Harley was sprawled on his back, suspended in a nest of ropes and tree climber’s gear in the boughs of an old sycamore tree. The moon shone pale on his gaunt, sweaty face. His eyes were darting back and forth in R.E.M. sleep. He was almost grimacing.

The shadow of his flying son passed over him, but Harley was too deep in his own dreams to notice.

He was dreaming of his mother. She was trying to shoot him with a deer rifle—a .22 Hornet that his father had owned, to be exact. Harley was running away from her through a forest of young pines and she was running after him, laughing. She seemed to be having some trouble working the rifle’s bolt. Then she fired once and Harley felt the angry energy of the bullet as it whizzed past his earlobe.

There was an old barn up ahead. Harley was running so fast that he was able to leap on the top strand of a barbed wire fence and launch himself—slingshot style—right up onto the barn’s roof. His mother fired another shot. Dust and old shingles exploded to his left. He kept running. Shingles slid out from under his feet. It was like trying to run up a down escalator. Finally—out of breath—he reached the top. His mother fired again, missing by inches. Harley just stood there on the ridge, frozen. He couldn’t believe mother was doing this. She slid another bullet into the rifle’s chamber. This time she squinted and aimed with the scope.

Harley wanted to run someplace higher and further, but there was no place left to go.

•     •     •     •     •     •     •     •     •

For months, Harley had been thinking deeply. He wanted to clear away all the blame and guilt and anger that was keeping him from leading an authentic life. Whenever he had an insight that seemed especially meaningful of profound, he wrote it down on a postcard in tiny, looping handwriting that looked like forget-me-nots. He later stashed the postcards in abandoned squirrel hollows and owl holes for posterity.

Lately, he’d been giving a lot of thought to his relationship with his mother. One of the reasons Harley had married Calliope was that he knew she would be a good mother to their children.  His own mother, with her unpredictable explosions of rage, had destroyed whatever closeness there might have been between them by the time he was five. It didn’t help that she had routinely beaten him with a pancake spatula, and once, duct-taped his head to a portable black and white television for no good reason. When Harley thought back on his childhood, all he could recall were moments of uneasy truce between them. There was never any love. In fact, he had become convinced, quite young, that his mother despised him.

Charlene had rationalized her outbursts to other adults. She claimed she had migraine headaches and Harley, the wicked boy, pushed her past her limits. But Harley was usually just minding his own business when she went after him. He would be playing in the backyard with his friends, for instance, and suddenly his mother would come marching out of the house with murder in her eyes and the dreaded spatula in her hand, screaming that they were “playing too loud.” And Harley would get whacked right in front of his buddies.

All through school, he had a reputation for having The Meanest Mom in Pine Bluff. He couldn’t wait to grow up so he wouldn’t have to deal with her anymore.

•     •     •     •     •     •     •     •     •

As a child, Harley had blamed his own actions for his mother’s violence. As an adult, he knew better. He speculated on the psychological and biochemical factors that might have been at the roots of his mother’s dysfunctional behavior.

Maybe the migraines were real…. She certainly took enough painkillers for them. Her medicine cabinet had always been full of Darvon, Percoden, and codeine. She’d placed so much importance on these drugs that Harley, as a small boy, memorized their names and often whispered them to himself before he went to sleep. His later obsession with psychopharmacology probably stemmed from there.

She also took prednisone—for her skin rashes—in such huge doses that it was dangerous to her health. Not only was prednisone hard on the liver and kidneys, but at the dosage level his mother had been taking it at—for years—it could also provoke psychotic reactions.

So maybe ol’ Charlene had been a borderline psychotic all that time.

Who knows?

Harley could forgive his mother a lot by writing it off to bad chemistry, but the one thing he couldn’t forgive her for was the death of his father. She had been openly having an affair. She was practically writing about it in the local newspaper, according to some folks in town Harley talked to later. But that by itself shouldn’t have been enough to cause his father to commit suicide. It was probably the daily nagging and bitching that wore him down.

Imagine being a miner, going down in a hole every day so you never see the sun, working like some overgrown gopher, and then coming home to Charlene’s hostility. She’s already spent all the money you earned and now she’s humping some yellow journalist right under your nose. Why do you put up with it?

That was the question Harley couldn’t get around: Why did his father put up with it? Why did he marry Charlene in the first place? Why did he let her boss him around? Why did he allow her to beat his only son? Instead of killing himself, why not just get a divorce?

Harley had to conclude that his father, in his own passive way, was just as screwed up as his mother. And that was hard for him to admit, because he’d really loved his father. But it had to be said:

My dad was a wimp.

On the back of a postcard with a picture of a well-muscled young man shown from the neck down clutching a naked newborn baby to his chest, Harley wrote:

    i was twelve
when you exploded yourself
in the turnips and dry summer grass
at the edge of our vision
the crows dropped like stones
from a blue sky to pick you apart
to suck marrow from your long bones
i found a dozen white seeds
scattered across my windowsill
it was years before i could admit
they were your own far flung teeth
i know the woman you married
i know the hours you spent hacking
the ground to dust in the same dark hole
must have hardly seemed worth the effort
but there were so many people
you never knew who only know you
as a torn black and white photo
in a half-empty scrapbook
on a shelf next to our old shoes

After his father died, the only place where Harley ever felt safe was in the woods. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that if his mother came after him out there, he could always climb a tree. Charlene was too fat to climb very high.

Harley supposed that was why he had such a love for being in the trees as an adult. In the trees he was free. No worries, no anxieties—just him and his tree climbing gear, achieving Oneness with Nature.

He knew his family thought he was abandoning them, just as his own father had abandoned him. But it wasn’t like that. He loved Calliope and Philo. He tried to look after them as best as he could. There were just some things he had to work through on his own.

Because he was blanking out.

He was becoming more and more a rooster.

And he was starting to worry that some of his mother’s violence was also in him.