I looked up and down the road, and although it seemed I’d been passed by a car-a-minute up until that point, it was ironically empty and clear then. The dog’s sounds became more strangled, more choking, and I jumped down into the ditch. Its head was crooked away from me but I could see the sun glinting off the eye on my side. The grass was pretty high, but it saw me coming and began kicking its back legs as if trying to make a getaway. All it managed to do was spin around into an even more twisted tangle of limbs in the stagnant water. I remember it raised a mighty cloud of flies in the process.
I saw its eye better then (I was no more than ten feet or so away) and it was wide in terror. I’d heard about animals being very dangerous when injured or near death, so I held back and looked really hard. And the oddest presence washed over me. That’s the simplest and most effective way to describe what happened; it was just like the dream with the man in the truck speeding along the highway. I was suddenly apart from myself and plunging into the frantic, dying eye on the ground before me. I saw every hair lining the ridge of black along its nose; the gash at its neck heaving and gurgling blood with every labored breath; the bristled mane running down the muddy crest of flayed spine. And even though I’d physically stopped getting any closer to the dying animal, my sight had not. Nor had the dog’s perception lessened, evidently, because it began kicking violently again, burying one side of its head deeper in the muck. When it breathed (and it was quite obviously with less gusto), bubbles popped on the surface of the insect-riddled water, sending the flies into renewed turmoil. I remember wondering morbidly how many were being sucked inside the dying animal when it did that. But in the meantime I continued zooming in, fastened to the stricken eye like a fish to a lure. It became even wider, more expressive. I could suddenly see my own reflection embedded there amid the sparkling agony that was like a live thing in the air.
Then the dog’s breathing was lost to a loud buzzing in my head (or my consciousness perhaps, since I felt so completely disembodied by this point), and the eye consumed my sight, mirroring the image it held until minute details rolled and unfurled themselves like flags in a high wind, until the clarity was icy pure.
I found myself in the image (much smaller and younger than I allowed myself to believe) standing ankle-deep in the mud, drawn to the dying dog like some alien ghoul from the wastes. But grouped all about me, both within the slimy trench of the ditch and above, closer to the roadway and lining the ditch for as far as I cared to see, stood a silent throng of ghostly strangers much like the ones my Grandma described years later. And every eye was fixated on whatever I’d become.
With this realization I started from the bizarre image and immediately found myself on my knees in the muddy water, gasping much like the dog had been mere seconds before. Only now the animal was dead. As I pulled myself from the mud to my shaking legs, that was painfully apparent. There was no expression left in the lone, glassy eye; there was nothing at all left there.
When I finally found the courage to turn around I was alone too, but the nerves in my body were humming as if I’d just taken a healthy dose of electricity.
This was the thing I remembered while Grandma talked in the leaky kitchen. This is the thing I valiantly tried to hide as my mother’s story spoke from her grave through my grandmother’s voice. This is the thing I have mulled over and found unexpectedly in many places since.
***
It wasn’t long after the birthday party that my mother began developing severe headaches. One day she collapsed on the Line (it was only by sheer luck that she didn’t fall into the scalding unit). She told her Super it was from the heat, and he hurried her home. The plant didn’t have a neat safety record and did its best to avoid negative publicity when it was in its power to do so. You see, some things never change. She mentioned nothing about her double vision; she didn’t even tell Grandma, until she wrecked the clunker of a station wagon several months later in Baton Rouge, she couldn’t make out things very well over fifteen or twenty feet. She began having a hard time getting up in the morning; her neck was frequently stiff. She started missing work, so much so that Grandma picked up a part-time job to supplement our already meager income.
And me? It was off to a neighbor’s trailer for awhile, for free. I remember absolutely nothing. Perhaps I’ve blocked out that time or simply chosen to forget it out of boredom. Or maybe sadness. It doesn’t matter.
The only thing that’s important now is the truth, and the truth is Mom lost that job. There was never any insurance or other benefits involved (this was the early ‘70’s and there were a helluva lot of other things going wrong in the country to keep most people busy), but the trailer was leased through the company and no job meant no roof. Or, at least, not any roof there. And this time there were three footloose beggars to house instead of just two. My grandmother’s suitcases had been no Pandora’s Box of riches.
So with little money, few contacts, and no rich relatives waiting to snatch us from the fire, the decision was made to change location. Completely. Grandma wanted to get back to Louisiana but Mom didn’t want to live in Shreveport again. The foot of the Boot was suggested, though New Orleans was immediately rejected as being too big, too violent. In the end three names were dropped into a shoebox and (supposedly) I fished one out. The choices were Lake Charles, Lafayette, and Baton Rouge. There were varying degrees of distant relatives in all three, even if none of them were falling over themselves to save us.
We landed in the Capitol a month later; the wagon on its last, coughing seizure; Mom constantly sickened from headaches; and Grandma worrying enough for all. Me, oblivious; just that short span of time we get to be so.
We were saved from complete disaster by a quirky bit of providence at a Stop sign. My wailing from the backseat was enough to distract Mom’s attention from what she was doing, which was driving. The brake pads had been grinding for the last hundred miles or so and this time they didn’t hold.
We rear-ended the Caddy (not even hard enough to put a sizeable dent in the bumper, according to Grandma), but the thin, chain-smoking, beanpole of a woman behind the wheel painted it as the Second Coming of Christ, and her, apparently, completely unprepared for such an event due to my mother‘s negligence. She existed the car already railing to high heaven while my Mom (fighting through another blinding headache, she told Grandma later) attempted to get out and appease the bitch. When the cops arrived fifteen minutes later the tobacco-eater was almost to the point of apoplexy.
Of course we didn’t have any insurance and the inspection sticker had expired eleven months before. So it was really no surprise that no more than forty minutes after reaching (what we hoped to be our saving grace) we were off to the police station.
Wherein lies the quirky part.
A little less than two hours after being booked in, Mom left with both an address of a nearby duplex and a job. Don’t ask me how she managed it; Grandma said she didn’t know (or pretended not to) but I am neither blind nor stupid. From the few pictures I’ve seen, Mom was a woman capable of drawing second and third looks. She used what she had, I guess…hell, who doesn’t in the end? Regardless, whatever sin she may have had to commit to save out sorry asses, it was very nearly her last.
We moved into the duplex (not too great, but better than the trailer in Arkansas), and Mom worked at the police station. Ironic, no? Life constantly sets such things into place as if to see just what great comedy or tragedy will evolve. And I guess none of us happened to be born with the good luck of a sense of humor.
A little over four months into the six-month lease I came waddling into the tiny living room, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, crying into my T-shirt. Whatever job Mom had around the station provided enough money for Grandma to stay home with me again. So be it; I never asked any questions.
I remember what followed as if I am still enmeshed in that dream which had only half awakened me.
I was crying, rubbing tears from my red eyes. And I ran to her, squeezing h
er tight and desperately as if something pursued me from the bedroom. Grandma told me later she even got up to peer down the short hallway which led to my bedroom, half-expecting some maniac with a gun or knife in hand to come stalking down it. Amid my onslaught of sobs, she said it took the better part of ten minutes to calm me enough to find out what was wrong. I’d never been one for nightmares. She bent down to tend me, and all I kept saying, moaning, was “Mommy, Mommy,” over and over again.
On the same day of the storm in my thirteenth year, she told me she knew something had happened as soon as she saw me. Something in my eyes, she said. Well, she stroked and cooed until I calmed down a little, all the while making a pallet in front of the couch. She got me a glass of warm milk, turned the television to Captain Kangaroo.
She was working up the nerve to telephone the station house when someone knocked on the door. What followed was the only true case of premonition she ever had, because as she walked the short distance to the front door she already knew my mother was dead. ‘Just as clear as a bolt of ice water shot through my veins’, were her exact words. She saw my mother falling across her desk (much as she must have done the day of my fifth birthday), the blood already coming in thin rivulets from her left ear.
It was an aneurysm, a simple little blood vessel in her head that could no longer take the strain it had been constantly under. Its warnings of headaches and double vision had gone unheeded and the clock had finally come to reset itself.
She was twenty-two and I was a little shy of five and a half.
So she became the ghost, the curled picture in the attic trunk, and I another step closer to becoming an orphan.
Grandma collapsed before the two policemen at the door even began their explanation as to why they were there.
Chapter 4:Alone
The next several years would have been an even bigger blur than the previous five had I not been older. The memories are stuffed and crammed into every available cranny of my mind like broken tools left to rust at the bottom of a discarded tackle box.
Grandma didn’t allow me to attend Mom’s funeral, I guess she was afraid the experience would do me too much harm. Even so, I’m not sure the alternative proved any more beneficial, but after all, we do, in the end, what we feel we have to. Mom was cremated; there was no money for anything more.
I have no idea what happened to her ashes.
I was left at the police station the day of the funeral. We had not lived in the duplex long enough for Grandma to entrust any of the neighbors with what proved to be her last possession (me), and the precinct seemed to be the most logical choice, the safest. Although some of the men and women took off to show their respect at the funeral home, the office was by no means deserted.
There is nothing from the moment Grandma dropped me off with the receptionist that is not preserved in my head like some Paleolithic dragonfly in amber. I still have the ability to call it up from memory in its entirety like some gruesome joke that refuses the release of a punch line.
And I really can’t blame the office worker. She was a simple nine-to-fiver putting in her hours with one eye on the clock, I’m sure. And there I was, a young curious boy of not quite five-and-a-half, full of energy made even more potent by curiosity. So it didn’t take much in the confused goings-on in the precinct to slip outside her thin range of awareness.
I explored, or rather I believe, was drawn.
In the movie-like reel that encapsulates the memory of that afternoon, I can clearly see the small boy ducking around the last corner into the hallway. I watch as he makes his way down to the third door on the left, his eyes fixed as if in the throes of a consuming dilemma. He reaches up (straining to his tip-toes) to reach the doorknob, and even though, normally, he would have never been able to turn it, the last person out has forgotten to close it firmly. The door swings open and Mr. Curiosity goes inside. And even though this action may tend to kill a cat, to a young boy it does nothing. Except endure.
With the hair actually sticking up along the back of my head (I know this; I can see it), the boy creeps in, seemingly narrowing in on whatever has drawn him. And although the forensics team and even the janitors have both done their job well, there is still one thing they’ve missed. Crawling underneath the desk I find the congealed spot of my mother’s blood as easily as a beagle flushing out a rabbit warren. And as I watch the memory (or as it watches me) I see the tiny boy who is the ghost of myself put his finger to the spot as the tears begin to come.
It takes nearly eight minutes for anyone to discover I’ve slipped away, and by that time I’ve completely rubbed the telling spot away. And no one ever knew.
***
Until now…
I’ve drained the seventh beer and call. No more. I can’t be dulled by a hangover tomorrow. I’ll need a cool head and all the courage I can muster to tell that sonofabitch what I have to say. And, Christ, I can already see it, his lip curling with that familiar smile, his eyebrows arched knowingly. Of course he won’t believe me at first (not after the things I have done), but he’ll see it soon enough. If I can pull it off without blinking it’ll be one of my greater achievements.
So…
All darkness now across the courtyard. The blue, dancing light of the television there winked out almost an hour ago and I imagine the old couple curled into their bed together, dreaming what I think to be the diluted dreams of youth. I hope it’s remembrance without the storms, at least. Mercifully, it will be.
They have at least one child, a fairly well-to-do man. He visits once or twice a week and treats them both with the kindness and respect evinced by his mother to his father. Their profiles reflect his identically, denying the piling on of years which has muted her high cheek bones, tried to deny his thin, Romanesque nose. I wonder what he does for a living? Surely he’s not a foot doctor too, some doppelganger podiatrist. He drives a new Saab and his parents don’t appear to want for anything. He looks like he’s got it made, like he hasn’t a care in the world, and at this moment I have to admit jealousy pricks me. I’ve sometimes, unwittingly, placed my face upon his features and tried to read the route of his life. I know it is utterly ridiculous, a bitter fugue to dull my own dissatisfaction, but sometimes, sometimes, it does seem to help. I picture magnificent Christmases and prestigious graduations; all those smiling girls and envious schoolmates; ivy-draped vacations and quiet beaches; a picture I’m sure he never actually lived, but I see it nonetheless. Maybe, it’s just the time of night that tends to send me on so, spiraling me down into the bitterness that has paled me. Reduced me.
It’s surely nothing to think on, but it comes and won’t leave until it’s ready. It plays on, all the while the picture of his idyllic existence parading before and around the images I harbor of my own childhood. Images of Grandma worn to the quick from her job at the post office, still-shots of more shitty daycares. Pictures of loneliness. Shadows of anger.
I became withdrawn after awhile, I guess it was inevitable, unable to give myself out of fear any new friend I would gain could be whisked away on the faintest, slight shift of breeze. Trying even as a child to buffalo my grandmother into believing there was really nothing wrong. Telling her the infrequent bruises and black eyes I carried home were hurts sustained in accidents on the playground rather than telling the truth. You see, I was small for my age until about twelve or so, and I’ve always had a mouth that was two sizes too big anyway.
But we both limped along.
I went to three schools between first and seventh grade. We lived on at the duplex in Baton Rouge and I managed the first school until fourth grade. Then Grandma was transferred to another district on the opposite side of town, and I had a hard time making the change. There were several fights, numerous trips to the office. I was eventually pulled out during the second semester of sixth grade and placed into another junior high to finish the year. Because of what, specifically, I have no recollection. I’ve erased all memories from my mind. I only remember sealing up tight
through the seventh grade until the day I walked into the duplex and found Grandma sprawled on the couch.
I’ll never forget how she looked. Worn, discarded like the couch she was lying on. Faded to every fiber and skinned to the soul. The fear in her eyes was apparent the moment I came inside. No more than five or six months after the storm and the revelations it had accounted for, and almost subconsciously, I’d come to fear for her more and more. It was as if she’d poured everything out to me that rainy afternoon with the raindrops pinging in the buckets we’d placed around the kitchen. It was as if until that day she’d not realized how old she was, or, more pointedly, my youth. And there we were, for the most part, penniless. I knew she was not sleeping well, but there was nothing I could do. I tried to be good at school; I endured several comments during that period I would not have otherwise entertained, but I could feel the tension in the house like a filled helium balloon and dared not add another percentage to it. Looking back, I realize it was as if I’d decided to bide my time, knowing somewhere inside, where the truth waited, that it would not be long. I’d hurry home from school every afternoon half-expecting to find Grandma in a position very similar to the one I did find her in that day.
The front door was half-ajar and the broom flat on the floor, the drift of dust from the pile she’d made trying to escape back to the corners. Her breath came raggedly in short little stabs. Her forehead was soaked and she clenched her left hand, all the while massaging the muscles in her upper arm by the shoulder with her right. I stopped cold in the doorway when I saw her eyes. The look was the same as the one I’d seen in the dog, only the terror was muted (Grandma could never see that thing that others do in me). I heard the book sack hit the floor, was unaware I’d dropped it.
She quit massaging her arm and motioned for me to come over to her. I hurried and knelt down, her arm falling away to where her knuckles dragged the floor. There was a thin, glistening line of drool spilled across her wrinkled chin. And it was at that moment I was truly ‘reborn’, ripped up and out of my life into what I have become.