Tales From The Tangled Wood: Six Stories to SERIOUSLY Creep You Out

by Steve Vernon

  Forget about your daylight savings time, Dad always tells me, here in the Maritimes time is an endangered fossil fuel – slow, creeping and hard to find. Living here has given me a case of the all-the-timers disease.

  That’s Alzheimer’s, dad.

  We’ve got an aunt who has Alzheimer’s so I know all about it. Once a month mom drags us up to see her and most times she doesn’t know us any more than I know the pope. The idea of Alzheimer’s kind of scares me. It’s a little like having your eye knocked back into yourself so that all you can stare at is your own personal TV reruns.

  No sir, dad corrected me, its maritimers all-the-timers. It’s a condition that you get from sitting around with nothing to do and no cash and all of the time in the world to spend it on.

  He does have a point.

  Maybe you’re right dad. Maybe I ought to head for the Prairies. I bet I will find something out west.

  There’s no call for moving, he said.

  I expected that. Whenever dad thinks about moving he grows anchors and mud banks.

  Lots of people move, I said.

  Not our family, he said. We stick where God plunked us, close to home. Your family has lived here in Nova Scotia since the first tide turned.

  Then he pointed his finger up the hill towards the town graveyard and I know what’s coming. I’ve heard the granddad rant maybe sixty or a hundred times this year. My dad is like a CD set on random play, with only so many tracks and only so many rants to go around. He just keeps flipping the channels from rant to rant, clicking through them daily as if he wants to be sure he doesn’t miss any.

  Your granddad is buried in that graveyard, dad said.

  He’s not really. Granddad died at sea in a storm that carried his body out into open water. There’s nothing up there in that graveyard but an empty coffin ballasted in with a baker’s dozen beach stones.

  I’ve got to go, I said. Maybe look for a job.

  Pick me up a pack of cigarettes while you’re at it, my dad said.

  Pick them up yourself, I said, before I could think better of it.

  Dad up and cracked me one on the cheek, right hard.

  Mind your lip, chummy, he said.

  I nodded, not saying anything more. I backed out of the door, in case he’s feeling ambitious enough to take another swing at me. I rubbed at the cheek where it smarted. The mark will have faded before I reached the street. If it doesn’t I will blame it on the chill morning wind.

  And pick me up those smokes, dad shouted as I headed down the sidewalk. It’s the liveliest I’ve seen him in months. Then he slammed the door and went back inside to those goddamn scratch and wins that never would.

  Which brings me back to Tommy, whom I run into after running right out of my house.

  So what do you think about street fighting, Tommy asked.

  I rubbed my cheek, wondering if it was bruised over or faded clean. Dad would be wild if he heard what Tommy and me were up to.

  Sure, I said. Count me in.

  * 2 *

  Sometimes I get so angry I want to hit something. I used to pound my fist into my pillow before I went to sleep. I hit the wall once and broke the plaster. I covered it up with a poster of some rapper. I take the poster down at night and stare at the hole behind it. The hole looks a little like a mouth getting set to eat me.

  I hope it does.

  Alright, so I know that sounds kind of foolish but you have to understand that this was about two or thirty-to in the morning. The time of night when the clock radio glows like that asshole with the braces back in grade three who used to steal my toque and blow his nose on it and throw it up into the pine tree out back of the school.

  We used to call that tree the toque tree because there were so many winter hats hung up in there, and that asshole hung most of them. And that same asshole was sitting in my bedroom at two or thirty-to in the morning staring at me and grinning through his neon green clock radio braces.

  I swung on him one day and corked him a hard one and he fell on me like a tree and I remember the teacher pulling me up and my shirt was wet and I could taste gravel only it wasn’t gravel and the kid had a crooked funny kind of smile from where I’d bent his braces and ever since then people said I was a fighter and then one night at two or thirty-two in the morning I put my fist through the wall thinking that it was that asshole with the braces and dad never woke up.

  Some nights I peeled that rap poster down, unsticking the Scotch tape an ick at a time, until the wall was bare. I don’t know who the rapper was. I stole the poster from off of a locker at school. He’s probably got a name something like Big Rappy Jayhay or Five Knuckles ‘Mo. All of those rappers have the same kind of cool names, different , so they stand out.

  Maybe I will change my name one day to something like Throwmaster Smackdown. That’d put the fear into anyone who heard it.

  Some nights I just lay there and whispered words into the broken holed mouth in the wall. It’s too late to make sense I just kept whispering and hoped that the words will pile up like snow into some kind of sense but they never did.

  It beats the hell out of dreaming, which I don’t any more. Nowadays all my dreams sound like static on the radio, blizzards in March, with the snow rattling against the window pane and the wind whistling down the flu hole.

  * 3 *

  I figured I’d better train for the fight so I watched every Rocky movie up to number five because that’s how many were in the set that Tommy five finger jacked for me at the shopping mall. We were watching the one where Rocky runs up the mountain and shouts the Russian guy’s name. I can’t remember which number it was.

  Tommy was sitting beside me, dreaming out loud as usual.

  We’re going to be rich, Tommy said.

  So what are you going to do with all the money you make from selling the dvd’s I asked Tommy.

  We make, he corrected me. We’re going to make the money, not just me. We’re a team we are.

  Yeah whatever, I said, not bothering to correct him. I meant us, you know that.

  You see that’s the difference between Tommy and me. I’ve never really believed in Tommy’s dreams and schemes. They’re just a way for me to pass the time is all. Tommy buys into his own imagination but I keep my feet planted in the dirt.

  I want to use the money to save and send my girlfriend Shelley to Canadian Idol next year, Tommy said. She can really sing. You’ve heard her.

  I knew what she sounded like. She used to be my girlfriend, only one day I walked in on her and Tommy banging each other like a pair of drums. I stood there with that sort of smile on my face that people wear when they don’t know what in the hell else they should say. Then I swallowed that smile and said that everything was fine. I never did really care for Shelley that much at all. She was always too afraid to swallow.

  I had heard Shelley sing and she sounded like a bagpipe stuffed full of barn cats in heat, only not so pretty. Besides which she was going to leave Tommy sooner or later because everybody knew that she was already banging five other guys.

  Like I said, Tommy was a bit of a dreamer. He couldn’t deal with reality the way I could.

  So you figure you’re ready for the fight, Tommy asked.

  I touched the cheek ruefully.

  I still hadn’t told dad about the fighting. He’d be wild if he’d heard what I was up to. He’d be absolutely pissed.

  Yeah, I tell Tommy. I’m ready.

  We stopped watching the Rocky movies because one of the dvd discs had a scratch in the disc and it kept showing the same scene over and over. Him drinking eggs, gulping them down, over and over while the music kept pounding louder and louder.

  I tried drinking eggs once and puked them all out.

  I guess I was too chicken to swallow.

  * 4 *

  We spent a whole week digging the arena.

  At least arena was what we called it on Monday. On Tuesday we called it the hole, on Wednesday that godforsaken shitdig, on Thursday a pain i
n the ass, on Friday we called it a well to hell, but on Saturday we called it the pit. Actually, Saturday was the first time that the pit really began to look like maybe we knew what we were doing.

  This is really a cool pit, Tommy decided. He was wearing a big cowboy hat, like John Wayne, only it didn’t look like it fit him. I’d never seen him wear a cowboy hat before today. It didn’t really suit him much but I didn’t figure on telling him that. Maybe he just figured it was tick season and he’d be better off wearing a big old hat.

  Tommy had brought two new buddies with him to help. Hank Drummond and Lorne Smith. They were there for the muscle and the fighting. Hank was all muscle, tough and lean with a little Mi’kmaq in him, although his mother swore he was pure Nova Scotian. He wore a big old hoop earring fish hooked through one eyebrow. I wondered what that felt like going in and decided I never really wanted to find out.

  Lorne was the bigger of the two, but not in a good way. He had run to fat and caught it, big time. All soft and mushy around the middle. He had a mean streak in him that only came out around people smaller than him, which was mostly everybody but Hank and Tommy. He was bigger than both of them combined but somehow they both seemed to stand a little taller than Lorne did.

  If I had to fight either of them I hoped it would be Lorne. I figured I could take Lorne, if I got lucky. Lorne was big but slow and no kind of a real fighter. He just came at you like a bulldozer. You could wear him down if you were fast enough. An army of roadrunning comets couldn’t have worn down Hank. Hank was hard, tough and mean.

  We ought to have a cage, I said. All of these tournaments are usually fought in a cage.

  No, Tommy said, a pit will do. He’d seen folks fighting in a pit in a movie or maybe a comic book. I don’t know which but it had taken over him like some kind of an inspired vision.

  All of the big fights are in metal cages, I repeated.

  Yeah, Hank said. He’s right, they are.

  Tommy wasn’t listening. Tommy was really good at not listening. There were times when you would swear his ears were nothing but stone jug handles hooked on either side of his head.

  So why haven’t we got a cage, I asked.

  We’ve got this pit, Tommy said. It’s just as good.

  We dug the pit out in the woods. Three of us were digging and Tommy was doing most of the talking and pointing. I wondered if talking and pointing was any harder than digging. It was damn hard work digging. There was nothing but rocks and roots and dirt. It was probably the hardest I’d ever worked at anything before in my life. It kind of felt good to see it done, to look down into that hole I’d dug and say to myself – there, I did that.

  And now I was thinking about the cage.

  How do you guys like my hat, Tommy asked.

  It makes good shade, I said, trying hard to stay diplomatic.

  I found it at the Frenchy’s, Tommy said. I figure we can draw names from the hat to decide who fights who.

  I kept seeing the cage rising up from the walls of the pit, looking like something out of a science fiction movie. It would be so damn cool.

  So who’s doing the fighting, I asked.

  So far I figure you three, Tommy said. Lorne’s big and Hank is tough and you’re the fighter. At least everybody says you are.

  I knew that he was just trying to stir me up so I paid him no attention and kept talking about what I wanted him to hear.

  That’s not much of a stable to work from, I said. We ought to have a cage.

  I wasn’t letting that go. I had a vision and I had to see it come true.

  A stable, Hank said. Are we going to be riding horses while we fight?

  I’ve been doing some research on the internet, using the Google and such I said. I had found out that’s what they call a gang of fighters. A stable.

  Well maybe we can fight two or three times, Lorne said. We could wear masks, like in the wrestling.

  I looked at Lorne. He wasn’t helping much. Besides, as big as he was there wasn’t anyone in town wouldn’t recognize him, no matter what sort of a mask he wore.

  Have we got a video camera yet, I asked Tommy.

  No, not yet, Tommy said, but we’ve got ourselves a hat.

  At least we’ve got a pot to piss in, if nothing else happens, Hank said.

  And that’s when that idea pushed up out of the dirt of my imagination and I went and said it.

  I said I know where we can find the bars for the cage.

  * 5 *

  We hit the plumber’s shed on Sunday night. Breaking into his place was pretty easy. Lorne took a hammer to the padlock and it came off on the second swing. I kept expecting alarm bells to go off and guard dogs to start barking but who was I kidding? This was the lower asshole of Nova Scotia we were looking at, not anywhere handy to New York or Toronto. Security measures were at a bare minimum.

  Get in there, Tommy said. It was your idea.

  It was my idea and I was damn proud of it.

  So I stepped in first. I guess it only made sense. If there were any trouble I needed to be the one to face it. I was the fighter, after all. I was the one best equipped to handle anything we ran into.

  Besides I had thought of the idea first.

  I stepped out into the darkness feeling a little as if I were stepping off into the Grand Canyon, blindfolded. It gets pretty damn dark out here in the country, and it’s even darker way back in the back ass of a plumber’s shed. What made things worse was the ski mask I was wearing which kept on getting in my eyes. I had bought the ski mask at the Frenchy’s used clothing store, just in case we needed it to fight in but I figured if we were going to become burglars it sure wouldn’t hurt. Besides, it beat the hell out of Tommy’s damn cowboy hat.

  Lorne had brought along a pickup truck that he’d probably stolen and he backed it up to the shed. That truck sure was loud and the exhaust damn near smoked us out the plumbing shed. I was sure we’d die from the fumes or else we’d wake up the whole town with the truck’s revving engine and the sound of our wheezing hacking coughs.

  We filled the back end of the truck with as much ABS pipe as we could find. I figured it would be a lot easier to work with than copper piping. All I needed now was some glue and a hacksaw.

  We found both of those on the plumber’s workbench.

  I stood there for a long time staring at the work bench. I wondered how it would be to own a workbench like this and call myself a plumber. It couldn’t be harder than calling myself a fighter, I figured. Besides, it didn’t look all that much different from my dad’s workbench.

  I wanted to leave the plumber an IOU note but I figured the police might be able to use that as evidence. I told myself that once we’d made our money selling the fight DVD’s we could pay the plumber back for his missing supplies.

  You see, I had already begun to believe in Tommy’s big plan.

  * 6 *

  I spent the rest of the night building the cage, cutting the pipe and gluing them together. I was proud of myself by the end of it. I used full lengths of ABS as bars and Lorne and Hank took turns driving them into the dirt at the bottom of the pit with a sledgehammer. Then I used ABS T-joints and shorter pieces of pipe to join the bars together at the top.

  The glue and lack of sleep was getting to me. I wasn’t seeing any flying codfish or pink whales, you understand, but everything seemed clearer and louder to me, as if I was in touch with some sort of a deeper power.

  We’ve got to keep this a secret, I said to Tommy. We could get in a lot of trouble if they catch us.

  No kidding, Captain Obvious, Lorne said. Why don’t you tell us something we don’t know?

  I was talking about stealing the pipes but Tommy and Lorne thought I was talking about the fight itself. Hank didn’t appear to care one bit one way or the other. Maybe that was what it took to be as tough as Hank was. You had to not care what happened or what went on. You had to grow yourself a set of horse blinders and look straight on at whatever it was you were headed towards.

&n
bsp; We can’t keep this a secret, Tommy said. We need people to know about the fight. How else are we going to make any money?

  I stared at Tommy, wondering what in the hell I was thinking about. He was still wearing that damn cowboy hat. I think he was beginning to enjoy wearing it.

  This fighting isn’t against the law, is it, I asked.

  Of course it isn’t, Tommy said. They don’t arrest you for fighting.

  You’ve looked into this, I said, trying hard to hide the question mark that was hidden inside my statement.

  Sure I have looked into it, Tommy said indignantly. We’re going to make a lot of money. This is a great idea.

  There he goes on about the money again.

  So when do we tell people about the fight, I asked.

  Tommy smiled at that. He really looked proud of himself. I think this was his big shining moment.

  My dad used to tell me that every man in the world should look forward to his one big shining moment. There’s a time when we all get to climb just as high as we are able to, he said, and when we’re up there we ought to make the most of it.

  And then he went back to scratching his goddamn scratch and win tickets.

  I’ve already taken care of that, Tommy said. I’ve set up a site on My Space and we’ve had hundreds of hits so far.

  Yeah, I said, thinking about a very different kind of hit. I was wondering just how many hundred were in a hundreds and how hard hundreds of hits could hurt.

  This is a good cage, Tommy said, grinning at me like he meant it.

  I grinned back in amazement. I think that was the first compliment Tommy ever gave me. It sure was the best.

  Thanks, I said.

  The fight’s tomorrow night, Tommy said. You better get home and get some sleep.

  I stood there in the pit, staring out through the bars I’d built, grinning and stoned on ABS glue and about three hundred and sixty eight hours without sleep.

  This is going to be great, I said.

  * 7 *