Tin Can Sam

I was a child of the late 80s, in a time when kids played on the streets till the street lights came on, and riding your bike through town was as normal as going to the corner store to buy your mom smokes. In fact, the woods seemed to be the only place my dad specifically said was off-limits. The woods seemed to be a boundary for many families, and I never knew anyone who went there willingly.

It's one of the few things that's stayed the same to this day, though so many other things have certainly changed since I was a kid.

One prime example was the telephone.

Coming from a small town, my telephone was on a party line, so if you wanted to talk to your friend, you went to his house and did it in person. I was fortunate in that respect. My best friend, Davey, lived right next door. If I wanted to ask him to play GI Joes or ride our bikes, I could just walk twenty paces rather than break out my Huffy.

Unless that was, we used the tin can phone.

The tin can phones were something we had cooked up after seeing it on a science TV show. The guy on the show had hooked a pair of tin cans together with twine and showed that no matter how far off they went, you could still hear the person with the other can. Davey and I had thought this was just about the coolest thing we had ever seen, and we set about making them. I found a pair of old soup cans and a long spool of mom's twine and attached the ends to the cans. We could hear each other pretty well, a fact that surprised us to no end, but the farther away we got, the harder it became to hear each other.

"Lemme show you a different way," Dad had said, startling us since we'd been so involved in our little project.

He had linked the cans together with a length of fishing line, and the connection had been the next best thing to crystal clear.

We used them a lot, linking our treehouses together with them, and we would talk into the night on them as we camped out in different treehouses. It wasn't as clear as a telephone, but it was amazing the conversations we could have over such a simple little device.

When Davey got grounded one summer, it became our only communication with each other too.

Davey had gotten himself a little bit addicted to the new arcade that had taken up downtown. The laundromat that had once been there had been cleaned out, but I can remember smelling detergent and fabric softener every time I went in to play a game of PacMan or Galaga. Davey and I went there a lot, but Davey seemed to have developed an unhealthy love of the games. Any money he could scrape together was shoved into the arcade machines, and I remember noticing that he was absent from school in the middle of the day and suspected he had snuck off to the arcade.

When the truancy officer brought him home around lunchtime one day, his parents finally decided that enough was enough. They grounded him for the summer, told him that he might manage to earn some time back for good behavior, but forbade him to go to the arcade until he could get a handle on his addiction.

Davey and I talked over the Tin Can when we could, but Davey made it pretty clear that his parents would take it if they found it. He would camp out when the weather was fair and talk most of the night, Davey's only real connection to the outside world being me.

So when I picked up the can one night, calling for Davey through the hundred feet of fishing line, I was unsurprised to hear someone pick up right away.

As it turned out, though, it wasn't who I was expecting.

"Hello?" said a small voice, and not like Davey's at all.

It sounded like an adult trying to do a bad imitation of a kid's voice.

"Who's this?" it said again, and I remember shaking off my uncertainty as I remembered that Davey liked to do voices sometimes. Davey and I sometimes listened to the radio DJ's "prank call" people, or we'd catch comedy performances on the satellite TV Davey's family had. Davey had a few characters he'd been working on, despite the fact that they all just sounded like him, and I assumed that this was nothing more than another bad character performance.

"Who's this?" I challenged back.

"This is Sam," the voice said, still high pitched but getting a little surer of itself as the string made it sound tinny and robotic, "but my friends call me "Tin Can" Sam."

Yup, definitely a new voice. If it had been the modern-day, I would have said that he reminded me of Herbert the Pervert from Family Guy. It was nineteen ninety-one, however, and all I could equate it to was the funny way that Michael Jackson talked. The voice was funny, kinda, but it still sounded like Davey doing a bit.

"Well, Sam, why do they call you "Tin Can"?

"Cause I wear the tin cans I empty like jewelry and clatter everywhere I go. I'm a hobo, you see, and most of my meals are taken from cans. Who do I have the pleasure of conversing with tonight?"

I played along and introduced myself to Tin Can Sam. He asked me if I went to school, and I told him that we were out for the summer. He asked if I lived around here, and I told him I lived next door. He asked me how old I was and if I knew the kid who owned the tree house and a dozen other things as I played along.

Some of you guys will think this weird. Why would I surrender a lot of information that Davey would have already had to him if he was doing a bit? Well, to answer that question, you'd have to understand how Davey was when he was doing a "character". Davey was one of those people who would commit to a role. If he was doing a new character, that person didn't know you. Interacting with him was like meeting Davey all over again, but he was my friend, so I put up with it. At least it wasn't Grandma Gerta, who had "memory problems" and constantly forgot the things you'd told her.

So I played along with the game, asking Sam what it was like to be a hobo.

"It's alright, I guess. I used to own a hardware store, but the people didn't like me very much so I had to leave. It's rough not having a house, sometimes, but I meet so many interesting people on the road."

"What do you do for fun?" I asked, nodding to myself at how thoroughly Davey had committed to the role.

"Tell stories mostly. You sit around the fire at night and eat your dinner and tell tales. We especially like scary stories."

"Scary stories?" I asked, a little taken aback.

Davey was not a fan of scary stories. He liked to try and play it cool, but he was a scaredy-cat at the core of it all. When we watched scary movies sometimes, the volume low so his parents didn't catch us, Davey always hid his eyes and sobbed sometimes when the killer got somebody.

Sam liking scary stories was not something I was prepared for.

"Do you like scary stories?" Sam asked, his voice sounding hungry for the answer.

"Yeah," I said, hesitantly, "I like scary stories."

"I've got a really scary story if you'd like to hear it."

I nodded before realizing that he wouldn't be able to see me, and told him that I did.

I was still absolutely sure that this was Davey doing a bit, but the longer I listened, the less sure I became.

The longer I listened, the more the voice sounded less like Davey and more like a stranger.

"Good, 'cause it's a real scary story. It's about these kids who were camping out in the woods one night. They didn't have a treehouse, like you, but a tent instead. They had set up far from the town where they lived, and they camped at the site often. They came there for a sleepover one night, but they didn't know that there was an extra at their party this time."

I sat on the fluffy orange rug I had taken after mom was going to throw it out and felt my teeth trying to chatter. If this was a bit that Davey was doing, then it was better than usual. As the string brought his words to me, I remember feeling my spine shudder in my back. This was different, way different, and I wasn't entirely sure I liked it.

"As I came up, they heard me. They looked out to see what was making so much noise, peeking from the zipper as they looked into the once inviting wood. It was dark though and the woods were dense. As I moved about, rattling and shaking, they kept looking around anxiously, trying to figure out where I was. The more I moved, the more scared they became. They thought I was a ghost, some sort of spook, and the longer I rattled, the more they shivered. It was windy that night, and I seemed to be everywhere."

"Okay, Davey," I said, my voice shaking a little as watched the fire on my lantern dance, "I don't like this game anymore."

"Who's Davey?" The voice asked, "I told you my name was Tin Can Sam. Now, where was I?"

I looked out the window, trying to see into Davey's tree house, but the branches of the big oak his dad had built it in obscured the structure.

All I could see was the string as it hung taut between us.

"Oh, that's right. I could hear them whispering over there, discussing their chances if they ran. They didn't think they stood a chance if they stayed, but if they ran...well, they believed I could only catch one of them. They were arguing, starting to yell, and as they got louder and louder, I crept up on their tent. I'd have had them then and there, but suddenly they burst out of the tent and ran in every direction. I smiled as they ran, knowing that I could easily catch more than one of them."

"Stop it, Davey!" I yelled, the story creeping me out when coupled with the voice that told it, "I don't want to hear anymore."

Despite this, I felt unable to take the can from my ear.

"I caught them, and I cut them. I sliced them and I diced them. I cut their throats and sliced out their tongues. I cut their legs and took off their fingers, and when I turned my attention to the third boy, I knew I could get him before he got home. I took off after him, my cans rattling like ghostly chains. He kept glancing behind him, hearing my clatter as I got closer and closer. His feet slapped against the ground, and if he'd hit a single root, we wouldn't be having this conversation. I was so close, my knife still wet with his friend's blood, and as I lunged, he jumped over a small fence and came into his backyard. I stood, watching as he tripped and rolled onto the grass of his home, and when he looked back, I melted into the woods, his race won."

I let the can fall to the rug, not wanting to hear anything else, as I scrambled to the ladder to my treehouse and pulled it up. Unlike the children in the story, I was not in a tent. I knew that no one could get me if that ladder was up, and as I dragged it into the treehouse, I could see a shadow as it hunkered at the edge of the fence that separated my yard from Davey's.

It was a man, a skinny wisp of a man, with strings of cans hanging off him.

He looked up at me as I looked down at him, and even in the dark, I could see his broad white teeth as he grinned.

I slammed the trapdoor shut, but even in my safe fortress, I wasn't outside his reach.

As I hunkered on the carpet, I heard his voice ooze from the can as he left one final word on the matter.

"Tell your father he was right to tell you to be cautious of the woods."

He may have said more, but I threw the can out the window then and heard it tonk as it landed in Davey's yard.

I spent the rest of the night with my knees against my chest, jumping at every sound outside as I listened for the clank of cans.

I didn't come out when the sun came up, and when someone called my name from the ground, I jumped in surprise.

Looking out of my window, I was happy to see that it was my dad.

I came down the ladder, leaping into his arms as I cried against his shoulder.

"What's wrong, kiddo? Have a bad night?" he asked, smiling but clearly concerned.

I felt him stiffen when I told him what Tin Can Sam had said, and felt him hug me even tighter.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I'm so sorry."

I never slept in that treehouse again, and after I told Davey about what had happened, I don't think he did either.

I'm an adult now, obviously, and my parent's house is now my house. After dad died of a stroke while I was in college and mom passed a few years later, Millenda and I decided to move into the largest part of my inheritance. Our children love the big backyard, the treehouse that I've refurbished and repaired, but I always warn them to stay out of the woods. They always beg to be allowed to explore, but I've put my foot down where the woods are concerned.

I've never seen Tin Can Sam again, but if I ever think that maybe I imagined it, all I have to do is listen carefully on quiet nights.

Sometimes, if you listen closely, you can still hear the clank and jangle of old cans as they blow in the breeze.