Winged Shoes and a Shield

by Don Bajema

  Clifford’s head wobbled on his broken neck. His arms flapped awkwardly; a giant blood blister formed like a bruised peach over the mushy crown of his head. His ear hit the wind-wing support bar and sent blood splattering out the window and over the back of the bench seat. He shit his pants, in a single convulsive explosion; a huge volume of piss firehosed down his pant leg. His legs slid to the left along the floor, knocking Lyle’s feet off the pedals. His paralyzed body flopped lengthwise on the floor.

  Lyle tried frantically to kick the heavy legs off the brake and accelerator pedals. He screamed when he realized the truck was describing a slow arc with the front of the hood falling. He tried to remember the position of the wheel, but it didn’t matter. The truck, in a solid bounce, crammed into the ditch on the left side of the road. Lyle’s forehead sent a shower of broken glass into the air. His head popped through the pre-safety-plate glass windshield and snapped off on the bottom of the jagged hole. His head bounced once on the fender near the left headlight, right next to the spot wiped clean by the jeans of the girl he thought he loved, and had just seen in his rearview mirror for the second time this morning.

  The girl paused as she noticed an abrupt end to the brown cloud of dust leading diagonally across the field to her left.

  She wondered what the boys in the truck were stopping for. She shrugged and kept stumbling down the road.

  BOY IN THE AIR 2

  You would have to have been in that stadium, and heard the echo every time the gun went off. You’d have to have been in the bottom, on the black asphalt with the white lines setting the limits of the lanes and the beginnings and the ends. You’d have to have been sensitive to the irony of the black surface and the ruled white lines — and somehow linked it all with an appreciation and awe of the threat to you, and the promise to all of black athletic talent.

  You’d have to have been there twenty-five years ago when cities ignited, fists were clenched in love and in hate, and at the same goddamn time. You’d have to have red hair, be thin with milk-white skin tinted orange from the hot spring sun of this border town in the southwestern corner between the Mexican border and the blue Pacific.

  You’d have to be thirteen years old and dreaming of a national record in the running broad jump as they called it in those days. You’d have to be consumed with the knowledge that some kid in New Jersey had jumped 19 feet 3 inches. You’d have to accept that you were the unchallenged best jumper out of thousands of kids, except black ones, by jumping just over 17 feet. You’d listen to Keith Richards, or some other Delta blues imitator, and understand as you heard “King Bee,” that the line could be crossed in expression, but the mystery of color would never change. You’d have heard of another white rocker who just had to be named Tripp. Arnold Tripp who had been king of it all just ten years ago. Tripp the fastest boy in San Diego whose career was dumped at the state meet, when the coaches raced him on a torn hamstring — because they wanted someone to beat the niggers. They had their Tarzan. You’d have to hate both of the words, Tarzan as much as nigger. You’d still have to bring your white skin with you to the starting line, and snort in contempt at the attitudes of both colors when the resentment came from the blacks, and racist encouragement was offered from the whites.

  You’d have to be in a stadium that echoed not only with the sound of pistol shots, but also with the sound of girls’ voices high and wild with humor and sexual anticipation as they waited for Louis Rey to take his next jump. You’d have to be sitting on the grass in the blazing sun at ten o’clock on a May morning looking indirectly at and listening intently to the conversation directed at a boy your own age, who came from a world with ten times the life and death of your own. Sitting there on the grass listening to the most beautiful girls in the world, gleaming white teeth, almond eyes, dark tanned deep black skin, tight skirts, white angel blouses that had heavy breasts bursting light and perfect under buttons that split and revealed black skin — and those shoes.

  You’d see Louis Rey (no one ever called him just Rey, or just Louis, because he was Louis Rey). Thin and muscular with large bugging eyes and a snarl for a mouth when he wasn’t smiling and hair that was becoming an Afro, skin oiled to a shine and every bit the urban Masai warrior walking proud and defiant, dominant and beautiful, and better than you at what you wanted to be best at more than anything in the world. You’d watch him intently because you had enough of it yourself to know what a genius looked like, but not what one acted like, as you waited for your next jump. You’d watch the girls in the stands who were at one moment on the coolest nonchalant trip, unconcerned and casual, and the next instant spreading their legs right in the twentieth row laughing and telling Louis Rey they had something for him. Louis Rey was smiling and promising all of them a ride in his brother’s car. Sharing the laugh when one of the girls asked which brother’s car it would be this time since he had taken them for at least ten rides this spring in different cars and he only had three brothers. The laugh peaked when it was noted that one of his brothers was only six. Louis Rey just smiled and took his place at the end of the runway, as the entire stadium watched him. He raised his hand lightly and told the official at the take-off board, “Scratch,” and jogged off across the field to talk to some older guys in trench coats with James Brown conks who seemed certain to be packing revolvers.

  You’d take the lead hitting 18'10" on your next jump and there would be a spattering of applause coming from the white section high in the shade of the stadium. The announcer would declare that with one jump to go you were less than 6" from the long-standing national record. You’d be wishing he never said that. You would steal a look at Louis Rey who never flinched at the announcement, but looked at the knot of white spectators as they called encouragement down to you. Ten minutes later Louis Rey would accelerate to the board, hitting an approach speed that was simply faster than you could ever hope to run. He’d transfer that black velocity into a neat thud and plant into a vertical lift that suspended Louis Rey in the air for a beat and another beat, and your own internal timing would be feeling your body drop because any other boy in the world would have to be dropping by now. But Louis Rey would be holding his apex because he had come in with such speed and power that he was still hovering. The stadium full of people began to sense that something was happening, but not KNOWING like you did, and the energy would cause the universal turning of a few hundred heads focusing on the boy in the air who for this instant was stopping time. Sailing above the sand, freezing your reality, taking your breath away and pissing you off in the highest sense of compliment imaginable. Gradually he wound downward and blasted the sand in a spray that surged from under his body, which bounced silently with heavy impact at a distance that was just weird. Plain weird.

  “Foul,” the official yelled as the red flag snapped into the air. You’d say under your breath, “Yeah, he did foul,” as you jogged lightly and with more speed and spring in your legs than you ever felt before toward the hole out in the sand. It was sad, it was just the slightest foul. You’d hear your voice demanding of the official to “Measure it anyway,” because you had to know. The official didn’t need much prompting. Louis Rey was on the grass holding his head with tears streaming down his face, the stadium silent. Just you and the official moving in slow motion, and your voice still echoing “Measure it anyway.” As they did, Louis Rey’s body started shaking like he was expecting to endure a beating, and he did when he heard the official, “Jesus Christ, 22 feet, 3 inches.” Louis Rey stood up and looked at you. You said, “You’ll have other days Louis.” Louis Rey thinking you were being mean said, “Shut up, you white motherfucker.” You just stood there and said, “Nice jump anyway.” He stared at you, and the girls started yelling, “Fuck him up Louis,” because if they couldn’t see a record they could at least hope for a fight. Louis Rey said quietly only to me, “I already did.” And I smiled. And he smiled.

  SPHINX

  If yo
u were roasting in the desert, twenty-five miles from the nearest gas station, standing under the sun, shielding your eyes and watching a little dot making its way toward you, you would be struck by a major and a minor element. The major element would be the heat, and the fact that the solitary dot out there in the shimmering horizon is a junior high school boy. The minor element, the question: Why?

  Pulling focus on the long lens of your imagination, you see him sweating in his shorts and T-shirt, crunching over the decomposed granite under his boots. Facing the blasting sun hanging low on the horizon, his three canteens riding the small of his back in the shade.

  His boots are aptly named desert boots. They are perfect: tough tan leather, ankle high, laced in four holes on the arch to prevent hot sand and stones from falling inside, flexible thick gum soles. The boy loves those desert boots. The boots are almost the answer to our question.

  Eddie feels trapped in the culture of Southern California. He is tired of the billboards offering him his own masculinity through tobaccco products. He hates the promises of confirmation of his sexuality and desirability from sports car ads on T.V. He is insulted by the assurance that he earns power and validity through the possession of this product or that, by the distorted and grotesque subliminal images promising him manhood, sex, heroism. He mistrusts the easy rites of passage supplied by his culture. He knows the commercial influences are wrong, threatening something akin to what used to be sacred.

  He couldn’t have put any of this into words. He feels it, with the unique clarity and purest wisdom of adolescence. He had begun to think there was nothing he could do about it. The cultural bombardment was sneaky, constant, unavoidable. It took a gradual and relentless toll on his spirit.

  Months earlier he had heard some embarrassed, uneasy laughter from his friends, and a faint voice calling him back to the school yard. “Eddie, Eddie. What the fuck, Eddie. What are ya starin’ at?” He was focused on his feet, and the feet of seven of his friends all standing in a circle. Five of those friends, including Eddie, were wearing desert boots. These boots were not used in the desert, and they suddenly seemed to him part of a uniform for pretenders. If he could have taken them off his feet and thrown them into the bushes surrounding the quad he would have. Instead he stared, stunned.

  He felt like a complete fraud. A fraud who hung around with other frauds, being fraudulent. He thought of a lyric from a new song by one of his favorite bands . . . “and he can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarette as me.”

  The bell for class rang, scattering his friends in four directions. He lagged behind, sleepwalking his way to his math class, feeling contaminated by what a few minutes earlier had seemed like just a kids’ collective sense of style. He wandered to his seat late, his face blank, unconcerned as Mrs. Fields eyed him over her glasses while marking him tardy again. His heart began pounding wildly. He understood clearly, as each thought possessed him, that he was already on his way to the desert. He stuck his feet out in the aisle and smiled.

  The next weekend via Greyhound and his thumb, he was out there. He loved it. He loved it so much he kept it a secret. Once every month for the next six months, right into the teeth of summer his boots became Desert Boots. Capital D, capital B. He progressed from walking out and back in an hour or two, to elaborate treks often to fourteen hours, each time feeling his spirit gaining strength as he lost sight of civilization. In the last two months he started out in the dark before dawn, heading out for a point to be reached before nightfall.

  The sense of accomplishment upon reaching his destination was extended and reflected upon during the ride in the Greyhound back to San Diego, prolonged during his silent, noncommittal rides as a hitchhiker from the downtown bus terminal to the eastern section of town. Waving thanks and closing the door on the stranger driving, he’d cut across orangegroved back yards and along the floors of domesticated canyons, making his way up to his front steps. He’d swing open the screen door saying, “Hi Ma, ’say Dad,” and head for his bedroom.

  Surging with secret pride at his accomplishment, and relishing the exhausting toll it exacted, he’d examine the dust on his boots, the sunburned skin, the burnt-straw shock of hair, the salt-caked clothes. He’d open his bedroom window, take off his shorts, pull off the T-shirt and slip off those scarred, durable boots. Yanking the cool sheets back on his bed, he lay in the darkened room looking out into a world which now had boundaries no one who knew him could imagine.

  He’d see the tops of the apartments sitting in the canyon that bordered his back yard. He’d listen with amused contempt to the faint calling and laughing from the miniature golf course which sat — phony and fake, unreal and gaudy — at the end of his street. The yelps and hollers would grow fainter. The sounds of the people playing and flirting on the plastic grass and trick fairways would subside entirely. His breathing would change into a slow shallow rhythm, dropping like a stone down a well into deep sleep, splashing slowly into the sweet carnal dreams of early manhood.

  After these weekends he relished coming back to school, standing with his buddies in the circle, looking down at these boots and the boots of his friends and saying nothing.

  There he is, a tiny dot making his seventh desert excursion, swinging along in a comfortable walking rhythm, confident that he will reach his destination. He stops, fumbles with the strap attached to the canteens, twists the top off one, and takes a long swallow. He turns an about-face in the direction from which he’s come. The expanse of desert stretches flat, rippling in the growing heat. The peaks jutting in the far distance seem to Eddie as close as they appeared six hours ago. A gust of furnace wind blows over his face.

  As though this were a silent signal, he turns and begins walking again. He has broken his rhythm during this forty-second stop. He will struggle out of harmony. The heat will bear down on him for several long minutes before his stride becomes the metronome that permits his mantric mindless peace. His heart palpitates at the restart. His skin flushes unbearably hot. Sweat gushes off his face. Khaki shorts find a new way to bind and hold his balls, rubbing a deeper blister between his legs.

  Still in stride, he reaches into his front pocket and takes out a small sandwich bag. His fingers wiggle in the plastic and remove a melted glob of Vaseline. His hand slips under his waistband. He stops, spreads his legs, and smears the goo around his crotch. The boots crunch along once again, searching for the harmonic drum of his steps on the desert floor. The heat has swollen his penis. He feels awkward as it flexes and flops until it finds its spot, riding the rhythm between the hot wet shorts and his bare Vaselined leg.

  He begins to think of his best friend’s mother down the street. Beautiful, warm disposition, a light, insightful sense of humor. He imagines her flat-roofed stucco tract home. He sees her on her couch. Lying on her side in the dark with the curtains pulled against the afternoon sun. He sees her ankles crossed and her body stretched out. Her palm is resting behind her sweating neck, revealing a black patch of armpit next to her face. Her breasts are outlined in the transparent, sweat-soaked, white cotton blouse. She slowly lifts her hips and shifts her weight toward the outside of the couch. Her eyes are closed. She’s nearly asleep, wide-hipped, heavy-breasted, peaceful.

  The fan, which always sits on the parquet floor during hot weather, buzzes left to right, an admiring machine repeating its once-over from head to toe. Repeating toe to head, head to toe, over and over. The breeze hits her thighs, flowing up the stream of her loose dress, following the indented line to the V under her stomach, fluttering her dress, trembling in the V, and continuing. It buzzes over the stomach, up along her breasts, giving her nipples a pulsation of cool against the white wet cloth, causing a slight blush and tightness.

  The fan continues up the curves of her thin muscular neck and stops on her face to reverse direction. A few sweat-joined strands of jet-black hair reverberate along her cheek for a second. Asle
ep. Her face turns like a dark flower to the cool moon of the fan’s breeze. Her lips kiss the fan’s invisible pressure, her tongue sliding slowly along her upper lip, pulling cool drops of sweat into her mouth. The fan’s buzz changes to a deeper tone and travels down her body.

  Eddie stumbles, unconscious of the variation of his cadence, on and on, over and around the knee-high brush, zigzagging along the frying desert floor. “Where am I? I’m here and I’m OK . . . still have a canteen and a half of water . . . about four or five hours to the gas station . . . it’s only . . . four-thirty . . . shit . . . but . . . hell, the headlights on the road work pretty good . . . like last time . . . full moon up at eight . . . plenty of time . . . I’m not scared, am I?” His heart pounds slightly. He swallows and waits for panic. Nothing. “No.” He checks his bearings, turning in a slow circle, finding all the landmarks exactly where he wants them to be. “Four-thirty-two . . . four or five hours. . . .” His heart races. He inhales the hot air deeply, blows it out and inhales again, blows it out fast and inhales again.

  “Fuck that. Who the fuck cares what time it is or what the fuck time I get there? . . . I got the fucking direction and I don’t need to waste my fucking energy getting all the fuck worked up over fucking nothing. Fuck it. I ain’t scared and I’m not going to start getting fucking scared by wondering what the fuck time it is, or when the fuck I’m getting where the fuck I’m going.” You’d have heard him laughing at himself if you had happened to be in the middle of the Mojave in August 1964. “I’m not scared, I’m OK. Now where was I? Oh, yeah.”