The Fall

1

Thursday was an amazing day. One to remember by anyone’s standards.

A day of secrets shared.

Mysteries revealed.

New experiences.

Tobacco.

Jack Daniel’s Tennessee sippin’ whiskey.

Playboy magazine.

An entire cooked chicken.

Mayonnaise (for dunking).

Chocolate fudge cake, a whole quart of fresh cream.

Tony Urtz finally buying ammo for his rifle.

A crisp $50 bill.

Which was probably the catalyst for such a day as this, anyway. And the Vermont sun shone down, basting the whole damn scene in hot, brilliant sunshine.

The three 12-year-olds sat high in the pear tree upon a platform of good seasoned timber. The three were Sam Baker, a New Yorker, and Vermonters Jools McMahon and Tony Urtz. The Vermonters were home-grown natives of a flyspeck that sat an easy stone’s-throw from Route 91, complete with a homely white-spired church and a village green.

Tony Urtz, barefoot and carefree, wore a red checked shirt complemented by a straw hat frayed to wispy strands around the brim. He smoked a corn-cob pipe while caressing the barrel of the rifle that lay across his knees. The fact that he looked a lot like a popular image of Huckleberry Finn wasn’t lost on Sam Baker.

In contrast to Tony’s countrified look was Jools McMahon’s image of urban chic, with Levis, a ‘Just Tokin’ Dope’ T-shirt, sunglasses and old trainers that looked sassy rather than scruffy.

Sam Baker, as always, felt awkward in the clothes his mother had chosen for him. As if he’d borrowed them from someone else. Even at 12 years old he knew clothes should fit you psychologically as much as physically. These yellow chinos and jungle-pattern shirt made him feel over-large, gangling and anything but cool.

Nevertheless, he sat there with his back to the tree trunk, legs stretched out in front of him, with as much nonchalance as he could muster. All three sat, or lay, on the boards of the platform, which rested on the branches of the pear tree some 20 feet above the soft green grass of the orchard. Arranged around them on the platform were the goodies they’d bought with a crisp, sweet-smelling $50 bill that providence had brought their way. The chicken, now picked down to its bones, attracted a softly-buzzing fly or two; there were cartons of rifle shells and cigarettes; the magazine opened at the centrefold; and the rest of the finger-lickin’ stuff.

This is good living, Sam thought contentedly, taking his turn at the whiskey bottle (wetting his lips only, not drinking: he didn’t want to barf back the chicken, cake and cream). After passing the bottle to Tony, he pulled lazily on the cigarette, all the time savouring the illicit, buzz-in-your veins thrill of it all.

Especially he liked the comradeship of his two new friends. And he loved to sit with them doing a whole lot of nothing in particular: chatting about this and that, sipping whiskey, allowing his eyes to contentedly rest on the beautiful scenery that comprised a dozen or so acres of apple and pear trees, heavy with fruit and set on a slope running gently downhill in the direction of the Connecticut River that shone like a highway of liquid silver beneath the noonday sun. In the sky a single cloud radiated black arms like the ghost of some spiral galaxy. But for the moment the sun shone clear and free.

‘Boys. Reckon it might rain some?’ Tony Urtz spoke slowly in his best old-man-a-rockin’-on-his-porch style.

‘Yup,’ Jools and Sam agreed.

‘Best make the most of this sunshine then, boys.’ Tony sucked thoughtfully on the corn-cob pipe while watching Sam light another cigarette. ‘This the first time you smoked cigarettes, young feller?’ He pronounced cigarettes ‘see-gar-rettes’.

‘Nope,’ Sam said, imitating the lazy Southern drawl. ‘Been smoking since I was knee high to Jiminy Cricket.’

‘You know, once that nicotine works its way into your blood? Gets ya like hookworm. Yah’ll never get it out. Devil old nicotine we call it round abouts here.’ Tony pronounced nicotine as ‘nick-oh-teen’, stretching out the vowel sounds by about a mile or so into that easy drawl that was nothing like his own New England accent.

‘And don’t forget the liquor, y’all? She gets in your system, nothing gonna get that bitch out, no way, no how,’ Jools added in a mock Southern style that veered more to cotton-pickin’ Uncle Tom than any genuine patois. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the liquor don’t get yer, the women must.’

They laughed. Tony let his leg swing over the edge of the platform. Again he looked the image of Huckleberry Finn: for all the world he could have been smoking his corn-cob pipe on a raft while allowing his bare toes to be caressed by the waters of the muddy Mississippi.

Sam Baker knew this was the day he could be honest about himself, tell any kind of secret, confess anything, and it would be heard by the other two with mature understanding. Perhaps this is what it’s like to be an adult, he thought. If it was, then growing old was just fine with him.

So, on impulse, he switched the cigarette from his right hand to his left. Then he held up his right hand, fingers splayed.

Tony drawled lazily. ‘Burn yourself on your cigarette there, young feller?’

‘Want to see something gross?’ Sam asked, dropping the Southern drawl.

‘I see your hand, boy. I see nothing gross.’ Tony pushed back the brim of his hat with his finger.

‘Don’t you see anything? Anything strange?’

‘Only friction burns from excessive personal abuse.’ Tony and Jools dissolved into boozy giggles. Their laughter was enough to shake the platform, toppling an empty Coke can that rolled over into fresh air and dropped down onto the turf 20 feet below.

‘No.’ Sam grinned. ‘My hand. What’s wrong with it?’

‘Give us a clue.’

‘Look, I’ve got five fingers.’

They both giggled again. Tony took off his hat and fanned his face with it. ‘We’ve all got five fingers, boy. Hadn’t you better lay off of that damn booze for a while?’

‘No, you haven’t.’ Sam’s grin broadened. ‘You’ve got four fingers and a thumb. Look. I’ve got five fingers.’

‘Jesus. Let’s have a look,’ Tony said as both he and Jools quickly kneeled up on the platform to grab a closer look.

‘How the hell did that happen?’ Jools asked, so impressed he had to slip off his sunglasses to examine Sam’s fingers.

‘I was born with five fingers and a thumb on each hand. That’s a grand total of 12 digits.’

‘What happened to the thumbs?’

‘I had an operation to remove them. My parents didn’t want me to grow up looking like a mutant.’

‘Cool.’

‘Is that the scar where they chopped off the thumb?’ Tony asked, pointing to an oval-shaped mark near one of Sam’s wrists.

‘That’s the one. You can still feel the nub of bone beneath the skin. Here, feel.’ Each solemnly touched the scar tissue that covered the nubby bump of bone. ‘The joint’s still there. Feel it going up and down? I can still wiggle the stump under the skin.’

‘Uh! Now that is gross!’ Jools exclaimed with a delighted grin. ‘C’mere, let me have a look at your thumb again.’

All three studied Sam’s left hand. ‘There, you can tell now, can’t you? Fingers have two joints, thumbs have one. That there digit on my hand is in the same place as the thumb but it’s got two joints.’

‘Ergo a finger,’ Tony said, dropping his Southern drawl at long last. ‘Didn’t they let you keep the thumbs in a jar of formaldehyde or something?’

‘No. Like I said, I was a baby when they chopped them.’

Jools replaced his sunglasses on the bridge of his nose, then solemnly raised the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. ‘We should toast the guy with five fingers per hand. All hail the mutant.’

‘All hail the mutant,’ Tony echoed and reached out for his turn from the bottle.

After that, they toasted the girls in the magazine, then the pears on the tree, then whatever they could muster.

‘All hail the black cloud.’ Tony raised the bottle to the cloud that spiralled slowly above them. ‘May it never piss on our parade.’

‘May it never piss on our parade,’ they all echoed.

As Jools took his slug of whiskey he suddenly thought of something. ‘Hey, we forgot to buy peppermints. My dad’s sure to smell the whiskey on my breath.’

‘No, he won’t,’ Tony said with a wry smile.

‘Why not?’

‘The cigarettes’ll mask the smell.’

‘Oh yeah, he’ll tear me a new corn chute for these, too.’ He held up the cigarette, gave it an accusing glare, then, shrugging, put it into his mouth again. ‘What the hell. I’ll brush my teeth when I get in. Say,’ he sat up, remembering. ‘You all going to the fair on Saturday?’

Tony clasped the pipe between his teeth. ‘Count me in, boy.’

‘Sam?’

‘Sure. If I can get… Oh, hell, no. I can’t.’

‘Why not? Damned fine rides there.’

Sam felt disappointment weigh down in his stomach like a stone. ‘I’m going home Saturday. Shit. I forgot all about that.’

‘Back to New York?’ Tony asked, dismayed. ‘You can’t. School isn’t for another fortnight yet.’

‘I know, but my dad’s flying in from Miami and I arranged to spend that last fortnight with him. Oh, shit.’

‘Well, you’ll be relieved to get away from this hicksville.’ Tony took a slug from the bottle. ‘Back to the Big Apple. I bet it’s pretty cool roaming those mean streets, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah,’ Sam said with no enthusiasm whatsoever. ‘It’s okay.’

The truth was he didn’t roam any mean streets. New York was a God Almighty prison for most kids. If you weren’t at school you stayed home with the door of the apartment locked and bolted. In his neighbourhood you certainly didn’t go out after dark. Night-time was the personal territory of street gangs, pimps, drug dealers and any demented asshole with a gun.

No and damned no. Shit to it. Shit with bells and whistles stuck into the whole steaming heap. He wanted to stay here among the hills, fields and forests of Vermont. He wanted to stay with his friends who were open, honest and easygoing. Through the branches of the tree, dangling pears in crazy profusion, he could see the white timber house where he was staying with his aunt and uncle. Here you could leave your windows open to the fresh air. There was no need for deadlocks, security shutters and electronic surveillance systems designed to stop some smackhead razoring your throat open as you slept. You didn’t live with the perma-hum of the air-conditioner. You didn’t breathe that Big Apple air of car fumes and fear. Shit, this was a good place. He liked it.

‘Uh-oh.’ Tony cocked an eye at the sky. ‘Looks as if Black Bertha’s gonna piss on our parade after all.’

A single raindrop fell onto the magazine, splashing wetly on the bare stomach of Gina La Touche, the blonde bombshell from Arkansas. (Only the cuffs didn’t match the collar, as Tony Urtz sagely observed.)

‘You save the ladies, Jools,’ Tony said, closing the magazine. ‘I’ll grab the booze. Sammy boy, you take the cigarettes. Got anywhere you can stash them at your aunt’s place?’

‘No problem,’ Sam said as another raindrop splashed onto a carton of rifle shells.

‘Can’t let these babies get wet,’ Tony said, taking off his hat. Quickly, he popped the cartons of ammunition into it and then covered it with a plastic carrier bag. ‘Righty-ho, boys, where do we go from here?’

Sam opened his mouth to speak. He wasn’t ever sure if he did manage to get the reply past his lips. Nor was he ever sure exactly what did happen in the next two to three minutes. Because that was when his universe – space and time and the whole of creation – was turned inside out in one searing flash of bluish-white light.

The cloud had been drifting north, pushed by warm, sticky air from the Gulf of Mexico. It had begun life as a tropical storm, shredding palm trees, flattening tobacco plants, tearing the corrugated-iron roofs off houses from Jamaica to Cuba. Its passing there would jack up the price of bananas in supermarkets nationwide six months from then; already farmers were burning ruined crops while turning their minds to the task of lobbying governments for disaster relief.

But all that was a long way from the orchard in Vermont.

Now the cloud was slowly dying. In an hour or two it would dissipate in the cool, clear air above the pine-clad mountains of the American-Canadian border. But at a little after one on that Thursday afternoon it decided on one final act of violence (if you choose to anthropomorphise a billion or so water droplets that have become electrically charged): whatever – it discharged a hundred million volts in the form of a lightning bolt to the ground.

The nearest thing to it that could be described as an ‘earth’ was the pear tree in which the three 12-year-olds sat.

Sam Baker’s recollection of the lightning strike made no sense to him for years afterward. He recalled a series of images so vivid they seemed to have been burned deep into his very brain tissue. But even though he tried his hardest he could not order them into their proper sequence.

He remembered standing beneath the pear tree. The grass was a stunning green: a far brighter green than it should have been. (Grass stalks had been boiled in their own juices by the lightning flash, so his uncle later told him.) The pear tree had become a blackened skeleton. Pears, cooked first on the branch, steamed on the ground, the pulpy flesh bursting from the skins, while hanging thickly in the air was the sweet aroma of the fruit’s roasted flesh. And Sam remembered being suspended in space, floating as weightlessly as an astronaut. For some reason he was convinced he was floating upward into what appeared to be a snowstorm of swirling flakes. Only these flakes were a violent electric blue that swirled around him in a dazzling shower of sparks.

And he remembered a great silence.

A complete and utter silence that, as he later reasoned, must have been impossible, because the lightning flash would have been accompanied by an almost simultaneous explosive roar of thunder.

Whether these images or hallucinations – tag on any label you want – came before or after his memory of standing beneath the tree, blasted black by lightning, he couldn’t tell. (And the doctor at the hospital did indeed stress that shock – both physical and mental – would scramble all memories until they were a cockeyed mess of fragmented pictures.)

He recalled, too, clumps of clothing lying on the ground, gently smouldering. What he took at first to be red buttons on a shirt were little spots of flame. He saw the sunglasses worn by Jools lying on the ground with one lens knocked out. He saw the burning stock of the rifle, the steel barrel bent into a question-mark shape. A symbol for this singular experience? Most wonderful of all was that an angel lay on its back on the grass, asleep. It was an angel, he decided, because the face was made out of gold. He saw the nose, the chin, the forehead, the closed eyes all covered with a golden skin. It was only months later that he realised that what he had actually seen was the dead body of Tony Urtz. The brass cases of the rifle ammunition had melted in the lighting blast and sprayed into his face like an aerosol. Doctors, police, friends, relatives – all assured Sam that Tony Urtz wouldn’t have felt a thing. That he must have been dead by the time the molten metal splashed his skin.

No-one survives a lightning strike like that.

But then why did I? Sam would ask himself this for years to come. How come I stood there in the centre of that electric furnace and survived? Physically suffering nothing more serious than singed eyebrows and a bruised shoulder from the fall out of the tree.

In the hospital the Sheriff had stood by Sam’s bed, turning his hat round and round through his fingers, and tried to answer that one.

‘Lightning strikes are strange things, Sam. Why, I’ve seen where they’ve hit a group of golfers on the green. It takes one and spares another even though they might be closer to one another than you and I are now. I know losing your two friends like that’s going to be hard. Not much takes the pain out of it. That is, unless you have religious convictions?’

Sam had shaken his head, then closed his eyes.

And all the time the memories were there inside his head. They were painted in vivid, jangling colours as bright and as unreal as when you fool around with the colour control on your TV. He remembered standing there. In the ruins of the scorched tree. The bodies of his friends burning at his feet. Tony Urtz in his mask of brass. A bumble-bee had walked down across the burnished forehead to the tip of the shining nose. The smell of roasting pears with their sweet-as-syrup aroma. The grass that was a brilliant day-glo green. And there, nesting among the grass stalks, was a pocketful of nickels and dimes fused into a single lump. White butterflies the size of paperback books flitted to and fro.

And there were images that came right out of left-field, too. Jumbled with what must have been genuine memories were rogue images of a man hanging on this huge wooden cross. He had jet black hair and wore peculiarly vivid red shoes. A ghost girl sat beside him singing in a soft, husky voice, ‘Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight, gonna come out tonight…’

The face of a bearded man with his eyes as lightly closed as a sleeper’s suddenly loomed before Sam. The man opened his eyes. And the moment the eyelid unsealed itself from the skin beneath the eye something darted from the eye socket to strike Sam on the lip, pricking it so sharply it felt as if he’d been stabbed with a pin.

Sam rocked back on his heels in surprise.

And all the time, the girl sang under her breath:

Of course, those were just dreams, he told himself. Do you hear, Sam Baker? Nothing more than bizarre hallucinations triggered by what was, after all, one hell of a shock.

What really happened immediately after the lightning strike was that his aunt had found them.

He remembered she’d ran back to the house and returned with a wet flannel with which she’d washed his face as he stood there, still as a statue. Weird. Why she washed his face he didn’t really know, nor had she ever explained the reasons since. Only she must have decided it was vitally important, and that it seemed the right thing to do. To vigorously rub away the sooty smears and scorched remains of his eyebrows with the wet flannel while his friends lay at his feet roasted to their very hearts.

Later, back home in New York, he’d sit up late at night with his electric guitar across his knee, his fingers probing the fret board for notes, even for sounds that would say how it feels to stand there eyeball to eyeball with death. He was going to compose a song about it.

Only he never did find the sounds. He could never even find a title. Meanwhile, outside, the city’s traffic played its own melancholy heart-song that, in its own way, sounded like the rumble of distant thunder.

And he’d fall asleep thinking back to that holiday in Vermont when he was 12 years old. It was the first time he’d smoked a cigarette, drunk whiskey, fired a rifle. Oh, boy… that Thursday should have been an amazing day.