‘All is True: The Naked Girl in the Treehouse’

 

BY MARK HOWELL

The Final Chapter, Ch. 14

I Worry and I Wonder

 

I was alone with Hadi in the Plymouth. David had gone off with Winona in their pickup.

“Did I ever tell you you’re my hero?” said Hadi for the umpteenth time.

“Yeah, you did,” I said.

“Your hand feels OK?”

“No. I won’t want to try that again. I’ve got teeth marks on my knuckles.”

“You won’t have to do that again,” she said. “You’ve already earned your ticket to heaven.”

“You believe in heaven? You, a Lakota?”

“My dad is Lakota. My mom’s from Poland,”

“So, you’re part Indian,” I said.

“I’m not part anything,” she said. “I’m double.”

“You are so smart,” I said. “I am really glad I met you.”

“I’m glad I met you,” she said with a smile that put me in heaven.

“So why did you and Win just doubt us both?” I asked. “You said we weren’t Rolling Stones!”

“Because you’re too nice to be the Stones. At least until you punched that punk in the mouth.”

“The Stones aren’t nice?”

“The Rolling Stones are Satanic,” she said.

“So,” I said. “Now you believe in Satan?”

“We live in evil times, Brian Jones,” she replied. “The vice president just shot the president, remember?”

I swerved to the curb and pulled on the hand brake.

“It was Oswald shot Kennedy,” I said, gazing at her, wide-eyed.

“And Johnson set it up,” she insisted. “Now, we’re in hell. You’d better believe it.”

It was then, while we were parked, that she made me the deal.

It took a while to absorb. But I was fully committed by the time I was ready to share it with David, aka Keith Richards.

Here’s how I put it.

“You’re not gonna believe any of this, so you gotta let me explain it slowly, OK?”

“OK, OK,” he said.

So breathlessly I revealed the deal.

“Hadi has this uncle on her mother’s side who’s built this tree house on a hillside in Marin County, which is north of San Francisco Bay in the State of California! And he lets Hadi stay there whenever she wants. And she wants to go now! And she wants me to join her because I stood up for her! And whenever she stays there she’s always naked!”

“Whoa!” gasped David. “Count me in on this! Don’t abandon me now!”

And so it was. We told Hadi we’d be at her treehouse within 10 days, a direct shot from Laramie through Salt Lake City, Reno, Sacramento and directly into Marin by the back way. We even gave the Golden Gate Bridge a miss!

“What’s the rush, fellas?” she asked.

“Oh, you have no idea!” said David.

And thus it was. Equipped with phone numbers and addresses supplied by Hadi, we set on the last lap of our Rolling Stones tour across the United States of America.

We stuck stubbornly to our three cardinal rules on this final leg.

No. 1 was never to let slip our real names when addressing each other while in the company of strangers. David was always Keith. Thom was always Brian.

Rule No. 2 was never overlook daily hygiene. Which meant an upper-body splash bath and shave each morning in the men’s room of the nearest gas station. Rule No. 3 was to endorse, every single day, Thom’s idealization of Mary, the vicar’s daughter back in England whom he foolishly forsook as the true love of his life, the lovely lady who actually managed to get Lawrence Durrell to use Thom’s name and Jack Kerouac’s name in the same sentence.

This last was required even as we roared through three states to reach that treehouse in Marin where the adored Hadi awaited us unclothed.

But something rather strange happened in Utah. David insisted that we stop outside a hotel in Salt Lake City so he could make a phone call. But we never made phone calls, let alone overseas phone calls, which he finally admitted he just had to make. “You’re not asking your parents for money, are you?” I asked. “We don’t need that.”

“Nah,” he said. “Just some private business.” This was the first private business to have come between us.

The rest of the journey became a black-and-white blur. Our anticipation sped up the passage of time, melting the day into night, sun into moon, blacktop into waves we surfed through dawn and beyond.

Like crusaders we fought our way over Battle Mountain and on into the plush warmth of inland California. We rarely talked, too much of the unmentionable weighing on our brains. We just counted the hours until we reached the woodlands of Marin. It was stunning country, a Cinerama mix of cool Mediterranean and Technicolor. Now, all that lay between us and the lapping sea was the naked girl in the tree house.

Soon we were spending agonizing time in roadside phone booths trying to contact Hadi’s uncle or Hadi herself.

Eventually we connected with each, but to me there seemed something amiss. Hadi told us the location of the treehouse, precisely to a fault, although she could have just met us nearby and walked us in. David, however, seemed to tolerate all these twists and turns and finally we did have exact directions and a proposed time of arrival.

Then it was David who started acting funny. He insisted I get out of the car on this gravel drive that led to the treehouse and told me to go ahead and scope it out alone.

I got out of the car, looked back at him through the windshield and shrugged my shoulders.

He leaned out of the window and said, “Go ahead. Go up the ladder. She’s made a new one just for us.”

“How sweet of Hadi,” I thought. And how uncharacteristic of David to let me take the lead.

A premonition struck home as I reached the bottom of the ladder. Life can be quite dreamlike if you let it. As I climbed up the ladder I heard, bubbling through the open door above, the distant echo of chiming bells. Quite a sexy sound. French perhaps. I took off my shirt and left it on the bottom rung.

I heard a girl singing.

Looking back at David, I saw him wave his hand, encouraging me to keep going.

“Whenever we kiss” I heard the voice sing, “I worry and wonder.”

My heart leaped at this. Worry and wonder! Precisely the way I have lived my life. And that voice…!

“Your lips may be near,” it sang, “but where is your heart?”

She was talking the words now. “It’s always like this, I worry and wonder.”

“Me too!” I cried out, getting near the top rung.

“You’re close to me here,” went the voice, “but where is your heart?”

My voice joined hers.

“When we kiss, do you close your eyes?” we sang. “Are you pretending I’m someone else?”

I mounted the top of the ladder and peered into the shadows.

“You must break the spell,” we sang. “Won’t you tell, darling, where is your heart?”

I sprang up now through the doorway and into the treehouse.

Standing there, smiling, was Mary.

I rushed to her, reached my arms around her to embrace her bare naked body.

We stood face to face, kissing deeply, our eyes closed. Then softly, she sang again.

“Are you pretending to be someone else?” she murmured. ”You must break the spell, this cloud that we’re under. So please won’t you tell, darling, where is your heart?”

I told Mary then that I loved her.

She told me that David and Hadi — miracle of miracles — had conspired to send her a return ticket from London to San Francisco. Hadi had told her that she she owed me, and David had told her he’d promised to make things right for me after I’d fallen to my knees at a car crash.

“And I’m singing ‘Where Is Your Heart’” she said, “because Connie Francis was our favorite singer.

“Do you remember?”

 

THE END

 

Happy holidays, everyone!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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