As Clifton walked back through the woods toward home, with Mr. Carlson keeping a comforting hand on his tiny shoulder, hundreds of things filtered through his mind. Up
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until that point, he'd always thought of the world as a wonderful and happy place. He'd never once thought about his parents being from different races. To him, they were just his parents. Two people who loved each other and loved him unconditionally. He'd been colorblind and thankful for it. But now his view had changed. The world was full of different colors, and that wasn't necessarily a good thing.
And then, close to a month after his visit to the Killing Pit, Clifton's view of the world changed even further when he witnessed his father beaten to death by two white policemen.
***
So now , with his box of bottles that each held a message, Clifton walked through that same rich neighborhood toward the woods--the woods he'd entered only that one time with his father so many years before. He felt a disconcerting tug in his stomach as he left the neighborhood and an even more uncomfortable stab when he approached the side trail leading to the Killing Pit. The trail was a bit more overgrown now than it had been years before, yet it was still easily traversable. But he refused to veer off, instead sticking to the main path that led down the rugged mountainside toward the Palisades. For a moment he thought about making a detour and going to the Killing Pit, but for some reason he decided against it.
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He was afraid that if he went too close, it might bring back solemn memories that he didn't want to relive. Going to the Killing Pit, he reasoned, might be too similar--in some strange way--to visiting his father's grave, which he'd done only once before. And once had been enough.
At the bottom of the hill, he crossed a dirt road, then a set of train tracks, and then climbed the steep outcrop of limestone that jutted out over the New River. The impressive rock formation stood like the spire of a castle. It stood, in fact, like a rook on a chessboard. It was from there, at the top of the Palisades, that his father had jumped with his friends as a boy on hot summer days.
After he reached the top of the promontory and caught his breath, he began heaving the bottles, one by one, over the edge. He watched as they whooshed by the sheer rock face, only to land with a loud splash a good thirty feet below. Then they bobbed down the river like a green crystalline flotilla, as if they were a motherless flock of baby ducks that he'd nurtured and then released. When one of the bottles caught a glimmer of fading sunshine, it was like a signal saying that it and the rest of the flock were going to be okay. Like a goodbye wave.
As the weeks passed and he continued to launch his bottles, it became his ritual to never leave the top of the Palisades until the last one had disappeared around the final bend. He'd
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found the bottle ritual to be a far better way of paying respects to his father than by standing next to a cheap headstone, the tablet poking out of the earth and etched with here lies james clifton carlson . For some reason, knowing that his father had once jumped off those cliffs gave him a sense of comfort. Almost as if his father were now watching over him. At any rate, he found it to be far better than having to see his own birth date chiseled into a cold piece of stone.
***
Though the notes in the bottles were never exactly the same, they were always pretty similar.
Hello My name is Clifton Carlson. I'm sixteen years old and I'm looking for something. I have no idea what I'm looking for but I know it's something. If you find this note, that probably means you were looking for something too. I hope you'll write me a letter and tell me about yourself. Tell me where and how you found the bottle. Things like that. I mean, if you find it, then
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that means we're connected in some sort of way. Maybe that's what I'm searching for, some kind of connection .I don't know but please write. Thanks.
After each note, Clifton signed his name and put his address at the bottom. He imagined that after his bottles reached the Gulf of Mexico, maybe they'd find their way to South America or at least Cuba. Maybe Haiti or something like that. But after several weeks of trying, he still hadn't received the first letter. By the time school let out in early June, and still his mailbox was empty every day, he decided he would've been happy to just get a letter from West Virginia, since the water from the New River actually flowed north before connecting with the Kanawha, then the Ohio, and finally the Mississippi. He'd even have been happy if he'd just gotten a letter from somewhere else in Virginia.
But then, two weeks into summer break, Clifton opened the mailbox, sifted through the bills and junk mail, and was readying for disappointment once again when he saw a wrinkled envelope addressed to him in sloppy, almost elementary handwriting.
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***
Chapter 4
Earlier in the day , before Clifton found the letter, the odor of stale beer and old cigarettes had hovered in the kitchen when he walked in to look for something to eat. It was a smell he'd gotten so used to that he didn't even think about it anymore. A couple of empty beer bottles were scattered around the table, many serving as receptacles for his mother's cigarette butts. A crumpled pack of Marlboro Lights rested on a dirty bread plate that was crusted with the remnants of Chinese food. Dried rice, resembling pellets of hard white mouse droppings, littered the table. By the looks of the mess, it appeared that his mother must have had difficulty finding her mouth the night before. Cockroaches scurried around the floor at his feet. Their antennae, bent and twitching, helped them to quickly find hiding places in the cracks between the wall and baseboards until Clifton disappeared.
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He opened the refrigerator, hoping that maybe he'd find a little waxed carton of leftover sweet and sour pork or fried rice, but there was nothing. All he saw was a quart of milk, several bottles of wine, some bread, ajar of mustard, an open box of baking soda, and something grayish-green in a plastic container that had been sitting there for at least three weeks. In the freezer he found a frozen French bread pizza that he pulled out and stuck in the microwave. As the pizza cooked, he filled a glass with water from the sink and walked into the living room to turn on the TV.
Not surprisingly, he found his mother stretched out on the couch instead of in her bedroom, her head turned to the side and her mouth agape, sleeping soundly. The crimson throw pillow under her head showed a dark circular stain where a drizzle of spit had leaked from her lips. A thin blanket covered her upper body, but her pasty legs crept out from the bottom edge. Clifton couldn't help but notice that his mother looked old. She was still pretty in a way but looked prematurely haggard. Her skin hung looser on her face, and a pair of defined lines, not exactly wrinkles, stretched from the bottom of her nose to each side of her mouth. She'd aged in precisely the way that eight years of depression, drinking, and smoking will do to a person.
A glass and an empty bottle of wine sat on the corner of the end table, and an ashtray piled high with last night's
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contributions was in the middle, serving as the centerpiece. Mrs. Carlson's labored breath rattled from somewhere deep in her chest as Clifton grabbed the remote and turned on the television. He didn't bother to lower the volume, and it didn't seem to trouble Mrs. Carlson in the least. She stirred for a moment and said, "Hey, baby," in a rough voice before turning over and going back to sleep.
He flipped through the four available channels, but the only things on were early-afternoon soap operas. He wished his mother would turn the cable back on, but she'd claimed at the beginning of the year that they could no longer afford it. He eyed the empty wine bottle on the table and wondered where the money for that had come from.
He stared blankly at the screen as a buxom woman dressed in a low-cut nurse's uniform tried to clean the wounds of a man who'd crashed his motorcycle. Apparently the man had once been the nurse's lover, but he'd abandoned her for a fashion model. The nurse's dilemma was whether she should try to help him or just let him suffer
for a while. In the end she decided to assist, but seemed to enjoy his pain as she applied rubbing alcohol to the deep abrasions on his handsome face.
When the microwave bell sounded, Clifton killed the television and went to get his food. He cleared away a space at the kitchen table, then ate his pizza as he stared out the
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window at the neighbor's dog. Bosco, half-black Lab, half-chow, sat chained to the metal post of a clothesline, his rounded snout fiercely gnawing at a large bald spot near the base of his tail. In the three years since Clifton's neighbor, Mr. Henderson, had gotten Bosco, he couldn't remember ever seeing the dog anywhere except right where he was at that moment. Day and night he sat chained to the metal post. He had worn a perfectly symmetrical circle around the post, and shooting off from the circle was a bare-patched swath of red clay that led to his doghouse. The entire area looked like the outline of a giant lollipop.
It was from Bosco that Clifton had collected the dogshit surprise that he'd left in Colt's locker. For his next attack, once school started back in the fall, he had thought about trying to scrape some fleas from the dog's back. He would collect them in a Ziploc bag and then somehow sneak into the football team's locker room and dump them into Colt's jockstrap. It was one of the many ideas, along with trying to come up with a library of insults about Colt's mother, that occupied him during his long, lonely days of summer. But that plan was still months away.
Often, he would stroll over to Mr. Henderson's yard while the man was at work and play with Bosco. It gave him something to do and Bosco seemed to enjoy it. At least, thought Clifton as he watched the dog continue to bite at himself, this
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time at his crotch, the fleas give him something to do all summer. That's more than lean say.
He finished his pizza and tossed the box into the overflowing trash can under the sink. Since he knew he'd eventually get scolded if he didn't take the bag to the trash can in the carport, he decided to go ahead and do it now and save his mother the breath.
He pulled the bag out and nearly gagged when something rank and rotten crept into his mouth and nostrils. It was as if he'd stuck his nose to an ashtray filled with cigarette butts and tuna fish oil and then tried to snort the whole mixture. He could nearly taste the odor in the back of his throat. He spun the bag around to close it, and hustled out the side door to the carport. A fist of mid-June humidity punched him in the face as soon as he left the comfort of the air conditioning. Beads of sweat instantly balled on his forehead.
The rusty steel garbage can sat in the corner next to his mother's beat-up Dodge. Holding his breath, he swooshed away the green-headed flies swarming over the lid with his free hand, grabbed the handle, and dropped the bag in. The can was nearly full, so he had to push down on the bag with both hands, as if giving it CPR, to make it fit. He forced the lid back on and then ran out of the carport to the edge of the driveway where he exhaled and then sucked in the hot, humid air.
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Though it was still an hour before noon, it was already in the mid-eighties and the humidity near 100 percent. The air was so thick that it was truly hard to breathe; it was so thick that he could almost see it. Clifton chastised himself for not getting up earlier, but he'd fallen into a routine that he knew he'd regret once classes started. He'd been sleeping in to ten or eleven ever since school had ended. At the beginning of summer vacation, he'd promised himself that he was going to get up early while it was still cool and try to go fishing every morning down at the New. Then, once the day warmed up and became unbearable, he'd slip back to the sanctity of the air-conditioned house, take a nap, then go back to the river in the evenings and fish some more.
That had been the plan anyway. And though he did do that for the first few days of the summer break, it didn't take long to slide into a different routine. Part of the problem with waking up early was that his mother was usually still up drinking her breakfast. Mrs. Carlson worked across the river, doing third shift at the Volvo factory in the industrial section of Samford; she didn't get off until seven a.m. Then she'd come home and drink until she fell asleep. She'd sleep through the day, get up in the early evening, get showered and dressed, and then go back to work. She had no social life at all and had never dated anyone since Mr. Carlson had died, which was fine with Clifton. He didn't want some strange
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man coming into his life who might try to take the place of his father.
Although she had become less and less of a mother as he got older, he still loved her. And he knew she loved him. She still doted on him, worried about him all the time, and did the best she could with what she had. At first, once reality had set in and they'd both come to grips that Mr. Carlson wasn't coming back, she'd done her best to console him. But early on Clifton withdrew so deeply into himself that no one could get in--not even her.
He knew that his father's death was part of the reason he didn't have any friends. When he'd first gone back to school after the incident, some of the kids (still innocent enough at that age to show compassion instead of cruelty) had tried to reach out to him. But he'd refused their efforts by choosing isolation over friendship. He'd refused to accept the compassion they offered. So after a while, his classmates had learned to stay away, in the same way someone learns pretty quickly to keep a distance from a skittish dog. After a couple of years, he slowly began to pull out of his depression, but by then it was too late. His peers had gotten used to the idea that Clifton was a pariah, and, unfortunately for him, the barriers of adolescent cliques had already been established.
As he'd pulled out of his depression, accepting his role as a loner, accepting his father's death, his mother had begun to
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slip deeper and deeper into another world. It was as if she had given everything of herself during those first two years to make sure that Clifton was going to be okay. But once she realized that he was, she gave up on herself, knowing she didn't have the strength to save the both of them. She'd chosen to deal with her pain by hiding within the opaque walls of a bottle. A wall of glass that only seemed to grow and thicken with each passing year, like tree sap that congeals around a wound until the tree appears, at least to the casual observer, to be completely healed. But Clifton knew she hadn't healed at all.
When she was drinking, she'd often reminisce about the good times when her husband had still been alive. And as bad as that was for Clifton, it could have been worse. Thankfully, she wasn't a mean drunk. She never got violent. And as much as he didn't like her drinking, he also understood she did it because she was hurting.
So he didn't blame her. Instead, he blamed the two police officers, especially Scarface. He blamed them for everything. Even blamed them for things that they had nothing to do with. If a carton of milk spoiled, he'd sometimes get so angry that he might fling the container across the room, screaming and yelling profanities. If he made a mistake on a test at school, he'd sometimes fly off into an inexplicable rage, storming out of the classroom. Oftentimes, when he'd lie awake in his bed
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at night, he'd plot ways to get his revenge on the cops in the same way that he devised pranks against Colt. But whereas his mischief toward Colt was more or less harmless, his ideas concerning the cops were anything but. When he was old enough, he told himself, he'd get them back. One way or another, he'd avenge his father's death.
So he blamed the cops, not his mother, for everything that went wrong in his life. He understood that she didn't have any other family except Clifton and that she did the best that she could. It was just the two of them. She worked hard, paid the bills, and kept food on the table--at least she usually did. But at the same time, as much as Clifton loved her, he didn't like being around her when she was drinking. During the school year, he'd wake up and leave the house about the same time she got home from work. But during the summer, it was a different story. That's why his fishing plans hadn't worked out as well as he'd hoped. By staying locked up in his room until she passed out
, he'd more or less fallen into a schedule of avoidance.
***
After he disposed of the garbage bag and then sucked in a little fresh air while standing on the gravel of the driveway, he went down to the mailbox to see if anything had come. And
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that's when he found the letter. There was no return address, but the postmark was stamped Crocket's Mill.
Clifton ran inside, left the rest of the mail on the kitchen table, and then went to his room to open the letter. He sat on his unmade bed, looked for a moment at an outdated, wrinkled poster of Darth Vader holding a light saber--a poster that he couldn't bring himself to take down--and then slowly began opening the envelope. He was nervous and anxious. He couldn't remember the last time he'd received something in the mail. In fact, he couldn't really remember ever receiving anything in the mail except letters from school about his deviant behavior. And those weren't ever addressed to him, they were only about him. He'd always made sure to intercept those and had become an expert at forging his mother's signature.
He had once asked his mother why he never received anything from his grandparents on his birthday. It had been the first anniversary of the beating, and he was still having a difficult time dealing with things. His mother had taken him to the McDonald's over in Samford and then made a fresh batch of brownies to celebrate his birthday, trying her best to conceal her own misery.
Gray baby: a novel Page 4
