Little Doors (39 page)

The final straw apparently came with a most unwise and unannounced expenditure on my part. I had learned by now not to advertise my horticultural expenditures. Consequently, the delivery of lumber, cast iron fittings and sheets of glass sufficient to construct a charming Edwardian greenhouse took Sparky completely by surprise.

She had the tact to wait until the delivery men left before laying into me, although judging by the mottling of her complexion, the restraint had nearly caused her to burst a vein.

“What the hell is all this, buster! Are you out of your everlovin’ mind? Your wife is walking around in rags, and you’re blowing through my inheritance like a dipso through free muscatel!”

I tried to divert her anger by joshing. “Oh, come now, dear. You have a sturdy and healthy husband not much older than yourself. Surely it’s premature to be speaking of my unlikely demise and your grieving widowhood.”

A look of pure vicious hatred such as I had never before seen on a human visage passed fleetingly across Sparky’s beautiful features, to be replaced by a composed mask of indifference. “Oh, too early is it? Maybe—and maybe not.…”

Her words and expression alarmed me to such a degree that I shrugged quickly into my ratty old puttering-about cardigan, murmured something about attending to a fungus problem, and hastened outside.

Kneeling at the base of a large, mistletoe-festooned oak tree, I was delicately aerating the soil around its roots with a small tool when I heard someone approaching. I looked over my shoulder and saw a horrifying sight.

My loving wife Sparky, hoisting high my fine British axe in her gloved hands.

Struck mute, paralyzed, I could only listen helplessly to her insane rehearsal of some future speech for an unknown audience.

“This is an absolutely
awful
neighborhood, officer. I’ve noticed tramps and vagrants and petty thieves lurking around our estate ever since my poor dead husband brought me here as his blushing bride. One of them must have finally broken in. I’m sure my husband died defending my virtue.”

“No, Sparky, no!” I finally managed to croak.

Too late, for the axe was already descending.

In my fading eyesight, filled totally with a close-up landscape of bark, I watched my own blood jet and pool in a hollow formed by two intersecting oak roots.

Then all went black.

* * *

The astonishing return of my consciousness at first brought with it no sensory data, aside from a sense of well-being and wholeness. For an indefinite time I basked in the simple absence of the shattering pain that had accompanied Sparky’s treacherous assault. The utter blackness and lack of sound in my current environment failed to frighten me. I felt too much at ease, too peaceful. I could only conclude that some good Samaritan had rescued me from my wife’s attack in time to save my life, and that now I rested in a cozy hospital bed, guarded by watchful nurses and doctors, my eyes and ears bandaged, my healing body suffused with morphine.

The closest I came to worrying about my old life was a vague feeling that certainly some drastic changes would have to be engineered in my spousal relations, once I fully recovered. Perhaps even a trial separation.

Then, after this period of idle, happy musing, odd, subliminal sensations began to filter into my consciousness. I seemed to register light striking me, but in a new fashion. Sunlight seemed to be impinging upon my “skin” and “face” in a whole-body manner, as if I were—horrors!—utterly unclothed at the beach. Discordant, jagged images swept over me. Likewise, I perceived the ambient soundscape in a novel, jumbled manner. Oddest of all though were fresh tactile impressions. I experienced a contradictory feeling of compression and extension, as if I were stuffed into a closet, yet simultaneously stretched on a not uncomfortable rack.

Likewise, my sense of time’s passage had altered. Objective minutes, gauged by the fragmentary movements of the sun, seemed to drip by like hours.

I used this extended realm of time wisely, and by the end of what must have been a single day, I had thoroughly integrated my new senses so that I could see and hear and feel in a coherent way.

From my new immovable vantage I enjoyed a 360 degree omniscient view of some very familiar landscaped grounds. And when I focused my “sight” in one particular direction, I saw my ancestral home standing forlorn and dark. Triangulating my position by landmarks, I could no longer deny the obvious conclusion.

My soul now inhabited the very oak tree at whose foot I had been slaughtered. I was now a male dryad, if such a creature were possible.

Acknowledging this impossible truth, I directed my vision and other senses downward. My human body had been carted away, but my sticky blood still filled the hollow where it had gushed. Alarmingly, I experienced a feeling of oakish satisfaction at this extra-rich watering, as if grateful for my pagan due. Apparently the original spirit of the oak still to some degree overlapped mine, offering its old perceptions.

Well, this was a fine fix, I thought. My old life had reached a premature conclusion, and such comforting rituals as milk and common crackers availed naught. But questioning the miracle would be futile, and I would simply have to learn to inhabit my new body and enjoy this mode of existence.

Surprisingly, the transition came quite easily.

By dawn of the next day, approximately forty-eight hours after my murder, I was already happy in my arboreal magnificence.

All my nurturing of this tree had prepared a veritable temple for my spirit. My roots stretched deeply down and out into nutritious, stable soil, while my crown of efficient leaves reared high into the welcoming sky. My inner flesh was strong and healthy, my limbs proud and free of disease. Birds and squirrels nested in my niches, providing gay company, while sun and rain stoked my slow engines. Ants crawling up and down tickled and massaged me and warred with insidious insects that would have harmed me. Like some Hindoo holyman, I experienced an absolute contentment with my condition, free of unsatisfied desires, my mind at one with ancient cosmic imperatives.

But then came a disturbing incident that awoke my human side.

Out of my old house stepped Sparky Flint, my murderous wife.

And with her was a man!

Tall and impressively muscled, clad in a dark suit and crisp fedora, the fellow strolled alongside Sparky with a sober yet irrepressibly jaunty air. I instantly assessed him as ten times the physical specimen I had ever been (although of course he was pitiful compared to my current girth and strength), and I felt complete jealousy toward this new suitor.

But then as the pair approached and I spotted the small mask guarding the stranger’s identity, I recognized him and my feelings flip-flopped instantly.

This was the Shade! Central City’s daring crimefighter, champion of the oppressed and wronged, had come personally to investigate and avenge my murder!

I focused my “hearing” on Sparky and the Shade, a small matter of forming a parabolic cone with certain of my leaves.

“I wish I had returned from my affairs in China a day or two earlier,” said the Shade, “before Klink and his boys completely obliterated this lawn. Look at this mess! Those flatfoots might’ve been playing a duffer’s round of golf, the lawn’s so hacked up. Any clues to the identity of your husband’s killer are long gone.”

For the first time I noted the terrible condition of the lawn. What the Shade had observed was true. I regretted I would not be able to roll out and reseed in my current state.

Attired in widow’s weeds, a veil floating across her devilishly beautiful features, Sparky sniffled with touching, albeit insincere sympathy. “Poor Dottie! He was ever so prideful of his whole garden. Sometimes in fact I think he loved it more than me.…”

Not so!
I wanted to shout.
Well, perhaps
…, honesty instantly forced me to amend.

The Shade regarded Sparky with a natural compassion, tempered, I thought, only by those common suspicions that attach to the spouse of any murdered husband. “There, there, Mrs. Dottle. I know it’s small comfort, but we’ll eventually catch the fiend who did this.”

“That’s what I pray for each night before I climb into my lonely empty bed, Mister Shade, where I writhe and squirm feverishly until dawn.” Sparky gripped the Shade’s right bicep in an overfamiliar manner and fluttered her long lashes at him.

The Shade appeared a trifle flustered. “Ahem, yes. Now, let me just have a look at this tree.”

Crouching at my base, the Shade produced a magnifying lens and examined my bark. With one gloved finger he took up a few flakes of my rain-washed and sun-dried blood. He cogitated a moment, then stood.

“I would’ve thought a man startled by an axe-bearing assailant might have made a dash for his life, or at least clawed at the tree where he kneeled in an attempt to scramble upright. Yet he died without a scuffle right where you earlier saw him working.”

Unwisely perhaps, Sparky vented her residual hatred. “Dottie was a meek little shrimp!” Hastily, she recovered. “That is, my husband had a mild disposition. He must’ve fainted straight away when the awful thug came on him.”

“Yes, that’s one explanation. Well, Mrs. Dottle, there’s not a lot I can do here. I’ll be going now.”

“Oh, please, Mister Shade, just walk me back to the house. I can’t stand to be alone near this tree. There’s something creepy about it now, since my husband died.”

As the Shade and Sparky retreated, she cast a dire look back at me, almost as if she could see her husband sheltering inside his oaken suit.

Once the pair was out of sight, I found myself sinking down into blissful vegetal somnolence again. The happy sensations of being an oak completely wiped away any mortal cares left over from my prior life. Why should I trouble myself about human justice? My old life would never be restored through the courts. Let the fleshly ones squabble among themselves. Their little lives had no impact on mine.

My arrogant invulnerability lasted for roughly a year. Through summer, fall and winter I gloried in the magnificence of my being, experiencing each turning season with new joy.

But then in the spring came my comeuppance. I had been much too cavalier in dismissing Sparky’s ability to do me further harm.

One day near the anniversary of my murder, a second set of killers arrived to slay me once again.

I witnessed the truck from Resneis Arborists pass through the gates of my small estate and down the drive. Improbably and most uncivilly, it actually continued up onto my prize lawn, the turf now looking less than perfect due to lack of attention. Rough-handed workers tumbled out, and a foreman began to shout orders.

“Okay, you jokers, get a move on! We’ve got to take down every tree on this property plenty pronto, if we want that bonus. And the big oak goes first!”

Horrified, I watched two men pull a huge saw from their truck and start toward me.

I could feel the big sharp teeth placed harshly against my barky skin.

The first rasping cut produced a dull agony. The second, deeper stroke sent fiery alarm signals down my every fiber.

I could feel my consciousness pulling instinctively back from the pain. I had an impulse to gather myself into the deepest core of my being, to escape the torture.

But before I lost touch with the outer world, I caught the arrival of Sparky and a brutish-looking stranger dressed in a suit with roguishly wide lapels. I forced myself to focus on their sotto voce dialogue, as they conversed in what they deemed utter secrecy.

“I gotta hand it to ya, Sparky baby,” said the thug. “This land is gonna make a swell spot for Central City’s new casino. But ain’t’cha being a bit, well pre-ma-tour with the choppin’ an’ the bulldozin’ an’ all? The permits an’ licenses from City Hall ain’t exactly a shoe-in. Mayor Nolan ain’t too keen on gamblin’. And her copper daddy’ll bust a gasket if he finds out who your backers are.”

“You just leave Commissioner Nolan and his brat in City Hall to me, big boy, and concentrate on what you do best.”

“Lovin’ and killin’, right?”

“Right, Jules.”

The conniving pair went into a clinch that violated every element of the Hays Code, but I could spare no further attention for their reprehensible licentiousness.

Loud creakings and groanings were issuing from my numb nether regions, which had self-protectively lost all sensation. With grave misgivings, I noticed that I was beginning to cant and tip.

My ultimate downfall followed swiftly. The final fibers holding me upright parted, and I crashed toward the ground. The thundering impact was titanic, and I lost consciousness for some time. When I came to, I could feel my proud branches being lopped. In short time I was hoisted by a newly arrived crane onto an accompanying flatbed truck and carted off.

Huddling deep inside myself, I realized then that my fate most likely involved a quick trip to the sawmill and a swift transition into planks.

But such was not the case. Apparently I was destined for stranger ends.

Whether subconsciously or not, Sparky had chosen a fate for my wooden corpse meant to humiliate. Even in death I would be denied utilitarian dignity.

When I felt a cessation of motion, I pooled my dwindling organic energies and tried to apprehend my destination. I saw a sign that read CENTRAL CITY SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN, and quickly intuited my ignominous lot: to become practice billets for budding, ham-fisted sculptors. The best I could hope for was to grace a tobacco shop as a lopsided wooden Indian.