Giraffe People

by Jill Malone

  From the kitchen, the teakettle whistles. “Hot chocolate?” Dad asks. “With marshmallows or whipped cream?”

  “Whipped cream,” we say.

  He comes back with a tray and offers backrubs. In my family, you have to trade; no one gets a backrub for free, except right now apparently.

  “What are you working on?” Dad asks.

  I try not to be irritated. The backrub and everything; obviously he’s trying. “My comparative essay on The Lottery and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

  “The Lottery’s the one with the stoning?”

  I nod. Dad knows a lot of shit. “Yeah, and they give the little kid pebbles to throw at his mom.”

  “Who wrote A Good Man Is Hard to Find?”

  “Flannery O’Connor,” I say. “You should read it. The story has a bunch of biblical allusions.” I hand him the book—if you can distract Dad, he’ll rub your back for half an hour.

  “What’s your essay topic?”

  “Foreshadowing,” I say, “to build suspense.”

  “Hmm.” Dad reads.

  Mom brings her novel, and sits in the rocking chair, with her tea, to read. Nigel flips back and forth in his Algebra book. The lackluster fire pops in the grate.

  Aren’t both stories about ordinary danger, the violence that rides behind us on a tandem bike? The kind of casual, horrible things that happen all the time? My atheist sent me an envelope with sand in it. No letter or anything, just sand. I poured it into the metal ashtray I made in seventh grade shop. I hope Meghan calls. I want to hear her voice. Does God hate me now?

  “You’re right,” Dad tells me. “I do like this story. She’s angry, isn’t she? I’d like to read it again. Maybe tonight while you’re at your show.”

  “Sure.” My stomach hurts. Last night I lay in bed for hours, not sleeping, not tossing, just staring at the ceiling. Days of homework still to do, and I can’t concentrate. I want to sit on the floor with my guitar and croon lamentations, like those heart-broken cowboys with their trashed guitars.

  I abandon my essay for vertexes. Bangs calls, and we finish our Biology homework together over the phone. In spite of my wandering brain, I read the History chapters and answer all the study questions, then translate some ridiculous Spanish exercise about camping in Europe (where do they dream up this shit?). By the time Dad returns with subs for our dinner, I’ve only got my English essay left to do.

  If I had a cowboy hat, I’d wear it to the gig tonight. Distortion. I crave it like a drug.

  The stage lights burn us. Ernie and Joe have sweat pouring off their faces, and I’ve shed my sweatshirt for the Doggy Life tank. Rather than slumping around languidly, they’re sprinting all over the stage as though the cords and stands and amps were an obstacle course. Between vocals, I dance with them. Trevor uses a towel to wipe himself down, and keep from chucking his sticks at us. Tonight, for the first time, he asked for a mic to sing background vocals.

  I can’t see anybody in the crowd. Even the kids nearest the stage refract light, or they’re moving so quickly that I can’t make out any of their features. I hear the band—all three of them—chime in with me on choruses.

  When you think of God, what do you imagine? That muscled old guy on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? I don’t see a body at all—just two hands in the dark. When I was a kid, Dad would read stories at bedtime, and if I hadn’t fallen asleep during the reading, he’d trace circles around my eyes and sing Sandman’s Coming, and maybe that’s where the hands came from: this comforting gesture in the night.

  One afternoon, I walked to the parade ground, and climbed into the umbrella tree, and from my seat, I could see light fracture the clouds. I thought it was Heaven, that I’d witnessed a portal, or a vision or something. Later, this woman at church said she couldn’t wait to get to Heaven where there’d be no sadness, only joy and adoration. No sadness? How would that work? If we were to be in a place with no sadness, we’d have to lose our memories too. Otherwise we’d bring sadness just by remembering, wouldn’t we?

  And adoration? I don’t want to sing praises for the rest of eternity. Heaven is basketball courts, and Elizabeth Bishop poems, and field hockey, and my guitars, and crisp bacon, and good music, and youth and vigor forever. Or Heaven is this: the four of us sweating under the lights. Now I get why native peoples used music to reach a religious ecstasy; it’s a delirious madness—music—a sense of euphoria and adrenaline and community. I love these boys. I love this blank, yawping crowd. We give them some Violent Femmes, and our reverence, and Joe yanks his shirt off and flings it into the crowd. We give them Joe’s shirt.

  From atop the speaker, I sing to the spread of them, the kids pressed to the stage, seated near the ramps, all the way to the back wall. When we do my song, I hear Trevor harmonizing during the verses as well as the chorus. His voice, tender and higher than mine, adds another level still to the song.

  We play for two hours. It’s like a bloodletting, I’m pretty sure I’m anemic now. Bangs’ band, Slim and None, opened for us. They hadn’t played any gigs since the first time I saw them at Board. Bangs said his drummer kept hocking his kit to pay rent, and they couldn’t find anyone to replace him.

  “That’s the best show,” Bangs says backstage, “I’ve ever seen you guys play.”

  “Thanks, man,” Ernie says. “It’s good to see you playing again too.”

  Bangs shrugs the compliment off. “We just fuck around. Oh Cole, Meghan had to bail. She had a migraine. I said I’d make sure you got home safe.”

  “Dude,” Trevor says, “your chaperone bailed. Now we can party.”

  “Another time,” I tell him. “I’m exhausted. Trevor, you have a beautiful voice, and your harmonies … you’ve been holding out.”

  “I like to keep the ladies guessing,” he says. And then I see the ladies he means: five of them, in outfits that make Daisy Duke seem modest, howl for him from the doorway. “Party bound.” And he strides away from us.

  Bangs and Joe and Ernie look at me. “Are you hungry?” Joe asks, handing me my sweatshirt.

  “Why do you even ask?” Meghan left me. Left the show. I follow the boys to Joe’s car, and we drive to the fluorescent diner for breakfast.

  Surmount. To mount upon or prevail over. Verb. The obsolete usage meant to surpass in excellence. Kind of a hard fall for a word, don’t you think?

  Gabby meets up with us at the diner after she drops all her friends back at their houses. I eat the heart-attack special and finally quit, feeling faint.

  “So,” she says, on her fourth cup of coffee, “soccer tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, what about you guys?” Bangs asks Joe and Ernie. “Want to play some indoor with us?”

  “Cool,” Ernie says.

  “Yeah, alright.” Joe smiles. “I’m on Cole’s team.”

  And the next afternoon, he is on my team, as well as Bangs and Ernie and Nigel, and Bangs’ skater buds. Gabby and her friends join Nate and Kelly. Meghan phoned to say she couldn’t make it.

  We play in a middle-school gymnasium, the wooden bleachers drawn tight to the walls, the windows so high up as to be completely useless as a light source. We play seven on seven and have two substitutes. Though I stretched for twenty minutes, my groin feels tight, and my head light.

  “Dude,” Ernie asks Bangs, “how do you guys have access to this place?”

  “Gabby knows everybody.”

  “Right.” Ernie appears smaller in shorts. He’s got on some crazy Bermudas and a white t-shirt and a pair of red Converse that he might have borrowed from Joe. I worry, the first time I pass him the ball.

  He runs so quickly that no one comes close to taking the ball from him, or blocking his drive to the goal. He shoots, and without even bothering to watch the ball land, simply turns and runs back to our half of the gym, almost as though he can feel the goal.

  “Ernie!” We shout. Bashful, and himself again, he lets us congratulate him.

  Joe cannot stay on his feet. He tumbles and dive
s and drops even in a clean run without defenders, but his aggression is unreal. Maybe because he knows he won’t be upright for long, he attacks the other team with terrifying urgency. They start passing rather than engaging with him.

  Bangs plays soccer like he skates: his movement balletic, his subtle shifts of the ball fluid, his height alarming in close quarters.

  We beat them 7–0, and they’re good sports but still ask if we can change up the teams for a fairer game. While we rehydrate between games, Kelly stretches beside Nate, her face turned up toward his with a look I never expected to see on her. Attentive. She’s attentive to my brother.

  When I was in second grade, Nate led us on an expedition to the orange clay pools. We hiked through the Missouri woods, past the creeks with turtles and tree-climbing frogs; we used our sticks as machetes, and wandered until the forest thinned, and the trees changed from evergreen to birch and finally gave way entirely to the orange clay pools. We stripped to our Underoos, and soaked in the warm water.

  By the time we got back home, every parent on Gridley Loop had been mobilized. We’d taken some of the younger kids with us—maybe eight kids altogether—all of us damp, tired, and painted orange. Nate got in an unreal amount of trouble. Spankings, if I remember correctly, and he never told them it was my idea, that I’d begged him to take me.

  Somehow, being punished for our innocuous adventure made it seem more remarkable, more daring than a walk through the woods. We treated Nate like a hero for years. Admired and aped him.

  During our second game, we trade Ernie and one of the better skater boys for a timid girl, and a guy I swear is wearing dress shoes. I steal the ball from Ernie, pass to Bangs, and he arcs a beauty of a lob to Nigel, who heads it into the goal. Nate takes goal when we’re up 4–2, and I score on him twice in quick succession—nobody telegraphs like Nate does.

  He calls something shitty to me that I don’t hear, but Bangs and Nigel do.

  “Don’t worry,” Nigel tells our brother. “I’ll score the next one on you.”

  Joe and I chase Ernie out of bounds, and Bangs flings the ball to Joe, who goes down almost at once, but the timid girl recovers the ball, and kicks it in Nigel’s direction. Kelly gets to it first, and she and Nigel race back toward our goal, Ernie and Gabby flanking them.

  Nigel’s stride lengthens; he catches the ball, and guides Kelly into dress-shoes guy, then lifts the ball on top of his shoe for a flicking pass to one of the skater boys, and we all push back toward Nate. His team scrambles to defend goal, to slow us, to rally.

  Bangs brings the ball under control with his chest, and spins once to angle a pass back at me, and then I lead Nigel, and he nails the ball right at Nate. For a moment they’re both airborne—Nigel with his right leg extended, and Nate with both arms thrown wide to save the ball. I want to leave them like that.

  Afterward, in the parking lot, Bangs juggles a ball, almost lazily, between his feet, and asks, “Pizza?”

  We look at Nate, our driver. “Sure,” he agrees. “I just need to call home real quick.”

  Gabby tells everybody the pizza is her treat. In this half-tavern, half-arcade, the big-bellied staff model thick gold jewelry and sinister wisecracks. We order six large pies, and mean to finish every slice. Our group commandeers the jukebox, and the pool tables, while Bangs and I play air hockey.

  “You kicked ass out there,” I tell him.

  “You sound surprised.”

  “Why don’t you play on the varsity soccer team?”

  “Jocks bore me.”

  “Is that right?” I point at Nate and Nigel and myself. “We all play varsity soccer.”

  “Hey, if I could play on the team with you, I’d be all over it.”

  “You’re so weird,” I tell him.

  Two massive dudes with muttonchops throw darts in the corner by the Budweiser clock. I imagine I can hear the darts whistle. Bangs grabs us a couple of slices of pepperoni with black olives. “I haven’t seen Jeremy around for a while,” he says.

  “Nope.”

  “I kinda miss the guy.”

  Nobody else has said this. “I miss him too.” Brilliant Disguise on the jukebox, and the entire place sings the chorus—their voices lilting upward with Springsteen’s. “What do you think God looks like?” I ask Bangs.

  “Whose?”

  “You know,” I say, gesturing at him with my pizza, “yours.”

  “I think God’s made of water.” He flicks his hair, and chews on his thumb, thinking. The guy has left the crust from each slice piled on his plate. I eat them as he continues, “Ever notice how all the big stories involve water: Noah’s ark, the Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Osiris, Jonah and the whale, Oceanus, fishers of men, baptism, the Fountain of Youth, the parting of the Red Sea? And when the Israelites are punished, they’re enslaved in Egypt, and then made to wander the desert—far from the ocean?” I think of my atheist, all these months in the desert, the awful waiting. “And Odysseus is marooned,” Bangs says, “and trapped in caves and shit? Water figures in all of it, you know? So I think God is water.”

  He drains a mammoth glass of Coke, before adding, “Maybe that’s why surfers are so insane; they have a chronic God rush. Have you ever thought about Eden maybe being submerged deep underwater?”

  No, I haven’t thought about that, but I’m still stuck on his initial assertion. “What the hell’s the Epic of Gilgamesh?” I ask.

  “It’s this ancient story about this dude Gilgamesh, and his quests; there’s a flood in it too.”

  “Oh sure,” I say, “that dude Gilgamesh. It’s all coming back to me.” What if we got tossed out of some sunken paradise, and were forced to grow legs and breathe air? Somebody hits the lamp above one of the pool tables, and it rocks back and forth, creaking.

  Bangs’ eyes skate across me, and away to the dartboard, and the pool tables, and our empty plates, and Nate and Kelly at the jukebox plugging quarters. Then he flicks his bangs a bunch of times, and finally admits, “My mom teaches Comparative Religion. Sometimes I read the books she leaves lying around. I’ve got this one about Confucius now. What a trip. Anyway,” he says, “doesn’t everything start with water?”

  “I thought everything started with light,” I say, “but I kinda dig your idea more.” From the jukebox, Livin’ on a Prayer, the second Bon Jovi song in a row—just a single would have been torture enough—and Nate and Kelly laugh like maniacs in the corner.

  My English essay, admittedly, blows. If something dynamic occurs to me in my sleep, at least I’ll have 45 extra minutes in the morning to spice up my conclusion. (Bright side!)

  I write to my atheist on ornate pink stationery my grandmother sent me last Christmas. Though I hadn’t planned to tell him, I write the fight with Jeremy, and the kiss in Meghan’s car, and whatever happened that night in her room, and Bangs’ theory of an underwater Eden. The letter goes on for pages, my handwriting morphing from print to cursive. Will he be shocked? Will he disapprove? I’ll send some Milky Way bars too, which should make the letter easier to swallow.

  After midnight, I switch off my lamp, and lie in the dark. God as a giant squid, as a merman, as an old bearded guy with a trident; God as a wave, pulling, pulling.

  Monday evening, I have dinner with Joe and his mom. She cooks stir-fry with strips of pork and tons of vegetables, and the entire meal she tells us about the insane shit that happens at her work—she’s a nurse in the trauma unit and has seen everything—like some guy with a thermos up his anus claiming to have fallen onto it while doing pull-ups naked in the woods.

  After dessert, Joe and I head back out to the garage where we already had a two-hour practice this afternoon, and sit on stools facing each another.

  “OK?” I say, nervous all the sudden.

  He smiles at me. I’ve considered songs that would fit the band better, and chosen eight to play for him. I watch his foot as I play, the way it keeps time with my strum.

  “Nice,” he says, at the end of the first.

>   “Grab a guitar,” I say, “and play the next with me.”

  We play together, with Joe occasionally plucking a bass line on his guitar, or harmonizing for the chorus. It’s the last week before Christmas break, multiple tests pending, and the portrait project for Graphic Arts, two gigs with the band, in addition to the Battle of the Bands competition at some metal bar, and this feels like meditation. Kicking with Joe, our acoustics warm and bright, our voices intimate.

  “Once more,” Joe says a couple of times. And we weave back through.

  Sometime later, his mom brings us another serving of apple pie and ice cream. When we finish eating, I tell Joe that I have to go.

  On the drive back to the base, a pitiful snow swirls around, sticking to nothing.

  “You guys going anywhere over break?” he asks.

  “The boys are going skiing.”

  “Not you?”

  “I hate skiing.”

  “Me too,” he says. “We should hang out, if you want.”

  I don’t mention Bangs’ idea about a movie marathon: watching gangster films from the 40s, which showcase all the little guys waving guns around.

  “I’m in,” I say.

  I had been worried, before dinner, when Ernie and Trevor left, and I stayed, that things might get tense with Joe, but it was easy, tensionless. And when he drops me off, I’m grateful to have had the respite, a leisurely evening away from my life.

  Two days later, we take the stage at the metal club—Metallic—how’s that for originality? Imagine a penguin habitat without the water or the penguins, but complete with penetrating smell, and you’ve got Metallic. Longhaired, scrawny dudes, entwined with thick-lashed hippy chicks, stand around smoking cigarettes and drinking beer from plastic cups.

  We play fourth, and open with The Ramones. On the second chorus, the first beer missile clips my mic stand, and splashes up into my face. Ernie and Joe are hit simultaneously—Ernie in the shoulder, and Joe, kicking up to defend himself, in the knee. More beer comes; I’ve crouched, and ducked behind a speaker, but some asshole lobs a pitcher, and a spray hits me before the pitcher crashes into the wall.