Invisible Fences (3 page)

“Oh my God,” Pam shouted. “Where’d you get that?” 

In his upturned palm: a hypodermic syringe. 

• • • 

“I don’t want my Mom to hear.”  

Aaron should have considered that before he squirted my neck with ice-cold water. He was lucky I didn’t shout loud enough to bring the whole neighborhood running. 

“Let’s go back outside.” Aaron used both hands to pull open the sliding glass door, then stepped onto the patio. We joined him, but nobody spoke until after Pam closed the door behind us with a heavy click. 

Pam stepped forward with her hand out. “Let me see it.” 

“Sure,” Aaron said. He traced a little path in the air with the syringe, treating it like a toy airplane. He made a buzzing noise then veered it in a mock crash landing towards Pam’s hand. She didn’t flinch, and I figured out why: the nose of the “plane” was flat, with no needle at the tip of the syringe. 

Pam pulled out the plunger half-way, then pushed it back in with a faint hiss of air.  

Thin black lines and small numbers marked the clear plastic casing. The syringe was thinner than I expected, about the diameter of a pencil.  

Then Pam pulled back the plunger again, and twisted her face into a goofy wide-eyed expression. She placed the syringe above the bend in her left forearm, then pressed down hard enough that I saw her skin dimple beneath the tip. 

“Don’t, Pam,” I said. 

She drove the plunger home with her thumb, then screwed up her face in a farce of agony and bliss. I looked away. 

Aaron was smiling. “Cool.” 

The next few minutes, Aaron used the garden hose to show us how to fill the syringe with water. Instead of pouring a thin stream of water through a hole, as you did with a normal squirt pistol, the trick was to put the tip of the syringe in the stream and pull back the plunger. Water dragged in after the retreating rubber plug, filling the cylinder like magic. I was the last one to try it, and the simple motion made the syringe less threatening. That, and its relative ineffectiveness as a squirt gun. You only got one shot, and the aim was unpredictable—a dot of metal remained in the plastic tip where the needle had been broken off, misdirecting the arc of water.  

I took a “revenge” shot at Aaron, and mostly missed. Maybe a little on his sleeve. 

“We should put cherry Kool-Aid in this thing,” Pam said.  

“Blood, huh?” Aaron pondered the idea as he took the syringe back from me. I wasn’t sorry to give it up, but I was glad the syringe had lost some of its power to frighten me. 

“Yeah,” Pam said. “You could jab it in your arm, then scream like you messed up. Blood everywhere!” 

Great. And now I wondered about the missing metal point—if, as my mind sometimes pictured it, the needle had broken off in somebody’s arm, a metal splinter tearing along a vein, the blood flow’s force pushing it further inside, tumbling like a whisk through fat and muscle tissue until it reached the heart. With each heartbeat, the lodged needle would scratch at the chest from the inside—an endless, painful metronome. 

Or something like that. 

Pam looked at Aaron. “Where’d you find it?”  

“Where do you think?” 

“Any other needles? Could you take us there?” 

He shrugged, answered a single “maybe” to both questions. 

Pam’s eyes lit up.  

“But what about…” I had to speak. “What about the dope fiends?” 

Even as I said the words, rich with all the haunting connotations conjured up in the dark of our mother’s living room, the phrase sounded foolish. Fiends, in our quiet suburban neighborhood? Proof stared us in the face, a hypodermic syringe apparently used to initiate a crazed drug binge. And yet, Aaron had tamed that horrible icon, needle broken off the tip and the stupefying drugs chased from the plastic cylinder with cleansing streams of water. An unspoken childhood dare hovered over us, as well: Aaron, the small boy whose mother also warned of dangers in our woods, had ventured into that wilderness and returned unharmed.  

One additional comment about Sunday mornings: my Catholic upbringing designated this as a “day of rest,” which might be another reason why Dad chose not to wake us for church. It was intended as a thoughtful, reflective day, a religious day. But for me and Pam, when our ploy to oversleep succeeded, the sweet freedom made it more of a stolen day. We’d tricked Dad—maybe even tricked God in the process—and that gave us some extra license. If we were ever to break a rule, Sunday was the day. 

And so… 

The Woods 

My left tennis shoe squelched in mud, and I almost lost my balance. The woods had suffered the same week of heavy rain as the rest of the neighborhood, and now the dense trees overhead kept the sun from drying the ground.  

“Maybe…over here.” Aaron was supposed to be leading the way, but he had a tendency to drop back slightly. Pam overtook him a few times, then stopped and glanced over her shoulder for Aaron’s guidance. 

It was hard to tell where we were headed. We’d passed our usual area at the perimeter, with its familiar landmarks: the double-trunk tree that split like a wishbone; the heavy boulder Pam always tried, unsuccessfully, to roll; the pile of abandoned lumber, too rotten to inspire dreams to build a secret clubhouse. Now we traveled strange ground, doing our best to locate naturally formed paths that wove between trees.  

Enough sunlight filtered through leaves to help us see, but it seemed darker the further along we got. The air smelled of dust, humid and misting along my exposed arms and legs, prompting sticky sweat along my shirt collar and behind the bends of my knees. The throbbing buzz of insects seemed to thicken the air as well, adding to my confusion. 

“That tree looks familiar,” Aaron said. The tree he pointed to had no distinguishing features at all. He might as well have said “eenie, meanie, miney, moe” to choose our next turn.  

I checked my watch. 1:15, which meant we’d been in the woods about ten minutes. Time to worry not about where we were headed, but how we’d find our way back. I’d have to trust Pam’s sense of direction; I couldn’t keep the twists and turns straight in my mind.  

I tried for a heavier tread, to press more obvious footprints into the muddy ground—an improvised version of Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. “How much farther?”  

“Close,” Aaron said. “I’m pretty sure.” 

He’d said the same thing two minutes ago. 

Eventually, a sulfurous smell wafted into the hot mist. A faint murmur mingled with the steady thrum of insects. 

“Did you go as far as the creek?” Pam asked. 

• • • 

The murmur got louder with each step, the only obvious path forcing us down a slick slope toward the rising smell. I wanted to cover my nose, but needed to keep my arms out for balance.  

“You don’t know where we’re going,” I said to Aaron. “I don’t think you’ve even been here before.”  

“Maybe to the other side of…that tree.” He pointed at another identical oak or maple or whatever. Pam charged ahead, her momentum fueled by the path’s downward slant. I paused every few steps to secure my footing, which made it hard for me to keep up. 

Careful as I was, I slipped and fell next to a puddle. My hand sunk into stagnant water, and a mush of brown clay oozed between my fingers. 

My face flushed, and I prepared myself for the laughter and scornful pointing that usually greeted one of my pratfalls. Instead, I heard only the rumble of the nearby creek. The path in front of me was empty. 

I got up, then with quick steps and slides I followed the curve of the slope.  

Pam and Aaron stood motionless after a sharp bend in the path. But they weren’t waiting for me to catch up. 

They were looking at the creek. 

Today, more like a river. 

The Log Bridge 

Pam and I had always avoided the creek, so we didn’t have an obvious point of comparison. Even so, recent rains had clearly caused the creek to rise higher than it should have. 

About a dozen feet ahead of us, creamy brown water rushed past, the roiling surface flecked with swirls of heavy tan foam. Although fresh rain should have diluted the creek’s tell-tale odor, the extra motion seemed to have unearthed new offenses, stirred them and mixed them and carried them foully through the air.  

Instead of the muddy, pebbled banks you’d expect beside a creek, the waters reached to a line of trees on either side, and weaved among slightly submerged trunks.  

It was as if a river had dropped here out of nowhere. I couldn’t trace the original creek path beneath it. 

Most amazing of all, the constant rain had weakened the foundation of a large tree; its roots and trunk had split from the bank and the entire tree had fallen on its side. It now formed a perilous bridge over the rushing water.  

“No,” Aaron finally admitted. “I’ve never been here before.” 

I remember thinking about the log bridge in
King Kong.
The ship’s crew ran from a man-eating dinosaur, rushed over a fallen log, only to have their escape blocked by a giant, angry ape. Kong lifted the trunk from his side, and shook the men off the log one by one. They each fell screaming into the pit below. 

Practically in our back yard. A lost world. 

“Oh my God,” Pam said, her voice pitched to a shout over the roar of water. “What happened to
you?”
 

She’d turned around and was pointing. Aaron turned as well. Against the wondrous backdrop of foamy dark water and fallen tree, they stood and pointed and laughed.  

I looked down at my shirt, ridiculously splattered along the front. My right hand wore a brown glove of mud, with long chocolate smears on my shorts where I must have wiped off the excess.  

“Did you crap yourself?” Aaron asked.  

“I fell.” 

“Uh, no kidding.” Pam snorted, more than she had at her earlier vision of David’s humiliating swing-set disaster.  

In an instant, the magic of the moment was gone. I wasn’t on some movie set or in a storybook fantasy land. I was where kids often ended up: in an embarrassing situation, with no exit to slink through. 

Did we ever miss an opportunity to be cruel? Even with siblings, especially with friends? 

Let me tell you about friends. I didn’t have many. Aaron was my best friend by default—proximity in the neighborhood, his Mom friends with my Mom, and at school we suffered a fairly similar level of peer tyranny. I was the third geekiest kid in our grade level; Aaron was second. How did I know this? Well, whenever Aaron was absent from school, I got picked on twice as much by the other kids. The two of us, together, sometimes picked on Ralph Fancy, our grade’s number one geek (and yes, his last name was part, but far from all, of Ralph’s problem). 

Now, as Aaron joined my sister in booming laughs at my misfortune, I hated them both a little bit. But I hated the predicament more, my clothes soiled and the rancid odor of the risen creek asserting itself anew.  

“Where’d you find the syringe?” That would get him. I knew he didn’t have an answer. 

“Nowhere,” Aaron said. “I get allergy shots each month, and the nurse sometimes breaks off the needle and gives it to me.” His voice, loud over the rushing water, expressed a kind of confidence he’d never had before. “I just wanted to see how far you guys would go.” 

I was ready to run at him, head butt him in the stomach and knock him into the brackish water. See how funny
that
was. Pam, I knew, would be furious about the wild goose chase.  

But she laughed again, not bothered at all. “Doesn’t matter.” Pam waved an arm over the water. “Look what else we discovered!”  

Two against one. I was supposed to play the role of “good sport,” no matter how much I wanted to rush home and ditch these uncomfortable, mud-soaked clothes. No choice but to stay, really. I didn’t know my way back through the woods. 

“Let’s look at the tree stump,” Pam said. She used other trunks to support her, staying a few feet from the water’s edge as she walked to the fallen tree. Pam didn’t look back to see if we followed her. I let Aaron go first. 

The trunk was gigantic—half again as tall as Pam. Its gnarled roots stretched in several directions like the tentacles of a desperate octopus.  

“I wonder what sound it made when it fell,” Aaron said. 

Pam smiled. “No sound, since we weren’t here to listen.” 

On one side, the roots dipped below the surface of the water. The rushing creek splashed loudly against the trunk and the clumps of disturbed earth. A Pepsi can rattled against the side, and a cardboard carton had hooked strangely on an extended root, just above the water line.  

“Hand me that branch,” Pam said, her feet anchored against the dry edge of the trunk.  

Aaron figured out where she pointed and grabbed at the long overhanging branch on a nearby tree. He tried to snap it, but the wood wasn’t brittle enough. He had to bend it back and forth, then tear it from the tree like it was a drumstick torn from a roasted chicken. 

“Here you go.” Keeping his distance, he passed the branch to my sister. 

Her feet steady against the trunk, her right hand tight around a thick root, Pam extended the branch past her left arm and poked at the trapped carton. Her first few movements misjudged the distance, but she finally caught one of the side flaps with the stick and lifted.  

Aaron leaned forward, but only slightly. Like me, he was too timid to approach the water’s edge. 

We couldn’t quite see inside. Pam tried again with the stick, this time lifting up a second flap then pushing the entire box away from the root. The box floated back, caught a spin in the current, then ducked under the tree and sailed out of sight down the creek. 

Nothing. In the movies, a severed head might have fallen out, or at least a dead animal.  

“This is stupid,” I said.  

“No, it’s not.” Aaron maintained an undeserved pride in the scene. Sure, he’d led us here—but by accident. And now he was letting Pam do all the dangerous work. 

“I dare you to walk across,” I said to him. 

• • • 

Well, why not? The fallen tree really did span the risen creek. Maybe these woods were like our neighborhood: all the good stuff on the other side of a Big Street we weren’t allowed to cross. Maybe we really would find abandoned needles on the other side of the creek. Or something better: an empty clubhouse; a bird’s nest of speckled eggs; a thick, rubber-banded stack of dollar bills we could split three ways.  

The tree would be wide enough to walk on for the first part of the crossing, a fairly straightforward balancing act. Further across, as the branches and leaves sprouted in different directions, it would be a simple enough task to find your footing. Just like climbing a tree, except you’d be climbing across, which was better than the increasing threat from gravity if you climbed straight up. 

I dare you. 

But he wouldn’t. Aaron would be too chicken to make the attempt, and that would end it. Humiliated, he’d agree this was stupid, and we should head back home. 

“Worth a try,” he said. Before I could stop him, he slid down near Pam and reached for the dry roots on the right side of the trunk. The roots were spaced almost like a ladder, and he stretched an arm toward one high over his head. 

And: “Faked you out!” he said. He spun around laughing. “No way I was gonna do—” 

Then it was Aaron’s turn to slip and fall. 

• • • 

It was almost comical, the look on his face. He’d spun around to laugh at me, and one foot just kept moving. His leg went sideways, like he’d swung at a football and missed. Then his body did a little ballet wiggle: his arms grasped in the air at roots that weren’t where he expected them, then he twisted back and the ground wasn’t where he expected either, then water was, beneath him, his body caught in a strong current that was ready to pull him away. 

(Now you might understand the significance of the box from earlier. We needed to see the empty box spin its perilous path along the rushing current. That set up the suspense—established the danger Aaron was in now, if he followed that same path out of sight.) 

Like Aaron before the splash, the moment itself twisted in the air, suspended between tragedy and comedy. I imagine my younger self with muddy hands raised over my mouth, either to stifle a gasp or hide a smirk. What saved the moment—and Aaron, of course—what made it okay to smile and maybe point and laugh and think, “You got what you deserved for fooling around, for fooling us,” was… 

For all its rushing force, the creek wasn’t really that deep. 

Aaron wasn’t swept away by the current; he didn’t sink beneath the surface, a trail of bubbles leading to a murky unknown depth. Instead, he stood there in the creek, a few feet to the right of the fallen tree, about six feet from the raised bank where Pam and I watched him. Aaron’s arms and head remained safely above the water line, five of his shirt’s horizontal blue stripes clearly visible. His hair wasn’t even wet.  

He swayed for a few seconds as the water foamed past him. He balled his hands into fists. The spray misted the lowest of his visible stripes into a rich, dark blue.  

Then he started to walk. His elbows winged out to each side, his fists nearly touching in front of his chest, Aaron swung his shoulders back and forth. If we could see beneath the water, we could have watched him lift his legs, knees high and feet lunging forward. 

But he made no progress. He was like one of those stupid mimes, doing the standard “walk in a windstorm” routine.  

Pam yelled out to him. “Are you stuck?” 

“No,” Aaron said. “The water’s too strong in front of me.” His voice cracked with a tremor of anger and humiliation and fear. “And the ground’s slippery.” 

He stopped moving and looked around for a minute, as if he could read an answer in the ripples of the water, in the gnarled bark of the fallen tree. “I could try moving sideways, I guess. If I reached the tree, I could pull myself along.”  

More swinging of the arms and shoulders, but Aaron was still a mime in a windstorm.  

He stopped, and looked at us. 

“You might still be able to swim,” Pam said. “If you push yourself forward with enough force…” 

Aaron nodded his head back and forth, his lips tight.  

Pam had moved closer to where Aaron had fallen in. She tucked the toe of her left foot beneath a sturdy root, and leaned forward. Her torso swung out over the water and she stretched out her arm, but her reach was too short by about three feet. 

“Nathan, maybe if I hold your arm real tight, you can wade into the water and pull him in.” 

I wished Pam hadn’t spoken so loudly. Aaron heard her, brightened up a bit, said “Yeah, Nathan!” and waited for me to dive in. Two against one, again.  

My earlier pratfall was still on my mind, the slime of mud and puddle water damp on my skin and my shirt and the seat of my pants. The creek water was far worse: loud and stinking of filth and whatever awful decay the recent rains had unearthed and stirred into a foul broth. 

“Swim,” I said. “Why don’t you swim?” 

Aaron knew how to swim. The Liebermans, in addition to their backyard swing-set, owned summer memberships to the municipal pool, and took yearly vacations to Ocean City.  

With Dad’s summer school job and woodworking projects, he’d never taken us to the pool. We’d gone there a few times with our cousins, but always stayed in the shallow end. I hated getting wet—even there, with water that was clear and smelled only of bleach and the vague threat of other children’s pee. A couple times I breathed water up my nose by mistake, which led to fits of gasping coughs, and bleachy soreness at the back of my throat. It surprised and outraged me that my nose and throat were connected: smell and taste were different senses, after all. 

“Just push yourself forward,” I told Aaron. I stayed back a few feet from the water’s edge. “We can grab you from here.”  

Then Aaron started getting mad. He waved his arms and screamed at me. “This is serious, Nathan!” The language he used next, if I transcribed it here exactly, would not have the proper effect: we were elementary-school kids in the seventies, in the years before cable television brought “fuck” and “shit” and “asshole” into everybody’s homes. “Retard” or “homo” or “pussy” were about the best we could manage, but those childhood insults no longer parse. “Poo-head,” historically accurate, provokes a giggle; I need the anachronistic shock of something like “motherfucker.”  

Not simply to convey Aaron’s rage—which was considerable, his hands scooping the surface of the creek and splashing rancid water toward us. But to convey how it felt to me, to be called these names by my friend. Not in the joking way friends spoke sometimes, not even how your enemies might taunt you in the hallway between classes. Aaron threw these ridiculous names at me, and he meant them.