During the last few weeks of school, Marty began writing features for the Jolly Roger, in addition to his regular column and comic strip. The modest 8-page newspaper was now nearly 25% composed of his creative output, and he wasn’t even a senior yet! He wrote a silly Dragnet satire about the Drake parking lot crowd, with a detailed, half-page illustration to accompany it. He was cranking out elaborate cartoons, sketches, short stories, and comedy pieces at a furious rate. Only a small fraction of them were ever published, but his editors loved to read what he wrote, including Michelle, the goddess cheerleader. She sincerely complimented him one day, in front of the two jocks, Russ and Mark, who were flirting with her and tossing their feathered bangs like a couple of young peacocks. Marty handed her his latest Nertz comic strip, which repeated a long shot of a nuclear power plant three times, and only the dialog changed.
Michelle looked at him frankly, as if seeing him for the first time. “You are so talented, Marty! This cartoon is good enough for a real newspaper!” She beamed at him, and he felt his ears getting red from the hot magma flowing to his face. Russ and Mark responded to the unexpected competition by changing the subject back to basketball, but Marty thanked her and walked away, floating 10 inches off the ground (which was the only way he could be taller than the jocks). All that period, Marty caught Michelle smiling at him, and he grinned back like a total idiot. She was so genuinely beautiful, it took his breath away!
Later, in his mildewed home studio, he wrote a long allegory for his White Pages column about a princess who fell in love with the court jester, and they lived happily ever after… it was extremely corny but surprisingly cathartic. He resisted the urge to give it to her and wisely tore it up instead. Marty wondered if she would know who it was about, and decided she would – after all, weren’t they kindred spirits in English class? For the first time in his life, he realized he was going to miss school during the summer.
That evening Marty wandered over to Paula’s place to score some weed, and was surprised to see a large gathering of people at the McAuliffes’ place. That was not unusual, but the odd thing was that they weren’t making merry – they were very subdued. Tillie intercepted him before he reached the stairs because she had to be the first to tell everyone. “Earl killed himself in our basement!” Her eyes were wide with excitement and horror.
“Earl the Spook?” Marty was shocked, but not all that surprised. He was a couple bullets shy of full clip; that was for sure. “He actually killed himself? How?” Tillie stuck out her tongue and pantomimed a noose around her neck. She wiggled with eagerness to inform Marty of all the gory details, and led him around the house and down to the basement. There were a couple of wide deputies filling the doorway, and they wouldn’t let anyone in, but they could peer around them and see detectives taking pictures of the setting, and a rope hanging from the rafters. They had taken his body away hours ago, and were checking for evidence of possible foul play. At least, that’s what Columbo would do.
“Holy shit, he really did it.” Marty blurted reflexively, and one of the deputies turned around and asked if he knew him. They called over a detective to ask a few questions: when did he see him last, did he give any indication he wanted to kill himself, and so on. Marty answered truthfully that he never saw any clues, but he thought Earl was very disturbed by his time in Vietnam, and anything was possible. That seemed to fit with their official preconceptions, and they packed up their equipment.
Marty returned to the porch with Tillie. The rest of the McAuliffes were huddled in small groups with unfamiliar visitors, and he supposed they were friends or family of Earl. Millie was comforting one sobbing lady who was probably his mom. There was a pall of disbelief hanging over the gathering, tinged with guilt that this was probably inevitable, and they should have done something to prevent it. He kept hearing platitudes and reminisces of how smart Earl was, how loyal he was to his friends, a doting son to his mother, ad nauseum. It was a shame that someone had to die before being appreciated for their good qualities. When he was alive, most people couldn’t wait to get away from him – including me, Marty realized with a twinge of compunction. Poor Earl. He hoped the strange little man found the peace in death he couldn’t find while alive.
“Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes…”
A week before Memorial Day, Little Billy called Mike and Marty to a meeting of the Lagunitas Triangle. First of all, they were surprised because he’d never called them before; for any reason. They thought they were ‘just kids’ in his book. They were impressed and flattered to be deemed worthy of attending tribal council, and debated excitedly as they strode down the railroad bed to see what the meeting was about.
“Okay, slow down,” Marty cautioned as they reached Little Billy’s house. He didn’t want them to run in, panting like a couple of kids at an amusement park. They calmed their breathing and sauntered up to the porch, where Tillie never looked up from her book, but pointed to the basement. Marty guessed she wasn’t invited… then he paused at the now-infamous doorway. This was the place where Earl had killed himself just a few days ago! They entered with an air of stoicism, but glanced sidelong at the cluttered walls and exposed beams, hearts pounding. There was a circle of chairs, crates, and such, most of which were already occupied by Little Billy, Gilly, Ent, and Paula. Mike quickly sat on the crate, which left Marty with his butt stuck in a milk can.
Little Billy wasted no time. “This is an important meeting, but first I want to dispel any remnants of Earl, who is now very much a real spook.” He had a very disarming manner of speaking that made his directness seem like common sense. He paused deliberately, lit the ceremonial pipe, and passed it to Mike. “This is our home – it has been in my family for three generations, and I’m not giving up my basement to a spook!”
“Are you kidding me? This is an exorcism?” Paula’s New Jersey accent gave the serious question a comical flair.
“You might call it that,” Little Billy nodded evenly, “I’m just saying I loved the guy, and I’ll miss him, but he’s gone, and we’re still here. This is our place now.” He looked around as if saying it to the walls, and evidently this point was very important to him, so they all agreed in order that they might hear what the meeting was really about. “Gilly, tell them why we’re here.”
“Lucas has put a barbed wire fence around the Inkwells, with ‘no trespassing’ signs.” Gilly tossed his surfer hair angrily like a blonde stallion. “He won’t let anyone use it anymore, because of the mess he has to clean up from people partying.”
“Um, doesn’t he own the Inkwells?” Mike asked, getting right to the heart of the matter as usual.
“Yeah, it’s Lucas’ land, but people have been swimming there for over a hundred years. Probably thousands. He can’t keep people away from a natural, traditional swimming hole!” Ent exclaimed passionately, with his eyes glinting in the lamplight behind thick lenses, and his knee pumping up and down like a piston.
“Well, if he owns the land, he can do what he wants with it,” Marty summed up matter-of-factly, but with a provocative tone of voice, just to get a reaction. There was a crossfire of opinion from all sides, and he resisted the urge to duck. Paula repeated ‘so what can we do?’ as a proposal that led to cease-fire. A thinking cap came down on the council like a lid, and they steeped in righteous consternation.
After waiting for the older guys to say something, Marty offered, “Why don’t Mike and I try talking to him? We drink his beer, and help with his shit.” He didn’t mean that literally – he was trying to do the masculine thing and replace a sensible word with an expletive to show how tough he was.
“Yeah,” Mike added, “He owes us one because he drove his fuckin’ bulldozer off the cliff into our driveway!” The other members of the council, delighted that the task of actually doing something had fallen upon the junior members, quickly ratified the decision and blessed their quest with a fresh bowl of burning herbs.
There was only a week before Memorial Day, and the Inkwells was usually crowded on holiday weekends. Mike and Marty crossed the creek and walked down the road so they could inspect the new fence. Sure enough, shiny barbed wire had been strung across the path down to the rocks, with big hand-painted signs saying “No Trespasin” (sic). Later, they diplomatically brought a 12-pack of Schlitz down to the China House and found Buster-or-Baxter working under the hood of a truck in the parking area (they never knew which one it was, because when asked they just grinned and shrugged). “Howdy fellas, I see you brought lunch.”
Lucas came out from the toolshed, wiping his hands on his overalls and displaying his missing front teeth. “Look what the cat dragged in! What’s up, boys?”
“We came to have a man-to-man talk,” Mike stated confidently, with that maddening, confrontational air that sometimes oozed from him like musk. Lucas raised his bushy eyebrows until they disappeared under the brim of his hat, then looked at Buster-or-Baxter.
“Well, well, we got us some men here!” He gestured to Mike and Marty, “Come over and set a spell, and let’s shoot the shit. Gimme a beer.” Marty did most of the talking and got right to the point, in a respectful way that he thought would be appreciated, and explained that the folks around these parts have been swimming in the Inkwells for over a hundred years.
“I know you got lots of history back in Georgia, but that’s just about all the history we’ve got around here, and we’d like to keep swimming there, if you don’t mind.” Marty had his speech all ready.
“Aw, hell no, I don’t mind,” Lucas laughed. “Is that what you ‘men’ were so worked up about, that you had to come down here like you was gonna fight?” He was enjoying pulling their legs, and continued, “I just put up them signs to keep out the hippies and riff-raff. They make a godawful mess with their broken glass and beer cans, and it’s my property!”
As amicable as he was, Marty wanted to clarify the deal. “So the people who live around here can still use the Inkwells, as long as they keep it clean?”
“And their guests?” Mike added, thinking of Annie.
“Only if they got nice tits,” Lucas winked, reading his mind.
The topic turned to hunting, a concept that horrified Marty as an animal lover, and he did his best to be indifferently mute. They finished off the 12-pack, shook hands all around, and invited them over for a barbecue sometime. Diplomacy was much easier with alcohol to break the ice. They should install kegs of beer at the UN if they really want to end all wars, Marty thought wryly.
Just then, Annie burst out of the trees in her blue and white Bronco, driving too fast for the dirt driveway. She ground to a stop in a cloud of dust, and yelled “Sorry-y!” out the window. What the hell? Marty thought to himself, how in the world did she know Mike was here?”
“Um, I gotta go,” Mike rolled his eyes with proper ‘what are ya gonna do?’ pathos, and Lucas sucked through the hole in his teeth sympathetically in the wordless fellowship of suffering men everywhere. Buster and/or Baxter got up and looked around, as if something urgently needed doing somewhere else. Annie was gesturing impatiently, not getting out of the vehicle to emphasize her agitation. Mike and Marty climbed in and listened to her angry run-on narrative about how she drove down to the cabin and the Stanger was in the driveway but Mike wasn’t in the house so what the fuck, then she drove down to the McAuliffes’ place and he wasn’t there so this was the only other road… “Annie stop –” Mike said, and ducked under a volley of expletives that assumed he was telling her to shut up, but he persisted, “– No, I mean stop the car! You missed our road!”
“Oh.” Annie’s cartoon balloon popped, and all the words and letters fell onto her lap. “I’m not used to driving in this direction.” Then she slammed on the brakes, crammed it into reverse, and twisted around in her seat so she could look through the rear window. She stomped on the gas pedal like kicking a horse, and tore off in that Bronco way too fast for the bumpy narrow road – backwards. Marty was gripping the rear seat for dear life, as if trapped in a runaway roller coaster. In the summer the single-track road dried up, and the mud turned to fine powder. She hurtled about 80 yards in reverse, kicking up a cloud of dust, and it was hard for her to see because she was backing through the cloud she had just made when she barreled through moments before. It must have been quite a sight when they passed on the hillside above the McAuliffes’ cabin, if anyone was there to see a large blue and white missile going ass-backwards through the dusty forest.
When the careening vehicle blessedly came to a stop, Marty went directly down to the McAuliffes’ and found Gilly and his biker cousin, Alex, waxing their surfboards under the redwood trees, with ZZ Top growling in the background. “Do you know who was the maniac driving on the road like that?” Alex pointed to the spot visible from their yard, where a fine dust still hung in the air. ‘He’ was actually a ‘she’ but it made no difference in the Lagunitas Triangle. Changing the subject, Marty related to them what Lucas said. At first pleased by the tidings, their faces fell with growing concern.
“What’s wrong?” Marty asked, “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Yeah, we get to swim there, okay,” Gilly shrugged, wiping his hands on a towel. “But we figure people are gonna come anyway. They’ll just climb over the fence.” He threw the towel down. “They’ll litter all over the place again, and he’ll kick us all out.”
“Not if we clean it up.” The thought just came to Marty. “If we want to use the land, we have to take care of it, too.”
“I like this kid,” Alex said congenially, draping a burly arm across Marty’s shoulders, making him extremely uncomfortable. “He makes sense.”
I wish everything made sense, Marty thought privately, suddenly remembering Earl’s departure from reality. He always seemed a little too friendly… maybe he was gay, too. He moved out of Alex’s range. How come gay people like me, but not pretty girls? His social life was more like a potluck than a gourmet meal, and did little to satisfy the great, gnawing hunger in his heart.