Mrs. Martin - Part II

The art of the dare is lost on most adults. Childhood is concerned with a different sort of wage. Money is less important than avoiding shame, being seen as brave or at least not a cry-baby momma’s boy who pees his pants. Respect is sovereign. It’s all I dreamed of. Me, riding down Della Street and parents pointing me out to their children, “Look, there’s the boy who went into Bear Cave without a flashlight!” or “Golly, Susie, there’s Shamus Best, the boy quickly becoming man who rode his bike off his own garage roof!” or “Wow, there he is! The boy who fake tripped into Mrs. Laramie’s boobs for an Ewok Tree Base! What a brave lad!” A dare is how I ended up face to face with Mrs. Martin.

It happened the day Em and I were mixing a hex for Melissa. We were up way high in the fort she and her Dad built in the crisscross limbs of her “sugar sap” tree. It was a huge maple that oozed sap from the nail holes gouged into the trunk. Em would just run her finger through the cola colored beads and suck at the sugar sap. I’ve never known anyone as moon-wild since. My favorite memory of her is the night we set out to catch a hundred lightning bugs, us leaping and sprinting, snatching stars right from the firmament. When we’d collected about seventy in our mayo jars she told me to pour them all into her hair. I think if I hadn’t been so in thrall with Melissa’s arriving womanhood, Emily would have been my first love. Her standing in the witch glow of dusk, her cattail colored hair lit up like a faerie Christmas.

So Em and I were stirring up a wicked voodoo brew in a Tupperware bowl we’d spray painted black. It was for Melissa who’d broken my heart by kissing another boy. Not just tongues I knew, but a full kiss. With want and surely, love. Our interpretation of it. And so Em had devised a hex that would make their lips glue together for two days. They would have to breathe the same old stink breath until they were unstuck and then they would never want to kiss again after that. After we’d mixed the mashed snails, the onion grass, the raspberry jelly, gum from the road, a hair from Melissa and a piece of paper with my drawing of the boy’s face in our plastic cauldron with some rootbeer to make it all fizz, we said the two lovers names backwards seven times and both spit into the mix.

Just as were talking about how to apply it to Melissa’s stupid old buttface lips, Em paused and said we forgot the last part. She had this odd look on her face, the one she’d get when Melissa would declare we were playing House and she and I were married and Em was our daughter. Em paused again and said we had to seal the mixture with a righteous kiss. I didn’t find out until later that Emily’s Mom, a professor of classics at Western Michigan University, had been reading her some Arthurian legends as her bedtime stories. She’d been trying to reclaim her daughter back from the sway of her rough-housing, man’s man, carpenter husband. These things I knew later from my Mom who talked frequently with her Mom at the mailboxes. I can only imagine this prompted the righteous kiss idea.

I’m not going to try to recapture any dialogue here because of course, it would be a complete falsehood as opposed to my little ones so far . I argue I’m at least still in the spirit of truth whether or not this all happened in one day or even was an episode of Punky Brewster or Facts of Life that I’ve co-opted for myself. I refused to kiss Emily because I told her I was saving myself for Melissa (a funny phrase I’d learned from an abstinence video my Mom showed me) so she upended the brew into my face and slid down the get-away rope. After I cleaned the gunk off and put most of it back in the bowl just in case we could still use it, I went and found Melissa sitting on the woodpile next to her garage. There were highways for tears carved out in her dust caked face. Before I could say anything, she snapped that I could look into the face of the thing I feared most as an alternative. And she knew that was Mrs. Martin, so she’d dared me to do it. And I never turn down a dare.

Mrs. Martin Part 1

I'll call her Mrs. Martin because I’m making up parts anyway. Because it’s memory and I’m always making that up. Mrs. Martin lived in a wheelchair and never left it as far as we knew. In fact, she never moved at all. In all the times we’d ninja into her yard close enough to get a look, we never saw her stir. The room’s only life was the constant flicker of television lighting up the windows and walls. She lived where Della Street U-ed into an industrial road that made the property value of our street just crap enough we could all afford to live there. We being Emily, Melissa, and me.

Our street only had three kids near my age. Em, a tom-boy with her own tree fort who believed in black magic, curses, and hexes. Melissa, a fifth grader who deigned to hang out with us, and would cock her head sideways, stick out her new chest, and tell me I’m cute when I laugh. Which would color me instantly. The third kid was Jason, who I hung out with for a week until we were in the forest playing commandos and he pulled down his pants and threw his own turd at my head.

It’s hard to be a boy with two girls as best friends. What I couldn’t see then is our first sonars of puberty, these first soundings. Sometimes Melissa would reach for my hand during cartoons. Em would wrestle me in her fort and just lay breathless on top of me. Em bought a training bra before she needed it because of Melissa. Melissa was jealous of the tree fort and found a secret place for us between our hedgerows. Once I asked Melissa if we could touch tongues after our daily batch of Kool-Aid. In the middle of her room, our tropical red tongues tipped together. She said later our first kiss was French. Em brained me with a rock when she found out.

We passed Mrs. Martin’s on our way to the forest. It looked all grown-back I told my Mom. I know the word now is reclamation. The twin maples jutted in, scraped against and into the attic window. The yard hadn’t been cut in years and the grass was head deep and pocked with litter. Probably not having noticed, Mrs. Martin had not followed the suburban trend of residing and her house looked bedraggled compared to the plastic sheens of her neighbors. Her house of cards was a fault line of expectations, a paint peeling question mark, a great breath of hesitation before something.

Someone take the lead here...

and figger this sucker out fer me.

I don't think my invitee is 'down' for this. Someone we might look at is Eiryn Jakob, who could provide an interesting vantage. I think she is a phenomenal writer. Czech her here: http://wajok.blogspot.com/

Someone take over on this or it will die on the vine. Someone write something. Do something, dammit. Live.

I was trapped...

...behind a long line of traffic that extended down the single lane behind me, disappearing over the false horizon in my mirrors. In front of me was a shitty white Datsun. The Datsun sounded like a children’s brass band. The side mirrors were cracked. The exhaust spat at me. The taillights were illegible. Strapped to a warped ski rack on top of the Datsun was a slab of inch-thick plywood. On top of the plywood was the severed head of the biggest bull elk I had ever seen. The ragged edges of the bull’s neck were flayed out around the head. The board had blackened from the blood, as though the veins had once pumped old motor oil. The glassed eyes were looking straight up to the sky. The tongue flagged out of the mouth to the side. I imagined that it would have been flapping, but it had stiffened beyond motion. From behind, it looked like the carcass of a primeval spider—the legish antlers extended skyward. The wapiti was strapped onto the roof of the Datsun with nylon cording strung from the uppermost antler point to the lowest and then hitched onto the rack. There it was, the Datsun’s aegis to the cold sun, a blood trophy and mascot, the wagon load of spoils, a hirsute and huge John the Baptist. Without the wind, a host of blue black gunmetal flies would congregate inside it to lay their eggs for the other heads of other creatures one step beyond. All the years eating water cress from the bottom of Beaver Creek, and the battles of antlers and frost, and the thin years and winter months when no Chinook found his harem. The rut and the gravity in the groin—the slicing bugle that could cut ice like a blowtorch. He had survived. So many years of knowing the Targhee better than God himself, and the final ride down a 2 lane state highway atop a sputtering, shitty Japanese compact driven by a man dressed like leaves.