Hazard

by Margaret Combs

  I slid off the chair and straightened my knees.

  “Arise, shine, for thy light has come,” I recited, thickly. “Isaiah, 60:1.”

  My lungs felt flaccid as old balloons. Mrs. Desmond chuffed and pleated her lips in a show of disappointment at my lack of enthusiasm, motioning me to my chair.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t rally. My head rested like a boulder in one hand, the hour oozing from the clock above the piano. I raised my hand only once, and then only feebly. For the first time, I wasn’t sure of the right Bible verse.

  Later on, after worship service, I slid from my pew and tunneled through cheery wads of grownups, moving down the back hallway, through the nursery, and out the side door to the parking lot. The dry February wind scraped its bony fingers down my neck and inside my unbuttoned coat, chilling my belly and ribs. Still, I ran for the car as if it were an outpost. I wanted nothing more than to be alone.

  The car door handle crackled under my mittens, shedding ice chips as I yanked it open. I slipped inside, scooting down onto the floor, my coat bunching around my ears. Wedged there, my spine against the wheel well, I opened the pages of my Bible to the Book of Psalms. I didn’t yet know I was a lover of poetry, or that my passion for Psalms, with their singing forms, was less about worship and more about the grace of sonnets and couplets; how the cadence of words was a windy musical flight, lofting whenever I turned a new page.

  Bless the Lord, O my soul … You set the earth on its foundations, so that it shall never be shaken …

  Briefly stretching my neck above the seat to confirm I was truly alone, I scrunched back down and read the lines aloud. They were even lighter in my voice, lifting from the pages like ribbons, fluttering about the car, weaving in and around one another, so that when I reached the last word, I felt I’d flown on a carpet, woven by rhythms, to somewhere warm.

  “There you are!” cried my mother’s voice.

  The Bible jumped in my hands. Through the window she was looking at me with an edgy mixture of pique and relief. She opened the back door and hoisted Roddy up onto the runner.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  I shifted from the floor and reached for Roddy’s hands, guiding him into his seat. The door slammed. My mother got in the front, took off her gloves, and looked over the back seat.

  “I’ve been looking all over for you. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming out to the car?”

  When I didn’t answer she motioned me forward and felt my forehead.

  “Ruthie Belcher was looking for you. She’s invited you over for Sunday dinner.”

  I lidded my eyes and sank back against the seat.

  “I don’t feel well,” I said, not looking at her.

  “Hmmm.”

  I’m empty is what I’d meant to say, what I would have said if I were years older and understood loss and its stages of grief. No one had asked me if I missed Lily. I hadn’t even asked myself. I just knew there was a new hollow in my chest. Time seemed more like a slow being, circling me, moving the clock’s hands in increments or not at all. There was a time when I would have arrived last to my car, sneaking instead with Lily into the church kitchen for stray cookies, or ducking behind the altar to peer in the Baptismal. Or plotting to ride home with her, tangled among the Sparlers in the back of their station wagon, planning abominable snowman games. Now, all I wanted was to be invisible, to ride away before anyone invited me to play.

  At home, I lay down long enough to fake a nap, and then cased around for a way to fill the long Sunday. Dragging my chalkboard out of my closet, I rattled its easel down the hallway. I wasn’t sure what my mission was, but I headed for the living room, maneuvering around Roddy and his precision convoy of Hot Wheels and Tonka trucks lined up, bumper to bumper, in the hallway. He’d been there for an hour, aligning axles and bumpers, his bottom stuck in the air, his face close to the ground. Now, as I stepped over his puppy body, I saw the line of the convoy was dead straight, just like Daddy’s pencil lines on his airplane drawings.

  Feeling lifted by this somehow, by the promise of it—Roddy had such precision so he must a smart boy—I set up my chalkboard at the edge of the living room carpet and pulled over a single chair. Then, I went into the kitchen to butter some Honey Grahams and swizzle Hershey’s into two glasses of milk: one for me and one for Roddy. My mission was taking shape: I was going to teach Roddy and fix his trouble once and for all.

  I couldn’t have known my brother was a small but clear dot on one extreme end of the autism spectrum, the opposite end of high-functioning so-called Asperger’s. None of us knew then: not my parents, not even Roddy’s teachers at the Wallace School for the Handicapped. Like most autistic children born into the world, Roddy was no savant, nor a high-functioning star. He’d come into life with a labyrinth of disabilities. His oddities, so familiar to me—the darting gaze, his flapping hands, his odd rituals and slurry words—so flummoxed his teachers that they shuffled him from one placement and classroom to another.

  These details weren’t part of my world at the time, but I sensed them, partly because of my own suffering in Mrs. Larson’s class. Roddy’s welfare, I reasoned, rested with me at home, rather than out in a world full of mean teachers. All his brain needed to catch up with mine was practice, like learning to tie shoes, or ride a bike, or scale a fat tree. Once he got a hang of it, from someone older, someone like me, he’d always know how. He’d never forget again.

  “Mama, he did it!” I called out to the kitchen, where my mother was frying up a chicken. Not fifteen minutes had passed since I’d coaxed Roddy to sit in front of my chalkboard and we’d plunged into our first lesson. “He counted all the way to ten!”

  “Is that right?” She turned from the stove, tongs poised above the sizzling pan, a faint, soft smile on her lips. When I saw her face, a note of hope around her eyes, I felt a triumph that kicked back at the world.

  I know now a deeper thing ran beneath that afternoon. I was beginning to grapple with hopelessness and anger. With the powerlessness I felt in the wake of my mother’s sorrow and my brother’s troubles. For all my seeming patience and benevolence, my efforts to help Roddy were a way to thumb my nose at life’s wrongdoing.

  When I softened my tone, pointing to the numbers and sounding them out carefully for Roddy, gently clapping and saying, “You’re so smart,” again and again, no matter how many times he had to start over, I was taking a kind of revenge. I was being what Mrs. Larson wasn’t, and what every child instinctively knows a teacher should be: kind, and willing to see all the way inside a child and to honor the treasures found there.

  When Roddy sagged on the third round of numbers, I put down my chalk and carried in the tray of buttered Honey Grahams, and we ended our school hour munching together. And when he slid off his chair and tunneled back to the hallway with its soothing lines of cars, I let him go.

  I didn’t know then that my anger was an egged creature, small and contained inside me. It was quietly growing, gaining enough strength to puncture its shell. I wasn’t aware it existed in me, or that I shared it with other children whose sisters and brothers were afflicted in some way. I hadn’t a clue how fiercely it would emerge and drive my life.

  Later that spring, my anger cracked through for the first time. I was sitting with Roddy on the school steps, counting sprouts of green nosing up around the concrete. Beside me, he munched saltines and made funny crumb-filled sounds. We were waiting for Mama to get through with my end-of-the-year conference with Mrs. Larson.

  Part of me was nervous. I had little hope my conference would turn out well. Mrs. Larson was bound to spill all of my misdeeds: the time I tossed a scribbled note to Bethany with the right answers so she’d stop making frantic faces for help; the time I horsed around with Russel in art class and jammed a pencil clear through the soft pad of my little finger; the time I told Lynette to “shut up, we’ve heard about your new horse a million times.” I knew I couldn’t take these things back, and I felt a turgid rumblin
g under my ribs as if I’d eaten something rotten from my lunchbox.

  Wrestling off my spring coat, I flopped over onto a slender patch of cool grass. A mad flurry of trembling blades caught my eye and in the next instant a roly-poly bug crawled onto my finger. When I tapped its backside it curled sweetly into its own self, rolling like a gray bead on my palm. I wondered if somewhere in the universe, some place where life was different and fair, people might be fashioned this way: born with their own armor and a way of enfolding their tender parts against the fierce outside.

  Tipping my hand, I rolled him back to the grass, and then, I lifted my head. Something was odd. Roddy wasn’t where he should have been, on the step, a few inches from me. A little spear zipped around in my stomach and my breath pattered as I twisted around, sitting up.

  At the far edge of the parking lot, a bunch of boys clotted around the fire hydrant. Sniggers loosened like rocks and rattled from the circle all the way over to where I was. And then, a word spit from the cluster of boys into the air.

  “Retard!”

  Unhinging my knees, I bounded off the step, churning my feet across the twenty steps to the curb, boring myself through the clump of bodies, straight into the heart of the circle. There, Roddy huddled against the hydrant, dipping his chin to his chest, his little body slumped and motionless, except for the fingers of one hand mauling his bottom lip. I flipped my body around, straddling my legs and jamming a fist into each hip. I knew Roddy loathed being touched, so I stiffened my spine, creating a mica-thin pane of space between us. The circle pressed inward, the boys’ bodies purposely close. One boy, bulky and oversized, towered over my head.

  “You leave my brother alone,” I hissed up at his chin.

  “He’s a dummy,” said the boy, pressing in and staring down at me.

  “You’re a dummy. Look at your face—you dumb dope.”

  Part of me watched these words spit from my mouth, hot and coming fast, at once exhilarating and fierce. I felt a soup of bad words boiling inside me.

  “Fat lips!” I said, pushing up on tiptoe and pressing my face close to his mouth. His lids fluttered. I saw I’d hit a weak spot. He was a swollen-featured boy. I punched again.

  “Blubber face. What’s the matter, you got the mumps?”

  I’d be whipped if Mama heard me, but I couldn’t stop. A fury cracked deep inside me, elbowing its way up my throat. I felt breathless, now that I had my enemy—this big, lunky boy, whom I could slap with my words.

  In that moment, I felt something sure—something I hadn’t realized. I’d been waiting months for this boy, for a fleshy bad person, someone who was my brother’s enemy, and mine. Someone I could punish.

  Though Roddy had no way of telling me outright, he’d been sending signals all winter that he was being bullied at his special school. I’d come home from my own miserable day in fifth grade to find him in his bedroom facing no particular direction, arms stiffened and held straight out in front of his body, palms up and flattened, fingers curled into what I guessed was his version of boxing fists.

  “Put ’em up boys,” he said to the wall.

  Another time, I looked up from the kitchen table and caught him peering around the doorframe. His flat hand was smashed against his face, palm outward, and he was staring with one eye through the webbed V of his thumb and forefinger, as if through some stubby, telescopic instrument.

  “What’s he doing?” I had whispered to Barbara Ann. She was sitting across the table from me, surrounded by encyclopedias, scribbling a report on Mount Vesuvius.

  “I think he’s scouting for danger,” she mused, pencil poised above her notebook, discreetly glancing over to where he was peeking around the door. “He’s some kind of spy.”

  Roddy wasn’t looking at either of us, but seemingly at the refrigerator, or maybe the stove.

  “Who’s his enemy?” I whispered back.

  I wanted to believe Roddy wasn’t dealing with anyone or anything crueler than I’d ever experienced. I couldn’t fathom anyone being mean to a child like him. No one in my circle had ever done such a thing.

  For a few minutes, Barbara Ann and I both watched Roddy scan the kitchen for enemies, as if we might gain a clue.

  “I’m not sure who it is,” she’d said, finally.

  Now, inches from this big boy’s face and smelling his Beefaroni breath, I was sure. Even as he blinked at me, I wanted to sink my teeth again, gouge deeper with a harder word, something searing and foul. I found it stored inside me, lodged in a dark place where I thought I’d forgotten it—a word uttered once by a loud-mouthed boy behind the door of the boy’s bathroom.

  “Asshole!”

  Spitting it out, I tasted ugliness, the kind that left bitterness in the mouth.

  In the next instant, Mama was out the front door and the boys disintegrated, scattering in all directions.

  “What did I just hear you say?” She gripped my arm and smacked my bottom, yanking me to the car.

  Not long before, I’d have been mortified, cringing with shame to be spanked out in the open. Even in that moment, part of me flushed. But in a deep and secret place, I felt good. It was the price I had to pay for committing a sin for a good reason, by choice. As I rode in silence all the way home, tying and untying the bow on my blouse, I knew, for the first time, why swear words were in the world. There were times when only they would do.

  Chapter 9

  Aileron

  In the warm, thinning light of summer evenings in Colorado, I knew where to find my father. Once our supper table was cleared and I’d dust-panned the crumbs away, I reached for the kitchen door knob.

  We lived far out in the country beyond a bend in the road. It was a place of virtues for me, a wandering child of ten, prone to loneliness and reverie. At twilight, when chiggers and mosquitoes forced me indoors, I sought out my father’s domain: our two-car garage.

  Daddy’s VW Bug, painted sky blue, always greeted me as I swung the door wide. Not two feet away sat Mama’s finned white Fury, both cars side by side, the way my parents would be throughout life, an inseparable fleet of two. Despite this, I believed my father belonged to me. I was most like him, taking after his side of the family: my blondish hair a whisper of his mother’s; my nose and eyes a regeneration of his aunt Malta; and my middle name, Ray, was the same as his first name.

  One summer afternoon, I pushed open the screen door to the garage and, for a moment, paused, dizzied by the pungency of warm engine oil, gasoline, and treaded rubber. A funnel of soft light fell through the only window, and there, half-perched on a stool, my father curved like a fishing pole over his work bench, casting and dropping his fingers into a pool of parts and bits that seemed from another world: model-pins, X-Acto blades, ball-headed studs, swivel socket links, stabilizers. Dust motes swirled around his dark thatch of hair, curling upward to the ceiling where a flock of delicate model airplane skeletons dangled from the rafters, covered in sleek flawless skins of brushed reds and buttery yellows. Though meant to float on the air like prairie birds, Dad’s airplanes, with their tissued wings and opaque membranes, appeared more to me like pterosaurs: mysterious, primal creatures taking shelter in our garage.

  Though I didn’t recognize it then, I sensed my father’s awe. Aviation was a youthful and evolving dream in 1962, with nearly a decade to go before Boeing would fly its first 747, ferrying crowds of people across unfathomable miles as easily and comfortably as Chevrolets. Nearly as many years would pass before Neil Armstrong scuffed his boot in the dust of the moon. Flight and its mystery were imaginative and visionary, and, in the case of missiles and booster rockets, heroic and powerful.

  My father didn’t look up. I stood for another small moment, the door half-open, and inhaled a deep whiff of glue and wood dust, my lungs billowing and folding like bellows. In the next half second, a clattering sound exploded behind me from the back corridors of the house. Quickly, I pulled the door shut as the noise tumbled up against its hollow core, muffled and fierce. In a distant be
droom, Roddy’s fists and heels whirled and pounded, bits of gears and toy parts scattering and crunching under his heels. The fury of his barking gave way suddenly to the deep thumping sound of his forehead, deliberate and unhurried, banging the wall. Bong, bong, bong.

  My mother’s footsteps hurried through the distant hallway as her voice rose and sank. Daddy’s face lifted to the window, his hand stilled midair, a tube of epoxy balanced on his fingers. I knew he was waiting, listening like me, and Barbara Ann in some other part of the house, her bedroom maybe, holding her palomino mare and the big chestnut stallion still on the pasture of her bedspread. Each of us paused, stalled long enough to measure whether the evening could go on.

  I carried only one word for my brother, then: retarded. Other words would rise as I came of age, obscure terms I didn’t understand. What I knew was that he was a shy boy with a funny, flat-footed run and a loppy smile, and what was wrong with him had moved into our home like a seizure, unpredictable and baffling, thinning my mother’s smile, rimming her hazel eyes with tears, and bowing her head in prayer.

  A silence fell in the garage, a dense lack of sound. After another moment, the silvery tube in my father’s hand resumed its journey downward, delivering a bead of glue into the waiting dihedral of the wing. Pushing out a puff of air, I shifted my weight away from the door and slapped my flip-flops down two steps to the concrete floor. Dodging the VW’s fender and sidestepping the lawn mower, I came up to my father’s side. He tugged a tall stool out from under the table and held it steady as I climbed on. Then, he chose for me a grainy square of sandpaper and a slender piece of soft white wood.

  Balsa was an essence to me: a silky slide beneath my thumb and forefinger, a tangy citrus inside my nose. Its delicate airy thinness, when trimmed and deburred, could catch the edge of the wind and wing to the sky. I was finally old enough to build my own plane, and the piece my father handed me was not just any scrap, but my first wing, with a trailing edge and elliptical curve that could part and shape the air.