two : columbus day

The linoleum halls of the school bustled with mothers passing staplers and lies between them, their carts filled with wide smiling ghosts and politically correct representations of ghouls and witches in preparation for Halloween. In Mr. McEvoy’s classroom Ian and his classmates made dioramas (the elementary school essay) depicting the spirit of the New World and the magic of discovery. His neighbor Katie Rose dressed little Indians out of baby corn and little explorers out of littler crosses and put them around a popsicle stick table feasting on pizza and spaghetti. Bailey, the product of a mother who couldn’t go 9 hours without a French 75, never mind nine months, couldn’t tell Pilgrims from Conquistadors and thus hot glued a turkey resembling a feathered basketball with googley eyes. Ian, under fresh from a paternal rant on the North American Genocide and eager to use the left overs from his lunchpale cut out five Spanish sailors, each with a grape head, running “fleet” on a Native American woman while dogs turned her children into confetti fashioned from snips of bacon from his BLT. The school saw this as a disturbing risk to student health.
“Ian! What do you call this monstrosity?”
“The grape of the new world?”
Suspended, Ian planned a journey into the forest in search of adventure. At home he packed a backpack with water, a Hi-C, a pocket knife he swiped from his fathers bedside table, twine, binoculars, a map of Washington State and Montana (As he did not for sure know how far he may wonder and did not, at that moment, realize Idaho existed), the Definitive Calvin and Hobbes, and a headset that picked up radio frequencies. He told his mom he was going next door to play Hayden’s new nintendo game, left out the side door, walked straight to their neighbors back door, waited for his mom to disappear from the window and return to her Oprah, then around their house and down onto the street and to where the edge of his neighborhood met the edge of creation. While neighborhood kids usually formed parties for forest bound adventures this time he high kneed over nettles and ferns alone, each step growing softer until he knew the wetness of the refuse and could step without much sound at all. Being sixty-eight pounds helped. After ten minutes of slow stepping the earth shot downwards towards a creek, slow at first, then with dizzying trajectories with jutting rocks covered in slick lichen and lime green moss. He searched the ridge for an old Cedar that leaned as if to spit over the edge. An old garden hung hose hung from one of its branches and coiled around the base of the tree. Two more garden hoses tied end to end attached to the first, all of them faded from their new emerald shade to a sickly waxy pale algae color spotted with the saturation of the woods. Neighborhood legend credited the hose to the Peterman boys before they moved to Chicago, although rumor circulated that they simply found the hose while looking for their mastiff Gibraltar and that it predated even their early explorations. Others insist they found the hose as part of a swing and added the subsequent two hoses to repel down the side. None knew for certain.
Ian gave it a firm yank, tied it under the straps of his backpack and across his front as to secure himself in and placed his heals at the edge. The ravine side gave way, his heals tearing through decaying wood fibers, mounds of black ants, thin snapping vines, sweaty and exposed clay: all giving way as he skated, freeing more hoze as needed. Near the bottom he untied himself and negotiated his backpack free from the knots he’d made. The three o clock hour never looked so dark, the forest never so still; as trees at the top of the ridge and his yard always rolled in breezes even when the air felt statuesque. The high tree-tickling winds left the Aspen and Firs be in the ravine. Scraping clay from the sole of his shoes he felt as though he’d stumbled into an untried frontier when in fact he’d crossed so far he almost made it to the next neighborhood, Cougar Mountain Estates .
He nestled himself under an awning of pine needles and tried in the timid darkness to read Calvin and Hobbes. He ended up just looking at the pictures for a time, the headphones buzzing top 40 from downtown slightly scrambled by the hills between. One calf on the opposite knee, he bobbed a foot to Brooklyn club anthem "ya needa headlamp for mah f*ck cave."
Then he saw a boy walking smoothly, as if on a sidewalk, and not over a conspiracy of low lying plantlife that want nothing more than to esnare. He felt compelled to hide, to go unseen, to stalk. He flipped his headphones off and slithered down the trunk until hid head rest in the nape of the roots. He watched the boy walk plainly, his lower half obscured by ferns until practically out of sight.
Ian gathered his stuffs, stayed low, walked softly and followed in the older boys direction until he found the path of red bark lined with river stones. He kept his eyes down on the ground to avoid piles of horse droppings, some fresh and moist, others little more than clumps of processed hay. He took severe pleasure in the sneaking. Eventually he found a sign that identified the trail as a watershed. He pictured an out-house like building leaking water, but never found it. The trail eventually snaked close to houses, their suburban sounds bled into the forest’s blue hum. A squirrel chased another from branch to branch above them scratching at bark, their little paws furious, chirping.
Then the boy again. He seemed to be sneaking as well, hunched over and crossing the long back lawn of a white two story slice of the american dream. Ian found the boy oddly dressed, a chain dangled from near his belt buckle to his back pocket, he wore tight gray jeans and plaid shoes, black hair made his pale face paler. His dark threads made him difficult to see in the wooded valley but beaming in the yard, especially against the white house, which aimed to convey a civil plainness, a neat perfection. The boy took a moment to duck behind a large obtuse tree that lacked needles and leaves and supported a thin series of planks and walls. Up a series of branches were two by fours hammered in steps up the side of the trunk. Ian immediately recognized it as an abandoned tree fort. Time stained its planks the color of stagnant water.
A second story window went awash with yellow light. A figure appeared, moved a bit, and then disappeared. One by one light popped on through the house until the person appeared behind a sliding door that lead to a raised deck. The boy popped out from behind the tree and walked across the lawn as she closed it behind her, holding her arms across the small of her back. He skipped up the stairs, touching the rail slightly at the top before kissing the girl on the cheek.
Ian pulled out his binoculars, a Christmas gift from an uncle who owned a sporting goods store. The girl and boy stepped inside the sliding glass door then sat at an island in the kitchen; the boy on a barstool and the girl disappearing from view. She returned with a carton of juice and two glasses. They sipped their juice while Ian, motivated by a feeling he did not want to explore; a sort of gun to his back that he wished not to see with his own eyes, climbed the latter of the treefort and set up post. He sat against a dark wall in the back, cloaked, engaging in what a wiser man would see as forbidden. A young Timothy Murphy sliding belly down into the muck of infamy. Oh, you don’t know Timothy Murphy?