All This Life

by Joshua Mohr

  “Be gentle with it, Larry. Maybe it can be saved,” says Uncle Felix.

  Larry lays the broken fishing pole across his palms, carrying it like an injured animal.

  Slowly, the three remaining members of the Curtis clan limp into the house. They lurch through the front door, onto the concrete floor, which Kathleen used to have covered with a knockoff Persian, the rug running the whole square room, concealing the cold cement underneath. Uncle Felix rolled up and torched the rug in the backyard once she’d left.

  The only furniture in the room now is a small couch, a record player sitting on the floor in the corner, hooked up to a couple of cheap speakers. All of Felix’s old vinyl is in a pile around it, Hank Williams, David Allan Coe, Johnny Cash. He’s been known to crank up the volume and howl along to his records, Rodney always staying in his room until these recitals are over. He barricades himself away because he hates that old hillbilly shit, but more importantly, he doesn’t like listening to his uncle sing—something he so badly wishes he could do—especially if a melody is being wasted on some redneck twang.

  There’s also a swamp cooler jutting from the living room wall, an ancient one that looks like a lawnmower has been turned on its side and jammed into the cinderblock. It makes so much noise when it’s on that the whole room reverberates, the mewling ricocheting off the concrete walls and floor.

  Not all three of them can sit on the couch at once. Rodney and Larry take a seat, while Uncle Felix lays the two halves of the broken fishing pole on the concrete floor and kneels down next to it, a doctor conducting an autopsy.

  “He is an evil man,” Felix says. “He wants to fight, fine. I am not opposed to physical violence. But ruining another man’s fishing pole?”

  “How’s your head?” Larry asks his son, running his finger across the boy’s cheek.

  “I’m,” Rodney says, then five seconds later, “fine.”

  “A fishing pole can’t even defend itself!” Felix says.

  “Do you need some water?” Larry asks his son.

  Rodney shakes his head no.

  “I’m sorry about this,” Larry says to Rodney.

  Uncle Felix takes both pieces of broken pole, waving them about like he’s conducting a choir, and Balloon Boy dreads what’s coming next. He’s seen this look on his uncle’s face many times, right before a bad idea: The look is like a whistle on a speeding train, telling you danger is on its way. The same face Uncle Felix had right before fighting Hank, or a couple weeks back when he rifled through the neighbor’s trashcans looking for salmon skins, convinced they’d stolen a fish from the fridge, or a few weeks before that when Felix jacked a battery out of someone else’s car in broad daylight, not even hurrying, calmly thieving, and then put it in his truck. Rodney knows this face and he fears it.

  Uncle Felix brings one of the broken pieces of fishing pole up close to his face. “As much as it pains me to admit, this pole is a goner. Hank can’t get away with it.”

  “He’s already gotten away with it,” says Larry.

  “The battle has only begun,” Uncle Felix says.

  Larry stands up off the couch, clapping his hands, swelling with toxic camaraderie. If Balloon Boy has seen the crazy look in his uncle’s eyes as he conceives and executes a bad idea, he knows this face from his father: a blank-eyed, abject agreement. He’s going along with whatever plan his brother spins.

  “I say we light her car on fire,” Uncle Felix says. “Let’s hold it responsible.”

  “Good plan,” Larry says.

  “Bad,” Balloon Boy says, then four seconds later, “plan.”

  “Hush,” they say in unison.

  “But wait,” Larry says, “won’t Hank kick our asses again?”

  Felix smiles and swings those broken poles about, keeping that deranged choir singing: “We need backup. Call our softball team. Call every Wombat. Get our whole batting order here and we’ll light her bucket of bolts on fire and get some revenge on Hank.” As he finishes his thought, he begins using the poles as swords, fencing thin air.

  Balloon Boy isn’t on the softball team, but he does go to the park to help with their practices, collecting equipment and whatnot. Sometimes a Wombat will look around the park and ask Rodney, “Isn’t this the place where it happened?” and he’ll say, “Yes,” and sometimes a Wombat will say, “How high’d you get on that balloon anyway?” and he’ll shrug with a smile, not wanting to talk about it.

  Now Larry gets on the horn, calling Wombats, and Balloon Boy sits and watches, knowing there’s nothing he can do to talk them out of this. But he can make sure that Sara stays safe, which is what concerns him the most. She might not love him anymore, yet that doesn’t mean he’s forgotten his own feelings for her. They’re locked in him. That’s what makes Balloon Boy feel so alone, all the swirling thoughts that can only clank around his brain like shoes in a dryer.

  Alone, with no way to articulate himself.

  The two halves of him, much like the busted fishing pole. Rodney and Balloon Boy. The same. Different. Permanent. Terrible.

  “Excuse,” Rodney says and gets off the couch, “me.”

  “Where you going?” Larry says, cupping the phone with his hand.

  “Need. Fresh. Air.” The whole sentence takes sixteen seconds to choke out.

  “No such thing in Traurig,” Uncle Felix says.

  Rodney goes out the front door, walks over the small dune in the yard, and makes his way toward Sara’s. He should have stopped in his room to get his pen and pad. This is going to take a lot of words. But it was about time to Rodney, maximizing his time. So he decided to blow off the pen and pad in the name of getting to Sara as soon as possible.

  The day is equal parts hot and achy, and Balloon Boy wonders if it’s even possible for him to get a concussion, after the damage already done. Hank’s fists connected hard against his body and Rodney feels a bit woozy.

  He hears a ringing, which isn’t a good sign. He might be concussed. Then he realizes it’s Old Erma’s wind chimes a couple houses up. Obviously, there is no midday wind, but she sits on her porch, clanging her cane along all the chimes, like a prisoner running a tin cup across her cell’s bars. She smiles as Rodney passes and calls to him, “Hey there, sweetie. You good?”

  “I’m,” he says, and six seconds later, “good.”

  “I love music,” she says, sending her cane over the wind chimes again.

  He sees a lizard darting up a wall and a swarm of ants slowly mutilating a moth and carrying the bits off.

  A toddler on a tricycle rides it in slow laps around an aboveground pool in a front yard. Rodney waves at her. The young girl doesn’t break concentration, slowly circling while wearing a ratty red bathing suit.

  He’s at the end of the cul-de-sac, standing in front of Sara’s house. There are so many other places he’d like to be—namely any place where Hank is not—and yet here is where he must be. Sara needs him.

  Hank has a Rottweiler the size of a Mini Cooper, but even that won’t stop Balloon Boy from warning her. The dog barks and froths on the porch, and despite being terrified Rodney walks right by it to ring the bell.

  Hank comes to the door and stands, tapping his foot and smiling. He doesn’t have a shirt on and Rodney hates how small he feels next to Hank.

  “You wanna throw some more hands with me?” asks Hank.

  “Sa. Ra,” says Balloon Boy.

  “Nope.”

  The Mini Cooper keeps barking.

  “Sa,” he says, “ra.”

  “She’s busy not talking to you.”

  “Sa! Ra!”

  “Don’t poke a grizzly with a stick,” says Hank. “We bite.” He rubs Bernard’s head. “We bite and it’s no bueno for you.”

  “Sa! Ra!”

  Sara finally comes to the screen door and says, “What do you need, Rodney?”

  “They,” he says, then five seconds later, “come.”

  “Who?”

  “Dad . . . un . . . cle.”

&
nbsp; “They’re coming here?” Sara says.

  Balloon Boy nods.

  “We no speaky the retard,” says Hank with a brash Chinese accent, walking back inside with his hound in tow.

  “Tell me what’s wrong,” Sara says.

  These moments in Balloon Boy’s life are the worst, the times when he needs words to make someone understand what’s happening without the aid of his pad and pen. It would have only taken thirty seconds to run to his room and grab them. Now he has to humiliate himself in front of her, one syllable at a time.

  And if she could ever see what’s been written down in his pad, he thinks it might rekindle what they had. Balloon Boy has heard stories of people losing one of their senses and then the others gaining strength. For Rodney, this compensation happens in his pad. He cannot communicate orally and yet he is able to write down everything, not only jotting recaps of each day, but he even allows himself to write little one-act plays. He bought a copy of a Sam Shepard collection at a garage sale, the volume containing seven or eight plays, and Rodney has read them a hundred times. He’s studied every line that Shepard put together. His favorite play is “Curse of the Starving Class.” It’s about a son who is doing his damnedest to avoid his parents’ mistakes, the death sentence of turning into them, a story that Rodney can not only relate to, but holds as his biggest fear. He’s already fallen off the balloon, but he so badly wishes that he doesn’t have to go down the same pit that swallowed his parents. He doesn’t want to be a coward that takes off, prioritizing herself above her family. And he doesn’t want to be a coward that stays behind, drinking too much and wasting his life. He wants to shuck these curses, do better.

  His one-acts are all set in Traurig, taking people and settings he knows and then spinning the stories from there.

  So if Sara took the time to read a few pages, Balloon Boy has no doubt their friendship would wake from hibernation. Chances are he’ll never kiss her again, and he’s accepted that over the years, but there’s no reason they can’t be better friends, especially if she reads and understands that he is still the same person.

  She exits the screen door and they’re standing only a few feet apart.

  “You know you can tell me,” she says. “Oh, man. Your face.”

  “I’m,” he says, and two seconds later, “fine.”

  “Hank did that to you. I never wanted that to happen. I’m sorry.”

  He says it again: “I’m. Fine.”

  “Oh, you’re a tough guy now?” she says.

  Rodney flexes his scrawny arms, nods, and smiles.

  He guesses this conversation is something of a birthday present. Sara disappeared all those years ago after he got hurt. She was friendly to him, but no more camping in the backyard. So even if he felt dumb doling out his monosyllables, he was not only aiding someone he cared deeply about but he got a few minutes in her presence. Sara might have only been five feet tall, but she had a big personality. Rodney could be shy, obtuse, even before his accident, and Sara helped him with this. It was like their first kiss. It was Sara who finally came right out and said it.

  If he could lean in and kiss her now on the porch, he would.

  “What’s going on?” says Sara.

  “Burn. Car.”

  “Did you say burn my car?”

  Balloon Boy nods.

  “You mean Larry and Felix are going to burn my car?” Sara asks.

  He nods again.

  Sara calls in the house to Hank, “They’re going to light my car on fire!”

  “Those jag-offs never learn!” says Hank.

  “Anything else, Rodney?”

  “Hurt. Hank.”

  “And they’re going to kick your ass!” she calls to her brother.

  “I’m more worried about slipping in the shower,” he says.

  “They’re coming here soon, Rodney?”

  He nods again.

  “They’re coming soon, Hank! Let’s get out of here. We don’t want any trouble, neither does your PO.”

  “You go ahead,” Hank says. “They wanna rumble, me and Bernard are willing to oblige them!”

  Sara rolls her eyes at Rodney. “Some families we’ve got, huh?”

  Balloon Boy shrugs.

  Sara and Rodney stand there for a few seconds, smiling at each other.

  If he had his pad and pen, he’d write a short note to her: Do you remember me? Can’t you see I’m still in here?

  “Birth. Day,” Balloon Boy says.

  “It’s your birthday?” Sara asks.

  More nodding.

  “Well, if they want to stay here and kill each other, maybe me and you can go for a drive, just us,” Sara says. “What do you think of that?”

  Rodney doesn’t nod this time, but tilts his head a little to the side, in awe, taking in every inch of her.

  “You’ll have to check my blind spots,” she says. “Thanks to your uncle, I’m down a mirror.”

  IN THE CAR, Sara’s speakers crank the same music Rodney had heard right before Uncle Felix kicked her car, a rapper once again going crazy over heavy metal riffs. Rodney likes hip-hop, mostly the old stuff. Tribe Called Quest. Wu-Tang Clan. Pharcyde. De La Soul. Anything with a beat that stays out of the way and lets the MC reign. Listening to tracks like that, Balloon Boy is able to hear the rhymes colliding off of one another, a pileup of fast and loose syllables sizzling from mouths. He’s never been much into the whole chainsaw guitar sound of metal, but this he likes. It’s aggressive and angry and crunchy, yet the singer is front and center, not drowned out by the fuzz. He’s like a surfer riding the livid riff, staying on top of it, using the music’s velocity to accentuate his cadences and all his rhymes are easy to make out. He’s a beast. A barker. He’s super-pissed and he wants you to know why.

  That would be a great birthday gift: a day, an hour, hell, even five minutes in which Rodney can call out like that.

  He points to the stereo.

  “Sorry,” says Sara, turning the volume down.

  “No.” Balloon Boy brings it back to its original level, which makes Sara smile.

  “You like it?” she says.

  He nods, listening to the singer rap something so deft, so on the beat that the syncopation makes Rodney bob his head.

  “You’ve got good taste,” Sara says.

  Balloon Boy nods, not wanting to congest the car with any of his sounds.

  “Where should we go?” asks Sara.

  But she doesn’t wait for him to say anything, not that Rodney was going to, only two or three seconds passing before Sara says, “Can I show you my favorite spot? You’ll love the view.”

  The word view makes Rodney think about being on the balloon, think about the glory of all the open space he was able to see.

  It’s about three in the afternoon, Sara’s AC working hard. They drive through what would be called downtown Traurig. It’s only five square blocks, the population of the Nevada town around 2,000. There was a time in the 1970s when people thought that Reno was going to have a population boom, become something closer to Vegas, and so these towns in the outskirts, say within fifty miles, were thought to be up and coming. They pocked the desert and the dominant thought was that they’d all soon be connected, updated, the chain stores moving in and giving it that American cookie-cutter feel.

  But it didn’t happen. There was no great immigration to Reno or its “suburbs.” The new people never showed and the chains never wormed their way in, and Traurig and towns like it became not ghosts, exactly—people lived here and worked hard—but there weren’t any real opportunities. You could commute into Reno or Tahoe to find better employment, or you could burrow into a union gig like Rodney’s dad and uncle. You could work those cracked and charred highways, repaving asphalt and cleaning up debris, scraping cooked carcasses like burgers from grills, feeling the meat jimmy from the road to your shovel, the slaughterhouse smell following you home. The nice and terrible thing about work on the highway was that it was never done, not with the sun�
��s ruthlessness breaking what you’d fixed a few months back. Always fissures to fill. Always a rattler to peel off the road.

  Sara takes the turn on the freeway, moving toward Reno.

  “Where?” Rodney says.

  “A great spot on the Truckee River,” she says. “It will be a while. Enjoy the music.” Sara turns the volume up and kicks the car up to seventy-five. If no semis clog up the way, they should get to the river in about an hour.

  It’s unfortunate about not having his pad and pen. He could’ve asked Sara to scrounge something up from her house before they bolted, but he didn’t want to be there, with Hank, knowing that any minute his dad and uncle and the Wombats might attack and who knew what would happen from there. Rodney was wrong about heavy metal guitar—it’s a good accompaniment for rapping. They challenge each other, and they bring out the best in one another. They are greater than the sum of their parts.

  If he had a pen and pad now, this would be the perfect time to talk to Sara. They’re stuck in the car, which is actually pretty clean, no trash or to-go cups or papers littered about. The only item is the broken side mirror, riding down by Rodney’s feet.

  This could be one of his plays. A one-act. A reconciliation. Something about long-lost friends on the run finding common ground.

  But before his play gets the chance to start, Sara turns the volume down on the stereo and says, “I’m fucked, Rodney.”

  “Huh?”

  Sara says, “Me. I’m. It’s. Um. Uh. Shit.”

  She’s talking like me, thinks Balloon Boy.

  “Um, it’s,” she keeps going, “like, I’m, uh, I’ve been screwed and my life is ruined and I don’t know what to do.”

  “What,” he says and four seconds later, “happened?”

  “I don’t want to tell you what happened,” she says. “I don’t want you of all people to judge me.”

  “I. Can’t.”

  Sara looks over at him. “You can’t judge me?”

  Balloon Boy shakes his head at her. “No. Way.”

  It comes out of her like she’s the MC with his anger, and Sara meets his and tops it. But she’s not rhyming or staying on the beat. She stomps on the car’s accelerator and gets them up near ninety and the car works from one lane to the next, passing people, and her words mimic their motion, careening, zigzagging, snaking this way and that, telling Rodney about her boyfriend who posted a video of them having sex online and she probably lost her job this morning and everyone is texting her about the video and pretty soon there won’t be anyone left on the planet who hasn’t seen Sara in such a compromised position.