by Eli Godbolt
“So…what set Joe off that night?”
Andy’s soft eyes are focused once again.
“Nothing. Everything. I don’t know. He was irritated. Drunk. He’d come in with ten dollars that night. That should have been my first clue. Six beers, one right after the other. It could have been anything, you know? Bad day at work, fight with his girl Cathy – you know her, right?”
I nod. Everybody in town knows Cathy. I don’t know her the way a lot of guys know her. Nels knew her that way. No way a freshman rejects a senior cheerleader who is all hands and lonely and has a belly full of peppermint Schnapps. He was just walking and she was out on her feathery lawn with an empty bottle, smiling at him like liquid sunshine. I don’t blame him, but I know I couldn’t have done it. Not even close.
“Well, anyway. He’s six beers down and getting pretty hot. He’s loud and in everybody’s face. Shouting about how he ‘hates this fucking town and all the shitty manure faggots that go along with it,’ or something like that. Real poetical stuff, you know?”
I nod. Joe was equally as eloquent when he was in school. That much I remember. He was the first one to call Scotty Charleston a vampire and a faggot. A veritable Wordsworth.
“So Kyle Taggert comes up to him and puts his hand on Joe’s shoulder. Right in the middle of his screaming vein-bulging rant, you know? Just comes up and puts his hand real gentle on the guy’s shoulder.”
He stops again. He is collecting himself for what is next, that much is obvious.
And then we are both torn out of the moment. There is a fish that jumps, all arched and silver and looking like a metal rainbow. Huge. Gorgeous and slippery like petroleum jelly. Angled and frozen in the air like a scaly apostrophe. Our breaths release when the gray splash snaps us back.
“Eli?” Andy is still looking out at the water, streaked with sun and the electric air.
“Yeah?”
“How could Joe do it? How? Just whirl around like a damn top, like someone had wound a rope around him, and punch Kyle square in the nose? So hard, Eli. So hard that his…I mean…it looked like his nose just split down the middle. Like a plum that got opened up. Oh God. I can see it, you know?”
And I can too. Kyle Taggert with his denim pants and white undershirt. He had been wearing a button-up Hawaiian print, but had taken it off. The bar is muggy and reeks of skin-sweat and salty odors and soft murmurs of how large and how scary Joe is getting. And after the fist lands square on his nose and splits his face wide, Kyle is on the floor instantly. Blood pooling thick, rivers that cascade all rubied down his cheeks. Nose split like a Christmas walnut. White jagged bone fragments lodge like slivers in his brain.
No pain. No shock. No writhing.
Just gone. Out.
Kyle breathes once before placing his hand on Joe’s tensed shoulder, and then never again after. Split nose and mouth opened as if in shock at the whole spectacle.
Andy takes his hands, which are steady and calm and still make me envious, and cups them over his mouth. Still fixed on the river. The water that babbles with softness and comfort. He is looking for another set of fins, slick scales, and arching beauty. I know it.
I am too.
Riley
His parents have hyperbolic drinks.
Drinks that defy the imagination with their color and creativity. A blueberry daiquiri that looks like it might as well glow in the dark. Splotches of color and ice and intricate paper umbrellas. Clinkity-clink, the drinks say.
His parents drink these by the blue zombie-light of the television. Where their skin slips from reality. Where the separation between the two of them doesn’t seem to matter. There is happiness on the screen, after all. An electric shadow of what should be solid like a delicate ceramic bowl formed by arthritic thumbs that know nothing but the feel of earth and love, love, love.
Riley hates the television. Hates the colorful drinks that sing their watery music-box tunes. Hates that the flash and the clink and the static are eating away steady: a cancer that won’t slow down and won’t be incinerated by radiation. He hates all of it, madly, deeply, without reservation.
Riley with his square frame and shirts with the sleeves cut out. Glasses shining darkly in his room as he fishes out another battery for his reading lamp. How he dissolves into the pages of graphic novels where people tattoo feelings on their foreheads and passion never fizzles like a sparkler in mud-puddle water. Where love is a constant palm-pressure. Worlds where the heroes are Herculean and obvious and so very, very steadfast. He folds himself neatly, neatly into those pages. He would condense himself down to concentrated powder and live between letters and ink-splotched pictures if he could.
I am there with him the night that his mother says, “It’s over. There’s no love. I know it. You know it. We’re just killing time here, and I can’t do that anymore. I can’t. Okay? You hear me?”
Just like that.
And I could hear it in her voice. In his father’s voice. Sad and disconnected like sparks that tried to leap across a vast black chasm towards each other and only made it half way. Close enough to see the other one pulse like a heated heartbeat and wisp away all billowy into the black.
Riley blinks a tear out of each eye, wiping them away with his thumb and forefinger, and keeps reading. Keeps wanting to dissolve into the page as concentrated powder.
“Go home,” he says.
“Why?” I say, staring at the popcorn ceiling.
“You don’t understand this. Any of it. Just go home.”
He is folding rapidly in upon himself. A giant collapsing. An exploding star and the subsequent black hole being formed. And so I set my mouth and shake my head.
“No,” I say. I yawn wide, swallowing air and sucking all the tension of the house into my stomach. Releasing it slow and methodical.
“No?”
“No.” I repeat.
Riley is taken aback and turns his boxy face towards me. His eyes are rivers during a drought, all dust and lightning-crack surface. They can remember moisture and life and comfort. It was only a season ago, remember?
“Why won’t you go?”
He is waiting. Not for me to leave. No. Not for that.
“Because I’m not leaving. Ok? I’m not.”
“I could make you go.”
“You could. But you won’t.”
“Why won’t I?” he says and tosses his book on the floor, all sprawled out so the pages will fold upon themselves. I hate that.
“Because that would be a prick thing to do. And you’re not a prick. And I want to stay. I’m too lazy to drive home.”
“You’re always lazy,” he says and puffs out air.
“I’d punch you in the sack for saying that if it didn’t require me getting up. An upper-cut too. Send your testicles straight to your lungs.”
The slow wave comes. Silver and curled and white-tipped. Laps and licks Riley’s legs and he begins a soft chuckle. A heated heartbeat spark. It animates his body and softens his edges. Brings mellow-fire and atmosphere into his bones.
In the muted air of a zombie-lit house, in the midst of a family that is fracturing, Riley lies on his bed and giggles with a hand over his mouth to muffle. He is sixty-watt-warm light splashing on popcorn ceilings. I am silent and stay constant by his bed, my fingers burrowing in the shag carpet, because it is what he needs right now.
Constancy and fire.
Magnetic
Eleanor touches her face with fingers that are kitten paws.
Fingers that have to feel like Saturday mornings in bed and dizzied-up heads. Like if she touched you once, just once, your insides would unpretzel and feel simple.
Ellie with her smile that spills and drips over silly things. Over reading Little Women. Again and again. “It’s a familiar face,” she will say. She reads the pages and says hello, as if it’s the first time. And in a strange way, it is.
I can see her face crack wide and her lips stretch like arms. Teeth. Head back an
d cascade-hair down her back. A chocolate rippled river. Cackle that erupts all electric out of her throat. Like a blue-eyed summer dust-day was somehow shoved into her lungs and then puffed back out again more shimmer-gorgeous than before.
I watch her there at the dinner table, shoveling food. She is beautiful and a woman – a magnet that pulls all life to her. Food and chew and consonant-speak mid-bite followed by giggles that sing of July-sun and are infectious.
Can it be so simple? To layer over pain with routine and simplicity and love?
I want to believe that Bobby O’Shaye and his oily face aren’t festering right behind her bubble-laughs. That the knee-gouge pebbles that dug and dug into my skin are blurring out of focus. I want to believe. God, so much, I mouth to my dinner plate.
But I know what I hear in the blue-black air. After midnight when the world is gape-mouthed and snoring. I can hear the soft hiccoughs. The nose sniffles that are muted static. I can hear Bobby O’Shaye in my house, and my blood rises to scalding. He is there in the black sheen of night, terrible and tipping his sweat-stained camouflaged hat. Just like it never happened.
The morning comes and she is the sunrise. Calm and slow and meaningful and kissing the mountains with infinite grace and tenderness. Fingers that are kitten paws and unfurl all everything like summer days. Leeching on to the simple things.
“There is a tree lit on fire by the sun, Eli.”
It does that because God wants you to see him.
“The trees bend so slowly. Like they’re about to fall asleep.”
It’s because they want to be beautiful. Because they have forgotten how to dance.
“Eli, it’s blustery and sunny and slick outside. There’s mud puddles all around. Walk with me?”
I can’t say no. How can I? Her eyes are lunar eclipse large and haunting and plead, plead, plead. She is a life-magnet and I am pulled in. Every day.
Because she needs it.
And because I do too.
Ryan and Kate
I have never seen it before, but I imagine their fingers intertwine like cobwebs. Like you can’t tell where one strand stops and the other begins. All feathery and intricate and impossible to separate without ending up in a mess.
They steal away behind closed doors and shadows because Riley and Donnie are loud and stare with envy-eyes. I pretend never to notice them. Pretend that I never want it for myself. You see, the ache of being awkward is always too much for me. It’s not that I want Kate to look at me and catch her breath all billowed and sudden in her lungs and for a second feel suspended and floating in the sunlight. I don’t want that.
I just want someone to see me.
To look at me the way she stares at Ryan. Like he has mass and his gravity pulls her in. Two planets that can’t help but collide in the frozen black lake of space.
Because I can see it in my mind. Those Saturday mornings when his parents are gone and they wake up lazy-slow together. The sun that toasts the skin and makes him squint, and how she shields his forehead with a hand that is almost translucent. Like her skin contains all the smiles that will ever explode on her face. She is there with her flashlight hand on his temple, and the sun is kept at bay, and they stare, stare, drink enormous gasping gulps of each other in. Just quiet. A frozen moment of lucidity and how you know it will be ripped away eventually.
So they cling.
Strong hands and elastic arms that stretch and condense everything, everything, goddamn-it, everything – even the yawning, smoldering sun that dangles like a solid promise in the sky – all of it down, down, into their embrace. Fingers that spider together and are cobwebs. Her head firm and secure and searing adoration into his collarbone.
I can see it all too clearly. A promise of someday, someday.
Please, God. Someday.
Love
When something is too depressing, you shut down. Raisin up into yourself and curl your knees to your chest. I know it, you know it. So here is a distraction for you.
There is a tree outside my house that looks exactly like an old man laughing. Warted and gnarled horribly. Branches that sag and wave steady at the earth as if they are always saying goodbye. Always saying I’ll see you soon, and then finding it impossible to leave. A lover who looks into the eyes that enrapture and can’t escape.
When I was young I wanted to climb to the top of that mess of branches and sap that dripped, dripped heavy in the summer. Like beads of sweat leaking out of pulpy skin. Now I am older and want the same thing but for different reasons. The atmosphere is thinner at the top. Purified. More defined and charged. Like you could feast off of the air for hours.
It is simple at the top. The tree will sway all frenetic and the wind will explode upon your face. I imagine it that way. The rocking and wind-explosion. The impossible blue and razored contrast of the dark green tips of firs.
It is love, and I roll that over and over in my mind. It is a pinked and cradling God-palm. It is the just-out-of-reach and the continual stretching of hands.
“Eli, will you walk with me?”
Yellow sunlight that melts fantastical. Autumn leaf that sears burnt-orange into the iris.
“It’s so clean and crisp out here, Eli. Please, just for a little while?”
Yes, Eleanor. Always.
The world will be sharp and cold with edges that look like razor cuts. And I will walk with you in it. Mash and organic decay feed the earth just beneath our sneakers. The same sneakers that peel away at the seams because the glue is dissolving. Everything cyclical and rounded and purposeful. I will breathe and nod my head and smile warm alongside you.
Instincts
“Thomas Vanderbuilt was stabbed through the throat. Nine times.”
Vincent Landon looks down at his yellow legal pad and taps absentmindedly while his badges wink incessantly in the florescent light. He doesn’t like this memory, and it shows on his face. How his mouth seems to shrink. How his lips curl down at the ends and turn his chin to granite. Like a bouldered cliff of a man.
“Violent, yes, but in Stephen Vanderbuilt’s mind it was necessary.”
“Necessary?”
“You never heard this part of it, Eli?”
I shake my head. Thomas was a kid. Eight years old and dusty haired. He loved football and potato bugs. He loved to watch chickens scuttle across their pens and paw at the dirt just so. Loved to see the cakey soil fly and the feathers shimmy when an orange beak swallowed an earthworm. He was a handful, yes. Scraped knees and legs like motorized wind-up toys and quickly, quickly down the sidewalk he went just as free as a spongy April morning. His mother was disinterested, sedated by valium, lived two states away, and only visited on Christmas and Columbus Day. If at all.
But his father. Stephen. The kind of quiet that is disquieting. The otherworldly eyes that bulged and looked too watery. Too much like lakes. Too black and too piteous for his own good. All of the neighborhood knew that he was strange.
“Eli?”
My eyes must be fixed on the far-off, because Vincent Landon has his head cocked to the side. Brow furrowed slight. He wants me to hear. To understand.
“Sorry Mr. Landon. My brain went a little sideways there for a second.”
“Mr. Landon is my dad. Cut that shit out. Just call me Vince. All right?”
“Sure.” I manage a grin. A stretching of my face that is all too forced. The camera is whirring on a tripod next to me. None of the guys could come with me today, and I can’t say I blame them. The sky feels like it could jumpstart your heart.
“You’ve never heard how all of it went down?”
“Bits and pieces, I guess.”
“But never about why he did it?”
“No. I guess I never thought that much about it. It just…seemed too sad to think about that. You know?”
Vincent coughs and clears his throat. A deep sound that reminds me of my grandfather. A man who rose up in the morning with its softened and delicate edges. The time of day when it
feels like everything is made of glass and must be treated with a certain degree of reverence. It’s a dark, silent, feather-reverie now that I think about it.
“Nobody likes to think about those things, Eli. They’re just there. That’s all. Stephen Vanderbuilt was a certified whack-job and he thought there was a damn demon in his son. Took a hunting knife to the boy’s trachea because of it. No other reason than that. Wasn’t mad at the kid. Didn’t ever haul off and beat him with a belt. Hell. I don’t think Stephen felt much of anything to be perfectly honest with you.”
“What makes you say that?”
Vincent can see it, in his mind. His own children. Blond and galaxy-smear eyes that open wide and wild in the outdoors. Pinked feet that are skin and swallow the softness of grass with fierce appetites. Arms that know spinning and counterclockwise cloud swirls and blue that is deep and distant and forever.
“Have you ever wanted to fold someone up and wrap them in your arms Eli? Have you ever wanted to protect someone like that?”
I nod. I know all too well what that feels like. How you can gather up someone into your arms and hold firm as they sprawl their octopus arms around on your back.
“I look at my kids, Eli. My oldest, Charlie, he’s nine. Nine.” His jaw sets again and he looks out the window. Vincent Landon is a man lost in emotions that he can’t unwind. Not even close.
“Nine times, Eli. Nine goddamn times in the throat. Right to his jugular. I…I can’t even tell you what it was like when I got there. Because this dad, this ugly, ugly monster is there in the kitchen: He’s soaked from armpit to index finger in blood. Covered. And he’s cradling his son. Cradling him, do you get me? Rocking him back and forth and…”
He trails off. Sees the picture of his kids and feels the piece of his chest, the ghost that has been scooped out years earlier. The lonely canyon that is imprinted on the left side of his bed. Breast cancer and long nights and sterile stainless steel hospital beds and chemo and condolences, Mr. Landon. All this runs through his head and his eyes lose their focus.
