Where I Belong (2 page)

“Is that all you got to say?” T.J. nudges me hard with the toe of his boot and my nose hits the wheel again. Blood drips and spatters on the asphalt.

Still gripping my hair, Sean yanks me to my feet. “Ah, look, ugly girl's nose is bleeding. And he's crying.”

“You owe Sean some respect.” Gene kicks my feet out from under me, and for a painful second I hang by my hair.

Sean opens his fist and lets me fall. I start to get up, but he pushes me down. “Stay on your knees and apologize.”

“I'm sorry,” I mutter. “I didn't see the bike. It was an accident.”

“Maybe his hair was in his eyes,” T.J. says. “Want I should chop it off?” He flourishes a hunting knife. The sunlight bounces off the blade like sparks of fire. I'm so scared, my insides are melting.

Sean pulls me up and shoves me toward T.J. T.J. shoves me toward Gene, Gene shoves me back to Sean. They're laughing, but each time they push me they push harder. Round and round I go between the three of them, faster and faster. I'm dizzy, I stagger, almost fall but they catch me and keep up the game.

Then, as quickly as it began, it ends. Sean lets me fall and stands there looking down at me. The sun is in my eyes and I can't see his face. He reaches into his pocket and I flinch, expecting to see a knife. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes instead and lights one, flicking the match at me.

“Girl,” he sneers. “Messed-up long-haired freak. Something like this happens again, I'll give you more than a bloody nose.”

The three of them get on their bikes and roar away, laughing. I scramble to my feet. The parking lot is empty, they're gone, and all that's left is my sore scalp, still burning.

I'
M IN AN UNFAMILIAR PART OF TOWN
, running blindly, too scared to slow down. I cut corners, dash through alleys, jump a fence, and scoot across a yard. Dogs bark at me. A horn blows and a car brakes to miss hitting me. A kid on a bike yells, “Watch where you're going!”

I finally come to a stop at the end of a road and stand there, gasping for breath, and wait for my heart to settle down. At the bottom of a hill, train tracks curve into the woods. I know where I am now. If I follow those tracks, I'll be home in less than half an hour.

I look down at myself. My shirt is stained with blood from my nose, and the knee of my jeans is ripped. Mrs. Clancy will be upset. She'll want to know what happened, who hit me and why. Soon she'll say,
Why can't you get along in school, why can't you be like other boys, if you'd just try to fit in, get that hair cut, improve your attitude, do your schoolwork, join Little League . . .

She'll make me eat dinner and then, after I go to bed, I'll be awake all night with a bellyache. My stomach twists just thinking about it.

If only I had someplace to go besides home. A safe place where I'd belong and nobody would call me names or beat me up or laugh at me. No school. No teachers. No mean kids. No Mrs. Clancy. Just me, Brendan Doyle.

Across the railroad tracks, the tall trees sway in a breeze. They have new leaves, more gold than green. They sigh and whisper to themselves.

Mrs. Clancy has told me drug users, drunks, and perverts hang out in the woods. “You go down there by yourself, you might never come out. You'd get lost and no one would find you for years. Those woods are part of a national forest. They stretch from here to Tennessee. No telling what's hiding there.”

But today I see the woods as a sanctuary.

I make my way slowly down the embankment, slipping and sliding on cinders. I look both ways. No train in sight. I run across the tracks.

Safe on the other side, I pause. Sunlight behind me, dark shade ahead of me. A branch snaps as if something stepped on it. Birds sing in hidden places. A crow caws and another answers. A breeze springs up and quivers through the leaves. Light dances from tree to tree, splashing the foliage with gold.

My skin prickles. This is a magic place, the sort of forest the Green Man might call home. I can almost feel him watching me from the trees, wondering what sort of boy I am. Will I harm the forest or be its friend?

Taking care to move slowly, I tiptoe so as not to disturb the deep silence of the watchful trees. Here and there boulders and rocks, mossy and splotched with lichens, rise from beds of fern. Trolls taken by surprise, I think, changed to stone forever.

The trees close in behind me, and I can no longer see the light at the edge of the woods. Just shafts of sunshine lancing through the branches. It's like being in a cathedral—at least how I guess it might be. I've never been in a cathedral. Never even seen one except in pictures. But the forest has the same sort of silence and the tree trunks are tall and straight like stone columns and there's a kind of holiness here that makes you walk softly and whisper.

The snap of a twig frightens me, and I look over my shoulder. Nothing to see except leaves and shadows, but that doesn't mean nothing's there. It could be the Green Man himself, following the trespasser in his woods.

Maybe I should turn around and go home, but I didn't follow a path. There is no path. Am I lost already? I stand there, unsure what to do.

A whistle blows for the Riverside crossing, and I realize all I need to do is follow the sound of trains to find my way back.

I decide to go a little farther. Slowly, cautiously, I take a few steps, watching and listening for signs that something is following me. After a few minutes, I glimpse light through the trees. Have I come to the end of the forest already? Did Mrs. Clancy lie about its size?

I brace myself for the sight of a road and the end of the woods, but instead of utility poles and cars and stores, I find myself in a clearing. In its center is the biggest tree of all, the king of trees, rising from the earth like a huge dancing giant. Its spreading trunk forms the giant's legs, its branches thrust upward like arms.

Awestruck by its size, I touch the tree's bark, warm in the sunlight, rough against my hand. I feel its magic, its age, its power, its sap rising like blood. This tree must belong to the Green Man. Like him, it's as ancient as the earth itself.

I tip my head way back and stare up into the branches. I long to climb all the way to the top, but the limbs are out of my reach. I walk around the trunk and discover a hollow big enough for me to walk into. Inside I see daylight far above my head. Finding a handhold here, a foothold there, I inch my way toward the sky. Wood dust and crumbling fungus tickle my nose, spider webs stick to my face, beetles scurry out of my way, but I keep climbing.

At last, I wiggle out of the hole and climb higher. I look over the tops of trees and see East Bedford pressed against the foothills. Clouds cast moving shadows on buildings and hillsides. If I raise my hand, I can block the whole town from sight. It's no bigger than a village under a Christmas tree. Tiny buildings, tiny cars, tiny people, tiny minds.

The ground is far below me, but I'm not scared. I sit on a limb and swing my feet in space. If only I could live here. I'd be happy, I know I would. And safe.

Slowly an idea comes to me. What if I build a tree house here, a secret place only I know about?

A wind stirs the leaves. For a moment I think I see a face among them. Pressing my lips against the bark, I whisper to the tree, “It's me, Brendan. Please allow me to build a house in your branches. I mean no harm.”

The wind blows again. My branch sways and the leaves around me quiver. Is it a yes or a no? I'm not sure, but I think if it were a no, the wind would blow me out of the tree.

Slowly and carefully, I make my way down to the ground. It's time to face Mrs. Clancy.

M
RS. CLANCY MEETS ME
at the kitchen door. “Where have you been? School let out hours ago and your dinner's sitting here getting cold.”

Lit by the late-afternoon sun, her face is wrinkled and her hair is a dull reddish orange. She colors it with dye she buys at the grocery store. I'm not supposed to know that—nobody is, not even her girlfriends. But I've seen the empty boxes in the trash and I know her hair is supposed to be the color of autumn sunset.

A real mother would smile and say something like
Sit down, honey, I'll warm up your dinner
.

But foster mothers aren't real mothers. The county pays them to take care of you, so you're just part of the job. And besides, what do I know about real mothers? Mine walked out and left me in the hospital and never came back. What did she want with a baby like me? Most likely I was weird and ugly the day I was born.

One look and off she went. She didn't leave her name or a forwarding address. Didn't tell anyone who my father was.

Once I overheard a social worker say I was a crack baby. I wish I hadn't heard that. I hope she didn't really say that, I hope it's not true, my mother didn't take drugs, she didn't, she didn't.

But maybe that's why no one adopted me. Maybe that's why I'm weird. And why I never fit in anywhere.

But what difference does any of it make? Here I am in Mrs. Clancy's house, and she's saying, “Where have you been? You should have been home over an hour ago.”

When I don't answer, she takes a closer look at me. “There's blood on your shirt and your jeans are torn. Have you been in a fight?”

“No, I just tripped on something, a root or a bump in the sidewalk, I don't remember what.”

Mrs. Clancy sighs.
What's wrong with this kid, why can't he behave like a sensible person, what am I going to do with him? Maybe I should send him back to Social Services
. Out loud she says, “Go clean up.”

In the kitchen, she plops my dinner down in front of me. Chicken. She knows I don't eat chicken. It was a pork chop last night, and meatloaf the night before. Growing boys need protein, she likes to say. Eating nothing but vegetables will stunt your growth and turn you into a weakling.

With a loud sigh, Mrs. Clancy sits down across from me, a cup of coffee at her elbow. She picks up a pen and studies the crossword puzzle in the evening paper. “Do you by any chance know a word that starts with an
m
and means ‘messenger of the gods'?”

“Mercury,” I tell her. If she read a book once in a while instead of watching TV every night, she'd know a lot more.

After I've hidden my chicken in my paper napkin—easy when she's doing a crossword—I go to my room and shut the door.

“Have you done your homework?” Mrs. Clancy calls.

“Yes,” I lie as easily as I answered her question about Mercury.

“Do you want me to check it?”

“No, thanks. It was easy.” Too easy to do.

“Well, I better see improved grades on your report card. You don't want to fail sixth grade.”

In the living room, Alex Trebek introduces the guests on tonight's
Jeopardy!
show. Television will keep Mrs. Clancy occupied until the eleven o'clock news is over. I open a drawing pad and begin working on a plan for the tree house.

The next day, after school and after I report to Mrs. Clancy, I run down the hill behind the house, stopping long enough to pull a rusty old wagon out of a clump of honeysuckle. I don't know who it belonged to or where it came from, but I've had my eye on it for a long time, thinking I might have a use for it someday.

Dragging it behind me, I cut down a couple of alleys and come out at a construction site. New fancy houses are going up where the skating rink and bowling alley used to be.

It's past four, and the workmen are gone. I gather up as many old boards and two-by-fours as I can manage and head for the woods. It's not stealing. Nobody wants muddy boards with nails sticking out of them.

It takes a lot of pulling and jerking, but I get the wagon across the tracks and into the woods. At first I can't find the clearing. I drag the wagon through trees and underbrush, over roots and stones, bouncing out boards and stopping to pick them up. I begin to think the forest has tricked me. I'll never see the tree again. Maybe I imagined it.

Just as I'm about to give up, I stumble into the clearing and see it, my tree, the king of the forest, tall and broad, a dancing man, a Green Man in disguise, his face hidden.

I stare up into the tree's massive branches and search the leaves with my eyes and ears for him, but he's not there. If I listen hard enough, maybe I'll learn the language of trees and hear the Green Man's voice.

But all I hear today is the rustle of leaves and now and then the creak of a branch. I unload the wood and go back to the construction site for more. After four trips, I'm sure I have enough boards.

But before I can begin building, I need tools. I think I know where to find them.

 

After school the next day, I sneak into the basement and raid the late Mr. Clancy's workshop. Nails, hammers, saws, drills—all the tools I need to build my tree house.

I spot three plastic milk crates in a corner. No telling where he got them, but it's my guess he found them behind the 7-Eleven. I also discover a pile of musty old tarps he must have used for drop cloths. I can use them for a roof until I come up with something more permanent. Last of all, I help myself to a long, thick coiled-up rope—perfect for hoisting things into the tree.

Taking care not to be seen from the house, I fill the wagon, head for the woods, unload, and go back for more. After three trips, it's time for dinner. For once I'm glad to leave the woods. I'm really hungry. And really tired.

 

The next day is Saturday. I wake up early, tell Mrs. Clancy a story about needing to use the computers at the library, and disappear for the day. First I rig up a simple pulley system by climbing the tree and hanging the rope over a limb. Back on earth, I tie a two-by-four to one end and pull as hard as I can on the other end. Up she goes. Slowly slowly slowly. The rope hurts my hands and breaks more than once. The two-by-fours crash down through the leaves and hit the ground hard. At last I manage to nail a framework to the tree, so high up that you wouldn't see it if you didn't know it was there.