South Village (Ash McKenna) (4 page)

T
he tree reaches out of the earth and unfurls toward the canopy like an open hand, a pale wood structure perched in the palm. The way the tree spreads up and out, it was impossible to get a ladder to the front door, so the ladder was built onto another tree twenty feet away, and the two were connected by a rope bridge.

The bridge isn’t up anymore.

Everyone’s here. With camp currently at capacity—the staff roster full and all the tree houses rented out—that means nearly forty people are crowded around the base of the tree. Heads downcast, still as statues.

Aesop and I approach, twigs cracking under our feet, and a few people look up, some familiar faces, most not. Some people are weeping, others are holding themselves or each other, and some are blank. A tapestry of shock and mourning. People step aside, allowing us to pass. At the center of the scrum, Tibo is crouched down so low his long dreads nearly touch the ground. He’s contemplating Pete like a painting.

Pete is sprawled out on the ground, limbs askew and head kinked at an unnatural angle. He’s shirtless, shoeless, wearing a pair of cargo pants cinched tight to his emaciated frame. His long red hair is spread like a burst of flame, draped across his face.

My breath catches in my chest. It’s cool here in the shadows created by the trees, but the heat on the back of my neck rises. No one is staring at me, but it feels like everyone is staring at me.

This guy looks way too comfortable. Can’t be his first time around a dead body.

Real dead doesn’t look like dead in the movies. The skin doesn’t take on a cool icy hue. The face doesn’t rest in a position of serenity. The joints and muscles fall slack. Everything gone but the meat. You look at a dead body and know it’s empty of something.

Pressure builds in my face like an over-filled water balloon, stretching my skin.

“Ash.”

The bridge is there, lying in the dirt. It looks like the bridge Indiana Jones gets trapped on in
Temple of Doom
, stuck between Nazis and the crazy Indian death-cult. Except this bridge was twenty-five feet over the forest floor, not hundreds of feet over a croc-infested river. I’ve walked across the bridge. I thought it was sturdy.

“Ash.” Tibo is standing next to me, his voice low. “I need you right now.”

I nod at him and he turns to the assembled staffers and guests and says, “This is a tragedy, but one that must be dealt with. Could everyone please return to the Hub? We’re going to call the sheriff and inform him there’s been an accident.”

A few people drift off, the guests and the newer staffers, the ones who didn’t know Pete, but most of the crowd lingers. Ignoring Tibo, staring down at the ground, like Pete might shake off being dead and stand back up.

Tibo raises his voice. “Please, everyone. I know this is very difficult.”

More departures. Tibo grabs Cannabelle as she passes. “Call the cops, okay? Ask for Ford specifically.”

She nods, her eyes rimmed in red. One small hand, her fingernails caked in dirt, placed over her mouth. Not like she might throw up, more like she’s trying to hold something in. She turns to me and her body looks like it’s about to unwrap and fall to the ground. She wants a hug. The comfort of human contact, and anyone will do.

I step aside, let her look for someone else.

She settles on Magda, whose face is mostly hidden behind a wild bush of fuzzy gray hair, her thick body draped in a yellow sundress and yellow shawl and yellow ceramic jewelry that clacks when she moves. They fall into each other and Cannabelle glances back at me, disappointed. Tibo puts a hand on each of their shoulders.

“Okay, ladies,” he says. “Head on back.”

They disengage, hold hands, and walk off.

There’s a sharp voice behind us. “We should start cleaning up.”

Marx is standing at the edge of the clearing, tense, like he’s preparing to pounce on someone. He’s barefoot, wearing an old pair of jeans, the legs folded up mid-calf, and a red t-shirt, and his stupid black bowler hat.

My understanding is he and Crusty Pete were close, but he’s not betraying any emotion other than anger.

Tibo takes a few steps toward him. “Why don’t you head on back with the others?”

Marx puffs his chest. Tibo is wires and bone and sinew. Marx is thick and lean. The kind of body that indicates a life of working outside. I’ve got a big ego and I wouldn’t want to fuck with him. But I kind of assume it’s going to happen eventually, only because he’s got a bad attitude and I’m good at inviting stupid things into my life.

“We can’t leave him lying there in the dirt,” Marx says.

“Yes we can,” Tibo says, pushing up his thick-framed black glasses, which are sliding down his face on a sheen of nervous sweat. He’s not so much looking at Marx as he’s looking at some point past Marx, beyond the trees. “We can’t start disturbing things. I know it’s not fun, but we have to do the right thing here…”

“The right thing. Leave him lying in the dirt. Of course you wouldn’t care.”

“This has nothing to do with me and him,” Tibo says.

Marx takes a step forward. “Does it? Maybe it does. How am I supposed to know that?”

This is the start of a familiar and very unproductive dance, so I get between them. “Marx, go back, keep everyone organized. We’ll handle things here.”

“What the fuck…”

“I’m not repeating myself,” I tell him. “This whole thing is very unpleasant. Let’s not make it even more unpleasant. In case it’s not clear, yes, that is a threat.”

Marx is mulling over whether a challenge is worth what’s next. His eyes studying me like he’s looking for a weak point. I want to tell him that no, it’s not worth it, but that’d be throwing gasoline on a trash fire. I hold his jade green eyes for what seems like a moment too long, and finally he shakes his head and looks around me to Tibo. “This doesn’t smell right.”

Tibo still won’t make eye contact with him. Marx spins around and stalks off. We watch him until he disappears, and then it’s the two of us.

And Pete, lying on the ground.

“That dude is a giant walking bag of dicks,” I say, nodding after Marx.

“That’s a strange analogy,” Tibo says. “I’d just call him an asshole.”

We turn, survey the scene. The bridge. The body. Look up at the tree house.

“Can you get up there?” Tibo asks.

“Cannabelle is the resident climber. Want me to go get her?”

“I need you to go up there.”

“Why?”

“Because I trust you.”

I put my hands on my hips, look at Tibo. “What’s going on?”

“I need to know Pete wasn’t stashing any drugs,” Tibo says. “Anything hard, at least. We don’t have long until the sheriff gets here.”

“What happened, anyway?”

“No one saw it. Sunny found him. I think the scene is pretty self-explanatory.”

“Snap, fall, snap.”

“It’s my fault.” Tibo says. He takes a big breath and sighs. “It’s my fault.”

“It’s not your fault.”

He looks at me sideways. “I’m in charge. It’s my fault.”

“Let’s put that aside for right now.”

Tibo arches an eyebrow, leans forward, and sniffs. “Little early to be drinking, isn’t it?”

“Only if you lack resolve.”

He rolls his eyes and hurries off, so I circle the tree, give the body a wide berth, look for a place to get a handhold. There doesn’t seem to be a very good one until I get all the way around to the other side, and find a branch low enough that I can catch it and thick enough that, hopefully, it won’t break under my weight.

Hopefully. One broken neck is enough.

Wait, no. One is too many.

I take a long drink from my flask, cram it back in my pocket, take a few steps and jump, grab the branch. The wood cuts into my palms and the branch dips toward me but it doesn’t break, so I pull myself up and wrap my legs around it, twist myself over until I’m lying on top of it. I slide down toward the base of the tree, to where the branch is thicker, and there are enough branches around it I can get up to a standing position.

Once I’m upright it’s a simple task of climbing the branches like a crooked ladder until I’m at a window of the tree house. It’s not netted, thankfully, so I don’t have to rip anything down. I climb onto the platform with Crusty Pete’s sleeping bag, which reeks of body odor and old food.

Oh Crusty Pete and your wildly accurate nickname.

I push the sour-smelling bag aside, climb across and onto the floor. It’s sparse and dim, this tree house not wired for electricity, so there’s nothing to turn on. The air is thick, the breeze apparently not coming through the window or the door enough to clear it out. There’s the platform, a chair, and a small table, everything roughed out from plywood by an amateur hand, unfinished and not painted. On the table there’s a paper plate, two shiny black water bugs feasting on the crumbs of whatever was left.

Motherfucker. I will never get used to seeing these things. Not here. Seeing them crawl out of a sewer grate or disappear under the fridge is at least familiar. I didn’t expect to find them in the woods. These are worse than New York roaches, too, because they’re bigger and sometimes fly at your face.

They pay me no attention, so I crouch down, to Pete’s worn and tattered duffel bag. It’s full of dirty clothing and a small plastic baggie of shriveled brown shrooms, which I shove into the back pocket of my jeans. On the sleeping platform, there’s a small pile of papers and books. Mostly books.

Rules for Radicals
by Saul Alinsky,
1984
by George Orwell,
God and State
by Mikhail Bakunin,
A People’s History of the United States
by Howard Zinn. All of them worn and beaten and standard reading for most of the folks around here. Also, an erotic novel called
The Kiss of the Rose
. Which is weird, but okay.

Underneath the books is a stack of papers, held together with a paperclip, the pages warped where they’ve been repeatedly soaked and dried and yellowed by age. The front page is a bad clipart image of a book of matches.

Setting Fires with Electrical Timers: An Earth Liberation Front Guide
.

I flip through and it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Lots of diagrams on how to commit some gnarly arson. This sets off all kinds of internal alarms. But as the son of a firefighter, it would. Even as a kid I would lecture people about the dangers of real Christmas trees and the importance of inspecting your fire extinguishers. The idea of arson is pretty fucking repellant to me.

There are two kinds of people who come through South Village: People looking for something—themselves, adventure, a story, whatever. And then there are the people who are in the tank for the hippie lifestyle. And that can run the spectrum from Woodstock to hard activism. Magda is the Woodstock type. Old-school happy fun times. Marx is the hard activism type. I’ve never been able to peg Crusty Pete down, because we never spoke much, but unless he’s morbidly curious, this seems to be a good indication of where he lands on the scale.

There are no notes throughout the document, but the back is filled up with careful numbers in little groupings, offset by dashes. This is probably not a good thing to leave lying around. It’s too thick to fold so I roll it up and jam it in my pocket with the flask.

One more quick look around. Nothing else in the open. I look back to the plate and see the two roaches, which now seem to be regarding me with some level of curiosity. Like maybe I’m edible. I kick a chair and duck in case they attack, but they scramble away and disappear.

I get down on the floor and check under the chair and the table, to make sure there’s nothing taped under anything. Other than that, there aren’t really any places to hide contraband. Not that it would be easy to find. The shrooms are one thing. If Pete really wanted to hide harder drugs, he probably hid them well enough that they won’t be found without physically tearing this place apart.

That finished, I step onto the platform that serves as the front porch, which doesn’t give me room to do much more than stand. Look down and there’s Crusty Pete. He’s closer to the tree house than he is the tree that held the ladder. His body is lying perpendicular to the path of the bridge so I can’t tell if he was coming or going. I consider jumping down but it’s too high, so I go back through the window and climb down the branches until I’m on the ground.

I walk around the tree, careful to avoid looking at Pete’s body, because I don’t want to look at it. I don’t like the way it looks. It reminds me of what happened in Portland. The way Wilson arced through the air off my fist and cracked his neck against the bumper of his car. The way his body felt as I carried it through the woods. Woods that looked a little like these woods, and suddenly the wave hits, roaring in my ears, pulling me down into the dark...

I try to focus on something else. I go to the bridge and take a knee next to the rope. Thick, brown hemp that probably would have been period-specific for
Temple of Doom
. It shrinks when it gets wet, which is why they soak it and dry it before using new bundles. That reduces the amount it’ll shrink when it rains. But I can’t remember the last time it rained, and I don’t even know if that would create enough tension to break it.

The rope is frayed so I twist it back together, to look down the length of it. To see if I can glean anything about how it tore. This is going to mean checking the four other rope bridges to make sure everything is sound.

Once I get it twisted back up to where it’s supposed to be, twice the thickness of my thumb, I run my finger across the face of the break.

Half of it is ripped and torn and jagged.

The other half is smooth and uniform.

Like it’d been cut halfway with a sharp knife.

Just enough that maybe it’d break if someone walked across the bridge.