Buddy Through The Woods (Updated July 8)

After a dinner of a cheeseburger, potato salad and corn niblets his mother brought to his room, Buddy sits on the grass beneath a front door with no steps. He twists the seal of his last mini-bottle of Fireball and downs half of it.

Dusk is thickening and soon he won’t be able to see through his binoculars to the white side door of Richie and Tammy’s long red barn. It’s time for her to check on the horses and the goats, in their own shed up against the barn. Sometimes when it’s hot, she comes out wearing shorty pajamas and Buddy turns the binoculars away for privacy.

 He pans the binoculars from the small parcel he left for her at the barn door across the yard to the house. She pauses on the landing beneath the overhead light to pull her blond ponytail through the back of her black ballcap. For a moment, yellow light spills over her head and shoulders. She quick-marches down the stone walk to the barn, ponytail jitterbugging. She crouches at the door, picks up the package, shields her eyes from the light above and waves in Buddy’s general direction. She tucks his package under her arm and unlocks the door. It sticks, she shoves it open, reaches inside and turns on a light. It falls faintly over a line of hooks draped with bridles, their silver bits glinting. She closes the door.

Buddy shakes down the rest of the Fireball, gets up from the grass and walks to the back of the house. He takes two steps up to the sagging porch where five cats - including a black and white one on three legs - gobble dark brown pellets from green plastic bowls. He spins the combination lock to his room his father had added on the side of the porch shortly after Buddy was born. Fifty years ago - his mother said the other night, reminiscing again about the good days for the family when “your father and me were so young and so stupid-happy.” 

Buddy sits on the black leather seat he took from a wrecked limo after a day’s work a month or so earlier gutting cars at Cosmello’s junkyard. He leans back and re-reads the opening chapter of the paperback book Tammy had given him for his 50th birthday in the Spring, along with a chocolate-frosted cupcake, a blue candle stuck in it. Tammy signed Richie’s name to the card, too. 

  Tammy said she thought Buddy might  like the book, considering that “you let it slip that you’d read all your father’s detective novels. Don’t worry, I can keep a secret.” 

She'd bought the book at a flea market along with an old Life magazine with the famous race horse, Secretariat, on the cover that she hung in the barn. The book was called “A Tan and Sandy Silence.” Buddy looked it up. It was written before he was even born by John D. MacDonald, who wrote a series of 21 novels about square-jawed hero Travis McGee, a kind of private investigator living on a houseboat in a Florida marina packed with party boats and women in bikinis. McGee exacts brutal revenge on those who have been cheated out of money or otherwise mistreated.

“You kinda remind me of Travis McGee,” she said, when she gave him the book, splashing him with her smile that always warmed him all over, like a Fireball for breakfast.

Buddy mailed away for the rest of the series, each book a color in its title - “Nightmare in Pink,” “The Deep Blue Goodbye,” “The Turquoise Lament.” Every two weeks he leaves her a new one in front of the barn door and after she’s read it she leaves it in Buddy’s mailbox for him to read.

 He skips to the gruesome last sentence of “A Tan and Sandy Silence,” that Tammy had double underlined, adding an exclamation point and a smiley face. Buddy puts the book back in its place on the shelf. Before shutting down the old computer Willie had given him, he watches his favorite scenes of “Country Girls Cavorting.”

He’s planning to ride his quad about seven miles through the woods up the hill and behind his house to the Flying J. truck stop where she might be. It’s always at least 10 degrees colder in the woods - even colder in early fall when wind comes through the path cut between trees for trucks to load slabs of bluestone from the quarry. He pulls a black sweatshirt over his head, tugs up thick tan pants, slips into its matching jacket and sets a white vinyl cowboy hat on his head, broken black plastic stitches sticking up from the crown. All of it bought at a near giveaway price at the Flying J because someone had boxcutter-sliced the Double XX Carhartt outfit and the hat had been catching dust for two years. His mother sewed up the jacket and pants. When Buddy is standing near someone he tries to angle himself so the stitches don’t show, although it would take a master tailor to find them.

On the way out of his room, he stops at his chest of drawers and stares at the array of plastic dinosaurs he got for his seventh birthday. He closes his eyes and rearranges them. Eyes still closed, he turns his head away, opening them as he steps toward the door. When he comes back, the dinosaurs will look as if they’d moved on their own.
He walks toward his shed and pushes back a sagging plywood gate, blotchy with mold. Behind the shed and slightly taller are carefully-separated piles of bumpers, radiators, tires, hubcaps, lawn mowers - whatever - now all finally dead after Buddy had picked their bones clean using their guts to fix and re-build lawn tractors, pressure washer, three-wheelers people would bring him from all  over the county. He still shakes his head when he thinks about the woman who said she was from down Honesdale and asked if he could rig her husband’s weedwacker to blow up in his hands.

“It’s amazing,”  he told Willie when just the two of them were sitting in Willie’s garage - a hangout for guys on their way home from work and on weekends - “how many people don’t want to fix their stuff. I think they're lazy and like hiring someone to do their dirty work.”

Buddy has rules about who he’ll sell to and flexible prices: if you have shiny pickups, or clean workboots, or a bumper sticker like, “I ride with my friends - Smith&Wesson,” The price goes up. If you have Jersey plates it doubles. If you have a sticker, warning “Baby Aboard,” he spits on the ground and turns his back.  

“All the stuff is sold.” 

Buddy unlocks the shed’s black door - a white skull and crossbones on it. He climbs onto the black quad, whose hood ornament is a plastic Darth Vader mask - red dots for eyes - he found  on top of the trash bin at the Flying J. He toggles on headlights and tests the spotlight mounted on the roll bar he added after flipping his quad one night just past the Quarry. He was lucky he was thrown clear onto a nice softspot. He roars Darth up the hill toward the treeline before slowing to a crawl just inside the woods.

Willie had asked Buddy why he goes into the woods only at night.
“No one else is around. It’s just me and the animals. Sometimes I turn off the quad and just sit there. It’s real quiet. I know they're watching me trying to watch them. If you wait long enough, they’ll figure you're not a threat. They can smell if you are. And then they go about their business and kinda share their territory. Sometimes I get to see them, too.”

“Huh, huh,” Willie said.

The guys hanging in Willie’s garage tolerate Buddy and his ways, which includes rarely saying much except to correct misinformation about a piece of equipment or to declare whose hay needs to be bailed before it rots.. When the topic slides to women, Buddy’s ears sometimes turn pink.

Of course, the guys don't include him in rants about their jobs because Buddy has never had a real one. Only handyman work that he chooses. He has rules for that too. He won’t paint because he gets bored and says as a warning that he'll probably walk off the job. And he won't rake grass after he weedwacks. “Makes me sneeze.” So he sits sipping a Pepsi and listening when they rev up complaints about jobs, jerky, disrespectful kids and wives, clawing at them all the time to do something they don’t want to do. After a bit they often slide into grumbling about jobs that they’re better than - can do in their sleep, or when they’re half, or more, in the bag. “The shit we gotta do just to get by. Just to get the fuck by!”

Willie and the guys know that Buddy has a temper but hasn’t had any outbursts in almost a year since he jumped off Jimbo’s quad to grab Gus by the throat. Buddy had made the mistake of telling Gus and Willie about the books  and the cupcake. A couple of weeks  later, Gus, who’d been drinking downtown at “Wild Hearts” most of the afternoon, teased Buddy about having the hots for Tammy.

“You do know she's married, huh, Buddy? Happily, I hear,” Gus said. “You know something about her that we don’t? I mean she’s a fine hunk a woman who likes to parade it around. She been giving you private parades? I always wondered what do those melons look like freed up.”

Buddy flew from the quads and grabbed Gus by the throat. Gus’s eyes were beginning to bug out when Willie and Jimbo pried off Buddy’s hands. Willie told Gus to go home. Buddy went home too. Gus never came back.

Willie told his wife that he thinks Buddy is holding in a lot, “what with his brother and his family coming to live with him in that tiny house. And of course his old man dying. Crazy bastard that he was. I could tell he loved his kid but never showed it.”

Buddy’s brother, his wife and two daughters moved in with Buddy and his mother three years ago after the brother’s OCD got him fired and then they lost the house. Among other things, the brother has a jones for are door knobs. He opens and closes the back door every hour - always three times - and strokes the curves of the outside doorknob three times in each direction before closing it.
Buddy doesn't say much about them living with his mother and him all jammed into the house except for one mini rant to Willie. 

“The TVs always on. Freakin’ Jeopardy blasting all day and them shouting wrong answers. But now, I make it into, like, you know, what they call, white noise.”

“You know,” Buddy said three  months  after the  Gus incident, it’s not like he lived in a mansion all  high and  mighty. It’s just an old single-wide his old man left him.”

 The trailer borders the tree line on the other side of Trudy and Ethan’s 10 acres, where Buddy used to do odd jobs for them until Ethan jumped off the Lanesboro Viaduct.
“With all of those people living in your little house, how do you work out bathroom time?” Jimbo asked Buddy. “That’s important alone time.”
“Actually,” Buddy said, “it’s one bedroom and a living room for them. I got my own bedroom. I was there first, my mom told them after they lost their house and came crawling back. She said my brother had to understand that he moved out in the first place, thinking he didn’t need us. ‘Actions have consequences, she always says.”
“And,” Jimbo said, “she probably likes another welfare check in the house, or whatever they call them these days to sound like what they're not.”

Buddy looked away from Jimbo and across the road.

Buddy’s been drawn to the woods and its animals since Mr. Griffith took him and two other boys when they were in seventh grade deep into the woods in his four-seater ATV, looking for animals, watching them so the boys could experience being “suspicious foreigners,” as he put it. Part of that lesson was to learn how to identify different species at night by the color of light reflected from their eyes.

“It’s because of their tapetum lucidum,” Buddy told Willie. “That’s Latin, you know. It’s a kind of thing inside the eye that reflects the light we shine on ‘em back inside their eyes so they can see good at night, and that makes us, like, see different kinds of eye colors from different animals.”

In the woods that night, Buddy said that Mr. Griffith and the boys sat stone still, Mr. Griffith’s 30-30 Winchester cradled in his lap just in case. They waited what seemed forever for their presence to settle into the woods so the animals would emerge to go on the prowl again, keeping a wary eye on Darth and passengers. Mr. Griffith also taught Buddy the only other subject he ever cared about - dinosaurs.

As Buddy chugs through the woods, he sees a greenish pair of eyes about chest high in his lights. They’re the same color as a fox’s but too high. Maybe a white-tailed deer. A little farther and to the right are yellow eyes about two feet off the ground - a bobcat. Maybe a fox. Two pairs of red eyes under the branches of a fir tree could be a rabbit or an opossum.

Going faster, Buddy and Darth dart through a clearing, the headlights hitting the ragged bluestone cliff that glows in the night like a huge crinkled bedsheet. Buddy swerves between chunks of stone strewn like dinosaur scat at the base of the cliff and quickly turns right around the side of the quarry. The birch tree - made skinny by firs bullying it over the years to grab more sun - was like a tall highway reflecting marker, reminding him to take a hard right just before he’d hit it. A left takes him alongside the swampy depression, taking on water on its way to maybe turn into a pond.
He guns the engine across an open field and then into another clump of woods. Twenty minutes later, a right onto Buell’s Road and a quarter-mile down the dirt road a left behind O’Brien’s Gunnery brings him to the side of the big parking lot. He rumbles past Denny’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Danny Dynamite’s Fireworks Emporium, all closed for the night. Sticking up behind the Excalibre Tavern on the far end is a Marriott Express, these days filled with frackers from as far as Ohio, blasting through the huge Marcellus shale fields, hunting pockets of natural gas, left there from way before even dinosaurs.

Buddy parks Darth on the dark side of the Sunoco station’s brightly-lit convenience store - where its the neon-lit marquee towers alongside Route 81- about 30 miles north of Scranton, another 30 to Binghamton. Three hundred to Canada.

The store’s aisles are bordered by racks of Slim Jims, Doritos, chips, candy, donuts, Twinkies, and a few Scranton-made sugary snacks to keep longhaulers - those not pill-popping - awake until the next sugar hit. Buddy takes the first two soda cans from the slide inside the cold case that looks like a bobsled run for tiny animals and watches the cans glide down it. Another refrigerated case holds loose cans of beer, including Pennsylvania’s own Yuengling. Buddy’s father, dead five years now, never drank anything else - to which the hundreds, maybe a thousand cans buried at the bottom of Buddy’s junk pile can attest. Buddy looked it up - the brewery started in 1829. Buddy told the guys at Willies his father had told him that - another of Buddy’s fibs about his father teaching  him stuff he never had.

Next to the cash register, miniature liquor bottles - vodka, gin, rum and Fireball - are locked up inside a cabinet. On his way back from the john, Buddy counts the Fireballs. He can’t buy any on his own because even though he looks way beyond legal with flecks of gray in his hair and beard stubble, store rules say he has to be carded. He doesn’t have a driver’s license or any I.D. other than his laminated Boy Scout card. So that leaves someone else to buy Fireballs for him and that means he has to kick back a bottle to the purchaser. That’s the only time Buddy wishes he had a driver’s license. Except for the nights she’s there.

She’s on the far side of the lot splayed on the hood of her grandmother’s maroon Buick sedan - pink dress, arranged above mid-thigh. She’s looking at the stars beyond the glow of the gas station’s tower. She’s spotted right away by anyone coming into the parking lot. Sometimes, she says she’s trying to find the Little Dipper and thinks of all the people who have looked at the same stars. Sometimes if she’s had a good couple of nights, she thinks of how many men were mesmerized by Cleopatra like the swarms of moths knocking themselves out on the price sign over the parking lot.
Buddy rumbles from behind the gas station and revs Darth before turning him off. She turns her head toward him, grins and slides off the hood, her dress slipping way up from mid-thigh.
“Hiya, Buddy. See you got your best go-ta-meeting hat on. Looking good.”
She walks toward him, skirt swaying above green cowgirl boots. When she gets close to him, Buddy turns his left side toward her. She flips her hair, sending a whiff of something his way. It’s not really perfume but something else, something real, not manufactured.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
“Want me to buy you some Fireballs?”
“Yes, please. Here.”
He gives her three twenties.
“One for me, right?”
“Yes.”
“I’m gonna get a vodka shortie.”
“After your bottle, use the rest for Fireballs.”
“Why’re you getting so many this time?”
“My birthday.”
“You don’t say. Well, well, well. What’re you, like 28?”
Buddy looks at the ground, shakes his head and breaks a tiny smile. He raises his head and looks over her shoulder to the pumps. The tips of his ears are pink.
“Close your eyes, Buddy. C’mon. Close ‘em.”
He does.
“Happy Birthday!”
She raises onto  tippy toes, kisses him on the cheek, pats his other cheek and squeezes his arm. She clomps her boots on the asphalt, flouncy skirt flouncing toward the store - vamping a Paris runway she saw once on the tv. She yanks open the door and whisks herself through. After a couple of minutes, she comes back, holding a bag and grinning.
“Here you go, birthday boy,” she says, handing him the bag.
She looks both ways, opens her fist, showing him the vodka bottle she’d swiped when the clerk was putting the Fireballs into the bag. She takes the vodka bottle Buddy owes her from the bag.
“Thank you, Buddy boy. You are a gentleman. A handsome, courteous gentleman, unusual in these parts, I’d say.”
She clunks wide-legged to the Buick and climbs onto the hood. She sets her hands behind her head, takes one back to shield her eyes from the sign’s glare and looks at the sky. Buddy is at the pump filling Darth

He hangs up the nozzle, pushes his cowboy hat high on his forehead and walks toward the Buick, reaching into the bag and pulling out a Fireball. He raises his eyebrows as he reaches her, Carhartt stitches away from her.
“Would you like to try a Fireball? I have plenty,” Buddy says. “It really doesn't taste like whiskey. Kinda smells like Dentyne gum.”
“That’s nice of you, Buddy. Maybe sometime. But I have stars to look for now.”

Buddy’s ears turn red. She curls her fingers around her eyes like a telescope and looks past the gas station’s marquee toward the Little Dipper. Buddy sees a father glance at her over the heads of two children, smile and wink at her. A trucker pulling his 18-wheeler away from the pumps gives her two short blasts of his horn. She acknowledges the tribute with a smile that doesn’t cover annoyance at being disturbed.

Buddy turns away from her, takes his Fireballs out of the bag and distributes them into deep pockets outside and inside his jacket. He tosses the bag into a wastecan, climbs onto Darth and doesn't look at her as he roars past her back to the woods.