Winged Shoes and a Shield

by Don Bajema

  Dying Swan

  Eddie was completing a crucifix swan dive, propelled with a force sounding like a choral roar sliding down a glassy wall, heading for the welcome imprisonment of a closed-out 8' wave next to Crystal Pier. The object was to be overwhelmed. He was seeking, day in and day out, the awe that catches the breath, before the lungs fill with dread and delight, under the surface on the edge of the Pacific Rim, cooperating zen-style, spun and twisted, trying to maintain a tight fetal grip, while the washing machine tried to pull him apart. He shuddered at his own ecstatic smile as he ran out of air and his vision turned a dark reddish blue. It seemed the cleanest, most honorable, and most satisfying way to go.

  Back in elementary school he had experienced a sensation that was akin to drowning, but it lacked the physical release that would have permitted him to use the experience as a message, a symbol. Instead of screaming inside his head the demand to survive, it felt as though his soul had imploded on its host. He noticed the deformed hand of his third grade teacher. As a third grader does, he registered the desolate-hopeless pain the image transferred, with complete empathy and surprise.

  It explained why Jenny was so cool. Jenny lying in the sand talking with her girlfriends about cultural topics beyond Eddie’s scope. Books, movies, themes to songs, make-up, fashion, cars, and older brothers. Eddie was dumbstruck recognizing the power of compensation. How what might seem tragic on first sight, might essentially be an asset, even an advantage. Maybe the friendship between Eddie and Jenny was based on something they had in common, some genetic error or difference that was revealed as a scar on Jenny’s face, but was hidden somewhere inside Eddie’s thoughts or spirit. Dragging himself out of the surf exhausted and spent, the tips of his fins slapping in the water beneath him he thought of Jenny’s scarred lip, and his own incapacity to communicate the things he saw and felt.

  Jenny was exactly what she was, and it was enough for anyone, even Jenny. Eddie was not anything near to what he was, and it was lacking for everyone, especially Eddie. The sentence ran through his head, “Who’s scarred?” Jenny had composure, self-assurance, adamant self-possession enough to lend it to anyone seeming to need it. She got it from a scarred lip, and the courage to face it. Eddie wished he could identify his internal scars, in order to try to find the courage to face them. As Eddie walked into the hot sand toward the towel Jenny was lying on he felt as though he were walking into a sort of church. She was anointed by direct knowledge, knowledge from birth, knowledge she could not escape, and reminded every second that life is not fair. She would have to seduce life, and she did. She held up her end of the bargain. She filled those hours making friends laugh with her re-grounding gentle humor, making wisecracks that carried the long shot into a pin-point deflating bull’s-eye. She had never in the years they had been friends once stooped to an instant of cruelty. It amazed Eddie. He watched her from a distance and continually fell under her spell. It was as though her words and face attracted him to follow her to a place where the fears weren’t imagined, where pain wasn’t temporary, to the place where she lived. As he neared the place where Jenny and her friends gathered in the sun, he thought back to that moment in the third grade when he stood transfixed, looking at his teacher’s terrified eyes.

  He saw the hem of her skirt flicking down the hall, he heard the clickety pattern of her heels reminding him of the weird beat of the wild hen faking an injured retreat leading the predator away from her hidden nestlings. She was carrying her deformed hand inside of her purse, a place that could and did, for the first time, draw Eddie’s attention to it. In the classroom she must have felt safe, and therefore the kids felt safe as well, seeing her hand but not registering its difference, or seeing it as a source of shame and pain. Out here she clutched the purse in a give-away that was desperate. Eddie wanted to cry as he saw his teacher turning her back on her own beauty, hiding the portion of herself that made her whole. She was so beautiful, carrying proportions of a movie star with innocence and a complete lack of vanity. Permitting an eight-year-old’s face to be buried in her Vargas bosom. Her tiny waist encircled in little-girl-pal arms. Her smile was devastating, inspiring the children to please her. But at that moment in the hall, traveling from this place to that, surrounded by strangers and out in the open, her shoes clicked too fast and her blonde head snapped from side to side, tilted with a studied staunch challenge, her eyes insane and terrified, a tortured smirk taking the place of her smile. Eddie remembered the horror pogo-ing on his guts and bouncing off the base of his brain making him lightheaded and nauseous as he absorbed his teacher’s mysterious nightmare.

  SLOW DANCING IN ‘66

  The end of the summer brought the next football season. Eddie was walking into an after-game dance nodding thanks to the kids whispering “Nice game,” as he moved into the hall looking for Jenny. Junior Osuna walked up and indicated the spot where Jenny was dancing. Eddie wasn’t sure if he should go to her immediately or wait a few more minutes. He had a feeling that compelled him to her. Junior nudged him with his elbow. As Eddie looked down at Junior’s profile, which was locked in the direction of Jenny, he took the proffered half-pint of Bacardi. He elbowed the boy next to him and the Bacardi passed along the line of boys leaning against the wall in the dark, listening to San Diego’s reigning band Sandy and the Classics playing “Hitchhike.”

  Jenny was dressed in black, with her hair shining in the red and blue light cast from the makeshift stage. She had lost weight in the last week. Never having been anything but thin before, her too skinny arms swung in time with the music. She had a peculiar luminous glow, like a ghost. Her cheeks were sunken and her eyes dark holes in a stoic face. Her head was tilted down and her hair was falling forward from her jawline, helping to hide any expression. Jenny was doing what she always had done every dance Eddie could remember. She was dancing in her inimitable style, and just a little bit better than any kid in the place. But tonight she was dancing alone. The hair on Eddie’s neck stood on end.

  Jenny could lift the whole room to a sway, and a stop, a turn and a drop, an increase, and a decrease of energy, all this absolutely on time, until every kid in the place was secure and euphoric, giving each other accepted half smiles and furtive glances as they followed her trail along the coolest interpretation of those too cool rhythm and blues.

  Tonight Jenny had it all to herself, no one followed her. She tracked the territory of the beat, and the meaning of the beat, and rode the bass all by herself. Any distance along her trail was too close for comfort for anyone dancing with her, except when every fifth or sixth song became a slow ballad. As the first slow notes began, and the elbows in the dark hall lifted under the lights and settled around the necks of each pair of dancers, a different boy would weave his way to Jenny to take his turn in her arms. Eddie observed one of Jimmy’s closest friends lose it completely when Jenny managed to give him a kiss and one of the smiles that reminded him of a time that wasn’t going to come back. The boy left in a beeline for the side exit with the sound of the push-handle door slamming into the wall outside in the night, while the Classics finished the last chorus of “You’ll Lose a Good Thing.”

  The parents who had volunteered as chaperones for this after-game dance noticed the pall over the floor. There was no laughing, no loud talking or horseplay in the entire gym. The usual three or four hundred kids were packed on the floor and the shoulders and hips dipped and waved in unison song after song, but other than the music, and the low murmur of voices, the place was silent and dark. There had always been tearful exits at these dances, the result of unrequited love, or discovered betrayal of the early teen variety, but tonight struck the five or six parents as something different. They patrolled the perimeters of the hall and spoke quietly to each other in small huddles, sensing something happening but not knowing what it was. A couple of parents made an effort to ask a few kids but none of them, from the most mature and cooperative to the most anxious-to-please
sophomore, would give an answer. The parents noticed a distinct coldness from each kid, as the question was posed.

  Jenny was followed into the bathroom by four or five friends. The gymnasium seemed to swell in a sigh of collective relief. The room returned to something more normal for a dance during the next few songs, and the voices got a little louder.

  Eddie looked at the other boy standing across the girls’ bathroom door. “Eddie, ya wanna go next?”

  Eddie answered with a nod of his head and the older boy walked over to the open spot next to Junior Osuna. Eddie could hear the girls walking toward the door as the sax began its climb up Harlem Nocturne. Jenny balked at the entrance to the huge cavern, and then seeing Eddie walked quickly toward him. Her face pressed against his neck and her hips drove into him. Her body trembled furiously beneath her black dress. They began their slow dance.

  As they held each other tighter she transferred her rage and pain to Eddie until it was trembling into his bones. As Jenny whispered one word into Eddie’s ear, instinct told them both that it was a waste, it was wrong, and it was a crime against nature that Jimmy, or anyone had to die in this new war in Vietnam. The inexplicable wisdom of their youth predicted that many more deaths would soon follow Jimmy’s. Jenny whispered, “Promise?” And knowing what Jenny was asking, Eddie replied, “Yes, I promise.”

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY

  1967. The accelerator pedal is on the floor. Robert Monroe and his younger brother Grant are heading to T.J., Sin City, Aunt Jane, Tijuana. Just a twenty-minute car-flight down Interstate 5. Their mother Wanda has finally succumbed to permanent depression and never leaves her rocking chair. Their older sister from Texas is married, unhappily, with her third kid on the way. Eddie Burnett is driving. Tonight’s excursion “South” is to finish off Grant’s eighteenth birthday. The Vietnam war is central in these boys’ lives. The war has polarized the society in which they live. Lots of rhetoric is tossed around, but the boys know the bottom line, and it’s profit over blood, their blood, Vietnamese blood. The practice is now common to cross the border in the trunks of cars driven by an eighteen-year-old friend for a night of drinking, whoring, and, increasingly, confronting Marines from Camp Pendleton sixty miles to the north. Tijuana is no-man’s land, patrolled by brown uniformed Federales who throw servicemen and rowdy Americans into the madhouse that serves as a jail. The boys and Marines are found in “off-limit bars,” the Federales serve as a natural buffer between them.

  Eddie Burnett has changed since you saw him last, constantly furious behind a cold-as-stone facade. His wide-eyed innocent perspective has become a dangerous angry rebellion. He is driving his boyhood friends to the notorious Green Note Bar brothel, a few blocks north of Avenida Revolución. Robert is certifiable, hopped up on huge quantities of speed, tequila, and anything else he can get his hands on. He has “checked out” for hours, now lucid and inspired, and then for days, vicious, irrational, and incredibly paranoid. Grant has been trying in recent months to be a stabilzing force between the outright hostility of Robert and the repressed anger and sadness of Eddie. In recent months they have been wrecking cars at an astonishing rate. They know where they are heading. It’s 1:45 a.m. and they are passing through San Ysidro.

  Cars are honking and brakes are screeching. Eddie is tailgating a Cadillac, then passing it and slamming on his brakes. He sees an “America Love It or Leave It” decal in the rear window. “Caaadddaaaalaaack . . . Caddaaaalack” repeats Eddie. The window on the passenger side goes down and Robert leans out beyond his hips with Grant grabbing the waistband of his Levi’s. “Fuck you . . . Yeah you . . . Love to, you blue-haired old bitch. . . . ” Eddie sputters, “Fucking little flag waving in the plastic decal.” Eddie jerks the car in front of the enraged Caddy and slams on the brakes again. The car lurches to one side and flies along the cyclone fence for a couple of hundred yards and pulls to a stop. Robert looking in the side rearview mirror comments disapprovingly, “Ah, Eddie that wasn’t even close.” Eddie, entirely calm and looking for another song on the radio besides “Light My Fire” which he hates, comments off-handedly, “Well, it’s the thought that counts.”

  Robert climbs over the seat and pulls Grant into a head lock singing, “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to yoooooo, happy birthday dear Graaaaannnnttaaaa, happppy birthdayyy tooooo yoooo. Eighteen! My little brother eighteen. Man-ohman. You are now killin’ age little brother, old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher.” Robert begins turning his pockets inside out, then he raises a finger in comic recognition, and pulls off his pants. From the front seat, “Robert, what the fuck are ya doin’?” “What am I doin’?, what am I doin’? I am getting high on my brother’s killin’ age birthday. I happen to have a stash of little bennies up my ass and I think we should indulge before we hit the border.” Grant trying to calm Robert down informs him that he is a little too high already. “No such thing. Never happen. That is to say it is all relative, little relative. Uh sorry, that was bad. But inside this tin-foil package that has remained stuffed under my young warm balls are at least fifteen little white pills.” Eddie tries to get the word to Grant to get the pills out of Robert’s hands. “Grant. . . .” Robert starts laughing, “Oh yeah, Grant, what are you gonna do? Hey, do you think Indians got high? They did. They were the stoniest motherfuckers in the world.” Grant trying to slow Robert down a little. “Those Indians are dead, Robert.” “That is what the white man wants you to think, they’re still around — someplace.” Robert opens his mouth over the mound of pills in his palm. Grant pulls on his arm and Robert jerks violently away. “Hey!! Now relax. There are up to twenty little whites melting in my hand presently. I will take them all immediately, or I will split them with my best friend Eddie. How’s that? I am willing to share. Hey. Where the fuck is the fucking brew? Who took the brew?” Grant cracks three beer cans open in rapid succession. Robert downing one and reaching for another, “Ahhh yesss. Now then. We drink the brew as befits a wake, which is your birthday, brother, in a manner of speaking, and Eddie, you and I split these bennies.” Robert climbs back into the front seat. “Open the old mouth Eddie. Stick out the old tongue.” Eddie opens his mouth, and sticks out his tongue. “Good. Now then. One for you, one for me, one for you, one for me.” This procedure continues with Eddie laughing as the whites pile onto his tongue, and Robert chews his. “Watch the fucking road there, Burnett. OK, one for you, one for me. . . . Fuck! Dropped one. Hold it a second. Ah, here it is, one more for me.” They start laughing. Eddie swallows his tongue full, washing it down with a hit of beer, checking the rearview mirror. Robert finishes the rest. Grant mumbles from the rear window, his elbow hanging out in the wind, his head resting on his shoulder and the air blasting in his face, “Happy now?” “Yeah, for the time being,” responds Robert in an entirely different and devastated tone. Silence in the car for several minutes. Robert looks out at the landmark electrical plant near the highway and mutters, “Crazy Horse. What a great fuckin’ name.”

  BOY IN THE AIR 3

  He was walking past a church that stood on a corner, painted brown and doing nothing and nobody any good. He resented that church, felt at odds with it, because he had been in headlong pursuit of forbidden kicks, and flirting with foreboding consequences. Strolling along the streets surrounding his campus, full of the rewards of athletic life, strong as a cat, fast as anything, daring, mean and violent. He was getting stoned as he walked along with his buddy, who he didn’t know at the time was into rape. They were passing a fat joint between them as night was falling. The last light of the sun had left the spring air warm and intoxicating. His buddy had an evil atmosphere that made Eddie feel secure, because he sensed that he had the worst-case scenario walking right beside him, so there was nothing to imagine that could be worse. Eddie had begun running dope across the border and part of his reward for those nocturnal labors was an endless supply of drugs. So, Eddie was walking along, keeping his secret, and his buddy keeping his, when he
said to Eddie, “Uh, there’s a cop behind us.”

  In 1969 in San Diego you were on your way to jail for a joint. Eddie had just been busted again, and was out on a hard-to-get-in-this-case Own Recognizance bond. Some local sports fanatic had come to his aid, willing to pay any weird price to tell his friends he was “helping” the star. Eddie was very glad to be out. He hated jail. He turned slowly, as he swallowed the joint, and adjusted the baggie under his nuts, expecting to see the much feared cruiser down the block. To his dismay the car was right beside him. Two cops looking out of the window, one saying, “Hey, get in the car. I want to talk to you.”

  Eddie stood there with his hair down to his shoulders in sunburnt coils they call “dreads” today, shirtless, with those late teenage constantly worked-out muscles slapped on his bones, baggy defiant Levi’s under the heels of his Adidas. Eyes blood red, angry mouth snarling “What did you say?” The delivery dripping with the disrespectful inflection that ends the sentence with an unspoken meaning that says, “Fool.” The car stopped and the cop began to move his arm on the door to get out. Eddie leaned off the curb and pressed his weight against the car door. His buddy was frozen in his tracks. Eddie put his face close to the face of the cop, who for a second was taken by surprise and had failed to grab a handful of Eddie’s hair. Eddie repeated in increasing volume word by word, “I-ain’t-getting-in-no-fucking-car.”

  Eddie took off straight down the road. It surprised him when the cop who was driving nearly had the tires lit in reverse by the time Eddie had cleared the rear bumper by twenty yards. The car beside him was rocking wildly to the left and right screeching black smoke.