I can see him sprinting through the black and golden bars of late May shade—then suddenly he turns to look at me and the stars are bright behind him, the shadow of antlers blooming out of his head—like something wild that’s crept unwittingly into town—cornered in the long railroad moonlight.
And in that same eye or heart or hope, they never catch him for killing Jorge, who died in the ambulance. They never teach him to lick a toilet clean or to suck a cock at knifepoint. He doesn’t fade into youth custody, to escape and get sent to real jail, never to escape the system ever again. On the bridge of his last midnight, he chooses a refuge where no cop car or convict can pursue.
So, he’s not pacing out with lowered eyes a lime green cell somewhere—he’s still laughing all the way down the long ladder to the light, which is just like darkness, only backwards.
HAREM SCAREM
Pubic hair was taboo, so I had mermaids in nylon, silk and suds glued to the walls of my tree fort—ladies who were later evacuated under emergency conditions to the floor beneath my bed.
Some will say that they instilled a false ideal of female beauty, or that they inspired at an impressionable age, the regrettable practice of collecting women like baseball cards. This may be true. But I would like to set the record straight on one very important point—I never drew eyes on their nipples.
The care I took with them embodied the fascination and respect we’re quick to call love when the situation seems proper. So, when even my hiding place beneath the bed was raided, I stowed the loveliest survivors in sheaths of protective plastic in the vacant lot behind our house.
I thought I was saving them from a horrible fate, until I made the mistake of remembering to dig them up. Then I remembered the willow trees I’d seen in graveyards. The long cool branches dangling down to stroke the stones and the names, and the wreaths in the grass my father said was flesh.
WE LIVE FOREVER
My thirteenth birthday. I lose my baby fat. As the sun was coming up I’d pound down the silent streets. The cool, challenging smell of the morning—past Sandy Sweeney’s house, which would be all dark and still. I was running after a black and red and white jersey, which the A team wore. I’d just missed the A team the year before and I wasn’t going to miss it again. I was going to make the A team and then I was going to run right on into high school. I figured if I just started back far enough and got up enough speed . . . So, come 6 AM in any weather, I was running. Then I’d jump rope, grunt through sit-ups, and finally grab the barbell I’d bought by selling subscriptions to Sunset magazine and Guideposts, and I’d burn my muscles like bullfrogs soaked with kerosene. The position I wanted to play was halfback, which meant I’d have to knock off the best athlete in school—Miller King.
Three years earlier, I’d called him King Kong, and his gang chased me through the walnut orchards and caught me right at the gate to our house. I was almost in our backyard, safe, but they cornered me and I broke down crying. I would’ve given anything not to cry in front of them—in front of him—but I lost control of myself. Later, I watched Miller have a fight with Josh Donohoe’s older brother in that same orchard. I was hiding behind a cool dusty-smelling walnut tree, feeling the texture of the trunk, and I made a promise to myself that I was going to remember everything.
A couple of weeks later, Miller King gave Daryl Steele, who was three years older, a bloody nose and a broken rib. He was going steady with Eve Warner, the girl with the biggest tits in the whole grade. He was already drinking beer and riding his older brother’s motorcycle through the orchards late at night. I could never really like Miller after the day I cried in front of him, but I could never really hate him either.
Then one day in late August he took his younger brother out for a ride on the Suzuki and woke up in a world changed utterly. The brother had been catapulted off the back and had smashed into a tree. Permanently brain damaged. Miller, the school’s best athlete, best fighter, regained consciousness to find he’d lost his right arm. The news stunned the school. In his suburban bedroom suspended in that lost orchard, one by one we came to pay our respects—to see the boy who fell from the sun—not a friend, but a fallen hero—wounded—vulnerable—as we’d never seen him before. Frightened—wan—naked—determined—boyish again in his deeper room. I realized I’d never been inside the King house before, even though I lived only five doors down and had seen Miller every day. His real father had died when he was a kid. His stepfather was an atomic scientist.
I’d never been close to him. The size and color of his room—the posters on his walls—were as unknown as the moons of Jupiter. And now to be there with others, peering in the doorway, pale sunlight leaking through the blinds and a vague hospital scent lingering like the clove and ammonia smell of uncertainty—we might all have been dead and risen to the ceiling of rooms we’d known and slept in and were now seeing for the first time—looking down at the body we’d been separated from.
He lay on the bed moving gently as if there were tiny needles underneath him. He was quiet and pale. He tried to smile. He did better than I would’ve, but I had the sad feeling that as much as he was glad to see us, our presence only worsened the impact of the misery and made the nightmare all the more real. In his stricken eyes I saw my father later lying in a hospital bed with a fat, dying heart, the tearful or grimly resigned faces of hospital waiting rooms, emergency rooms, hospices and the scenes of accidents. His fragile, unbelieving, yet still calm, powerful eyes were windows to all those moments of wreckage and agony.
I felt a tenderness for him I’d never known. He was many things I hated, but he was also for me that bigger something we all in some way aspire to be. It was a challenge to all I held sacred to see him fighting to smile back.
Every afternoon, with one sleeve pinned, he’d peer through the chain-link fence on the edge of the practice field, watching our scrimmages, searching for my number. I outdid his records in every category. The first time I touched the ball, in my black and red and white jersey, number 19, I scored a touchdown. I was sprinting down the sidelines with the crowd noise sweeping past and I noticed through the wind-stung corner of my eye, Eve Warner shaking her pompoms—for me. For me!
Yet somehow, what I was chasing eluded me. I gained eight hundred yards, scored fourteen touchdowns, caught twenty-two passes and threw a last-second game-winning TD pass myself from a halfback option. But I never went steady with Eve Warner. I never went steady at all. For two glorious days I held Shari Tomlinson’s hand. I didn’t know if I was supposed to do more. I was too shy to ask. And when I wasn’t shy, I was petrified. And always when I turned, I seemed to see Miller watching me.
In dreams I go back to that neighborhood, not the real neighborhood you can walk around today, however changed, but that secret neighborhood we entered unbeknownst to our parents, the place of truth and danger—of terrible hopes and sorrow growing like ivy over fences crumbling away into the soft-smelling nights, where whispers linger in the air for years.
The bus that took us to junior high stopped in front of Miller’s house and in that secret sense still does. Even the kids who are dead now, for surely some must’ve died since, are still there—the glow of our bodies moving in and out of shadow, the voices—funny, shy, cruel, challenging. Everything is still there in that perfectly broken orchard of light. There are G.I. Joe action soldiers and Barbie dolls buried in the dirt, a once-bright Tonka truck rusting under a juniper.
I’m coming down the street from my house and I know the name of the clouds I see because we learned the types in school. Cirrus clouds this morning, maybe cumulus later, or nimbus, or better still, a mackerel sky, those gentle ribbed undulations—and always a warm jasmine and ozone scent, like sex before we understood the smell.
There are girls laughing and playing with their hair, breasts beginning to form like time-lapse flowers opening in that Disney film we saw for science, The Living Desert. The girls aren’t thinking of penises; they’re thinking of shoulders and muscles, bla
ck eyes and bloody noses they’ve seen in playground fights and the spectacles behind rows of pine trees or down in the cardboard box wasteland under the bridge. Mr. Brose, who’s running late to his boilermaker management job, rounds the corner in a Buick Riviera and seems to gesture at us, but what he’s really doing is evaporating, like all our moments of wonder and chagrin . . . toys and dreams. The world trembles as Simon Bar Sinister threatens to make one of the stoplights stay red forever so the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade can’t advance—and the late car quietly vanishes with Mr. Brose inside—just as the bus and time and the relentless crush of money and routine will take our bodies and our youth from us, leaving only the soft electric faces we wore when no one was looking . . . the smell of ozone mixed with Welch’s grape jelly.
I see Miller. I see him as he was, tall, solid, somehow older than the rest of us.
I have a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in a plastic bag advertised by the Man from Glad, and a Mickey berry pie or a pack of Hostess chocolate cream-filled cupcakes. The idea is to peel all the icing off and then suck the white foam from inside the sponge cakes. Josh Donohoe’s black spiky hair and big white horse teeth bore me with talk about minibikes, David Mauren is overweight and constantly tells jokes about farts. Sad tough-guy Jeff Crowe really is handsome, I realize now, but he’s got some kind of reading problem and has trouble with his temper—there’s something hopeless about him even though he was good at kickball when we were younger. He reminds me of Carole Michelson, a tall afghan of a girl who goes from shy, stringy blonde with glasses to trippy drug babe who puts out for her older boyfriends. She keeps getting murdered even though we tell her not to hitchhike alone. Sometimes they find her body lightly covered with leaves by the side of the highway. Sometimes they have to use dental records to identify her because she’s been missing for months and the body, when a famous psychic finally finds it, is badly decomposed.
Before she started fucking and drinking and knowing things, Carole would sometimes appear at the bus stop with a notebook pressed against her flat chest and sway so willowy and shy I felt sorry for her. But even as she twisted around all gawky and goofy, you could see the girl burning away to reveal a woman. It was terrifying in those days, to be at the mercy of such werewolf vampire changes. You never knew what would happen over summer. Chubby boys got tall and strong, scrawny girls got soft and full. But some of the most mysterious things, you couldn’t see. There were foggy mornings sometimes, when the kids would emerge from the orchards of mist like zombies lumbering out of a black-and-white movie, like the dead rising up out of the ground in the damp, potato-smelling air.
But in the dream of Miller, the one-armed boy, there’s no weather to speak of at first—then it seems to shift from glaring midday nothingness to a soft rose sunset, a little cold, like early October—the crunching brown leaf-bone and smoke scent will soon fill the air.
I have a confession to make to him. When his arm was torn off in the motorcycle accident, I found the bloody limb and took it home. I washed it and kept it hidden in an aquarium full of alcohol underneath my bed. I was afraid that if they found it, if they could sew it back on, then he’d be a football star again. For years I kept the arm secret, watching it float like some intermediate life form, afraid it would wriggle from the tank at night and come to strangle me. Finally, I had to bury the wrinkled, bloated and rotting thing in the orchard to free my mind. I’ve come back now to tell him, to ask his forgiveness, to go into the orchards, if any of them still remain, and dig the arm up. He has a bone to pick with me. Oh, yes. We must dig and find it among the walnut trees.
I’m walking up from the shopping center, where I vacuumed the dry cleaner’s and where we climbed on top of the Rexall drugstore—where Mom gets her hair done, sitting under the time-machine, brain transplant bubble of the drier, knitting mechanically.
There’s an old white wagon wheel out in front of Scott Dale’s house, a row of stunted Monterey cypress trees that separate the house from the railroad tracks, or where they used to be. I approach the corner where the school bus is forever arriving and I see Miller as he was the last time, long ago, wearing a T-shirt under a down vest, the mutilated arm like something he’s carrying, not a part of him. I’m watching him the way he watched me through the chain-link fence all those long practice afternoons ago and all those endless adult afternoons of making money ever since. The boy with a mangled shadow, laid out on the green blades with such ferocious tenderness; it grows larger and longer than any shadow possibly can. The boy with the invisible arm is full of black grass. He looks torn sometimes—when the sunlight blasts him against the rusted diamonds of the fence—like a doll that got chewed by a dog. Like Gus Gus. We live forever with those faces we begin with—the names we play and the games we can’t forget.
I see you, Miller. Maybe the motorcycle accident that ended the life you’d known kept you young—and so I expect to find you still at home with the music pouring out of your suburban bedroom with the dirty underwear behind the door and Penthouse magazines stacked beneath the bed.
We live forever with those faces we begin with—the names we play and the games we can’t forget—warnings and mysteries from the hidden world.
I see you still, Miller. And so I expect to hear Jimmy Page’s guitar on Houses of the Holy drifting out your window into the orchard—where I once hid behind a walnut tree and watched you fight with both strong arms—and promised myself and time that I was going to remember . . . everything.
LOWERING HIM INTO THE TANK
It took four of them in sterile gowns with masks and latex gloves to hoist my father onto the hammock.
The motorized winch loosened the tiny links of chain and he descended into the stainless steel tank.
His fat face cringed. Not since the war hospital had he felt so raw—not until this daft laundry of nerves immersed him in the Hubbard tank.
His belly was, for the moment, unspeakable—gruesomely quilted with pig skin stretched over screen. His red legs grew flaccid. His ginmill humor turned to quacks in the steam. But the stapled grafts of flesh kept seeping true, like spiderwebs fallen on a pond.
Each white, medical morning, they lowered him into a body of water, a clear young body with eyes that stared at us, at me.
“I think the water is deeper than it looks,” I wanted to say.
But his blue eyes seemed to answer back—water, like blood, is always deeper than it looks.
EPICENTER
A town of dripping air conditioners, dust drifting—stinging gold in our eyes. We took our places for the relay, the ritual beginning—Albert down in the blocks for the start, me soaked in adrenalin in the second-leg zone, waiting for the baton to appear in my hand—a slippery tube of aluminum. Glint silver in transit. Butterfly nausea. Carry it home.
We were elegant in our motley regalia. Two streetwise islanders, a tall Icepick Slim—and a white boy wishing he was darker—all tugging at the elastic of our shining green shorts. We were pitted against hayseed drag racers and Italian orchard-owners’ sons, homeboys fresh from the Homeless Boys Center and one crazed black greyhound with an evil blue eye.
We’d take the lead as soon as Albert stood up—a foregone conclusion—strained hamstrings and spit. Spiked shoes ripping up the packed dirt track. A rutted oval we were used to—none of that chic-tartan-spongy-black-asphalt for us.
Then the tremor struck, like the daydream-fear of my childhood—in the Age of the Earthquake—look at the teacups. At last—it’s all going down.
The little town we were trying to run in, you see, had a precarious secret hidden underneath its fields and streets—under its gas stations and graveyard—under the cannery and the loading docks.
Heart stitched close, my shoes tied tight—lungs, groin and legs ready for the electrocution of speed—I watched the boys on the starting line poised on sprinters’ tense thumbs topple over in unison.
Whistles blew, horns honked—false start! False start. No aftershock. No nothing at all. J
ust dust and silence in the bleachers—all of us holding ourselves to the ground, waiting for a total eclipse of the water tower, and the track to disappear down a golden angry crack in the world.
Finally, the whistles and the crowd and the teams breathed again. Someone who knew the eccentricities of the valley decided it was all right.
We’d run after all, it seemed. Knee to thigh in our narrow lanes, we’d stride along the fault line in the heat of the familiar sun in the middle of nowhere—and winning.
THE SHOVELER
It was 108 degrees Fahrenheit when my stepfather decided the rock beds circling our seven pear trees needed weeding. Better than that, he proclaimed that the stones should be levitated and polyethylene laid down to keep the weeds from growing back. Smart thinking.
So, I maneuvered that accursed sky-blue wheelbarrow fringed with rust to the base of the dry trees—plucked the shovel from the shed, dog shit still stuck to the edge—and began to toy with the stones, listening to them more than lifting them at first, ringing and plopping on the lawn.
The leathery golden pears fell all around me, bursting juice on the piles of stones I shoveled in a mist of perspiration until . . . I scratched my shoulder blade on one of the sharp branches . . . and looked up to see Gwen Janco watching . . . watching me . . . working without my shirt on beside the cardboard box wet with the mush of the ruined fruit.
Was it in your green eyes, Gwen? Or the way you wore your hair? It was something subtle—not your long body that had yet to fully blossom. But it was something sharp, too, like one of those stiff branches. A glance across dark noon summer space . . . and time.
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