ONE
At just past six in the morning on the last Monday in June, my brother Jason and I walked out of our garage and headed for the construction site up the street from our house. The wheels on my wagon chirped like lost birds as I pulled it behind me.
Summers in Southern California were brutal to say the least. Sometimes they were hot, at other times unbearable. Mostly they were scorching. We’ve got a saying here in Southern California: ‘Summers suck, unless you live at the beach, then they suck a little less.’
It was June 30th, 1982 and one of the most beautiful mornings I could remember from my youth. Because at the time I was still innocent and pure. We all were.
The temperature was in the mid 70’s at that time and there weren’t any clouds in the sky to get in the way of the warm, newly risen sun. The light from it hit the mimosa trees lining Cottonwood Court with a radiance that turned the green leaves a soft blue and the purple, fuzzy flowers at the ends of each branch a deep red. I’ve never seen another summer morning quite like that one. It’s taken its own special place in my mind and in my heart and has stood out for almost three decades now.
We had lived in the three-bedroom house at the bottom of the street for eight years. Our father had bought it the year I was born. It was a nice little house that sat on a quarter acre of land like all the houses on Cottonwood.
We had just passed the third house up from ours when Jason took me by surprise by saying, “We can oil them when we get back home.”
Bringing me out of one of my daydreams and having absolutely no idea what he was talking about, I said, “Huh? What do you mean?”
“The wheels,” he said. “That squeaking is going to wake up the whole neighborhood.”
Walking and pulling, I told him, “Dad won’t let me touch his stuff in the garage. He says I’m too young.”
“That’s okay. I’ll do it for you.”
“Thanks, Jason.”
My brother was a pretty good guy back when we were young. He let me hang around with him and his friends whenever I felt like tagging along. Most older brothers would kick the crap out of their younger brother just for being alive, but he told me, as long as I could keep up, I could hang out. Jason and I rarely fought.
Crossing over half way up the street I asked him, “Jason, do you ever have nightmares?”
He turned to look at me and said, “Yeah, sometimes, I guess. Why, did you have one last night?”
“Yeah. I had one last night and one the night before.”
I had actually been having them for about two weeks by that time but didn’t want to worry him so I left it at that. They were strange dreams too. They weren’t the kind were you wake up screaming (if they had been Jason would have surely known since we shared a bedroom), but the kinds where you just feel awful in the morning. Like someone you’d known a very long time had died recently and you were still recovering from the shock.
“What was it about?” he asked.
“It’s hard for me to say,” but I tried to explain anyway. “It’s like I’m in this giant place were there’s nothing. It’s all black and I can’t see anything around me. Like I’m lost in the dark. But there’s bubbles floating all around me. I can’t see them but I can feel them. And every time the bubbles pop, they scream at me. Like they want to hurt me. It makes me sad in my sleep.”
My brother seemed to ponder over it for a moment, and then said, “Don’t worry about it. It was just a dream.”
“I saw a movie were people would dream something and then something bad would happen to them. I’m scared Jason. Do you think something bad will happen to me?”
He stopped then and grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “Listen, Ricky, dreams don’t mean nothing. They’re just like cartoons or TV shows, except in our heads. They’re not real. Nothing bad is going to happen to you, so don’t say things like that, okay.”
“Promise, Jay?”
“I promise.”
“Okay.”
When he had stopped me to set my mind at ease, we hadn’t really noticed where we were standing. Now, we turned at the same time to see that we were in front of the last house at the top of our street; The Miller’s house.
Jason turned back to me and said, “Hey, I dare you to go up and knock as hard as you can on Donald’s window and then run.”
Donald Miller was a boy my age. He was born with Canavan disease and had seemed to cope with the affliction for the first few years of his life. But, eventually, by about the age of five, it had started to slowly take its toll on him.
Canavan is a degenerative disease that causes the brain to turn into spongy tissue riddled with microscopic fluid-filled spaces. It also causes imperfect development of the myelin sheath-which is the fatty covering that acts as an insulator around the nerve fibers of the brain. Some of the symptoms of the disease, which usually start to appear in infancy, include: mental retardation, loss of motor skills, poor muscle development and progressive brain atrophy. There is no cure and the average life span of someone afflicted with it is four years.
Donald had, this far, made it twice that long.
After falling so ill that his parents had to take him out of school, they converted their garage into a makeshift hospital type room; fully equipped with monitors should he ever take a turn for the worse. They had also added a window on the west facing wall by the entryway to the house so the room would get natural light in the afternoons.
“No way,” I said to the challenge. “What if his dad catches me? I heard he caught Rudy from down the street looking into the window and he pointed a gun at him. Made him piss in his pants and everything.”
Jason looked at me and rolled his eyes. “Aw come on. Who told you that?”
“Cory did. He said he saw it.”
He chuckled dryly. “Cory’s just pullin’ your leg. Come on, go up and knock on his window and run.”
“No way. I’m scared, Jay.”
“How about if I go with you?” He asked.
“Nope.”
My brother then came up with a new tactic. “Come on. We won’t knock on the window then. We’ll just look inside.”
“What if his dad comes out with a gun?”
“It’s six o’clock in the morning, Ricky, he’s probably still sleeping. Look, the front doors closed. They won’t even know we’re there.”
I thought about it. My brother was always good at convincing me to do stupid things. Most brothers possess this gift and so I gave in.
“Just going to look?”
“Just going to look,” my brother repeated with a look of pleading truth on his face.
“Okay, but we gotta hurry,” I said. “I don’t want to get caught.”
At that he headed up the Miller’s driveway. I dropped the handle of my wagon and followed. We crept up toward the house like sneak thieves, silently, on tiptoes so as not to arouse Donald’s parents.
As we snuck, a memory of Donald came back to me. We had been in the same class in kindergarten a couple of years before-when he was still able to socialize with others. He had been by himself on the playground one day, the other kids avoiding him because he wore braces on his legs and didn’t talk very well and of course kids never know how to react to someone who’s different than they are.
I was sitting on one of the swings, alone myself, motionless, when he had clambered over to me, his braces rattling as he walked. And for a while he just stood there, his mouth slack, teeth crooked, a bit of drool running down his chin. I figured he’d stand there until the recess bell rang but finally he spoke.
“Pu me.”
When he said it, it had startled me because I wasn’t sure what he wanted and what he was even saying. But then he repeated it.
“Pu me.”
And that time it clicked with me.
Push me. He wanted a turn on the swing and would need a little help getting started. So I let him sit down, his metal clad legs sticking straight out in front of him, and pushed him until the bell rang. The w
hole time he sat on that swing, he laughed. It was a real laugh. I’d never heard another child laugh quite like that before (although I’d hear one in the days to come). It was beautiful and high pitched and sounded like music sung from the heart.
Jason and I got up underneath the window that looked in on the converted garage, but were both too short see inside. Jason made a pointing gesture toward the flowerbed to the right of the front door. Two cinder blocks sat there like giant incisors and we grabbed them and moved them quietly back under the window and turned them into step stools. My brother stepped up first, looked in and gasped. I followed his lead and through that window I saw the most pathetic sight of my eight-year-old life.
Donald lay in his bed looking like a tiny, old man. He had no muscle or hair. There were tubes sticking in his nose and an IV stuck into his right hand. A white bed sheet covered him from his chest down, but we didn’t need to see the rest of his body to know he probably didn’t weigh any more than about twenty-five pounds. Every couple of seconds a leg or an arm would twitch, and his eyes rolled in his head under their lids. He moaned and grunted as if he were having a hard time breathing.
We stood there, silent, for a few minutes, a little saddened by what we were looking at, thankful for not being him, when the front door flew open with a sound like a tire blowing. Donald’s mother was there in the doorway in her bathrobe holding something long and straight and black at her side.
“You boys get the hell out of here and leave my boy alone,” she screamed at us.
We jumped off those cinder blocks and ran back out to the sidewalk like we were on fire. My brother grabbed my wagon as I ran for the corner at the top of our street. He met me there seconds later, huffing and puffing, pulling my wagon behind him.
“Did you see that, Jay, huh, did ya?” I blubbered, out of breath. “Did you see what she was holding? I told you. I told you. She had that shotgun. Probably the same one Donald’s dad pointed at Rudy. I’ll bet you anything.”
Jason stood on that corner catching his breath; hands on his knees, looking at me like I’d lost my marbles and immediately burst into a fit of laughter.
“What?” I asked him, angry. “What’s so funny?”
After he had himself a little more under control he let me in on what it was he thought was so damn funny. He set his hand on my shoulder took a deep breath and with a straight face said, “That wasn’t a shotgun, dork. That was a broom,” then doubled back over in another fit.
I turned and headed around the corner toward the construction site and away from my brothers donkey brays. I was only eight, but I knew what ‘the bird’ was and I employed the technique over my right shoulder.