Steve in the Trees
by Joseph Linscott
Strolling in the evening, that’s what we called it. Strolling: casual, old timey, it made us feel like we were ready to smoke unfiltereds, before we saw what they did to our uncles and grandfathers—wore their teeth away to nothing but pitty little nubbins in the mouth. Evening: sophisticated, elegant, it made us feel like we hadn’t gone through what everyone else wanted us to call trauma, it was just a little fun that gave us a different flavor from everyone else.
This was our age, we thought.
This was our world, we thought.
This was how we wanted to spend our time, especially that free time that was always open as a child in the evenings, after your parents had stopped telling you to go to bed but before they finally stopped loving you and let you walk away.
So we strolled that evening along the path that winded itself from the park in the middle of the town to the lake on the edge of it.
I was the first one of us to notice the man hanging in the tree. We were in the wooded patch of neighborhood that bloomed each spring into dense coverage for the rich to hide behind, before they left the rest of us in the sodden fall and winter.
The man’s legs caught my attention first, how they just dangled there in the soft light of a cloudy dusk. It hurt my eyes to look at him. I couldn’t adjust. I worried what I was seeing was something otherworldly. Then I noticed the legs kicking the air, gathering momentum, and soon they leapt to another tree and there existed the man from a tree directly above us. I thought we were witness to god for a moment, before the clouds broke enough that I could see.
Instead it was just a guy named Steve who was trying to train for some show he had watched on TV once.
“They got these scrawny, wiry little guys on the show bouncing all over the course.” He talked in a manic woodchipper cadence that had me thinking he was some kind of drug. I wanted to be prescribed to him and see the world through his eyes. I didn’t realize this was just the way enthusiasm presented itself in adults. I wouldn’t see that again until I listened to my father, lying on his deathbed, tell me all of the damaged and rusty vehicles and appliances he had left in our yard that he wanted to fix up and repair—how cognizant he sounded, how I believed him for a bit, until his proselytizing was broken up with the bloodied phlegm that was a constant alarm beeping away the time he had left.
“And so you’re gonna go on there,” one of us asked, I can’t remember who.
“That’s the plan. Gonna win it all. If I can just get this forearm to knock it off.” His left arm was shorter and skinnier than his right. Some accident had left its impression on him there and he talked of how it was the only thing keeping him from getting on the show—or hanging on to a woman. He laughed hard at this, and we, three scared girls who only wanted to find a place to get high and drunk, laughed with him.
“I won’t keep you,” he told us before he dashed back up into the trees.
“That was Steve,” one of us said like the others hadn’t also been involved in the conversation.
We got to a spot that some boys had told us about in our organic chemistry lab. Three broad shouldered athlete-looking nerds who couldn’t throw a ball any father than any of us three girls, but their shoulders were impressive and gave off the impression that they might be capable of great things. It was why I talked to them. That, and the fact that I didn’t know what was going on in the class.
I had told the other two girls that everything was going wrong in my life; that nothing seemed to make sense. I’d write my name at the top of the lab report and even that felt wrong. I’d check the notes I had just taken and couldn’t understand a thing that they said. I tried to look into mirrors in the bathrooms around campus but every time I entered the lights turned off on me and I was left with only two eye whites staring back at me—black orbs of abysmal thinking always centering my experience.
“You’re being a bummer,” they had told me.
“We need to get you high,” they declared.
I had nothing left in my brain to suggest that anything else would be better, and so I said yes.
They worked the joint into being and presented a bottle of Mad Dog. I didn’t know what I was doing and so I watched them intently. Hoping to glean something from what I was meant to be doing.
This was our relationship in these days. I watched them when I thought they weren’t looking, and I attempted to copy their movements, the way they looked when they were thinking, and now, the way it looked to smoke and drink.
The bottle was an unnatural color of blue, and it reminded me of my mother washing windows and mirrors on Saturdays when I was growing up. “Do not ever drink this,” she would tell me when I was young enough to let loose lips slip that I thought the blue in her bottle was tasty looking. But that wasn’t ever it. That blue was arousing. And here I was aroused by the smell of the weed and the look of the blue in that bottle that we had started passing around.
***
“Why didn’t you go away for college,” my father asks me one evening, an evening too cold for strolling. I don’t know how to respond to him, and worry that he will tell me that I have to find my own way for my last year—for what I have told them will be my last year.
“Each year,” he starts, “you tell us you’re moving on and finishing up loose ends.”
“And each year,” my mother follows, “you are here, at our table, eating our food and telling us that there were too many loose ends.”
“That you couldn’t find all of the knots to tie things up with.”
“And so,” my mother’s voice breaks, and I cannot tell whether it is from my emotional manipulation of my parents or the spice in our meal breaking up the phlegm in the back of her throat, “it is starting to feel like maybe you are lying to us.”
“That you have no intention of leaving us.”
“That you will not just let us carry on with the rest of our lives.”
“That you are punishing us for something that you think that we have done.”
“Haven’t we done enough for you?”
“Haven’t we provided you with a good life?”
“Didn’t I protect you? Didn’t I tell you not to drink the window cleaner or the toilet cleaner, or to not put your mouth near the lawn mower?”
“And I,” my father starts with his white fingers grown whiter around the contours of his mug of tea, “was I not a tender enough father? Shouldn’t you be grateful for me not being the authoritative father figure that specters over all others’ lives? I could have been that, you know? I could have been that specter of intimidation.”
“Why must you punish us?”
***
When the three of us return to the spot by the lake where we get high, Steve is hanging from a nearby tree. We greet each other with silent affirmations of the hand and we wait for him to swing and climb his way away from our clearing so that we can get high.
It had cooled significantly since our first stroll to this spot, and the leaves have started to change from deep green to sharp orange and dull brown colors. My parents had told me to bring a sweater with me on this stroll, though I started to believe they didn’t care whether I would be cold or not. I worried that when we smoked the joint we rolled with us that I would dwell too much on the idea that they were going to lock me out of the house, that I would be homeless, that the only belonging I would have to my name would be the jacket that they told me to bring. And so I did not bring the jacket and I was happy about it when the warm breeze blew in from over the lake.
When we checked on Steve, on how his left arm is holding up in supporting his weight hanging from the tree, we notice that he has not moved since we arrived.
“Everything okay,” we ask him.
“It’s just a beautiful night.”
“We agree.”
“The breeze is so warm up here.”
“As it is down here.”
“No,” he said, almost sternly and in a way that almost scared us, “if you haven’t felt it from up here then you do not know how truly warm it still is.”
“We have some idea.”
“Come join me.”
We had not climbed a tree since we were all very little girls, and had been yelled at by our mothers for doing something so potentially dangerous, so potentially disruptive to what our bones could handle should the worst case scenario happen.
We had not followed any men (or singular man) up into a tree in all our lives, and since the tree was not a van—for we had been told for many years as small girls to never go into a van with strange men or a strange man—we decided that we would follow Steve up into his limbs.
The bark was sticky, making it easier to find a way up to the lowest branch, which gathered us into its embrace so familiarly it felt as though a parent swaddling us. We enjoyed the feeling, and we understood, we thought, what it meant to be Steve. His arms had more bulging veins in them than we had seen in them during our first meeting. The sun was still hovering in the sky, just above the lake’s horizon, and the breeze was warmer up in the tree.
I felt as though I could breathe again, which surprised me as I didn’t realize I could not breathe down below. I wanted to thank Steve, but he had disappeared, and so it was just us three girls, the joint, and the breeze.
“Thank you, Steve,” we yelled into the breeze, our voices echoing through the leaves, following him in his pursuit.
***
When winter break had broke the bodies began to spill back over the town, clomping through the snow that turned to slush by afternoon. The desolate days of January bled into the bone-biting chill of February and melted into hopeful March afternoons and April mornings. By May my parents had started packing their belongings.
“We’re leaving you the house,” they said.
“We can’t do this anymore.”
“We love you.”
“We don’t even know if we love you.”
“We want you to do what you want.”
“We want you to leave us alone.”
“We just need to find ourselves.”
“You’ve been in our lives too long.”
“We need to determine if we still love each other.”
“We certainly can’t keep loving you.”
“We don’t think you’re ever going to graduate.”
“We don’t think you’re ever really going to move on.”
***
The two weeks before graduation were warm, muggy days filled with awkward glances, dread-filled floor and stairwell squeaks, and meals eaten out of paper bags and shoved down into the bottom of new trash bags.
I had decided to give myself bangs.
I had forgotten about Steve.
There were other boys, as there were always other boys. And there were parties, as there were always parties. And there were friends, as there were always friends. And there were no more parents, as there had never been parents, it started to seem.
A seam had been torn from the fabric of my life in those days. The girls left to go home before finding their own ways in the world, and Steve was nothing but a faint memory that I had started to convince myself was an apparition of loneliness that I was feeling terminally by those days. Amongst the loose threads of my live, I was unable to tie any of them together in a way that felt like an ending I could be happy about.
The house’s emptiness did not sit in my uncomfortably, as I thought it would, but rather contained a calming quality.
I spent my days and my nights alone, sunk into the couch, eating what remaining cans and dried goods my parents had still locked away in the back of the pantry. I considered myself the last person on earth and was eager to start the rest of my life in this space. If only I could move on from the school that existed in what felt like another sphere of existence, as all summers make school feel.
“What will you do now that you’re grown?”
It was Steve, he had found his way to the tree outside my parent’s bedroom window, where I had begun sleeping most nights as it was cooler than any other part of the un-air-conditioned house.
“Am I?”
“You’re not underfed, that’s for sure.”
“Everything in life feels in such duress.”
“Something only the wise could know.”
His forearms bulged and the veins looked larger than even I could hope to remember as he swayed in the wind. I wanted to invite him in, but I worried he would think it offensive. I worried what anyone walking by with their dog might think. I worried my parents would return home, longing for the comfort of their marriage bed, though I knew they were gone and I would never see them again. All of the pictures of me still lay scattered over the furniture in the room.
“I haven’t seen you around.”
“I’ve been around.”
“Everyone else has left.”
“There are still those of us here, hanging around. At least for a bit.”
Joseph Linscott is a writer living in Providence, RI. His work has recently appeared in Bridge Eight, and can be found online and in print elsewhere. He is a lead fiction reader for Okay Donkey. Reach him on social media @prosephlinscott.