by A J Grayson
He shuffles. ‘Whatever. I’ll listen.’
‘Thank you, Joseph. I appreciate that. Now, I’m going to need to ask you what you remember about the boy.’
13
Monday
Damn, if I’m not sick and tired of poetry. I can’t think of how many years I’ve been writing it; there are at least forty notebooks full on my shelves at home – but for what? How many times can ‘dancing sunlight crest the hills’ or ‘artful emotion hug the embrace of day’? I’ve done all the metaphors. I’ve called love everything it can be called, and only on days like today do I start to realize that I haven’t come close to saying anything at all about it. Saying what it really is. Not that I would know; but I know enough to be certain that no stanza ever written has done it the tiniest fleck of justice.
I fling my black Moleskine down in disgust. Margaret’s bench receives it silently. It’s taken this angry assault before. Every so often I go through a poet’s tizzy, convinced momentarily of the senseless uselessness of it all and avowing never again to waste the earth’s depleted paper supply with more vulgar verse. The fit is generally accompanied, like today, with the flinging away of the notebook in disgust. Twice my pencil has even been tossed into the foliage as an extra act of rebellious defeatism.
But I always go back for the notebook, if not for the pencil. It’s far easier to rebel for a moment than for a lifetime. I long ago figured out that the reason the hippie movement died out was because it just takes so much bloody energy constantly to protest everything, no matter how much pot and free love might be involved. When it comes to my own literary rebellions, the weaker but more practical half of my brain always figures that I’d better not actually leave my scraps behind, lest, at the most basic of levels, I find myself in my next fit of disillusionment without anything to fling away in disgust.
For the moment, though, screw it. I’ve been sitting here for the past twenty minutes, trying to wrest a few good lines out of the bowing branches and larger than usual flock of waterfowl on the pond this lunchtime, but it isn’t working. Today the Black Princess water lilies just look like aquatic weeds and the ducks like pond rodents with their butts up in the air as they poke their bills beneath the surface for some revolting, muck-smeared bug.
For an instant I realize that this is nonsense, that the difference between poetry and pessimism rests entirely in the state of wonder with which a person looks at the world around them. But I’m not feeling any wonder today. Today, I’m just seeing the duck butts.
I’d feel wonder, I’m sure, if I knew what had happened two days ago. Then I’m sure my life would feel normal and I’d be able to operate in my usual style, all my emotions appropriately intact. Instead, I have the sinking feeling in the pit of my belly that I might not feel anything at all until I know what’s come of my boy.
My boy.
I’m too much a poet not to notice the shift into the personal possessive.
I gaze out over the pond. One of my pencils is down there, below my perch, somewhere in the greenery, rotting away.
Beyond, on the far shore, I see the spot where the boy ought to be standing. He isn’t, of course. He wouldn’t be. But his stick is lying in the mud, its point touching the water.
And for just an instant, I think that this is wrong. That I’m sure I took that stick with me when I ran after him. That it shouldn’t be there at all.
Memories are strange beasts, impossible to control. I am not sure what keys one into place now, at this precise moment. Maybe it’s the abnormality of the situation, evoking a normalcy from the depths of my mind to try to counterbalance it, to set things into their customary equilibrium – but for just an instant both stick and circumstance disappear. It’s no longer today. The spot is the same, vaguely, but the day is different. I am back in the midst of wonderful moments. At one supremely wonderful day. The day I first saw him.
It’s eighteen months ago, perhaps. Maybe twenty. I’ve been visiting my bench by the pond for at least six weeks, and I’ve started calling it that. ‘My bench’. I’ve staked my claim. Planted my flag. Clichéd my rhetoric, perhaps, but I’ve found my spot.
I took my time settling on just which one would be called my own, back in those days. There are hundreds of benches in the park, I don’t think that’s an exaggeration, and they come in every conceivable type of setting. Open air, in the midst of large quadrangles. Tucked amongst tended flowerbeds. In stone form within the Succulent Garden, surrounded by the potent scents of rosemary and a hundred other herbs. Hidden in darkness beneath the redwoods. Alongside accessible footpaths.
There are even more just like this one, alongside ponds, of which there are four or five in the gardens and dozens in the park as a whole. So that factor alone can’t account for my taking to this bench in the way I did. It is, like so much in life, in the mixture of things. Just the right amount of shade, without being dark. Near the water, but far enough from its edge to avoid the bugs. Blooming, colourful plants amidst the greenery below, but not so many as to feel you’re sitting in the middle of your grandmother’s flowerbed. That, and it’s a bit off the beaten path – a cliché that’s perfectly literal in this case. The path to this spot isn’t beaten down by the same amount of foot traffic as so many others. It’s still a bit raw, a touch wild.
For a moment I think again of the stick, of the present, but memory has too powerful a hold.
Since the day I first arrived here, since I found this perch and christened it my own (with all due respect to Margaret, whose claim is more memorialized than present) there was very little to surprise me. I cherish that as well. What sort of people are they that spend their lives chasing after surprises? Some may crave the burst-through-the-woodwork spontaneity of the unknown, but I’ve always preferred the peace that comes from comfortable regularity. Some have called me predictable. I’ve always thought them incomprehensibly daft. Is it ‘predictable’ to cherish the familiar face of a friend? Or a scene one has grown to love?
But one surprise did, in fact, come into my otherwise unsurprising retreat. Two days ago, in the past-that’s-present, the way memories go. A Monday, so vividly clear now. I was just starting what I hoped would be one of my longer poems, an exercise in iambic pentameter (I don’t usually write in meter), and I was distracted mid-iamb by a rustling of the otherwise silent greenery.
I didn’t know where to look, at first. There’s so much of it. Part of the appeal of this place is that the pond is completely encircled by trees and dense shrubbery, embraced by it. A flutter in the branches could have come from anywhere.
But sight is far more precise than sound. Green everywhere, rustling leaves everywhere – but a small figure that stood only in one spot. A little landing at the edge of the water, almost immediately across the pond from my perch on the bench. The foliage reaches out nearly to touch the shore, thick and dense; but just at its edge is a foot and a half of hard-packed mud that leads into the water itself.
And on the muddy shore stood a little boy.
I’d never seen him before, which is part of what made his impression on me so interesting. Not being a man with children, or with any cause to be around children regularly, it could realistically be said that most boys are boys I’ve never seen before. For that matter, apart from customers in the shop, most people of any age are people I’ve never seen before. I am not the socialite that culturally advanced mothers hope their sons one day will become, climbing up civic ladders on the shoulders of fleets of ‘friends’ who bear that title after a single lunch together or chat over a Starbucks counter. I have two friends: Greg, whom I haven’t actually seen in six years, but who sends an email on most major holidays and with great faithfulness a week or two after my birthday; and Allen, a co-worker with whom I’ve grown close enough that I suppose by most standards we’ve crossed the amorphous line that distinguishes acquaintances from friends. He owes me three drinks down at the Mucky Duck bar on 9th. That’s a good measure, I should think. Only friends owe each other
drinks.
But this boy, who in the present moment is the cause of my angst, was then a complete stranger to me. I’m not even sure just how or when he appeared on the shore of my pond. When I looked up, he was there. He can’t be more than four or five, though I’m hardly the best judge of ages (I still consider Allen’s daughter, Candy, to be three, the age she was when I first met her five years ago).
I find myself at a loss for words to describe him – a strange position to be in, for a poet. He’s a touch over half my height, scrawny, brownish hair in a fluff over his ears. His arms look a bit like wires, but dirty wires, well used. He wore a white T-shirt under his overalls on Monday, and again yesterday. I can’t say it was clean, or that it might smell too nice were one close enough to catch a whiff. But boys play, don’t they? He’s a long way off from puberty and the special reek boys develop when the hormones hit, but sweat is sweat and will stain the clothes of a boy as well as a man.
His overalls are the lighter, rather than the more common darker, denim blue, just a little too short for him. Probably in a growth spurt.
You’ve probably seen this kid. At least, I felt I’d seen him before, or at least the image of him. Mark Twain had him in mind when he dreamed up Tom Sawyer — this exact boy. Add a straw hat and a Mississippi steamer and you’ve got the principal casting for Huck Finn sorted. Throw in a lovable golden dog and you’ve got Travis Coates getting ready to run after Old Yeller. Put him in the Catskills and you’ve got Sam Gribley on his side of the mountain. He’s that boy, all those boys. A bit out of place for modern times, perhaps, but the traditional image in all its details.
Yet there’s something more about him. Something as unknown as known. Something I couldn’t quite grasp, back then. Or now. I haven’t been able to get a good look at his face – not yet, not even after all these months. The shadows in this part of the park sometimes play havoc. Maybe that’s part of it. But a faceless child is a little … well, eerie.
I was sure, though, at that first sighting, that I’d see it soon enough. Each day the boy came back. Same spot, same still posture. Playing with a stick, though barely that. He just stood there, really, but he seemed content enough.
And I returned too, again and again. It became my habit. Nothing to do with him. Yet I would still sit on my bench, my notebook open on my knee and pencil knuckled tightly in my hand – and I would gaze out over the water. Waiting for him to appear.
14
Monday Afternoon
No, the stick definitely should not be there. My comforting recollections have puffed out of existence as fast as they came and I’m bound back to the present. Here, now, I’m absolutely certain that I picked the stick up when I went looking for the boy after The Disappearance. I’m sure I walked with it into the trees. I don’t know where I left it, but I know I never returned to the boy’s spot.
But there it is. Today. Impossible. Wrong.
I’m already walking down that path again as the thoughts come – the familiar ring around the pond. Walking this time, though, not running. I arrive after a few moments, half expecting the vision to be gone. An illusion. The stick, though, is lying where I’d seen it, its wispier tip still in the water.
I reach down to pick it up, and I’m momentarily taken over, again, by that stark feel of wood on skin. Rough, natural, completely earthy. But there’s more to the feel: today there is memory. The kind of memory that resides in fingertips and nerve endings more clearly than brain synapses. This is not a lookalike, not a similar piece of forested remains. I have felt this stick before. I have held it.
Two days ago.
I’m not sure it’s possible for a heart to ‘suddenly’ beat twice as fast as it had been a moment before. I’ve read this in books, but I’ve always shied away from using the expression in my poems. It doesn’t seem like organs should really work that way. But my pulse is certainly racing forward right now at a speed it wasn’t before this moment. Maybe there is meaning in certain catchphrases, just like there is good in certain evils, truth in certain lies.
It’s important that I don’t panic. What happened on Monday was close to panic, and the outcome was less than fruitful. I have to keep my wits about me. Be calm, I command myself. And then, with a familiar retort, Don’t repeat Nashville.
It’s my own stock phrase (we all have to have them) for moments of too-intense emotion. Don’t repeat Nashville. Had I never gone there, never ventured out to see the music scene and taste a culture I’d never known, I’d be a happier man. But I went. Curiosity is a hard cat to kill. I went, and I heard the music, and I saw the scene. And I discovered Jaegermeister, as well as the tolerance I thought I had for Jaegermeister. My closest friend at the time, Greg, should have known better than to let me drink the way I did; but Greg had also simultaneously discovered Jaegermeister, so we were sort of together in the proverbial boat.
The boat tipped when Greg’s stomach turned inside out. That’s how I remember it: not just vomiting, not just retching. It was as if his stomach simply inverted itself. In a single instant, what had been inside was out – and it was everywhere. Disgusting, and everywhere.
I was sure that Greg was dying. Stomachs aren’t supposed to do that. The quantity and the suddenness were unbelievable. Everything was tinged a surreal brown from the drink, and that didn’t help; but in the amalgamation of it all I simply lost my wits. I panicked. I started to perform CPR on him after he fell to the floor, and had to be ripped off his chest once everyone else in the bar convinced the bouncer this wasn’t a good idea, as Greg hadn’t lost consciousness or stopped breathing. I, however, was in a panicked frenzy. I punched at the bouncer, on impulse I suppose, but this was an even poorer choice of action than the CPR. The fist that swung back at my head was like an iron cannon. I can still see the lights that flashed through my vision as I planted my face into the wet, wooden floor. None of the shake-it-off-and-swing-back magic of action films. One punch and I was levelled. Levelled until consciousness returned. When it did, attention had shifted entirely away from me and was focused on Greg, who seemed to be tottering on his feet in the midst of a huddled crowd. I can’t explain why (I’ve tried so many times, for years), but I was convinced the whole bar had surrounded him, to finish the upheaval of his flesh that his drinking had started. They weren’t there to help him: they were going to hurt him. They were menacing beasts, that’s how I saw it. My Jaegermeister vision. So I crawled up onto my knees, then my feet, and snuck to the back room to a payphone and called the police. My friend was being assaulted. Violently. They were trying to kill him. Get here quick. I read the address off the typeset note behind the plastic sheath of the payphone.
The police arrived a few minutes later with guns drawn. Two shots were actually fired, thank God not at any people but as warnings into the floor when the bouncer and an associate, charged up on emotion and surprised at the sight of firearms, initially lunged at the intruders. But the badges that the officers held high stopped them before real damage was done.
Greg was fine. Sick as a rat, and had to have his stomach pumped; but I was jailed for the first time in my life. A fucking monumental overreaction, dipshit. If you can’t hold your liquor, stay the fuck out of a bar. That’s how the booking officer put it. Not wrongly. I still cringe when I think of it.
I cringe right now. I’ve already charged into the police station over this boy. I’ve already run around the park accosting elderly couples. Overreaction. Stop it. Don’t pull another Nashville. But there’s a force inside me, the same, perhaps, that possessed me on the floor of that Southern bar. Don’t stop. Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong.
I peer down at the ground beneath my feet. The parallel lines of heel scuffs I’d noticed two days ago are still there, though slightly less distinct now. Mud doesn’t hold shape for long. The only witness to the something that I know I saw is fading. Soon there will be nothing left at all. No testimony. No—
I can’t finish the thought, and it’s not for overemotiv
e speculation. There’s something else, there in the mud, something I’ve only just spotted. Less distinct than the fading trails, but there. Footprints. Little ones, the size a child’s shoes would make. Right there, following the same path as the trails.
And more importantly, the footprints are pressed on top of the trails. First they point forwards, out to the water; then back, towards the trees.
I squeeze my hand so tightly around the stick that its rough edges begin to cut into my palm. I’m shaking. I don’t know why, but I’m instantaneously certain. The boy has been back. He’s come back here, and he’s left me his stick.
In the next seconds I try to figure out what this could mean. Why return at all? It certainly hasn’t been at his usual times; I’ve been here every day. And he’s never before left anything behind. Not until—
They say realization ‘hits’ you, and I know exactly what they mean. It comes at me like a two-by-four straight across the eyes.
He’s come back to leave a message. He’s reaching out to me.
There is no reason I should think like this. Part of me knows immediately that it’s illogical. Spectacularly unlikely. When I’d called out to him before he hadn’t responded, hadn’t shown any sign at all he’d heard. Yet maybe he had. Maybe my voice had reached him and in the midst of his – I struggle to find an emotion to apply to his consistently emotionless visage – in the midst of his whatever, he knew that someone was concerned about him. And he’s come back to leave me a message.
But I’ll be damned if I know what message a stick is supposed to leave. Be a little more concise, you little bastard. I can’t be too sweets and butterflies with this kid. After all, I don’t know him from Adam. But then, the jarring thought is a little harsh. It’s not anger I am really feeling, it’s concern.
There’s more. Something else draws my attention, not far from the footprints. There is a fleck of white down past my knees. It’s one colour that doesn’t belong on a mud-patch at the edge of a pond. Greens, browns, oranges, some reds and blues: these are all the colours of nature. But this kind of white is unequivocally unnatural. Manmade. It attracts my eye, and I allow my head to follow.
