Chapter 62

Terrors of teen-age fashion, dressed in their everyday Halloween best; a half dozen gum-chewing, toothpick-sucking, lipstick-nibbling oral compulsives, outfitted for an ordinary day with the gang. A carful of young America in living color, chemical monsters created by du Pont, with nylon flesh over neon veins pumping Dayglo blood to Orlon hearts. “What’s buggin’ you, dad? You look rank. I mean you look rank!” “Nothing. I’m just having a narrow escape is all.” “Yeah? Yeah? An’ what happened?” “I was on my way across town when I was captured by a band of aliens.” “Yeah? Brass band? Ball-point pens? Bamboo who? Who?” A group giggle punctured by pistol cracks of gumfire unnerved me slightly, but I was nevertheless able to decipher their code. “Bam-bee thee,” I answered. “See ...?” The giggling stopped, and the gum-cracking. “So ...how’s the life?” the driver inquired, after a cease-fire of silence. “Rife,” I answered, a little less enthusiastically this time. My coded witticism met with silence a second time, and something in the tone of this silence told me that my companions did not take kindly to squares turning their own slang back on them. So I kept quiet to let my benefactors concentrate on the road and their gum (Ran and hid, and ran again from alley to alley and shadow to shadow until he was confronted by the head-lighted sweep of asphalt highway). After a few moments of gum-clacking the driver laid his hand on my sleeve. “Well now. That church key, man.” I handed him the opener. He took it without thanks and went to work on a seed between his teeth with its plated point. I began to get worried. The air was charged with a sadism too overt to be imagined; I had got into hot water this time and no fantasy. There is a certain kind of impending violence that one can never mistake, no matter how rampant the imagination. But just as I was about to throw open the door and leap from the speeding car a girl leaned up from the back seat to whisper something in the driver’s ear and he glanced at me and blanched, his maniacal leer changing to a little boy’s ingratiating grin. “Oh...uh...but look, mister ...unless you want a glass of root beer, I mean right now at the A and W up ahead, where can we drop you? Electric chair? Frigidaire?” “There!” I pointed at a pair of fading ruts leading off the highway west into the push of green. “Right there!” (The child lay in the ditch until his panting slowed; then he dashed across to a private dirt road hedged high on both sides with dense undergrowth.) Again on impulse, plus the desire to flee my newfound friends: “Right there will be fine, thanks. . . .” “There? I declare. Nothing up that road but cedar keys and sand coons dunes. It’s wild child out there.” He slowed the car to a stop.  “It’s wild in here,” I noted, setting off a new sputter of giggling and opening the door to step out. “Well, I thank you...” “You, hey. They say you’re Hank Stamper’s brother? Huh? Hey, well anyway, here’s where you wanted out.” The driver waved with a casual lift of his hand, grinning in a way to let me know that for reasons unknown to me I was either very lucky or very unlucky to be Hank Stamper’s brother. “Blue-tail fly,” he called meaningfully. “Good-by.” The whitewalls jumped, spinning gravel back at me as the car pulled back onto the pavement and I scuttled into the underbrush before another carful of good Samaritans came along. Free from the car’s predatory atmosphere, Lee tries once more to calm himself: What’s the hurry? I have at least another hour before I meet her . . . loads of time (The boy walked through the overhanging dark, able for the first time to question his sudden flight; he knew that it hadn’t been the house that he ran from, nor did he really fear his brother— Hank would never hurt him, never let anything get him—so what had he run from? He walked on, knotting his little features to understand his actions . . .) So, seriously now, what is the hurry? If I expected to find respite in Mother Nature’s lush green arms I was disappointed. After continuing for a few minutes, the wobbling road petered out completely and I left the last human scatter of paintless shacks and geranium plants in coffee tins and entered the dense jungle that is found all along the Oregon coast wherever the sand dunes, driven up from the sea, have become mixed with enough organic material to support life. The span of this jungle where I crossed was no more than thirty or forty yards, yet my passage took an equal number of minutes, and the weaving vine maple trees with their supple limbs and pale fall leaves purified by sun and rain seemed no more natural than had the teen-age laboratory concoctions that had driven me to the woods. So, seriously, what is the hurry? It’s not that late. But then . . . why does my chin tremble? It’s not that cold (Why’d I run? I ain’t scared of them Swedes. I ain’t scared of Hank neither. The only thing I was really scared about was that he might be watching when I jumped or yelled or something . . .) Though it was still early it was already beginning to grow a bit dark. Clouds had moved in to take the sun from me. I stumbled forward toward a quiltwork of dim light filtering through the leaves. Once I broke through a garden of rhododendron and huckleberry into an oily purple-black bog, glassy with decay where decomposition spread in a thick film over the shallow water. Lily pads floated here and there and from a particularly foreboding mass of peat and pollution a disconsolate bullfrog cried, “Suh-WOMP! Suh-WOMP!”—with all the desperation of someone shouting “Murder” or “Fire.” I tried to skirt the bog, veering to the left, and at the edge, near the place where the frog had been voicing his plight, I found myself confronted by a community of strange, sweet-smelling tube-shaped plants. They grew in upthrusting clusters of six or eight, like little green families, with the oldest attaining a height of three feet and the youngest no bigger than a child’s crooked finger. Regardless of size, and except for the broken-backed unfortunates, they were all identical in shape, starting narrow at the base and tapering larger toward the neck like a horn, except instead of the horn’s blossoming bell, they turned at the last moment, bowing their necks, looking back to their base. Imagine an elongated comma, sleek, green, driven into the purple mud with its straightened tip; or picture half-notes for vegetable musicians, thicker at the neck than at the base, with the rounded oval head a swooping continuation of the neckline; and it is still unlikely that you have the picture of these plants. Let me say only that they were an artist’s conception of chlorophyll beings from another planet, stylized figures half humorous, half sinister. Perfect Halloween fare. (So the only thing I was really scared of back at Swede Row was of Hank seeing me get scared. Now ain’t that simply the most ridiculous thing? Sure...The boy laughed to find his fear so ridiculous, but kept walking away from the town just the same; he knew that what he had done had banished him forever from his home; he knew what old Henry and all of them thought of scaredy cats, even if the thing the scaredy cats were scared of was of being scaredy cats.) I plucked one of the plants from its family to examine it more carefully and found that under the comma’s loop was a round hole resembling a mouth, and at the tapered bottom of the tube a clogging liquid containing the carcasses of two flies and a honey bee, and I realized that these odd swamp plants were Oregon’s offering in the believe-it-or-not department of unusual life forms: the Darlingtonia. A creature trapped in that no-thing’s land between plants and animals, along with the walking vine and the paramecium, this sweet and sleek carnivore with roots enjoyed a well-rounded meal of sunshine and flies, minerals and meat. I stared at the stalk in my hand and it stared blindly back. “Hello,” I said politely into the oval, honey-breathed mouth. “How’s the life?” “Suh-WOMP!” prompted the bullfrog and I dropped the plant as though burned and fled westward again. When Lee reaches the top of the dunes he shivers at the sight: a few hundred yards away the ocean lies, peaceful and gray, with its lacy edge turned back upon the beach like a chenille bedspread ready for night (The moon led the boy across the dunes. A scant sliver of moon that barely lit the beckoning surf ); but there is the sand . . .