28.1 – A Different Heaven

Surprised, Marty woke up.  It was morning, and the afterlife looked strangely like the interior of a truck.  The sleeping pills didn’t work… or rather, they didn’t do what he wanted them to do.  Now what?  Obviously, 30 sleeping pills weren’t enough to kill him.  With a gob smack, he realized a huge tactical error the night before.  If I was really going to kill myself, he reasoned, what the hell did I care if I didn’t have enough money to afford the big bottle of sleeping pills?  Why didn’t I just grab it and run out the door?  It wasn’t like that old lady was going to chase me down or anything.  By the time they reported the theft, I would have been long gone…  He shook his head to clear the morbid cobwebs, and realized the irony of being saved by his own sense of honor.  From that day on, he never feared death.  He had faced it – embraced it even – and it really didn’t seem that bad.  After all, everyone does it.
 
I guess I’ll be needing this body for a while, he conceded, so I might as well feed it.  He ambled down to the house to make some breakfast.  Marge’s old Toyota was parked crookedly in the driveway, and her bedroom door was closed.  Annie’s Bronco was up there, too, and the two Prom lovebirds were nestled under their blankets, fast asleep.  Marty grimaced at the thought of what he might have been doing this morning instead of recovering from an attempted suicide, and shoved the image of Michelle deep into the dumpster of his mind.  He never told anyone of his drastic act.  Like everything else that happened at the Rusty Bucket Ranch, it was too difficult to talk about.  So the pain settled on him like a thick carpet of fallen redwood needles, until a new storm might wash it away.
 
After breakfast, he grabbed a canteen and his jacket, and headed for his secret spot.  It was a short hike, really, but Marty considered it to be his “special place.”  He never told anyone about it, and never saw anyone else there.  He didn’t cross the pipe at the Inkwells, because he was walking kind of funny – as if his legs were made of rubber, from the cold night spent in the cab of his truck.  He skirted the side of the road to reach the trail, and cut away from it where a narrow ravine plunged down from the steep ridge.  There were only a few footholds, and the ravine gave no outward appearance that it would reward a curious adventurer.  A few dozen yards up, and past a group of fallen trees, things began to get interesting.
 
The canopy was luminous green, and choked with alder and bay laurel trees.  Many of them were tipping over on the steep banks.  A few darker shadows could be sensed beyond the leaves, and these Marty knew marked the location of a hidden grove of redwoods that was hard to reach.  It required zig-zagging across fallen logs and creek rocks, climbing small waterfalls, and ducking low under mossy, fallen trunks.  He knew the best way to get there, and soon saw the first notable redwood tree.  It grew straight up out of the creek bed, as if from a great depth.  Its many root burls twisted and knotted upon themselves like the hands of a worried old man.  The creek was making its own little canyon here, and more impressive trees could be glimpsed through the fragrant screen of glowing leaves.
 

Around a bend and up one more waterfall ledge, Marty was suddenly surrounded by an unlikely grove of old growth coastal redwoods.  Somehow, the loggers had left this one family of trees undamaged.  There were large, stumpy reminders of their avarice on the Rusty Bucket Ranch property, and all throughout this area.  But for some unknown reason, this one special “fairy ring” had been left untouched.  Marty liked to think that nobody but himself had ever seen it, unless perhaps the coastal Miwoks.  Here, a Druid circle of gnarled, old trees formed a clearing about 30 feet in diameter, thickly carpeted with golden needles.  They were all connected underground, and formed a single, intensely autonomous presence of life.  The air grew still, and the temperature dropped in their shadows.

Marty liked to come here when he wanted to be alone, or had something on his mind.  It was his own little fort in the forest, made from cinnamon-colored couch cushions.  He sat on a comfortable, mossy tuft in the center of the ring, because he had a lot to think about on this visit.  He imagined that the trees knew this, as they leaned in protectively, and lifted their branches to let in more light. He always got good vibes here, but what Marty liked best about his special place was that it helped him feel like he belonged.
 
“Oh, why did I try to kill myself?” he wondered forlornly, hugging his still-painful knees with despair.  A tear rolled down his cheek, and hung on the end of his nose.  He was now shocked to his very core to realize that last night he had swallowed an entire bottle full of sleeping pills, and had expected never to wake up. 
 

It really pissed him off to think he would have missed this glorious day, with the little wood thrushes twittering in the underbrush, and a crow croaking kindly from somewhere above him.  The sun was reflecting off of a rippling pool in the creek next to the grove, and the light beams danced on the trunk of one of the oldest trees.  The air carried the spicy smell of bay laurels, mixed with the earthy scent of the needles on which he reposed.  He breathed in deeply, and was glad to be alive.  His heart was as empty as the fallen redwood cones around him, but the seeds of possible new growth had been scattered.  Soon it would be time to rejoin the real world, where the shadows were not as beautiful.


~

It was the last week of school, and the senior class was busy with endings: final classes, farewells to classmates who wouldn’t see each other for the rest of their lives, and preparations for graduation.  Yearbooks were delivered as well, and the year’s last issue of The Jolly Roger was printed: appropriately called the Senior Edition.  Marty’s doodles were scattered around the margins, as there were plenty of Senior Wills and superlatives to fill eight pages.  Michelle naturally swept the “eye candy” categories for best legs, most attractive derriere, and prettiest hair.  (The paper didn’t have a “nicest tits” category, but there was consensus among senior males that she would have won that, too.)  Marty consoled himself by griping about the “Barbie Awards” to anyone who would listen, but his comedy routine was strained and bitter.  People still shied away from him when he walked the halls with his beat-up briefcase and thrift store clothes, and he wore his rancor like rancid grease in his hair.  In his Senior Will, he left his pencils to Willard, his desk and locker to Chas, and buried his worn-out heart underneath the bleachers.  But he couldn’t resist one last, heartfelt sermon in his column:


“Love is all that can save this world.  Not virtuous technology, not mass manipulation, not even starting over again could benefit the Earth in the ways that love could.  Love for humanity, love for people and the good they can do; to disregard the petty differences that make strangers of us all.  Now that we are released into the world, it is our responsibility.  Gone is the innocence and exclusion of childhood. 
Gone is the indifference and apathy that shadows the life of the dependent. 
We have all been given a new conscience, and love could keep it clear.”

An excerpt from the final ‘White Pages’
in The Jolly Roger

He passed around his yearbook like the other kids did, and there were several unexpected inscriptions.  A crazy girl he’d been trying to avoid expressed her undying passion, and ordered him to call her, “or else.”  Kim and Lisa, the art room groupies, revealed to him separately – but in unmistakable terms – that their boyfriends would be going off to college, and they were available.  Lisa even wrote her number!  Chas and the guys made jokes about drugs and parties, and boasted about all the things they’d be doing that summer.  But the most surprising message in his yearbook was from Michelle.

She had been avoiding him in journalism class, hanging around with the well-bred types who would be going off to live at prestigious four-year colleges.  A couple of times he caught her looking at him with a mixture of pity and compassion, the way a woman might gaze at a baby with a birth defect.  He averted his glance immediately, and didn’t care if he was as perceived as rebuking her.  Her exquisite eyes were opal lasers of blue flame that caused nothing but pain, and he shied away from them the way a horse avoids lightning.  In the space within his heart formerly dedicated to her magnificent tapestry of beauty, there was nothing but a few old rags.  Surprisingly, he didn’t feel hurt, or scorned, or even unwanted.  He felt nothing at all.

Then he read her message in his yearbook.  Half of a blank page was filled with her oversized, angular handwriting, and he could picture the way she turned the page sideways and cocked her wrist when she wrote.


“I guess we had something there for a while, although it’s hard to say exactly what.  There was so much drama all the time, it was hard to get to know you as a person.  I know I haven’t been there much for you, but I was going through some personal things, the kind you can’t talk about, and it wasn’t the right time for me.  Maybe someday there will be a time and a place for us.  You are an amazing guy and you touched me on deep levels that nobody else has ever touched, please know that.  Thank you for wanting to love and be with me.”

He was so done with all that “drama,” too, and the tantalizing hint of “maybe someday” made no impression on him.  His heart was as hard as stainless steel, and could no longer be written upon.  Beneath Michelle’s confession, he recognized Melody’s scrunched-up script: “Don’t worry Marty, you’re a great guy and you will find true love.”  That meant more to him than she would ever know… as she was tragically killed in a car accident a week after graduation.