Except, of course, the Bird Man and I had never killed anyone. If I was right, Mr. Ha-Ha had.
One of the bedroom bookcases had been overturned. I set it upright and started re-shelving the books. At the bottom of the pile was that scholarly-looking tome I’d seen on his nightstand, along with the Bradbury novel I was currently reading. I picked it up and looked at the cover: a funnel filling with stars. The Origins of Fantasy and Its Place in the World Matrix—what a mouthful. And Jungian Perspectives to boot. I looked in the index to see if there was anything about the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. Turned out there was. I tried to read it, then just scanned it. It was everything I hated about what I thought of as “hoity-toity” academic writing, full of five-dollar words and tortured syntax. Maybe that’s intellectual laziness on my part, but maybe not.
So far as I could make out, the author of that particular chapter was saying there were actually two beanstalk stories: the bloodthirsty original and the sanitized version kids got in Mom-approved Little Golden Books and the feature-length cartoon. The bloodthirsty original bifurcated （there’s one of your five-dollar words） into two mythic streams, one dark and one light. The dark one had to do with the joys of plunder and murder （as in Jack chopping down the beanstalk and the giant getting smooshed）。 The light one had to do with what the writer called “the epistemology of Wittgensteinian Religious Belief,” and if you know what that one means even with its headlights on, you’re a better man than I am.
I put the book on the shelf, left the room, then went back again to look at the cover. The inside was full of trudging prose, compound-complex sentences that allowed the eye no rest, but the cover was a little lyric, as perfect in its way as that William Carlos Williams poem about the red wheelbarrow: a funnel filling with stars.
5
On Monday I went to see my old pal Mrs. Silvius in the office and asked her if I could take my once-a-semester community service day on Tuesday. She leaned over the desk toward me and spoke in a low, confidential voice. “Do I smell a boy who wants to play hooky? I only ask because students are asked to give at least one week’s notice before they take their in-service day. Not a requirement, Charlie, but a strong suggestion.”
“No, this is the real deal,” I said, making earnest eye contact. It was a useful technique when telling lies that I had learned from Bertie Bird. “I’m going around to downtown merchants and pitching them on Adopt-A.”
“Adopt-A?” Mrs. Silvius looked interested in spite of herself.
“Well, it’s usually Adopt-A-Highway, I got into that with Key Club, but I want to go farther. Get store owners interested in Adopt-A-Park—we’ve actually got six of them, you know—and Adopt-An-Underpass—so many of them are messes, it’s really a shame—maybe even Adopt-A-Vacant-Lot, if I can convince—”
“I get the drift.” She grabbed a form and scribbled on it. “Take this around to your teachers, get a sign-off from all of them, bring it back to me.” And as I left: “Charlie? I still smell hooky. I smell it all over you.”
I wasn’t exactly lying about my community service project, but I was shading the truth about needing a day off from school to do it. During period five I went to the library, got a Jaycees booklet listing all the downtown merchants, and sent out an e-blast, just changing the salutations and the names of the various Adopt-A projects I’d thought up. It took half an hour, which left me with twenty minutes before the chime announcing the change of classes. I went back to the desk and asked Ms. Norman if she had Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The actual book wasn’t in the library, so she handed me a Kindle with PROPERTY OF HILLVIEW HIGH Dymo-taped to the back and gave me the one-use-only code to download the book.
I didn’t read any of the fairy tales, only ran down the contents and skimmed the introduction. I was interested （but not entirely surprised） to find that most of the ones I knew from childhood had darker versions. The original of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” was an oral tale that had been around since the 1500s, and there was no little girl named Goldilocks in it. The main character was a vile old woman who invaded the bears’ home, basically broke all their shit, then jumped out a window and ran away into the woods, cackling. “Rumpelstiltskin” was even worse. In the version I vaguely remembered, old Rumpel flew away in a huff when the girl tasked with spinning straw into gold guessed his name. In the 1857 version of Grimm’s, he drove one foot into the ground, grasped the other, and tore himself apart. I thought that was a horror story worthy of the Saw franchise.