Halloween and Other Seasons

Hedges

By Al Sarrantonio

I thought, Will I finally belong?

I passed the boy at dawn on my bicycle. He was standing in the middle of the road, his backpack slung over one shoulder, the way students do. He was reed-thin and tall, a little hunched at the shoulders, with a cranberry colored baseball cap on backwards. Grinning slightly, ironically—again, the way students do.

There was no danger of hitting him, but I wondered why he was standing in the middle of the street. Then I saw the school far ahead on the left, set back off the road, in the middle of a cleared field. There were lights on in the windows that looked like they had burned all night. They may have been bright in the darkness but now, with the sun rising behind the school, they looked defeated and dim. After giving me a smirk as I passed, the boy slouched toward the school.

I peddled on.

Before the school on either side was a short packed line of small houses, bordered by a thick hedge. Suddenly the dawn was banished back to night. Overhead were crouching, overarching oak trees, their branches brushing like the fingertips of lovers.

The hedges grew thicker to either side, a wall of April green buds on winter-sharp branches. It was dark gray as midnight, and the air had cooled. I was suddenly tired, and I slowed, and then the bicycle, urged by my slowing, tilted to the right and leaned me over against the hedge.

It held me pricking, a wall of sharp sticks and tiny faintly perfumed wet buds, and I heard a faint voice I could not make out. It sounded like it said, Yes. The voice was very close. I pushed myself away from the hedge, my hands sinking momentarily into it, branches scratching, and something else, something that felt almost liquid and very cold, drew over my hand and then away.

I pulled my body back in disgust and fumbled at the bicycle, which caught against my straddling leg and again moved me over into the hedge.

The voice was right next to my ear, whispering, Yessss.

I flailed back, pushing my left foot against the bicycle pedal as I straightened the machine with a scrape and pushed off, back out into the road—

A car passed, close by in the gray darkness, horn bleating. It’s lights were dimmed, swallowed by the encroaching gray, and a pale oval face, hairless, lit with a green inner light, peered out at me from the rear window as it drew roaring away.

The hedge was next to me again.

I heard the whisper and felt cold pushing toward me and lurched back, dragging the bike sideways, making its tires scrape with complaint. My feet fumbled and found the pedal and then I was off again, straightening the front wheel.

But now in the grayness I saw the hedge narrowing in front of me.

I began to fight for breath.

The oaks had disappeared overhead and the hedge had grown up around into a crowning arbor. The air was chilled, damp, sick-sweet smelling.

The hedge narrowed into a closing dead end; I heard beyond it the fading roar of the car I had seen with the pale green face staring—

I thrust my feet backwards against the pedals, making the bike stop with a screech, then forced it around. Already the hedge had grown down from above, almost touching my head.

It was narrowing on all sides ahead of me, like a closing wedge.

With a shout I hit the pedals hard, keeping low, and shot through the narrowing opening even as it closed. I felt the scrape of budding branches like grasping bony fingers on me, and smelled something wet and lush and fetid, and heard what sounded like a sigh—

Gasping for breath I tore ahead, blinded by sudden sunlight. Ahead of me on the left was the school, its windows filled with rising sunlight now, the field in front of it full of milling students.

The loud blare of a horn made me stop short; in front of me was a school bus grinding to a halt, its brakes squealing. The driver was shouting at me behind the huge windshield set into the massive yellow front.

In a daze, I moved the bicycle off to the curb as the school bus ground into gear again. The driver glared at me as he drove past, then pulled into the long driveway toward the front entrance of the school.

I looked behind me.

The street, dappled in tree-shaded new morning sun, stretched straight behind me, lined to either side by a row of neat houses, cape cods and cute ranches. There was no sign of a hedge as far as the eye could see.

In the far distance was a cross street, a busy one by the look of the traffic at the intersection.

I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Wha—”

An equally startled face peered back at me: a crossing guard, an older woman with a white cloth bandolier across her jacket holding a small red stop sign.

“I’m sorry,” I began. “I’m new here, a Chemistry teacher, I start today—”

“You could have been hit by that bus,” she said, concern and scolding in her voice. “You were tearing along in the middle of the street—”

“Can I ask you something?” I interrupted. “Has there ever been a long row of hedges in the street back there?” I pointed to the spot from which I had come.

“Hedges?” She looked confused.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and began to pedal away, turning in toward the school. “I’ll be more careful.”

“Do that,” she said, the scolding tone coming back into her voice. “There are children around here, you know…”

~ * ~

“So how did it go?” Jacqueline asked, with, as always, neither concern nor interest in her tone. A fresh vodka tonic in a clear tall glass lay on the kitchen table before her. Beads of cool perspiration freckled the glass. She did not offer me one but instead sipped her own, looking out the kitchen window to the backyard, a riot of green trees and untended bushes.

“About as expected,” I answered.

“You mean like all the rest?” There was an undercurrent of venom in her voice now. I told you so and I knew it and Here we go again, her tone said, without her saying it.

I tried anyway. “Have you ever felt, Jacqueline, that you just didn’t fit in? The children in this school are even worse than normal. They didn’t show any interest at all. It was like I was talking to thirty sacks of potatoes. And the Vice Principal was almost unfriendly. I have the same bad feeling, Jacqueline. Just like all the other times. Like I don’t belong. Haven’t you ever felt that way?”

She sighed heavily, and turned her near-perfect face, framed in long black hair, slowly away from the window toward me. She pinned me with her violet eyes. “I’ve always belonged, Howard. The only question I’ve ever asked myself is why in hell I married you.”

I opened my mouth but she turned her attention back to the window and her drink.

“The back yard needs tending,” she said, tonelessly. “Every one of these houses we’ve rented, in every one of these rotten little towns, always has an overgrown backyard. This one’s worse than the rest. Do something about it.”

I said nothing.

As I turned and left the kitchen she called out casually, “I’m going out for dinner. There’re TV dinners in the freezer if you want something. And I’ll need the car again tomorrow.”

~ * ~

The next day was no better. When I entered the classroom all the desks were facing the back of the room. The day before, every student had been staring intently at the ceiling, which made me look, too. The boy in the cranberry colored baseball cap was among them. From that moment on, when they all broke into laughter, they had me. Today was no better. I should have made a joke, but nothing came to mind.

I tried to teach the day’s lesson, to ignore them, but instead they ignored me, kept their desks turned around.

Soon they began to talk and joke.

The chalk trembled in my hand. I closed my eyes, leaned my forehead against the cool blackboard and then turned around, trembling with rage.

“This isn’t right!” I stammered hoarsely, but they ignored me.

I dropped the chalk and walked out of the classroom.

The Assistant Principal was there in the hallway, and I almost ran into her.

“Having a bit of trouble?” she asked, and I couldn’t help but detect the near-disdain in her voice.

“Yes. I—”

She moved around me and stuck her head in the classroom door.

“That’s enough!” she shouted. “Get those desks back where they belong!”

There was instant quiet, followed by the shuffling of moving furniture.

The assistant principal confronted me again in the hall.

“Just treat ‘em like animals,” she said, giving me a smile that told me what she already knew: that I wasn’t capable of treating them like animals, or anything at all.

She turned on her heels and marched off.

When I walked back into the classroom the talking began again. By the end of the period they had all faced their desks toward the back of the classroom once more.

~ * ~

I took a different route home, the same I had ridden that morning. There had been no trouble then, but this time as I left the school behind me, turning my bicycle into a wide street with houses set well back on manicured lawns, a wall of hedges suddenly thrust up in front of me. I drew to a stop. The wall was rushing like a living wave toward me. I turned my bike only to see another behind me. To either side the houses began to disappear, sharp green buds pushing out from their trim fronts, doors and windows and shutters, devouring them. The hedge drew in on me from all sides. I felt cool wet green and smelled rich oxygen.

“No!” I shouted in panic.

There was a driveway to my right, still clear of obstruction, and I drove the bicycle that way, the hedges closing in on me as I did so. As the driveway reached the side of the house branches pushed out of the siding toward me. The house disappeared in a blanket of green. The hedges pushed the bike to the right, where another wall of green awaited me. I felt the caress of soft buds and a whisper in my ear.

Yesss…

I screamed, driving the bicycle forward. There was a free-standing garage in front of me bursting into green before my eyes, the hedge closing in from both sides in front of it. But there was a slim opening to the left leading to the backyard and I peddled fiercely at it, pushing through as the branches like cold hands sought to pull me in—

And then I was through the suffocating hedge, the bike shooting forward into the clear backyard and toward a well-separated line of forsythia bushes that marked the backyard boundary between houses.

I stopped, skidding on the grass, and turned around.

The house was as it had been—neat, trim, unblemished by green limbs and tiny leaves.

The hedge was gone from the driveway, from the far street.

I turned and dismounted the bicycle, rolling it through a gap between forsythias and into the abutting backyard and then to a new street and eventually home.

~ * ~

I tried one more time.

“I just don’t fit in.”

Jacqueline laughed. “You’ve never fit in,” she said, her voice slurred, and then she laughed shortly again. “And I do mean that in every way.”

She was disheveled, the front of her dress buttoned incorrectly. She had obviously had much more to drink than the vodka in front of her. Her lipstick was smeared and her eyes unfocused as she bobbed her head around to regard me.

She smiled.

“I’ll need the car tomor—”

“Have you ever felt physically smothered?” I asked, ignoring her.

She looked at her vodka tonic. “All the time.”

“No, I mean physically. For real. Like everything, everything you’ve tried and failed at, your whole life, all your unhappiness, was literally closing in on you. As if…hedges, actual green hedges, were pushing you in from all sides and wanted to swallow you whole—”

It was her turn to interrupt. She laughed and then hiccupped, then brought her drink to her lips before putting it down again.

“Harold, you are a moron.” She got unsteadily to her feet, forgot the drink, pushing it aside. It tipped over and fell from the kitchen table, breaking in a pool of clear liquid and glass shards.

She moved past me unsteadily, pointing languidly at the refrigerator.

“TV. Dinner,” she said. “I’m…out. Need the car…tomorrow. Ride your bike again…”

She walked to the front door, leaving it open behind her, and in a few moments I heard the car door slam and then the engine start.

In the empty house I looked out through the kitchen window at the backyard, overgrown with weeds and bushes and what looked for a moment like a rising tide of hedges, which abruptly vanished.

~ * ~

I took a third route the next morning. After Jacqueline had left the night before, the Assistant Principal had called and told me the school had decided it wasn’t working out and that I should not continue teaching. Would I please come in the next morning to sign some papers and pick up a check for two day’s work.

The new route was out of the way but clear. In effect, I was riding in a wide circle to get to the school. As I turned onto an unfamiliar street that would bring me back in the right direction, the boy with the cranberry colored baseball cap was crossing the street in front of me.

He leered at me as I went by and shouted, “So long!”

I put my head down and rode faster.

When I brought my head up, I gasped.

“No!”

Hedges were pushing in at me from all sides, and the sky was quickly blacking out from a lowering cloud of green.

Buds burst from the street below me, snarling the spokes of the bicycle and then stopping it dead.

Branches twined around the handlebars, the seat, yanking the bike out of my grasp.

I felt a cold wet touch slide across my fingers, my face.

Yessss.

When I tried to scream, hedge shoots snaked over and up my body and deep into my mouth.

I was pushed onto my back and lifted in a cocoon of branches and leaves.

I gagged, and then the voice sounded close by my ear.

You don’t understand.

I continued to thrash, to fight, watching the last glimmer of the world, a tiny hole of blue sky, blotted out above me by a tiny green wet leaf.

Think…

“No—!”

And then, suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown in my head, I did understand, and I stopped fighting.

“Yes!” I cried.

The hedge enclosed me, into itself.

Yesss.

My fingers are cold and wet, with green fresh buds at the ends.

I belong.