i decided to carry this one myself. hope you like it...
i decided to carry this one myself. hope you like it...
Like Wildfire
Bill hadn’t thought about The Hanging Tree for more than a second in decades. It had come to him in his grief—his father was dead—so he’d Googled it and pulled up an aerial view.
Somewhere on the east coast, eight-year-old Billy Jones let the screen door slam shut and stomped off into the wood, kicking twigs and acorn caps and chucking stones at the trees. He didn’t want to play war with the boys or help the girls across the street at their lemonade stand. He wanted his mother to come home. She had only been gone a little over a week, but to Billy, months had passed. He wandered, grumbling, hardly glancing at his surroundings. The distance between his backyard and the high chain-link fence, which kept him from traveling down and sifting through the highway trash or getting smooshed by traffic or pulled into the mythical white van full of hippies or hobos, he’d put at a mile if anyone asked, though he’d find, when he was much older, an estimated distance of fifty-one feet. So long as he could see the backs of the houses and didn’t stray too far from the pathways or cross the drainageways, Billy trusted he was safe.
Grabbing the bill of his baseball cap, he pushed up to let the brisk air at his forehead. He sneezed. The cloying scents of mint, honeysuckle, and moldy bark had overwhelmed him. In the distance, a woodpecker pecked and, closer, a squirrel scrabbled about. There were other quieter sounds and the low swish-swish of traffic. Here and there, the clear morning light pierced the foliage in slanted, tree-width beams.
When his anger began to fade, Billy felt the sun on the nape of his neck and looked around to get his bearings. He froze on the spot. In his peripherals, he saw the fence on one side and the rise of rocky earth on the other. The vehicles were louder now. He could almost feel the beating he’d get if his father found out he was here alone. Before the wood opened into a great expanse of forest, it narrowed to a small clearing of about thirty kid-paces across. The Hanging Tree stood centered in the space of hard, trodden earth.
Why the kids called it The Hanging Tree Billy never questioned. It was actually two, eucalyptus trees cut off at nine feet and connected by a two-by-four with a splash of red paint near its middle.
He retreated. He had almost walked beneath the board, and none of the kids were stupid enough to risk that. On a dare, a kid might walk around one side of The Hanging Tree to stand at the far edge of the clearing for a couple of breaths, before he booked it back, pale-faced and wide-eyed.
Billy had asked his father about the history of the structure, but his answer had mirrored the other adults. He’d shrugged, blank-faced, and threatened the belt if Billy ever traveled to the clearing alone or had the gall to venture into the forest.
As he turned away, a familiar, faraway voice called his name. A shadowy, smoldering figure in a white dress smudged the ground as it made its way toward him, gliding from tree to tree, disappearing behind them like the characters in Saturday morning cartoons. Before it stepped into full view and revealed his mother’s pale skin, dark hair, and light eyes, the fine hairs on Billy’s body stirred and an oily, fiery bubble rose from the pit of his stomach and popped in his throat.
“Mommy.”
The woman waved, silently drawing nearer and nearer until she stood in front of him. Her bare feet were clean of debris. Smiling, framed by The Hanging Tree, his mother looked Billy up and down. Vaguely, Billy noticed the silence. No cars, or animals, or birds. Just the sun on the spill of his mother’s hair, the veins in the tips of her pink fingers, the glint at the sharp points of her nails. Bit by bit, in the shimmering haze behind her, the scorched trailway disappeared, receding like the tail end of a backtracking snake.
He flung his arms around her and squeezed. A teardrop slipped down his face. The skin beneath her stiff clothing was cold and taut. A hand patted the top of his head, and he let go, a bit disappointed. He was underneath what he called the bloodstain.
“Daddy said you left,” Billy said. “He said you went to Aunt Sally’s house.”
The hand ruffled his hair, and his scalp tightened.
“Don’t fault the man for lying, Billy,” she said. “He’d do anything to protect you. Only this time, I fear, he’s protecting himself.”
“What?”
“Never you mind.”
Frowning, Billy started home.
“Come on.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, beautiful boy. I can’t come through unless you invite me. It’s just how these things work. Haven’t you ever read Dracula?”
“What?”
“Oh, I’m so silly. Haven’t you ever seen the movie?
“Well, yeah, but you’re not a vampire.”
“You’re right about that, but you’re wrong in assuming I’m your mother. Not yet, Billy. Not yet.”
His mother grinned, her big teeth washed in blood until he blinked. He wiped a hand across his eyes. Her smile was gone.
“Say it, Billy. We all respect The Hanging Tree.”
She grinned again but her teeth were small and white the way he remembered.
He waved her through with his hand.
“Come on.”
“Say it, William Silas Jones. Tell me I’m invited. Tell me, and we’ll go home. We’ll make a cake together, and I’ll give you the batter on the spoon, and we’ll make the frosting, and you’ll get the spoon for that as well. And tomorrow Daddy will go back to work, and it’ll just be you and me again. Like it used to be. I promise.”
Billy grabbed her limp hand and pulled. He refused to say anything. He was angry with her, because she’d left him. With a flick of her wrist, Billy landed on his backside. For a heartbeat, her skin felt like his bike’s handlebars in the morning. Though dark clouds had hidden the sun, it was hot out, much hotter than it had been when Billy realized he’d taken himself to The Hanging Tree. His shirt clung to his back and belly. His torso thrummed and fluttered as if it were a bucket of swimming minnows.
He got up and brushed off, his hands dry and itchy.
“I’m sorry, Mommy.”
“You should be. Am I invited or not?”
Billy swiped tears from his eyes.
An exposed root cracked and echoed through the still morning. Billy gasped.
“Say it,” his mother hissed.
“I knew it. I just told you not to come out here,” his father said. “Who is that? Who are you—"
His father walked into the clearing.
“Oh my God.”
His father pressed the butt of the rifle into his shoulder. His body straightened, and the loose skin on his face tightened. Billy caught his father’s scent on the slightest breeze. It smelled like the beer cans his mother rinsed out. His father was generally slow and cheerful when he smelled like that, but not now. He looked ferocious, and as if he’d grown to Godzilla-size. The question of why his father had brought the rifle never occurred to Billy, but days later, he would listen to the man drunkenly talking about the issue and think: because you needed it.
“If you’d like to be able to sit,” his father said, “you’ll get your ass over here.”
Billy looked from one parent to the other. His face warmed over and his chest heaved. He put both hands on his hips.
“No. You said she was at Aunt Sally’s. I don’t remember Aunt Sally.”
“Don’t make me say it again,” his father said. “She doesn’t even look like your mother.”
“Billy?” his mother said, and Billy reached for her. His body still ached for a hug. Startled by a series of rapid footfalls, he hesitated. He was jerked by his collar and flung back. He tumbled onto the dusty earth, scraping his palms.
“You need to go,” his father growled, stepping back, lifting the barrel of the rifle.
“Hank,” his mother said. “Maybe you should clout the boy again. I don’t think that one worked.”
His mother turned her gaze on Billy. His father grunted. For an easily forgotten flash, her eyes hadn’t looked right. She opened her arms.
“Say it, Billy. Let me in, and we can all be together.”
Billy pressed his scraped palms into his eyes.
“Ok, mommy. You can—"
“No, no, no,” his father interrupted.
He centered the barrel of the rifle on the woman’s forehead.
“Hank,” she said. “Billy and I have plans to make cake. Our son. You’d do it? Think of the mess. You know something always lets me in. A chink in the armor. Something little-big like a lie.”
She pressed her forehead against the barrel, dimpling the pale, clear skin. His father glared at her. Billy had never seen such a look. He hated them both.
“You need to get it through your thick skull. She’s not your mother.”
His father’s finger moved from the trigger guard to the trigger.
“I said go.”
He shifted the barrel toward the woods. Billy noted the imprint of one circle inside another on his mother’s forehead and the red mark moving away from it.
His mother placed her hands on her hips and studied each of them. The silence deepened. Her head darted forward. She sucked air through her nose.
‘Good enough.”
Her eyes turned a glassy black. What little light pierced the dark clouds lent them a red iridescence. They reminded Billy of polished stones.
She spun around, stepped out of the white dress that had pooled at her feet, and walked naked into the woods. Billy stared down at his shoes. His father remained quiet for so long that Billy started when the man’s voice cracked like a wind-broken tree. It was time to go.
Gently, one of the man’s hands added pressure to the boy’s back and guided him homeward through the heat. The rushing of the cars on the highway slowly faded to the whisper of a broom on a hardwood floor.
The front door closed. The deadbolt snicked. His father carefully placed the rifle in the corner. He led Billy to the couch, and Billy sat. Soon the man sat beside him, and Billy slid into the dip. His father’s arms wrapped around him.
“It’s okay. We’re safe. You shouldn’t have been out there. I told you not to go out there, but—”
The man shuddered. Something twisted low in Billy’s stomach.
“Daddy?”
His father’s stubbly chin found the top of Billy’s head. Hot tears collected in his hair. The man sobbed, sputtered, spoke.
“Your mother’s dead, Billy. She’s gone for good. I can’t say why I told you different.”
Billy stared at his father’s pantleg.
“She was always so sad,” his father continued. “But she loved you. You know that. Just like you know that woman in the woods wasn’t her.”
Billy nodded, remembering those awful eyes.
“That woman was not your mother,” his father said, squeezing. “You can’t let it get into you. It spreads. It spreads like…”
Bill closed his mouth and the laptop. The image on the screen had stirred up impressions he didn’t have the heart to investigate. The Hanging Tree was so much smaller than he’d thought. No bigger than the front door of a house.
He made a fist and looked at it. He had placed the hand on the cold rigidity of his father’s chest, while the other rested on the cloth overlay lining the coffin, and he’d had to lean forward over the man to do it. The man who hadn’t made it out of his sixties. The angry drunk he’d feared as a child and loved secretly as an adult.
“I have no parents,” he told the room.
He wondered if his father’s voice would take up residence in his head the way his mother’s had. Strangely, though Bill knew she had killed herself with pills, his mind insisted on another story. She had walked off into the woods one day, never to return. From time to time, since boyhood, an image flashed in his mind’s eye. A couple who looked a lot like his parents, but with fish-belly white skin and lifeless eyes like polished stones.
Bill considered his ex-wife and their daughter and decided he could try to make things better. He had known what it was like to lose someone dear and had let his father slip away too. His wife’s door was closed and locked, but he imagined his daughter’s was open a crack. He promised his parents he would act soon.
Bill rose and steadied himself with the back of the chair. The furnace hummed, warming the small, quiet room, but the hand—the one that had touched his father—still seemed cold. An idea came to him with a pang of truth. He wondered how much of his life he had spent waiting for that eyeblink moment when the eyes looking back at him were so red they appeared black.
© Michael King