Winged Shoes and a Shield

by Don Bajema

  “So, when they sold the farm out from under us . . . and didn’t compensate us, other than to remind us of our poverty . . . I got pissed.”

  He shrugs, offering her the last of the canteen, which she appreciates since she is thirsty as hell, and has had more than her share already. He looks away, saying wordlessly that he expects her to finish it.

  “And you know, it feels real good to be an outlaw. To stand exactly in the square of slings and arrows, and directly in the path of outrageous fortune.”

  He laughs at himself. Remembering Lilly Langtree.

  She is stunned hearing Shakespeare quoted out here in the dust storm that is picking up around them. When she left St. Louis, she thought it would be an adventure and here it is standing in front of her — a coarse man limping off an injured hip, flourishing his words by throwing his arms in the air.

  He waves his hand in the direction of his lost land and the empty railroad tracks, an hour ago the stage of life and death.

  He pulls some of the worn shirt off the raw skin of his shoulder. Tears fill his eyes and he winces, which surprises her since she thought he’d make a show of being brave. He squints down at her.

  “Next time, I won’t bother to wear a kerchief over my face. . . .”

  She doubts that he’ll have to.

  He clomps around in his boots; one heel is broken off. He pitches to the side with each stride. He pulls off his boots. He walks over to a ditch where most of the shooting came from, and comes back wearing someone else’s. She hasn’t moved a muscle. Sweat is running down her face, her hat has nearly blown off in the wind. He mops her face with his kerchief and hands it to her. She tucks it between her breasts. He is oblivious.

  “It’s a damn sad day when you have to shoot your own horse. Well, it’s a long walk, so I guess we’d better get started.”

  They begin to walk at right angles from the railroad tracks.

  “You don’t talk much, do you?”

  The girl just shakes her head.

  RITA

  Summer of 1964 was a heat wave blowing over flaming cities, police dogs, draft induction centers, universities, prisons, self-immolating monks, civil rights workers deep in the slave states, and San Diego asleep on the Mexican border.

  Eddie Burnett’s relatives are visiting from Chicago. Over the past months, his mother, father, uncle, aunt, and three cousins have driven up the coast to Seattle and seen the Space Needle. Gone to Disneyland, driven to Marineland, hit Knott’s Berry Farm on one of the smoggiest days in Los Angeles history, and spent the last month hanging around the house.

  Because of his father’s flatulence, and the weird squawking whine that his mother has developed, each undoubtedly a form of passive aggression designed to avoid proximity with the relatives, the inter-family trips have come to a halt. The summer vacation was planned to last until August, and last it will, even if the meals are eaten separately, or in resentful silence.

  Eddie’s aunt and uncle are early risers. They read the paper first, pissing off his mother who likes to get it fresh off the lawn and read it without egg and coffee stains. The aunt takes long showers, using most of the hot water. The deaf uncle follows her, singing at the top of his lungs. Show tunes waking the rest of the family who fight for the remaining hot water.

  Around ten o’clock Eddie’s mother grinds her toast into a paste by chewing it hundreds of times, annoying all hell out of the cousins, who are slurping cereal and making jokes at Eddie’s expense. They like to make him spell words, and laugh hysterically when he fails to get them right. Eddie opens a can of fruit cocktail and swallows it in four non-stop gulps. He disappears out the screen door, leaving his cousins to hang around the house while the bickering adults shift from one room to the other, whispering shit about each other.

  But the next day is Eddie’s fourteenth birthday, and to celebrate everybody is going to the zoo. By seven o’clock both families are clogging the door to the bathroom, bumping into each other in the kitchen, and yelling at the kids. The race to be ready first begins with Eddie’s aunt pointing out that, judging from the amount of fruit salad Eddie’s father had last night, it might be best to take separate cars. Eddie’s mother takes her sister to the side and whines that this teasing about a little fart now and then has gotten out of hand. Eddie’s uncle has the T.V. cranked up to maximum, listening to the morning news, announcing at the top of his lungs that there won’t be any rain today. Eddie mumbles that he doubts that it will since it’s already 102 degrees, and there ain’t a cloud in the goddamn sky. The biggest cousin tells Eddie to watch his wise-guy mouth and Eddie suggests that he fuck himself. This of course, gets the feathers flying, ending with a broken chair and both women running to separate rooms to cry over it.

  Eddie’s inability to follow simple instructions costs his racing parents too much time in the contest to be ready to leave first. Eddie’s family’s efforts are regarded with disgusted snorts from his aunt’s family, who stand beside their car and wait patiently for the less competent Burnetts to finally get ready.

  Eddie’s aunt barks, “Eddie, front and center!”

  This she expects will elicit the same response it does in her own sons, or maybe it’s meant to demonstrate the hopeless state of discipline in her sister’s boy. In any case, Eddie does not make it front or center. He makes it out the door and down the street, yelling honk when you’re ready to leave.

  By noon on one of the hottest days in San Diego history, Eddie and his father are sitting on a bench under the trees that shade the largest collection of primates in the world. Seventy cages of varying species, all of them clearly out of their minds, imprisoned in hot-boxes, and fed up with another season of peanut-tossing tourists. Ambulances are wailing in and out of the parking lot treating twenty sunstroke victims an hour. Thousands of sunburns are already lobster-red heading toward purple. The heat is driving everyone into delirium. An old man standing near Eddie’s father has eyes that sit back in his head like a cadaver’s. His face is red wax. His tiny wife’s old ankles are swollen over her shoes; her mouth is open and she is panting. Eddie whispers they should give up their seats to the elderly couple before they collapse. As they stand, two high school girls pretend to be oblivious and sit down. The old couple shuffles off in the direction of Deer Canyon. Eddie and his father join the mindless amble of exhausted and suffering vacationers milling past a row of monkey cages.

  Monkey eyes follow Eddie. There is not a single primate looking anywhere except directly into Eddie’s eyes. Each face frozen in disbelief. Time stops. No one breathes, no hearts beat, there are no birds in flight, no one speaks, the heat is gone. The entire zoo hovers in a vacuum. The bars are optical illusions. We are caged in our mindless condescension. They are crucified. They understand everything we are doing to them. Eddie becomes terrified.

  A single wild cry unleashes a chorus of slanders and shrieks. Gibbons scramble up the cage screen, stabbing their arms out of the wire mesh at Eddie. The shrieking does not decrease as he passes. Wires shake in fists, eyes roll white, leaping figures fly from floor to ceiling, banging full speed into the fences between Eddie and these homicidal creatures.

  Seventy monkey cages are in full riot. Suspicious attendants begin to arrive. People are muttering, pointing out Eddie who must have somehow tormented these chimpanzees rolling drunk with rage on their deck, arms flailing, gibbons’ unhinged jaws snapping spike teeth, spider monkeys gnashing and whizzing above him. The shrieks engulf and shame him. He decides to find a place to retreat. He looks back toward his father who is laughing, convulsing on a bench holding his stomach yelling, “Hey, Eddie, where ya going? Where ya going? Eddie?”

  Eddie heads down to Deer Canyon, which is an inferno without shade. The asphalt road mushes under his feet. There is no breeze. A tour group trudges up the hill, each tented under a canopy of newspaper. An attendant with a walkie-tal
kie is leading the old couple toward a curb. Eddie plunges down into the canyon. People coming up are gasping things at him.

  “Don’t go down there.”

  “Too hot, go back.”

  Eddie picks up a discarded newspaper, places his head in the fold and disappears down the hillside.

  For the next two hours, Eddie stays near a drinking fountain watching a cape buffalo frothing in a cloud of flies. When the setting sun leaves the canyon shaded near closing time, Eddie, with nothing else to do, reads the paper. A church was bombed in Birmingham. A bible class of kids his own age were blown up. Four little girls died. After the third loudspeaker announces the final call before closing, Eddie sneaks up to the baboon cage.

  He holds his eyes down. Sliding over the rail, he crouches against the screen. A guy with a broom ten cages down is sweeping slowly.

  A huge graying male leads an ancient female’s approach. She sits turning her back. The male watches the guy sweeping. The old matriarch turns her head.

  He waits, expecting a sign, looking for some kind of answer. Her bloodshot eye slides slowly over his face. Knuckles whack the concrete floor. Callused lips pull up, revealing black gums and the top quarter of huge yellow teeth. A nostril cave blows wet hot gusts on Eddie’s cheek. Her face recomposes without a trace of anything from this millennium.

  The snoring and the musings of apes asleep buzzes low in the late afternoon heat. She stretches and lumbers away. The male follows her, looking backward over his shoulder on every other stride.

  “What the hell are you doing? Goddamn it, we been waiting an hour.”

  Eddie is marched out of the zoo, across the parking lot and thrown into the Oldsmobile. They leave the park and drive home.

  Eddie looks through the back seat window. Time stops again.

  A church. A neon sign glows Jesus Is Love. A fireball blows down the church’s front door. The explosion lifting him out of the back seat, his head thuds on the car roof. His father asks him what the hell is going on. Then everything returns as it was.

  Eddie mumbles.

  “Don’t mumble.”

  “Where’s Birmingham?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Birmingham is in England. Don’t they teach ya nothing in school?”

  “Dad, everything is really a war isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “Everything is a war.

  “Ah, yeah, I guess so.”

  “I mean everybody is against everybody else, right?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Eddie’s mother says, “That’s not true, honey.”

  Eddie’s father waits at a long stoplight.

  “You shoulda seen those monkeys screaming at Eddie.”

  “What?”

  “When we were down at the monkey cage. Shoulda seen ’em. Right, Eddie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you guys want for dinner?”

  “I dunno.”

  “I dunno. Hey, Dad, ya know they bombed a church in Birmingham.”

  “They did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hmmm. Too bad.”

  Two thousand miles away, Rita sat over the wing watching the green land below, the intermittent flashes as the setting sun bounced off the web of the Mississippi’s tributaries. Nothing registered. Fatigue and fear had disembodied her. The plane dropped, the airfield below rose, the tires bumped, the plane taxied toward a little tower with a small cafe beside it. She watched the blurring circle beside her.

  A low cyclone fence in front of the cafe bore the weight of three baggy-suited photographers, each with a jacket in the crook of an elbow — sunglasses, white cotton shirts, loosened ties, and expressions on their tanned faces that seemed to know plenty. Tight thin-lipped mouths that said little. They were blurred in the rippling heat like three emissaries from hell, moving toward the shade under the wing of the airplane.

  The doors opened. The windows steamed over; Rita’s clothes stuck to her skin. The other passengers waved newspapers under their chins. Her suitcase weighed a ton and bounced off her knee as she descended the stairs. A knot of reporters and onlookers waited.

  Microphones obscured her vision as she tried to walk. She searched the crowd, hoping someone would shout over the mob of reporters, policemen, and gawkers.

  “He’s alive! Turned up five hours ago!”

  There was no voice. Just the mumbling of the reporters and Klansmen like gravel rolling under water. She strode on saying nothing to the increasingly demanding questions. A loud snarl.

  “Why are you here?”

  She searched the men towering over her until she located the eyes laughing at her. He continued.

  “The best place for you is right back where you came from . . . and the best place for your husband is right where he is.”

  Eyes shifted from Rita to the voice shuffling through the crowd as it parted for him. The eyes slowly revolved back to her and waited for a response.

  “I am here to find out who killed my husband. The best place for anyone to be who knows anything about the whereabouts of my husband, or anything pertaining his disappearance, is on the phone with the Attorney General of the United States. I have been promised an FBI investigation beginning tomorrow morning.”

  Six reporters turned and ran for the telephone hanging on the wall inside the airport. The FBI . . . here. Any fool could see a Commie troublemaker happened to fall into the wrong hands.

  “And if you people don’t like it, you can go ahead and kill me just like you killed my husband.”

  Nothing moved, until the soles of shoes scratched uneasily around her. A half-circle of men stared at her, occasionally spitting through their teeth, hands in pockets. Three in the center slowly shook their heads from side to side. One smiled broadly.

  “The heat must be getting to you, Miss. Nobody wants to see anybody killed.”

  They turned in unison and walked toward the parking lot.

  As Rita passed, a young man’s voice rose in volume and screeched out of his chest.

  “Excuse me, Miss . . . er . . . Mrs. . . . ah . . . Can I say something?” Rita kept walking.

  “Does it have to do with my husband?”

  “Well, ah . . . yeah. It does.”

  Rita faced him.

  “Would it help him to get yourself killed? What good would that do?”

  She turned toward him. He began to sight his camera on her, his hand twisted around the lens, and then he lowered it.

  She examined his face. It was self-conscious, ashamed. From head to toe, a tall, rumpled, chinless wonder, lost, scared, and ignorant. His face reminding her of her mother telling her to stay home; her father, resigned, turning slowly from the front porch to the screen door.

  She did not really hear the young man explaining that she was only falling right into the Klan’s hands, that she didn’t understand how it was down here.

  Her words fell out so weary and sad.

  “I don’t think you understand.”

  She walked past the staring faces and found a booth in a tiny coffee shop.

  The photographer stood in the doorway changing cameras, hoping for a shot before she left for her probable appointment in some ditch by the side of the road.

  He noticed his hands shaking and realized he was afraid she’d see him and address him, confront him and tell him more things about himself that he wouldn’t understand. He began to hate her.

  Rita crossed her arms, turned her head and stared straight at him as he found her in his camera. He lowered it, raised his eyes and saw her smile faintly, the slightest softening in her face, and the smallest movement of her mouth.

  She turned her hipster-sunglassed gaze toward the telephone on
the wall. One hand rose slowly, her thumb rubbed her bottom lip, then it folded into a small relaxed fist, and froze. The camera clicked. Rita stared into eternity.

  5-28-92

  That loud clean snap means a sharp blade. One that leaves you staggering and aching from lack of blood before you can judge the depth of the slice.

  But a serrated edge tears a rip that lets you assess the depth, the speed and the damage, via an unforgiving pain. The ragged edge sawing past skin that yearned for more kinds of living than minutes provide, pulling through muscle made weak in the refusal to take less than the treasures laid at my feet. Stopping me in my tracks, asleep at the wheel, under the influence of fits of euphoria producing nothing but insight, turning to hindsight, mocking me as time moved on.

  That was the sin that made those angels groan. Made them turn their faces and sing in tongues that I couldn’t understand but had that simple refrain, about living only once and the time is running out. Just barely long enough to fit in one more promise.

  The edge tears more than it cuts. The surface just broken, then torn gashing to the bone. Past skin slick with kisses, wet with the labor life requires, rivulets of saline rolling down the cheek now opening in a red instant. The vicious need we have to work each other over to something we think we want, but don’t know what to do with when it faces us.

  Our shadows fade in the light; our tired eyes grow weak. We jinx ourselves muttering, “What’s the use?”

  We stare, recognizing a curse when we utter one.

  Because we need it all. And that bus left a long time ago and it’s only the echo of its gears grinding around the turn we hear, making us believe we can catch up. So we wait there alone in the dark. Crickets sounding invitations to a warm night, breeze blowing in a way we think we remember, stars above us like a map we can’t read, newspapers sliding around us like snakes in the air. Waiting.