Under-Heaven

by Tim Greaton

  Then I started attending classes at the University of Maine…and met Peter!

  Just thinking his name made me want to scream! How had I let him pick me up like some novelty at a Maine gift shop? I’d never know. Worse was the way I had let him discard me the same way.

  Oooo!

  Two more acorns fell at my feet.

  Not caring where they came from, I kicked them off the deck like a soccer star. The jolting motion sent two spike-like pangs right into my surgery scars. I massaged under both breasts and wondered what kind of a man would want me after I’d maimed myself for that womanizing bastard!

  Damn him!

  At least back here in Maine, Peter wouldn’t have a front row view of my failure to replace him. I leaned back in the chair that suddenly didn’t feel as comfortable and stared up at the old oak tree that shaded most of my parents—now my—back lawn. Ray had generously deeded his half of the house to me before probate had even finished with my parents’ meager estate.

  It was especially great of him since he didn’t yet own a home of his own.

  Ray had been in medical school for my entire adult life and was now finally working on his residency at Maine Medical Center. Given how much even novice doctors made, I suspected he could have purchased a nice home anytime he chose. Though he never said as much, I got the impression his roommate—lover—George was the reason he had been putting it off. Apparently, George was still playing the field, which sent Ray into jealous fits. When the two of them had picked me up at the Portland Jetport, the tension was unbearable. When, two hours later, we finally pulled up the long gravel driveway to my parents’ hilltop house, I was beyond relieved to get out of a car. Next time, Ray would either transport me alone, or I would take one of those scary four-seat airplanes from Portland to the tiny Farmington airport. After all, I figured a plane crash couldn’t be any worse than the wreckage that Ray and George’s relationship had become.

  I was still staring up into the oak tree when I heard chattering and saw an acorn come sailing out at me. I ducked and the little nut smacked loudly into the back of my father’s Adirondack chair.

  “Hey you!” I yelled, trying to peer up through the heavy foliage.

  A cluster of leaves moved, and I heard a noise that sounded strangely like snickering. A tiny black nose connected to a gray snout poked out where I could see it, but a second later it disappeared. After a few more minutes of being laughed at, I stomped into the house. I wasn’t sure who I was angrier at, Peter for forcing me to move back to this ridiculous state, or the owner of the tiny gray arm that flung another acorn at me just before I slid the patio door shut.

  Ping.

  I had only been back in Maine for a month when my first dating disaster occurred. I suppose he was a nice guy, but Cathy had either exaggerated or meant “really cute,” in an unkempt-bear-in-the-woods kind of way. The sound of a backfiring engine coming up the hill announced his arrival, and I was waiting on the front steps when a rusty Chevy pickup truck pulled up beside me. Other than rust, the truck consisted of at least four different panel colors, almost as though parts from different vehicles had been stuck together. Inside the cab wasn’t any better. Loose wires hung out of the dash and the cloth ceiling draped down and stuck to my recently moussed hair like lint to masking tape. By the time we slalomed around the few potholes that my date managed not to hit on the way to Menyon Falls’ worst restaurant, my hair was an absolute catastrophe. Of course, it probably went better with my date’s uncombed, oily curls.

  The evening went downhill from there.

  Junior (I swear that was his name) had left the truck and was halfway across the parking lot by the time I managed to extricate myself from the fallen cloth ceiling and the sticking passenger door. I seriously considered walking in the other direction and maybe hitching a ride back to Campbell Hill, but I knew my co-worker Cathy had genuinely been trying to help when she arranged our blind date. One way or another, I was determined to get through it before closing the chapter on the huge man in the sweat-stained tee shirt that was still moving away from me.

  Big John’s Fish and Grill was, as the sign suggested, run by a man named John. Contrary to the restaurant’s moniker, however, there was nothing big about him. He was short and thin with stick-thin limbs. But his deep bass voice boomed like James Earl Jones every time he called back an order to his thirty-something son who, equally short and thin, ran the grill. Two squat older women ran back and forth between Big John’s worn tables with trays of deep-fried food sprawled across grease-spotted paper plates.

  “Want the seafood platter?” Junior asked as he somehow managed to slide between the table and a bench seat. Rather than looking at me, his eyes were directed towards a stack of fried batter on the table across from us. He was salivating like a dog waiting for table scraps.

  I winced and kept silent.

  “What can I get for you two lovebirds?” one of the older women said as she wiped her hands on a disturbingly soiled apron.

  I forced a smile.

  “We’ll have two seafood platters,” Junior said, “with extra coleslaw and rolls.”

  It was true that I hadn’t announced my preference for food that wasn’t an oil-soaked heart attack, but it never occurred to me I wouldn’t get a turn to order.

  “And to drink?” the woman asked.

  “A martini,” I said, “heavy on the ginn.”

  The woman’s eyebrows rose and further wrinkled her already deeply creased forehead.

  “Good one,” Junior said.

  His eyes still hadn’t left the table beside us. At any moment, I expected the couple beside us to tell him to “Go lay down.”

  “We don’t mix drinks,” the waitress explained in a tone that made it clear she didn’t appreciate having to educate me about it.

  “Two diet Coke’s,” Junior said.

  Before the woman could scratch that on her pad, I spoke up.

  “Diet Coke for him,” I said, “and beer for me. You do have beer?”

  The waitress gave me a scathing look and a slight nod.

  “Heineken or Bud—not light.”

  “I can’t drink before I eat,” Junior said after she left. He spared me a brief glance. “Alcohol bothers my digestion.”

  My eyes bounced off his gut, which was pressed against the table like a giant overstuffed sausage. Somehow I suspected his digestion problems had more to do with treating his throat like a continuously open funnel than any particular type of food or drink.

  It wasn’t long before the waitress brought our drinks, which at least gave me something to do while my date concentrated on other people’s food. Watching his throat and jaw move silently while he stared at other people’s dinner, pretty much ruined my appetite.

  By the time two steaming piles of deep-fried something or other arrived at our table, I already had the beginnings of a buzz. I would have ordered a second beer, but for some reason my addled brain wasn’t having any better time than my sober brain had. Besides, it struck me as wise to stop now and ensure I could control the evening well enough to cut it short.

  “Is there anything else I can get for you?” the woman said, more pleasant than before.

  “Black coffee?” I asked.

  “Another Diet,” Junior said with a burp, holding up his glass.

  Over the next half hour, I nibbled on one of the rolls while Junior attempted a speed record for inhaling Big John’s food. At one point, I reached for a sugar packet and thought he was going to take a chunk out of my elbow when he stabbed his fork at another mouthful of food.

  “Good, huh?” he said, coming up for air near the bottom of his own platter.

  I swallowed hard and nodded, then pushed my own untouched meal toward his side of the table. His look of appreciation was the most attention he paid me the entire evening…which , don’t get me wrong, suited me just fine.

  Finally, when all the shrapnel could be cleared away, Junior offered to take me bowling.

  “I
t’s a great way to work off a meal,” he said, patting the top of his bulging stomach, followed by a long, deep belch.

  “That’s okay, Junior,” I said. “I’m feeling a little tired.”

  The waitress appeared a few seconds later and slid an upside down bill solidly to his side of the table.

  “Are you sure I can’t get you any dessert?”

  For a brief second, it looked like Junior might actually attempt another paper plate-to-stomach speed record, but after brief consideration he declined.

  “And you,” the waitress asked, “can I get you an ice cream sundae?”

  I shook my head.

  As she turned away I heard her add in a low whisper, “Or a cab?”

  I smiled.

  “Change your mind about bowling?” Junior asked.

  I shook my head.

  Junior burped every time his truck struck a pothole on the way back, and I thought he was going to lose both our meals when he hit the washed out area between Elm Street and the beginning of my long gravel driveway. I prayed that his truck would make it up the hill in record time because even with the windows rolled down, I didn’t think I could endure the smell of his gastric gases for much longer.

  I nearly cheered as he crested the hill.

  He was still trying to wrestle his shifter into park when I flew out the door, wished him well and raced inside. Thanking god for allowing me to escape the awkward I-think-I’ll-puke-if-he-tries-to-kiss-me moment, I breathed heavily and leaned against the locked door until he finally got the hint and drove off.

  I didn’t realize tires could squeal on gravel the way his did all the way down my long driveway.

  Relieved it was over and prepared to tell my mother about my disastrous night, I poured myself a glass of wine and went out onto the deck. A light breeze was blowing, and beyond my little square of groomed lawn, the tall field grass with hundreds of fireflies riding the stems undulated like floating candles on a choppy lake.

  Breathtaking.

  My gaze settled toward the low shadows at the back of my lawn. I opened my mouth to speak, but suddenly realized there were two, not one, tombstones staring back at me. I had always been able to talk with my mother about things like boys and bad dates, but I wasn’t ready to share them with my father. I knew I was being silly but I remained silent.

  I heard a soft chirping coming from the old oak tree.

  I flipped the backyard light on and there, seated on the tip of a branch that seemed barely able to hold itself forget an animal, sat the cutest baby grey squirrel. But as I studied it, I came to realize it wasn’t so much a baby as just extra thin, almost skeletal.

  “So you’re the little troublemaker,” I said.

  The squirrel cocked his head to the side and stared at me with wide amber eyes.

  “You wouldn’t be so thin if you stopped throwing your acorns at people.”

  He gave me another soft chirp, then turned and marched up the branch, which swayed like a rope ladder beneath his skeletal weight.

  “Bones,” I called after him. “I’m going to call you Bones.”

  » ~ »

  Bradley Christopher Dennelly was a member of Menyon Falls’ most wealthy family, which owned a tire warehousing company. In the three months since I had moved back to Maine, he—like half the single men in town—had come to view me as the exotic challenge of the year. But, unlike nearly every other man in town (Junior was from Augusta), I didn’t know him from my childhood. Apparently, his parents had sent him away to several private schools. And his summers had been spent out on the Massachusetts Cape, only three doors down from one of the Kennedy clan.

  I thought I vaguely remembered him, though. One time his father had decided to have a float in the local Thanksgiving Day parade. It was a huge papier-mâché tire with a boy swinging from a much smaller, real tire in the center. About the only thing I remembered about that swinging boy was a pair of deep dimples that were either movie-star good looking or Wizard-of-Oz strange. As Bradley pulled to the top of my long driveway in his convertible BMW, I decided it was the former.

  “Your chariot awaits,” he said as he got out of his car.

  I came down my two front steps—and tripped, face-first onto the gravel!

  Mortified, I lay there for a moment before reaching up to be helped to my feet. My arm hung there for several seconds before I realized that no help was coming. Now doubly embarrassed, and with tiny bleeding scrapes on my palms, I got to my feet and said a silent prayer of thanks that I had chosen dress slacks and not the green dress that was still lying on my bed.

  “You okay?” Bradley asked. He hadn’t budged more than a step from his driver’s side door.

  “Peachy,” I informed him. Even though I was aggravated enough to march back up my stairs, I was hungry. Besides, I felt confident that although obviously not gallant, he probably had reasonably good taste in restaurants.

  In that I turned out to be right.

  We drove the twenty-five miles to Augusta in about fifteen minutes. Though I had known he drove a convertible and made sure to leave my hair mousse free and pre-tousled for the ride, I couldn’t have known how his driving would be terrifying enough to ruin my makeup.

  We pulled into Ben Angionne’s Fine Italian Cuisine parking lot on two wheels and slid to a screeching halt beside an Augusta police cruiser that was either waiting for a call or was picking up dinner. Either way, the officer didn’t seem at all prepared for us when Bradley’s car came to a jarring halt barely two feet from his door.

  Anger was written like a jail sentence across the policeman’s face, and that anger turned to intense fury when he realized he couldn’t even open his door to get out and issue a summons.

  Then like the star of some crazy college buddy movie, Bradley leaned over and gave the policemen the finger.

  “Looks like you’re stuck, Officer,” he said.

  I would have bailed out right then but, like the policeman, I didn’t have enough room to open my door and crawling out through the window would have required crawling into the policeman’s car. Given the officer’s feral snarl of hatred, that didn’t seem like a good option, either.

  Bradley stomped on the gas and sent us surging forward like a rocket out of a launcher.

  I must have screamed more or less constantly as we slewed out into traffic and barely missed a telephone pole and a mailbox, because my throat was already sore by the time we shot past the Augusta mall.

  “Stop!” I yelled at him.

  He didn’t even look at me, a smug smile plastered across his face.

  What was it with the men in Maine?

  I continued to scream and beat on Bradley’s arm, but to no avail. By the time we hit the Winthrop town line, the convertible was leaping small hills like a BMX on a cross country track. Unfortunately, what comes up must also go down…but not necessarily with my stomach intact. After leaping one particularly steep hill, we landed hard, bumper-first.

  Sparks flew and so did whatever was left of my lunch.

  Being lucky, as I obviously am, I spewed straight onto Bradley’s shifting hand.

  “Gross! That’s fucking hot!”

  Somehow I didn’t think he meant hot as in sexy as his car careened to a sliding stop.

  “What’d you eat fucking eat, charcoal bricks?” he said, furiously wiping the back of his hand against his pant leg.

  I didn’t care what he said, because I was already churning backwards out the door and over the curb, where I stumbled to a seated position on someone’s lawn. I started to cry.

  “Fucking crybaby!” Bradley spat.

  The momentum of his takeoff slammed the passenger door shut as his tires peeled smoking rubber for the first few hundred feet.

  But no matter how fast his car went, Bradley Christopher Dennelly couldn’t have disappeared from my life fast enough. Later, I would laugh at the sight of the half-dozen police cars that swarmed past me only a few minutes later. At that moment, however, my entire body was still
shaking with terror.

  Cathy tried to talk me into catching a ride home from Junior, who after all lived only a few minutes away in Augusta, but I told her she either had to pick me up herself or I would tell everyone in the office what had happened between her and the soccer team in eighth grade. I had only walked a mile or two before her red Jetta made a neat U-turn in the middle of the road and pulled alongside me.

  On the way back, we passed Bradley’s car, surrounded by at least a dozen police cars from several different towns. Though I had been hoping for huge dents or for his car to be flipped upside down, I at least took pleasure at the sight of him spread eagle in the middle of the road with an officer the size of Junior yanking his hands behind his back so he could clap on handcuffs.

  By the time I got home, I felt fairly confident that I would never date another man again for as long as I lived, plus ten years. Bones seemed to agree from his narrow branch on the old oak. His amber eyes stared sympathetically into my own.

  “Chirp,” he said.

  “Okay, Bones, you can be my date from now on,” I told him. “At least you don’t drive.”

  I took a long swig of wine.

  Though as a kid I had always thought the single oak tree on Campbell Hill looked stupid (especially since my father would never let us climb it), I was rapidly growing to enjoy its shade and its furry gray occupant who had put on a lot of weight since we first met a few months before. It was starting to get cool, especially at night, and Bones began working diligently to collect fresh nuts for the winter. One night, I saw him scurry out onto a narrow branch and reach up to grab an even smaller branch that he then shook with all his might.

  Acorns fell like…well, acorns…to the ground.

  He shook a few more loose before scampering down to collect them.

  At first, I thought he was eating them but soon realized that each time he came down, he stuffed at least three acorns into his mouth before carrying them nimbly up into his squirrel hole where they would, presumably, be deposited into his squirrel pantry. Sometime in the midst of all his hard work, I retrieved the bag of treats I had gotten for him at the grocery store. I placed half a dozen peanuts still in their shells on the grass beside the ten or so acorns still there. When he reappeared on one of the oak’s lower branches, I had already returned to my deck.