by John E. Simpson
Here comes Spike. You know Spike, right?
Spike’s the one who when we were kids once, he stood up on the railing of the treehouse that we built out of pieces of lumber that Spike’s dad didn’t use when he built the garage that eventually a couple of years later fell down and killed Spike’s Uncle Mickey, and he stood up on the railing and beat his chest and yodeled like Tarzan and then before I could stop him or even knew what he was doing, he reached out for the rope hanging off that branch over our heads like it was a vine and he was going to swing on it, only it wasn’t a vine and it wasn’t much of a rope either, just this kind of thin cord wrapped in vinyl, and it wasn’t much of a knot holding it onto the branch either because Spike, he’d just wiped out, totally wiped out on the Tenderfoot knot-tying test and he really didn’t care much anymore about knots so I guess he was trying to prove he was bigger than some dumb old knots, so he grabbed the rope and yodeled like Tarzan and jumped off the railing and dropped straight down and broke his collarbone and both his arms and he had to walk around for months afterward in this crazy plaster thing that made him look like Frankenstein because it kept his arms out at his side with these like poles that were also covered in plaster, and I don’t know if I was more surprised or Spike was when they had this kind of dance thing at school in the spring and Mary Weber asked Spike to dance, a slow dance, and they even made it into a spotlight dance and there was Spike and his bright white plaster Frankenstein arms out at his side moving in circles in the spotlight with Mary Weber and the white light made me blink like he was giving off the light himself, and then a couple weeks later the cast came off and Spike, he asked Mary Weber to go to a Saturday afternoon movie, “The Parent Trap” because he told me he didn’t want to go to anything mushy, at least “The Parent Trap” was kind of funny, at least it was back then, and he said that Mary Weber kissed him on the cheek when he walked her to the porch of her house and the weird thing was, Spike said, he didn’t even try to stop her and even I could see that Spike was different, a lot different the way his eyes shined, I don’t think I ever saw him with shiny eyes before, and you know how things go, Spike and Mary Weber ended up so they didn’t ever go out with anybody else, I didn’t see Spike much for a long time and eventually I didn’t see him at all, I always wondered about Mary Weber’s friends, if they like sort of dropped off her map too, until that one time seven or eight years ago when out of the blue Spike calls me up and says he and Mary Weber are getting married and he wants me to be his best man and it was almost like old times there for about six months except of course that we were both a lot older and really didn’t know what to talk about anymore so we just shot pool and drank Ballantine and then Spike and Mary Weber moved someplace, New York or Ohio or one of those states and I didn’t hear from him again until he called me in March and he said he had to talk, so what was I going to do, I said sure, so I met him over at his parents’ house only it’s not his parents’ anymore because his mom died the year after Spike and Mary Weber got married, his dad just lives there by himself now and stares out the window, kids in the neighborhood probably think he’s crazy, I know Spike and me would have if we were still kids and his dad wasn’t his dad, and when I met him there he said let’s go up in the old treehouse so we did and while we were up there, actually it was still in pretty good shape now that I think about it, but the point is that after we were up there about fifteen minutes just kind of talking and thinking or at least I was thinking I could sure use one of those Ballantines about now Spike suddenly stands up and climbs up on the railing which creaks and looks like it’s going to break but Spike grabs hold of a branch over his head and sort of tiptoes around so he’s facing me and he says Mary Weber and me, we ain’t married anymore and I look at him and he looks at me and he doesn’t move and the railing doesn’t break and there’s no rope for him to grab onto and he doesn’t jump but all of a sudden just like it was happening again, I see it, and there’s Spike again thirty years back dropping straight down in slow motion, his arms waving like crazy, and you know I think I heard the crack again.
Yeah. That’s Spike. Here he comes. Just thought you ought to know.
