In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

  Papaw starts to answer but slides into a coughing fit. Which is its own answer.

  I tell him I hope I don’t disappoint him here. He says I could never. I’m not so sure.

  We talk for almost an hour. Being outside by the lake makes me feel like we’re together on our front porch. As my battery starts to fade, I sign off and text Delaney to see if she wants to say hi. She sprints down, and we call Papaw back. For the first couple minutes, she’s as short of breath as he is.

  “Hey, Pep!”

  “Tess!” Papaw beams. “You look happy.”

  “I am. Also got a lot of sleep last night compared to what I usually get.”

  “You and my grandson staying out of trouble?”

  “Mostly. We went to a party last night.”

  “Cash said. Now tell me something I don’t know.”

  She tells Papaw that trees have a sense of time—it’s how they know that warm days are spring and not late summer, that they can share nutrients with each other to help ailing fellows, and that they send out chemicals to attract wasps to attack insects that are a threat to them. He asks her if she’s working on his cure with her fancy new science lab. She says not yet; she’s been too busy and hasn’t had a chance. He tells her to stop horsing around and get to it. She says she will. The three of us talk until my phone battery verges on dying.

  I invite Delaney to come watch Midnite Matinee. She declines. I join the guys on my floor. There are a few girls mixed in, twelve or thirteen people total. Geeky, goofy welcoming types. Raheel and Cameron are there. So is Atul. I get quick introductions to those I don’t know.

  We crowd onto couches and beanbags and open bags of snacks. The show begins, and everyone sings along with the theme music, with lyrics they’ve invented. The show is a decidedly low-budget, cheesy affair. The two host ladies dress like vampires and do skits and read viewer mail during breaks in the movie Dawn of Dracula. They’re no TV professionals, but they seem to be having fun, and so do we.

  For one of the interstitials, a tarot reading, the two ladies have a visibly unenthusiastic man, playing someone named Professor Heineken, assist them. During this, I surreptitiously check my phone with my remaining three percent of battery, to see that Vi has tagged me in a couple of photos she took of us in New Canaan. It lifts my heart to see that someone like her thinks I fit somewhere into her glamorous existence. Maybe I’ll do all right here after all and my world will grow. Maybe I’m not so different from everyone and I’ll have a great year. Maybe this is where my life finally turns a corner.

  My spirit floats on this swell of hope until 11:55, when Raheel and Cameron make us turn off the show before the end credits—another tradition—so that we can make a mad dash to brush our teeth and be in our rooms with the lights off by midnight. Tripp and I mutter “ ’Sup” at each other but say nothing else.

  I lie in the moonlight that leaks in through the edges of the blinds and carries me off to sleep.

  * * *

  I hoped to dream of sun-drenched days, laughing in the company of new friends, surrounded by love and opportunity.

  But we don’t choose our dreams; they choose us. So instead I dream of doors sealed by death and wake up sweating in the mute darkness, my roommate sleeping in blissful oblivion a few feet away and a world apart.

  Memory is a tether. Sometimes you get some slack in the line and you can play it out for a while. You forget and think you’re free. But you’ll always get to the end and realize it’s still there, binding you, reminding you of itself, reminding you that you belong to each other.

  Delaney and Vi holed up in their room all day Sunday, taking advantage of one last opportunity for meandering free time before school starts. They texted me goofy stuff occasionally, like they were at a sleepover. It’s wild to see Delaney connecting with a new friend.

  Raheel, Cameron, and I camped on their floor and watched about eight hours of Game of Thrones. It helped alleviate my anxiety over starting class the next day—but only a bit.

  Now I’m nervously sweating under my navy blazer, even though the morning is crisp, as Delaney, Vi, and I approach the auditorium for our first Middleford morning assembly—a mandatory full-school meeting occurring every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday before class begins. Aunt Betsy’s words echo in my head: Fear tells you to make your life small. Don’t give it the air to survive. But I’m giving it a lot of air today—I’m basically pumping a bellows on it.

  Delaney had hooted with laughter as she saw me approach the dining hall earlier, wearing my uniform: khakis, white dress shirt, haphazardly tied tie, and blazer. I grinned sheepishly and did a little spin, arms outstretched. “Never gonna get used to you done up like that,” she said. “Back atcha,” I said. It’s jarring to see her in her white blouse, navy skirt, and plain black shoes. Vi’s clothes look crisp and expensive and fit her perfectly. But she seems jittery too, and we’re quiet except for sporadic small talk.

  My already-thrumming pulse revs as we join the other kids flowing into the auditorium and take our seats. I survey the crowd. Groups of seven to eight students sit talking and laughing among themselves. I can taste the ambition and intelligence in the air, smell the wealth. I begin spiraling. You don’t belong here. What are you doing? Who do you think you are? Go back to where you belong. You don’t belong with these people. I remind myself of the time I spent with Cameron and Raheel, and of Vi tagging me in her photos. I remind myself that the shining prospect of Middleford’s science program chose me as her best friend. It helps a little.

  The animated cacophony in the auditorium quickly tapers off as Middleford’s head of school, Dr. Archampong, takes the podium, dressed in an immaculate charcoal three-piece suit. “Good morning, students of Middleford Academy.” He speaks in a stately baritone. “To those of you who are returning, I say, ‘Welcome home.’ To those of you here for the first time, I say, ‘Welcome to your new home. You are now part of a long and proud tradition of excellence…’ ”

  He talks about his impoverished childhood in Ghana. He exhorts us to cultivate a love of learning and of each other. He has a formal but warm and welcoming air. I wish I could give him the attention he deserves, but anxiety is winning out, gripping me like a snare that tightens the more I strain against it. I scan the sea of heirs and heiresses surrounding me, dressed in crisp khaki, gleaming white cotton, and navy wool. I feel rumpled and wrinkled. My clothes, which are new, still look shoddy and cheap compared to my classmates’. I must look like I’m wearing a rich-kid Halloween costume. Hillbilly trash, they’ll think. Who let him in here?

  I glance over at Delaney, who’s watching Dr. Archampong with rapt attention, looking equally thrilled and scared shitless. Ditto Vi. I imagine myself five years ago, peering into a crystal ball, seeing future-me sitting here. I would have been astounded.

  Dr. Archampong finishes. “And so, new friends and old, let us go forward into another school year. May we walk in the light of love and learning. May we write our names into Middleford’s proud history.”

  Everyone applauds, then stands, and files out, chattering.

  Delaney looks at me. “Here we go.” All color has departed her face.

  “Here we go.” I try to keep the quaver from my voice but fail.

  * * *

  My head aches by the time I get to Intro to Poetry. I’m starving just from my brain’s expenditure of energy trying to keep up.

  My classes are small, and we all sit around a table and have a discussion. There’s nowhere to hide. And nobody seems to want to anyway. I’m used to kids racing for seats in the back of the classroom, slumping with hoodies pulled up, stealthily texting or vaping while the teacher tries their damndest (or not) to keep them engaged. Not here. Everyone jumps right in.

  I look around at the other students in the poetry class. All of them—eight girls and four guys—look like poetry kids, with a dreamy or haunted
air. They look like artists and readers. I feel like a cartoon bear in a trench coat among them. What am I doing here? Why am I intentionally seeking out failure?

  Dr. Britney Rae Adkins enters and takes a seat at the table. The air changes. I sense immediately that this class is going to be different from the others. Her eyes are the luminous electric gray of lightning through a rain-washed window and contain a piercing intelligence. Her iridescent-blue-tinged black hair falls to her shoulders in tight curls. She has a silver nose ring, and silver rings cover her slender fingers. She’s lean and compact. She actually reminds me a lot of Delaney.

  She wears a sleeveless black blouse, and covering one pale forearm entirely is a photorealistic black-and-gray tattoo of a wolf’s head. Covering the other is a similarly lifelike and grayscale tattoo of a red-tailed hawk. She has black line-drawn symbols inked on her knuckles.

  She somehow looks neither old nor young. She’s missing a tooth on the right side. It’s a jarring sight after how immaculately composed all of the other staff members we’ve met are. Her voice has some aged and worn quality about it, like leather rubbed to a dark sheen.

  She calls roll. She pauses when she gets to my name, as though she recognizes it. She finishes and puts down her pen, eyeing us for a long time before finally speaking. “You can’t fix a car with poetry. Poetry won’t help you build that new app and make billions. It won’t win you an election. There are so many ways that poetry isn’t useful in the way we think of things as being useful. And yet…” The corners of her mouth turn up in the faintest smile. “We bring poems to read at weddings and funerals. We write them to lovers. When our lives have been burned down around us, we look for that single glowing ember remaining, and that’s a poem. Poetry is one of the highest artistic achievements of humankind.

  “I told you that there are many things that poetry won’t do. But there are many things poetry will do. Poetry makes arguments. It presents cases for better ways of living and seeing the world and those around us. It heals wounds. It opens our eyes to wonder and ugliness and beauty and brutality. Poetry can be the one light that lasts the night. The warmth that survives the winter. The harvest that survives the long drought. The love that survives death. The things poetry can do are far more important than the things it can’t.”

  She speaks with the fervor of a true believer. As I listen, spellbound, there’s a slight stirring deep in me, the rise of a wind you don’t notice until it rattles the leaves around you. I may not belong here, but I wasn’t misled on what a great teacher Dr. Adkins is.

  She finishes her introduction and explains that we won’t be writing poems in this class—that’s for Intermediate Poetry—but we’ll be analyzing poems to understand how poetic language functions, to understand metaphor and subtext. I have a vision of myself taking apart my Chevy engine with Papaw, but instead of setting out combustion-blackened pistons and connecting rods on a greasy tarp, we’ll be laying out words and phrases.

  She goes around the circle, and to get to know us, she asks us if we have a favorite poem or poet. I hear a lot of names I don’t recognize. Charles Bukowski, Sylvia Plath, Rupi Kaur, Langston Hughes. My heart thuds in my throat. I don’t have an answer I’m not embarrassed to share.

  When I was younger, I’d get Mamaw’s old fake-leather-bound King James Bible with red-edged pages from her nightstand and try to read it like I was supposed to. I never got much past the first chapter of Genesis.

  But those first verses of Genesis moved me. My head swam imagining the vast emptiness that preceded the Creation, the void and formless world that God called into being. I loved the sparse, gorgeous sentences detailing the Earth’s building. I marveled that so few words could contain all of Creation.

  I hurriedly scour my brain for something that won’t draw inward snickers. I already feel conspicuous enough. I don’t need everyone thinking I attended some snake-handling church down in the holler. I figure surrender is my least embarrassing option. “I don’t have one right now.” I’m the only one who can’t name one. My face burns.

  Dr. Adkins says gently, “It’s called Intro to Poetry for a reason.”

  By 3:40, as I’m entering the gym for my first crew practice, I’m too mentally exhausted to even be nervous. At my old school, I consistently felt at least on the upper end of average intellect, if not above average. Here? Thoroughly below average. I’m going to have to work every second to keep from disappointing Papaw and Mamaw and Delaney.

  To distract myself, I fixate in my mind on the rhythm of the rowing from the video, the whisper of the boat gliding through the water, the smoothness of its motion seemingly unconnected to its human machinery. Nothing will improve this day like being on the water—in your element.

  Even though it’s only been days since I was on the river, it feels like years. I mentally rehearse the movement of water, the two tiny vortices that spiral away from the edges of my paddle on each stroke. Digging in and feeling my heart pump more oxygenated blood to my hungry muscles. Whatever chemical in your body causes stress and exhaustion, it can’t survive that.

  I arrive at the meeting place—a corner of the gym with soldierlike ranks of rowing machines. A tall, thickly muscled man with a shaved head, a stopwatch around his neck, and a clipboard under one arm greets me with a crushing handshake.

  “Wes Cartier. Novice and JV crew coach. You’re?”

  “Pruitt. First name Cash.”

  He pulls out his clipboard and checks off my name. “Pruitt. Ready to sweat?”

  “Yessir.”

  “What I like to hear. Hang tight; we’ll get started in a sec.”

  I scan the room for any familiar face, seeing none. Here and there, guys stand in little clumps talking. A few stand alone and apart like me.

  Coach Cartier claps and sticks his pinkies in his mouth and whistles. “Circle up.” He has a military bearing. “Welcome to crew. Racing is one of the purest and oldest forms of human sport. We’re born to race. Speed is survival. Not only that: The pack is survival. Teamwork is survival. Here, we work on speed and we work on teamwork. Every movement you make in a racing shell—which is what we call our boats—affects everyone else in the shell. There is no I in crew. But there is a we.”

  “Technically an ew,” some brave smart-ass behind me whispers.

  Coach Cartier cups his hand to his ear. “Sorry?”

  Everyone shakes their head—wasn’t me, nope—and stares at the ground.

  He continues. “I’d hate to interrupt anyone’s cleverness by talking about crew. Did we get it out of our systems?”

  More staring at the ground. Slight nods.

  “Good. Now, the first rule of speed is strength. So for the next several practices, the only water you’ll be getting near is what you use to rehydrate after you’ve sent weakness packing. We can’t work on technique until the conditioning is there.”

  My flagging spirit stumbles headlong and skins both knees. Being on the water was the one thing I needed today. Maybe at least a good workout and sweat will help.

  “And the good news,” Coach Cartier says, “is that because we’re working on pure strength and conditioning today, rather than finesse, we can jump right in.”

  He takes a few minutes to explain the workings of the rowing machines, aka ergometers, aka ergs. Then he starts assigning us to machines in alphabetical order. “Alvarez…Dunn…Haddad…Nguyen…Olsen…Pak…Pruitt…Schmitt…”

  And we begin. It’s one of those workouts where you think, Okay, I can survive this for a couple of minutes. But we don’t do it for a couple of minutes. We row in three-minute intervals, highest resistance, all-out, with short breaks. They don’t help. My heart feels like it’s pumping lava to my muscles and organs. Every breath only reminds my lungs of what oxygen is, only making them hungrier. This must be what Papaw feels like.

  During one of the intervals, when we’re frantica
lly trying to cram as much air back into our blood as we can, I make eye contact with the guy next to me. It’s the sort of look I’d imagine exchanged between soldiers pinned down under fire. Hope we make it out of this. Me too.

  We do somehow. Coach Cartier counts us down and we halt. I trudge a slow circle around the perimeter of the room, fighting nausea. Even this exertion feels dangerous and I stop, with my hands on my knees, bent over, gasping in the sweat-humid air.

  I sense someone beside me, mirroring my pose. It’s the guy who was on the erg next to me.

  “Bro,” he says between wheezing breaths. “I was this close to asking you to tell my parents I loved them.”

  “You’re assuming I would have survived.”

  “I can see it now—someone rolls up at my parents’ door: ‘At least your son died doing what he loved: transforming his finite number of heartbeats into mechanical energy to spin a fan on a rowing machine while a dude who looks like a Predator drone screams at him.’ ”

  I laugh even though I can’t afford the oxygen.

  The guy extends a sodden hand. “Alex Pak. Sorry, all sweaty.”

  I shake his hand. “Cash Pruitt. Sweaty too.”

  “Pshhh,” Alex says. “Man, I’m from Houston. There’s one weekend in January when you’re not soaked. That’s it for the year.”

  “I thought Tennessee was bad.”

  “You from there?”

  “Sawyer, Tennessee.”

  “We gonna have to throw down about Texas barbecue versus Tennessee?”

  I smile. “Maybe.”

  “Even if Tennessee wins, I’ll still rep that Korean barbecue hard.”

  “Never had it.”