About 12 months ago the book’s characters came one by one into my life, where they became so real they vied with my family for my time and, on occasion, managed to take over my waking hours completely.
In closing, I’d like to thank you for giving me the most precious commodity of alclass="underline" your time. And to invite you to turn to the first page of a strange tale that fascinated and sometimes frightened me as it either unspooled itself from some dark recess of my mind – or simply used me as a flesh-and-bone antenna. Well, either way, ladies and gentleman, the story is just about to start and that first page lies but a moment away…
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.’