The Sky Below

by Stacey D'Erasmo

  I didn’t say anything. The ceiling fan whispered, It’s not my fault, it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault.

  “At least I fucking did something!” I yelled. “At least I cared! Screw you! How were we ever going to get back—we can’t live here. This is a terrible place. I almost had enough, too. You ruined everything. We never should have come here.”

  My mother looked at me as if one of us were at the bottom of a well, with no rope. Then, regally, she stepped through a spill of money on the floor. “You shit,” she said quietly, and walked out. She slammed my door behind her, but it bounced back open, because it was a cheap door.

  I stood there sweating. The necklaces, the little plastic tubs of grape jelly, the lanyards and Mickey Mouse pins, and everything else, my whole glittering plan for the future, was scattered across the floor. There was money everywhere, but it wasn’t mine anymore. It wasn’t anyone’s.

  I picked up a ten and began folding it into a small green and white bird. I hadn’t forgotten how. I pointed a green and white beak.

  Caroline, frowning, came to my door. “Come on,” she said.

  I set the money bird carefully on my dresser to guard my wrecked room and followed my sister down the hall, out of the Sunburst Motel, and into the parking lot. Our mother watched silently, expressionlessly, from the balcony as we headed to the car. She threw the keys at us over the rail, hard, metal striking gravel. Caroline picked them up, we got in, and she drove, not looking at me, one arm out the window on her side of the car. Her black hair flew up all over from the hot wind, like she was jumping down a chute. I felt as if the pressure inside my head was changing, as if my ears were popping, though the road was as flat as ever.

  We went down a road I didn’t know and pulled off at a place I’d never been. The ground seemed firmer than in the other swamps. The water, when I put my hand in it, wasn’t cold, but it had another note in it, a darker note. The sun kept moving in and out of clouds, as if it was restless. Caroline walked ahead with slow, intent steps.

  “Let’s go back,” I said.

  She didn’t reply. Usually, the swamp opened up at a certain point, and it was like being inside some sort of primordial green plum. But this swamp was narrower, the trees overhead thicker and more entwined; when I looked behind us, I wasn’t certain I could find the way out. Dismally, stupidly, I wanted to go home, though I knew we couldn’t go back until our mother cooled down. I wondered if she was making a bonfire of the money, throwing bills into the flames one by one. My sneakers felt heavy on my feet. My balls itched; I discreetly scratched them. Caroline began whistling “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” and it made a pretty, thin sound there in the swamp. There wasn’t much to eat that wasn’t poisonous in this one: a few stringy purplish leaves. I knew we couldn’t live here; I didn’t need Caroline to tell me that. Maybe, I thought, we could live in the car and buy food in plastic packages from rest stops. I could earn our keep along the way. Maybe we could start driving and never go back. Maybe we could head north until we turned into ice versions of ourselves, with snow for hair.

  Caroline was peering at the trees. She seemed to be counting. “This way,” she said tersely, plunging to the left. I followed her like a leaky balloon on a string. I felt like I was bleeding to death, invisibly.

  “Okay.” She stopped at the foot of one of the taller swamp trees. A brown fungus covered one side. The tree listed slightly. Grasping the trunk, Caroline began climbing it, reaching high above her head for the lowest branch. She pulled herself up, looked down at me. “Come on, let’s go, Gabe. Get up here.” She rested easily in the tree, as if they were the best of friends, leaning back to back. She scrambled up, reached above her for the next branch. One of her sneakered feet disappeared into the leaves.

  I was afraid she might leave me here forever, keep going straight into the sky without me. I grabbed onto the trunk and pushed and pulled, scraping my arms, scraping my knees through my jeans on the wet, tough swamp bark. I followed her into the tree. She twisted ahead of me, going up gracefully, fast. When she got about halfway up, perhaps ten feet from the ground, she stopped. I made it onto the branch next to her, huffing.

  “All right, Gabe,” she said. She looked straight into my eyes with a raw solemnity that she rarely let me see these days. This, I knew, was her deepest secret. I squirmed, not sure I really wanted to know her deepest secret. She reached into her back pocket, took out a plastic bag, dipped her hand inside, and briskly rubbed something all over her arms, as if she was putting on suntan lotion, though it was nearly dusk in the swamp, the day’s light rust-colored, shadows lengthening around us. She grabbed my hand and put something in it, a dab of some mushy, grainy stuff. “We don’t have that much time before it gets dark.” She closed her eyes, balanced perfectly on her branch, and extended her arms, turning her palms up. Her hands and arms were shining. “Shhhh.”

  Straddling my branch, I limply held up my palm with the mushy grainy stuff in it. I kept my eyes open. My sister was so weird, I thought. I wondered if my mother was crushing all my treasure, tossing it out the motel windows, putting it on the road and letting cars run over it. I imagined it shining on the asphalt, and then the crunch of the cheap metal under tires. The tires blowing out, cars skidding sideways, killing everyone inside. Bloody, whimpering dogs. The swamp smelled of life and rot, and my sister, on the branch next to me, gave off the calm alertness of a swamp creature blending into its home turf. Her crazy black hair seemed to have been pulled from the shaggy tree we sat in, and to be reaching to retwine itself among the branches. It was hot in this swamp; it seemed hotter than it had been outside of it, as if the heat of the day had collected and condensed in here, caught and held by the abundant undergrowth, waiting for the tide of night to cool it. Where we sat felt like the exact edge of day and night, heat and coolness, earth and air. The tree against my back was sticky and sharp, holding and biting me at the same time.

  We were both sweating, but Caroline was smiling, a look of concentration, of will, wrinkling her brow. I tried not to think about how high up we were. I wondered if she knew how strange she was. No wonder she didn’t have any boyfriends. Mosquitoes began biting me as the dusk thickened. Outlines blurred. I slapped at my arm, and Caroline again, sternly, hushed me. “Fuck you,” I said, but then I was quiet anyway. The sooner she was done, the sooner we could go home and I could see if any of my treasure was left. I particularly wanted to see if any of the Christmas trees with the rubies at the top—even though I knew they weren’t really rubies—had survived. I focused on how bored I was and how stupid the swamp was. Gingerly, I licked at the dab of stuff Caroline had put in my palm. It was greasy and sweet; I sort of liked it.

  They weren’t there, and then they were. They seemed to arrive so suddenly that I might have said they emerged from her hair, that the ends of her black hair had turned into small black birds with yellow wings, but of course that isn’t true. They flew to her and landed softly on her outstretched hands, her arms. They settled on her shoulders and the top of her head. They seemed to bring a light with them, but maybe it was a sound, or a motion. Or it might have been a feeling, or something that they knew all together. Caroline smiled, winced as they pulled at her hair, keeping her eyes closed. They jostled one another, dipping at her shining hands and arms. They were the most gorgeous things I had ever seen, and my sister seemed to be dissolving into them beginning with her outer edges, undoing herself into a flock of small birds streaked with gold. Her arms were their branches; her hair was their nest; the black-and-gold birds were her thoughts whirling in the air around her. Her eyes were closed. She had become something else. She was so beautiful. She was elsewhere. The gods had chosen her, they had changed her, they were changing her before my eyes. More than anything in the world, I wanted that to happen to me.

  I held out my hand with the stuff in it. I did it like Caroline, wincing, palm up, but with my eyes open so I could see what to do next. She didn’t move, so I didn’t move. I wanted them to cover
me the way they covered Caroline, to fill my arms and shoulders with their wildness, to pull on my earlobes and tug at my hair and tell me their secrets and take me with them. I held out my hand, waiting, trying very hard not to cry or fall out of the tree like an idiot. A few of them hovered near me but didn’t land, wings whirring. “Caroline,” I whispered. “Hey.”

  She frowned, making a short sharp sound, like a bark, that meant I was supposed to shut up.

  I was damp with sweat and longing and the first swelling of rage. If they didn’t come to me, I might be stuck in the swamp, petrified, for eternity. My arm was beginning to quiver, but I didn’t give in. I could stay here as long as she could, longer, as long as it took. I squinted, held my breath. They were so close. Caroline’s branch was inches from mine. Their cheeps were like small tears in the night, shreds of bright noise from another world very close by where it bent briefly, recklessly near to ours. I wanted to see it so badly. I needed to sneeze, but held it back for fear it would scare them away. I was pierced with jealousy, because I knew now that this was where Caroline had been going. She’d been practicing with her relentless fervor, and she was way ahead of me. I knew both that she was doing me a favor, giving me her best gift, and that I might never, ever catch up.

  I concentrated as hard as I could on keeping my arm steady. At last there was the tiny pressure of a bird’s foot, a few quick pecks. Then gone. The memory of the unbearable brightness. My empty hand. Caroline opened her eyes and smiled at me, and in a rush, as if a bell had rung, all the birds rose and flew off, a few with strands of Caroline’s wavy black hair trailing from their beaks. Caroline exhaled loudly, wiped her hands on her jeans, and pulled her hair off her forehead into a rough knot on top of her head.

  It was over. She was her usual weird self again. I realized that we were both covered in swamp dirt and tree junk and whatever that sticky homemade crap was, that we were sweaty and filthy and bitten to shit by mosquitoes that had feasted on us along with the birds. When I scratched my arm, I scratched up skin and mud together, indistinguishable. There was bird shit on one of Caroline’s thick eyebrows.

  “See?” she said. She was so happy.

  I nodded. I did see. And it was already gone. Leaving just a bright spot, like a mirror, in me, waiting for the reflection to return, like the sun sliding into view across the mirror’s face. I knew it might be a very long time, with all the trouble I was in. Fucking fat Jenny. My fucking bad luck. But the bright spot: I could live there until they came back for me.

  “Okay. Look out climbing down. That’s when I always slip.”

  I clambered down ahead of her as fast as I could, swinging from branch to branch, monkeyish, letting go of the second-to-last one too soon and slamming heavily into the swamp dirt.

  “Goddamnit, Gabe,” said Caroline, making her way down carefully, back to being the peculiar nerd she was. “I told you.”

  I just laughed, lying on my back in the swamp. My knees and my spine were banging with pain by the time we made it back out in the dark, but I was calm.

  The motel was quiet when we got home. My mother had locked me out of my room, but I didn’t care. I let myself into an empty motel room and slept on top of the scratchy covers. I dreamed that my light was sliding in and out of a large darkness. The next morning, Caroline and I didn’t talk about where we’d been. Our mother didn’t ask. When she let me back into my room, it had been swept clean. Nothing under the bed at all.

  And then the way it worked was this: since Jenny was the one going to the dealer, and since she was older (which I didn’t know until then, that they’d held her back more than once, she was actually almost eighteen, her real name was Genevieve, who was she?), if I testified against her she’d be under more pressure to turn in the Fort Lauderdale guys. Which I did. And which she did. The court sent her to juvenile detention. It sent me to a different high school, where I had to talk to an ugly counselor every day for a month.

  I was a man in exile.

  I didn’t go to the bus station anymore. I wondered if they missed me, my kneeling men. Who did they kneel for now? Who had they knelt for before?

  The cops took everything that was in the shoeboxes. I’d still like to know what they did with it all, how they spent my money. I could feel the cold hollow, the invisible ruins, where the shoeboxes had once been, under me as I slept. It gave me bad dreams. To ward them off, I slipped into my mother’s room one day when she had gone to one of her endless bridge afternoons. Her room was extraordinarily neat, like she had joined the army. The white sheets, the two modest pillows, were crisp as salutes on the high, single bed. The venetian blinds shone like clean blades. She had an antique mahogany dresser with curly feet that she’d refinished with great determination; on the dresser was a small, square mirror in an oak frame. The floor was no-color linoleum, just like everywhere else in the Sunburst, though hers was scrubbed until it was almost a not unpleasant beige, with maroon stars. When had she become so selective? No more paisley. Velvet banished. Though we lived in Florida, she had never saved a single shell.

  I looked at my face in her small square of mirror: Gabriel, Brewster, midafternoon. The funny thing was that I couldn’t see G anymore. G had vanished entirely. I wasn’t sure if I even missed him. I was Gabe now. Gabe the fuck-up, the skinny red-headed kid who lived at the Sunburst Motel and got expelled from Brewster High for dealing drugs.

  At first I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I looked on the bedside table, in its one drawer—an old New Yorker, a stick of lip balm, and a calculator. I looked under the bed: nothing but scrubbed linoleum. I was sure it was here somewhere, and I knew it wasn’t downstairs in our little tilted motel living room, where we almost never opened the curtains, since we were on the ground floor. The dresser scowled at me, warning me off. With a certain amount of trepidation, I opened her closet door. Inside, set precisely heel to heel, toe to toe, were her work shoes: black, laced, no heel, thick sole. White insoles that bore the faint impression of her feet. A slight bump on the left shoe that marked her bunion. In the back, a cheap pair of heels with silver buckles, a few pairs of sneakers splattered with paint and stain, the soft gray slippers Caroline and I had given her for Christmas that she never wore. They still looked new. A belted coat, a blue dress, a poncho the color of an Appaloosa pony that I remembered from the Bishop days, all on hangers.

  I was tall enough now to reach the high closet shelf. I felt around. I was sure that, secretly, she had kept it. She couldn’t have thrown that overboard. No matter the sharp-cornered white sheets, the square of mirror barely big enough to see your face: she was inside somewhere, like a spirit in a rock. I felt carefully past boxes, a phone book, a flashlight, then there it was, its crumbling spine in my hands. I was almost crying as I took it down, so gingerly, from the high shelf. I stood by the window and let it fall open, as if magically: there was the fleeing girl, Daphne, her arms twining and leafing, her untied sandal; Phaethon tumbling headfirst from his chariot with the sun and moon and stars all whirling chaotically above him; a bull (Zeus, in disguise) with a vast span of lethally sharp horns swimming in the swirling, thick lines that were the sea. Last, most thrilling, the savage Tereus becoming a bird—crest of his head, beak of his nose, sword in one hand, feathers sprouting almost obscenely from the other. The feathers were etched, cartoonish, aggressive. I turned the pages with my dirty, nicotine-stained hands, entranced.

  I picked up a few stray navy-blue scraps of spine that had fallen to the floor. I wouldn’t leave any traces. Although my mother wasn’t home—no one was home except the spacy, pregnant girl who worked the desk on weekdays—I tucked the big, old book against my chest, under my shirt, and spirited it away to my room, where I covered it in plastic wrap and slid it between the mattress and the box spring. I didn’t have any cheap porn under there; my life, as far as I could tell, was cheap porn. Instead, I had the book from before, the most important one, the one that told all about how the gods took pity on those who were inconsolable in the
ir grief, turning them into animals and trees and stars. I wished the gods would take pity on me and turn me into something, into anything.

  But I never did go back to that swamp, that certain tree, the one the gods clearly knew about. I told myself I didn’t know where the tree was, I didn’t know how to make that stuff that summoned them, which was true, but it was more like I was saving it for some other time, in a better future somewhere else. Keeping it a secret, even from myself. Instead, now, between me and the cold ruins where the shoeboxes used to be, I had this middle earth of incredible stories, this metamorphosing populace. I felt them all furling and unfurling underneath me at night, bumping into me with their horns and fins and branches, murmuring and clucking and lowing. They comforted me almost as much as masturbating did, and when I had my cock in my hand I felt them draw close, closer, closer still, drawn by the scent. In this way, for a little while every night, the gods did take pity on me. Stiffening, I was a beast in that magic bestiary, an animal, all the animals, and all the trees, and all the rivers. But in the morning I was back to being the same guy.

  On my second day at the new school, I got a girlfriend with ratty blond hair and screwed her all the time. I failed as much as you could fail and still graduate, just for the hell of it. I used the diploma for rolling papers. Jenny wrote me some terrible, mean letters from juvenile detention. I couldn’t have been all the things she said I was, but I suspected that maybe I was a few of them. I wore dirty jeans and felt as if I were an old plastic bathtub toy in a condemned building, a dolphin flecked with rotting spots. Felicia called, but I didn’t have much to say. My new ratty girlfriend loved to hear about the shoeboxes and the whole affair. I left out the bus station bathroom part. “I can’t believe you did that, G,” she’d say admiringly, and pinch one of my nipples. She thought I was some kind of sexy, foreign criminal, a hard case who left girls crying in doorways in their underwear.