Winged Shoes and a Shield

by Don Bajema

  He sees her again. It was the time he came to her house last week. It was really hot that day. Good thing he wasn’t out here then, 106 in San Diego. That’d be somewhere like 120 out here. Anyway, he went into her house in the late afternoon. The house was asleep, everything completely still. He trailed the absence of sound out to the back yard patio, found the woman’s husband and their kids passed out in the heat, lying on mattresses they had dragged outside into the shade.

  He could hear pipes and faucets sputter from the bathroom shower inside the house, settling into a high-pressure rain. The woman gasped for breath as she stepped into the shower. He argued with himself as he involuntarily walked back into the house. His silent steps wound from the patio along the corridor between the bedrooms and the bathroom. From the amplified splash and the sound of the spray and the bare feet squeaking against the wet porcelain, he determined that the bathroom door remained wide open. He could hear the water storming over her body and exploding in wet impact on the floor of the tub. Taking a breath, he turned the corner of the corridor and faced the bathroom. Cold steamless water ran over her silhouette, streams of water raced in clear webs on the inside of the shower curtain. The shadow bent at the waist and long arms stretched downward, breasts falling easily under shoulders, head down, hair hanging like a black waterfall.

  She stood up, arms pulling the mane of hair up and over her shoulders. Her face was tilted upward, her mouth open. The jet of water blasting against her neck. Cool air swirled from the bathroom door.

  She twisted the faucet shut. Eddie slipped out of the doorway and waited. Hearing her yank the shower curtain aside, he timed his voice to say, “Robert? . . .” with perfect innocence, and turned the corner. Her eyes met his. She was mid-stride, one leg suspended over the rim of the tub. She made no effort to cover herself, but froze there like a photograph, her eyes driving into his, betraying a mixture of curiosity and amusement.

  She stood there, skin gleaming, holding his eyes prisoner with a magnetic power within her gaze. He could see nothing of her but a terrifying and increasing depth behind her eyes. He felt his body go weightless in panic as he realized he was far beyond his depth.

  At that instant she smiled and reached smoothly for a towel and hugged it front of herself. She glanced out of the side of her eye, letting slip for an instant something that felt to Eddie like understanding and forgiveness, unsettling him even more and informing him immediately who held all the power. Her attitude shamed him, as though in these frozen instants he could see the real meaning of his mistake.

  It was as though she had expected, even recognized, the inevitability of this contact but was disappointed in what Eddie had done with it. Without a word, she told him he had gone about it entirely wrong, and although she would not use the word, he knew “fool” was the only one appropriate. His face burned, his eyes dropped down, unfocused. Still holding her image, almost but not quite registering his boots on the wooden floor, he said, “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  Her voice held a curious tone, coming from deeper in her chest, ironic and more real than it had ever sounded to him before. It made him imagine the way she would sound giving simple directions to a stranger who had lost his way. A matter-of-fact voice that in some way labeled him an equal. It seemed final and strangely welcome, spoken under her breath. A code, a frightening challenge, a whispered riddle. “Oh, yeah, sure, you are.”

  SHERRY BABY

  Eleven-thirty, a moonless night. Empty streets in suburbia. The tenth day of a heat wave. The Santa Ana gusts hot and dry, ninety-two degrees. Eddie Burnett is urinating under a street lamp on the middle of an asphalt road. It’s a tradition with him this summer. Standing in one spot, he turns a slow circle. His record is four revolutions, he calls them “piss rings.” He does this almost every night on the way home from his girlfriend’s house. The rings stain the road for several days. Each night a new overlapping ring, until he gets five. He’s doing this to commemorate the 1964 Summer Olympic Games.

  His girlfriend’s house? Not really. That is, it’s an unrequited love. Sherry likes him, but on the social level he’s considered much too goony for her. Eddie does not quite get it. He gets his hair cut by his mother, and dresses from the Navy PX, with no sense of style, and worse, no interest in it. The social situation means much less to Sherry than the sense that Eddie doesn’t trust something about himself. She puzzles at his obvious feeling of inferiority, despite qualities that should make him confident. She wishes Eddie would find that place that gives most of the other boys the ground they stand on. He seems to have lost that place, or had it stolen. Sherry’s curiosity and attraction comes from the feeling that Eddie knows where that place is, needs it, and thinks it’s worthless at the same time. He speaks in a code, using images that create unwholesome feelings in Sherry. They appeal to something essential inside of herself that she fears most. Just about everything he has to say makes Sherry laugh, or seems faintly intimidating, as though he knew some bitter secret.

  Eddie is especially happy tonight, though. Earlier today Sherry passed her Coke bottle to him. When he passed it back, she just finished it off without a second glance. Right in front of her friends. Didn’t check for backwash or anything. Didn’t even wipe the lip of the bottle. To Eddie and to the other kids, this gesture spoke of intimacy.

  Sherry’s hair is summer blond, her eyes are gray. She smells stunningly innocent. She’s ripe and it’s all operating, pulsating just under the surface. Eddie is in full-throttle, aching adolescent love.

  Mornings they meet at the beach. She rides with a girlfriend’s mother or older brother. Eddie thumbs out with a couple of the guys, making a heroic beach entrance from the far reaches of thirty miles of inland freeway.

  Sherry knows she drives them all crazy. She sees it as their problem and has zero patience with any boy who brings it up. The boys her own age can speak of almost nothing else in the minutes that follow seeing her. Men pull over in their cars to holler their promises to her. She sends them off stammering insults in her general direction, with about the same effect on Sherry as if they were bouncing off a nearby lamppost. Nothing disturbs her self-possession. For this quality Eddie adores her. Her beauty is only secondary.

  He is fascinated to discover that her self-possession is not the result of insensitivity or a callous stupidity, but is fueled by her tremendous intelligence and fierce courage.

  Tonight, as Eddie finishes off the last piss ring, he hears Sherry’s voice from the phone call that afternoon. Minutes earlier he had been in her front room keeping her company as she ironed clothes for the entire family. He hears her soft, trusting voice as she sobs tearful-hateful-father misunderstandings. Sherry is being punished for being out too late the night before with Eddie, and for coming home with grass stains on her white shorts.

  Eddie had walked her home. They were only a few minutes late. He made her laugh at something. There was an intoxicating jasmine bush hovering over their heads. Suddenly a wrestling match exploded. Sherry and Eddie struggled against each other on the warm, wet lawn. A blue light shone out of the window of some stranger’s house as they sat inside watching Ed Sullivan on T.V.

  When Sherry’s father inevitably forbade her to see Eddie, he spent his nights, wings clipped, perched on the rims of the canyons of his childhood, looking down into an expanse of darkness.

  He had already lost his direction. That summer he didn’t go to movies, or hang out with his friends. He didn’t go to the beach, or read, or learn to do anything new. He was overwhelmed. He needed Sherry.

  He dragged around the streets at night, trying to dodge the ultraconservative, ultramilitary San Diego police department. Eddie had already been introduced to the San Diego police. It had occurred on a sidewalk two summers earlier.

  Cops pull up in their cruiser. Cops jump out. Cops tell Eddie to stand still. Cops throw him facedown, pin his arms, shove his face into the concr
ete, twist his wrists, ratchet on the cuffs. Cops throw him in the cruiser, banging his head into the doorjamb as they toss him into the back seat. They drive him someplace, and tell him to get out. They walk him to a screen door, where a woman with a purple swollen face and a bloody cloth held over her mouth says, “No, that’s not him.”

  Cops take off the handcuffs. They try to tell Eddie they’re sorry, but add that he “answered the lady’s description.” Eddie looks at the short redheaded one, with stubble like rust on his chin. Immediately Eddie understands something about the genetics of outlaws. He senses something that is not in his favor, in fact quite the opposite. It’s as though from that moment on, he saw the line drawn in front of his feet. Something they think makes him wrong, and he knows makes him right. He looks at the cop and smiles, “That’s alright, I’ll always answer the description.” The rusty face contorts at an equation, the face cannot find the sum. The cop takes his stand behind authority: his weight settles on his spread feet, his pelvis shifts forward and this conversation is over. The other cop offers Eddie a ride home. He looks like his feelings are hurt when Eddie replies, “No, thanks.”

  After that initial meeting, it seemed the cops felt that they should find something he had done to justify their mistake. They picked him up and drove him home a lot. Parked squad car rumbling in front of his house, neighbors opening curtains watching his parents’ place.

  In response, Eddie committed as much malicious mischief as he possibly could for the next year and a half. Specifically motivated in his contest with the cops, generally motivated by the silent, stucco, lawn-sprinkler existence of San Diego. The contest was a tie. Eddie didn’t get caught, but he remained stuck within the quiet, soulless, white-pebbled roofs, all contained by the cops. But by the time he met, and lost, Sherry, he was leaving the community alone, and wasting his time by himself.

  Sherry was in a car with her big brother and one of his friends. Eddie was on foot carrying a couple bags of groceries home. He felt something was wrong before he turned around to see the smirking faces on the boys, and heard the enthusiastic shouting of his name called out of the car window. He managed an awkward acknowledging jerk of his head above the bags in the general direction of Sherry as she passed out of sight, sitting in the front seat between two football heroes.

  He finally dropped the bags on the kitchen table and said, “I’m taking a walk” to his mother, who tried to stop him but gave up as the screen door swung closed.

  She may have only wondered why Eddie would want to take a walk in 102-degree heat immediately after carrying two full bags of groceries a half mile. Maybe she wanted to offer him an iced coffee, or ask him why he got in so late last night, or would Sherry like to come to dinner some night, and she hadn’t seen much of Sherry lately . . . was anything wrong?

  Eddie was walking in the dehydrating, asphalt-melting, cornea-frying, lip-cracking summer weather of interior San Diego. His head ached, it buzzed with fatigue. He made himself go look at the tire tracks on the shoulder of the road leading from Food Basket. He was slouched more than ever, his face parallel to the mushy black road. He was not moving across the busy intersection fast enough for the man driving the station wagon.

  Eddie is in the middle of the crosswalk, directly in front of the station wagon’s two-tone baby-shit-brown hood. He can smell the suffering fan belt’s burning skin. He hears the wheezing radiator.The windshield reflects a blinding glare. HONK! HONK! HOOOONNNNKKK! Eddie is stunned. He stands there, then turns and faces the guy driving, who emanates a tremendous amount of loathing. He starts to walk again. HOOOOONNNNNNKKKKK!

  Eddie gets to the far right headlight and turns an about-face, crossing the front of the hood again. The man starts yelling shit at Eddie. He sticks his American-man war-hero head out of his car and spews more shit at him. Eddie makes another about-face and crosses in front of the car again. The door swings open. The man clomps his backache out of the seat. His hard soles hit the pavement; his sweaty shirt is stuck to his pear-shaped body. He swaggers toward Eddie with balled fists.

  Eddie is supposed to run. But he is pissed. The man grabs for the boy’s T-shirt and tries to stretch it within the grasp of his other hand. Eddie cannot believe that this fat fuck thinks he is going to treat him like a child. It seems almost funny that the man thinks he can yell and try to overpower him with his adult-size bulk. Eddie jerks loose of the man’s awkward grabbing. The man’s fingernails tear into Eddie’s arm. In an instant, Eddie has hit him — hard. The shot is planted on the side of the man’s crew-cut. The man is already tilted downward, from just that one quick pop. Disgusted, Eddie belts him again. The man hits the pavement. Eddie leans down, lines up the spot where the jawline meets the neck under the ear, and passes. Blam, he hits him in the forehead. Just because the man doesn’t have basic respect for anyone; because he honks at barefoot kids in hot crosswalks going too slow. He honks, honks, honks, at disillusioned, nothing-to-live-for, nothing-to-die-for kids. He puts his hands on people he doesn’t know. The man wants to intimidate other people, too busy ignoring his own kids, who are staring at Eddie in terror.

  Daddy’s kids are crying. Boy, are they crying. Screaming. Daddy is lying on the ground trying to get his burning elbows off the furnace-hot grit. Daddy is flopping around with his equilibrium fucked up from the knots on his head. The kids are under ten, two little girls and the youngest a boy. They keep repeating, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” in sobbing, breathless screams. Eddie has a vacant feeling, as though there is nothing left of himself. If he’d put it in words, it would have had something to do with nature, what he had done, and the way he felt about those kids felt unnatural.

  The wife is sitting in the honey seat. While Dear is getting up on his knees, Eddie sees the wife’s wide eyes. He knows that he has humiliated her husband. Her desperate expression tells Eddie that he has given her husband problems he will not overcome, and those problems will extend to her and her innocent kids. That although she will never express anything but hatred to Eddie, at the same moment she is pleading with him to do something. It is his responsibility because he is the one standing. Eddie’s remorse at the sound of the shrieking children, and the sexual tilt in the woman’s unspoken plea, is more than he can handle this morning. Eddie walks over to the curb and sits down. He realizes the man’s behavior is not an isolated incident, and his wife probably hates him as much as Eddie does. But the kids.

  Dear staggers to the car and parks it across the street. He’s yelling brave things now, since it is apparent Eddie is down for the count. The blustering pear is just that kind of guy. Then Honey starts yelling about the police and runs into Speedee Mart.

  The stock boy, a friend from elementary school, comes running out in his green apron. He squats down next to Eddie on one knee, surveying the commotion building on the corner. “You better get the hell outta here, Eddie. They already called the cops.” Eddie mumbles, “That’s good.” He focuses on a gum wrapper between his dirty, callused feet. His heart is exploding in fear and anger. The fear is climbing and the anger is falling. He wishes they would just drive away. He knows they won’t.

  The cops come. Dear stands there, the center of self-righteous attention. The cops stand nearby, regarding Eddie like a rabid dog. Eddie overhears Honey, who evidently has read Newsweek, because she is certain that Eddie is on “pot” or he would have run away. Dear picks up his cue and makes it clear in a loud voice to all the bystanders that people on “pot” have more strength than normal, and that is the reason he didn’t kick the kid’s butt. They start speaking in quiet voices suggesting that Eddie is winding down from some high and is falling into a stupor. The kids have quieted down. Eddie sits there smelling the wrapper. He’d bet it was Juicy Fruit — wrong, it was spearmint. Slight smile in the corner of Eddie’s mouth. Sentence inside his head — “Just not my day.” The man stands next to the big guys with the guns, nodding his head in some social bond. Eddie lo
oks at Honey, who is smug with the knowledge that she has, probably for the thousandth time, gotten Dear his balls back.

  But as the black-and-white pulls away with a silent Eddie in the back seat, it’s because Eddie wants the kids to see the police take the bad guy away.

  BUCEPHALUS

  I was fifteen. I’d just gotten out of Juvy, and my parents were pretty upset. I was starting my first year in high school and I was hoping to do something right. My father told me I was trying out for the school football team. As usual, I wasn’t in a position to argue with him. I knew I’d never make the team anyway. So there I was on September 5, 1964, at nine-thirty a.m., sitting in the locker room of Wilson High School, the pride of interscholastic sports in San Diego, California.

  I had a helmet that didn’t fit right, way too loose. It looked stupid. My neck was too thin, my eyes too big, my face too narrow. The idea of intimidating anyone in the locker room was laughable. I sat in front of my locker with tunnel vision. Putting on the gear I was having an anxiety attack, before I ever got near the football field. I sat there surrounded by last year’s championship players, thinking, “Dad would just love this.” The linemen were acting big and brutish, defensive linemen especially. The linebackers were the characteristic psychopaths everyone imagines linebackers to be. There was a cluster of pretty-boy stars, undoubtedly the quarterbacks, running backs and receivers. They were all smiling, telling jokes, happy to have another year of glory, admiration, and sex beginning again.