Ewan I: You Can Always Go Back
by K. A. Harris

Billy and Chuck watched the strange man from their vantage point atop the hill. He stood at the hill’s bottom, where the path through the woods turn to the left and paralleled the stream. Their bodies silently twisted and turned, almost trying to become one with the ground in order not to be seen. The large mountain laurel bush above and the fall fallen foliage on the ground provided ample cover, but too much could never be enough.

The two boys had been playing the ever-popular childhood game of War around a small hill of dirt and their newly built fort where the dirt once resided. Political Correctness was slow to reach this small farming town in Southern New Jersey. The boys played the game as their fathers had and their fathers before them. Their fort was their most recent masterpiece. The creek flowed before him, and he stood staring at it as quiet as those who observed him from a far. A stranger dressed as if he were on the way to a very important business meeting. Billy and Chuck had only seen men dressed like this at weddings, funerals or on television. The boys stared on as the briefcase slipped from his hand and rested on the ground. The man remained still, almost captivated by the stream and woods before him. These two boys did not and would never know but the man had lain where they lay, played where they played.

He once read that a depressed person could identify the make and model of a gun by the taste of its barrel. He was surprised the path through the woods was still there and not overgrown. The big tree still leaned out over the stream. Obviously the kids that replaced him in the neighborhood after he grew up also played here. Would this place call out and comeback to them in the years to come as it did to him? The woods on the other side of the stream had thinned out and a sprawling housing development looked as if it had dropped out of the sky. The sprawl was slowly closing in on this place. It wouldn’t be long until he could only come back here through his memories. He turned around and felt the tree’s bark through his sports coat as his body slid down the trunk of the tree. The moss-strewn bank of the stream was moist to the touch. How long had it been since he physically sat here? Twenty? Twenty-five years? His eyes moved slowly from the branches above and settled on the ground. He reached for the briefcase.

Billy and Chuck cringed as he turned and looked straight at them. Their bodies hugged the ground and hoped the falling leaves would provide enough cover. They gritted their teeth, but he didn’t call out to them, or even acknowledge their presence. It was as if he was looking right through them. Billy wrapped his hand around the bb gun lying next to him. Smart thinking bringing it, although it wouldn’t do much good if the man headed up the hill at them. Ok, so maybe it wasn’t a smart idea, but now was neither the time nor the place to debate the gun issue. It was his first instinct to grab it when he saw the strange man walk though is backyard. They had watched the strange car come to a stop on the street in front of their house. From their fort, they followed the man as he walked across their yard and towards the path leading to the woods. They had spent most of their summer vacation in the fort. Both boys had dug until they had blisters on their hands and then they dug some more. The kids dug for two days straight resulting in a wide trench atop the dirt pile. Looking back from an aerial perspective, it looked as if a snake had swallowed a coffee can. The trench was twenty feet long and deep enough for each boy to sit up in. Plywood and any other type of wood they could lay their hands on was laid atop the trench and covered with a portion of the dug dirt. At one end of the fort was a hatch that could be lifted for members to descend into the fort, craw through a five-foot long narrow tunnel into a ten-foot long chamber. At the opposite end was another five-foot long tunnel leading to the turret. The turret was an old half rusted 55-gallon drum that was turned upside down overtop the end of the fort. Convenient rust holes allowed lookouts to crouch and watch for approaching rival factions, of the imaginary kind, of course, until today.

The briefcase snapped open and the smell of cheap pleather quickly mixed with Mother Nature for an aroma like no other. One could almost be sure that the combination of leather and skunk cabbage would not find its way into any copy of Cosmo, Men’s Health, or Brian’s Bondage Babes you may find in the immediate near future. It was time to write. Words that he had put off putting to paper for a couple of days now. Writer’s block and/or fear had prevented the authoring due; but now time was short and he had to put pen to paper. As he leaned forward and picked up the pen, his eye caught the glint of shining metal. Off to his left, he took note of a small piece of barb wire, embedded in a tree. Time had not been kind to this wire as the tree had grown around it through the years, almost totally absorbing it.

A piece of wire, almost as old as he. They shared a history here. The wire was piece of a large pen that once held his horse. A horse he could not remember, his memories comprised of only what others said. While he had no recollection of the horse, he grew up running up and down the barbwire lined path past the long abandoned pen that lead down to the stream. He always had to be wary of the wire, as his old man was always too drunk or lazy to take it down after the horse was sold, even for his own kid’s safety. Again, he was too young to remember but was told that the horse had tried to bite and throw him so his parents sold it. He was surprised his father just didn’t shoot it and leave it to decay in the woods. That was more his style. He couldn’t see him going the effort of finding a buyer for the horse. Was what he was told true? How much of it was a whiskey-instilled delusion? How long would that small piece of barbwire remain there? How long before the tree swallowed it whole? Above the wire were scares in the tree’s bark. The tree was disfigured with jagged scars that over the years had grown into something Picasso-esque. Long ago those scars were his initials and those of the girls he loved from afar. With that, the memories came rolling back to him, faster then he could put his pen and thoughts to paper.

Billy looked at Chuck and mouthed "What is he doing?" Chuck could only shrug. The watched as this strange man stat on the ground, writing like his life depended on it. Billy elbowed his friend to get his attention yet again. He moved his head back towards the house and this time Chuck shook his head as if to say, I ain’t going nowhere.

Strange place to write a letter, Chuck thought to himself. Strange enough that he did not want to move until the guy did. He looked harmless enough, might as well see where this is going. If Billy wanted to head back to mommy, let him go. Adventure never came to Ewan and if this was its first appearance, then Chuck wasn’t moving. If he just sits there writing, then he’ll head up and let the adults know there is a strange business man writing a short novella in the woods.

His fingers cramp and he looks up from the paper to remember running and sledding down this hill. His dreams have always led him here. A week hasn’t gone by since he left that he hasn’t returned here at night. Was this the one place he felt comfortable, almost a nocturnal womb he could return to when things got too much? His childhood friends, co-workers and family have joined him here from time to time, although none of them aware of it when they awoke. He was tempted to bring rope with him. One last swing on a homemade Tarzan swing. One last time back to a place and time when he was happy, or was oblivious, not knowing any better. His fingers working again, he quickly finished up the last letter and placed it alongside those already written. He laid the pen down and it was soon replaced with the Glock.

When they saw the gun, each boy elbowed the other. Silently and with a nod of the head, Billy turned around and sprinted back up the path in search for help. Chuck didn’t watch him, but choose to keep his eyes on the man. What little noise Billy made, was of no concern to the man as Chuck noticed he never he never looked up once his tongue wrapped around the barrel.

They say your life flashes before your eyes just before death. With the barrel placed against the top of his mouth, the only one memory flashed. He remembered learning to shoot here as a kid. It was with a .22 automatic rifle. He sat at the top of the hill, shooting downward at a paper plate nailed to a tree. The 22 auto was in name only as it jammed after every other shot. This bonding with his old man lasted as long as it took him to drink the 12oz beer in his hand. Growing up, time wasn’t told in minutes and seconds, but in beers. Outside catch with a ball, ½ a beer. Mowing the lawn – 4 beers. As a boy he liked the way the rifle felt in his hands. He was upset when his father told him it was time to head back to the house. It was that day that he first thought of killing his father and then tasting the barrel on his own. His dad constantly told him the .22 could kill a man a mile away, but he all he could wonder was what it would do to a poor excuse for a father a few feet away. As he got older, he was fascinated with the tape of R. Bud Dwyer. Now there was a man who admired a .357. It was his weapon of choice, err I mean taste. Who’s R Bud you ask? Google him and watch the video. The trigger pulled easier then he thought.

Chuck found himself drawn down to the body. He didn’t remember heading down the path. No.

Chuck didn’t remember picking up the gun, let alone wandering down the path after the shot. No.

The Ewan Volunteer Fire Department found the young boy sitting next to the body, the gun in his lap. No.

Reality flooded back into the writer’s head. Again, the ending was just out of his reach. He couldn’t get past the ending yet again. Nothing he wrote seemed to work. Each sentence sounded more asinine then the one before it. He thought that coming to this place would be the end all cure for his writer’s block. He was tired. Tired of attempting to come up with an ending. Let it be someone else’s turn. The gunshot echoed through the trees and the gun slipped from his and into the stream.

© K. A. Harris

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