Songs for The Lost

Always an Angelwitch over Suicide Hill-2

I sensed Jenny saying something, and watched her mouth the words: Please Witch, please. Yeah, Jenny needed her bad that night. We all did.

The river flooded that night, the twenty-fourth of a weirdly windswept August and the most severe flooding of the whole summer. The water rose quick. It’s where she lived and slept when not haunting the hill, our strange and powerful Witch: in the river. In its deep green scummy water, in the muddy river bottom tangled in the underwater weeds and submerged garbage, in the dangerous undertows that had pulled more than a few swimmers under for good throughout the years. The sky pissed hard and the river she rose fast and washed out the distant cement trails before we could find them on the outskirts of the woods; the mud paths we were on turned into quicksand sewage and sent us sliding and slipping through the underbrush. Thorns snagged our clothes and scratched our skin, burrs stuck to our clothes like hungry parasites, rain blinded us, thunder shook us, the night strangled us in its thickness, black and black all the way through.

We found our way by instinct: we knew those woods like we knew each other: intimately. Finally we crashed through the tangles near the base of the Hill. The deluge hit us hardest then, outside the cover of trees, in the open with the fields stretching dark and huge to the south and the slope rising like a mountain face in front of us. One of us – I think it was Robert– gave an inhuman cry, garbled and scared. We followed his pointing hand, thrilling at the movement above us on the slippery, rain-washed slope. Squinting through the downpour and windblown foliage, we saw.

It was my dad owning the bald summit of Suicide Hill past midnight, with rain lashing down from the sky. He was naked, with eyes so lost to the moment he didn’t seem to see us gathered at the base of the hill; or he didn’t see us for who we were, jaded teenagers out looking for fun and escape but getting washed out by stormy weather and the mighty magic of the Witch we’d foolishly raised; his son looking for a dad who’d gotten lost in a jungle in another decade on another continent. He called down to us in a mighty roar of a voice, like he was a prophet or god and we His disciples: “Killing a man means nothing, don’t you know, boys? Killing a man don’t mean a thing because the only thing that matters is the death of a soul, and man he has none. Man he has none, for the deeds he’s capable of! Naw, God squashed what soul he had with the first stone arrowhead knocked and let off! That’s why his angels left Him at his throne and walketh among us upon this scarred earth!” I don’t know how we heard him through all the racket and roar, but his voice was a bugle’s song cutting the night and I’ve never forgotten a dark wise word of its message.

We watched as he hefted the M-16 to his shoulder and aimed at something in the sky. We recoiled at the salvo he fired out into the night. I wondered whether he found his target up there. His voice, reaching us through the roar of the storm, told us he had: “Blood! Blood! Oh, it’s raining tonight, boys!”

I saw her first: deathly blue-skinned like we’d dreamed her, hair caked with mud and leaf bits and grass, crawling uphill at a good fast clip just like we told her story. Our mossy-cheeked rotting Blue-Face Maria, river-weed clumps around her shoulders like a disgusting shawl, making a bee-line for my dad feeding the sky bullets. He was oblivious to the danger he was in. We screamed at the sight of her, terrified at our conjuring powers. We waved our hands for him but he was caught by his bloodlust and kept pumping ammo upstairs. I was just starting uphill, too, to save my dad from our horrible creation, but the Witch was already on top of him. He kept firing his gun. Blue-Face Maria paused directly alongside my dad, looking up at him, watching him with weird eyes, like he was her saviour, from the sky and whatever it held. She sat this way for a few seconds and then crawled past him and out of sight over the hilltop. Another minute of him shooting up the night and then he lowered his weapon and scanned the sky from north to south. Then, nodding to his left as if towards someone invisible to us, he made his voice roar its bugle-roar again: “Thank you, darling! Oh, thank you for watching over me all these long hard years, darling!” The fury was gone from his voice then, though. Instead it was filled with something else. Joy. Joy would be the best way to describe it, although it doesn’t quite say enough.

The last we saw of him that night was a strong picture, etched in lightning and shadow: hand to temple in a rigid respectful salute to the wilderness of the fenland and flooded trails, then slinging the M-16 across his bare back, turning and marching with his practiced step over the summit and disappearing down the opposite slope, in the wake of the Witch.

With his retreat came a shocking peace from the storm: the rain let up in its viciousness straight away. Soon it stopped completely. Lightning flashed its goodbye in the far west, without its constant brother thunder’s soul-shaking voice.

V:

Me and my friends were getting stoned in the garage the next afternoon when the ghost arrived. Just like that he was with us: my dad, or the shell of him, back from the dead and whatever Hell witches and wraiths and warlocks and soldiers go to, with whatever trace of the man he’d once been loitering inside his body like a squatter in a condemned building. He snagged the joint right from between my fingers, crossed the room with it between his lips with a thoughtful expression on his face, came back to us and collapsed between Jenny and me on the ratty couch. He took a long good toke, eyes narrowed, a smile on his lips. Turning to Jenny, checking out her t**s in her tight tank top with a careful eye, and then saying to us all: “Man, these are the days, boys. A break from the s**t, all the thunder quietened down for a blessed bit, just smoking with your buddies. Stolen moments, like finding gold nuggets dropped in a landmine field.” He didn’t always talk this way, not always, but when he was lost in it he was lost in it deep and good.

“What s**t, sir?” whispered Robert, stoned to a mellow playfulness, grinning good-naturedly through the smoke. He was wearing his old green army jacket, even though the humidity was bad enough to keep all of us hidden in the shade of the garage that whole afternoon. I think the memory of the night before had inspired to him to dig the jacket out of his closet and brave the angry August heat with it sticking to his back like a second skin.

My dad only slipped deeper and deeper into it that afternoon. He leaned back on the couch with a squealing of its springs and said, “Oh, I guess you ain’t seen the papers yet, pal? Eh? You ain’t read ‘em yet? Well, good for you, but I best tell you now. Best you hear this latest s**t from me than anyone else ain’t your pal. Just over breakfast I read about all this: a girl was raped on the flipside of town, and butchered and left in the river, what was left of her; and a fire got set and burned down a portable schoolhouse, with one old man janitor stuck napping inside, poor, poor man; and the highway gunman got another one, near Kingston this one, and what’s that make, just over a dozen and he’s only been at it since the beginning of summer?” And he looked appreciatively at the cloudless blue sky framed in the window, and he said wistfully, “Such black news – black news! – on a perfect-looking day. The Devil truly is the great deceiver, ain’t he? Dropping his apocalypses on us all the time and we can’t sometimes hear it over the bees buzzin’ and the children playin’. s**t, man, what year is it anyways? They say the mess and s**t’s over but we know, we know…”

We listened to the bees droning through the backyard, and the children whooping from over the rooftops. A tranquil stoned daze fell over us all. We baked in the stillness and heat. At some point we realized he wasn’t with us anymore: my dad, stealthy soldier as ever, had crept off without any one of us noticing, melting into the bushes and flowers.

We said nothing, just enjoyed the peace.

Yeah, my dad was still back in the jungle. He still is. We keep him like a secret, like the broken family member nobody wants or dares to talk about for fear of making someone in the family upset. Luckily for us, all our families are f****d-up families, so dad fits right in among the greater tribe of us. If there’s a tribal chief, he’s it, watching the trees for suspicious green shadows and dreaming napalm dreams. He kind of turned into that role he’d dreamed up for himself on top of Suicide Hill on the storm-night, when the world of his dream got mixed with the world of ours. Or maybe there were no dreams at all that night. Maybe everything that happened that long weird summer was no dream at all but all the realest this weird world can get. Maybe us and him are just the exact same kind of crazy or sane, only from two different generations.

I thought then of dad’s picture, and the invisible angel it held, and I knew I’d never see her, no matter how hard I looked. But that was okay: she was there besides. I know that now.

The weeks they’d passed too quickly – September was right on top of us, and the uncertainty of a school-less law-less time loomed like another storm front bent on demolition of the highest order. Yeah, fear was in the air then. It was there with us all that summer, with the heat and haze and humidity and sunlight and fish flies and mosquitoes and weirdness.

VI:

Me and Jenny were still listening to records in the garage later that afternoon after our friends had crawled home, when my dad dropped back in. He came like a spider, in through the broken window opening onto the backyard: no shirt this time, his big chest smeared with mud, caked through his hair and making his grey crew-cut brown, his camouflage pants and boots covered, too. A dirty bandage, spotted with deep red, was wound around his hand. Pieces of foliage clung to him, too, green strips of different sizes with serrated edges like nothing I’d ever seen growing in the garden or neighbourhood. I wondered what firefights he’d seen, what blood. He made no sound. None at all. Not even a jingle or jangle of dogtags disturbing the yellow stillness. A professional or a natural or both. He acknowledged us with a quick nod of his head, a look of friendship in his glaring eyes before spinning around and making his nest in the window frame. He un-slung the rifle from across his back and took careful aim along its nose, guarding the garden and sunlight outside.

Jenny smiled at me. I held her real close and we lay together, watching my dad in the sun-washed window.

He was a sniper. We were friends in this dark world.

The curse is finally broken.

Walls too mighty for enemies to breach.