 "Monster
Hunting in the Back Yard"
by David M. Fitzpatrick
When I was a kid, we had two back yards
at our house. The first one, behind the house, we simply called “the
yard.” Beyond that was the “back yard,” although it should have been
called “the woods” since that was what it was: thick with brush and tall
with trees, stretching for countless acres into the wilderness. I suppose
most children had back yards made of grass and spent their time doing
typical things: they spent springtime batting softballs and playing on
swingsets; held court in summertime clubhouses; jumped in leaf piles in
autumn; fought snowball wars in the winter.
None of that was challenging enough
for us. Only the danger to be found hunting monsters in the woods
was enough to placate our adventurous spirits. Sure, lots of kids
play monster-hunting games; but most bore of any game quickly and
move on to other things. But we never tired of our endless fantasy
quests, seeking out monsters to vanquish, evils to defeat, wrongs to
right. We spent five summers together, traipsing through those
spooky woods, armed with our homemade weapons, and it wasn’t until
the end of that fifth summer that we actually found anything.
I was the oldest, always going armed
with my plastic sword. With matching scabbard, armor breastplate,
and helmet, I looked darn good—definitely ready to lead my intrepid
band. My brother Pete was two years younger than me and always
sported his trusty shield and weapon—a garbage can lid and a tennis
racket. The boys from the two adjacent houses, Jeremy Baker and
Shawn Carson, were his age and quite a barbarian tag team with their
plastic whiffleball bats. The only girl in the group was just a
month younger than me, but Melinda Mason was as tough as any of us.
Any girl who wielded a quarterstaff wasn’t anyone to be trifled
with. Early that first summer, we learned the consequences of
pulling her blond pigtails.
We had great costumes, too. Leftovers from Halloween, treasures from
the secondhand shops, and booty from the closets and attics of our
houses sculpted us into a roving band of butt-kicking
monster-slayers. The summers were full of long days hunting the
wumpus and the snark, tracking bigfeet and dragons, searching for
man-eating beasts and child-snatching ogres. We looked for the
coffins of vampires and the lairs of werewolf packs. We kept
journals of our adventures as we sought the demons and devils that
lurked in the deep shadows of the forest—where, as Maurice Sendak
might say, the wild things were.
But by that fifth summer I was twelve.
My fading plastic armor was beginning to strain at the fasteners as
I outgrew it. The merits of things like motocross, a future career
as a fighter pilot, and the way the bodies of the girls I knew were
changing had begun to occur to me. Playing at finding monsters was
beginning to seem a little silly. Next summer, they would hunt
monsters alone. It was the
last week of school vacation that year, and given my own
adolescence, it was likely this was our last monster-hunting
expedition together. We suited up that final afternoon with costumes
and weapons, and headed into the gloomy forest where the sun vainly
fought to break through the thick shield of foliage. I led the way,
with Melinda to my right and a bit behind. The other three brought
up the rear, ready to defend against the minions of evil.
The day came to a close with no
monsters found, except within our imaginations. We marched back in
formation, weapons and defenses at the ready; but I think we knew it
was a walk down the last mile, so to speak. Nobody spoke; the carpet
of crunching pine needles beneath our feet was the only sound.
Finally, Shawn said, “Paul… we ain’t
gonna hunt monsters no more, are we?”
“It’s the end of the summer, Shawn,” I
said. “We have to go back to school. It’s gonna get cold and then
the snow will come and we can’t hunt monsters like that, anyway.”
“Yeah, monsters don’t come out in the
snow,” Melinda said. We traded glances that told me she was feeling
the same way about hunting monsters as I was. I felt suddenly like a
grown-up then, trying to use kid logic to fool a child into
believing there really was a Santa Claus.
“Yeah, but I mean never,” Shawn said.
I didn’t say anything. It just seemed
wrong to kill the tradition. And something about being older and
wiser… learning about the real world was nice, but that power was
somehow corrupting everything that was my childhood.
“You don’t wanna hunt ‘em next
summer,” Jeremy said quietly. “Do ya, Paulie?”
“Sure he does,” Pete said. “Paulie and
me have been hunting monsters since before we knew you. Since I was
just a kid.” “You are just a
kid,” I said, hoping to divert the attention away from the topic at
hand. It didn’t work. “You
don’t like hunting monsters anymore?” Shawn said.
“Yeah, I do,” I said. As if to
emphasize it, I lifted up my plastic sword and hacked away a
helpless branch that was in my way. “It’s just that… well, next
summer I’ll be thirteen. I’m getting older. At thirteen you have to
start doing other things with your summers.”
“There ain’t any monsters anyway,”
Jeremy said sullenly. “It’s just a game.”
“I wish there was,” my brother said.
“If there was monsters, we’d be here every summer hunting them.”
“Well, there aren’t,” Melinda said,
shaking her head. Her pigtails bobbed back and forth as she did so,
and as she spun her quarterstaff around before her. She was pretty
good with it. I had no way of knowing it then, but the following
summer the pigtails would become one ponytail. The summer after that
the hair would be chopped off. The summer after that she’d have all
the curves and bulges of a woman. Things change so much, so quickly.
It’s easy to lose your childhood—easy to not see it slipping away,
one bit at a time, as if stolen piecemeal by a clever thief who
knows better than to clean you out on one haul. You might notice it
then. “Maybe we just ain’t
found them yet,” Shawn said defiantly, but his voice told me he
didn’t believe it any more than we did.
We walked on through the forest. It
seemed darker than it should have been by then, and the trees seemed
unfamiliar. It was odd that, after years of covering these woods
inch by inch, I didn’t know exactly where we were. But a hard day of
hunting, combined with hunger and a morose mood, could do strange
things to a kid. After
another five minutes, I must have been showing a little confusion,
because Melinda skittered up beside me and said in a low tone,
“Paul… I don’t know where we are.”
She was always so direct. I said,
“We’re almost there, Mindy. I’m just… taking a long-cut.”
She didn’t believe me, I knew. Even as
kids, men refuse to ask for directions and women know better. It was
five minutes later when Jeremy brought it all out into the open for
us with, “Paulie, you got us lost, dintcha?”
“No,” I started, but Melinda cut me
off with, “Yeah, he did.” I
sighed and halted and everyone reigned up. “Okay, so I got a little
sidetracked. Petey, hit the branches and see where Route 15 is.”
Route 15 was visible for miles around if you got up high enough, so
sending Pete skyward was how we usually got our bearings.
Pete dropped his racket and garbage
can lid and grabbed the low branches of a towering tree. He was a
regular monkey and zipped up the thing as quickly as you or I might
climb a flight of stairs. It was always a bit unnerving to watch him
go up at the speed he did. Twenty years later, he’d free-climb El
Capitan in Yosemite. How things would change. I wonder how all our
lives might have unfurled had this day never happened the way it
did.
He must have been a good sixty feet up, at the very top of the lanky
evergreen. The tip was narrow and swayed dangerously under his
weight. We all held our breaths as we watched him scan this way,
that way, all around. After a few minutes, he returned to Earth. He
looked at me accusingly, shaking his head.
“You really got us lost this time,
Paulie,” he said. “You’re the one who’s getting in trouble when we
get home.” “Which way is
Route 15?” I said firmly.
“There ain’t no Route 15, you dummy. Whaddaya think I’m trying to
tell you? We’re way lost.”
Groans and complaints tittered up around me from the boys. Melinda
just looked calmly at me and said, “So what do we do?”
“Head back the way we just came,” I
said. “We’ve been going in a straight line, so if we keep going,
we’ll get back to the stream and follow it. It’ll be a roundabout
route, but we know it’ll get us there.”
I led and they followed. They always
trusted me, even in times like this. Later in life, I went to
Annapolis and came out a Navy officer, leading others in grand
tasks. None ever grander than the tasks in these woods, though.
We walked for a half hour—twice as
long as our initial walk away from the stream and moving at a much
faster pace besides—but the familiar stream never appeared.
Presently, Shawn whined, “We’re really lost.”
Even I was nervous by then. The sun
wasn’t too low, but it sure did seem darker than it should have.
After years of exploring these woods, it was inconceivable that we
could be so hopelessly lost. While I stood there debating whether or
not to send Pete up another tree, Melinda tapped my shoulder with
the side of her quarterstaff and said, “Hey, Paulie… look…”
We all followed her outstretched hand.
She was pointing to a tree about twenty feet ahead. The bark was a
light, powder blue in color. It stood about ten feet high and
sprouted a mushroom-like top with pink leaves. Turquoise flowers
grew from the tips of short, twine-thin branches...
* *
* The weirdness for these
kids is just beginning. Look for this in Ahmed Khan's upcoming
Cheer Up, Universe anthology.
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