Thrive: Ghosts in the Glades

Thrive: Ghosts in the Glades

By Staci Andrea

“To curl up in fear, like a cat trying only to protect the organs in its belly, does you no

good, Boy. To make yourself small in these parts is just asking for the predators to pick away, slowly and meticulously, at your bones, gnawin’ on your marrow until you are nothing left but a specter of what you once had been. You want to win this? You want to claw your way out of the underbelly of the gator, ripping its head off for the win, wearing its teeth around your neck on one of those fancy little pieces of leather that all the surfers are wearin’? Then you gotta get you a hog in the fight, boy. You gotta force the thrive.” -The Pencil Man

Prologue

I never feared him, never knew enough to understand that I was supposed to fear him, although maybe that was just the naivete of adolescence. Maybe it was just my loneliness desperately wanting to connect with a kindred spirit, a fellow outcast.

I had heard the rumors, of course, of what he had been accused of doing to those kids after his wife had passed away, the odd hours that he would spend out in the Everglades and the peculiar ways that he presented himself about the town, but I had never given those whispers of dark apprehension any weight within my soul. Mama had always taught me that people like me, people who were beckoned to overcome their own whispers in the darkness, the ones who were forced to thrive just on the outer edge of normalcy share a bond, we are more alike than we are different.

That was how I always saw the quirky Mr. Scroggs, as my friend, my guide, my fellow oddball. Being set apart from the rest of the world, singled out when walking into a room full of “normal” humans, having whispers echo behind you relentlessly through every hall that you bravely scurried down. These are the things that we bonded over.

There is a kindred pact among the strange, the ones who are left out, the ones who are bullied, threatened, and abused. We search each other out. We gravitate towards each other, simply wanting to feel less alone, less fearful, and less fragile. He taught me that my only vulnerability was being weak, and that if I had learned to wear a more structured and confident persona, that aura would then affect the way other people perceived me as well, leading them to look right past my blatantly obvious physical deviations.

To think of the terrible things that people have assumed of him, how he had been left alone to wallow in his own grief through the years in his cozy little trailer, without so much as a friendly wave, a neighborly, “How ya doing?” or really, any other human contact for so long pisses me off and leaves a dark stain on my view of humanity. Well, that and what I have already been put through myself. Crudely put, people are assholes.

I tried to remain calm while sitting on the floor of his cozy little trailer, the clean, yet worn, avocado green shag carpeting rubbing against my bare legs, stinging them just a bit from the nasty sunburn that still blistered my thighs from a long afternoon of chasing boars out in the Florida sun. I hadn’t been successful in catching anything, so I went on out to one of the public docks and threw a line in for a few hours, hoping to snag a snook or a fat ol’ sea trout, but my line had gotten snarled and my patience had worn thin, so instead, I spent a little time helping a little old man that we called, “Pencil Man” get his nets and lines ready to drop for shrimping later that evening off of the pier.

Pencil Man was almost a sage in those parts. He was the type of darker, albeit kind, soul who was so unremarkable that he all but faded into the background fabric of day-to-day life, yet he was also prominently always around. I never knew what his life had been like in his younger years, nor did I ever ask. Physically, he wasn’t much of a threat, but mentally, he was a hurricane who could rip you apart, limb by limb. Wise didn’t even begin to describe him. It was more than that.

The first time I had ever run into Pencil Man was right after we moved over to this end of town, and he was standing on the corner of where our trailer court lined up with the little dime store across the way. Frazzled, his leathery skin tanned dark from the years of hanging out in the sun, and his graying hair matted into long locks by the salty air, he sat on a cracked five-gallon bucket with a handful of sharpened pencils and a change jar. He whistled something that was familiar, but I couldn’t quite make it out. I stood by, fascinated by the spectacle that had unfolded.

Little kids would excitedly wave and come running up to him asking him to do “the trick”. The kids would hand him money, sometimes dollar bills, sometimes change, and they would ask to buy a pencil. His pencils were always ten cents. As he kept on whistling, he would then take their money, hand them their pencil, count out their change, and the kids would go wild. I didn’t get what was going on, so I shyly walked on over to see what the old man was up to.

He sat there, staring straight ahead as the salty breeze kicked up, startling me as he spoke, “Well, boy, you just gonna stand there starin’ at me like a possum eatin’ grits or you gonna say somethin’?”

“No sir, I’m not staring. I just saw all those youngin’s over here laughing and carrying on and thought I would come on over and sit a spell, see what all the carrying on was all about.” I sheepishly said to the ground as I reached into my pocket, fishing around for some change, finding a dollar and offering it to the old sage.

“How many ya want? Ten cents a piece,” he asked, holding up a pencil in his arthritic and blistered fingers and then dropping his voice to a near whisper and asked, “Or are you wantin’ a little somethin’ else?”

Confused and panicked, I stammered back, “No, just two please, I’ll take two, thank you Sir.”

I watched as the fragile little man ran his fingers over the bill that I had given him, pausing momentarily before folding it and dropping it into his jar. He then reached into his other jar of change and grabbed a handful, counting out exactly my eighty cents. I noticed that he looked nowhere besides straight ahead.

As he put his gnarly, yet gentle hand out to hand me the change and two pencils, I leaned in closer and saw that his eyes had no color. They were a dark and cloudy gray. He spoke before I could move away, startling the bejesus out of me, the scent of sweet butterscotch dancing off of his breath.

“Nope, I can’t see Boy. Ain’t been able to see nothin’ but shadows for years now.”

Ah! So that was the trick the kids were carrying on about! He was somehow able to know exactly what amount of money they handed him and gave them the correct change all without being able to see! Grinning to myself, I thought I was pretty smart at the time, having figured out that he knew the coins by feel. But, I had wondered how he knew the difference between bills?

I jumped damn near out of my skin when he apparently read my mind and stopped his whistling long enough to blurt out, “The five-dollar bills have a thicker ink, and I don’t give change for bigger bills than that.” Then he went back to whistling his tune, contently staring straight ahead. It would be a few years before I would truly appreciate the wisdom and talents that the Pencil Man was capable of.

Anyway, that was how I got the sunburn on this day, staying out in the sun too long, killing time with the Pencil Man. I had thought about heading back out after the sun sets to see if he was catching any shrimp with the other shrimpers, because although I had never really acquired a taste for the little critters, I was always in awe of the color that the emitted off of them beneath the water at night, darting around like little bright blue fireflies right beneath the surface. Some nights, the whole marina would be alive, glowing with them. Other nights, the shrimpers would sit and wait for hours with not as much as a single flicker beneath the surface. The thought amused me that these tiny little creatures were so revered, so wanted, and coveted.

Instead, I made my way back home and down here, to his trailer, my body screaming at me for being late with what it was violently wanting. I hated doing this, yet I had to do it. My body craved it, yet I still hated the pain.

Carefully, I rolled up the sleeve of my left arm, exposing pinkish colored skin, only slightly burned from the long afternoon of hanging out on the docks. The scarred marks from previous injections lined my arm. My body was now covered with little bumps as a rush of cool air flowed mercifully over my sun-drenched skin, blown there by the oscillating fan that was directly across from me on the floor, making clicking noises with each change of direction that it made.

For one sad reason or another, staring at that old fan brought back a calming memory, a simple flash in the past of my younger brothers and I, many years ago, innocently sitting in front of a rusty box fan in Pop’s garage at the old house while he was working on his old Camaro. They were a couple years younger than me, my brothers, Mac and Jax, and we were sitting there leaning in towards the fan, making noises and yelling just to hear how the fan would change the sounds of our voices. I will never know why, but it was clearly right then that I had a sharp realization that something was wrong with me. As we sat in front of the fan on our knees, I became acutely aware of just how much the boys had grown over that summer… and how little I had. Seemingly overnight, they were almost as tall as I was.

Pulling myself back from the darkness of my past, I reached into my bag that I had flung to the ground next to me, clumsily fishing around for my lifeline, the syringe that was supposed to elevate me to a new world, a world without pain, without fear, without being permanently marked as odd. I had been on a lifelong quest to outrun the sadness, to trick the depression and to out maneuver the obsessive-compulsive disorder that this life has attacked me with such venom.

Sitting in that little trailer on the floor, holding my syringe in a shaky hand, I paused once again, as I normally do, just before forcing that bitter needle into my already abused and swollen veins. Staring around the living room, I tried to pick something to focus on, something to avert my attention from what I was about to do, because it just never gets easier.

To a kid who has always been deathly afraid of needles, even the thought of jamming one of those damn things into my arm takes a lot of psyching myself out, focusing on something, anything else, in order to do it, no matter how much I wanted to. No matter how much my small and failing body craved it.

Gazing around, I began assessing the room, trying to trick my mind into forgetting about what my trembling hand was about to do. There were piles upon piles of books, although neatly arranged, lining the walls of the living room on shelves and in piles on the desk that sat in the corner. Although I wasn’t a fan of the big philosophers at the age of fourteen, I enjoyed reading about technology, inventions, and things that were up and coming in the world of science. I could get lost for hours reading about new medical advances, theories of evolution or the possibilities that there was life on planets beyond our own. Cocking my head to the side and squinting heavily through salt water impinged vision in the dimly lit room, I found my focus.

There, resting on top of an old typewriter, was a familiar and well-worn and dog-eared version of Shakespeare's Macbeth, the copy that I had borrowed the previous year when we were studying the play in school. A grin crept across my lips as her face immediately popped into my mind. Beautiful. The girl was just beautiful. And a goofball. Mags was definitely that, too.

Back in the sixth grade, when I first showed up to school here, Mags was the first person to talk to me, and that was after a few classes where absolutely no one would talk to me at all, they just whispered and stared, in awe at the new kid, the different kid, the weird kid. But not her.

Mags never batted an eye, never really even said anything about how I stood out. Instead, she dropped her tray next to me at lunch and asked me where I came from, what music I liked and if I was into gaming at all. That was after I had already met her best friend, Jojo, as he rolled up in his stylish wheelchair, a device that he had been forced into by way of a killer wave and a nasty surfing accident. They were inseparable, and soon, we all were.

Jojo wasn’t in our English class last year, but Mags and I spent hours reading and laughing, trying to make sense of the play so that when we were called on in class, we would have some idea of what we were talking about. We both feared being called on to read aloud in class, both of us terrified of public speaking and of all eyes being on us. At least if we had to do it, we wanted to be ready.

Clinging to those memories, I sat on the floor of the little living room holding the needle, my heart deliciously savoring the hours that we would roar with laughter reading, her laying on the floor, feet up on the couch, her wild auburn curly hair sprawled out on the floor, crowning her like and angel while I sat in the Lazyboy, glancing at her from over my book from high above.

What we did understand about Macbeth was that it was actually a story about a man who wanted to be great. He wanted to claw his way to the top, killing whomever he had to in order to get there so he would appear strong and powerful as his wife was taking it all in stride, urging him to keep going even though the road to the top was long and hard fought, even when the kingdom wanted the both of them dead. You can imagine the horror, then, when I was chosen one stifling hot afternoon to read the lines of Macbeth and Mags was chosen to read aloud the lines of his Lady.

That afternoon, in one of the hot little accessory trailers that the school had set up outside of the main school building because of overpopulation and the little school district had no money to build on, the curious faces of the rest of the class fell away, and for about ten minutes, it was just goofy old Mags and I, reciting to each other the lines that we had rehearsed over and over again in the little living room, her giggling every time that I goofed up a line and me focusing on the sound of her calm voice to stay in place and keep me focused and grounded as I read.

For what had been the first time in a very long time, I hadn’t felt like an outsider, hadn’t felt weird or out of place. I didn’t feel like people were paying attention to me because of what they felt was odd or what was wrong with me, but simply because I was just a kid who had been chosen to read in class. They were classically bored and barely paying attention. I loved it. I craved it. I just wanted so badly to be an everyday kid in an ordinary classroom that no one really noticed, just going on about another boring school day. And I was, for about ten minutes. Then the bell rang.

Just thinking back on it as I sat on the floor of the little living room in the trailer on the old green shag carpet, my stomach lurched at the next memory that was forming, the darkness that was once again smothering yet another tiny slice of hope, snuffing out any comfort that thinking of Mags had brought me.

The all too familiar ache of loneliness, the shameful embarrassment of being singled out, crawled up my spine as nausea stirred up fleeting waves in my gut. I felt like I was there again, rushing out into the hallway when the bell rang, excited about the absolute normalcy of the whole day, proud that for once, I was prepared and that for a tiny bit of time, I was just normal.