by Morrissey
“He isn’t in that box, is he?” sobbed Justy; “how could he be?” he trailed away.
“Ledger’s?” came Ezra’s brave suggestion, and he pointed to the cemetery gates in the southerly corner of the plot.
“First in no pay?” Nails felt rejuvenated, and with a ferocious tear they pushed each other away from their fierce embrace and they bolted manically through, over and across; around all of the variously sized stones and monuments that blocked their dash to the southerly gates; hurdle after hurdle, legs wide and sprawled and full of kangaroo sideways swerves through the Jewish section, whilst galloping even faster across the Polish Garden and laughing all the while as faster and faster went the trio, from gallop to glide, their neatly solemn suits askew and awry with messy devilment; Ezra nosing ahead, Justy of yelps and fearful moans as each stone tablet varied in jutting awkwardness, with some to maneuver around and some to breeze above … “Yeeeey!” came Nails with high-flying gusto … dodging the Sacred Heart, leap-frogging St. Francis, crashing down onto unvisited graves of unwedded maidens, kicking up soil and the tish-tosh knick-knacks of Gone but not forgotten, always in our hearts, just a whisper away, Loving Brother, taken too soon, World’s Best Grandma, reunited in heaven, Our Little Angel … uncle unmarried unwanted and gone, the stampede paid no heed to respectful consideration as depleted bouquets flicked wildly under kicks, and our three became lost tearaway children turning anger into Benylin adrenalin … through the gates and through main-street traffic lanes, woo-hooing their illegalities and delighted stupidities of funeral fun … why always remain in control? Who’s to say what should or should not lift the spirits? Whoever put the pain in painting had also put the fun in funeral. But why always stand there, zombified, awaiting life’s WALK sign? Are you now incapable of walking unless instructed? Harrieee … Harrieee … Harri underground whilst we remain above, and here is an afternoon to waste as we’d wish! And soaked we shall be at Ledger’s, where ties are removed like shackles of subjugation and the bottles line up and the whiskey doesn’t touch the sides as it sinks as today’s thinking man’s drink.
Later that night our trio lie on college towels sprawled across tiled floor as gentle jets of water spray like Japanese rain on the huddled far-gone three in the otherwise deserted after-hours sigh of the college locker rooms; bombed and smashed they lay on their backs, their skunk-drunk faces rising upwards and into the falling spray, a long necklace of wartime bombs shelling the children of the sleeping city. Shut up hearts sprang open as the wide and steamy jet-stream managed to bounce off all three faces as they lay back, shoulder to shoulder, boulder to boulder, their clothes abandoned in single-file brotherhood trail from doorway to shower-head. “I wouldn’t change me for the woooorld,” started Nails in a singsong outcry … “Who disturbs my peace?” clamors Justy … “Me does!” splits Nails’ throat … “You must be suck-out-loud buzzed … and I mean that in the most caring way of course,” is a waul of a squall from Ezra … “Youze cookin’ with gas!” yelps yappy Nails … “God will repay me as he always does …” carries on Ezra … “Well, he doesn’t repay me … still driving that El Camino” … “You just said you wouldn’t change you for the world,” blurts Ezra, and the silliness goes on. “I’d kiss my own little face if I could. This thankful bodily creation lying next to you, mi amigo, truth in my heart, no legs stronger or finer, it’s all in my favor and stirring with manhood … or somethinghood.” Nails cannot be stopped.
“But where is Harri now? In repose, repose, repose? In turmoil? In nothing? Human roadkill? In nothingness? Why were we not reason enough for him to stay? Are we really so bad?” Justy offers the sweet and the sour.
“I’d say … yes,” pipes in Nails, “death a dark falling … someone said … Harri just so … one last heave, journey to go.”
“Let me press that to my heart!”
“Weep yourself clean, my man!”
“Great sweeping thoughts I can barely grasp … just all day … I see his face in his final hour … and where was I when he needed someone? I was matter-of-fact, somewhere else, and useless …”
“You mustn’t keep asking yourself how you’re feeling. There isn’t a lesson to be learned from every single thing you do!”
“Then why do them? Why do anything?”
“And if I should stop asking myself how I feel then I shan’t apply this lesson, because if I apply what you’ve just said then I’m asking how –”
“Oooh shut up, tool you …”
“Oh sweet mother, tool you? That’s tough.”
“l have a small head. It can’t contain much. It will grow on you as it grew on me.”
“Now. Your leg is touching my leg, which is all very nice, but I think of you more as a friend.”
“Ah yes! Sorry! God forbid a leg touches another leg and the entire foundation of rigid sexual mores crash to shuddering, shamed failure!”
“He’d walk across the field … towards me … with that strong stride and stupid with smiles, and I’d be happy just to hear whatever the hell would stream out of him on that day, on any day … that open face, that knowing grin … that grin I’d known all of my life … before we’d even met. I grew up on tales of his exploits, I knew his body like I knew my own.”
At this stage it hardly mattered who was saying what, since all were in a whiskey-soaked lecturer’s tub-thumping tirade.
“Everything’s a question! Everything’s a question! Isn’t it?”
“I press that to my heart,” said Ezra.
“Weep yourself clean!” shouts Nails.
“I’d drink poison for our man!”
“Well, let’s see if you’ll drink poison for this one,” cut in the un-expected monotone of Mr Rims, suddenly appearing in the locker-room with a champion-styled candidate. “ He’ll behead, blow up, strangle … whatever you need to get that June cup.”
“Yes, but can he run?” wised-in Nails.
“Don’t try to be witty, it doesn’t suit you and it doesn’t work and it’s upsetting. I give you … Dibbs, and you’ll take Dibbs because you want him and you need him, and that’s that, so shut up.”
Like a ghost ungone, the shell-backed Rims had appeared unexpectedly as if getting his own back in his search for the last word. As a reluctant pallbearer, he had noticed earlier the three Boston tearabouts flee the scene of sobs and dart like buffos of a new age across to the southerly gates leading to nowhere logical other than Ledger’s. From here, Rims underwent the bone-splitting agony of deserting Dick Cavett slowness in order to track the tracksters down with trap-tackle and force them face-to-face with the dog on a chain known as Dibbs. Dead and reborn numerous times, the boys now listened to Rims as life moved until whatever is meant to happen next happens next. Arranged like cut flowers, Dibbs was good at pulling faces whilst looking like nothing worth taking seriously (but what were the rest if not saddened and searching youth?). A non-verbal entity, Dibbs struggled with all of the certainty of someone who obviously knew too little, and with a language unknown, slopped into a mess of one who blathers for the sake of blathering. Look at these knotholes posing as sprinters (or is the appalling word ‘spinsters’ ?) and welcome, welcome to a new walled paradise. Our three rise and offer gentlemanly handshakes – friendly nods and murmurs of welcome. Dibbs beamed as fresh young life of wide smiles and bending-over-backwards confidence – a power hitter of herky-jerky motions. The boys drank him in as Dibbs laughed a deep and warm laugh whenever anything was said, be it amusing or not. “I run for beer!” he announced, desperate to crack into mounds of unbreakable ice, desperate to replace the irreplaceable.
Mr Rims was soapbox ready: “A virtuous emblem remains to be left on the age, and here is the man to save our spirits and eat fire, as we learn as professional athletes that we must take the bad days in the same spirit as the good. Half of your life has not been worth living if you let this opportunity go. Harri has slipped from us, an
d we’re all just a few yards away from the emotional edge, but I tell you that a light shines at the far end – the far end now being closer than it once was, of course – and it is acceptable to stand upright and to resume because it all remains to be done and you’ll evoke only eternal pity if you miss this particular bus.” At this stage, everyone had stopped listening to Mr Rims, but he continued regardless. “You already possess all that you need, and with Dibbs here you’ll find every answer in a return to the track. The track to where, you wonder? What’s at the end of that track? Well, pride and joy shall be there, and Harri would want you to continue at his urging, and if you don’t believe me then just suffer. I don’t want to feel that I’m running up against a brick wall just by pointing these damned things out. I could be at home pulverizing my wife at Scrabble, or scrabbling my pulverized wife, so don’t think I don’t have far more sophisticated things to do. Winning will tell the truth about all of you because you’ve worked hard for it and you’ve earned it and proof of everything is in your cannonball conduct, and, yes, inner resolve is one thing, but the outer reality counts just as much, and it’s not as if you have anything else to contribute to earthly wisdom. There is indeed a God who helps athletes win against opponents. Harri is gone, and you must accept that and go beyond it because the alternatives help neither yourselves nor those unfortunates around you. We are all fully dependent on unforeseen circumstances. Do your best to prove to yourself that the pain does not exist. Don’t be saddened by having felt Harri’s loss, but instead take a broader view and feel all the richer for having known him. He’s not gone anywhere that we aren’t heading ourselves. There’s nothing unique about his journey. Let the public see what they’ve invested in you for so long now, and Dibbs here – for all the silliness of his name – is not so easily intimidated on the track. I can’t speak for elsewhere, and I have no interest. Now, with relief I ask you to dry off and get dressed and then get to know this speed demon and I know he’ll restore your faith and ambition and you will be on track at 8 a.m. tomorrow eager to maintain your true selves and your reputation like no other spring and sprint college team known in this competition. Feelings must carry into deeds, otherwise what’s the point of those feelings in the first place … we don’t have feelings in order to do nothing with them. Sleep in your own beds tonight and I do assure you that you’ll awake with an increased level of pride knowing how Dibbs – for all the silliness of his name – has all your assets and asses covered … an area growing considerably in recent weeks, it must be noted. Now get your pretty little village faces out of here and take full heed of what passes between us. I’m neither cold nor indifferent to Harri’s death, but nothing you or I can do will bring him back, and the only way to deal with it is to accept it. But we don’t crack under duress. What you can give you will still give under my watch, and the world will applaud and delight in your open-throttle vocation. Do I make myself clear? Or is my expression not quite intense enough? I’d prefer to stop talking whilst I’m still clean-shaven.”
Mists of pain shifted and all four boys smiled broadly. Newness began again. Preliminary chatter rose with a stark-tiled echo, and then out into darkness they slackly dragged their sports bags and track tackle amid excited whispers of possibilities. Ezra gestured an I’ll catch up with you wave as he dawdled slightly in the barren barracks-styled washroom where necessity raced him into one of the bathroom stalls where, once seated, he rolled out a college events calendar in order to relax his mind enough to allow grand expulsion. The faint drip of a shower-nozzle, very distant slamming of car doors, but there was none of the echo-chamber clatter of epic daytime shrieks and goad-ing gabble that fill these rooms during studious hours. Now, with midnight minutes away, Ezra sat in the eerie silence of a college with no afterlife when unoccupied, and it dies a fast execution without its busy and odorous humans, as a subterranean hush washes through the halls and the building simply cannot live. At nighttime the rooms are spirited away, unable to manage convincing sleep, unable to be anything at all minus its sludgeball students, as life leaves its old soul – as if these bricks and glass thrive only on human blood, and graveyard corridors sob softly with the despair at having no use once the pock-faced pygmies have gone to their homes to moan. The building remains as the stroppy scholars had left it, and it waits for resuscitation when revived by the return of the algebraic washed and the naked life of the brain-dead well-fed. As Ezra sat scrutinizing the sports pages of honor-mad rah-rah teams … Man of the Month, One to Watch, the latest league charts … he felt an arm gently resting around his own right arm, making the same cradling shape as Ezra’s own and pressing in warmly as if to shake awake. Ezra stared intently at his arm and then he jumped in sprite fright to lean his full body against the left-side wall of the stall, pulling away from this mysterious sensation. Powerful orbit jetted Ezra out of the ‘johnny house’ and into the large washroom, where he scrambled to organize his clothes and pull himself together as a rush of unholy phobia and stampeding blind panic told him instinctively that he was in a place that he ought not to be – and in a moment that one ought not to play about with. Timorously a voice then spoke to him with a gentle apprehension, of suffering and terror, of disheartening qualm, so terrified in itself that Ezra felt immediate calm at the sight of the small elfish woman standing pressed into the corner of the room. The human frailty held onto the wall for support, a shrunken and concave visualization that looked as if released from her own grave, in desperately poor health, of distressed hair, and inexplicably cloaked in layers of interwoven garments. Her voice posed no threat to Ezra other than the shock of actually hearing it, and he concealed his fear as his eyes burned into the enslaved creature before him. She spoke with humble yet powerful insistence, torn with a sick desire.
“Make an exception …” she began, “in my case … and listen to me as an act of kindness, I beg of you. I offer you no harm and I am incapable of such. There is none to whom I can turn. I suffer greatly in painful silence and I speak to you, now, with servitude whilst also pleading for your understanding. I am alone and I agonize in an exasperated state. Is it within your heart to help me be at rest with the one and only thing I have ever loved?”
“What-is-it?” stuttered Ezra, his voice a half-shout. She moved a few inches closer, without removing her outstretched arm from the wall that balanced her, and Ezra now caught the full shape of her face, so frozen in dejection and want.
“Justifications are unnecessary. I am forever trying my best to speak up, so forgive me should I falter, but here it is. To the rear of the long-disused Gate Lodge on the grounds of this very property there is a heavily shaded area where stretches of sackcloth and tarred tarpaulin have for twenty full years covered out-moded garden equipment of hoe and plow and wheelbarrow and lawnmower and hedge-trimmer gadgets and bicycles that none shall ride again … all neatly blanketed by a durable covering of weather-soaked layers of sheet metal, now pinned into the ground from years of rainfall and fastening wind, undisturbed for all of twenty longer than usual years. Unseen from the road, and forgotten by all who work at this college, there is no reason for anyone to stray towards this forsaken nook with oak trees weeping down upon it and boxing it in. Beneath the mess of meshed filth and cluttered litter lies a human child, well, no longer human to others perhaps, once buried like a rabid dog, for his life could offer no continual purpose to his resolute murderer. The boy was my son, molested and butchered by a man who had enticed with such kindness, one I am able to name, now, as the very dean of this college – you know him well, whose advancing age is a problem and whose kindly kindred soul belies what lies beneath the forgiving and indulgent shell, for none could believe him capable of the cruelty he bestowed on my own child, now wrapped in vigorous sheets of cold plastic beneath rusted machinery, so deeply unjust and murdered by power maniacs ruled and owned by the sick desires of career and money, such honorable local citizens of position with their almost satanic over-valuation of a family life that they secr
etly despise, their coded references to my sweet boy – a boy who had nothing and knew nothing and did no one harm, and for this he was sodomized with hatred and bloodlust and bigotry … And they, and their all-powerful benevolent God, allowed my boy not another day to live. Dean Isaac might now appear timorous, but this is no reason to forgive how he behaved when he was strong.”
“What is it you want me to do?” asked Ezra in a wavering whisper, his clothes still undone, his eyes wide with some doubts that whatever it was that was happening was actually happening at all.
“Elizabeth Barbelo is my name, and my son was Noah. Before another day rushes in would you, as an act of humanity, rescue what remains of my boy and bless him with the dignity of a just burial? Only then could I find some ease. I would begin my rest, my trial ended, and the horror of these twenty years I would take as acceptable. I was nobody at all throughout my entire life … and I am recalled by no one, even now … but only the living can end my pain and release me from this terrible dark force, each day a renewed terror.”
“I will do as you ask,” said Ezra, and the woman’s head fell at the weight of her tears, sobs which developed into hacking and cracking coughs as the severe and agonized face looked away with an embarrassment both shy and humble.
“In pitiless solitude I give you what thanks I can … if you would please forgive my overstated gratitude. Marooned as I am in the events of these last twenty years of tears, you will allow me to close out the dreadful past and you will allow me to rest every aching bone, to seal my son’s life from womb to tomb with a dignified distinction afforded to even the most cruel and evil of beings, yet denied my dear and loving son. Your actions will forever live in my heart, as you will forever be nearest the heart. I take my first hour of slumber, for you have removed the knife from my back. Without your help my despair would see no chance of hope. I would wish upon no mother this darkest of dark shadows. I humble myself to nothing before you, for it is agonizing for a mother to have full responsibility for an outcome over which she has no control. I have sought compassionate listeners for many years. You must please forgive my unrestrained sentiment. My only prayer is that he may lie beneath a stone bearing his name … Was he not worth that, at least, instead of the evil and derelict design that befell him – discarded as worthless waste? My life with my son was modest and resigned, lowly and marked by struggle, yet savored minute by minute for our deep feelings of love and for our combined laughter, our friendship, and for that joy of natural affection … You see, he is me.”
