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  “I want it cut down!” Brian’s dad had roared, grieving over the body of his lifeless son. “Some other kid’ll fall off and b-b-b-break himself into pieces!” he had cried and then broken down completely into tears.

  That was when the ingenious idea that currently occupied Timmy’s mind this dark evening had been born. Cut it down? No, that wouldn’t be too convenient for me just yet.

  He knew somehow that very branch was going to be the means by which he took care of Eddie once and for all.

  From his right hand dangled a saw he had swiped from his old man’s shed before slinking away in darkness that would have been complete if not for the hauntingly full moon beaming above like a large Cyclops’s eye. He was going to cut underneath that branch just enough to weaken it.

  Let’s see that creep’s balancing act when the branch starts dancing!

  Tomorrow, he was going to announce to the gang he’d just like to see that Eddie kid try the same trick on him because he was going to climb up that tree after him, march across that branch—come hell or high water—climb up to his tree house, and pulverize it in order to avenge Brian. He would then give Eddie one hell of a trouncing, and all would be made right in the universe.

  And he knew his subordinates like a mother knows her children. They wouldn’t dare miss out on a spectacle like that.

  When that little creep Eddie went running across it, thinking all was going to be safe and sound, he was going to climb up after him and then watch the show.

  He arrived at the tree.

  Without so much as a second’s hesitation, he grabbed the first branch (unlike Eddie, this required no acrobatic jump), and with the saw strapped to his back, he began climbing.

  There was a chill in the night air, and Timmy wasn’t sure if it was cold out or if it was because of the deed he was about to do. Swatting this bothersome thought like a mosquito on his arm, he proceeded upwards, a gleam in his eye as bright as that of the full moon above.

  After several minutes, he reached the branch. Here goes nothin’, he thought to himself.

  He was directly underneath the branch, pulled out his saw, and began feeding wood to the sharp metallic teeth adorning the blade like a shark’s mouth.

  SI-SU-SI-SU-SI-SU-SI-SU

  He swore vehemently as sawdust fell and entered his eyes. “Ah, you’re gonna pay, Eddie boy,” he told the inanimate branch and then wiped the sawdust out of his eyes furiously.

  SI-SU-SI-SU-SI-SU-SI-SU

  “It’s a touching note you wrote.”

  The saw fell from Timmy’s hand, nicked his arm but didn’t break through the garment, and went clanging against just about every branch the tree had on its clumsy, unceremonious descent to mother earth.

  A squirt of urine stained Timmy’s pants, and a chill went down his spine like a splash of ice cold water.

  For a moment, he wished his two runts were there so that he would have a better reason to play tough. Somehow, being without his mates seemed to drain his valor.

  Nonetheless, he tried.

  “Who’s that?!” he asked stupidly, knowing the answer, but hoping he was imagining the whole thing.

  “Should I read it to you?” the voice asked, ignoring Timmy’s question.

  “Look, Creepy Eddie; I don’t know what you think you’re doing up here. You killed Brian, and I covered for you. I told my dad and Brian’s dad that Brian did it on a dare. Now, they said this branch had to be cut down, and I’m here CUTTING THIS BRANCH DOWN FOR MY DEAD FRIEND—GOT IT?!” he yelled. He had aimed for a tone of self-righteousness, but shuddered when he heard nothing but fear in his voice.

  “I hope I put enough spelling mistakes in this to make it look like yours, but I realize the very fact this message is written might cause some to doubt your authorship.”

  “What are you talking about?” Timmy demanded.

  “Dear Mr. Ruggins:

  “I told a big li to you the other dey, and I’m ril sorry. Brians dead, and its my fault. I dard him to clime that branch. It wasnt hiz idea. I told him to do it, and hed get a nikname. Its my fault. Now, I cant fix it. Sorre, evrebode.”

  “Does that sound about like something you would write, or is it a little too apologetic? It might be a hard sell that you’d actually apologize. I brought a pen and some extra paper, if there’s anything you’d like change. I wouldn’t want to put words in your mouth.”

  “Listen, Eddie boy—I mean, Ed—you’re an alright kid but just a little strange. That’s why we pick on you. But, I tell you what, if you come out of wherever you’re hiding and talk about this with me, maybe I’ll let you join our club.” As he said this, he pulled out a small pocketknife with his right hand and held it behind his back.

  “It sounds like you’re okay with the note’s general content. You’re not as picky as I thought you might be.”

  Suddenly, Timmy felt something wrap around his neck. It was a rope, and it was cinched tight. As Timmy’s two hands went instinctively towards the noose that was now around his neck, the knife went clanging down the tree and joined its partner, the saw, on the ground.

  Out of nowhere, Eddie emerged.

  He was smiling, but it was a subtle smile. No big crocodile grin here, but an unmistakable pleasure was on his face.

  “So, you say you might let me into the club?” Eddie asked.

  Timmy bobbed his head up and down. “Yhee-e-es,” he gasped.

  “We were going to have a little meeting here tomorrow, weren’t we?”

  Timmy did his best to look confused.

  “Is that what the saw was for?”

  Timmy looked dumbstruck.

  “Ah, what am I being so hard on you for, Timmy? After all, I’ve always been a special friend to you, and now you’re going to let me into your club!” Eddie said with a strange smile on his face that looked sincere.

  Timmy bobbed his head up and down rapidly. “Yes, yhhe-e-es, YEEES!”

  “I accept,” Eddie said.

  For a brief moment, Timmy breathed an immense sigh of relief and began to imagine the thrashing he was going to give this creep as soon as he undid the noose from his neck.

  Then, he noticed something terrifying in Eddie’s eyes, and he realized he would be giving out no more thrashings to Eddie or anyone else . . . ever.

  “Thanks, friend,” Eddie said and then grabbed Timmy in a bear hug and jumped from the tree.

  Timmy went swinging through the air with a new friend hugging him thankfully for admission to the club over which Timmy would no longer be presiding.

  Chapter 24

  It was another backbreaking day at the beloved lumberyard for Righty. But instead of dreaming about his glory days or the fourteen beers he was going to pour down into the bottomless pit of his stomach, he was thinking about . . . studying!

  Over the past several months, instead of draining the liquor shelves at Toby’s Bar each evening, he had been raiding the bookshelves in his wife’s home library. When she had first started his education, she knew she was going to have to start at the basics, but she assumed those basics were algebra, introductory biology, and literature. Thus, it had taken some self-restraint on her part not to smirk when she realized they would instead be starting with basic arithmetic and the alphabet.

  Early on in the program she had discovered to her horror that her husband was almost completely illiterate. She had never suspected him of being a closet genius staying up into the wee hours of the night working on some esoteric mathematical formula or fine-tuning the aesthetics of a deep philosophical poem. But she had thought he could read for Kasani’s sake!

  She soon discovered that he had been taught to read—to the small extent he could read anything—via something called the look-say method. He pulled out the town newspaper to show his wife he was not a complete fool, and although he never hoped to breathe a word about liquor around her again if he could help it, he also didn’t exactly enjoy looking like a moron in front of her. Thus, two powerful, yet contradictory, desires were a
t play when, upon scanning the newspaper, the only words he knew were those such as “liquor,” “bar,” “whiskey,” etc.

  His pride excelled his judgment, and he proudly pointed to one of these words and pronounced it, thus showing that the look-say method could work moderately with excessive repetition.

  Janie taught him phonics, and once he could read moderately well, she gave him extensive reading assignments, telling him, “Reading well-written books will teach you spelling, grammar, vocabulary, and philosophical insights.”

  As for math, she had gotten him through the multiplication tables up to twelve and was now starting to show him long division and multiplication.

  He was starting to see the world through different eyes. New vocabulary often expressed succinctly for him what before he might have struggled to communicate before with several words. Under the guiding hand of grammar, his thoughts and words flowed more succinctly and organized, and on those rare occasions during the day when the foreman stopped by to quiz him on the progress of his small crew, he found the foreman looking at him differently. He wasn’t sure it was an altogether pleased look. In fact, he thought he saw something like suspicion in the foreman’s eyes, but mixed with it was something he was sure was respect.

  When Janie had first begun her curriculum for him, it had been like pouring rain over a parched, barren desert with seeds hidden deep beneath the surface waiting to sprout upon coming into contact with the heavenly substance of water. But whereas the soil of a barren desert is parched from years of deprivation of water, the soil of his mind was barren from years of whisky, bareknuckle brawling, mind-numbing labor, and a complete lack of mental stimulation. As the words and numbers from pages rained down through his eyes and into his soul, they had at first met little in the way of seeds. But buried deep within the stupefied mind of this man who had abused his mental faculties for over a decade were seeds of intelligence supported by an iron determination, and after the first month and a half, both he and Janie were starting to see results.

  With the gains he was making in his intelligence, there was a tinge of sorrow. He hadn’t the slightest idea what he was going to do with everything he was learning, and the more he learned the more he became aware of his profound ignorance and of how little he knew compared to successful men of the world, such as bankers, lawyers, accountants, and senators. He feared that even if he learned all these men knew—and that might take him the rest of his life—he might never find an escape route from the hellhole upon which he was utterly dependent for putting food on his family’s table. Those men, he figured, in addition to all the knowledge they had, also had held apprenticeships during which they received practical training. At his age, and still quite a few years short, even with prodigious effort, of acquiring their knowledge, nobody would want to give him the chance of becoming an apprentice and getting hands-on training.

  Janie, who considered his transformation nothing short of a miracle, which had restored her faith irreversibly in the supernatural, was not about to let the ugly pits of self-doubt and despair ensnare her husband and coax him back into a nightmarish cycle of self-loathing and binge drinking down into which he would drag himself, her, and poor little Eddie. When she saw him beginning to think this way—and especially if he said so out loud—she would sit on his lap and look at him lovingly and tell him it wouldn’t be that way.

  He didn’t know why, but this seemed to always snap him out of his negativity. He had a trainer once with that knack. His trainer hadn’t sat on his lap, and he sure as Kasani didn’t smell like Janie, but he did have fiery eyes, and he would snap Righty out of self-pity if he was getting frustrated and doubting himself.

  With all of his newfound focus, he had all but forgotten about his son. It wasn’t entirely for lack of interest, although truth be told, when he got home his main focus was eating something to fuel his exhausted body, drinking about half a pot of black coffee that Janie always had ready for him, and then diving headfirst into his books and hoping against hope that they might someday produce within his mind the solution to leaving the captivity of his job, which he considered little better than slavery.

  Usually, by the time he got home Eddie was already in his room with the door shut and the lights off and—he assumed—asleep. On Sundays, Eddie would go off into the woods the entire day and come back late at night and go straight to his room. Sundays were a particularly important day to Righty. He would get up at the break of dawn, drink half a pot of the darkest black coffee Janie could find, and then dive into his books. At midday, he would have another half pot of coffee, and get back to the books and keep at it until about midnight. Sundays were special not only because of all the studying he got accomplished—he figured one Sunday was worth about four workdays because of all the extra time and energy he had—but because they gave him the sweet taste of freedom, the soft whisper of the life he might have one day if he worked really hard.

  He had been alarmed only momentarily a few months back when he learned first of some knuckleheaded kid in Eddie’s class falling to his death off a tree branch not too far from his and Janie’s house and by a suicide just days later of the young fool’s friend, apparently due to remorse he felt for having given him the dare in the first place.

  Kids nowadays lack both guts and common sense, he philosophized. When I was a kid, you didn’t take a fool dare like walking across a branch that’d kill you if you fell off of it; you took fool dares like walking across a branch that’d break your leg if you fell off of, he thought and then smiled upon realizing that if a branch was high enough to cause you to break your leg if you fell it could probably kill you too.

  He had asked Eddie the next chance he had if everything was okay. For all he knew Timmy and Brian might be friends of his, and he didn’t want Eddie getting any fool-headed ideas like now it was his turn to kill himself because some knucklehead in his class had done the same.

  “No, Dad; I didn’t really know either of them that well,” was all he said.

  That had satisfied Righty just fine, and he didn’t see any need to prolong the conversation. Janie, with her motherly instincts and extra time, had done a bit more investigation and had gone to see Eddie’s teacher, Mrs. Reichart, who had told her, “Well, to tell you the truth, Mrs. Simmers, no—they weren’t friends at all. In fact, they teased Eddie quite a bit, calling him their ‘special friend’ in a very unflattering tone. I often suspected the bullying might have been a bit more severe outside of school, but I never heard any complaints from Eddie.”

  That had briefly alarmed and then pleased Janie. She was alarmed at the bullying, but pleased the bullies were done for: “Even though,” she would add unconvincingly whenever broaching the subject, “they certainly didn’t deserve to die.”

  Finally, the day was drawing to a close. Approximately ninety times—eighty-seven to be exact—he had picked up a large piece of lumber from the receiving zone and carried it to the factory where a group of more-skilled employees either cut the lumber to certain basic specifications—for example, if it were to be used for building a home—or where a few highly skilled craftsmen took lumber and crafted it into things like tables, chairs, and desks.

  As the day drew to a close, he was feeling nervous. He was getting back the old thirst, and only with great resolve was he able to remind himself of his resolution and the perdition that awaited him if he went back down that path.

  But it was calling, calling, calling.

  Worse still was the fact he figured if he went home he would fall directly to sleep and not make the slightest bit of progress on The Escape. The Escape was the secret name he had given to his pipe dream of escaping his miserable job and moving onto something better. He found it kept a bit more allure if he romanticized his goal a bit. He imagined himself being locked cruelly in a dungeon somewhere as the result of a wrongful conviction. Every day, he dug a little out of that prison. Every day he didn’t dig meant one more day in that prison. Thus, he knew he had to keep digging, dig
ging, digging. He liked the prison analogy in particular because he knew that he had been put there wrongfully—put there by Oscar Peters and the rascals on the boxing commission.

  He tried to play the prison analogy over and over in his mind, but he knew the day would come when it wouldn’t be enough—when his will would break, and he would desire death or a drink, and either way the result would be the same.

  “Hey, Righty?”

  It was Thomas, the guy who had long since given up on dragging Righty to the bar and knew better than to rag him about it.

  “Hey, Tom.”

  “Not interrupting any important thinkin’ there, am I?”

  “No, nothing important,” laughed Righty good naturedly, feeling his spirits lift a little bit.

  “Look, Righty; I know you quit drinkin’, and don’t tell any of the boys I said this, but ‘tween you and me, I’m damn proud of you. Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but I know you said you’ve been book learnin’, and, well, I can see in your eyes that you’s as tired as a dang dog and probably wishin’ you could go for a beer or nine rather than goin’ home to read over them books and such. Well, put a little of this in your nose ‘fore you get home, and see if those books don’t suddenly seem a little less tiresome. It’s the last of it I got left, and somethin’ tells me it’ll go to better use with you than with me.”