by Eli Godbolt
There is a certain floating feeling you get in moments like these. Adrenaline and clothes that somehow find their way onto your body. Driving in your car and feeling disembodied and in slow motion and nothing, no nothing is fast enough and everything is so very far from where it should be. The stars blazing diamonds and the moon that hangs its slivered body smack in the middle of the horizon and smiles sideways at you. Stars winking and the sideways smile of the moon as if the cosmos and God are saying trust me, trust me. The corn fields that pass by with stalks hanging their heads slight because they seem to know.
A cacophony of sounds and record-player-lights that spin, spin and the mashed up static of walkie-talkies and Riley and his mother who stand with eyes that are wet and wide. His square frame holding hers with two hands that are large and will not let go. She is clutching a cloth blanket tightly to her chin. They both look straight ahead at everything and nothing.
Nels on a stretcher. Eyes narrow slats that the paramedics keep forcing open with latex-hands as they shine pencil flashlights into his pupils.
He is alive. A grand concussion and some broken bones. Ghastly lacerations and purpling bruises.
Vincent Landon is there with his cowboy hat pulled down over his eyes, just so. I am glad, because when I try to advance on the stretcher and the medics make a flesh-wall, he comes up and separates the waters for me.
And as Vincent argues with the paramedic from Bellingham about how an eighteen year old kid won’t hurt nothing here, I put my right hand on Nels’ right shoulder and look at his face that is bruised and beginning to swell like a ripe plum. I think there is a smile that is cracking on his lips, and all I can think about at that moment is how Nels is the one who will split his mouth open wide and laugh until his cheeks look like Christmas.
Nels disappears into the white maw of the ambulance. The buck-tooth doors close on him and the spiraling lights flash and flash on the trees and on our faces. Riley and his mother who has not had a neon colored drink in weeks stand and stare as the ambulance shrinks down the road.
I nod at the sideways moon and the stars that wink like Yumi’s exchange-student eyes. Trust me, trust me.
I do.
Coyotes
Hospitals smell like sorrow all dolled up in disinfectant.
I think about this as I sit in the waiting room with Ian, Donnie, Ryan, and Riley. Our eyes don’t meet. There is a TV and gaudy magazines and nurses with hair pulled tightly, tightly against the nape of their necks and red digital numbers that count the minutes we have been here. So much around to distract, and yet our eyes are firmly stitched to the floor. Counting the black-pepper flecks in each tiled square. Anything, anything to lose ourselves in.
Ryan did not bring Kate. “She had to work,” he says, but I know better. She has been intimate with him, but has never seen him vulnerable. Has never looked at the soft underbelly. He has never wanted her to see that part of him, and I scratch my head trying to figure out why. Because if love is love is love, then the cracking open of a chest should be all inclusive. Every damn portion of him.
I imagine it that way for myself. That when the girl comes along who will look sideways at me and suddenly seize a breath in her lungs and crack an invisible smile – when that girl comes and glides like an aching mountain all swathed in a sunrise – I know that I won’t be able to help myself. I’ll unhinge my jaw and unfurl everything.
I think about these things as the nurse calls us back down narrow hallways that look all marbled and whitewashed. Too sterile and squeaky clean. Too shiny for their own good.
Nels looks microscopic in the cavernous hospital room. Monitor blips and IV drips and a thin-lipped smile that warms my spine straight through. He is exhausted and alive and saturated in florescent light.
Nels. Busted collarbone. Compound-fractured tibia. Bone bruises. Skin bruises. Face scratched to hell by glass and debris, but no arteries were nicked, thank God.
“He’s lucky,” the nurse says. We nod. If the truck had been going just a little faster. If the metal had groaned and bent another way. If the stubborn tree limb hadn’t impaled straight through the window and seat six inches from where he was sitting. If the airbag hadn’t deployed.
There are too many ifs. Too many stories that smash together in my brain. They are a wild flying whirligig in my head. The pictures and sounds and emotion and how I want to crush them all down to a pebble and throw them at the stars.
Because the truth is very simple.
Nels Hendleman is driving home after watching a movie at Ryan’s house.
There is a long stretch of road that he is driving down. A road that is straight like a mother’s backbone. White milk-light from the moon and pebbles that pop under knobby tires. Nels loves to drive at this time of night because it is quiet and the farmers have turned off many of their lights to save energy. Just road, cherry-apple truck, and the moon that smiles with dusty teeth.
And for a second, for a split second that I can always and forever relate to, he turns off his lights. Just long enough to see the muted-light world rushing by. Just long enough to feel the naked night shoot alongside his window. He is not drunk. He is not high. He isn’t anything other than lucky at one particular starlit moment in time.
The lights flash back on because Nels is close to Riley’s house. The lights flash on because if Vincent Landon saw him driving through town that way he’d pull Nels over and give him hell.
A dog darting on the road. A phantom with paws.
And Nels swerves because his heart is large, even though he would never admit it. He swerves and spins figure eights after he hits a rogue patch of ice. Spinning and spinning and the tree kisses the front of his truck and crumples its nose. Bones crack. Metal buckles and gives. A calamitous crash.
Moonlight milk. The hiss of water steaming and metal moaning and the car, oh the car slowly exhaling in sizzling pop-sounds. Everything slows. Everything winds down.
Silence.
And now Nels lays in front of me on a bed that looks mathematical and cold. Lips trying to smile. Body aching. And as I come back to the room I can hear Riley saying things like, “You’re not around the house to keep an eye on your sister. I might make a move on that.” A strategic hand from Ian that swats Riley straight in the crotch. Howls from the boys. All of them.
We are coyotes in a sterilized hospital room, throwing our heads back and swallowing oceans of air.
The Pearl
We sit and let the hospital drip off of us. We sit in the food court of the Worthington Shopping Center.
I inherited a loathing of shopping from my father. I can’t say that I’m disappointed by this.
The mall disgusts me.
The stores are tiny cubes that are infinitely cloned. I hear and hate the cavernous echo-pop of high heels. Hate the neon lights that hum like insects and yowl at shoppers to come in, come in.
The stores are tombs that have been pillaged by grave-robbers.
I am being over dramatic. It happens sometimes. And when I scour down and dig at what the issue really is, I see it clear. It is a question of the heart.
I am not meant for the city.
It is very simple. My insides unfold in the tangled weave of my forest. When I can smell wet leaf and touch tree bark and needled ground. When my bare feet can massage chlorophylled energy out of the grass.
Yumi understands this. Her gardens and the balancing act that goes on when she walks through them. The mathematical precision and clarity and peace that she finds there.
Ian, Donnie, and Ryan are off buying greasy pizza that is too expensive but sits like jewelry in a glass display case. Riley pulls at my arm. There is a group of girls that stare and stare at us. They speak into their hands and whisper and it sounds like sighing.
“Talk to them.” Riley says.
“I can’t.” I shake my head and feel my right knee shake. It is jittery and reminds me of Eddie Kludtz.
“What the hell is your problem, Eli?�
�� Riley throws a straw at my head. The girls giggle. The mall swirls. The lights and the stores and the cloned cubes are pounding hot and my cheeks are red and on fire.
I want to be bold. I want to shine white-hot and blind people when they look straight at me. I want to be so damn beautiful, a giant white pearl that vacuums all attention towards it.
But I’m me. Muted. Mousy. Unimpressive and awkward.
I play those words over and over in my head as the girls leave. Heads thrown back playfully. Curls springing on their backs like so many feathers. Mouths outlined in gloss and unreachable. Unreachable because, in my heart, I know that they are like the city. All lights and glitz and noise. Look at me, look straight at me and don’t you dare blink.
They aren’t like a quiet girl who sees symmetry in gardens and can turn her ear towards running water and smile as if it is music. Not at all. But in a year, the lip gloss will be here, and the garden-girl will only be an empty seat in a boxy classroom.
A half-grin smears across my face as I realize that the bright-light-girls, the hand-whisperers, will never understand me. How could they?
I am not meant for the city.
Implosion
Kenneth Ortiz is my neighbor. A man who smiles with his whole face.
He has been married for twelve years. He has twin ten-year-old girls who laugh like snowflakes. A wife who wipes her dishwater hands on gingham aprons. A dog with hair that is long and must be brushed, brushed, and stroked and looks like feather-gold out in the early December sun that is timid and hides more often than not.
Kenny is forty five, is surrounded by ballooning life, and is being eaten from the inside.
“The doctors told me a month ago, Eli. I was in for a routine physical and complained to them about these nasty headaches I was having. I had that drafty tablecloth on and I was sitting all uncomfortable on that table-bed thing. Cold as hell. I remember squirming, because I hate the thought of other people’s asses being on those things. I mean, I know they sterilize the bejezus out of those rooms after each visit, but still. You’re sitting on a table where another butt-crack was not even thirty minutes before. There’s just something damn unsettling about that.”
I smile wide. Kenny Ortiz has a black-cloud tumor in his brain, but his humor has not left him. Not yet.
The December day is crisp, but Kenny wants to be outside. He wants to feel the excited air on his skin. The sun is a lemon in frosting, almost breaking through the thinly veiled mid-afternoon fog. He looks up at the fir trees that jut up soldier straight and he breathes deep like Whitman would have wanted him to.
“He showed it to me, on a computer screen. Right back here, apparently.” He points with an index finger that is skinny and shivers in the sunlight. “It’s a funny thing, Eli. To be able to see the thing that’s slowly killing you. To be able to look it in the eye and understand that it isn’t going to flinch. It’s going to take you down.”
There is a glaring star of sun bouncing off the video camera and Kenny is squinting, so I get up and reposition the tripod. I sit down and he shoots a sideways glance at me.
“How long have you known me, Eli?”
I have to think. To crawl in my brain and access the internal calendar. “Ten years.” I say. “Ever since I was eight and accidently shot your rooster with a pellet gun.”
Kenny laughs deep in his throat. It is a laugh that he tries to muffle at first, like he is surprised at his own reaction. Then it explodes. Makes his shoulders shake and his eyes squeeze into tight stars. Tears that run all jeweled down his cheeks.
“Accidentally shot him? Oh hell, Eli. I hated that rooster. Would’ve liked to have shot him myself if I had the chance. He was ornery, would peck the hell out of my shins if I tried to get too close, and had taken to crowing at 5 a.m. right outside my damn bedroom window. God damn, I hated that bird. I only gave you hell when you were eight because I could see how torn up you were about it. You remember that turkey noodle soup I brought over to your house the day after it happened?”
His eyes are shining with the joy of remembrance. Like twin satellites in the sky.
“How could I forget? You scared the piss out of me the day before. I thought you were coming over to take a shot at me with the pellet gun.”
Kenny about chokes on his glee.
“It wasn’t turkey.”
Even though I had figured it out way before the punch line, his face is joy and Christmas and family and orange-coal-fires and thin-tissued-presents all rolled into a set of blinding teeth. He erupts all wild and unfettered, laughter rolling and shaking the tips of the evergreens, laughter that separates the fog that hangs with desperate fingernails to the frosty blue.
He needs this right now. Because I can see where the story takes him when I go away and he goes back into his immaculate log cabin home.
Kenny Ortiz will shake my hand in a very solid manner, and I will feel the calluses that have built up over a twenty-five year career of logging. Hands that feel like sandpaper and tree bark and the good of the earth. I will shake his hand firmly, knowing full well that a week from now he will be skinnier. The vomiting and the midnight migraines and his wife wiping at his sweaty brow with a near-transparent pocket handkerchief that Kenny has had since his aunt Sylvia gave it to him for high school graduation.
I will leave his front yard, and Kenny will begin to think on his life. How he wishes Rachel would have come along ten, fifteen years earlier. How he would give anything to walk on the powder-white sands of Lanikai beach with her again, to hold her in the tropical afternoon when it is weeping rain and sounds like television static in their ears and the leaves that tremble all wet and slick and the sky has cracked open and is waterfalling all around.
He will sit there on his porch and hate the lump that is inside his skull, but only silently. Only ever silently. He will never let Rachel know how terrified he really is. He will stay steady like dogwood for her. Even as his body shrinks down to a skin-skeleton and the vomiting becomes all inclusive at all hours of the day, even when he feels internally wasted as if his bones have become gelatin and he wants nothing more than to just let go with both hands and tumble soft into the night, even then he will not flinch. He will stare his tumor down, unblinking, and know in his core that this thing cannot rule him.
I will leave and he will set his shoulders and go back into the house where Rachel waits and is ready to break down again for the fourth time today, which is three breakdowns better than where she was yesterday. His daughters, Kalie and Jessie, will be upstairs practicing their solos for their Christmas choir concert. They know. They understand that when they are on those risers that echo like mountain caves and creak under the weight of so many middle school children, they understand the intangible weight that their solos carry that night out into the audience. And so they have to be perfect. They must sound like silvery tongues and holiday fires.
Kenny Ortiz will hold his wife in the kitchen bathed in the near-solstice sunlight. It will be a fleeting and aching memory for her. A moment that she will want to dig her fingernails into and refuse to release. She will grapple at his flannelled shirt that smells like sawdust and sweat, because Kenny refuses to stop working outside. Refuses to stop splitting wood to bring inside for Rachel, although she begs him every day to hire me to split and stack it for him. He will have none of it. He wants her to feel him every time there is warmth in the house. In the middle of the night when the razor-teeth of winter are frosting their windows and her skin is comfortable and smiling, he wants his face to be behind her eyelids.
And as I pack up the camera and shake Kenny’s hand that feels like sandpaper and earth, I can see a man who has lived so fiercely. A man whose only regret is that he is leaving his family much too soon. He is imploding in upon himself, and he knows it. He has accepted death, but will not let it ruin him. It is why he can smile with his whole face even as he stares down the very thing that is killing him.
And as I leave his house that is
built with logs that fit together like lovers, I cannot help but want his confidence. I cannot help but hope that when my own body collapses, it will be with half of the grace I see in him.
Good Man
My father has lucid eyes that are waxy evergreen needles.
He stares at my mother who is nearly fifty, silvered, and still beautiful to him. He tells her this and kisses her forehead with lips that do not smell like hops. Not today. No, today they are waiting for the doctor to come in with his clipboard and say, very clear and freeing like honeysuckle-winds, one single word. Benign. Not malignant. That is not even a possibility for my father.
I have heard the story many times. My father is twenty and at a party where everything is glowing otherworldly – all black light and sweat and the moldy stink of marijuana – a college party that has swallowed everyone whole. He is not high. Not loaded to bursting. There are friends around him that are hyenas and are tripping madly in the dark over nothing. But not him.
He is shy. Terribly shy and looking around for any reason to stay. For any trace of knifing god-finger light in the midst of a throng of shit-sludge.
And he sees her.
Mom.
It is not like the movies. Not a sudden beam of light and angels belting out choruses and hallelujahs and lightning-love and a wild, chaotic, spastic falling, falling motion. It is none of that. It is a pull. Magnetic and gentle, but constant. A lock of eyes for a second. Not fireworks and blue-crackle electricity and hot-magma lust.
Inevitability. Gravity. Curiosity.
In all his stories that my father has either said or slurred, he never once romanticized things. The pull was real. The courting was slow and intentional.
Dad, you’ve woven stories about grandma, and I’ve listened. The woman that told you to pick a switch every other day. The woman who passed out once on her bed while smoking a cigarette and nearly burned down your house. You’re from a childhood of a father who drank and shot guns and died young from scarlet fever. You’re from a childhood where you had to be the man of the house at thirteen. And I know you’re scarred. God, I know it.
