IGMS Issue 33 Page 2

  "Where'd you go?" he said.

  My mother waved away his question before I could answer. "School called, they said you left before religion," she said. "Where were you?"

  "The library," I stammered.

  "Why the hell didn't you call?" my father said petulantly.

  My mother ignored him. "Why did you leave school?"

  "Some kids were after me."

  "Some kids? Who?"

  Reluctantly I told her about Kevin and the threat in the stairwell.

  "Why didn't you tell the teacher?" my mother asked.

  "You gotta learn to stand up for yourself," my father said. "You gotta whack one of these mutts if they come after you."

  A refrain I'd heard before.

  "I asked you a question," my mother said.

  "They wouldn't do anything."

  "Oh they damn well will do something." My mother took her plastic-covered phonebook from the junk drawer and opened it to a list of numbers in red ink inside the cover.

  She dialed with angry, circular zings. When someone picked up, my mother said in her phone voice, "May I speak to Sister Gertrude, please? This is Mrs. O'Grady." Pause. "Yes, a pupil in the sixth grade, Jerry."

  My heart sank.

  My mother outlined the problem to Sister Gertrude with elaborate politeness and elocution as phony as a cake in a bakery window. There was a brief conversation, then my mother hung up after offering the principal her brittle thanks, and assurances that she would be there after school the next day.

  Through the whole performance my father just sat there, smoking and staring into space.

  The prospect of the meeting in the principal's office had me running to the bathroom all day. When I didn't feel as though I was about to shit my pants, I felt like vomiting.

  At two-thirty Sister Gertrude's secretary, a cheerful, elderly woman with a dowager's hump, knocked on the classroom door to collect me and Kevin.

  The first hint I had of what was in store was when I glanced at Kevin's taut, sweaty face. Lost as I was in my own fears, the misery in Kevin's demeanor all day hadn't sunk in.

  My mother and Kevin's father sat in straight backed wooden chairs opposite the principal's scarred desk, their faces like that of boxers squaring off before a match.

  Kevin and I weren't invited to sit.

  "Jerry, Sister Agnes said you left school yesterday before her class," the principal said. "Is that true?"

  "Yes Sister," I muttered into my collar.

  "Speak up!" my mother snapped, "And look at people when they talk to you."

  "Yes Sister," I dutifully repeated, looking up, if only as far as the wooden cross that hung on the front her habit.

  "Why did you leave school?" she asked.

  The last thing I wanted to do was rat on Kevin -- I was still afraid he was going to kill me.

  "I don't know," I said, shrugging a little.

  "What?!" my mother yelled, oblivious to Sister Gertrude's disapproving look. "Tell her what you told me yesterday!"

  Caught between a rock and a loud place, I folded. "I was afraid Kevin was going to beat me up."

  "Why did you think that?" Sister Gertrude asked.

  "He told me he was going to, on the way to lunch."

  Kevin's father turned to his son. He wasn't a big man, and his voice wasn't loud, but he spoke with a scary intensity. "Is he telling the truth?"

  "I was just kidding," Kevin said, not looking his father in the eye.

  Kidding?! Before I could object, though, before I could think, Kevin's father slapped his son's face so hard that sweat flew off Kevin and onto me.

  Kevin was rocked by the blow, but he didn't cry out, though his eyes watered up immediately.

  "Mr. Lester!" Sister Gertrude said, slapping her hands down on the desktop, "That will be enough!"

  "Don't tell me how to discipline my kid," he said to the principal with the same quiet intensity. He turned back to Kevin, whose face was bright red where he'd been slapped.

  "Say you're sorry."

  "I'm sorry," Kevin said quietly, staring at his father's feet.

  "To him," his father said ominously, nodding at me with a slightly bristly chin.

  "I'm sorry," Kevin said, facing me with eyes still downcast.

  I was frozen to the spot, mute. Even my mother had to clear her throat before she could get a word out.

  "Shake hands," she said.

  "It's okay," I said, shaking his moist palm. Kevin almost met my eyes, and the pathetically terrified expression on his face haunts me to this day.

  From that day on, Kevin avoided me. Eventually, without his goading, the others lost interest in the chase. Relieved of my fear, I started to notice Kevin -- or things about him that had always been there, but that I'd ignored to concentrate on survival. Maslow's pyramid, and all.

  When he wasn't teasing some other kid -- that had stopped pretty abruptly after our little meeting -- Kevin's eyes were in constant motion, scanning the schoolyard, or the street, or even the classroom. He bit his fingernails raw, and he always wore long-sleeved shirts. He was a nervous kid. My relief at not being his target anymore kept me away from him.

  For weeks I couldn't go to the lot, or anywhere else by myself. My mother took me to and from school, making it clear with scowls and irritated sighs just what a burden I was.

  I often asked Miss Walsh about the leaf I'd brought her, but it became obvious that my enthusiasm was wearing on her, as her responses on the subject became more vague and terse. I felt like I'd done something wrong, but I wasn't sure what.

  Summer finally came, and even my mother's appetite for martyrdom had its limits. Also, right at the end of the school year, my father had a big fight with his boss and "quit" the company. His presence around the house soon required my mother's undivided attention, and by the beginning of July I was off the leash.

  I had been planning my expedition all along. My cousin Jimmy's cast-off backpack held my pocketknife, notebook, pencils and sharpener, Fig Newtons, a compass, an aluminum canteen from the army-navy store, and in a flash of inspiration, a roll of orange plastic tape of the kind used to mark off construction sites (something else that fell off a truck).

  From the outside, the lot appeared even more weedy and overgrown. By the time I worked my way to the shamrock tree, I was sweaty and smeared with plant sap and dead bugs.

  After I wiped my face and had a few sips of metallic-tasting water, I broke out the roll of orange tape and started cutting off foot-long strips. When I had about twenty of them, I stuffed everything back in my knapsack and headed up the hill.

  As usual the sun was in the southeast, just over the trees, and the sky was a hard blue with a few patches of snow-white clouds. The birds were out like crazy, and insects hummed all around me. A bright yellow grasshopper jumped off a stalk right in front of my nose, scaring the bejesus out of me.

  The wood was thick with herb smells and dappled green sunlight under the trees. I stopped about every fifty paces or so and tied one of my plastic strips to a branch or a bush at eye level, looking back to fix the position of the previous strip in my mind. Every fifth stop I'd take a compass bearing back along my line of march and write it down.

  I wanted to time my walk, but again my watch had frozen. Though clouds moved across the sky high and silent, the sun stayed where it was. I was glad for the shade of the increasing number of trees. And what trees they were: some with long, thin leaves that trailed down to the ground, and others with silvery bark and round, copper-colored leaves that flashed like mirrors in the breeze. Trees with strange fruits that looked like wrinkled purple tennis balls, and others that could almost be miniature palm trees, except the fronds were puffy and covered in fine white hairs.

  I had looked through a lot of books that first weekend after discovering the shamrock tree, and more since -- field guides, botany books, and dozens of Natural History and National Geographic magazines. Everywhere I looked in the lot, there were strange plants that I was sure exist
ed nowhere else in the world. It wasn't just that I hadn't seen these particular plants and trees in the reference stacks -- I hadn't seen anything that looked even remotely related to the greenery around me.

  When I reached the water, a broad, slow-moving river about as wide as six lanes of traffic and heavily wooded on its far side, I was stopped in my tracks. I stood there for five minutes, taking it all in.

  I didn't have the vocabulary then to describe what I felt -- a feeling that had been building in me since the first time I set foot across the lot's border. Looking back I realize it was something akin to religious awe (if you use the word "religious" loosely; I felt much the same thing a few years later when I first saw Mary Wisniewski with her shirt off).

  I was a Brooklyn kid. I had been outside of the city once, when I was very young, to my aunt's bungalow outside Ellenville, New York -- a stay I recalled chiefly for the pervasive smell of mildew, and being crammed on a fold-away bed with three resentful cousins.

  But I loved the outdoors. I read every copy of Field & Stream at the library, and all of Tom Brown's books on woodcraft. I knew, in theory, how to survive in a blizzard, build a fire in the rain, and navigate by compass. And I had a good sense of direction, which is no more than just paying attention to your surroundings, I think -- a survival skill I'd had to master on the street for other reasons. On our infrequent trips to Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, my mother would reliably get turned around and ask me which way was the carousel or the greenhouses.

  This was the first time I was alone in the outdoors with freedom to roam. There was river and forest as far as I could see in every direction. Birds swooped and called over the water, and the air was dense and heady with botanical smells. It was like being in a green church.

  I ate some Fig Newtons and drank more water, then I drew and drew: trees, the river, the shape of the hills, the birds wheeling over the water (they had teeth, I saw, when one lighted on a nearby branch). I drew until my hand cramped.

  I checked my stopped wristwatch from force of habit, then the position of the sun. Still in the same place. I didn't want to leave -- I wanted to cross the river. I wanted to see everything. But I knew if I screwed up again I'd be under house arrest all summer -- a thought even less appealing because of the constant state of tension between my mother and father.

  I packed up my supplies and headed back along the trail I'd blazed. I hardly needed the orange tape: The direction back to the lot's entrance seemed as obvious to me as a highway.

  Close to the edge of the lot, a tree with fluffy bark caught my eye. When I got closer, I could see that the bark was actually shredded in strips from a height of about ten feet or so down. It wasn't until I took in the strong animal stink that I realized I was looking at claw marks.

  I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Whatever had made those marks was big, and had sharp claws. I thought of the little pocketknife in my knapsack: the three-inch blade would be useless.

  I crossed the rest of the distance to the lot's edge, ears straining, trying to look in every direction at once. I was glad it was still daylight when I stepped onto Classon Avenue -- walking home in the dark would have freaked me out.

  It was just as well that I had an escape that summer. Potentially lethal animals didn't deter me from going to the lot every day, rain or shine. I knew something about evading predators, after all, and nothing could be worse than being held hostage to the escalating hostilities between my mother and father.

  My father said he was looking for work. What that meant was that he'd leave the house sometime after lunch, and return after my bedtime, reeking of booze and C. Howard's violet chewing gum, which was supposed to cover his alcohol breath, but instead only broadcast it into the room before he arrived.

  The arguments started when my father woke, and continued until he slammed out of the house with my mother yelling "You won't find any jobs at the bar!" at his retreating back.

  Once I woke in the middle of the night to my mother's screams and the sound of breaking furniture. No one called the police, of course, and in those days it was doubtful the police would do anything but drive my father around the block, unless he was drunk enough to take a poke at one of them.

  I became an expert in walking small, even moreso than before, to avoid setting one or both of them off. When my Aunt Mary called to find out if I'd gotten my birthday card and check, I said yes, rather than give my mother cause to lay into my father about it.

  Away from the house, I could breathe. As my confidence grew, I roamed further and further afield. I was always alert for animal signs, of which there were plenty. I would occasionally see furred shapes receding ahead of me into the wood, and once something scaly and big rushed by me close aboard like a subway train. I could stand in one big footprint with both feet and leave room all around the edges of my Keds. That encounter left me shaking, but nothing pursued me nor disturbed me.

  I knew from the field guides that you weren't supposed to surprise animals, especially not big ones. In bear country you were supposed to carry a bell on your backpack to make sure you didn't startle an eight-hundred-pound grizzly. But there were only a very few times, besides the first one, that I actually surprised any animal.

  Years later I learned about ecosystems, and why apex predators are necessarily thin on the ground. But even as a kid, I started to notice that in accounts of explorers in wild jungles or pre-colonial America, encounters with big animals, though dramatic, were few and far between.

  Birds I saw all the time -- including one with a fast, penetrating call that I named the stiletto bird for its needle teeth. And lizards and fish and small, furry tree-climbers that were like reddish-brown squirrels, but with bigger heads and no tails. There were rabbits, almost (they did have tails, and moved almost like little kangaroos), and insects in the zillions. There was something I started calling the maxipede, which was about a yard long and had a head the size of a baseball.

  I never saw a snake, or a frog or a turtle, but down near the water there were furless animals the size of rats with mottled green skin that lived in holes in the bank.

  I started drawing maps as I explored, and it occurred to me that I had to label things to make any sense of my geography. The river became Down River, because I thought of it as flowing down from the hills to the northeast. It had tributaries like the Little Pinky and the Gumbo, where the soft clay bank sucked the sneakers right off my feet. The hills just on the far side of the spot where I'd first encountered the river became the Camelback Range.

  At first I thought of the whole place just as "the lot," but it wasn't long before I was calling it Dreamland in my head, though it seemed more real to me than the streets. Maybe because I needed it to be so.

  I crossed the river, finding fords at gravel shoals and at places where sandstone vees channeled the current deep and fast, but narrow enough for a felled tree to span its width. I climbed trees to draw maps, and worked out crude tricks for myself to estimate distances.

  Upstream from the place I first saw the river was a deep, cold lake (Cloud Lake, for the way it reflected the sky like a blue mirror), in which swam something that, from my one brief glimpse of it, I thought must be related to the Loch Ness monster.

  I got good at estimating how much time had passed in the real world, and almost as good at estimating how long I could stay away from the house without provoking concern or anger. I was growing tan and strong and I wasn't bothering my parents -- that was enough. Meanwhile I filled composition books with notes, maps and drawings, and began developing an understanding of geography and terrain thatyou could never get from a book.

  I went through one box of pencils, then another and another, alternating between making maps and drawing the landscape and wildlife. I took a job on Sunday mornings, putting together newspapers at the candy store on Myrtle Avenue. I hated the time it took away from my explorations, but I was able to take my pay in drawing pencils and cheap pads and notebooks -- things
that my father would neither notice nor be able to pawn.

  It wasn't just the empty space that appealed to me. There were no straight lines in Dreamland. In the real world, what's fashionable to call the "built environment" nowadays, the straight line and the 90-degree angle rule your line of sight. It's a visual prison that you don't know you're in until someone opens the cell door one day, and you step into a world without edges.

  I never got tired, head-tired, of drawing in Dreamland the way I did in the real world. My hands would cramp, and my eyes would get heavy, but I never lost the thrill of getting it exactly right: the meander of a stream across a grassy plain, of the way a line of hills humped across the horizon like tree-clad giants bent to some megalithic toil. From the tops of trees and mountains I could capture the face of the landscape. I pushed myself to see what was beyond the next treeline, over the next ridge.

  There were always blank spaces at the edge of the map. On those warm, timber-ry days I found myself in the thrill of discovery. I was in the top third of a tall, tall evergreen -- if the type had a name in the real world I didn't know it -- just below the point where the branches would bend or break under my weight. The sun shown down from the 10 o'clock position as usual, and there was an east wind high aloft, sending fleecy brigantines racing across the sky. The patches of sun and shadow moving over the ground revealed details of the landscape like god's x-ray machine, and I mapped the details with a fast hand, anxious to capture every bump of elevation and riparian contour.

  September, and the seventh grade, arrived as a grim surprise. One day I was fording a tributary of the Down, the next I was following my mother through the din of the A&S Department Store on Fulton Street, dutifully trying on uniform pants and white shirts for school.

  Though I'd grown taller and broader over my summer of exploring, I occasioned no special notice from my teachers nor classmates, maybe because my mother bought all my clothes a size too big. "You'll grow into them."