Spoonwood (22 page)

19

MISSY

A
t age twelve I meet someone who will change my life for the better. Her name is Melissa “Missy” Mendelson, the youngest daughter of the Mendelsons. Missy is a year younger than I am, mature for her age in one way, immature in another. We meet down by Grace Pond. The first time I see her I resent her for playing in my domain. I'm so selfish, Mother. I just can't help it. She starts talking about saving the whales, and I tell her there are no whales in Grace Pond, and she says wouldn't it be great if there were, and the next thing you know we are speed-talking. I make my first friend.

Missy is taller than I am and very skinny. She wears thick glasses. Like me, she is bashful. She goes to private school, and she doesn't really like her summers at home because she doesn't have any friends here. She is the first girl I meet to talk to, and her presence excites me very much. It isn't a sex thing—I don't have sex on the mind at that age; it is, well, I don't know how to describe the feeling, it is just a feeling of wonder. When I am with her I am happy, and when I am not with her I make myself happy by thinking about her.

Most Darby kids swim at the lake where you were a lifeguard, but Missy and I swim and fish at Grace Pond, even though there's no beach and the shoreline is weedy or rocky or both and the bottom is mucky. We like the privacy. We like to muck around. I show her the place where Dad sunk his boat, but it's gone, which confirms my suspicions that Dad is out there someplace, watching over me or maybe just spying. Afterward we walk a couple miles down off the heights of the trust to Ancharsky's Store, drink Cokes, and hang around the Green.

I show her how to stalk people in the woods, but she isn't very good at it, and so we don't do that very much. We climb trees, or build “nests”—Missy's word—among the rocks. To relax from our forays in the wilds we sit around her room with the doors locked and play board games and listen to music. Or sit out on one of the many Mendelson decks in lounge chairs and drink pink lemonade. During these times, Doc Mendy doesn't act like my therapist but like any other dad—or what I believe real dads are supposed to be like—and I am grateful to him for that. Missy and I talk about our secret fears and desires.

I show her Forgot Farm. My school bus home, the Volkswagen in the briars, the falling-down yurt and outhouses, all the old hippie remnants have been removed. Even the well is filled in. The land has been allowed to return to “natcha,” as Grandma Purse would say.

Missy is never hateful, but hate is her favorite word. She hates her nose, she hates her dark kinky hair, she hates her thick glasses, she hates allergies that won't allow her to wear contacts, and most of all she hates her body. Missy believes she has some kind of terrible disease that prevents her from being a real girl. Her friends at school are growing boobs and some even have periods. (No reports of commas.) Doc Mendy and Maddy tell her she's normal, just a person who will mature late, but Missy is convinced that her parents are lying to protect her from the awful truth: that she will never mature.

I tell her she's lucky, that permanently immature people are the children of God. I tell her about my telepathic powers, and I
suggest to her the possibility of remaining a child forever through sheer willpower. For the first time I am behaving like a child, talking like a child, in the grip of the wonder of childhood. After much discussion, Missy and I conclude that childhood is The Delightful State. We could stunt our hormone growth through willpower and telepathy, I tell her. We practice by levitating objects, but no matter how intense our thoughts, we cannot lift a dime. We do have some luck dissolving clouds. We lie on our backs and stare up at the sky, thinking deep thoughts, and eventually the clouds part for us.

“Do you want to become a teenager?” she asks one day as we lie on one of the many Mendelson decks while mentally locking in on a cotton-candy cloud.

“Never,” I say.

“I have secret thoughts that maybe I do, and, like, maybe I don't,” Missy says.

“Look at the terrible things they do,” I say. “They litter, they drink, they take drugs.”

“And they, like, have sex,” she says.

“Do you want to have sex?” I ask.

“I thought about having babies, but not sex—no, not sex. I couldn't have sex or babies anyway. I'm just a freak of nature.”

“What I hate most about teenagers is their dirty talk, using the ‘ef' word all the time, worse than even Grandma Purse. I hear them when I spy on them. Look, I just dissolved that cloud.”

“I don't enjoy their sarcasm,” Missy says. “I wonder if you wanted to enough you could create clouds instead of, like, just dissolving them, which seems sort of violent.”

We make a pact that we will never have sex until marriage (not that I intend to marry), or if we do have sex we will never tell each other about it, because it will be so gross it will ruin our friendship, which is sacred. And so forth, just kid talk, but it is serious business for us.

We play Monopoly and Scrabble and I tell her that these little wooden blocks are made by working people who do tai chi. Missy is good at Scrabble, but I am better. We watch rented movies on the VCR, such as
Third Encounters of the Close Kind.
I find movie-watching liftupping and religious, and I wonder why Dad kept me away from the experience all those years. After the movie we have a long discussion about the possibility of intelligent life on other planets.

It is raining outside and we are in Missy's room. She is lying on her bed and staring up at the ceiling. I am lying on the floor, head on a giant beanbag sofa, and I am staring up at the ceiling. We have super-glued a mirror up there, so we can lie on our backs and look at each other and converse.

“You think it's possible?” she asks.

“That people would voluntarily be kidnapped by aliens?”

“No, that some people are, like, destined to live in a place far far away from anything they know growing up, even another planet.”

“What do you mean by destined? What other planet?” I say.

“I don't know exactly,” she says. “I have, like, this feeling that I don't belong anywhere I've been. That I'm not even on the right planet. That there's some far place where I truly belong—home, a real home.”

“Not me,” I say. “I was on the road for eons, and now I've arrived and for me the trust is not just a place, it's the only place. It's people outside the trust that creep me out, the way they live, and they're all so ugly.”

“I'm ugly,” Missy says.

“You're not ugly. You're beautiful, you're perfect.”

She takes her glasses off. “Here, put these on,” she says. “You need them more than I do.” We both laugh. Laughing with Missy is about the most heavenly experience I can imagine.

“Who do you take after in your family?” I ask.

“My old maid aunt Priscilla on my mother's side,” she says. “All the sisters are pretty but her.”

I watch Missy in the mirror, a long lanky being, not a girl, not a woman, not a boy or a man, but some special kind of gender that I like a lot. “They used to say Priscilla was a look-alike for Eleanor Roosevelt. Who wants to look like her? Who do you take after? Your dead mother?”

“I guess I look like my dead grandfather Salmon.”

“The Squire? Daddy says he was a great man.”

“I guess. I think your father is a great man.”

“I wouldn't know. He never tells me anything great. Your father is, like, unusual,” Missy says.

“My father is the greatest of all men,” I say. “I wish I didn't hate him and want to see him dead.”

Missy can see my face in the mirror, and she says, “Birch, are you going to cry? Don't do it. It would upset me.”

I master my emotions and do not cry.

“Do you ever see him?” Missy asks.

“I'm not allowed to, and Grandma Purse gets angry every time I mention his name, and the Elmans act real sad. Dad makes everybody sad. I just hate his guts.”

“They say he's . . . well . . .”

“I know what they say, that he's the town drunk. And maybe he is but I still love him.”

“I thought you said you hated him.”

“That's what I just said, that I hate him.”

“No. You said you love him. What do you think about when you think about him?”

“I'm a baby again, lying in my stick crib that he built, and he's working at his shaving horse making spoons, and I'm listening to the sound of his knives—
sip sip sip;
it's my lullaby.”

“What do you mean, spoons?”

“Dad carves spoons out of wood, or at least he used to, and he taught me how and it's such a stupid way to pass the time. It all seems kind of useless and I don't carve them anymore, because, well, it makes me sad.”

“You want to grow up to be like your dad?”

“I could never do it. I'm not good—I'm selfish. I don't care about anybody but me. I am basically evil. That's why I hate him. Because he's good.”

“You're bad, Birch, but I'm worse. I'm spiteful to my mother and sister. I hate their beauty, that they've got it and not me. ‘You're just a stick—honestly. Eat something,' my mom will say, like she's ashamed of me. And I'll just hate her when she talks to me like that, I'll just want to moosh her face into a meat grinder
and throw my sister in for good measure. So you see I'm more evil than you are.”

“I guess you are. I admire the hell out of you for it too.”

“Thank you, but I don't admire myself.”

“That's too bad, because self-admiration is the key to happiness.”

“Are you happy, Birch?”

“I'm happy when I'm with you, Missy. Your friendship makes me happy.”

“I'll be happy when I get boobs and I'm beautiful like my mother and she's old and ugly, and I can rub it in.” Missy's words are mean but her voice is sad and full of love. “You don't know what it's like having a mother. You're better off because you don't have one.”

I try to feel better off, but it doesn't work. I would take Maddy Mendelson as a mother even if she is a nag.

Missy and I don't hang around with the other kids, because we're Upper Darby snobs. We believe other kids are gross and stupid and violent.

20

POACHERS ON THE TRUST

A
fter Missy leaves for private school, I go back to stalking wild animals and hikers, and home schooling. It's rewarding to read a book and write an essay about it and to listen to my grandma Purse discuss it; it's rewarding to learn new things about the world of science from Katharine. But there is a great big hole in my heart. I try to hide my feelings, but I can't fool Grandma Purse.

I climb into her bed and she puts her arm around my shoulders and hugs me and blows smoke rings for me to watch. “I made a mistake bringing you out here into this big and lonely house where you can't find friends,” she says, her raspy voice full of regret. “I should have sent you to prep school, but I wanted you for myself. It's too late now. I don't know how to change myself, let alone change you. You want to go to Tasmania with me this year?”

“My mania is here, Grandma Purse,” I say.

“I knew that. I'll be gone for a month. You'll be okay with Katharine and Soapy and Roland?”

“Yes, Grandmother, I will be okay.”

I feel her strength flow into me. Unfortunately, it doesn't root and goes right through.

Missy comes home for the holidays, but I don't see her much because she and her family go south to vacation. Which I don't understand. There's nothing like the New Hampshire woods in the winter. Why go to a muggy, buggy place? I am more destitute than ever.

On the night of the first official day or winter four or five inches of fresh snow fall. It's over by morning, and there is no wind and the snow decorates the trees. The air is crisp, cold, and still. After morning home-schooling lesions I tell Grandma Purse I am going to go sledding. In fact, I am out into the chill looking for my deer.

It is her fourth year, middle-aged for a deer. Their bodies are still youthful at age five or six, but their teeth are getting on, which makes it harder for them to eat. By the time they're six or seven their front teeth are so worn they can't bite the hard twigs they have to munch on to strip buds for nourishment in the winter. Old deer usually weaken from lack of nutrition, especially after the snows begin to fall. Coyotes, or domestic dogs off the leash, chase them into exhaustion. If they escape the predators they'll lie down one fine day after a storm and just drift off to deer heaven. Death by jaws, death by starvation: why do you do this to your creatures, God?

I find the tracks of my deer family, though not of my doe. The deer are transitioning from fall to winter habits, though they have yet to move into their winter yards. Deer are like people. Some are smart, and some are stupid, and even the smart ones are stupid about something. The stupid ones use logging roads as trails for walking. They get shot in deer season. The smart ones stay off the roads, and the really smart ones, like my doe, devise hiding places and escape routes. But all deer are stupid about house and home. A deer family will stake out a territory and hole up for the winter until spring. The family will return to that same deer yard year after year. Sometimes they'll eat all the browse in the yard and starve to death even while food is in supply over the next hill.

I start back toward the main trail when I see tracks where a deer has come to a stop and stood still for a while. My doe. She's
been watching me. I think about my doe and her wariness and the doom of winter; I think about you, Mother; I think about Missy. I stand alone in the woods, trembling with emotions I do not understand.

A big winter storm hits a week before Christmas, and then comes the hard cold that invariably sets in after the holidays. I stay away from the deer yard, because I know my scent could scatter the family. They'd return to the yard, of course, but they'd be weakened by the unnecessary exercise.

Grandfather Howard helps get me out of my funk. We are having a big bowl of popped corn, sitting around the wood stove.

“Look what I found in the snow yesterday,” Grandpa Howard says. He puts a thirty-odd-six rifle shell-casing on the table. “Somebody's poaching deer on the trust lands, Birch. I saw blood on the snow and tracks beside this shell.”

“Why do they poach?” I ask.

“Some do it to supplement the family food store,” he says. “Back when we were short on cash, I was known to jack a deer out of season myself. That don't amount to much. Then there's ones who like the thrill. Kids mainly, not very good at the hunting part. It's professionals you got to watch out for. They kill deer and wild turkey, even ferrets and coyotes and porcupine. They sell the game to fancy restaurants in ski areas or as far away as New York. They sell to furriers, religious nuts, and quacks of various stripes.” Grandpa Howard must be reading my mind, because he adds, “You stay out of the woods for a while. Understand? It could be dangerous.”

“Yes, Grandpa,” I say, but it's a lie. I am going to catch that poacher and turn him in. I think maybe if I can be a hero I'll have masses of adoring people surrounding me and I'll be less lonely. Suddenly, I'm thinking about Dad.

“Do you ever see Dad?” I ask.

“Only by accident,” Grandpa Howard says, his voice flat, and he won't look me in the eye.

“I don't even know where he lives,” I say.

“That's because he doesn't live anywhere. He moves from place to place.”

“You think I'll ever see him?”

“When you're eighteen. If you want. That's what the law says.”

End of conversation. Nobody I know wants to talk about Dad. I work hard at forgetting he exists. Dad, the man who lives in forgot places, is on the way to becoming a forgot person.

At the moment I'm interested in finding the poachers. I don't know exactly what I have in mind. I'm curious, I'm bored, but mainly I'm sad. I want something wild and strange to happened to me. I used to imagine that I was being watched by alien beings who were judging my behavior. If I'm a hero the regular people of the world, the Hunger Money people, will reward me with some kind of spectacle beyond my imaginings. I know it doesn't make much sense, but that is what I am thinking.

By now a fresh snow has covered any tracks that poachers might have made, but I am still able to discover where they have been. I check the deer yards in the area. Two of them show the routine of winter deer life, the paths in the snow, the chewed shoots of hemlock trees. Another deer yard has been harassed by coyotes. In a fourth deer yard I find what I am looking for—disturbed paths where the deer fled an intruder. The deer returned when it was safe. I bet that my poacher knows what I know, and that he will be back too.

This particular deer yard is the logical one to raid, because it is the closest to a town-maintained road. Even so, if a deer has been shot here the poachers would have to drag the animal more than half a mile, though most of the going is downhill. I inspect the area. I see broken branches and soft indentations where snow has covered clumps of tracks. From the disturbance I judge that two or three people have hauled a deer out.

The trail leads to a town road and a wide place where the snowplows turn around. No doubt the poachers parked their vehicle in this spot.

I try to think like the mastermind poacher. I plan this act very carefully. I am a hunter, and I know this particular deer yard. I
know about the turn-around, so I'm probably a local guy. I am not a kid. A kid might take a pot shot at a deer, but he wouldn't know about the deer yard and he wouldn't have the wherewithal to get the deer out. A rifle shot at night would arouse suspicion, but it's not unusual to hear rifle fire during the daytime in the woods, especially on a weekend, when shooters do target practice, so I'll shoot the deer on a Saturday or a Sunday in broad daylight. I have a partner, maybe a brother or a best friend. One of us owns a pick-up truck or an SUV big enough to stuff a deer into the rear. Ideally, I'll watch the weather reports and commit my crime the day before a storm to cover my tracks.

Over the next couple weeks I learn some more about my poachers. He and his partner(s) are working on weekdays as well as weekends. They shot a half dozen wild turkeys and at least two more deer at another deer yard, the one that has already been disrupted by coyotes. I see from their tracks where one poacher has deliberately scattered the animals to panic them and another shot them as they ran down their paths. I have to stop them before they stumble onto my dear deer family.

I catch up to the poachers in an unexpected way, when I am not even looking for them. I am walking the snowmobile trail only a half a mile or so from Upper Darby Road when I hear the crack of rifle fire close by. Without thinking I start for the noise, clomping through knee-deep snow until I come to some rocks. I see movement not a hundred feet ahead. I freeze. I hear voices, but there is no alarm in the sounds so I know they haven't seen me. I creep closer, until I come to a big rock and hide behind it and peek over the top.

A big man in a red hunting cap and a full brown beard stands over the carcass of a bear. Beside him is a guy who could be his younger clone, maybe eighteen or nineteen, holding a rifle. His long brown hair is in a pony tail, which he constantly smoothes with his free hand. Beside him is a boy about my age. He is shorter than I, but very wide all the way around—head, shoulders, hips, chest. Not fat, just wide.

“Give me the bag,” the man says.

The boy about my age fishes around in his pocket until he comes up with a plastic bag.

Meanwhile, the man appears to be feeling up the dead bear with the point of a knife. It is embarrassing to look at.

“I hear something,” says the older boy.

I hunker down while they strain to listen.

“There's nothing out there,” says the man. “Don't get trigger happy with that thing.”

The older boy chuckles. Years ago when I was an infant I heard that laugh.

The man takes the bag from the younger boy.

“We're not going to shoot anybody, are we, Uncle Chester?” says the wide-bodied, younger boy.

“I'm tempted to shoot the Chinaman on general principals, but no, never mind. You're like your mother, Bez—you worry too much.”

The older boy points the rifle at the younger boy and says, “You doublecross us, and I'll shoot you, okay?”

The man named Uncle Chester chuckles just like the older boy. “Don't scare him, Junior. Nellie won't like it.”

“I wouldn't want that to happen. You're not a good daddy when you're shut off.”

“Watch your mouth, Junior.”

Uncle Chester stands holding the bag. I see a flash of red before he tucks the bag into young Bez's backpack. He wipes the knife on the hide of the bear and slips it into a sheath on his belt.

“Come on, let's hike,” says Uncle Chester.

“What about the bear?” asks the boy named Bez.

“The coyotes and the crows will strip him clean.”

The three poachers start walking away. I stand out from the cover of the rock. I have an idea to call out to them. Getting shot at or even shot seems grand. I have a good look at their backsides now and at the bear lying still in the snow. How could I be so stupid as to expose myself like this? I am about to duck behind the rock again when suddenly the young boy, Bez, turns
around. He sees me, and the two of us stare at each other for what seems like an hour, though it's more like five seconds.

“Come on, Bez,” Uncle Chester says.

Bez turns and walks off with Uncle Chester and Junior. I wait for them to wheel around and shoot me, but it doesn't happen. They just walk on, disappearing into the trees.

After the poachers are out of sight, I go in for a closer look. The bear is shaggy, not that big, about the size of a big dog, smaller and lighter-colored than the bear I found in a den a year ago. It has been shot behind the ear. I look around and can see now that the poachers found the bear's hibernating den, just some dirt dug out of the hillside, and shot it dead before it ever woke. They dragged it out onto the flat to do their dirty business. They didn't take the head or the hide or the teeth or the claws. Just what did they want with this poor creature, who was just trying to get a winter rest? The question is more disturbing to me than the carcass.

I don't tell Grandma Purse or the Elmans about the poachers. They became part of my secret life. A week later I am in Ancharsky's Store just hanging around. Joe Ancharsky was raised in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, but he had a dream to own a New England country store, and when he finally got one he made the most of it. The store is old-fashioned in looks but it keeps up with the times. It has a pot-bellied stove, necessities, a deli, and a movie rental section. Joe is the perfect storekeeper. He talks to everybody, he knows everything that is going on, but he never takes a position on local issues, so he has no enemies. Grandma Purse is checking the bulletin board, which she does every week or so, when I hear the ting-a-ling of the front door. A woman enters. She's pretty, but she has a wide body. With her is Bez, the boy poacher. We spot each other at the same moment. Bez's mom goes one way, and Bez goes the other—toward me.

“You didn't squeal on us,” Bez says.

“You didn't squeal on me,” I say.

“I was afraid Junior would of killed you,” Bez says.

“How'd you find that bear den?”

“Dumb luck. We stumbled across it during legal deer season.”

“You and those criminals coming back to the trust?”

“No, Uncle Chester and Junior don't work a place long enough for their truck to look too familiar.”

I'm relieved. My deer family is safe for now.

“I won't tell on you then,” I say.

“You're the Salmon kid, right?”

“My name's Birch Latour, but I do live in the Salmon house with my grandmother,” I say.

“I always wanted to live in a mansion,” Bez says.

That's the beginning of our friendship. Bez's real name is Bezaleel Woodward. He and his mom, Comfort “Nellie” Woodward, live with Bez's sister, Trudy, his uncle Chester Rayno (distant cousin of our cook, Soapy), and Uncle Chester's son, Junior. Chester is not really an uncle. He is Nellie's boyfriend. They live in the trailer park in Darby Depot. Bez and I sit around and dream up ways to assassinate Uncle Chester and Junior and get away with it, though neither one of us has it in ourselves to do the deed.