Unstoppable Moses

by Author Tyler James Smith

  Mr. Coleman, one of two barbers in Guthrie, and someone who gives free haircuts to police officers and veterans, said, “That’s what they all say. Allah, Islam, whatever.”

  Hollie Bridge, a girl I’d gone to school with since I was in kindergarten, started a local charity called WARMTH which raised funds for the bowling alley and stood for We ARe More Than Hate.

  Stirring testimonies from prominent members of Guthrie—and, to a lesser extent, Greenfield—ranged from outrage and contempt to a terrible, rattled melancholy. That was the worst part: the slow pain. Footage that would’ve broken your heart and then glued it shakily back together. The news story juxtaposed our high school portraits over the burning remains of the bowling alley, to really emphasize how far we’d fallen. Then they showed the community holding vigils and praying together: solemn masses of people wearing WARMTH shirts holding hands regardless of card-carrying religion, Christian hands holding Muslim hands holding Jewish hands holding the hands of every shade of faith in between. We were an example of what happened when the privileged youth got restless.

  All of the stations shared variations of the same footage. It always started with a shot of the reporter standing in front of Pinz!, the screen undercut with some tired version of the superimposed smear campaign “Local Arson, Possible Hate Crime” before the camera panned up to the half-destroyed, still-smoldering bowling alley. Depending on which network was airing the piece, it would either cut back to the anchors, looking as upset as reporters are allowed to look, or to footage taken the previous summer of a very happy barbecue that Pinz! had hosted in its parking lot.

  They always rolled the “after” shot next: it was B-roll taken when the sun had finally come up and the fire had been put out. The focus of the shot was on the gods-blob. It was a cloud-shaped heap of blackened, bruise-colored plastic with bits of fabric and hardened bubbles dotting its surface. The camera always lingered on the smoking Holy Blob while the booming newscaster solemnly narrated in omniscient voice-over.

  Then the public reactions.

  The angriest reaction we saw, the one lined with the most wrath and resentment, was Reverend Harper’s. Harper on camera with the church behind him, which was notably lacking a Jesus with a Gibson guitar. Harper, who had seen us take his Jesus with a Gibson guitar. Harper, who was a minister and not a priest.

  Most of the other religious leaders just looked confused.

  Eventually it would cut to the courtroom, when I got to talk. By this point it was spring; when most of the facts had lost their mystique and most of the outright fiction had been sheared away—when the hateful dust settled and it became clear that our crime was being idiots, not bigots—we were slowly but inevitably becoming nothing more than a footnote in small-town folklore.

  Living that close to Chicago, there were always bigger stories to pay attention to.

  Still, some people persisted—like the lady in line at the coffee shop, who’d had the same flash of recognition in her eyes before tugging at my sleeve and saying, “Jesus still loves you, even if you hate Him.”3

  Or the kids at school who would lower their volume whenever I walked by, who would watch me like they were waiting for me to start screaming and crying and confessing that the news reports had all been right. They looked at me the way doctors look at benign tumors. Unsettling and unwelcome, but not life-threatening. Probably.

  And each time they pointedly did or didn’t talk to me, every time they made sad, lingering eye contact before looking down and shaking their heads just the slightest bit, I’d feel the cold exhaustion dig itself deeper into my bones; I’d feel my undercurrent freeze just a little bit more. But I kept moving and I kept going to coffee shops and kept on showing up for class because I was Moses the Machine; I was the one who always got back up, the one who came back.

  One of the advantages of growing up in a small town and being privileged is that sometimes the judge who decides your fate happens to also have been your soccer coach from third grade, not some daytime-television asshole who doles out theatrical Old-Testament punishments for crimes of every nature. The disadvantage of living in a small town is that sometimes third-grade-soccer-coaching judges also decide that your best course of action is a second chance surrounded by a bunch of screaming children in the woods for a week.4

  The bus’s hydraulic brakes hissed as the driver pulled us off the highway past signs promising Camp Jaye’k, just three miles down the road. Ten more minutes of kids and Buddies alike staring out the windows of the huge yellow bus that relied on compartmentalization rather than seat belts to keep us safe. The three Buddies ahead of me settled back into their own worlds. Girl Buddy was trying to type something on her phone as No Longer Sleeping Buddy leaned across her lap to talk to Pee Buddy, who nodded, said something while gesturing with his hands, then started laughing.

  Even this close to our destination—a time generally reserved for mild panic attacks and escape plans—the bus was a frenzy of individual ecosystems. From the Buddies in front of me talking with the hatchet-haired boy, to the Travel Show Host behind me pointing out native trees, to the clutch of angry-looking little kids in the back of the bus who were swearing loud enough for the bus driver to hear and then acting like it wasn’t them, to the little girl in the aviator hat sitting next to a student wearing noise-canceling headphones, the bus was a geopolitical map of life and hormones and stories, and up until just a few minutes ago, none of them had involved me.

  A quarter mile down the country road, a small shape was trundling along the center line with its spiny back turned toward us. As we closed in on it and the bus driver made it clear that he had no intention of swerving around the porcupine, the girl with the brown hair next to Faisal spoke up, pulling her hood off, as if that would make her voice more clearly heard.

  “Hey— There’s a—”

  The front half of the bus let loose a collective squeal when the bus ran the porcupine over. Every ecosystem on the bus synced up as it banged under the front of the chassis, smacked up against the floor under my feet, and got tossed out behind the vehicle.

  The curious kid next to me spun around and looked out the back window. His fingers dug into the back of the seat and he kept scraping his shoes against my leg, trying to get a better view. Behind us, the tiny broken shape lay motionless on the shoulder, upright but facedown, and it was impossible to tell if the other buses hit the broken-apart little animal.

  “He hit it! Why didn’t he move?” he asked, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the bus hadn’t moved because that’s life: the bus does not swerve.

  “Yeah, why didn’t you try to move?” It was the brown-haired girl who’d recognized me; she had a voice like classic rock, like power chords. She had a voice you paid attention to.

  “Didn’t have room,” the driver said without looking back.

  “It was moving with the bus; you didn’t have to swerve,” she said.

  The driver didn’t say anything back.

  “You aren’t supposed to swerve if you see an animal in the road. Especially if you’re driving a bus full of students,” I said to the kid as my phone buzzed in my pocket. Neither the kid nor the Buddies toward the front of the bus seemed to think the driver was anything less than an asshole though. General road precautions aside, they didn’t seem wrong about him either.

  The kid had his face mushed against the window to try to get a look at the animal behind us when I pulled my phone out to check it. It was a text from my mother that said,

  Hey SB!5 Have a great (court-ordered) time! You’ll do great. Love u lots.—Mom

  THREE: A MOM AND DAD MEET THEIR SON

  A WEEK AFTER CHARLIE and the bowling alley, I still can’t sleep. I lie there wide awake, hoping the whole goddamned thing is a nightmare, until I fall asleep and have actual nightmares that are really just my memories. And it fucking sucks.

  We’re in the middle of Christmas break so I don’t have to deal with seeing all of my classmates and teachers yet, b
ut life has taken a weird turn where break kind of resembles school: I wake up early, I don’t see my parents, and I go to bed earlier than normal. There’s weight attached to every conversation that I have with my parents, like we all know that there’s this massive, jagged canyon forming between us, and nobody knows how to address it.

  Somewhere around one in the morning, I decide I want coffee in the middle of the night because I don’t want to sleep and deal with dreaming and if I’m going to be awake, then I want to be awake. But when I go downstairs, Mom and Dad are still up.

  They don’t see me because the front of the couch faces away from the entrance to the living room and because our old wooden stairs are somehow almost entirely non-creaky, but I see them. They’re sitting on the couch, and he’s lying sideways with his head in her lap while she stares straight ahead and absently runs her fingers through his hair.

  Dad clears his throat, and his breath comes out stuttered, and I realize he’s crying and Mom’s been crying, and the TV isn’t even on. They’re not pretending. They’re just sitting there together being wrecked.

  I back up to the stairs, quiet, climbing up two or three steps, and fake a cough as I come back down, stepping on one of the creaky parts of the stairs, letting them hear me.

  This time, when I go to cross the living room entrance, Mom is thumbing away any trace of tears under her eyes and Dad is already halfway across the other side of the room, headed for the bathroom.

  “Hey, sweets,” she says, trying to smile. “What are you doing up?”

  Lately, I don’t bother asking either one of them why they look like they’ve been crying.

  “Can’t sleep. Gonna make some coffee.”

  “Coffee,” she says, smirking. “Why are you such an old man?” She holds her hand out as she says it, an open-palmed gesture that says, “Come here. Come sit with me.”

  So I do.

  And I don’t expect to feel so far away.

  I don’t expect to be so nebulously mad. I want to say, “You can cry around me. I know what happened. I was fucking there. You trying to hide it makes me feel like you’re crying because you’re ashamed of me. Which you probably should be.” But of course I don’t say anything.

  And I know she senses something, because I know everything inside of me is tensed up and moms can read that sort of thing. Then Dad flushes the toilet to uphold the illusion that he was just in there peeing and steps into the room, and he looks just as tired and frustrated as I feel.

  When I sit up, ready to just go and make coffee and be by myself, I see Mom’s eyes go hard and resolute. I see the moment where it clicks in her head that she’s figured out how to approach the situation and how to approach me.

  Dad sees it too, because he’s staring at her and they’re having a silent conversation that amounts to him asking her if she’s sure this is what she wants to do.

  Right there on the couch, my mother starts in on putting our pieces back together. “Our little firebug is up making coffee.” She looks at me and there’s love and thunder in her eyes. Eyes that dare the pain to even fucking try.

  Dad’s shoulders drop just a little, and he swallows, and he says, “You are such an old man.”

  And then we watch TV.

  FOUR: CAMP STOP THIS FEELING

  I DECIDED TO PUT THE PHONE away without replying, and ten minutes later we pulled into Camp Jaye’k.

  After we gathered our carry-ons, we clamored out of the bus and loitered around until we were told what to do. Across one of the fields, other buses had already arrived, bringing their own loads of kids and Buddies from other districts to have their own educational adventures.

  The camp was every camp Charlie and I had seen in all of the movies we’d watched growing up. The buildings were faux Lincoln-log and nestled into lush green woods by a small lake with a tangle of brightly colored canoes on the shore. There were bull’s-eye targets attached to hay bales, and there was a battered old speaker mounted to a flagpole that proudly waved both the American and state of Michigan flag. The only things missing were wood-paneled station wagons and a killer in a hockey mask.

  Jeffrey the Travel Guide stood with his hands cupped around his mouth and announced, very officially, where the students were to go and where the Buddies were headed. His Buddy shirt even said TEAM LEADER on it—written, I noticed, by hand. We divided into two groups as per our gleaming leader’s order: Buddies and non-Buddies. The roughly sixty non-Buddies ran screaming and flailing to their assigned cabins, kinetic after three hours of built-up energy and eager to meet with their friends and classmates that had already arrived, while some of the roughly twenty Buddies6—eager to move themselves—called after them half-heartedly not to run. “Remember, Buddies. Head to the den for your assignment! We’ve got young minds to nurture!” Jeffrey said, unironically.

  The little girl in an oversized aviator’s hat elbowed past him, not slowing down or looking back. A stern look flashed over Jeffrey’s face like he was going to act like the adult and tell her to apologize, but she was moving with too much purpose; by the time he’d readjusted his hair, she was already halfway to the other kids piling up around the flagpole.

  We made our way to a squat log cabin that looked like it went on forever, and looked like something Thomas Kinkade would have painted—warm-toned and sincere, Lincoln-log walls with antlers that adorned the doorway, the word “Nakwatuk” carved deeply into the cedar log above the entrance.

  A life-size fiberglass Buddy stood next to the doorway, thumbs up, grinning like an asshole, with a sign shackled around his neck that said, “Be someone’s better half!”

  I vividly imagined trying to pull the fiberglass Buddy’s head off.

  The roughly twenty of us tri-county high schoolers shuffled into the building, while a middle-aged man standing in the center of the room directed us to the folding chairs stacked against the wall. We arranged the chairs in a loose circle around him.

  “Okay. So, welcome, Buddies, to Camp Jaye’k.” He was not a tall man and his face was hidden away behind his glasses and mustache; he was the kind of person that wore shorts in pants weather. “I see some familiar faces and I see some new ones. That’s great.” He paused his speech for effect, but he never really stopped moving—his hands were constantly gesticulating or his feet were tapping back and forth. “For those new faces, I’m Mister Test. You can call me Coach. Or Mister Test.” His eyes were set firmly on the three Buddies who had recognized me—and his gaze told stories. The girl, the one who’d recognized me first, raised her hand. “Matty, yes.”

  Faisal and the Sleeping Buddy both went aggressively quiet and straight-faced when their friend was called on. All of a sudden, they were the picture of model student leaders. They operated like they were a single organism—there was a fluid, silent communication between them, even when it just meant fucking with a camp counselor. The Buddy who’d been sleeping was biting both of his lips, forming a tight straight line like he was trying not to laugh. Matty, though—her face was entirely composed.

  “Just wanted to say hi, Coach.” There was the slightest beat before she said “Coach” and her face was so entirely void of laughter and so entirely full of “I am the kind of person who calls a random adult ‘Coach’” that the Buddy sitting next to her, the one who’d been sleeping on the bus, immediately fake-yawned in order to hide his smile into his sleeve.

  A suspicious pause.

  “Hello,” he returned. Faisal, who had sat down late to the circle after using the bathroom, raised his hand next, and Test squinted, even more suspicious. “Yes, Mr. Al-Aziz?”

  “Hi, Coach. Just … wanted to say hi too. Coach.”

  Sleepy Buddy buried his face in his hands, almost to the point of tears but doubling down on his “I’m just tired and this is how I yawn” act.

  Test twitched his mustache before saying, “What about you? You want to just say hi?” He was looking at the Buddy who was struggling to draw out his fake yawn.

  “No, sir,�
� the kid said, clearing any laughter off of his face. “I’m just looking forward to a productive week of camp activities and team building.” Mr. Test—Coach—wasn’t buying it.

  Somebody cleared their throat.

  “Right. We need to get started. I hope you all brought warm clothes; you should know by now that Lady Nature plays by her own rules up here. For those of you that are new: expect everything from the weather. It’s going to be Halloween in a few days, which, if you’ve been here before, you know doesn’t mean S-H-I-T. It doesn’t mean jeans and sweaters. This is the other side of the lake and we have a little thing called Lake Effect. It can mean winter coats and boots, it can mean T-shirts and jean shorts, it can mean anything in between,” he said, speaking like a man who’s seen some real shit. “We’ve got plenty of work to do this morning, so I need you in groups.” He spoke with his hands out, his arms like ramps leading down to his fingers where the words could launch off, directly to us. “Count off from one to three,” he said, starting with Faisal.

  Faisal shot his friends a look that said, “Oh shit, we always forget to sit the appropriate number of seats apart in order to be put in the same group for activities!”

  It was a complicated look. It also meant that I was guaranteed to be grouped in with at least one of them—one of the people who was part of the group that recognized me. It meant that I couldn’t just blend in. Couldn’t be just a face in the crowd.

  FIVE: MOSES THE IMPOSTER

  I’M IN CHICAGO, STANDING in line at the convenience store on the corner of Clark and Addison, across from Wrigley, on lunch from another day of sitting in front of a panel of youth counselors. It’s springtime, and this is all part of my evaluation process. If all goes according to the judge’s plan, I’ll pass the eval, stay in school and maintain my grades, head off to camp in the fall, and maybe go to college, where no one will have heard of two fuckup kids named Charlie Baltimore and Moses Hill.