point. Yet there it was, glowing like a city in the darkness. The school buildings I knew so intimately were now rendered strange to me by their security lights and the grand old oaks of its quad were up-lit and beautiful. The football field and track were also lit, as if it was homecoming weekend, but the place was deserted. The sudden order of the manicured campus seemed a bizarre affront to the madness of the woods, and the school looked, from this angle, less like a school than a brochure for the school. It seemed an ad campaign for unattainable progress and it surprised me that Jason chose this view for his window.
More surprising, perhaps, was that I began to understand something important about humans and trees at that moment. I began to understand our shared history. To look at the world from a tree, as I had done so often in those years, is a fundamentally different way of seeing. It is contemplative and detached and the objects one studies from that height are rendered, at the same time, both majestic and small. A generally commonplace item, in other words, may stir admiration and mystery when viewed from that vantage point. Or, at worst, it may breed jealousy, desire, and contempt. It all depends on the viewer. And so, I have to wonder, what kind of viewer was I? What was that, exactly, up in the oak trees of Woodland Hills? An animal? Some sort of Peeping Tom? A sensitive boy racked with love and guilt?
Maybe.
My point is that climbing a tree to look at the world is primal. It is ancestral. So, as I imagine it now, the eyes in my head on that night were as dark and unreadable as an ape’s. This may not have been the case, of course. I may have been only a nervous kid with a key in his hand. Still, it makes me wonder. Where is that missing link in our human history? Isn’t it strange we can’t find it? Australopithecus? Homo erectus? What was the exact moment we hopped down from the branches? When we said Enough with all this looking and became emotionally engaged with the world? When we became vulnerable? What dream were we so compelled to pursue? What was the prize? What was the hope? What was the goal?
“Hey,” Jason said. “Come back down here. I need you to help me bury something.”
31.
The soil of the Earth is made of horizons.
Beneath our feet, intricate layers of matter lead down to the core. The first layer is known as the O Horizon and is where most of your visible activity takes place. This is the domain of the earthworm and mole, of rotting leaves and flower root. It is called the O Horizon because it consists of primarily organic material, all of it still closely connected to the living or dead. Lean down and muss this stuff with your hand, kick it around with your feet, it is of little consequence. There is so much life traffic here that your tracks will be covered in no time. Below this is the A Horizon. This is the place where hardy trees and perennials tap and grow and go dormant and then wake again the next year, a place the weakest vine and weed roots never reach. It is settled and weathered and dark and rich and so long established that it will forever be a part of this ecosystem. Drop a geologist out of an airplane and, rather than orient themselves with the stars, they will dig for the A Horizon. It is so abundant with life-giving energies that even the falling rain, I’d imagine, is hoping to settle there. Below this is the B Horizon, where only trace elements of life still remain. The stuff of this place is ancient and cool and so entirely leached of desirable nutrients that it has collapsed upon itself and become too dense to scoop or sift by hand. It is instead thick like earthen clay and, once excavated, must be molded, formed, and often cooked in hot ovens for long periods of time to become something that we can once again recognize: a bowl, a plate, a human face.
Beneath this is solid bedrock, where no shovels go.
All to say that it is only by digging through the many horizons of my memory that I’ve come to understand how this particular night of my youth evolved into the one in which it all went down. It has taken me a while, in other words, to understand how a day that started so benevolently—with my genuine interest in the welfare of Lindy Simpson and Chris Garrett—could turn into a night in which I stood in the dark woods with Jason Landry, looking down at a corpse.
The fork-eared dog had been shot through the head in a manner I would later hear described as execution-style. As it lay on its side, the one eye visible to us was sheared of its lid and made it seem as if the dog were in perpetual amazement, perhaps witnessing some miracle ahead of us in the woods. Its dark tongue had bloated and fallen through the bottom of its jaw, which was gone, and the onset of rigor mortis had stiffened the legs to make it look as if it was stretching for a nap. It looked healthier, in a strange way, than the only other time I had seen it, which was when Jason fed and chased it away from his house those years ago.
Still, it broke my heart like life does.
“Jason,” I said, “who did this?”
“Damn,” he said. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
I didn’t.
Of all the permutations in my head on that occasion, none conjured the scene that I later learned to be true: that of my mother with a pair of gardening shears in her hand, a bucket full of clippings at her feet. And on a hot day in the yard while her son was at school for orientation, when sh
e had perhaps paused to sip from a glass of lemonade on the wrought-iron table near the swimming pool, she heard the strange sound of a whimpering. Another sound, then, of a man’s voice. And it was only a casual curiosity that led her to the fence of our yard, where she pushed aside the branches of the althea and azaleas that had grown so strong in that light. And once there, she saw through the chain-link fence the enormous body of her neighbor, Jacques Landry, dragging a dog by the scruff of its neck to the woods behind their properties. And wherein as soon as she recognized this dog as the fearful stray she’d stumbled across on occasion, one she’d felt a torn sympathy for, toggling between calling Animal Control or perhaps bringing it into her own home to share with her son and surviving daughter who could use some cheering up themselves, she saw her neighbor straddle the dog between his legs, pull a pistol from his belt, and shoot it in the head. And as she was still so stunned by what she had seen, still held motionless, the moment her neighbor with a bandaged hand made his way up the hill and glanced casually in her direction, meeting her eyes with his own, she was unable to keep yet another small part of her once hopeful nature from dying. And so she backed away from the fence and ran into her house, where the only remaining space left to retreat was inside of her mind. And this is where she found me, I suppose, in her memory, mentioning a dark room full of pictures in that large neighbor’s house.
I didn’t know any of this then. I only knew that my mom had been frightened that day and that Mr. Landry was frightening. I also knew that Jason Landry was old enough to be working in a convenience store, to be venturing out in life, and yet there he was pissing his blankets at night, sleeping alone in a childish fort. I knew that he had scars on his back shaped like dimes because I had seen them. I also knew there was a part of me that believed Jason himself could have killed the dog. And so, now that he had chosen me to confide in, to team up with, I also knew that our views of the world were so wildly disparate that the fond way I thought about Randy Stiller, my pal, my best friend in the good old days, was likely the way Jason Landry thought about me. Over all the other mounting evidence, it may have been this strange idea, that I was possibly the closest friend Jason Landry had, that convinced me of his father’s guilt.