Songs for The Lost

Always an Angelwitch over Suicide Hill-1

ALWAYS AN ANGELWITCH OVER SUICIDE HILLI:

There’s one thing in this world that I know for sure my dad loves. It’s a photograph, grainy and yellowed and warped around its edges with time.

It isn’t of my mom, or me, or my kid sister who died when a Trans-Am hit her on her sixth birthday and put the permanent shadow in my mom’s eyes that everyone notices but never talks about. Mom accepts dad for what he’s become but plays dumb to it, too, like she doesn’t notice his ghosts looking out from his eyes every day he looks right through us.

Of course, his beloved picture is a picture from back then, because when else: him and his pals draped like wet clothes all over a hovercraft sitting in a Cambodian river. Everything’s green in the picture: the river, the sky, the tree-line, their uniforms and helmets, with only the red or brown of their skin shining through it all. One thing he said about the picture always got me thinking and puzzling as a kid, and romancing every inch of what that picture held and might hold, hoping to see what he saw but never quite finding it there in all the green.

“Blind luck we caught her in this snapshot, boy. Blind luck. There she is. An angel. Me and the boys, and an angel there with us. Everyone in this picture made it out, son. All of us. I know why, and so do my pals. We had ourselves an angel watching over our steps through that s**t. Angel Company: she thought we were special and I doubt we’ll ever learn why, but I’m grateful she did.”

As a kid I’d always ask him, eager and excited: “Where, pop? Where is she? Do you mean the boat? Is that what you mean? Is she the angel you mean? Where is she then?” all while imagining fairy-like ghost-shapes in the sunlight speckling the water or searching for but never finding some secret design in the hovercraft’s sleek but battered hull. But he’d only smile for me in his aggravatingly kind and patient way, like a teacher waiting for his lesson to sink in to the mind of a daydreaming student. But I wasn’t distracted. I wanted to see her. I wanted to believe in her. But where was she, right? Where the hell was she and what was wrong with me that I couldn’t see her?

II:

We were simple kids with simple desires: passive stoners on the hunt for pot and booze and secret outdoors places for s*x, and the occasional myth to give a bigger meaning to our otherwise hazy boring shitty lives. Escape artists, creative enough to find pathways away from the day-to-day boredom and frequent catastrophes that kept us humbled and afraid of what the future might have in store for us.

We invented the Witch of Suicide Hill one long drug-f****d midnight, and we embellished her on future nights and wee mornings, but never expected her to be born through our story-telling, not really. But her manifestation came later, a hazy while after her invention between tokes on the joint the five of us were sharing and swigs from the bottles of cough syrup we were passing around, the woods around us dark and foreboding and hiding every terrible and thrilling ghost we dreamed into being.

The hill was local legend: every grade schooler feared it, every high schooler got drunk and stoned and f****d on it at some point, or dreamed of doing all of the above there. It also frightened us all, though not all of us kids admitted to being under that part of its weird spell: maybe it was the hulking look of it etched against the backdrop of fields stretching for miles and miles to the south, with the trees surrounding it like giants worshipping at an immense altar; or maybe it was the strange aura that surrounded the place, that seemed to come from the hill itself, like it was a colossal sleeping animal, hibernating, a leviathan biding its time until the right gang of teenagers chanted the right spell to wake it from its ancient dreams. It got its name after a girl – nobody really remembers her name because she was before our time, though everyone pretends to have known her, and to know her story, like it was their own – who killed herself there. Some say she used pills and that her vomit had made the grass crunchy and yellow when a grandpa and grandma found her asphyxiated corpse the next morning while walking their dog; others say she opened her wrists with razors and swear her blood still soaks the grass on certain weird midnights when the moon’s bright and the Devil’s wandering the nearby woods and influencing the local wildlife and ghosts in dark ways.

We told it this way: the girl, a teenager around our age, crawled up the hill one stormy night after her parents drove her out of the house with their fighting (why she crawled I can’t recall but that’s how we’d told it and it always seemed the right way to tell it). Once gaining the top of the hill, she looked skywards and opened her mouth wide, drinking the rain down until it drowned her. When they found her, whoever they were, the girl was hard to recognize, she was so water-bloated and blue-skinned. We imagined her resurrected shell like this, a monstrous mermaid, losteyed and haunted by her past that had sent her crawling uphill in search of a drowning by the sky; and this became our witch who haunted Suicide Hill, giving it its bleak name and wandering the woods and swimming in the deep dark dangerous river cutting through the oaks and willow trees, casting her weird magic over the forest and fields and animals and teenagers dumb or drunk enough to hide out there, too. We named her Maria – Blue-Face Maria – after a missing Woodslee girl we’d heard about, and spooked each other by pointing out the shadow of her scampering way out in the thick of the trees or floating in the water or crawling up the hill after midnight.

It’s a big hill, grassy and steep. Nearly sheer along its southern face, and treacherous in bad weather. It was a weird summer weather-wise, setting records for rainfall and twister touchdowns, and the river flooded enough times that it turned the fields and wilderness surrounding the Hill into constant swampland. Deep, misty, mysterious. And dangerous. A perfect home for troubled spirits, real or invented, to roam.

III:

My dad was miles-deep into crazy country with the bridge burned long behind him, and my mom drank more than any of us did by way of coping with his madman antics. Jenny understood: her parents were w*********h through and through, and noticed her only on the last day of every month when rent was due and her part-time gig at the bowling alley saved them, and saved a place for the two of them in the liquor store checkout where the welfare cheque was cashed like clockwork. Mainly it was me and Jenny versus the world, but our friends were close ones, and all f****d in the same kind of ways, too: always broke, hungry, pissed off and bored: Robert, king stoner and happy drunk, always looking for the joke in good or bad situations because if you can’t laugh, he liked to say, well, the other option isn’t so good; Paula, older than the rest of us by one year and shunned by her classmates because she wasn’t the prettiest girl around, not by a long shot, happy to hang out with the only small band of loserdom that would take her in; and Trevor, big reader of horror magazines and worshipper of the midnight hour, the best of our gang at spinning the tallest tales to get us thinking away from the usual s**t.

No wonder smoking and drinking were such good friends of our gang. We never talked about the mirror-people we were becoming to our families who embarrassed us so much, but I’m pretty sure we all thought about it, at least when we were sober.

My dad served. He wants everyone to know it, or maybe he just wants people to know there was a time when he was needed to serve and he did. When someone refers to him as being a veteran he’s quick to set them straight: “I was a soldier...” Like ‘veteran’ doesn’t quite define him adequately enough. Like the war isn’t done with him yet. He’d been a sniper, specifically, God-gifted with a sure shot and cherished by the military, but he doesn’t like to tell people these details for some reason. Sometimes, when his pride’s wild and strong, he tells the world that the soldier’s still serving: “Once a soldier always a soldier.” This is why ‘veteran’ doesn’t hold water: it implies deeds done, past and buried. My dad’s tour hasn’t ended just yet. A tour never does, he taught me once.

At least I had Jenny: we’d started dating at the beginning of the summer, and it went good from the start. She was great: mellow and sexy, angry but quiet, and she thought about things, too, like me. Plus I’ve always loved blondes in general, and dirty blondes in particular. Yeah, she was so cool. Us versus them, that was our motto from the start, whoever and whatever they were. I found my mom crying once that summer, but she never found out about it. I was on my way out, to meet up with Jenny at the pool hall, and saw mom standing at the kitchen window with tears running down her cheeks. She was smoking, and her cigarette was shaking between her trembling lips. The ashtray was on the counter beside her, and I could see all of the lipstick-smudged butts piled there in the ashes, looking bloody and hurt. I thought maybe she was seeing Allie again, dead and crumpled all over the curb, her tricycle twisted and broken beside her. I watched her for a while, though, and knew it wasn’t Allie in her head. I could see him through the window, too: dad taking a break from it all in the rickety old rocking chair we kept on the backyard patio, looking like any other dad or husband relaxing in the late afternoon sunlight, smoking a cigarette and watching the sky. But I knew better, and found it right away: his trusty M-16, laid across his lap, rocking along with him, like the extension of the man he’d become all those years ago.

I don’t know why I didn’t say anything, try to comfort her in some way. Maybe I felt embarrassed because I was crying by then, too. Maybe I just felt that everyone’s alone with their sadness in the end anyways, so why bother trying to bring her a peace that wouldn’t stay with her.

Later that night me and Jenny left the pool hall and split a bottle of DM in the woods near the Hill. Laying there in the old sleeping bag we always shared, watching the stars coloured cough syrup-purple through the trees, imagining the shuffling sounds of Maria crawling through the leaves nearby, she whispered in my ear. Her whisper was anxious, her lips hot and moist and sexy on my earlobe, “Are you scared? Like, of tomorrow?”

I kissed her. It was the only answer I had. It was a good one. It was the strongest one I had to give. It got us through the night, leading first to s*x and then to spooning warm against the cold air and finally to sleep and dreams as purple and thick as the potion inside us.

IV:

So we called on her soon after, near August’s sweaty end. Like a summoning without the black candles or sacrificial beasts, just our belief. Because we did believe in her. We’d given birth to her and she felt real to us. More real than most things we saw and felt every day. We needed proof of the magic we could summon. We needed to be saved. It was a weird and uncertain time. Summer was almost over, and a dying season was coming on strong. It was a call we had to make.

We were standing in a circle in the dark heart of the woods. A little stoned and plenty drunk, the mossy ground at our feet littered with empties: beer cans and cough syrup bottles. Pot smoke merged with the mist in the air and made everything uncertain and eerie. We said things like “We summon thee, Witch” and “Rise Witch, rise” and “Come home to your hill, Witch, and show yourself to us”. We meant every word, too. Being smoke- and drink-f****d had nothing to do with it. We’d have said the same things – less creatively, but with the same sentiment, heartfelt and desperate – if we’d been sober. Jenny held my hand through it, clammy with excitement. Our friends were a comfort there in the dark and wet, too: Trevor, eyes closed in concentration as he led us through our summoning chants, the expression on his face telling us that we’d be wise to follow his example because a look that desperate meant he needed our Witch to rise, maybe to help him forget his dad run off with a girl half his mom’s age; Paula, looking happy to just be there at all, quiet and timid as always but with eyes clenched tight in her concentration, lost in the world of our ritual; Robert with his torn jeans and long hair and pot-lazy smile, relishing the spectacle of us gathered in the woods like cult members on the brink of exiting the world for a better place.