Villains from the Gallows Tree

This is the complete novel, which I had been posting previously in segments. This is a series of stories in which I chose to run somewhat out of order, using the seasons as an organizing principle rather than chronological. So, in effect, some stories foreshadow others in the sequence with only the first and last chapter meant to open and close the volume. This is a story about my relationship to my childhood friend. We were not good kids -- although we later turned out to be half way decent adults. I excluded a novella that includes these same characters partly because of length. I will publish this later. This collection is a draft and I will be publishing a print edition after it has been reedited. Any editor who wishes to help will welcome. 1- Cigarettes and Coffee 2- Cleaning Day 3- His mom hates me 4- Sweet Water 5- Men from UNCLE 6- Emerald's Cave 7 - Truckers 8 - Memorial Day 9 - Cream Soda 10 - Camp Out 11- Devil's Crack 12 - Battle...

Dave's voice this is over the cheap plastic walkie-talkie we used to speak to each other late at night only I'm not home in my room, I'm under the awning of the coffee shop across the street, waiting and watching as Dave's mom packs their station wagon for their annual trip to the shore. “Is she gone?” Dave asks. “Not yet,” I say, watching as she closes the rear door and hustles her kids into the car, more shepherd than parent, her expression strange, not angry over Dave's refusal to go this year, sad, scared and a I look I least expect from a woman like her. Then the car pulls away in a puff of smoke, exhaust that lingers in the air long after the car has reached the top of the hill and disappeared over it on its way down to the highway. “Are you coming down?” I ask through the radio. "You'd better come up," Dave says. I'm not quite ready," Dave is never quite ready. So, I hurry across the street to the door next to the ...

    Dave is filling my head with tales about White Castle hamburgers. He always comes up with new ones each time we sit down to eat. Since we usually buy a bunch to split between us, I suspect he is trying to gross me out sod he can get a bigger share. Our White Castle sits on the corner of Main and Piaget, directly across the street from the main branch of the public library, which is directly across the highway from the junior high school we attend. A road runs under the highway from the school to the library. We never take it. The truant officer often hides down under there watching for kids who cut – kids like us. We run across the highway, dangerous, unexpected, something the truant officer can’t stop, and won’t do himself when we do it. The Library property is holy ground, a building with a large park in front of it, park benched and enough shrubbery to keep us out of view of the street. When we buy sliders, we always argue over whether or not ...

Dave wears the same suit as I wear when neither of us ever wears suits. I used to wear ties in Catholic grammar school, feeling as if a noose hung around my neck, which makes everybody wonder why we wear suits now that we are in Junior High School when nobody has to, which is why we do it, because we can, and must, drawing stares, not merely because we look the way we do, or sound like we do in the echoes of these marble halls, where my mother and uncles walked and talked, not even because we are who we are and people always stare to see what we will do next, but because this time we’re doing something nobody ever expected, and because we look like we shouldn’t look, and act the way teachers, administration, truant officers and police want us to act, at least, on the surface and everybody sees that and laugh and never stop staring. I don’t even know whose idea this is, Dave’s or mine, only that we both have ties and suit jackets back home some family member gave us in the ho...

  We have no business dressing up like we do or going around fully armed for a war that should not happen on a day like this, when historically all the neighborhood gangs call a truce. We just don’t trust it. Even if Dave wasn’t as tall as he is, he’d stand out, and me, a year older, though a half foot shorter, I do, too. Dennis comes as a ghost; Dave as a vampire; I dress up like a mummy, though Dennis says I mostly look like a zombie and holds both his hands over his sheet-covered head so, I don’t eat his brains. Dave says I’ll need all the brains I can get; but he thinks eating Dennis’ brains won’t help me. Coming to First Street, I say, is a mistake. This is Dave’s idea. First Street has all the best stuff and he wants to stay on the Clifton side of our street this year since last year when we went to the Paterson side we nearly got shot – not by some out of control street gang; a hot head older guy with a biker costume who called us hippies and told us to ge...

We see a pool of blood and think: someone got murdered. The track runs in back of old factories nearly the whole way from Paterson to Passaic, isolated, dark, overgrown with weeds in the places the trains don’t reach. Dave shivers and not from cold, says maybe a train his someone. Trains don’t haul off the bodies they hit, I say, trying to make my stride match the rail ties, and never can, they always just out of kilter with the stride I take, so I have to hop a little to reach the next or slow down a little. Dennis, who stages along with us this time, says maybe someone just cut himself on something; broken bottles litter the sides of the tracks, a jewel collection in the rush of train lights when we come here at night. Too much blood for just a cut, I say. If the person crawled away, he didn’t get far. Dennis says we should go look for him. Dave says we should go home. This is a dance we dance each time we find something bad on the tracks, Dave always wanting to go ho...

I don't know who thought this game up; but I'll kill him when I catch him at least that's what I'm supposed to do. We don't have a name for it. Dave calls it “Night of the Living Dead” after the movie with the zombies That's a good name as any and the others don't mind.   We only play it when we come here to Eastside Park, down near the bottom around the old stone building with the bathrooms in it, and a kind of porch that runs all around it -- so you can run in a circle in it and never stop. One of the other kids thinks it's more like the movie with the pod people, where if you fall asleep you become one of them. We sometimes start out with a dozen or more kids who come here by bicycle – me, Dave, Dennis sometimes even Little Dave -- making   our way through the Eastside of Paterson from the foot of Lakeview Avenue by the projects, through the streets with used car dealers and small warehouses to the rich neighborhood in the big hous...