HALO AROUND THE MOON

1
Beverly Hills, California Present Day

The mutilated bodies of dead trees smell nothing like the mutilated bodies of dead humans. When a tree is torn apart and begins to rot, the air fills with the melancholy perfume of molasses and soil—the tangy smells of an old violin or a wet forest. By comparison, the human body is a disgusting thing. In the days shortly after death, the atrocious odors of a lifetime of accumulated sulfur and nitrogen bubble out in morbid flatulence.

These thoughts occurred to Marcus Melter while kneeling over the leg of a man who’d been run partially through a wood chipper. He poked at the transparent skin of the calf. It gave way, belching forth a stink so repulsive that he had to cover his mouth and nose with the back of his latex-gloved hand.

It was a warm sepia tone afternoon in a weedy vacant lot surrounded by mansions and high hedges. The September sun hung low, and everything appeared as if viewed through a jar of piss. With a pair of tweezers, Marcus extracted a pinky-sized shard of blood-stained wood from the upper portion of the severed leg.

“Who the fuck puts someone into a chipper?”

From his knelt position, Marcus looked over his shoulder at his long-time friend, Detective Jack Bratton, who was speaking to him from a safe distance.

Marcus shook his head and stood.

“I don’t know.”

Then he dropped the blood-coated splinter into a plastic bag that Jack held open for him.

2
Washington County, Arkansas 1905

Incredible as it may seem, earthworms are not native to North America. Their arrival on the continent wasn’t marked by ceremony; a few hundred worms dumped with the wastewater from ballasts of the first European ships entering the Chesapeake Bay, sometime shortly after Columbus. Late in the fifteenth century, the worms began their generational migration westward through the thin, rich crust of the North American continent. During this slow and steady westward wave, earthworms irreversibly transformed the continent as they turned, rolled, and squeezed the topsoil through their transparent little bodies. Earthworms eat decaying plant matter, inadvertently swallow dirt, and accelerate the natural processes of decomposition in the soil.

Before their arrival, a thick mulch of rotting leaves blanketed the continent and fed the broadleaved trees of the great forests of the Northeast and Upper Midwest. The worms’ movement through the landscape was slow and steady, but at the scale of geological time, they raced across North America consuming everything in their path, turning thick layers of rotting leaves into a thin veneer of nutrient-rich, loamy castings, better suited for pines and other fast-growing trees. In that geological instant after their arrival, the species composition of the vast forests of eastern North America changed forever; maples to pines, basswoods to cedars, and beeches to honey locusts.

Had the worms not committed this unintentional arboreal genocide, perhaps different trees would have dominated the forests on the western edge of the Ozark Mountains near the roadside between Springdale and Fayetteville. Perhaps, in the unusually cold winter of 1905, the vigilante captors of Obediah Bratton, Jack Bratton’s great-grandfather, would have successfully carried out his hanging from a limb of a sturdier tree; but as it were, the earthworms had been by that very spot and accomplished their steady work many years prior, leaving only fast-growing, weak-limbed loblolly pines in their wake. Obediah Bratton was neither a decent nor good man and deserved well to be hanged on that cold, full moon November night. He sat in the snow, watching white puffs of his breath dissipate in the blue moonlight, tears streaming down his cheeks. When no option for escape remained, he began to plead and grovel. He was hunched over, his hands tied behind him, his upper back resting on a tree, listening, but not making out the words of the hushed, angry conversation of his three captors. They quickly came to an agreement, and an old rope, no wider than a man’s thumb, was knotted and thrown over a lower limb of a pine tree near the road shoulder.

One of the three men forcefully pulled Obediah to his feet and walked him to the hanging rope. The second man weaved the flaccid hoop over Obediah’s head and cinched the knot down on the back of his neck. As the two men lifted Obediah off his feet, the third man pulled down hard on the rope. Obediah struggled and kicked violently in the empty air. Saliva glistened in the moonlight as it came trickling out of his mouth onto his blotchy beard. The rope pulled in hard on his neck, cut his skin, and crushed his Adam’s apple. Obediah’s face turned bright red, contorted, then almost purple. His vision darkened and narrowed to a tunnel, then went black in his left eye. The men stood stoically watching, waiting for the struggling to end. Blood covered their captive’s neck and was dripping from his bulging eye.

A loud crack rang out in the night. Obediah, and the limb from which he was suspended, came crashing down. The noise of the broken limb echoed out into the woods, and silence returned. The three men looked down on their motionless captive. They could hear Obediah’s difficult, short breaths. The rope was still around his neck, and the broken limb lay across the lower half of his body. Blood dripped from Obediah’s face and landed on the snow.

“Should we haul him back up another limb?”

“Let him go.”

“He’ll live, though,” said the man with both hands still gripping the rope.

“Not likely.”

“We made all the effort. It’d be nice to see him dead.”

“Let’s go.”

The man dropped the rope, and all three returned to their horses and rode off in the direction from which they had come.

Obediah was awoken from his unconsciousness by a biting pain in his neck and the cold of the snow on his face. He struggled to his knees. His hands were still tied behind him and the rope was around his neck. He rolled over the low snowbank onto the road, his breathing an involuntary quick panting. Confusion and panic were washing over him. He tried to take a deeper breath, but the air wouldn’t come. The remaining vision in his right eye failed him, and he passed out again, falling face forward onto the edge of the snowy road.

On that dirty white slope, with the sterling moonlight on his back, for the second time, Obediah Bratton’s short, 22 year-long life should have come to an end, nipped out by the elements while each of his organs spiraled down to a halt, but it did not.

3
Glostrup, Denmark 1941

The fat lady with the beard worked around the edges of a pore on her inner thigh. She could see the hair under the waxy plug of skin and she wanted, no she needed, to free it. With one leg up on the arm of the old maroon recliner she leaned back and strained to bend over the rolls of flesh on her torso. She prodded it gently with her long jaundiced thumbnail. With the concise pressure and accuracy of a surgeon, she forced the pore to give birth to a yellowish-brown plug of dirt and greasy sebum. With a second squeeze she brought forth a creamy custard afterbirth of puss, and the curly wet hair was reborn anew into the world.

“Shut the fuck up,” she yelled over her shoulder. “You’ve been whimpering all night and I’m sick of hearing it.”

She adjusted her stained underwear and took her foot down off the chair arm. She stroked the long straggly hairs on her cheek with the back of her fingers and turned to look at the gimp. “We’re all sad he’s gone, but enough’s enough.”

She would find out later that Otto Gillot Hort, the wondrous flying midget, the diminutive Danish devil, the daring dart, who died during the previous afternoon’s performance, had been the gimp’s clandestine lover for four wonderful years.

Earlier that day as Otto crouched into the human cannon, an untied leather bootlace lodged in a crack along the interior wall. When he was ejected with the smoke and powder, he spun sideways and fell short of the net by ten feet, breaking his neck on impact.

“I’m sorry, honey. Come over here. I know you’re sad; we’re all sad.” The fat bearded lady stretched out her hand to the gimp, who limped to her like a hurt child. He curled up on her lap with his misshapen head between her hairy breasts and wept into her dress. The gimp wasn’t only crying for the death of his lover, but because of what the ringmaster had said shortly after he was pronounced dead and they were deciding not to cancel the evening performance.

“The show must go on,” he said. “The show must go on.”

4
University of California at Los Angeles Present Day

“Interesting,” Marcus said, methodically scanning the bloody wood fragment under the lens of a microscope in his lab on campus.

“What is it?” Jack asked while anxiously looking over his shoulder. “It’s a bloody piece of wood!”

“Come on, dude, stop fucking with me,” Jack said. “I’ve been on this thing for three days. I have nothing to go on here except for this splinter of wood.”

“Nothing?”

“No. No ID on the body, no distinctive clothing, no face left. Except for the brand, no distinctive markings on the chipper.”

“Alright, let’s see what we have here.”

Plants are strange. They have parts of their bodies that are completely dead, yet still functioning. The wood in a living tree is actually dead for the entire life of the tree and changes little even after the tree dies.

The thousand-year-old wood in the center of a thousand-year-old tree can remain unchanged as that tree begins to die and eventually fall. The body of that dead tree could wash down a whitewater river and out to sea and spend hundreds of salty monotonous years floating in giant circles in the Pacific gyre, like a ship in the night that eventually comes to grief on the shore of a distant island, only to bask in the tropical sun on the hot beach for several hundred more years. Some savage could come along and pick away at it with a rudimentary stone tool to gather enough of the tree’s magnificent body to burn in a weary little fire. That half-burned fire and the unknowing humans sitting around it could then be buried by a wall of mud from a ghost tsunami from some distant earthquake. If all that happened, then thousands of years later, an archeologist could dig up the partially burned charcoal and identify the original tree.

“The wood’s edges are dried and torn. The blood got on it much later.”

“So?”

“So the wood must have been in the chipper a couple days before the person was put in it.”

Marcus continued, “Since there are no seasons in the tropics, most tropical woods don’t have growth rings in them, which are a tree’s response to seasonal rain and temperature. When a tropical tree is grown in LA, which has seasons, albeit lame ones, the wood develops in a peculiar way.”

“I don’t get it. Do we have anything to go on?” Jack asked.

“This is clearly a piece of wood from a tree in the willow family. If it had a temperate growth ring pattern, I would have thought it was from a willow, but it doesn’t. It has the growth pattern of a tree from the tropics.”

“Does that mean anything in this case?” Jack asked.

Marcus smiled and said, “There’s only one kind of tropical tree related to willows in LA, the Costa Rican Holly, Olmediella betschleriana, and they’re mostly grown by collectors and in botanical gardens.

“Nice.”

“We have a small line of them here, by the sculpture garden. Make some calls to botanical gardens, and I bet you’ll find someone’s missing a chipper.”

5
Grajaú, Brazil 1930-1955

If one were to begin a question with: was there a human alive who has ever___? Or has there ever been a human who did___?, the answer is always yes, regardless of how those questions are completed. Billions of humans have lived out various lives—brief, insignificant, joyful lives—a quarter-million born and dying each day.

One may, for instance, ask, has a human ever been eaten by a snake? Has a human ever died in a pogo sticking accident? Has a human ever been born with a tail? Has a human ever made sweet, sweet love to a cantaloupe? The answer is always, yes.

Has a human ever died as roadkill? Has a human ever been hit by the indifferent bumper of a passing car and left to die on the pavement of the road shoulder, to rot and be picked apart by whatever scavengers pass by until their remains are nothing but bones and glistening sinew, like rust-colored taffy, inside torn clothing? One would think not. How could it be possible? A person missed by no one, rotting on the road? The scene of the accident untraveled by decent humans? Is it possible that someone could have died like that? The answer is always, yes.

Human roadkill wouldn’t seem so unlikely after a visit to São Paulo, Brazil, in the 1940s and 1950s. The city, slow to recover from the widespread neighborhood bombings of the 1924 Tenente Revolt, had doubled in population between 1920 and 1940, without the necessary city services, infrastructure, or relevant law enforcement for such a population increase. Shantytowns stretched out in concentric rings from the dirty brick buildings of old town São Paulo. It was a city overcrowded with a swirling, sweaty, suffering, and striving mass of humans, a few short generations past the end of Brazil’s brutal 300-year experiment with slavery, left to their own devices by coffee barons and the sugarcane and banana plantation owners.

Marcus Melter’s grandfather, Joseph, came to São Paulo in the late 1930s from a dreary suburb of Munich, Germany. While still a teenager, his uncle told him of a South American timber-trading ship that left from the docks at Bremerhaven each March. There was work on the ship, and as a European, young Joseph would be granted a piece of land from the Brazilian government to help with what was called “bleaching the race.” The Brazilian government was wary of the possibility that slaves brought from West Africa a century earlier would outnumber other ethnicities, and Europeans were enticed to Brazil with land.

Three springs after first hearing his uncle’s story, Joseph Melter, who had earned a fair bit of money working on timber trading ships, stepped down the gangplank onto the docks at São Paulo. After a visit to city hall and payment of a nominal application fee, he was deeded a piece of the land outside the southern Grajaú region of São Paulo. There he met Mãe Paciência, Marcus’s grandmother, a sixteen-year-old black girl whose freed slave parents had immigrated to São Paulo from the poor sugar-growing northwestern corner of Brazil. So happy were they to marry her off to a European that they paid him a hard-earned dowry of six burlap sacks filled with sweet manioc root, which Mãe lovingly prepared and Joseph graciously ate for the first six months of their marriage.

Each night, while muttering unintelligible German expletives, Joseph Melter made every effort to bleach Mãe Paciência’s race, and in the summer of 1939, Marcus’s father was born. Joseph Melter’s bleach was weak and Marcus’s father, Alexander Melter, was born black, as black as if he’d been secretly fathered by one of the men working for Joseph. Joseph’s fears of a cuckolding were relieved by the baby boy’s perfectly straight, slender nose and almond-shaped eyes. Joseph and Mãe went on to spawn several more hybrids of varying shades, but none as dark and none as beautiful as Alexander.

Life on the outskirts of São Paulo for a German farmer, his black wife, and their children was difficult at best. Joseph Melter’s land grant was barely enough to support his family in hard times, and as World War II came to Brazil, it accentuated the poverty in São Paulo and put the farmlands at risk of being overrun by the starving masses in the nearby slums. With each report of yet another Brazilian ship sunk by a German U-boat submarine in the Southern Atlantic, Joseph Melter’s paranoia and distrust of his fellow Brazilians heightened. As the war continued, food was rationed, commerce slowed, and the Melter family learned to survive on little.

These were the times in which Alexander Melter lived his first years, surrounded by degrading poverty and the fear and paranoia of his father. In 1952, at age fourteen, he found the remains of the July 1st, 1946 issue of Life magazine. Its greasy color drawings of women in bikinis on the beaches of Southern California hit him like a revelation. The coincidental magazine discovery and his recent entrance into the puzzling and shameful world of puberty were almost too much for young Alex to bear. He kept that magazine hidden, and a small fire ignited in him for a place called Los Angeles; a fire that apparently existed in his penis, which he stoked regularly and vigorously.

The magazine solidified his vague idea of escaping Brazil. He was neither German, nor was he truly Brazilian, not white nor black, and had always been treated differently because of it. Now the bikini-clad women reclining on their beach towels under tall palms in the golden Santa Monica afternoon provided him with a clearly defined destination.