“And even then, Ellie, even when the water was getting all dingy, we wouldn’t stop.”
“No. We didn’t.” She sighs again. The afternoon is lazy-wonderful with sun-dust and the whispers of the outside and Ellie’s balloon is stretching out again.
“Ellie, what day is it?”
“Tuesday. I hate Tuesdays.” And I don’t have to ask her why. I remember. I was there.
“You know what, Ellie? I’m going to promise you something, ok?”
She is silent. She has heard many people profess promises. I am sure they must sound hollow and echo canyon-large in her ribs. But I continue anyway.
“I will be here on Tuesdays.”
She arches her neck, head sliding backwards, and looks upside-down at me. “Why?”
“Because Tuesdays are for you.”
And I mean it.
And she knows it.
In the dust that hangs yellow and lethargic, we sit on a garage sale couch that is more comfortable than it has any right to be. We are silence and wide eyes. Ellie smiles at me in a way that betrays the melancholy she has bottled in her chest, and then looks away. It is passing, but it is enough. For today. For Tuesday.
Baristas
Eddie Kludtz is a jittery man in his mid thirties. He has a receding hairline and a cleft chin that looks like a geometry problem.
I am sitting across from him at a coffee shop, the one with cute hand-painted specials gawking all wonderful and neon-loud on the windows. Watery espresso that is pale and ferociously frothed. People drink it because decent coffee stands are miles and miles away, and besides, Mary the barista has a smile like a fish hook. The floors are deep mahogany and have grooves scraped into them from sliding chairs. The walls are littered with little league baseball team pictures that were taken by an amateur photographer. But listen, I didn’t come here for that.
I’m here because Eddie Kludtz likes Mary the barista. Because he sees the way her body curves when she steams the milk, and it makes something twist up peaceful inside of him. How her eyes are soft and seem to reach out all dainty and touch his cheek. Just his. Always ever his.
I’m here because Eddie spent all day and the better part of a misty water-curtain night looking for Zack Tallman.
I’m here because Eddie held Zack in his arms as he died.
“You have to understand, Eli. You’ve got to get this part of the story right, ok? Zack was careful. So goddamn careful that he was borderline crazy, you know? It was downright infuriating hiking with him sometimes.”
Eddie is shaking his right knee, bobbing it up and down in a vigorous fashion. The camera makes him nervous. And Mary makes his heart slam against his ribcage.
“That Thursday we were up there, it was foggy. You’d step out onto the trail and you couldn’t see two feet in any direction. Thick. Like trudging through mashed potatoes or something like that, you know? I remember it, because it was like nine in the morning and the crows were cawing like mad. Must’ve been close to a nest or something. I hate those birds, I really do.”
His hand goes to his nose, which is slightly greasy and shines in the low light like a polished bowling ball. He thumbs the side of his nose absentmindedly and rubs his temples, licking his lips before he starts again.
“Now, I told you that Zack was careful. He had our hike all plotted out. He’d gone it alone before. He was like that; just liked to be alone in the woods and hear everything that was around him, I guess. Anyway, the fog is there and it’s spooking me a little. A bit. A lot, ok? I’ve never been here before, and I don’t have any idea where it’s safe for me to step. My foot could slip, boom. Done. Game over, right? So Zack is in front of me. Right on the edge of the white curtain, you know? Walking the trail that he was so sure of. So careful about mapping out.”
He stops and looks dead at me.
“You ever seen someone disappear? Like clean away from where you can see them?”
I shake my head slow. And I can tell. He wants me to appreciate the gravity of this picture that he is trying to paint. For me to be there. To see what he saw.
“He was there, Eli. Right there in front of me. One minute there. Then all I saw was white. All I heard was a little puff of something. Like paper rubbing on paper or something quiet like that. No scream. No pitiful cry. Just a whisper. And, you know, I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I stood there for a solid five minutes looking in front of me, waiting, just waiting for Zack’s head to pop back up. For him to smile and just say he was bullshitting me. Because no way, no way in hell did he just fall. No goddamn way was I alone.”
And here is Eddie Kludtz. He is shaking very slight now. Almost imperceptible, but I see it. He has watery espresso with thick cinnamon foam resting on top. He has the dark, vacant eyes of one who is lost in a memory that he doesn’t want and can’t escape. The camera whirs beside me. A mug clangs heavy on the sink behind the mammoth coffee machine and sounds like an anvil. Eddie Kludtz remembering now. How he is walking blind in the white-smear. The ghost atmosphere that makes his shirt weep with moisture. And even when the fog lifts, when the sun is hot and prideful and winking down on the craggy mountainside, how he still can’t see Zack.
“I looked all day,” he says with his chin cleft just so. “All fucking day. And I-” Stops. Chokes. Drinks coffee again and clears his throat and swallows the lump back down.
And as he speaks, I can see it – the mountain and the trail and the fog that is soup and clings, clings. It is nighttime when Eddie finds Zack. His hands are shaking like guilty men walking death row. He plants his jeans down into the mossy mud and feels the water soak clean through. The sludge and the green and the night filling his nostrils. Zack is there with his eyes half open, little slats that are filling up with mist-water, all slick and shiny.
“I wanted it to be like the movies, Eli. Because, God, I was there and his head was on my left elbow, right here, you know? He was looking up at me and I was saying his name and cussing under my breath. I was whispering, and I wanted it to be like a movie. I wanted him to look at me with steady eyes and say something back to me that was meaningful. Something that let me know how everything was going to be ok and I didn’t need to worry. Just, anything. Anything, you understand? I just wanted his lips to move and to hear words come out.”
But the words never come. Zack’s skull is cracked and he is bleeding internally, one lung completely collapsed and the other slowly filling up with liquid. The words never come, and Eddie Kludtz is cradling a man who is so very careful, yet is choking to death. The thick gurgle sounds of blood in the throat ring out in the damp night.
And now Eddie looks at Mary once again. At her curves that grab his chest tightly. The dark eyes are still there. Still in the middle of the watery curtain. Still looking for a way out and hoping, hoping, God, hoping that the fish-hook smile will bring about what a man choking on his own blood could not.
Ian
He has curly hair that looks like how a river laughs.
Ian with his whiskered face. Infant-skin and cheeks that are prepubescent and dotted over with freckles. Baby face that sits in the dark wood living room of his house and breezes through calculus problems. Shirks them off like they are feathers that rarely touch skin.
His parents are planets in perpetual orbit. Mother that flits from the kitchen to the craft room to the study to the patio without even a “Hell of a rainstorm today,” or “Your hair makes me think of my uncle Earl. Did you know that Ian? How he would let it down wild in the field as he turned the earth, which was all sun-saturated and hungry for hands.” No. None of those things.
She flutters about, a parallel shadow of the frenzied trees outside, and Ian sighs. Audibly. He scrawls out the last answer and wrinkles his nose at the calculus book. He has found the area under a curve, but he doesn’t care. He won’t see the arc in real life. Won’t be able to run his finger down its pencil-thin spine. Won’t be able to cradle himself in its vertex or take comfort in the tangen
t line that shows, definitively, where the derivative kisses it.
All bullshit. Numbers that explain the way life works but never how to live it.
The lines on the paper can never explain why his heart races when he stands outside in the torrential rain that feels like a river. Why he feels that he must, must unhinge his mouth wide and squint at the clay-sky when it canyons open for him. Water and sky and atmosphere congealing and being solid for one moment. One moment. To feel like he could be driven into the earth and nothing, nothing, not even a mother who flits and never speaks, goddamn nothing could take that away from him.
Ian has curly milk-hair that flows and flows. Hands that turn the earth and are cedar-strong like his uncle’s. A mind that understands abstractions but prefers rain that is heated and smells like September sky. Like it has been sun-baked and is waiting to unleash. To rip down and drive him into the earth. A laughing river. Infant cheeks and love.
Anvil Hands
My father is a drinker.
Hard and heavy. It takes a six-pack to get him close to glassy-eyed, and another six-pack to get to where he wants to be – black out drunk and being drug to bed by me.
It is standard. Come home from school, scraping sneakers that are worn down at the back right of the sole (always the back right – just the way I walk, I guess) all the snap-pop way down the powdery quarter-mile driveway. Round the corner, the lazy one that swings over to the right like a metal hook, past the rhododendron bush that towers twiggy and massive and blood red. Father is on the deck with his signature flannel shirt wrapped around his thick torso. Silver malt-liquor can in his right hand. Swig. Glassy eyed otherworldly stare. Swig. He notices me approaching.
And it’s always the same.
“Good day at school?”
“Yes, dad. Just fine.”
“Good. Have any math tests today?”
“Math was last semester, Dad.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
And so on. So forth. Until I unfold myself into the kitchen, slapping marbled hamburger and pungent onions and croutons and my dehydrated heart onto the cutting board and mash all of everything together. Patties that will be thrown onto the barbeque, to sizzle and char under intense heat as the silver cans continued to disappear.
I am sitting in front of the barbeque, red-lick flames skating across the burgers that are shrinking, shrinking on the grill, and I feel the anvil-hand of my father resting steady on my shoulder. I look over to his grizzled face, granite features etched by chisel and love, and see a softness there. An attentiveness. Lucidity, if only for a moment.
“I love you. You know that?” I do. And I nod. Once. Twice. Continually. Slow and steady. And always staring at the fire.
“Eli. I’m sorry. Do you understand?” He says this even as the metallic-cold silver can caresses his lips again.
I do not understand. I will not. I shake my head, not daring to look at his granitic cheeks. Not wanting to look at his weepy malt-eyes. Not wanting to admit that there is a part of me that does understand and leap ecstatic at the warm timbre in his confession; that I have a reservoir of love for this man who drinks everything in his life chalk-dry.
Against my will and my clenched jaw, teeth wanting to grind to dust, I reach up my slight left hand and cradle his cracked, dried, leathery fingers. Brief pressure. But it is all he needs, I think. Just the lightning brush, quick and intentional. Just to know that my reservoir is still pumping fluid.
The burning embers, sizzle of meat, and my chest sighing as my feet crunch back to the house. Dad still cradling his can. Still searching for the moment when he can black out. Lucid eyes glassed over.
Antebellum
I am sitting in fourth period and the same thing keeps rolling around in my head.
My creative writing teacher is full of shit.
“Write what you know,” he says. “You are the definitive voice for your life and experience. Nobody sees things like you do.”
I don’t buy it. He is forty and pot-bellied and knows donut shops. He knows traffic jams caused by Holstein cows. He knows how to write stories that get published in piss-puddle newspapers like the Tribune and the Gazette. Oh holy fuck. The Gazette. There are a million and one of those around the country, no?
He doesn’t get it. He looks at Whitman and sees potpourri-scented prose that tickles earlobes and sounds nice when you say it out loud to the opposite sex. He uses it as a punch-line. The end to a bad joke. He sees Shakespeare and feels safe. Sonnets that have meter and rhyme and a set pattern that you can tap out with a yellow Ticonderoga pencil while you’re daydreaming.
I read Whitman and then take in large gulps of air through my nostrils. Like I haven’t breathed in days. Like the atmosphere is all filled with God-fingers and wind-gush and I can hardly contain it. Like I will rip at the seams.
My creative writing teacher writes to get noticed. To have students read his limp prose and bombastic drivel. He talks about living and writing what you know and being unique like your fingerprints. Touchy-feely lovey-dovey hipster malarkey. All of it. He smiles and you can almost hear the plastic squeak.
Because he doesn’t know life. He knows how to throw fancy words out there and sound frou-frou. He knows what the period before the Civil War was called, and he can write a poem about it that sounds flowery but is wooden. It is a silk rose. A cheap imitation that no girl in her right mind would ever display in her window.
Can you see him? See him at his desk, tapping out the rhythm on a yellow legal pad? Ginseng tea just to the right and stubbled face scrunched into a look of concentration. He wants you to see him. Wants you to look at him all hunched over the paper. To nod your head silently and think to yourself about how lovely he really is.
My creative writing teacher is full of shit.
The Kindred
Andy Steadman is twenty-nine and bald. I can’t see a polite way around it.
His head is shiny, and there’s something comforting about that. Something about the way it catches the spidery sunshine and reflects light like an imploded super nova and starlight and late night laughter with friends. He’s sitting at a park bench down by the Brandy Bend in the river. We call it that because the winos come here every night to drink syrupy bottles and look at the ignited-fire night that, dappled with stars, is beautiful-black. And who can blame them?
Andy is rubbing his hands together. Strong hands. Hands that are calloused and split wood and build the frames of houses. Hands that know the feel of a gouged and well frequented oak table top bar and just how much tequila to put in a margarita during happy hour. Hands that are so much more steady than mine are on any given day of the week. I envy him in that moment, as I realize that I am jealous of this quality. And I wonder how the hell it could be this way, how he could be so dead-rock calm.
He saw Kyle Taggert die. One second alive. The next, bloody face and bone fragments in scrambled egg brain.
“How do I start, Eli?” He fidgets a bit and rubs his hands together again as if for warmth, even though it is hot and muggy like the inside of a mouth. He is a steady man, one that has seen much. But he is quiet. He must be like me. Must have picked this spot on the river because the water sounds like bones sighing, and that soothes him. He must go outside on spring mornings when the sun has exploded buttery and bold and he must breathe until he feels drunk and swirl-headed. Yes, Andy Steadman is bald and gentle by the river and is a kindred. Yes.
“Joseph VanDyke was meaner than usual that night. You went to school with him, right?”
“Joe? Yeah. He was a senior when I was a freshman. Hell of a short fuse.” And it’s true. I remember the neck that was a tree trunk. The blood that would scald easy. The words that he would shoot like shards of a broken windshield at Bobby O’Shaye, and how I secretly loved them and sometimes wished they had come from my lips. And how I would be confused by the twinge of pity that jabbed directly afterwards when I saw Bobby’s face.
> “Well, Joe had been coming into the bar every Friday and Saturday like clockwork, ever since he turned twenty-one. I could set my watch by him. Eight-forty-six on the nose. Every damn time. Don’t know how he did it.”
Andy is looking out at the water. Always the water. The ripple and the gray-soup and the rocks that jut out occasionally like snag-teeth.
“Why would a guy be like that, Eli? So damn punctual for a place like this? And always the same thing. He’d slap down a wadded up five dollar bill that was sweaty and came from the back pocket of his jeans and order three cheap cans.”
He stops and is waiting for an answer. I shrug my shoulders and fill my nose with air that is perfumed slightly by the river water and hangs in the nose all earthy and makes me think of summers and swimming pools dug in the earth and Ellie’s smile that flares white-hot. I’m lost for a minute, and Andy nudges my shoulder.
“You ok?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure? Looks like you were zoning there for a second.”
“I’m sure. Just got caught in my head for a bit. That’s all. You know?”
Andy smiles, chuckles soft, and nods. Kindred, remember?
“Why would a guy be so damn predictable?” He is stuck on this. Licking his lips against the breeze and scrunching his forehead. Wrinkles and skin and the soft splash of blue and sun.
“Predictability is safe, Andy. Makes a guy feel good, right?”
“I guess so.” He is hesitant. Because he is a man who knows routines and silently hates them. Open up shop and check the liquor levels. Turn on the fryers that pop and hiss occasionally like angry cats. Lights. Ventilation fans. Sweep the back floor that slopes up in the right corner with the peeling linoleum. Sweep the front. Slog out the mop and clean whatever crusted over nastiness is left as a gift in the restrooms. Predictability is safe, and it is a steady dirge into the blinded night.
The camera is whirring beside me. And the water is shushing silent. Ian is behind the lens, wondering when we will get on with it. It was lunchtime half an hour ago and he is anticipating a greasy bag of food when we are done.