“It’s going to be okay, Kodie.” I kept trying to get her to glance up at the mirror with my overt head jerks. But she didn’t.
“You don’t believe that, do you?” she asked, still not looking up. “That it’s going to be okay.”
Johnny emerged from his reverie and looked at me, restating her question with his face.
Too much time went by. I demurred, “The world always looks bad when you’re hungry and tired.”
“No disrespect, Kev, but the world looks pretty bad. I don’t think some sandwiches and a nap are going to change that.”
“Thank you, Johnny. Thank you for your perspective.”
“You’re quite welcome.”
We held it in for a few seconds, but, thank God, that made us all bust out laughing.
I was amazed that there weren’t fires burning out of control in the city, that nobody dropped a cigarette as they got the feeling, left a gas pump open and flowing. The skyline revealed no smoke save for an upward trickle coming from what I knew had to be the plane crash. Early afternoon now and the wave has hit and gone and now it’s just quiet as hell. That’s it. The world set to stun.
Somehow the charge in the air told me things were beginning, not ending.
Johnny asked, “Shouldn’t we…? Maybe there’s people downtown—”
I slammed on the brakes. “Oh, man! Bass!” Then I floored it.
“Bass?” Kodie asked.
Bass and I tried to grow a small patch of weed together just to see if we could, behind the equipment shed at the elementary school. If some maintenance guy whacks it down, so what, it’s a weed.
Bastian’s a varsity football benchwarming linebacker doing his time. Bastian puts on the pads, hits people at practice, but he’s never started a game. He’s on the team out of familial expectation, he tells me, and because it’s good for college applications. Holds water with some colleges and with Daddy’s sphere of influence when it’s time for internships. It’s a club badge, Bastian would say, as he did just last week as we sat in his beater Bronco and smoked from our first homemade bag listening to his Heartless Bastards on repeat. The smoke tasted like burnt lawn clippings and stung more than usual and it didn’t get us but slightly lit which was okay with me. I don’t like getting stoned stoned. An awful feeling.
How, you may ask, do a jock and a band geek become friends? Isn’t this against the rules? True, cross-pollinations like ours are rare. I guess it’s more Bastian being Bastian than me making some great leap across the social divide in a moment of altruism.
Social strata and rules between jocks and band, cheerleaders and punk rock girls? Man, all that’s just…gone.
Bastian’s a big guy, more lank than thick. He says that he’s strong of haunch. This is Texas football, remember. Big public school. Even the benchers are monsters. He could break me over his knee on a cold day.
We’d been good friends at school for a year now. We didn’t hang much outside of school except as smoking buddies. Not until recently, that is. I think his friends had been giving him guff about hanging out with me, too.
My friends—and here’s the thing, and I wish the world was still functioning as this bit of insight might matter—they were the same way. I got tired of their assumptions that guys like Bass were mindless brutes. I wasn’t angry about it because I think it’s natural to defend oneself. High school, like nature, is red in tooth and claw. What I’m saying is Bass and I became tight this fall because we weren’t interested in remaining in our guarded worlds.
“Bastian. My friend Bastian from school. He texted me about the same time you did. Said to meet him. Aw, dammit. Hope he’s okay.” I pounded the steering wheel.
“Do I know him?” Johnny asked.
“Huh-uh.” My eyes scanned the road for issues as I hit sixty, took the curve around Burnet as it veers toward Hancock.
A pile of stones in each of the parking lots of the Pint House Pizza, the Noble Sandwich. Johnny’s eyes toggled on them as we blew past.
Kodie gripped the door with her hand. Neither fussed me about the speed. The speed notwithstanding, I still saw movement, forms sliding into the city’s slots.
Why didn’t they come out with their arms waving asking for help?
We do this avoidance dance and don’t know why.
They’re the watchers. I’m the wonderer.
I took a sharp turn at Hancock and gunned it. “Hey, easy there, Ricky Bobby,” Kodie said.
Johnny couldn’t contain his smile. He liked the speed and the idea that the rules were now as out the window as his face thrust out into the sun and wind. “Shake and bake!” he yelled at the Yarborough Library. The eerie echoes coming off those walls made my guts turn.
“Meet where?” asked Kodie over the engine roar and tire squeal.
“Terrapin Station.”
“What’s that?”
“The graveyard up here.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
I shook my head.
“Why do you all call it that?”
“Just a dopey reference to a band we both loathe, the Grateful Dead.”
“I’m not following.”
“I don’t like them either,” offered Johnny. “Jam bands, ugh. I’d like to kick that Bob Weir in the balls.”
I slowed down a little as we crossed Shoal Creek. “We,” I paused and looked at Johnny. He’s witnessing the world end and saw a man with his head blown off in the back of a gun store, so I knew my prudence was wasted. “It’s where we grow pot.”
“Oh, now I get it. Pot, the Dead, cemetery. Sure. Clever. Your little pothead code,” Kodie said with no opinion or judgment attached to it whatsoever.
“Pot?” Johnny asked.
The stock points representing whatever reverence Johnny had of me, if there was any left after I hit him in Rebecca’s hallway, went down a few ticks then. God, he looked disappointed.
We arrived at the entrance of the cemetery. “J, it’s hard to explain.”
Before I continue—I know this isn’t proper memoir form, nor is it particularly good narrative development to just kill the momentum by doing this, but, lest you forget, dear reader, I’m doing this on the fly and borrowed time.
So, in case something happens before I finish, I want to insert a couple of poems. One from memory I’d written last year. I gave it to Mr. E. It wasn’t assigned. On the extra-credit essay I wrote on Lord of the Flies over the summer, he’d written below the A+ affixed with a red smiley face, What else you got?
Mr. E’s my teacher and my advisor. He said he made them make him my advisor. We’ve been hanging out a lot this fall. Go ahead, use the word mentor. Go ahead, use the words father figure, in loco parentis. Martin sure isn’t one.
That’s not true, Martin. I’m sorry.
Anyway, here’s one that I’m making up now. Been experiencing these images.
I call it Milkteeth.
pretending it drips
from their soft milk teeth
they’ve all still got
so proud to still have them
those pristine pearly birthrights
rooted in malleable razor rows
suckle at the lips of wounds
gashed into their effigies
one at a time
each takes his drink
the reward a small stone
from which night’s cold has leached
drawn away by coastal morning sun
when they’re done
they look up and smile at everyone
laughter riots from their throng
like satisfied birds about to depart
in one massive uplift
an exodus that would eclipse the sun
long enough for me to get away
under its saw-toothed dark8
&nbs
p; And here’s the one I gave Mr. English in his office after he’d asked what else I got. I stood there and watched him read it, his lips moving. No title:
she emerges from those ozone fields
full of requisite thoughts coursing bodywide
not mattering if yesterday was
tomorrow’s repeat or if
now is a lot like then9
It isn’t my favorite, but it’s the one that popped in. I guess it’s because of Kodie—the emerging she and fields. Okay. So, yay, those stunning beauts are on record. I’ve got lots more doodling epigrams like that, but need to keep things going here. The rest of them are in a spiral notebook in my desk drawer right below the SAT preps.
I remember two of Mr. E’s comments about it, after he lifted his eyebrows and blew out his cheeks. One comment was: “You know who e.e. cummings is.” I nodded, ashamed. He said, “Hey, it’s okay. Standing on the shoulders of giants is okay. That’s how the giants learned their way—”
I interrupted, “Hey, that rhymes.”
His other comment was: “Why did you say mattering when caring makes more literal sense?” I remember him trying to hide the expectation on his face by taking a long sip of coffee from his Styrofoam cup. When I said I didn’t know, it just felt right, he nodded and wiped his mouth down with his palm and said, “Good answer. Anytime you want to share your work with me, let me know, okay?”
I stupidly asked him if it was good.
He said, “What’s great is that you said it felt right. Going on feeling rather than propriety, that’s when you leap off the giant’s shoulders. That’s when you soar.”
This whole thing here, telling this story, kayaking to the Matagorda—I’m taking Mr. E’s advice: I’m going on feeling.
Okay, back to the action.
Remember how earlier in the day I was coming back from the bridge—the bus, jumpers—and passed the Montessori school and the cemetery was across from it? Well, we’re back there now. Not in time, but in place.
Memorial Park Cemetery is where the writer James Michener is buried. I haven’t read him but Mom has his books Texas and Tales of the South Pacific on the shelf at home. Big doorstop hardbacks. Mr. English said I should apply to the Michener School at UT someday for my writing and that he could help me when the time came.
The cemetery is actually a city park. Once you get past the initial creep of being among almost twenty thousand corpses just six feet below you everywhere you look for eighty acres, it’s a peaceful place to bike through on its winding, tree-lined, curbless roads. Before I got my car, and often since, when the homestead was bringing me down, i.e., Martin and/or Mom riding my ass about something about as consequential as a mouse fart, I started coming through here so often that when Bass and I were driving around looking for a place to toke one evening, I suggested we should pull in here.
Problem was, we didn’t think to commit the closing time to memory so there we were parked in his old Bronco at the back of the cemetery on the gravel shoulder under a huge oak tree and smoke’s building up in the cab like Cheech and frigging Chong and up behind us rolls the sexton’s black pickup. It’s custom, all matte black, full-tint windows, hubcaps, everything. I notice it in the mirror as Bass is pulling on his quartz-cut pipe he got down at some booth on First Thursday on South Congress next to the drum circle and the Keep Austin Weird T-shirt vendor. I’m basically frozen looking in the rearview mirror like Death itself has crept up on us, scythe gripped in his boney hands.
Bass was about to roll down a window to blow out but I said no, don’t do that, the dude’s behind us and he says what dude and I said the cemetery dude the black Mad Max behind us and Bass coughed out his smoke while simultaneously uttering shit, sounding like sh-cough it-cough.
I snapped off the music. All to be heard was the fulsome chug of the sexton’s black nightmare. The truck flared his brights once. We’re expecting the guy to narc on us but instead all we saw were his hands hovering outside his window, one hand pointing to his watch. We were out of there idiot-giggling and the guy didn’t follow us out or anything.
He had to have known. Probably deals with weird stuff like that all the time. Like, I’m always seeing this same guy walking through there, some dad-looking dude who’s either reading a book while walking or listening to the radio and talking to himself. He’s harmless, but I’ve also noticed a homeless guy smoking a pipe pulling his things behind him like he’s rolling through Heathrow.
I swear, I’m not one of these goth kids. I dunno. It’s more of a peaceful place than most parks full of nannies and moms and squealing kids and put-out dads with their hands on their hips, like, can we go home now, dear, the game’s on, some huge Hispanic family having a picnic and cumbia’s slave shuffle blasting. It’s quiet, green, and nobody here expects anything of you.
As we were turning off Hancock to the entrance, I stopped and craned my head around and saw a cairn in the Montessori parking lot right next to that Volvo I’d seen with the arm hanging out the window. The Volvo’s door was open.
Mad Max’s window was down. In the driver-side mirror I could just see the sexton’s ear and jawline.
We drew alongside the truck. The guy’s eyes were open, white crystal effluvium protruding from his mouth looking like a crude spearhead.
Kodie uttered something under her breath and looked away. Johnny and I looked at the guy, his hatchet-faced gaze. He looked shocked to be sitting there with this stuff choking out of him, his wide eyes having the look of marble.
I accelerated forward. Kodie asked, “Why here?”
“You mean why’d we pick this place, me and Bass?”
“Yeah,” answered Johnny. Kodie nodded in the rearview.
“I ride my bike through here a lot and—”
“Wait wait wait. You ride your bike through this graveyard?” Most girls would probably put on a face of disgust, but not Kodie Lagenkamp. She let uncork a knowing smile when she heard this and then said, “That’s fubar, Kevin.” Our eyes met in the rearview. I’d found a girl who not only wasn’t repulsed by the fact that I often rode my bike through a cemetery but who found it understandable and endearing.
“I do. Well, I did before I got these here sweet wheels.” I didn’t want to lose that fascinated look on her face so I added, “But I still do. Once a week at least.” I spoke the truth. Kodie shook her head looking down with that blushy smile still on her face. “Why, what? What’s so funny?” We were in high flirt now.
As the world fell apart around us and we entered a cemetery to check on a friend I had no way of knowing was still here while a little girl we don’t know lies on Kodie’s lap in a coma, we were in high flirt. I mean, if this doesn’t tell you how powerful the need for the species to continue is, I’m not sure what will.
I’m thinking about the species’s survival now as I sit here in my kayak, the current taking me. Life will go on. It will survive despite this.
“It’s not funny.”
“Well, what?”
She kept shaking her head and stroke-combing the towhead in her lap. I toggled my eyes between the narrow cemetery road and her face in the mirror. “I do the same thing. I did the same thing. Did. Do.”
“Ride your bike through here? I’ve never seen you.”
“No. I go for long walks and lately I’ll turn into this little place over in Hyde Park, behind the church. There’s maybe twenty or thirty gravestones back there, old ones. Very secluded. More gothic than this. I’ll sit and eat a sack lunch there sometimes, feeling morbid at first but then somehow I feel okay among them. The sun will break through the branches and come around the church wall and warm my face and I feel okay. It’s comforting, not scary.”
My eye caught on a grave decorated for Halloween with a softball-sized pumpkin and Dia de los Muertos sugar skull swarmed by flies. She continued. “What are the odds that two people, you and me,
would both do something so rare like that and end up in such close proximity to each other?”
I found myself slowing down as she spoke and then I was at a stop, looking at her in the mirror. “Long odds, I’d say,” and in my mind’s eye, Grandma Lucille closed her eyes and nodded.
“Yeah,” she said all forlorn. We had made this connection, but now there was a cast of melancholy to her, her yeah distant and fraught. “Long odds.”
Rolling under the canopy of oaks and ash, cedar elms and pecans, the lack of that whisper-roar that always came off MoPac, which bordered the west side of the cemetery, struck me hard. I’d rather hear sirens, bomb concussions, even distant screams rather than this harrowing silence.
Right now in my ears sounds the hurry and rumble of this swollen river. But I know just beyond it: silence, stillness.
Up on MoPac you could see cars pulled over to the side. I wanted to see more chaos, more wreckage, something that told me we put up a fight. The end of the world can’t be this orderly, this benign. Not this whimper, everything just winding down to a nullity.
Quiet welled such that it threatened to breach my sanity’s threshold, so I had to keep talking. “We’d been here before in Bass’s car. And then late one night, the Fourth of July actually, we jumped the fence, smoked some, and planted what was left. The plants have grown since.”
I thought I knew where Bass wanted to meet. But that’s not where he was. The small wood lining the back northeast corner of the cemetery is Terrapin Station. However, as I crested a small hill, turning right, and passing Michener’s grave, up ahead, under the tree where we usually parked his Bronco, sat Bass wearing our blue-on-white Paladins football helmet.
He had to have seen us coming the whole time because the view down the hill to the road is clear almost all the way to the front of the park. Yet he wasn’t standing up and waving. He just sat there and I thought the worst.
“Is that him?” Johnny asked, concerned.
“That’s him.” I honked the horn. The sound brought good cheer to the scene. He looked up and waved but stayed sitting. Closer now and I saw where his other hand was and the smoke rolling out from behind the face mask. I was dismayed at first but then I thought of those guys in Vietnam getting stoned before going on patrols. How to cope.
The Late Bloomer Page 9