A wounded deer leaps hig.., p.10
A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest, page 10
When she sets the phone back in the cradle and the click of it echoes in the kitchen, Mom says it was Mr. Kohl calling, that he wanted to check in, make sure everything was okay here.
I am sure now he saw me talking to the fruits and vegetables at the store, and wonder what else he’s noticed. Maybe he saw me looking at his crotch like Toby. Maybe he saw Mom at the store and wants to date her like all the other men do, and his call wasn’t about me at all. Men will do a lot of things to try to get to Mom.
“Everything’s fine,” I say, and she tells me to make sure I tell her if there’s ever anything going on. I think of White Richard and Jerome and Claudio, of the crying and the thuds and the knives, but I doubt Mr. Kohl would want to know about any of that.
“Did he ask you out?” I ask, and she turns around with her brow creased but also a small smile pulling at her lips.
“Of course not,” she says, “What a strange question.”
She goes back to what she was doing as the rain keeps coming down. Our basement has a creek running through it now, smelling like tarnished silver, like silt. Drowned mice are belly-up on the stairs, and outside their gray bodies are soaked through, pushed up and out of their hiding places with the rising waters. Along the driveway and in the grass of the front yard they are laid out like we are having a funeral, their pink feet curled into themselves. I put on my boots and grab our shovel to bury each one, but I’m running out of places to dig. Mom helped out at first, but now is tired of it—she is tired of everything. The new boyfriend she told me about has vanished, my wishes granted, but a wide, blue sadness covers everything anyway. From a distance, the dead mice on the bright green grass look like strange Easter eggs, abandoned and rotting in their too-easy hiding places.
“Their bodies need to go back into the earth. We have to keep going,” I say, but Mom just shakes her head and closes her eyes.
She doesn’t move or say anything as I go back out alone to bury all the ones I can find. She watches me from the window as I dig the holes. I scoop out dirt with the shovel and apologize to each one as the mud covers it.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
One of them is still alive, but barely. His small mouth is open and he gasps for air, his body moving with slow shudders until he takes one last breath and goes still. I smooth down his gray fur with my finger, and apologize to him, too.
“I’ll put you by the fig tree,” I tell him, and scoop him up gently in case he can still feel the earthly feelings.
After he and the others are buried, I head back inside and take off my boots. Mom says to make sure I wash my hands with extra soap and I shake the rain out of my hair like a dog.
“You need a haircut,” she says from the kitchen table where she’s drawn a picture of a mouse on the back of a coaster she brought home from some bar.
She motions me over and moves her warm fingers through my wet hair—her gentle hands are strong and sure, even as her eyes are sad enough that she might start crying any minute.
In the bathroom mirror, I pull all my hair back so my forehead goes tight, and imagine it all gone. What I most want is for her to shave it all off, to watch each dark curl fall to the cold floor like sad confetti, leaving me clean and new, a more streamlined creature left with only bone and muscle and nothing else to slow me down.
“Have you ever shaved your head?” I ask her, back in the kitchen, trying to picture her as a shorn sheep.
“God, no,” she says laughing. “Remember Mrs. Boogey?”
She should know I will never forget Mrs. Boogey. She sleeps under the Marion Street Bridge. Mom says she was probably released from the mental hospital and didn’t have anywhere else to go. When I was five, I started picking my nose and couldn’t stop, even though I knew it was gross—an embarrassment to Mom and to myself. She told me hundreds of times to knock it off and threatened various punishments—no cartoons, no dessert, no nothing—but I couldn’t stop myself.
She put me in the car one morning when I was still in pajamas and drove down to the bridge. We parked and waited, and Mom wasn’t talking, wouldn’t say anything, just had a grim look, like she had to do this thing and nothing was going to stop her. It wasn’t too long before Mrs. Boogey appeared. Her hair was pulled out in clumps, her bald scalp scabbed over on one side, reflecting back the gray light coming through the clouds. The orange coat she wore hung off her skeleton body. On her left foot, she wore a big, black combat boot, on her right a blue sneaker with no laces. Her pants were the worst—stained a deep, dark brown at the crotch, ripped open at the knee.
Her hands moved mechanically, right on cue. I looked at Mom and knew why she’d brought me there. With one hand and then the other, her fingers jabbed and scraped deep into her nostrils, followed by a frenetic licking of what came out, over and over like she’d never be able to stop.
I pictured her as a kid my age, named Stephanie or Megan, with parents and a house, going to school and getting A’s—but none of it mattered now. Here she was alone, in wet, dirty clothes, under this cement bridge, with no one around to help her, and just her own snot to eat for dinner. Mom wanted to show me how I could end up if I didn’t get my own problem under control.
I haven’t picked my nose once since then, but a couple times Mom must have thought I was going to, because from where she sat in the living room or on the front steps all she had to say was Mrs. Boogey and I stopped what I was doing, transported straight back to her, all wet and cold out there, alone in her picked-apart body, with her dirty fingers and scabby scalp.
“You wouldn’t look like Mrs. Boogey with a shaved head,” I say.
“You wouldn’t either. And you’re going to have a beautiful life, baby,” she tells me. “Don’t think about Mrs. Boogey too much. Taking you to see her was just another of my very bad parenting decisions.”
I choose an old, stained towel from the drawer, wrap it around my shoulders and sit on the kitchen stool. Mom has her sharpest scissors out and puts on her Joni Mitchell record. It’s the one where Joni is on the front smoking a cigarette and wearing a black beret. Mom has the same beret but doesn’t wear it very often. The rain outside makes a chorus that goes along with each of the songs.
Every scissor snip is a lightening-up, a freeing. Each curl tumbles toward the blue and white linoleum while her hands work above each ear, at the front and at the nape, the metal sure against my skin, and it feels like a kind of medicine. Joni’s voice sends high notes down my spine and the patter of the rain outside is the sound of home.
When Mom rubs my head and takes the towel off, my job is to sweep up all the hairs, take them outside, and set each wisp in a tree branch for the birds to make their nests. It was something her grandmother taught her once, something she did back in Texas. She told me that by the time her grandmother died at ninety-nine, all the birds’ nests in the neighborhood and even beyond were soft and white, that they glowed silver in the moonlight. Outside, I place my hair in different tree branches, and tell the blue jays and robins and house sparrows that it’s all for them.
Back inside Mom laughs because I haven’t even looked in the mirror yet. I go to the bathroom and can’t believe she’s done this thing. I run my hands over my cropped head, holding my breath. I am a sleek seal, an ocean swimmer, a shorn lamb. I am a real boy now, sturdy and tough. I feel the most right I’ve felt in a long time, and Mom is smiling behind me and giving me a hug, and my stomach knives are completely still, like they’ve been washed and dried and put away in a drawer closed so tight they are going to lose all their sheen.
“Let’s try to finish the painting before it grows out,” she says. She hasn’t abandoned the portrait after all. “Maybe when the rain lets up.”
I nod and run my hands over my head again. Mom says she’s running me a bath so I can get all the tiny hairs off. She puts in bubbles.
I climb into the tub, and she gets a washcloth to clean my neck, shoulders and back, and rinses off my collarbone. Her touch is gentle, but something has shifted; a growing tension making all the bubbles pop.
“Remember how I told you about Gary?” she asks, and my stomach sinks, my gnashing teeth always ready to wake up when the time is right.
“I thought you got rid of him,” I say, and she looks confused, then frowns. “I thought he wasn’t going to come around after all.”
“He can’t quite yet but will very soon,” she says, “but you’ll meet him on Saturday. We’re going to go visit him.”
I ask if we are going to his house and she says, “Not exactly.” Mom doesn’t want to talk anymore. She rubs shampoo into my scalp and tells me to close my eyes as she uses the bucket to rinse me clean.
“Have you been writing in your journal? It’s okay if you haven’t.” Before I can answer she says, “Making art is the only thing I respect about myself.”
I want to be one of her art projects, one of the things she feels good about making. She lifts the bucket to give me one more rinse.
Mom leaves me to go turn on the heater that snaps and crackles to life. If you look down into it there is a tangle of wires, glowing orange. I wrap the towel around my body and head to my closet, put on pajamas. I pull out the journal and pen again. I count the number of pages, the number of words I’ve written so far, the number of freckles on my right arm, then my left arm. Tomorrow I’ll meet Gary. Maybe he will like me, teach me things—boy things that Mom doesn’t know about or have time for. I count how many boyfriends I can remember. I count how many days in a row it has been raining. I count how many black and white penguins are on my pillowcase. I count how many toes I have even though I already know. Feel, notice, and want.
I feel the sleep coming, and notice that the spider who lives in my closet has dropped down lower than usual. He wants to know how he can help. He hangs by an invisible string, floating back and forth as my breath pushes him. He knows he can trust me, understands I won’t hurt him. Talking to him with my voice would be too loud for his small ears so I talk to him with my mind. You’re okay here. You belong here, too. No one will hurt you. Satisfied, he nods and crawls back up his string to the uppermost corner, maybe for a late-night snack. He calls me by my real name, says he’s going to watch out for me tonight and for all the nights he can. I want to make my own invisible string, a silver rope, that I can climb up into some hidden place. I will try to start learning how in the morning.
I write Gary’s name nine times at the bottom and close the journal. Mom said nine is the number that means both magic and the end of something. She told me about nines because that’s how old I’ll be soon, but all I want is for nines to mean the end of Gary. I set my journal out into the hallway so maybe Mom will find it. I hope she will be curious and read what I’ve written so far and understand she has to change her mind.
Rain hits the roof harder and the creek water in the basement below us picks up more speed, drowning more mice but also the laundry hamper and my bicycle, too, a rising tide that we can’t do anything about, except move what we can lift to higher ground, and wait.
Those mouse bodies out there in their shallow graves might all be on the grass again in the morning, belly-up once more, their tiny pink feet a cold gray—curled and clenched. From now on, for the rest of my life, I’ll spend every morning burying them and every night preparing for their return, until I’m as old and alone and sad as Mom is—until all that’s left of any of us are the tiniest of bones that the crows will find and take away like jewels.
It’s the worst when Mom tries to hide her crying, when she places the palm of her hand on the top of my head for a moment and keeps walking, past where I sit on the couch, to her room. She closes the door behind her, and I can hear the sigh of her bed on the floor as she lies down. I picture her curled into a ball—like a potato bug, like a knot—when the tears come, her hands clenched into fists or maybe rubbing at her eyes—her head on the pillow where all her tears will be soaked up and saved for later. She is sad and there is nothing I can do about it. The men bring the tears, and they take them away. I turn on the TV to the sound of fake laughter and wait.
On Saturday, Mom says there’s no time for cartoons and burns the scrambled eggs she’s made for us. I push them around my plate without trying to hide it, wanting her to know how unhappy I am. Mom’s too nervous to notice or eat—she keeps checking herself in the mirror and even puts on lipstick. She almost looks like a little, brown-haired Ronald McDonald but she’s not smiling big enough.
She packs a lunch, and we get in the car and drive through a neighborhood I’ve never seen before.
“It’s called Felony Flats,” Mom says as we pass crooked porches and junked cars with their hoods propped open, a toddler in diapers playing with a tire pump in the yard. “When I was in high school a friend of mine lived right there,” she tells me, pointing to a sad, brown house with moss and prehistoric-looking green ferns taking over the roof. “I wonder what happened to her.”
Beyond the houses is a wide asphalt area with no trees at all. The sky’s thick, gray clouds hover over the parking lot next to the tall cement blocks of what Mom calls the minimum-security facility, a place for locking people up who have done bad things but not the worst things. The barbed wire leading to the jail yard looks loosely done, as if someone hasn’t bothered to make the tension hold and the wire is just for show—no one is going to try too hard to get in or out.
“You’re sure Gary wants to meet me?” I ask Mom again.
I asked her this last night, too. She nods now but hasn’t really heard me, and turns the radio on and off as we sit in the parking lot. I tell her I hope he is different from the others, and she says she hopes so, too. I think of Kaleb and all the air goes out of my chest. I still miss him, even though he’s never coming back—I know it for sure now. She squeezes my shoulder and tells me to grab the lunch from the backseat. I want to ask her where she’s been going at night if he’s in here. I want to ask why she always leaves. I want to ask how she met Gary, ask how long he’s been locked up, and if maybe he’ll stay in there until I’m a grown-up. By then I’ll have moved away to my wilderness home and Mom can be with gray Gary, his face and arms probably the same color as all these cement blocks surrounding us.
Mom told me that Gary is in for robbery. He took things from old people when they were sleeping to get money to buy narcotics. Mom says he never hurt the old people so I don’t need to be concerned and explains that narcotics are drugs that make your mind and body numb so you can’t feel anything for a while. She says it’s not Gary’s fault he got addicted.
“Sometimes the pain of being alive is too much,” she says.
Maybe the narcotics could make my stomach teeth and all my feelings numb, too—make the tiny knives stop their cuts. I will ask Toby if he knows anything about them.
In the visiting room, the guards near the doors wear tight, tan pants and their penis lumps are clear outlines of zucchinis, cucumbers, and bananas. They have button-down shirts tucked into black leather belts and sturdy work boots they keep polished and shiny. Their muscular, hairy arms are too large for their shirt sleeves, and I keep waiting to hear the rip of torn fabric when they reach for their clipboards and pens. There is a vending machine with a cracked front that for a dime will shoot out a paper cup with spades, diamonds, hearts, and clubs printed on the sides. The last card needed for a set or a run is underneath, but Mom only gave me one dime so I haven’t had a chance to win yet.
The visiting room has the look and feel of the YMCA, with paint peeling off the walls and no money for heating. In the center of the room sits a heavy pool table with worn-down green felt that can withstand the weighted leans of large, tattooed men.
When Gary comes in through a thick door, he does not want to meet me. He doesn’t even look in my direction. He only has eyes for Mom—hard eyes like he is a hungry wolf who understands he won’t be eating for a while. Mom tells me they need their alone time but that she put a deck of cards in my lunch box: Solitaire again.
She says I can eat the sandwich she packed whenever I get hungry. I look in the bag and find that Mom got me a treat—not the usual whole wheat—instead, the starched white Wonder Bread that I’ve only had once, when Toby shared part of his sandwich with me. He said it’s what the astronauts eat when they go on their space missions, and it made sense. Sitting on the bench near the barred windows, the bologna and lettuce stick to the roof of my mouth, and I keep my eyes on Mom and Gary. I’m on an alien planet in my space suit—a speck of light far off in the distance.
A man in one of the orange jumpsuits comes over and leans down to my level, eye to eye, and introduces himself as Amos. He is lean, with tattoos of ships and anchors on his skinny arms, all the blue ink fading back into his dry, cracked skin. He follows my eyes to where Mom and Gary sit, holding hands and either laughing or crying, I’m not sure which.
“Lovebirds are the worst,” he says, rolling his brown eyes with a smile like he understands my situation exactly.
Amos is in here, but he is more of a songbird than a regular man, light on his feet and bright like the house sparrows that come to our yard. I can’t imagine him having done anything terrible enough to get locked up, can’t imagine him stealing from sleeping old people.
“I grew some plants I wasn’t supposed to,” he says, reading my mind. “I wasn’t hurting anyone—it was for medicine. I miss those plants, but most of all I miss my dog. I hope he’s okay. My cousin is supposed to be looking out for him while I’m in here.”
I know he is talking more to himself than to me when he says that, but when I blink, there is Bingo—tied up alone outside, even when the ground is frozen—his sad eyes following me when I pass. I try to concentrate and tell him with my mind that someone will rescue him, and that I hope that someone will be me—that I will try to find a way.
I understand what Amos means about missing his plants, too. I want to be beneath Old Oak’s branches right now, taking deep gulps of fresh air.
