Small Town Glory

by Eli Godbolt

  Dad, the doctor will come in here in two minutes and tell you and mom that the tests came back negative. That you will get to keep her and keep her for many more years. And what will you do?

  You will go home and drink cheap beer until mom cries and I sling you over my shoulder that is shaped like your elbow and I will flop you into bed.

  That is what you will do.

  My stomach always is conflicted when I see my father sober. Because he is a good man. A good man with a patient and forgiving wife.

  A good man that breaks me down every damn day.

  Ouroboros

  Ellie says that grass feels like eyelashes against her feet. I am about to tell her that I would never let anyone’s face get that close to my foot to ever validate her simile, but I remember that it is Tuesday.

  We are sitting on the couch that is itchy like the inside of a cheap blazer, sitting and talking about spring. It is Ellie’s favorite season, and who am I to argue. She has a monopoly on the direction of our Tuesday discussions.

  The limbs outside whip violently and are untamed toddler tantrum-arms. Ellie looks at them and sighs through her bangs.

  “I like that in April, it smells like the woods are waking up.”

  They are waking. The sun is chasing winter out of their skin. Pulpy-pores that yawn and shudder and you can hear the cracking-stretch-spring-snap of the woods waking. A mist-song that your ears secretly know and when you hear it your heart swells a little.

  “I like that too,” I say as I look outside and wonder why it is that frenetic tree limbs never fail to reach inside my stomach and untwist all of my knots.

  “I want to tell you about my perfect day,” she says without looking at me. I set down my history book and am glad for the distraction from the Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction. She sees me do this, grins because she has my whole head, and turns cross-legged towards me.

  “The end of April last year. The temperature spiked to 68 and it almost felt like summer for half a day. Remember that? It was a gorgeous Friday and you came to me at the end of lunch, pulled me aside, and said ‘Ellie, we’re going.’ Just like that. No sixth or seventh period, because the sky was…what did you call it? A baby smiling or something like that? You’re such a geek sometimes. You know that Eli?”

  She punches my arm lightly. I look straight ahead and grin faint like creases in skin.

  “How could I say no to you? I was a freshman and felt like such a badass skipping school with my older brother. And where do you take me?”

  And she doesn’t have to say any more. We are both there. Both of our brains tuned into that April day that was butter and impossible blue. The camel-hump hill by our house that had the lone crabapple tree with its arthritic limbs. The blossoms that were all pinked and exploding loud – feathery reflections of Independence Day.

  It was simple. Wool army blanket on the ground that was still spongy and would have soaked through our clothes. Me tightroping my way through trigonometry problems and unit circles and ellipsis. Ellie weaving buttercup bracelets and giving me hell about not asking Heather Snyder out because, clearly, she had been giving me signals all over the place.

  The sky that was Hawaiian ocean-water. The overly-ripe sun that made me squint at the white textbook pages and silently curse Mr. Austin for assigning every odd problem.

  “That was your perfect day?” I say and get distracted again by the lashing limbs and the December clay-sky and I sigh deep from my toes.

  “Was, is, and will be.”

  “Will be?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “That’s a very bold statement. There’s a lot of life left for ‘will be’.” I say and give her knee a nudge with my elbow.

  “It’s not that bold. It’s not that outlandish, Eli.”

  “Yeah it is, Ellie. Graduation. First job. Marriage. Children. There are tons of perfect days that could happen, you know.”

  “Not like that one.” She smiles, all winsome and distant. A strange half-smile and I can only assume that she is still locked in to the memory. And it is at that moment I realize that I can’t argue with her about how you can’t possibly quantify perfection. It’s a paradoxical situation that stacks and stacks upon itself. A snake eating its own tail or something like that.

  I don’t want to argue with her. Not at all.

  Because I want it to be true.

  Tardy

  Nels rolls up to me on wheels that sound like my grandfather breathing. Compound fracture in his right tibia and hairline fracture in his left femur. Two casts and a wheelchair that was given to him by the nurse at school. A chair that has a tin can shine and a thinly padded leather seat.

  The hallway at school is busy. Restless. Kids floating to class because the holiday break is a few days away. Heads that seem to be pulled by invisible silk threads and they never turn, never turn, never look and see Nels fumbling with awkward metal wheels and a backpack that is cumbersome.

  I do what anyone who is closer than relative-blood would do. I take both of the wheelchair handlebars in my palms and begin to part the waters for Nels.

  “God damn it, Eli, I can take care of myself.” Nels does not stretch his face. He is tight lipped and stewing in his chair. He is too used to night drives in his cherry-truck. A free-spirited wisp of cirrus cloud that has been bogged down in a heavy-cream-nimbus.

  “Let go of me. Let me have just a little dignity.” He insists and does not look at me.

  I say nothing and keep pushing.

  “I swear to God, I will wail on you if you don’t stop.”

  “Fine.” I say and let up on the handles.

  We go quietly down the hallway. Nels traveling in a wobbly scribble. His hands cracking dry and aching just a little, but he doesn’t care. He is glad that the heads around him aren’t snapping sideways. Glad that the girls in the hallway aren’t tilting their heads to the side, softening their eyes, and breathing quiet little squeaks of sympathy under their breath. Glad that I have let go of him.

  Glad that I continue to walk next to him, all the scribble-line way down the hall that is thinning out and the passing bell clangs electronic and jarring. Glad that I will be tardy alongside of him.

  The One

  Donnie’s cousin, Anna, is twenty-three and refracting light like a prism. In the middle of a family that is tearing stitches apart at the seams, she is grabbing handfuls of fabric and constructing her own quilt.

  It is her wedding day, and she is desperately, madly, deeply in love. You can see it. The day is chaotic around her, a maddening rush of relatives and handshakes and sideways hugs and is it an open bar? and people that mutter under their syrupy breath that it will never last more than a year because they can just feel it in their bones – that this family can never keep anything together and it’s just a stupid thing to ever get married because the odds are stacked up so high and they can’t help but topple down on top of her.

  But Donnie and I can see it.

  She has found the one. The way he leans over to her ear and puts his hand on her cheek just so. The way they are drawn to each other slowly, not a desperate grappling of hands and clothing and a thick haze of jealousy that hangs and hangs and drips off their skin.

  It is simple. Quiet. Like they can feel it without words.

  They are locked in on each other as they sit and eat fruit together. Strawberries that are out of season but have been shipped in from California and are rubied and look like hearts. They are not oblivious to the clumped flesh around them. Anna smiles at the naysayers. A dazzling white-enamel middle finger right into their inebriated faces.

  Donnie and I offer our congratulations, and Anna holds on to his hand, and looks straight at his knuckles.

  “Is it true, Donnie? Did you really hit him and make him leave? I only heard second hand from Cousin Marcia, and you know how reliable she is.”

  Donnie looks down at his hands and nods his head slowly.

  “Yeah. It’s true. So
n-of-a-bitch made like he was going to hit Ethan.”

  Anna looks at Donnie’s face, which is twisted a little and hardening around his chin. Her own lips purse a little, and she nods.

  “I’m glad. Do you hear me?”

  “Yeah.”

  Donnie begins to pull away, but Anna squeezes his wrist gently. It is enough to stop him. Enough to make him look at her.

  “You and Ethan are ok now?”

  “We’re fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  And Donnie remembers the summers when he was eight and Anna was thirteen and babysitting him and the infant Ethan. How she was gentility and yellow-sun and so very foreign but strangely familiar to him. A song you had forgotten and want to remember so desperately.

  “Yeah. I’m sure. We’re fine, Anna. It’s been a month or so and he hasn’t been back.”

  “Because…if you ever need a place…”

  She is white-refracted light and holding onto his hand in a way that almost makes me catch my breath.

  Donnie nods his head and cannot say anything more. Because he is leather and knows no other way of being. He cannot soften himself enough to feel what he once did ten years ago.

  But he knows. I know. This marriage will not be like the movies. Not happily ever after with a shiny gloss finish. None of our lives are. But it will be happy more often than not. They will be simple and quiet together and wake up to the sun knifing lazily through their bedroom window and smile at each other in the dusty dark and remember the slow-coal fire that burns in each of their bellies.

  Serpentine

  Ian’s driveway is serpentine. An endless pebble path that seems to fold in upon itself in places and feel as if you’ve seen that rock before, that stump, that patch of lichen-encrusted organic mush.

  I am walking because it is what I do. Because when my feet are moving, the gears in my head do the same. Ellie is with me because she needs the fresh air and loves how the vine maple trees bend over the driveway like arms. Every now and then she waves to them and hooks her arm around my elbow and smiles with white, white teeth at the sky.

  The lazy loop just before Ian’s house. The road opens its mouth wide and there is Ian, in front of his house that is round and looks like half of an ice cream scoop.

  Something is wrong. My stomach drops to my knees and throbs emphatically.

  Ian. On his knees. Jeans lapping up the water from the grass and the mud and the dirty puddles. Streaked blue material that shoots my mind back to that night, that cold night with the powdery moon. His river hair is cascading down over his shoulders and rippling in spastic waves. Hands grabbing for large clumps of grass that is saturated and slippery. He is breathing in the sky and the clouds and the mist that is prevalent in the haunting morning.

  He cannot speak. Just hiccoughs and lurches with his torso and pounds with his right hand that is balled up into a fist and is smashing the ground, grinding the soil to pudding. His body tenses and the dry heaves come, the gagging and near hyperventilating.

  I put my hand on his back and Ian swats it away almost instantly, shaking his head and sending his curly hair into grand swooping arcs that flay at the air desperately.

  I shake my head and breathe with eyes that are wide and feel Ellie’s constant hand on my right shoulder and clasp it tightly.

  Ian yells and curses then. A tangled yowl that unfurls from a dark place inside of him. Mangled and mashed in the middle of it all he manages to tell me to go away. That it’s too messed up and too much and too ugly and that Ellie shouldn’t be there and for me to get the hell out.

  I pull on Ellie’s hand, because Ian is folded in upon himself like his driveway. Because there are times when you need those who are closest to you to leave, and leave quickly before the world splinters to pieces right before their eyes.

  Seattle

  Oliver Hastings opened his mouth for a cherry bomb. He lit the fuse, felt the sulfur burn on his tongue, and after four seconds, did not feel any more.

  Oliver was Ian’s father.

  I could tell you stories about Ian playing with him as a child. How Oliver would take Ian in his arms and spin until the world turned clockwise as they lay on the ground taking in giant gasping breaths. About how he would take Ian up to the second floor patio in their house and take the telescope that was as long as Ian was tall and point it at the moon and look at the canyons and dried up seas on its surface. Ian saw his first lunar eclipse from that patio, his father sitting beside him on a wicker chair that snapped every time pressure was put on it, and Ian remembers how the moon looked rusty and so very much like an alien planet just hanging large and lonely in the night. He remembers how it seemed to reach down and touch his lungs, caught his breath, and made him smile.

  I could tell you many things about Oliver Hastings. How his favorite time of the week was seven o’clock on Saturday nights, because that’s when his wife Nancy would put on their Beatles vinyl records and the house would be alive with the warmth of analog sounds that filled the house like liquid. She would pour their favorite Muscat wine from a little vineyard that sat nestled up against the foothills and Riddleridge Creek. In the dark of the winter months their house, on Saturdays, would be full of candlelight and dusty records and glasses of white wine that would shine supernova bright.

  But all the stories, all the background and warm photographs that I can paint here won’t make the shock of it any easier to swallow. Not for me. Not for Ian. Not for his mother, Nancy, who hasn’t flitted around the house in many, many days. Just sits and sits at her kitchen table as if she is waiting for life to change before her eyes. For the world to spin backwards and for fires to bring wood back to life.

  Because I never told you about the other half of Oliver’s life. The days that he would spend wrapped up in his bed sheets. The nights when he would sit with his back against the stainless steel refrigerator in the kitchen, body naked and shivering in the dark, staring off into nothing and wishing that the sickness in him would subside. How it frustrated and infuriated him that he could swing so quickly and so violently between ecstasy and the miry bottom of a stone well.

  Ian always saved him. Always made him climb the craggy walls of the well and scrape his knuckles and come out into the daylight once again. Ian was this beautiful part of Oliver and had innocent eyes and a heart that pumped so wild for his pendulum-father.

  I want to offer Ian hope. I want to offer you hope as well. But I’m looking at these words and am continually brought back to the facts.

  I do not know why Oliver Hastings killed himself.

  It is a Friday night and Ian has a band concert. His mother is there, watching him slide his trombone and bend notes that sound like Saturday night records. Oliver is at home. Maybe because he is tired from a week of farming. Maybe because he could not pull himself out of bed today. Whatever the reason he is there at the house by himself.

  I do not know what pushed him to the kitchen, but that is where they found the body, all crooked and oddly angled limbs: a labyrinthine crack in a windshield. Maybe the thought of Ian being gone in four months was too much for Oliver to handle. The beautiful and innocent part of him waving and smiling in the setting sun, leaving for Seattle and only coming back to visit on Thanksgiving and Christmas. He knows. Knows that once his son is gone the world will be large and exciting and will swallow Ian up with gusto and never want to let him go. No more wicker-chair nights. No more telescopes and icy stars.

  Oliver Hasting can see it in his mind: Ian in the city with its neon lights and cafes that are open late into the night. He will find a girl there. One that loves the way his hair flows and she will laugh with shiny teeth and will talk like a lullaby. All of this is too much for Oliver Hastings to handle. Too much for him to wrap his head around, and so he wraps his mouth around lethal explosives, because that’s how his insides feel.

  And who am I to try and postulate anything? Who am I to try and make sense of his life and his love and his thoughts? Because th
ey are inscrutable. The human heart is too wild and too much like a serpentine road. And goddamn, how I wish I could just accept that.

  How I wish I could just look at Ian, who sits on the wicker chair on the second floor patio and looks at the stars and moon with watery eyes, and tell him exactly what he needs to hear. How I understand there is a gaping hole that has opened and is continuing to grow in breadth and depth square in the middle of his chest. I get that. I get that he has a sorrow growing inside of him that no one could accurately measure.

  But I want Seattle for him. I want the lights and the late nights at the cafes and for him to catch the darling eye of a girl who laughs with her eyes closed and looks at him like he is a mid-winter fire. He will always carry around the ghost of his father, always have that hole inside of him, but I do not want it to define him.

  I want him to sit in that wicker chair and remember what it felt like the first time he saw the moon, all ruddy and otherworldly and titan-large in the sky.

  Ripples

  A friend of mine who lives in the city and only knows cars and towering buildings and noise, noise, noise once told me, “It must be so nice to live in a small town. I mean, everyone knows everyone else. It’s like a show from the fifties, yeah? You know; the perfect lawns and the white fences? I bet it’s really nice where you are.”

  But my friend didn’t know the truth of the matter. How interconnected everything is in a small town. A ripple over here shakes and sends frothy waves over there. Waves that rock your bones and shake up your marrow.

  Yes, everyone knows everyone else, and it’s a grand and marvelous world when things go right.

  But when a father blows the back of his goddamn head off with homemade explosives? When a friend is being eaten alive by cancer? When the inconsistencies of life come clanging loud at your door at midnight?

  Yes. It’s really nice where I am.