The Man in the Tree Page 2

  When he had a nickel and had spent it, he could always reach into another world where it was still in his pocket. If he wanted more, he could multiply the nickel as he had done with the beetle. From the time he found this out, he always had money for candy or anything else he wanted, and he sometimes treated other children to a bottle of pop or a package of gum. Once or twice they asked him for money, saying, "Come on, you're rich," and he foolishly gave it to them.

  One day his mother said to him, "Gene, Mrs. Everett says Petie told her you bought him a model airplane. Did you?"

  He saw that he was in trouble, although he didn't understand why, and he said, "Petie's a liar. He lies all the time."

  "But she says Zelda Owens saw you. And I talked to her mother, and Zelda says you gave her some money, too."

  "Only a quarter."

  She put her hand on his jaw to make him look at her. "Gene, tell me the truth. Did you give Petie the money to buy that airplane?"

  "Aw -- yeah."

  "But where did you get the money?"

  He knew that if he told the truth his father would beat him for lying. He told his mother that he had found a five-dollar bill on the street. She let him go, but he knew she thought he had stolen the money.

  That night while his mother was washing the dishes, his father made him sit down in the living room and gave him a lecture about stealing. Gene insisted on his story about finding money on the street; the guiltier he felt, the more vehement he became. At last he said, "You believe everybody else, but you won't believe me," and ran into his room.

  After that he never gave other children money, and whenever he got anything for himself that he could not have bought with his allowance, he smuggled it into the house and hid it.

  Gene Anderson never had any of the usual childhood illnesses; once in a while he had a fever, but it passed away overnight. When he was seven his mother took him to the dentist for the first time, and he disliked this so much that from then on he examined his teeth every night, using a little piece of mirror that he had found behind the garage, and when he discovered a cavity, he made it go away. After a while he must have learned how to recognize them without looking; he stopped thinking about cavities, but he never had another.

  One Saturday when he was eight, his father took him downtown to Dr. Rodeman's office where he was to have his tonsils out. He was apprehensive about this, but his father told him that it would not hurt, and that he could have an ice cream cone afterward.

  Dr. Rodeman made him lie down on his table and put a little gauze mask over his face. Something sweetish and stinging dripped onto the mask; his lungs were full of tiny bright needles. In terror of his life, he reached out and did something without knowing what it was. He heard the doctor say, "That's funny, this can seems to be empty. Just a minute."

  Then he understood what he had done, and when the doctor brought another can, he made that one empty, too. Dr. Rodeman took the mask away' and stood looking at him with an odd expression. He told Gene's father that they would have to come back next week, but they never did, and he never had his tonsils out.

  Gene knew that his parents suspected there was something strange about him, other than his tallness, but they never talked to him about it. He knew that they were worried about his future. Once a visitor stupidly asked him, "And what do you want to be when you grow up?" Gene was almost as tall as he was. "I mean, when you get older."

  "I want to be a giant," Gene said, and left the room. His mother lectured him about politeness afterward, but her eyes were moist.

  Because Gene was so tall and strong, his father began to make use of him again, in the afternoons after school and on weekends. He learned to plane a board smooth, to use a miter box, to make and read working drawings. Under supervision, he was allowed to use the bench saw, and his father promised that in a year or two he would teach him to work on the lathe.

  Once or twice, during school vacations, Gene's father took him to a house he was building with another carpenter, and it was here that Gene first glimpsed the satisfaction of having imagined something new and then made it real. The things he could make were only copies of other things. He tried imagining things and then looking for them in the shadows, but they were not always there. Occasionally, when he had been given a present he didn't like, he found that he could reach through into another world where his parents had decided on something else. In this way he got a book that was his favorite for a long time: an illustrated copy of "The Little Lame Prince," by Miss Mulock.

  All through school he was too big to sit with his knees under the desk. It did not occur to anybody, and certainly not to him, that they might have brought in a bigger desk from another grade. He sat sideways, cramped into the narrow space between the seat and the desk, with his feet in the aisle. He wore men's shoes with pointed toes until the fourth grade, when the teacher gave him permission to come to school in tennis shoes. "Feet" was still his nickname. Several times the teacher called him that without thinking, and there was a roar of laughter.

  In school he wrote at first in large, awkward loops, but when the teacher criticized him for this, he began to write smaller, then smaller still. The teacher complained about that, too, but he kept on until he could get hundreds of words on a page. He began to make carvings out of soft pine, little figures that he kept in walnut shells hinged with adhesive tape.

  In the fourth grade there was another boy who was almost as tall as Gene, a lumpish, red-faced creature whose lower lip was always shiny with spit. His name was Paul Cooley; he was twelve years old and had been kept hack three times. He was the son of the police chief, a red-faced man who dressed like a sheriff and carried a revolver on his hip. Whenever Paul saw Gene he called out, "Hey, Feet, you stink," and then laughed, looking around as if he had said something clever. They fought at recess, and Gene beat him; afterward Paul wanted to make friends, but Gene disliked his dullness and his slobbering lip.

  One Sunday afternoon Gene was playing alone in the upper story of a half-finished house of his father's, as he often did. The floor was strewn with sawdust and with nails dropped by the carpenters; through the window openings he could see the tops of maple trees; He was pretending that it was his house, and that he was grown and could do anything he liked.

  He heard footsteps below, and in a moment a shaggy head appeared over the top of the stairwell: it was Paul's. He hesitated when he saw Gene, then came up. "Hey, Feet, what you doing here?"

  "Nothing."

  "You want a Cigarette?" He pulled a pack of Luckies out of his pocket and offered it.

  "No."

  "Well, okay." Paul lit a cigarette and tossed the match away, still burning.

  "Don't do that," said Gene, and stamped it out. Paul struck another match and dropped it.

  "This is my dad's house. You better quit." Gene stepped on the second match, but Paul was already lighting a third. Because Gene did not want to fight him again, he reached with his mind and made the match disappear, then the rest of the pack.

  Paul looked stupidly at his empty hand. "What'd you do with my matches?"

  "Nothing."

  There was a whistle outside, then a low voice: "Hey, Paul?"

  He turned his head. "Up here!" Two boys came up the stairs; they were twelve-year-olds, friends of Paul's. One of them, a tall boy wearing a baseball cap, was already smoking. "Who's this?" he said.

  "That's Feet, he stinks," said Paul, and laughed vacantly. "He took my matches away and he won't give 'em back."

  "Yeah?" The two boys came toward Gene. "Listen, why don't you give him back his matches?"

  "I haven't got them."

  The two looked at each other. "Grab him!" said one, and they wrestled him to the floor. While they held him, Paul went through his pockets, pulling out a few coins, a wad of string, some baseball cards and a wadded handkerchief. "Guess I'll keep these for my matches," he said, and laughed again.

  "Lemme see them cards," said the tall one, and they let Gene up. Paul was bac
king away, but they tripped him, sat on him, took the cards and money out of his fist. While Gene was putting out their dropped cigarettes, Paul got up and rushed at him. He took Gene off balance and fell with him half out of the window. "You took my matches! You took my matches!" he blubbered. Gene was pinned by his weight across the window frame, one arm under him, his head down.

  "Get his pants," somebody said. Hands were fumbling with Gene's belt buckle. He kicked and struggled, but all he accomplished was to force his body farther out the window. He was crying. Blindly he reached and turned, felt Paul's weight slip away from him. He heard a shriek, then a thump below that echoed against the house like a pistol shot.

  He grasped the window frame and pulled himself in. Below, Paul lay with his head on a blood-spattered two-by-four.

  The other two were gray-faced. "You killed him!" the tall one said. "I'm going to tell my dad!"

  Their footsteps rattled down the stairs. Gene followed. They were running down the street toward town; he went the other way. He ran until a pain in his side forced him to stop; then he went on, weeping and groaning, up the hill into the trees. It was about three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon; be was nine years old, and he knew he couldn't go home.

  Chapter Two

  Dog River, Oregon, named after the stream discovered by Lewis and Clark in 1805, is situated at the confluence of the Dog and the Columbia. The river was originally named Labeasche, after Francis Labiche, one of the expedition's French watermen. (Neither Lewis nor Clark was strong on spelling.) "Labiche" was taken by many to mean "the bitch," but this fact apparently has nothing to do with the name finally selected for the river and the town: it comes, rather, from the experience of some early travelers who were reduced by starvation to eating dogs.

  Dog River lies in a fertile valley largely devoted to apples, pears, and strawberries. Most of the valley is flat as a table, but the town itself is hilly; up from the river, the streets rise so steeply that at some intersections there are concrete steps with pipe railings. Behind the County Library, the hill is so abrupt that there is no street at all, only a switchback wooden staircase that rises to the suburban district sixty feet above.

  The business section, which is entirely modern, is four blocks long; here will be found the First National Bank, the Odeon Theatre, the courthouse, the Bon Ton department store, the newspaper office, the two drug stores, the Medical Building, Stein's Meat Market, and the Book and Art Shoppe.

  The town is not hostile to immigrants, of whom there are many: Mayor Hilbert, for example, was born in Germany, and Desmond Pike, the editor and publisher of the "Dog River Gazette," is English; but it congratulates itself that its young people are almost uniformly fair-skinned and pleasing in appearance.

  Morris Stein and his family are the only Jews known to live in town. There is one black family, headed by a man who works as a janitor at the Dog River Hotel near the railroad depot. Out in the valley, much of the most productive orchard land was formerly owned by Japanese immigrants and their descendants, all of whom, however, were taken away to internment camps during the Second World War. The town is staunchly Republican. The state anthem, "Oregon, My Oregon," is sung with fervor in the schools. The high-school football team, known as the Beavers, has a traditional rivalry with the team of Dalles City, twenty miles to the east.

  Many of the residents of Dog River came to Oregon during the first quarter of the century from Iowa, Nebraska, and other midwestern states. Among these were Donald R. Anderson, from North Dakota, and Mildred Sonderlund, from Ohio. They met in Springfield, where Anderson was working in a sawmill and Mildred was teaching elementary school. After their marriage in 1939, they moved to Dog River, where Anderson set himself up as a carpenter and builder. Their only child, Gene, was born there in 1944.

  Tom Cooley, the son of a Portland bootlegger, was nineteen when he married Ellen McIntyre, the daughter of a Dog River orchardist. Their first child, Paul, was born in 1941; he was an infant when the war broke out. Cooley served in the Marine Corps, reaching the rank of sergeant. After his discharge, he worked for a while as a beer distributor and had a part interest in the Idle Hour Billiard Parlor, along with his cousin Jerry, who had been in the Marines with him. In 1944 he and Jerry sold out their shares in the billiard parlor and bought an apple orchard which had come on the market cheap. (The former owner, a Mr. Takamatsu, was in a relocation camp in Colorado.) Cooley was a silent partner in the orchard operation; he wanted something to keep him busy. In 1947 he became Dog River's chief of police.

  Chief Cooley cruised the back roads around Dog River for three days and nights, ranging as far east as Dalles City and as far west as Portland. He drove slowly in his eight-cylinder Buick, watching both sides of the road and peering into every car he passed. Once on Monday morning and twice on Tuesday he saw a man on foot ducking into the underbrush. Cooley leaped out each time with his gun drawn, pursued the man and caught him, but all three times it turned out to be some tramp or migrant laborer with a guilty conscience. At night Cooley sometimes drove with his lights and motor off, coasting down a long hill, looking and listening. Toward dawn he parked the car and slept for a few hours. He stopped five times for gas and food, once for a bottle of blended rye. By Wednesday morning he had put nearly two thousand miles on the Buick.

  Cooley was a short, sturdy, red-faced man who carried a .45 in a belt holster and wore a cowboy hat. He was the entire police department of Dog River. Under ordinary circumstances, the job did not call for anything more demanding than hustling an occasional drunk or vagrant into the county jail.

  He came down out of the hills into town, red-eyed and unshaven; he slewed into the driveway, scattering chickens, and yanked on the emergency brake. Tess Williams, his wife's sister, met him inside the door. His voice was thick. "How's Ellen?"

  "Where have you been, you sawed-off son of a bitch? She's half out of her mind, is how she is."

  Cooley started up the stairs. "And Mayor Hilbert's been on the phone seven times!" she called after him.

  "Tell'm go shit in his hat," said Cooley, and staggered into the bedroom.

  Gus Hilbert came around at four that afternoon, when Cooley was up and dressed. Hilbert was a big man, popeyed and balding; he ran the town's one movie theater, in which, until her retirement a few years ago, his wife Ethel had played the Golden Wurlitzer organ.

  He found Cooley at the kitchen table eating bacon and eggs. The chief had shaved, and looked a little better, but he still looked like a man who had been on a three-day drunk.

  Hilbert dropped his hat on the table and sat down. "Tom, you through making a fool of yourself now?"

  Cooley looked at him and said nothing.

  "You know by now that kid's gone. Hitched a ride somewhere, he's out of the state."

  "By now," said Cooley.

  "Even if he wasn't, he's a juvenile. What was you going to do if you found him, beat him up? Shoot him with that damn gun?"

  "He killed my boy, Gus."

  Hiibert said after a moment, "How's Ellen?"

  "Okay. She's asleep upstairs. Doc Phillips gave her something."

  "I know what a knock this is for you, Tom, and Ellen too, but you can't take the damn law in your own hands, and I can't let you do it. Now what I want to know is, have you given it up? Because if you haven't, I've got to take your badge."

  "Think you're man enough?" Cooley asked, and put down his fork.

  "Now, Tom, don't be that way."

  "You can have the goddamn badge any time you want it," Cooley said. He got up and threw his plate into the sink. The scared faces of two young children appeared in the doorway and then vanished. "You kids stay the hell out of here!" Cooley shouted.

  "Tom, are you coming back to work? That's all I'm asking. There was an armed robbery at the Idle Hour Monday night, I had to call in the sheriff, and there's some vandalism up at the junior high school."

  "Yeah, I'm coming back to work. What the hell else can I do?"

  "Okay. Get some rest
first. God, you look awful."

  The following afternoon, just after lunch time, Cooley got out of his car in front of the Andersons' house and stood looking it over. It was a white one-story house with wood siding and a shake roof, behind a picket fence and a big maple tree. Unraked leaves were all over the yard. At the end of the driveway was a garage; through the open doors he could see workbenches and stacks of lumber. He climbed the porch steps, looking at the scratches on the paint, and rang the bell.

  After a moment the door opened. "Afternoon, Miz Anderson," Cooley said. "Like to come in and talk to you, if you don't mind." She was pale, and her eyes were pink-rimmed.

  "Yes, come in," she said. She led him into the living room. "Mr. Cooley, I want you to know we're terribly sorry about what happened."