Termite
He sees through the blue and it goes away, he sees through the blue and it goes away again. He breathes, blowing just high. The blue moves but not too much, the blue moves and stays blue and moves. He can see into the sky where there are no shapes. The shapes that move around him are big, colliding and joining and going apart. They’re the warm feel of what he hears and smells next to him, of those who hold and move and touch and lift him, saying these curls get so tangled, wipe off his hands, Lark, there’s Termite. He sings back to keep them away or draw them near. That’s all he’ll say, he won’t tell and tell. Lark bends over him and her hair falls along his neck and shoulders, her hair moves and breathes over his back and chest in a dark curtain that falls and falls. Her hair smells of flowers that have dried, like the handful of rose petals he grasped until they were soft and damp. Lark names the flowers and he says the sounds but the sounds are not the flowers. The flower is the shape so close he sees it still enough to look, blue like that, long and tall, each flared tongue with its own dark eye. Then the shape moves and the flower is too close or too far. The shape becomes its colors but he feels Lark touch it to his face and lips like a weightless velvet scrap. The flower moves and blurs and smears, he looks away to stop it disappearing. Pictures that touch him move and change, they lift and turn, stutter their edges and blur into one another. Their colors fall apart and are never still long enough for him to see, but the pictures inside him hold still. Their gray shades are sharp and clear and let him see, flat as the pages of books Lark holds near his eyes. The books are colors that run and shine but the pictures inside him stay and never blur. They might say one color or two, bright colors that shine in the gray like jewels. He sees them when the sounds of the train or the pounding of rain flies all around him. The pictures move, revealed as though a curtain slowly lifts, moving as Lark’s hair might move, parting and falling away until the picture is still and complete. The pictures tell their story that repeats and repeats again and stays inside him until it ends. He sees them without trying. It’s how Lark sees everything, everywhere they go. She couldn’t walk and run so fast and be so sure through his moving colors, his dark that blurs. But she can’t hear what he hears. He listens hard to tell. She never knows what’s coming but he can’t say and say.
Lark gives him the glass moon man that smells of soap. Inside the hole behind the face there’s a trapped sweet smell no one can wash. Lark’s fingers are long and smooth. They come and go.
Lark says feel your soft blue shirt want to wear this? She says hold the crayon it’s green as grass is green. She says listen to the radio even if it’s not so loud as you like. She says eat your toast while it’s hot and she gives him toast, thick and warm and buttery in his hand with the blue jam on the knife like the farmer’s wife. The knife comes and goes across the plates. The table holds the pouring and crashing and banging while Nonie walks hard and fast in and out of the kitchen in her white shoes. Her legs swish every step and he can feel her stepping room to room to room. No matter where she is he can hear and he puts his head on the table to hear the sound alone through the wood without all the other sounds. But she picks him up, one strong arm around his chest and the other bent for the seat under him she calls his throne. They move fast, thudding across the floor out the door onto the ground where the sound goes hollow and deep.
The porch door bangs.
Sudden morning air floats low to the ground amid the small houses like fragrant evaporating mist, a cool bath of dew and shadow and damp honeysuckle scent. He gasps and hears the sharp grass under them move its fibrous roots. Lark has brought his chair but he leans far back in Nonie’s arms to look and look into the dense white sky. Heat will climb down in wisps and drifts, losing itself in pieces until it falls in gathered folds, pressing and pressing to hold the river still. Far up the heat turns and moves like a big animal trying to rouse. All the while he can hear Elise’s car roll its big wheels closer until it turns roaring into the alley but Nonie puts him in his chair. She brushes his hair back with her two broad hands while the car throbs in the narrow tracks of the alley, crushing gravel to rattles and slides and bleating loud. He calls and calls and he wants to go but Nonie goes. Under the motor sound he hears the car take her weight, a sigh before the door slams. The car roars away down the stones onto the smooth pavement and goes until it’s gone. There’s a shape in the air where the car was. He feels the shape hold still before it begins to end. Slowly the air comes back. The grass begins small sounds. The ground under the wheels goes hard and soft. Lark pulls him to the trains in the wagon and the rail yard is silent. Each stopped train is a deep still weight. Water trickles in the ditch where the dogs drink. They snap their jaws in the heat and Lark throws stones to make them run. They skim their shadows across weeds and broken pavement, loping the slant to the tipple where they slink and watch. Lark gives him his ribbon to hold. She knows which train will clank and rumble, jerking back before it smashes loud. He blows on the ribbon, moving the blue, and the train begins to move. Lark is quick and strong and she pulls the wagon fast, running beside the roar that clacks and smashes and races smooth. A dark rush spreads and moves and holds them, rattling inside them and tunneling deep, leaving and roaring, pushing them back and back. The boxcars go faster and begin to flash, moving their heavy shapes. The closed doors glint and the open ones are moving holes, dark in the rattling noise. Lark runs closer, harder, and the roar begins to make the shape, long and deep like the roll of the river, shaking round and wide. The picture inside him opens in gray shades, closer and sharper until each still line and curve has its own pale sound and the lines and shapes can turn and move. He lets go of the blue to tell and say and the train takes and takes it, whistling loud, bleating and disappearing into the trees. The train shrieks and the narrow bitter smoke is a scar that whispers and falls, pouring away across the railroad bridge, over the river and on.
Lark stops running and sits on the ground. She leans against the wagon and her breath moves the wooden slats. He listens until she’s quiet. The hot rails hum and each cinder thrown into the wagon is a small rock spark. The little rocks are warm.
Termite, Lark says. I’ll fix the radio. Don’t worry.
Here’s your ribbon, Lark says.
She wraps the blue around his wrist. He moves it to his face, just above his eyes, but he doesn’t look.
Mow the grass, Lark says. Big storm they talk about.
He waits. Soon she’ll go.
She says, don’t think you’re going to sit out here in the rain with lightning flashing all around you.
He holds still, listening. Far down the alley where the gravel meets the street, he hears the orange cat paw forward on its ragged paws. Away down the alley across from Tuccis’ house the ragged orange cat is stepping careful, dragging its belly along the stones under the lilacs. The cat waits then for Lark to go. The cat waits low and long where no one sees and the growl in its belly thrums deeper. The cat knows Lark will throw a stick or a handful of gravel that lands like stinging rain.
Termite, Lark says.
She puts her face close to his, her eyes against his eyes. Lark’s brown eyes are stirred like the river when the river is milky with rain. She knows he can see if she’s very close but he doesn’t look now, he doesn’t try, he doesn’t want her to stay.
She says, you ring the bell if you want anything.
He wants to hear the train. Far off the train’s bell sound is long and wide and dark as the shade under the railroad bridge. The bridge goes over the river and the trains pour over top. He wants to feel the roar. Lark and the Tuccis take him through the rail yard on the way to the river, between the Polish boys and the ditch. The boys have got a snarling something in the ditch with their sticks and Lark says they’re worse than the dogs, cornering one thing or another, beating and hitting until a dog sounds like a cat and a farmer’s wife with a carving knife. Joey and Solly fight the boys and Zeke stays in the wagon. Lark is never scared. Joey and Solly roll i
n the dirt punching and grunting with the Polish boys from Lumber Street and Zeke throws stones behind.
Zeke, hold Termite tight. Here’s a faster ride.
And they’re riding faster into the cool where the arched tunnel walls are furry. The leaves move up and down the rock and the ivy is shadows on the curve above. No sky it’s a stone sky Termite that’s why it’s gray. Beside them the river is the only sound until Joey and Solly burst out yelling from the bushes.
So you’ve got a bloody lip no call to yell like a banshee. Look Termite, a scrape like a star on his chest. Solly, wash off in the water and cover that up with your shirt. If Noreen sees it she’ll know you’ve been fighting. You cold, Termite? Look, we’ll make a fire on the dirt where no weeds can catch. Zeke, no more telling about fires or fights and you can have marshmallows. We only need some sticks for Joey to sharpen, he loves his knife so much.
Termite, look how the fire leaps up, see how warm?
Doesn’t matter if it rains the river is full of rain. We could ride the river all the way through Winfield past Parkersburg to Sophia and Shady Spring, past Pulaski and Mount Airy. We could ride the train to Charleston straight through to Charlotte and Jacksonville, clear to Florida, Termite, to the ocean. Like our seashells I show you, like that water sound inside them, all spread out for miles, bigger than a country, bigger than the air you watch through your ribbons. Nonie cuts ribbons from the blue plastic bags that cover her uniforms three at a time. Sometimes her uniforms hang in Elise’s car in the sun and the blue is warm. Nonie works at Charlie’s and she doesn’t go to the river. She says the rail yard is near deserted now and no place for them to be. But there are no boys anymore at the rail yard, no sounds in the ditch, only empty trains passing south and sometimes a man in a boxcar throwing bottles out. Not at you Termite, tramps ride the trains and sometimes they clean house. Lark takes him close to the empty boxcars on the overgrown sidings and lets him touch the hard broad sides of the cars from the wagon. Blocks of silence shift behind the huge doors, trapped inside, too big to turn or rest. The sides of the metal cars are grainy with rust and warm with banked heat even in the morning. Termite feels their low steel drone in his fingertips, a drunken stir like hundreds of stunned insects warmed and beginning to move. But the cars don’t move; they’re hot and cold and day and night and he stays still to hear them. Lark says there were coal cars, long flatbed cars filled at the tipple no one uses anymore, now the mines have closed. The wooden boxcars breathe, she says. They carried animals and have skinny windows too high for cattle and pigs to see out. Loud wind poured through, cooling chickens in cages so small the hens couldn’t move and so they went to sleep. That was a long time ago. Now the boxcars only wait or move empty to bigger towns. The freights pour through without stopping and Lark moves him far back to watch. Once a bottle thrown from a train smashed at his feet, brief as bells in the roar. A mean drunk, Lark said, not like most of them, old men riding and drinking. They don’t bother us, Lark says. It’s the trains that are fierce, rumbling their rattling music to shake the ground, crossing the river and leaving the town, leaving and leaving. At night the long low whistles sound like windy cries, moist with dew and darkness. Nonie doesn’t know, she doesn’t hear. She comes home and takes off her shoes and says she’d give anything. At the special school the teacher tells him to hold still. She holds his hands tight shut and says to nod his head to the music. The farmer in the dell. She puts the straps around him in the chair with wheels, across his front and his chest.
There. You’re nice and safe and sitting as straight as you can.
The Victrola scratches out the song and the song comes to the end.
There that’s once.
She starts it again. It’s Lark’s song not her song. He moves his wrist to sound the bell on his chair but there’s no bell and this is not his chair. The bus will come a long time after lunch to take him home. He likes the bus and its big noise even if he’s the only one the driver carries up the steps. The driver belts him into his seat and he can lean his head on the window. Footsteps pound heavy while the other kids climb on and the voices go high and low. The driver starts the engine and says Quiet, quiet now, while the special bus gets quiet. The long low growl of the bus can start then, and the thrum and shaking. The whole floor trembles like an animal under its skin and the sound is warm and deep, pouring into him through the vibrating frame of his seat and the silver rim of the window. The bus stops at railroad crossings and shudders, swings the big doors open on their giant hinges. There’s a whoosh and flap like metal wings slapping out, then in. He sits still to feel it all at once, breathing when the bus breathes. The bus is a long hard shape like the tunnel under the railroad bridge, but the bus is from the school. The bus goes to the school and comes from the school where the woman holds on to his hands.
Did you listen close that time? Now we’re going to clap.
She reaches for him and he pulls away. The lights on the ceiling are tubes that flicker when he blinks. She grabs his hands hard and pulls his face to hers. She smells hard and clean but there’s another smell, small and curled and crumbling in her mouth where her words come out.
I’m here in front of you, see? Look at me. People? I need an aide. You, please assist. Stand behind him and keep his head stationary. Both hands. Gentle but firm.
The music goes again and the hands beside his eyes are fat and damp, his head held fast in the cleft of a pillowy white chest. He can’t move and his breath gets fast and hard. He reaches, trying to go, his fingers going fast. The teacher holds his arms and jerks them once twice three times and smashes his hands together. The sound stings and cuts and she grasps him hard, counting. His fingers race and his heart pounds and he hears the dull alarmed thud of a heartbeat in the back of his head. A sound keens out of him, a sound to push her back, and he goes into the sound. Then there are cold cloths on his head and his stinging wrists and his chair is pushed to the window. The needle of the Victrola bumps and bumps in air.
Stronger than he looks. Let him sit quiet if he will. Let him sit.
The smashed air swirls all around him and the straps of the chair let him lean forward just enough to touch the window with his forehead. Colors and shapes surface through the pocked glass. The yellow form of the bus sits like a loaf shaped blob on pulsing blacktop. The black tilts toward him in a sidelong square and the hot tar surface seethes in the heat, whining deep in his head like an insect he hears through a pin. He breathes Lark’s name inside himself where only she can hear and the hard black shape lies down. Now he stays still and waits for the bus to move.
Termite, Lark says.
I’m going back in, Lark says.
The ragged cat drags its belly across where the grass is short and the stones are sharp, under the lilacs that have no flowers. The flower smell is gone and the white falls off the trees. Seeds, Lark says, little seeds with parachutes to fly them, Termite, all in your hair, and she runs her fingers through his hair, saying how long and how pretty. He wants the grass long and strong, sounding whispers when it moves, but the mower cuts it. The mower cuts and cuts like a yowling knife. He hears the mower cutting and smells the grass pouring out all over the ground, the green stain so sharp and wet it spills and spills. The mower cuts everything away and Nick Tucci follows the mower, cutting and cutting while the orange cat growls low to move its soft parts across the chipped sharp stones. Deep under the lilacs where no one sees, the orange cat waits for the roar to stop.
North Chungchong Province, South Korea
JULY 26, 1950
Corporal Robert Leavitt
24th Infantry Division
You’ll be safe here. Leavitt turns toward the tunnel and thinks the words the instant he hears the planes, but he’s at the edge of the crowd with the boy in one clinched arm when the sky opens up. He’s shouting to run for the tunnels in English and faultless Korean, to run for the cover of the railroad bridges, but no one hears over the ack-ack of multiple fusillade raining down on them. The
re are three planes or four, American F-80 jets whose swooping first pass cuts down straight rows of women and old men with kids in their arms. The strafing has them in a death grid as precise as a checkerboard, and the column of hundreds scatters. His men, lined up single file to the left of the Koreans, have the best chance; most run away from the tracks, but some sprint for the trench of the creek bed on the other side. Refugees hemmed in by the press of the crowd die first; they die on the tracks and the gravel, they die in the creek. Others crouch against the sloping banks in shallow water until the planes pull off to circle for another pass. The unencumbered, most of them men, run for the fields and distant foothills. Those with children, and the women—nearly all the women have children, one or two or three, and some a babe in arms—follow him, racing for the cover of the double railway bridge just ahead. The children are screaming. Leavitt is running with them. He’s thrown down his rifle and he’s holding the girl, lifting her off her feet; he has her in one arm and the boy in the other; she grips the old woman against her, dragging her; Leavitt is carrying them all. They make the cover of the tunnel as the planes open up again, flying a final pass before they lift away. Standing with his back to the tunnel entrance, shielding them from the crowd surging in all around them, he sets the girl on her feet and looks her in the face. She’s not injured; none of them are. They’re safe; he can leave them here. In the din of wailing and uproar, they’re silent. More and more refugees pour in behind them, shoving and screaming, bleeding. The girl looks at him, motionless, her stunned eyes flaring.
Lark and Termite Page 7
