Blue Bottle Tree Page 2

  Here’s why I don’t tell Penny Longstocking about the bones: one time I tried her out on a softer story—a more gentle one than human bones in a cave. I told her what this kid Rickey—Rickey “Mad Dog” Smith, whose name suits him and he even likes being called Mad Dog—and I did a few summers back, when we were kids. He said it was a scientific experiment. It did have a sciencey feel to it, but then it was gross and sad. It was the kind of thing that makes you lie awake and wonder why you did it—you think it was a needless experiment. What he did was this—Mad Dog was showing me about how you can open up a frog and look at its beating heart. It was actually a toad, but we called them all frogs back then. I don’t know why. I think we knew the difference. Toads were slow, so slow even I could catch one. Easily. I could catch two at a time without even trying.

  Mad Dog showed me that you can thump a toad on the head and it will knock him out. I never knew that, but it was true. Not even a super-hard thump, just a regular one. Mad Dog caught a toad, and I wanted to try it out too, so I caught one and thumped it. Then we laid them out on a tree stump like a surgical table, put them on their backs, stretched their arms and legs out. They were still breathing, so they definitely were still alive. Then he pinched the skin of the underbelly. I did it to mine too. You don’t even need a knife—you just kind of tear it open. It’s very squishy and soft and a little rubbery. Inside the toad, there will be a beating heart. You can see it beat.

  We watched the hearts beating for a while, and probably poked around the guts a little. There was a slimy yellow part like a sliver, the lungs were gray, and there was some black bile. Then we were done. Right away Mad Dog had another idea and was ready to take off for the next thing. I liked him. He had crazy ideas nobody else would ever think of. He recommended I not tell anybody about the frogs. So I didn’t, until Penny.

  She got all grossed out, said it was cruel. I agreed and said I felt bad about it, but the fact that I had already done it was all it took. That’s how I knew she was not ready to hear about the bones. What happened after we opened up the toads was sad. Mad Dog threw his in the lake. I had already started to wonder what we were supposed to do with them when the experiment was over, and that was the answer. You throw them in the lake.

  This is what I was getting at about Mad Dog Rickey, and why everyone calls him that. He probably never even thought about it, that we were torturing animals. But throwing those toads in the water, watching them float off, torn apart and belly-up, and thinking I don’t know what—maybe some big fish would come along and eat them, or else they would just rot in the water—it wasn’t worth it. It was wrong and unnecessary. Even a toad deserves some kind of a life.

  Not only does Penny Longstocking wear stockings, but they are actually long. She has very long legs. She’s got long red hair—auburn, she says. Like the swirls on an old staircase banister. And there’s a lot of it. A spray of freckles parts along her nose and when she’s been in the sun too long they glow. She keeps her hair plaited and hung off her neck in a ponytail—it swings from one shoulder to the other when she’s walking fast. And she’s one of the tallest girls in high school. She must be nearly six feet tall, but I think I’ll be taller than her by next year.

  Penny Longstocking has excellent posture. Especially for someone with no arches. I assume she has no arches because she wears those heavy clodhopper shoes. She can balance a book on her head while playing the clarinet and walk at the same time. If you’ve never seen anyone do that, it’s very impressive. Her ponytail doesn’t swing when she does it that way, practicing for marching band.

  No one can tell it now, because I look almost exactly like every other white kid in Bellin, but from my grandmother’s side we were Creoles. The kids in Bellin think they’re pure. Mad Dog told me that it takes nine generations to be cleansed of any black blood. What kind of asshole even thinks like that? “I’m Seven,” I told him. But he didn’t get it. Mad Dog doesn’t get a lot of things.

  My grandmother can still speak Creole French. Voodoo was hardcore back in New Orleans in the old days, and it was very serious stuff about Li Grand Zombi—which is where the word zombie came from, the one who died and came back to life. Hollywood has got it all wrong on zombies trying to eat everybody. Real zombies don’t do that. My grandmother has died and come back. It’s been proven by doctors she was dead—they pronounced her dead. But at her own funeral she sat straight up—sprang out of the open coffin while the preacher was praying. “I saw Papa Legba at the gate,” she said. “Papa Legba sent me back!” Then that funeral turned into the biggest party ever.

  When my ancestors started getting in trouble with the law, they had to scale back on the Voodoo. They changed the name to hoodoo. My grandmother says it wasn’t really the dolls made of hair and feathers, or the sacrificing of goats that did them in. The goat without horns is a big part of it, but she never explained exactly what that meant.

  There is a skeleton in my cave, of a child. It’s not scary and you don’t even think about it being a person or being alive. It smiles with empty eyes and a faraway grin. The bones have a nice weight, not too heavy, not too light, and they seem like they would last forever.

  Penny Longstocking doesn’t have a boyfriend. I’m too young for her and besides, she thinks she’s too cool. She thinks I’m a weirdo. Now she’s putting her clarinet down and picking up the National Geographic.

  Where are you now, whippoorwill? I’m going back in my cave.

  * * *

  Inside the cave it’s cooler. Outside it was heating up and smelled like green leaves and bugs. Summer is coming and it jumped straight from cold to hot with barely a day of medium in the middle. I have taken Penny Longstocking’s advice on the newspapers—not that we ever talked about it. I mean I adopted her method of staying clean. I don’t throw the newspapers away and get new ones every day like she does, though. Mine stay on the cave floor until I wear them out. I’ve made a little trail of newspapers where I have to get down on hands and knees to crawl to the back of the cave. I’m wiry, so it’s no problem for me, but I can imagine that adults would have trouble. This is probably why no one pays any attention to this cave. They assume you can’t really get to the back room because the crawl space is too tight. They might not even know it has a back room. In fact, after crawling for about fifteen feet, it makes a curve and then you go down over a rock. But then you can stand up. That’s where the bones are. You really have to know what you’re doing to find them.

  It’s damp in here and very quiet—just the sound of dripping, the occasional ping. There is no smell of green like outside. It’s dank like dirt and worms. There’s a pool that has fish in it. They’re blind, living in the dark all the time, but they can tell a disturbance. Maybe they think it’s a cricket, so they swim over and take a nibble. But when they realize my finger is not a cricket, and I splash or try to grab one, they puff up. They even have spikes on their bellies. They get twice as big. When I take my finger out and don’t bother them, they calm down, and go back to their normal little sizes. I’ve never seen any other fish like them. I don’t think people put them here. I think these fish were here before people. Probably before the Indians. Probably a thousand years.

  The pool is from an underground spring. It trickles out a little bit on the other side of the hill—I’ve seen it. The first couple of times I drank the water it made me sick, but I’m used to it now.

  You cannot hear anything back in my little cave. With the flashlight off, it is the darkest dark. It’s so dark, you can’t even see your hand in front of your face. So I burn candles. With the lights out, there is no amount of time you can wait for your eyes to adjust. You just hear the dripping. I sleep in here sometimes. It’s so quiet my thoughts seem louder and the words give way to scenes. A flash of lightning just went by and I felt a wisp of wind. I open my eyes but it’s the same either way. Probably a bat. I’m running up this hill. I hear a high-pitched ringing and a dial tone in my head. I might be sleeping now.

  2 Penny L
angston Freaks Out

  I knew Seven LaVey stared at me, that he watched me when I practiced. Seven was a weird kid. Didn’t he have anything better to do? We had been in band together for two years, but he still had not figured my name out. He called me Longstocking. I guess he was making fun of me. As if he took a perverse pleasure in reminding me how inconsequential I was to him. So I returned the favor. Which seemed so unnecessary between us. After a party last Thanksgiving, we were talking and then he kissed me. It started snowing right that second. And it was like rose petals, millions of them, falling from the sky. It was so romantic I could have died right there. Back at school on Monday he asked me if I had fun at the party. Like it was nothing! Like he had totally missed it. I said, sure, it was great until I tried tequila, and I guess I blacked out after that. He never took his trumpet home, never practiced. He thought he was too cool to be in band. It was like cheating, pretending to play when he was not. The band director knew and just let it go. “Playing badly is worse than not playing at all,” he said. There were about seventy kids in band, and a lot of them faked it. Not me—I played every note of every song.

  The first time I met Seven was at a music store in Nashville. He seemed to know me, but I didn’t know him. He knew I was in band. My mom and I were there to find me an upgrade on clarinet. I was getting ashamed of the beginner’s model that I had. I had explained to my parents that if I was ever going to be any good, I would have to have a better instrument. I had to move out of the Etude and into a Selmer. It could be used, but it had to be pro quality. So that’s what we were looking for and it was a coincidence that Seven happened to be there at the same time. He was about twelve years old and had apparently made his way to Nashville by himself.

  He had a trumpet, trombone, and sax all laid out in front of him. He was testing their weights, trying to get a feel for them. Picking an instrument can be hard for some people. I always knew I wanted clarinet. The music store guy was giving him the pitch. He was a little man with a mustache, a musty tweed suit, and bow tie. But he knew his stuff. He could play all the instruments better than anybody in high school. While the guy was talking, Seven looked past him and asked me, “Which one do you think?” I pointed at the trumpet and he shrugged. “I’ll take it,” was all he said.

  I came to my tree early today, still ticked off with Velvet West. I had approached her at lunch and slid my yearbook across the table to her. “Velvet, will you please sign my annual?” I asked her. Three of my former friends rolled their eyes and coughed like my presence was polluting their oxygen.

  “Oh, sure, Penny,” Velvet said. She smirked and snapped her fingers. Her right-hand attendant produced a pen. Velvet gritted her teeth and jutted her delicate little chin. She had to be dying her hair—nobody’s hair could be that black. And I took the moment to appraise her fashion choices. Somewhere between Cleopatra in stilettos and the wicked Snow White. Her golden arm bands looked like they were supposed to deflect bullets. It all was topped off with hair pulled tight and spouting out the top of her head like a petroleum fountain of thread. Her choker was a three-inch leather collar with locks and silver chains. It was some kind of torture device. If the teachers knew what it was, there’s no way they would let her wear it.

  She gave my yearbook back and shooed me away. So much for my effort to make amends. We had been friends most of our lives and now high school was almost over. We might not see each other that much anymore. I wanted to set everything right and be done with our grudge. Apparently, she did not feel that way. She found an empty space in the ads, one by a furniture store, and it had a picture of a chair. She wrote, You will be cursed for this. Her signature took up two pages. Wow. And this was how I was wrapping up my high school career. Dead in the water because of one mistake, one time I chose revenge. I thought I would leave high school on a high note, having accomplished something. But it felt more like a failure now. I wasted my life for this, to be the first chair clarinet, and I just wanted it to end. There wasn’t anybody in high school I cared about anyway, so maybe it was good. It would all be over soon enough. I could reinvent myself and begin again. Fuck them. Fuck them all.

  Except Seven, who was adorable in his weird way. I was conflicted about how surprisingly comfortable I felt about having him up there, spying on me like a jerk. He was crouching, watching me now from the mouth of the cave. He might even live there. Creepy. I think his mother was a nurse and used to work nights, so he could probably do whatever he wanted. I also heard his mother disappeared and his grandmother was a witch, but nobody knew for sure. Everybody in Bellin knew everybody else, but nobody really knew them. They bought a shack in the woods somewhere outside of town. But I asked around and no kids in band, nobody at all had actually even seen it.

  He came out of the cave, stretched and yawned, then went around to the back of the hill. Soon he came back and stood with his ridiculous mop of hair dripping like a black jungle fern. His face was all wet. He crouched down, staring at me. A deluded warrior. He ruffled up his hair and made it spikey. He was plotting something, so I decided to turn the tables.

  I stopped practicing and laid my clarinet down on the newspapers, slipped behind the tree out of his sight, and then behind a rock, a fence, and some bushes. He was momentarily distracted and I could tell he was surprised when he glanced back and I was gone. He scanned the field, and when he couldn’t find me, he stalked down.

  I kept him in my sights but crept around behind him, and watched him zigzag until he was at my tree. Then he grabbed my clarinet! Asshole!

  He made a beeline back for his cave, but I was already there—I had snuck in. It was cramped and dark, but there was a little flicker from around a corner. I crawled on the dirty newspapers until I was in his room in the back.

  I never knew this was here—I don’t think anyone did. It opened up into a surprisingly big room. There was a tiny fishpond with a candle burning over it, making a sparkly reflection on the water.

  I crouched down behind a rock and tried not to touch any of the mud. He had my clarinet with him. I was hidden and wanted to see what he was going to do, what he actually did in here all the time. His shadow was huge on the wall, and his spikey black hair was distorted like tendrils, like Medusa snakes. He once told me that he never brushed his hair. Vanity, he said. Brushing hair was vanity, so he never did it. It looked like that, like he always just woke up. But it smelled good. I had to march behind him in band. His hair did not smell like shampoo, it smelled like cinnamon toast.

  I had a crush on him a couple of years ago, when he first got to Bellin. There were no other boys here like him. The first time I saw him his shirt collar was sticking up—like it’s doing now—like a dagger jutting out of his neck. Sometimes he carried the disheveled look too far. He wore the kind of shirts that you were supposed to iron, but he never did. That first time I saw him he was wearing a black cowboy shirt with roses stenciled on it. A real cowboy shirt and heavy biker boots with a dozen silver buckles. Nobody does that. It was so retro and cool, unheard-of in Bellin. Once I asked him about it and he just turned up his nose, snubbed me. And it wasn’t just the crazy shock of hair. It was his eyes. His eyes were the palest blue I had ever seen, like swimming pool water, closer to clear than a color. And they pierced when he looked at me. I guessed he was Italian. But he told me, no, Creole. I had read that Creoles were from New Orleans a long time ago. They were all gone now, though, so I let it go. He looked like he came from another country, or another planet.

  But he was so shy! I made myself available, standing around, waiting for him to say something, but he never did. He was a withdrawn, brooding guy. I think the first time he spoke to me was an accident, then he got away as quickly as he could. I figured he didn’t want anything to do with me, so I moved on. But he was always turning up. We just ended up at the same places at the same time. He was at that cave the first time I came to the tree to practice. I didn’t want to bother him, so I acted like I didn’t even see him there.

  When
Velvet and I had a little tiff over first chair, Seven came to me and said he believed in me. Nobody else said that. Nobody else had ever said it. And I fell for him again when that happened. I lost a lot of friends over getting first chair, but he really came out of the woodwork to stick up for me. It lasted a couple of weeks, and we made out a few times, but he never really would talk to me. We never became an item because he just sort of drifted away.

  While I was in his cave and chiding myself for having wasted too much energy on him already, I happened to look down. There was a skull. I almost jumped out of my skin. It was small, like a child’s. My breaths came so fast and deep that I got dizzy. I reached out to the wall before I fell. My heart pounded like it would explode. He could not see me, so I knelt down behind the rock and tried to compose myself. I closed my eyes and focused on the swing in my backyard. When I was anxious, or as in this case, horrified, I thought about the swing. About my hair flowing behind me, the wind in my face, my happy place. Deep breath out. Swing to the sky. Kick legs and lean way back. Pull the chains. Deep breath out. Ready. My eyes opened again and I picked up the skull.