Winged Shoes and a Shield

by Don Bajema

  “In a minute.” “I will.” “I did.” “Oh, I forgot.”

  Eddie wanted to tell her he’d do anything for her. Steal, lie, leave home, take her anywhere. Instead he played catch with her brother. Without showing the least effort, he threw electric blue lines that smacked into her brother’s glove the instant they left his fingers. He knew she could hear the ball hissing from where she slouched against the doorjamb. Eddie threw harder. Her brother showed his bravery, standing in front of an eighty-mile-an-hour fastball with a casual blank expression on his face, his eyes as big as saucers. Eddie spoke to her as Grant’s return throw popped into his own glove. “Hey, Sis.”

  She let his words hang in the air, timing her response to the moment before he’d think she was ignoring him. “Eddie, don’t throw so hard.”

  To show her who was king of this street, who ruled her brothers and the other boys around those canyons, Eddie jerked his chin over the back yard fence and he and the brothers vanished in silence for those canyons, and the shore breaks, and the ballparks, and the matinees, and the girls Eddie’s age. Girls he lured out at night into the canyons and behind the bushes, or into unlocked cars. Girls who removed his hands from their breasts. Girls who pressed their knees together, or crossed their legs as Eddie felt their sweating faces, and heard their strange throaty whispers telling him, “No. No. No, Eddie.” Girls he had been pretending were the bad girl from Texas, ever since she had left town.

  BOY IN THE AIR

  A stack of books cutting into my forearm, the wind blowing in my face, I’m a seventh grader walking home from school. I’ve made it a couple of blocks and am presently making my way past the high school athletic field, I’m noticing cars and kids converging with loud chatter and a certain kind of anticipation toward the wide-swung chain-link gate. There must be a couple of hundred kids flowing through that gate and taking their seats in the stands. I won’t ask anyone what’s going on, but it seems to be something pretty good, although I haven’t heard about it. I’m standing in the way, getting jostled, and doing a slow spin trying to balance the stack of books and to “get the hell out of the way,” as I am being advised. I manage to get to one side of the river of teenagers and pretend to be doing something other than trying to find out if it costs money to get in, because I don’t have any and I don’t need the embarrassment. Most of the time I feel invisible, and in fact I never attract much attention unless I’m in the way. So I stand there shirttail-out in my Converse All-Stars, my orange hair and freckles, getting tired in the hotter-than-usual April sun. I don’t recognize any of these kids, except for one or two of the older brothers or sisters of my friends, who pass by me in silence. I know my place.

  Sitting on my books waiting for the crush of kids to lighten, I dig some wax out of my ear casually, burp loudly with a certain aplomb, spread my knees wide and pull my socks up so that my white legs don’t show beneath my khaki pants. “Fuck you guys,” I think. “I’ll rule this place in a couple of years.” One of those old Fords that have all the edges rounded out and have dusty, vomited-in-smelling upholstery screeches up and runs over the curb. The Ford is full of girls. Not three in front, and four in the back, but more like five in the front and ten in the back. All the windows are down and arms and an ankle stick out. The radio is loud. The girls are singing “Angel Baby,” as loudly and sincerely as possible. I stand up, and put my hand in my pocket. Then I sit back down, resume my former position but twist my butt over so that I can get a better view of them. By now they are untangling and swearing at each other as shoes scrape down unlucky shins, and elbows balance awkwardly and painfully in sensitive, newly formed places. More laughs, and the doors bounce open. If I look up a skirt no one notices and I am poker-faced.

  I’ve seen girls in packs before and I know that one does not want to be noticed by them under most circumstances. As they always do, they wait until their full number is standing in a close knot beside the door. Purses are found, hair is brushed, mirrors are flashing, and lipstick is borrowed. This takes twenty-five seconds. As though by genetic imprint, like a flock of birds, they make the final dress-press with hands, tilt their chins just right, and stroll slowly and silently toward the gate.

  I see their calves. Their feet are as big or bigger than mine. They have veins showing in their feet, and the calves are shaved smooth and tanned brown. I breathe deep and notice it before I sigh. I close my mouth and the chestful of air stops at my closed mouth and passes silently out of my nose. My eyes are bugging so I turn toward the opposite direction and notice that the gate area is empty and there is no ticket booth. Okey dokey.

  I turn and three of the flock are standing next to me. They are saying something to me. They are asking me an urgent question. They are expecting an answer. I am still sitting on my books. I stand up slowly, gathering my thoughts as though I were a rodeo star recovering from an eight-

  second ride on Oscar. I brush off my butt, why I don’t know, and I say, “Huh?” I notice that my eyebrows are somewhere around my hairline and that my voice has squeaked. I clear my throat and compose my face. It doesn’t work. The girls are looking at me with a great deal of impatience and they know I am a little jerk. One girl has already given up in disgust. Another one is saying “I said, is Rick Hanks jumping here today?” I don’t have any idea. But I know that someone might see me talking to these high school girls with their women’s bodies and I have to somehow prolong the occasion. I do not want to be lacking in anything, information about Rick Hanks, whoever that lucky boy must be, wit, or anything. I get too worked up, and the sentence I begin turns into a stammer. My mouth will not cooperate and it keeps stammering. The best-looking girl looks right over my shoulder and this makes me turn around. I hear her voice saying, “There’s the bus.” All the girls see the bus from Hoover High pulling into an adjacent parking lot. These are Hoover girls looking for a jumper named Rick Hanks.

  My moment has passed. I imagine I hear a “never mind” as the girls disappear but I am probably being kind to myself. I see Junior Osuna looking at me out of the corner of my eye. I stoop to pick up my books and try to act like maybe I’m with these girls and I follow a pace and a half behind them toward the gate. I give that up pretty quick and feel foolish. I then acknowledge Junior with a “Did you see that?” leer behind the girls’ backs. But Junior is walking across the street picking his nose. I’m still walking forward with my head turned. I am not looking where I am going, in other words, and manage to stumble in the dirt. This kicks up a fair amount of dust and sand, which coats the heel and instep of one of the girls walking in front of me. I bump into her as she empties out her shoe. I mumble an apology. She’s so happy to be seeing Rick that she smiles and says, “That’s OK.” I melt. She leaves and I look for a place to sit in the stands, which are full.

  Now I am in front of about a hundred kids and even a few adults. I am facing a sea of faces. I feel like a complete goon. I cannot stand to look for a seat for more than four seconds, I would rather sit on roofing nails. I wander off to the side of the stands and lean on a fence with the little brothers and sisters of the athletes on the field. Little kids. I move to the other side of the stands, walking behind the stands this time, and stand near some trees that obstruct most of the view. The place smells to high heaven from the piles of neighbors’ dog shit. I am alone at least.

  Hoover’s track team wears maroon sweats. They are an integrated team of Negroes and whites. They are walking in the direction of the field in knots of five or six. The home team wears white sweats and is all white. I wonder which boy is Rick Hanks. I search the thirty or so maroon figures looking for someone who could pull a carload of bitchin’ girls to see him jump. I can’t tell.

  A smallish white boy appears in the bus doorway. All his teammates are on the field. One boy with three coaches steps down the stairs. As soon as he is out of the bus, he smiles a huge smile. The girls in the stands are on their feet yelling “Rick”
and waving at him. He is walking like this happens all the time. He breaks into a light trot toward the high-jump pit. This is enough to get the girls louder for a second. They sit down in silence, and then they start mumbling to each other. I can hear them. Most of the words are along the line of cute, so cute, or sooo cuuute. Well, cute I don’t know, but certainly improbable. He’s got a baby face, a Kingston Trio haircut, and with the three other guys he now walks with, he looks like a younger brother. Except for something. What, I don’t know. I look into the stands and I can tell that all the Hoover kids are feeling pretty good to be going to the same school as Rick Hanks.

  The track is bright in the sunshine, the wind is dying down. There are red, blue, and white plastic triangles hanging in long lines all around the infield. The chalk is in even lines all around the huge track. The hurdles are sitting in stacks by the straightaway. The high-jump pit and the pole-vault pit are mountains of fragrant wood shavings and sawdust. The athletes are jogging, stretching, jumping up and down, passing batons, and every face looks like it means business. Men in red jackets are carrying pistols. Coaches are standing in conference with clipboards, pointing and directing the occasional athlete that approaches. A man sits at a table with two large loudspeakers, one facing the stands and the other facing the infield. The man at the table shuffles a stack of papers. The stands sound like a gigantic beehive. I am beside myself with energy.

  The jumpers take turns warming up by jumping over the bar at a fairly low height. It looks about 5' or 5'6". Well, I should say that the home team jumpers are jumping. The Hoover guys are elsewhere. Finally they join the three white-uniformed jumpers. One Hoover guy jumps a couple of times clearing the bar by a lot, maybe a foot. The home team jumpers begin to sit down. Rick Hanks is over by the football goalpost, reading a book. A few minutes later, after the other jumpers have begun to settle down, he appears to be advising his teammates on their approach to the bar and to the take-off area. Each boy stands under the bar and swings his leg up toward it. Some boys do this many times, too many times. It is clear they are trying to appear to know what they are doing, but they seem nervous. Rick Hanks gets a tape measure from one of the coaches and with the help of a teammate stretches it from the near side of the crossbar, out several feet into the grass infield. He sticks an ice pick on a measured spot and winds up the tape. One of the other guys returns it to the coach. Rick Hanks stands motionless at the spot. He goes over every inch of the ground leading to the take-off spot — for twenty minutes. He tries out his steps, and then gets the tape measure and measures it all over again. He seems to be staring at the bar. He drops his head and with the first step of his first warm-up jump, everything in the stands, on the field, in the universe stops. Rick Hanks takes nine even steps, smooth and relaxed, with absolute purpose and ease. He does not stop at the take-off spot. His run and take-off combine in a single explosive instant. He shoots lightly into the San Diego sunlight, rises up, passes above the bar immediately, continues rising, rolls slowly hovering high in the air for what seems to be four heartbeats, and slowly descends into the sawdust. He brushes himself off as he returns to his book.

  I am sure the girls responded in some manner. I know I heard a couple of hoots from the stands, a smattering of applause, and a grown man yelled something. I am sure that anyone who saw Rick jump that day was happy and inspired to see a boy eventually jump 6'10". But for me the world had not begun to turn yet. I was riveted to the boy reading on the lawn, lying on one side, propped on an elbow, his chin in his hand, his twitching foot the only indication of energy. A boy who knew something. A not-so-special boy who knew how to hover in the air, and do something so beautiful and so dramatic that he could let it speak for him.

  “YOU’RE ON . . .”

  The stakes are always so high. From the very beginning I thought it must be a complex combination of guts, glory, luck, and resolve. But I was looking too hard. If it had been a snake, it would have bit me. All the stakes are high, it shouldn’t have thrown me off. As usual, I guess, I wanted it simplified.

  It turned out to be more difficult than simply “Keep your eye on the ball.” An old Indian used to drink behind our Little League Park. A home run was a lost ball. I was still ignoring the warning track in those days. After bouncing my head off the chain-link fence with a miracle disguised as the third out stuck in my glove, I lay still on the grass for an eternity. I knew a dramatic moment when I felt one. Slowly I raised my glove above my prostrate body. My dugout, of course, became a Vienna choir of cheers. Ecstatic, and bounding toward my team, I heard the Indian’s voice pulling me down to earth, growling, “Relax.” I told him to speak to me in English. His laughing fit lasted the next two extra innings. We lost.

  For the next few days, the Indian was determined to teach me to hit. He made his own assumptions, I guess. He thought I’d be motivated by his words, had a direction to begin with, and really wanted to hit the ball in the first place. I didn’t.

  My field of glory was out there. Not in some box with a fat man in black breathing down my neck, pointing out which ball I could have hit. I lived in the field, in the unpredictable moments of defense. I didn’t want anything served up, I didn’t want to think about a trick pitch. My life was never gonna be a count of three or four.

  But the huge face with the purple alcoholic lips kept insisting, “Keep your eye on the ball.” I knew it was the wrong advice for me. With a nervous system resounding like a perpetually rung tuning fork, I became a strike-out king. I started swinging the Louisville 31 about the time the dust popped out of the catcher’s mitt. I wasn’t gonna look harder, I wasn’t gonna look at all.

  The Indian must have known that. He had to. I was born to live above the letters and below the knee. Out of the strike zone. His advice just turned me on my heels and sent me walking, emptying the Red Hots down my throat, thinking in a whisper . . . speak to me in English.

  I liked that Indian, I think he was telling me about something he had once but didn’t own anymore. It took me a long time to understand it. But now, to this very day, every time a fastball hisses at my heart, I can hear his voice echoing. “Take your base.”

  Clarity

  It rains accidentally, or it rains on purpose. It rains, we know that for sure. At weird intervals, for a moment, or for a couple of celestial days, I’d get it all. I could see it all plain, I’d be absolved of all these sins, I’d have the blessing of cognizance and capacity. I’d be living right then and there. But it evaporates. It leaves no trail. When it’s gone, you feel left behind, on fire, in the glare, wishing that clarity would drop out of the sky and soak your long hair, and wash your burning face.

  Next Fall

  Sex does the same thing. Hours where whatever ground your feet are planted on, the rest of your body is wrapped in the confusing immersion of hers and yours. Warm rapids rolling and bouncing into a flat placid space, revolving slowly in a fainting spin toward the lip of the next fall. Old women whisper about it, saying to anyone who’ll listen, that it’s just like youth, one day it just doesn’t come back. It’s gone, except in annoying dreams that make the fabric of their clothes irritate them here, here and here. They look away, and their fingers draw light circles on their soft cheeks, they get up and walk into another room.

  The magic of a principled universe has us on our knees anyway, there’s no need to bend down. We stand in our gain, and walk to our loss. There’s nothing to remember and only ourselves to forget.

  BLACKROAD

  When there’s nothing left of America to sell, try a piece of blacktop. Just go right out there in the heat of the summer and kick off a hunk or two by the side of the road. Take it back to your doorway, your park bench, your abandoned car. It’ll give you something productive to do while you wait for the rest of your life in the two-day-long line, once a month, every month, for the maybe-it-works-maybe-it-doesn’t anti-AIDS vaccine. And if you can’t pay for your vaccine again thi
s month, you can use a chunk of asphalt to help you take the change off the other homeless people you used to step over every day.

  You see the beauty of it? It’s versatile. Bust out a piece of your car’s rearview mirror. Get the light just right and it’s as good as a microscope. Now just sit down and get a good long look at that gritty piece of oily shit, that smelly piece of America, that black hunk.

  What you have there is the hottest-selling item in the world today. You just need a little imagination. You’ll want to catalog the things of value in each piece. And it is rich, and just by association, you are too. Look close. You are holding American nostalgia right there in your hand. You’ve got product and you can sell it.

  Go ahead, collar any fool. Show him the tiny pieces of roadkill and hit-and-run. Little scraps of flesh and hair, feathers and blood — every damn thing that walks, crawls, swims, or flies on this rancid continent is stuck to that tar baby. Minerals? Well, you can pick out a bit of rusting natural resource in any piece; it’s standard. Just follow the wasted trail of any romantic redneck who aimed a Bud can at the “Dangerous Curve” sign ahead.

  Give your prospective buyer a taste of the shit-splash and piss from the abolitionists and Negroes who were out of place, out of time, out of luck and, with unanswered prayers, hanging right here above this very road. There’s probably a faint trace of the marshmallow sandwich from the happy picnic under the kicking feet above.

  You can stick a piece next to your pigeon’s ear and let him hear the tires screeching out of control from five thousand prom nights. You’ll hear the abruptly ending pleas of the cheerleader’s last ride. There’s Janis, singing about a drifter who decided to squirt and scram instead of riding along with some trucker trying to remember another song. You can tell that pinched-faced woman trying to sell her kids off to rich folks for a good price that she’s already rich if she’s holding a piece marked with the treads of the weight of Elvis as he spun the Cadillac around for one more peanut-butter-honey-and-fried-banana sandwich.