“How could he do it, Eli?”
And how can I answer? He is looking for the light switch in a tar-black room. Hands groping clumsily on the wall. Feeling the grooves and spanning the surface with strokes that are wide, but feeble.
How do you speak when the answers scare the shit out of you?
I think about this as I shake my head slow in the low, dusty light of the afternoon and say softly to no one in particular, “I don’t know. I…just don’t know.”
Ocean Shoulders
I want you to feel this.
You wake up in the morning with the fog of sleep still hazing behind your eyes. Crack your lids and see the sun that blazes incessant behind the doughy clouds. Rub your face and stretch until your spine shakes and you begin to understand why animals shudder in ecstasy when they arch their backs.
You put your feet on floor. Solid floor. Floor that groans when you step on just the right board. Floor that is splintered in parts, but never bites your feet with sliver-teeth.
You walk past your dad’s room that is empty because a baker wakes up in the ink of midnight and comes home at precisely one in the afternoon looking like he’s been rolling-pinned over five times or so. A room that has its windows flung open wide, even in the dead of winter, because dad loves to hear the trees and it pisses you off a little that you share that quality with him.
If you are me, you see my mother in the kitchen. She is sitting at the dining table and has black coffee in front of her. No cream or sugar. Straight.
She is silent and has hair that looks like silver straw. An ice sculpture face that is almost too beautiful to look at. Timeless. It makes jaws drop and waggle low.
“Eli. Can I talk to you for a second?”
We are a quiet family. We open our mouths to eat and to laugh soft. We talk of weather and homemade vinaigrette dressing and the varied thrushes that shuffle along the dead leaves. Slow words that are weighed on tongues with much deliberation. Always the inconsequential things of life. But I can feel it: a heaviness that is palpable in the room.
“I was at the doctor’s office yesterday afternoon for my yearly check up.”
The next string of words come sloshing in my ears. Soup words. Thick and gelatinous and hot. It is a slow-motion swirl of lump and biopsy and won’t know the results for at least…
I can’t look at her. Her gorgeous eyes that remind me of winter and the first snow when the world is blanket-hush-silent. And the virulent hate that steams steady out of my ears when I think of the word. Cancer. How I want to grab it by the throat and shake the hell out of it.
Because how dare it. She is silvered and majestic and rainbow-prism beautiful. How dare it try to touch her with its cell-devouring hand.
She is the one that weeps soft when she thinks the house is asleep. Weeps for Ellie. For the husband that drinks and stumbles into the kitchen and shoves chicken carcasses in his maw until he throws his arm over my shoulder and I help him unfold into his bed. She is the one that cracks open her chest and pours and pours out all over.
And I love her.
And how dare cancer try to touch her.
“Don’t tell Eleanor,” she says and pleads with her thin lips and watery eyes. “She’ll only worry herself silly.”
She thinks I am strong. That my shoulders are wide and can support oceans.
Mom. I’m not. Do you hear me? Do you understand? I’m not as strong as you think I am. My knees go clackity-clack when I think of losing you. My mouth shrinks down to a period. My head shakes and shakes and I can’t steady myself to think straight. My spine curves like an S when I think of a house devoid of your midnight tears. No mother. Not strong, see?
“I love you, Eli.”
“Mom, don’t.”
“Don’t what?” She takes my hand and stares out the window at her rhododendron bush. It is nothing more than a waxy green shrub in the October air, but it is something to fix eyes on.
“Don’t talk like you won’t be here a year from now.”
“But I don’t say it enough, Eli. And I do. You know that, right?”
Yes, mom. I do. You have no idea how much I see the vastness of your empathy. Your leagues-deep compassion. In every hiccough in the dark.
And I love you too. Biopsy be damned.
Donnie
His house is full of goddamn you and belt buckles and welts that rise like loaves of bread.
Do I need to say more?
I wish to hell it was different. Donnie with his polished head that he rubs down with baby oil. Donnie with his walk that says Don’t fuck with me. Donnie who has, on occasion, been wedged to the floor with a steel toed boot against his neck.
He is leather. And he wants it that way.
He doesn’t cry in the night. Doesn’t shed lake-tears and blubber silently to himself. He only puffs his chest up large to bursting and shouts at his step-father, Travis. Tells him that he’s glad he’s not his son. Says that if Travis ever touches his little brother that he’ll kill him.
Donnie doesn’t love his mother, and it breaks him a little. She is the one who invited the alcohol-breath in. She is the one who sits numb in the corner. Strung out. Mumbling. Eyes distant and fumbling for memories.
Memories of when it was simple. Summer days and curly dirt-hair and gummy toddler smiles and sprinklers that cascade in jeweled prisms.
Not this.
Not the screaming and the tea pots whistling shrill and Ethan, who is nine and crying, cowering behind Donnie who is puffed up massive. Breathing heavy. Being a shield and concrete bones and a fleshy wall for a child that he loves so fiercely it makes him shake. Veins that pop like tiny rivers out of his skull. Purpled spider-webs that pulse and frighten little Ethan but calm him at the same time.
A cacophonous symphony of Get out and punk-ass-kid and lucky your friend is here and a wide arcing fist that connects to Travis’s mouth and sounds like a muffled cough.
I am two-dimensional. Against the wall. Awed and terrified.
Donnie, the one who shaves his head and rubs it down with oil. Watching his deadbeat stepfather stumble out the door, lip split wide. Travis will crawl away and shrivel somewhere. He could die and no eyes would shimmer sad. Poof. Gone.
And Donnie, who is leather, wraps up Ethan in his tree-trunk arms and doesn’t flinch when the boy grapples with octopus arms at his back all desperate like he’s grabbing at sand. Donnie gives him big handfuls of it and shakes a little as he cries into his brother’s thin shoulder.
Ventriloquist
I put words in people’s mouths. I can’t help it.
It’s reactionary. An impulse even. The mouth stops moving and my eyes glaze over and I imagine just what could come out.
Ellie sits there at the couch and hugs her legs with arms that are fleshy sticks. She looks off at the window, out at the trees that bend and moan and are a pulpy reflection of her stomach.
I put words in her mouth, because she is distant in the waning October light and I know that on some days it is better just to sit and be still. We have a silent conversation as the trees are hissing and shushing at the sky.
“If I hold your hand just so and squeeze, then the pressure in your shoulder blades will hiss out, right?” I say in my mind as I cradle Ellie’s hand on a Tuesday.
And I can see it, clear and lucid like a mountain creek. The words that tumble out like so much river-rush rock-water. How she wants to leave and spread her wings wide all over the continental U.S. The world. How she wants to wake up to the sun breaking the mountain’s back and breathe in like the air is honey. To not feel Bobby’s palm against her neck. To not see a gray rock-pipe around every corner. To not close her eyes and weep warm lakes. To be able to look at me, square in the face, at my nose that is bent slight like my mother’s, to look and to not blink or turn away.
The day outside is blustery and gorgeous. A promise of the blanketed winter. And Ellie sighs and does not speak. Not with words, anyway.
Synchro
nized
Friday night.
The lights are dim and there is a flash and crackle that buzz spastic from the television. Ryan and Riley, Ian and Nels, Donnie and me. We want to squirm out of our skin because Ryan’s house is stone-still and breathing slow. The ramen bubbling and the static and the horrible off-sync speech of the dubbed Bruce Lee movie and the fluff-whisper of the Himalayan cat.
The Beatles are pinging about in my head. How Jude shouldn’t make it bad and those strawberry fields that stretch out forever. Songs that congeal and merge solid and roll about and ricochet.
“I need to drive.” I say. Mumbling. Groans. Heads that don’t turn and are glued to the static and lives that are dead and wheezing electric. Everyone but Nels. He nods as if I have uttered the most brilliant phrase to ever grace his ears. I am grateful, because Nels understands even without words.
His truck is not like Bobby’s. It is red and waxy-clean like a proper apple. All metal muscle and knobby tires and windows that you roll down with your hands.
You have to feel it. Just once in your life. The bone-jar buzz that shakes and shakes up through your feet when you place them on the floorboards because Nels likes to gun it hard and heavy down the county roads that stretch to infinity. Roads that come alive after dark. The tar and pebble and rubber speaking in tongues to each other. The moon that splashes ghost-milk over the rows of corn that will be harvested any day now. The satisfying tension that comes with rolling down your window by hand. The heater from the dashboard spewing oven-heat out and the bite of the night air mingling. A dance, you see.
And the sky. Oh, God, the sky. Stretched out and winking wild. All jeweled black velvet.
You put your head out the window and close your eyes because the wind lashes and it is instinctual. Nels is there and the radio hums low and the dash glows like a Saturday night. Perfect synchronicity.
“That moon is huge. Jesus Christ.” Nels breathes above the low moan of the car.
But I can’t see it. My head is jutting out the window. An awkward flesh-tumor on a metallic giant. Air blasting my face and lungs swallowing large. Barreling down the endless roads that speak in friction-tongues.
Rebuilding
The metal is cold and the metal is gray and the metal is impersonal and opening its horrible black maw.
The barrel of a gun. Pointed straight at William Tanner. Staring him down all icy and sleek and glinting from the freckled night sky. Aimed right at the ridge where nose meets eyebrow-bone and skin is bunched together as if it is being pinched.
Billy Tanner is thirteen and has a gun in his face.
And Leo Martin’s twelve year old hand is shaking as it cradles a revolver that is too heavy for it. A weight of metal and powder and friction that will spark and ignite and tear flesh, rupture bone, and scramble brain.
I am not there, of course.
No, I am in a stuffy one bedroom house. The same one that groans under the mass of Billy Tanner’s mother who is overflowing out of her flowered summer dress. Her dress rolls like hills in Ireland, at least, the hills that I have seen in pictures. I am pulling at my collar which sticks to my neck and sweats and stains and sweats some more.
“It was nine o’clock on a Friday night, Eli. The kid never listened to me. I told him not to be outside that late. All kinds of hell breaks loose at that time of day. All kinds. But would he listen to me? No. Goddamn stubborn kid. Like his idiot father if you ask me.”
She is stone. A great ponderous boulder that has been set before the foundations of the earth. Before God laid the first fleck of granite in the ground and pulled the rib out of Adam and breathed that gush of air into his elastic lungs. She is hard and unwilling to soften her face. And even as she recounts and the camera purrs and Donnie moves for another angle, I can see the hardness that is learned. In her face. Her voice.
She feels, but only under miles of fossilized rock.
“Leo Martin wasn’t no saint neither. Believe you me. Had a father that would sooner reach for the belt than speak. Like it was a nervous tick with him. Leo looked like a damn clown on most days. Face all colored up and blue. Tragic and sad really. But I told him. I told Billy to stay away from him. To not stay out at night. You don’t go out that late and expect good things to happen, right?”
I shrink a little in my chair. It’s reactionary, believe me. Mrs. Tanner gives off an aura that is all sun-fire and red-bump irritation. As if her eyes narrow to slits and slice right through the cracks.
I know why Billy went out at night. How the sky would call to him. How the billowed wind would whisper in his ears. Whisper. Do you get me? I can see him, twelve years old and right ear flaming red from being used as a leash. How could he not go out in the evening and look at the horizon and imagine a house filled with gentle hands and voices that never knifed through paper thin walls.
“Are you listening to me, Eli? Jesus. You ask me to talk about my son and then can’t even look at my face? You listen to me, you hear? Look me in the face. What? Can’t even look at me straight in the eye? Christ.”
“No, no Mrs. Tanner. I’m sorry. I was just thinking about that night. If…if you don’t mind me asking, how did they know each other?” I squirm a little, and Donnie is tense. He wants to give Mrs. Tanner a piece of his leathered mind. His arms bend a little at the elbows and I can almost feel the shiver-heat that permeates the air.
“How does anyone know each other? School, of course. They would do everything together there. Get in trouble together there. Always the phone calls in the afternoon. I never forgot. Billy’s teacher would call at three-thirty, every other day, and give me a steaming plate of guilt. How Billy and Leo wouldn’t stop talking. Laughing. Fighting, Eli. But Billy was never like that before Leo. No sir.”
I shift, stretch and clear my throat deliberately. I wait for Mrs. Tanner to go on, but her face is set. Stone.
“This interview is over, Eli. I’ll have no more of it. This is a damn foolish thing. All that you’re doing is making people dig up dirt that’s best left untouched. Leo Martin shot my son in the forehead. Point blank. Left gunpowder burns on his skin because he was so close. And now he’s in Juvie. Gets a parole hearing when he’s 18. It’s not fair, and it’s not right, and there’s not a goddamn thing you or I or anyone can do about that. Not a thing. So you can just get the hell out. Leave me be.”
And this statue of a woman, this Irish hillside that rolls expansive, sits in her easy chair and rocks with her face tilted towards the streaked window. Granite.
But I can’t leave it. Even as Donnie, who is puffed up and on a razor’s edge, packs up the camera and nods goodbye to the flowered summer dress. Even as we walk outside, Billy Tanner is still in my head. Still a specter and standing in front of cold steel and gunpowder for no good reason.
I can see him. So clear that it frightens me. His eyes that are a blue and frosted December. All the lights that wink on houses, all the presents, all the joy that flits under skin and wakes jittery on Christmas. It’s all there in his face. And I have to make sense of it. I have to. Have to stop shaking my head at people like Officer Landon and mumble that I don’t know. And so I begin to weave it together in my mind.
Billy Tanner is thirteen and letting his ears breathe. Letting the fire subside because his mother has, once again, flowed magma onto them. The city park is next to his splintering house. It is nine o’clock and the moon looks like a dollop of mashed potatoes. Billy thinks about these things as he walks and walks and doesn’t care that the air is all summer-muggy.
He misses his father. The man who would sweat scotch and was always quiet. It vexed his mother to see a quiet man in her house, one that worked and lumbered home and sat in the muted light of the living room. But Billy admired his father for this. Quiet constancy. Always the Friday nights home at five and the soft blue buzz of the television that drowned out the needle-words. And how Billy would sit next to him and let his tiny palm be swallowed in his father’s giant paw.
Heart attack. Gone.
Billy thinks about this silent giant as the shadows in the park play like dark taffy stretching out over his skin. And then he sees Leo. Standing. Just standing with his back to the giant maple that juts up and brushes the sky with gentle strokes.
Leo is bruised, like always. Angry. It’s not uncommon, but tonight is different. Leo watched as his father put out a cigar on his sister’s delicate wrist, and could do nothing. Glowing ember and charred pink skin. And goddamn how it burned Leo’s insides to blackened ashes.
And so Leo palms the gun clumsily, because he is twisted and doesn’t know how to reach inside himself with surgeon hands and untie his stomach. And Billy, Billy who sits with him at school and laughs at his doodles and teases him about Cindy Batista and is more like a brother and blood than anyone in Leo’s life, Billy is the one who is there. And he will do, Leo thinks to himself.
I can’t say that it’s right, this whole night that I’ve painted. But I have to build something. I have to. Otherwise the moon hangs enormous in the sky and I want to pull it down with greedy hands and stuff it in my ribs. I have to rebuild that night because Billy Tanner’s December face stares unblinking back at me whenever I close my eyes.
Nels
His family is a warm oil painting.
You can sit at their table and drink it in for hours. Look at the textured strokes and marvel at the mixture of colors that look like a weeping sunrise. Beautiful. It really is.
And it’s not fake. Not some cheap poem splattered all over a greeting card that has a modest house and tire swing on the front of it. These people smile and they mean it. They laugh together and throw their heads back and let the soft chandelier light cascade down their throats.
How does that work, Nels? To laugh like your heart is full to bursting and your skin is itching to explode? Because your face is red and rosy and heated as you grapple for air, suck it down swift, and chortle some more. Your whole family. Everyone. Mom, dad, sister, awkward-puberty-squawk brother, everyone. Laughing and drinking in the light.