by Andrew Smith
But when I ran the tines through the hay, I disturbed a small nest of mice. They ran everywhere, and I was scared because I had never seen a mouse before. This also sent our chickens into a frenzy as they chased down the fleeing mice and pecked at them.
Our big black hen actually ate a mouse, whole. She had to struggle through a few attempts at swallowing the thing, and I watched, horrified, as the mouse’s tail wormed into the beak and disappeared down the hen’s gullet.
“Higgledy Piggledy!” I said.
“What’s that?” Louis asked.
I pointed. “The name of this chicken.”
“Oh! I understand!” Louis said. He nodded enthusiastically. Louis was always happy. I liked that about him, and I often wondered why Wendy or my mother couldn’t just decide to be happy like Louis could.
We went from nest to nest, picking up eggs. I occasionally dug into the hay with my cultivator, trying to stir up more mice, just so I could watch the carnage.
I said, “But I have a question.”
“What is the question, Little Lucky?” Louis, who’d known my fathers since they were boys, liked to call me Little Lucky.
“What is a ‘gentleman’?”
Louis shrugged. “A man who is civilized.”
“So, there’s no such thing as a gentleman anymore, then?”
“Put that back there.”
Louis wanted me to put the cultivator down exactly where it had been when we came into the henhouse. Louis was like that. Louis appreciated the idea of order. Louis made life in the hole civilized through the reinforcement of predictability.
Then Louis said, “No. You read; you write; you don’t run around naked and spit. You are a gentleman, Little Lucky.”
“Sometimes I run around naked and spit,” I said.
“That’s all,” Louis said. All the eggs were gathered in Louis’s bucket.
“Not one of these chickens laid nine or ten eggs, though,” I said.
Louis shook his head. “No chickens lay nine or ten eggs. One only. No more. One.”
I was disappointed in the rhyme. Whoever made it up could have probably figured out something that rhymed with “hen” that wasn’t grossly misleading. It bothered me for a long time. Why would Higgledy Piggledy churn out nine or ten eggs for a civilized man who didn’t spit or run around naked?
I sighed. “Telling a lie is uncivilized.”
Louis patted my shoulder. “That makes you a gentleman.”
“Let’s see how many eggs she lays for me tomorrow.”
The Boy on a Boat Straddles Time
Once I’d read about a morning prayer—a practice in Judaism—that offered thanks to God for restoring one’s soul upon awakening from sleep.
It made sense to me.
I often thought you would never know anything, not ever again, if you went to sleep and did not wake up. The enormity of that idea is both frightening and soothing, without end.
When my soul came back to me, I had been drifting in a boat, maybe for hours, maybe for days. Time is irrelevant when your soul checks out.
When my soul came back to me, and I opened my eyes, I was lying on my side. I was shirtless and sunburned, wearing nothing but torn camouflage pajama bottoms that were twisted around my legs.
When my soul came back to me, I was looking directly into the eyes of a brown-skinned little boy with knotted clumps of dripping wet, amber hair that dangled around his face. He was so close to me that it tickled my nose when he exhaled. His cold and wet little fingers were gripping my upper arm, and I was faintly aware that he’d been shaking me.
I remember wondering if I was looking at a human or a something else. The boy seemed to be as wild as anything I’d ever seen outside the hole.
“Hoo-wee! Look at that, Olive! I think he’s alive!” the boy announced to someone else I couldn’t see.
The boat rocked in the water.
I wasn’t fully convinced I was awake.
I raised my hand to my face and rubbed my eyes. Everything seemed to be real, seemed to fit the model I’d constructed in my head. Then I reached across and touched the boy’s hair. He was real too. I untangled my pajama bottoms and pulled them higher on my waist. It was all I could do to get into a sitting position. Standing would have been a very bad idea.
I could not remember how I’d ended up here, but when I saw the torn blisters on my palms, I dimly recalled pulling myself up on a rope and struggling to stay afloat in deep and cold water. For just a moment I believed I may have been the drowning man in Max Beckmann’s painting.
“Where are we?” I said.
The boy smiled and twisted an index finger up inside his nose. “Well. We’re in your boat, which is named Little Grace, on a river that has a name, but I don’t know what it is, somewhere in Tennessee, I’m pretty sure.”
And Tennessee was inside somewhere else that had a name, which was in another place with a name, and on and on, name after name, word after word, without end.
I closed my eyes and rubbed my face. The connections were all dangling loosely.
“But don’t worry. I swum out and tied your boat to shore to stop you from drifting, on account of your being next-to-dead unconscious. Hell! I thought you might have been dead! Didn’t I say that, Olive?”
The boy had a little too much energy and spoke a little too loudly for me at that moment. I kept my eyes shut, trying to remember how I’d gotten here.
Then the kid said, “My name’s Breakfast, and this is Olive.”
I opened my eyes.
And then it hit me that for the first time in my entire life I was in the presence of another young person—a boy who was alive and real and outside of a hole.
I tried to take it all in—coax the pieces to reassemble. The boy who sat in front of me, his knees up in his chin, knuckles braced on the deck of the boat, was completely naked. His lack of clothing wasn’t unnerving or stressful, or even odd to me—like it would have been to Wendy or the civilized Louis, or even my mother—because those issues just didn’t exist in the after-the-hole world. Behind the boy—Breakfast—were two wood-framed glass doors with windows on either side. I could see inside the boat’s cabin, which looked like a house. There was a bed, a kitchen and dining table, and even a woodstove that brought back memories of our last Christmas in the hole, when Wendy had set everything on fire.
And it had all been sealed behind glass—a neatly preserved museum display, like the posters and decorations in Henry A. Wallace Middle School, from a time before I was born.
I said, “What did you say?”
“Breakfast,” the boy repeated. “My name is Breakfast.”
“I know you,” I said. “I’ve read notes you left behind for us. We’ve been waiting to find you.”
Breakfast rocked enthusiastically and scratched his balls. “Hoo-wee! I knew somebody would find those things, Olive! I knew it!”
Then I looked past Breakfast and for the first time realized the person he’d been talking to—Olive—was not a person at all. Olive was a chimpanzee. She was perched on the edge of the upper deck that sat atop the cabin’s flat roof. Although I had never come face to face with an actual chimpanzee in my life, I’d seen enough pictures and videos of them to confirm to me how this one—Olive—fit into my model of the world.
“You— There’s a monkey behind you,” I said.
Breakfast glanced back at Olive, then, with a little bit of acid in his voice, said, “That’s Olive, my best and only friend in the world. Don’t call her names.”
I shook my head and combed my fingers through my sweaty hair. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to call her names.”
Breakfast nodded. “That’s okay, then. I believe you.”
Olive bounced up and down.
And Breakfast said, “Are you hurt or something?”
I shook my head. “No. I don’t think so. I’m really thirsty.”
Breakfast stood up and pointed over the top of the bow. “We have water. And food, too. Are
you hungry?”
I said, “Yes.”
“Well? Do you have a name, or are you just the boy we found on a boat?”
“Arek.”
“Nice to meet you, Arek!” Breakfast rubbed the back of my neck and added, “And I’ll be honest—I’d have left you out on the water if you was old, and not just a boy, because, you know, old people who’s been around since the other times, well, you just can’t trust ’em, can you?”
“No. You can’t.”
“Well, let’s get you out of the sun. You look like you’re as burnt as you could ever be!”
Breakfast flattened his hand to shade my eyes. Then he grabbed my hand and pulled me up to my feet. I saw how he’d taken a line from the bow and secured it to a tree along the shore, right by where a fire burned inside a ring of stones.
And, straddling time, that was exactly the moment when I remembered about Mel, and how I’d left her behind at Davy Crockett Campground, alone with that insane old Sergeant Stuart.
I had to get back to Mel.
Keeping My Eyes Out for Hungry Leopards
“Dang if driving a boat ain’t about ten times simpler than driving a car,” Breakfast said. “And there’s less to crash into, too.”
The boat—Little Grace—chugged slowly against the current, heading upstream.
The wild boy was a kind of miracle. He sat with one leg over the rail of the stern, his armpit hugging the tiller as he focused on the wide path of the river ahead of us.
He said, “Maybe me and Olive might look into getting a boat like this.”
“Well, if I get back to my van, you can have this one,” I said.
Olive clapped and patted my knee.
Breakfast and Olive had fed me fish and wild greens, and I’d sat with them in the shade of their little camp, where we exchanged stories about our lives as after-the-hole kids. While I had the strongest feelings of mistrust for Sergeant Stuart, Breakfast, who was born from the same time as me and Mel, made me feel as though I somehow belonged in his community—that we understood each other in a way that I hadn’t experienced with anyone in my life, with the exception of Mel.
And it was easy to see how Breakfast fully regarded Olive as just another person—albeit one who did not speak. I found myself completely taking for granted the notion that Olive knew just as much about what was going on, if not more, than either Breakfast or I did.
And while I’d finished eating what they’d given me, Breakfast had scrambled between shore and boat, over and over, lugging heavy gas cans and tools and canvas bags, and in very little time the wild boy had the engine running on my boat, promising he and Olive would help me get back upriver to Mel and our van.
Breakfast took a deep breath and chewed on the end of a stalk from one of the plants he’d used to prepare the meal we had eaten.
“Damn,” he said. “Sergeant Stuart. I could have swore he got eaten at the farm when we were completely overrun by those goddamned bugmen two summers ago. Do you know I wasn’t even ten years old, and he wanted me to join the army?”
“He wanted to get me to join too,” I said.
“I never said yes or no about it. I wouldn’t even talk to him. But I refused to put on clothes, especially ones with all those symbols and flags on them. He did get Joe to join, though. Poor Joe. He was probably the same age as you when we first met Sergeant Stuart.” Breakfast picked his nose and flicked a little scab of mucus into the river. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Sixteen. Same as Mel.”
“I only seen a handful of girls in my entire life, besides Olive. And most of them were old enough to be my mother’s mother.”
“I’ve only seen four in my entire life,” I said.
“Besides Olive,” Breakfast added.
“Yes. Besides Olive,” I agreed.
Breakfast nudged the tiller out a few inches and pushed forward on the boat’s throttle with one of his bare feet.
“It’s so hot,” he said. “I have half a mind to just jump out into the water.”
“I can’t swim.”
Breakfast was shocked. He couldn’t understand how there would ever be such a boy who did not swim, nor catch things with his bare, wild hands.
“No wonder you wear britches, then. You ain’t even a bit wild.”
“I suppose not,” I said. “I was raised in a hole.”
“I lived in plenty of holes,” Breakfast said. “That never stopped me from living.”
“There were lots of rules in the hole.”
“Well, I could show you how to swim. There’s not much more to it than knowing not to breathe in water. That’s the main rule of swimming: Don’t breathe water.”
“Thank you.”
“You have any money?” Breakfast asked.
“What?”
“Money. Don’t you know what money is?”
“I guess I do. But I don’t have any.”
“Well, you should look into getting some. Me and Olive have lots of it. We’re rich. We need to find more people with money, though. Otherwise it’s not worth much.”
“I guess that’s true of most things.”
Breakfast scratched his balls.
“How many bugs you seen since you left your hole?” Breakfast, who knew all too well what living inside holes was like, asked.
“Only two, and they’re both dead now,” I said.
“This year, we ain’t hardly seen none of ’em either. They’re dying all over the place,” Breakfast said.
I nodded. I thought something was wrong. Nothing came close to the model that had been built for us inside the hole. The world was different, changed from how my parents believed they’d left it.
Olive bounced contentedly. She rubbed my back and combed her fingers through my hair.
Maybe the hole was closing, I thought. Maybe it was all over, everywhere, and now people could finally come out from their holes and reestablish all the magnificent things that made us human—hatred, war, competition, betrayal, thievery, selfishness, sinking ships, rules—the things that drove men like Max Beckmann to paint.
It’s no wonder cicadas live so briefly after they come out; cicadas probably did really shitty things to one another, given enough time.
“We killed one the other day, and it was all full of worms inside,” I said.
“Yep,” Breakfast said. He held up a hand and wriggled his rough little fingers. “I seen that before too. White worms, as big as your fingers. Yep, I think they’re dying off. Good for us, right?”
The afternoon cooled into evening. I had no idea how far down the river had carried me, or how long I’d been sleeping on the deck of the Little Grace when Breakfast found me. I didn’t want my mind to start imagining all the terrible things that might have happened to Mel since the night we separated. Those things were too frightening to put into words, and putting them into words would help to make them real. I tried to only think about the perfect last moments Mel and I had been together and alone, before Sergeant Stuart showed up, pounding on our door, tricking us, invading our hole.
In my mind, I made up a story about The African Queen—about the boat in the movie, if it was anything like this one, and if the man and the woman on the cover’s picture actually ended up kissing, or maybe doing a lot more than just kissing in the movie. I decided the man would be named Arek, and the woman would be named Mel. And, in the movie, Arek and Mel are on this boat together, but they don’t know where they’re heading. The movie Arek and the movie Mel love each other very much, but they both want the other to be free and wild, so neither of them admits how they feel. In his defense, the movie Arek had been hit in the balls with a bag of rocks and was forever cautious about relationships after that; and, in her defense, the movie Mel was very patient and hopeful that the movie Arek would believe in himself and stop being afraid of things that would never happen, like Bigfoot attacks and murderous blackbirds. Then movie Arek and movie Mel get separated, and they both become very lonely and realize how badly the
y’d squandered their opportunity to find the only thing that truly matters.
Then movie Arek gets eaten by leopards and dies a frustrated virgin.
The end.
That was my movie, and all stories are true.
I hoped I’d be able to watch it with Mel, even if movie me did end up being eaten.
I hoped Mel and I could crawl back inside our little hole in that black Mercedes van and shut everything else in the universe out, without end.
And as the Little Grace trudged along, I kept my eyes out for hungry leopards hiding in the trees along the darkening shore.
An Optimist for a Librarian
Fathers are required to reveal frightening truths to their sons.
Sometimes those truths are after-the-fact explanations, like when my dad, Austin, told me the truth about why getting hit in the balls with a bag of rocks hurt as bad as it did.
Sometimes those truths are inaccurate but elaborate models of reality. All the colors are dulled, all the edges made safe to touch.
And sometimes those truths make you think about things you never want to deal with. They keep you from sleeping at night. They make sons wish they could take on all their father’s hurt.
Maybe all boys have to confront their terrible truths at the age of thirteen.
Robby, my other father, told me this: “When I was in seventh grade, just after I turned thirteen years old, my father went away. And even though everyone expected him to come back, he never did.”
I wanted to ask Robby what that was like for him, but it was all too much. I had no construct for knowing what school or seventh grade would have been like, or how that was also the year that Robby fell in love with Dad. On top of everything, I did not want to think about either of my fathers going away and then not returning to me, to the hole.
And I don’t know why Robby told me about his father at that particular moment.
This happened just after the imposition of Wendy’s bath-segregating rule. I was only eleven years old, and I was in the shower room, drying myself off like a good banished and segregated boy was supposed to do. It was morning, Wendy’s official boys’ time to take showers, and I was watching Robby shave.
