Winged Shoes and a Shield

by Don Bajema

  I wanted a drink. I wanted to wear old boots and find a sawdust floor and exchange a glance with a hungry woman. I wanted to find the unspoken promise and set the trap. I wanted to fall. I wanted to burn. It almost doubled me over. If I couldn’t play it, I wanted to hear it. If I couldn’t have it, I wanted to see it. If I couldn’t do it, I wanted to fake it. It felt like the last twenty years of my life had vanished. The kid’s voice: “Weak. You forgot the seasons, you forgot to breathe in the available air.” I began to whine in embarrassment. The kid asked me with an incredulous tone, “What happened to you?” I blacked out.

  “He’s gonna come back.” I didn’t know if it was a promise or a warning. I began to feel the pain of circulation coming back to frozen limbs. A dreadful and welcome pain. Almost too much to stand. As she continued speaking I opened my eyes to her retreating face. She stood far out in the middle of a dance floor. I walked to her and wrapped my arms around her; the fit seemed perfect. Shadows danced around us, most of them limping and trying to support each other. I could smell blood and disease. I heard muffled sobbing. The mists covered us again. I’d forgotten how beautiful she was. Her face changed gradually from one girl to another, from the girls I had known to the women I wanted to know. The process seemed to take hours. Her body constantly crossed the line and became mine, and pulled away and became her own. I was on the edge of orgasm.

  I felt like an imposter, a stand-in, as though I would be discovered any second in a humiliating mistake. She held me tighter and convulsed in my arms. I was afraid to believe that she was still here with me after all this time. I wanted to say something, but I knew it would be stupid. I couldn’t find any words. She did. She said, “You’re one and the same.” She smiled briefly, then leaned further into my ear. Her breath was hot and her sweating face made her words moist as she whispered, “You’re making too big a deal outta this.” She vanished.

  I ran in circles until the dogs were too tired to keep up and howled at me from a distance, enraged that I had escaped. I crept into a grass field as the sun dropped like a stone down a well. I stumbled in the waist-high swirling grass and began to part the field with my hands as the dogs behind me gained ground. Dead white faces at my feet, with blue foaming lips, tried to say my name. I blacked out again. For an hour I heard my father’s dog tags jangling as he ran ahead of me.

  Pitch black. Dim red light. Close quarters, sulfur, muffled prayers. Felt like a couple hundred degrees. The trick was to keep breathing, in and out, in and out — the slightest pause and I was sure to ignite. I smelled burning hair, it was that close. The kid dragged the chair across my mother’s kitchen floor. He sat on the kitchen table and as my eyes adjusted to the dark, his murky form emerged, perched like a statue supporting his head in his hands. I thought of infrared sights and snipers.

  He looked up at me. I remembered being eighteen and rushing with the onset of hallucination, how I’d go find a mirror and stare into it, saying, “So that’s what you look like.” It was him. He grew impatient. “You ignored everything you knew to be true. I wish you’d had more balls. You lost your nerve, forgot all the rhythm and timing, the seasons, stopped counting on your own sense of what to do next. Why did you listen to all of that bullshit, all those times you doubted yourself.” He lost control and hammered me in the sternum with his fist. It felt like I was being slaughtered. We coughed blood over the table and bent over in agony.

  He paused for a second. We regained our composure. I thought for a minute he wasn’t going to finish what he was trying to say. He held that pause the way one who loves you pauses before she tells you she has caught you in a lie. The moments crawled in that strained manner that takes hold when you receive the news of a loved one’s death. “We were always afraid, and always will be. But fear alone doesn’t make you a coward.” He began to calm down. A streetlight went off outside the window. It began to rain. Single early-morning lights went on in the windows of dark houses perched in the surrounding canyons. I walked over to the screen door smelling the rain on the asphalt mixing with the deep green moisture lifting from the lawn, nearly tasting the seductive air from the jasmine tree. A warm wind blew down from the hillside. I heard jeering voices calling me in the distance. Although he didn’t raise his voice, but of course he didn’t have to, his words drowned out the dark jeers. “They try to make us all declare some kind of war on someone, or something. Your war was on me.”

  It was as though his hatred vanished when he seemed certain I understood his meaning. We began to gain power. I felt speed and strength returning to my body. I heard the sound of my own voice above the din of the terrified enraged voices screaming conflicting instructions. My fingers became talons clutching my bleeding soul. I was again airborne when he said, “It’s the middle of summer, your season. Mine was spring.”

  let us pray

  Somewhere

  between a fight and a dance

  is the mystery of our true spirit.

  A secret

  that can turn moments into a history

  fit for human consumption.

  To let time nourish instead of erode,

  to let time nourish instead of erode,

  to let time nourish instead of erode.

  To let time nourish instead of erode.

  SPILT MILK

  Pelican Bay up above San Francisco is dicey with its visitation rights. I’d drive up from Topanga Canyon to be told the population is locked down and they’d send me home. Like today. I’m playing the Jerry Lee Lewis live at the Hamburg Star Club tape I intended to give Uncle Pete Burnett. A styrofoam cup of brown-water coffee from a Chevron station wedged against my balls. Driving south, thinking about 1961 up in the farm country on the Washington-Canadian border.

  My father and mother had just shown up and were getting ready to take me back to Southern California when the feud between the Hoeks and the Burnetts finally got deadly. Like most things that have long-term consequences, it keeps you wondering how it could have happened. I mean, there had been about six other incidents that could have left someone dead. It was a foregone conclusion that something was going to happen someday. And then when it did, you never saw it coming. Things just got out of hand, I guess.

  The men in the Hoek family down the road were either moonfaced, perpetually red and sweaty, huge and dumb, or like a cartoon rat, hatchet-faced fucks. They tried to play themselves as practical jokers and bad-asses. Everyone up there knew them. Well, they knew us too, but people didn’t spit on the street after we passed, or leave the bar when the Burnett men walked in.

  The Hoeks were nine families of nine brothers. We had eight brothers and their families plus four sisters and theirs. Most of the Dutch farms on the Northwestern Canadian border had big families. It wasn’t all that unusual.

  Two of the Hoek brothers cheated my father’s best friend out of a tractor in high school and got the county to quarantine my uncle Ray’s herd for six months by spreading a rumor about a sick calf he said he had to kill, one that Uncle Ray sold him. It took two quarantined months of dumping milk and taking blood samples to prove that there was nothing wrong with his herd. If it weren’t for his brother Sam, Ray would have lost his farm.

  The Hoeks made you feel you’d been insulted. It was in their yellow-stained sneers and smoky breath. The way they’d slink, while their eyes grinned an accusation of stupidity or cowardice at you. They didn’t want to get into anything real with my uncles. It was just constant hot air and bullshit. They never really came right out with anything you could build a conflict over. It was sneaky, “good-natured” stuff that just made the world a lot less pleasant. They were universally despised and they reveled in it.

  They also had five of the nine brothers on the six-time Washington State Men’s Championship Softball Team. They got lots of beer bought for them, and they were able to take advantage of hundreds of hicks who never saw pitching and hitting lik
e theirs, from Yakima to Everett to the Columbia Gorge. They sold unusable aluminum siding, cheated in pool halls and blackmailed a drunk with a wealthy family near Bellingham. The rats played infield, while one of the fat giants pitched and the other one caught.

  Mom and I were sitting in the International with Dad eating donuts in front of the thrift store when two Hoeks, a shortstop and a giant too big to play, named “Three Ball” because of his huge red nose, passed our truck. We pretended not to see the squinty little glance or notice the huge pair of overalls walking sideways and forward at the same time. Mom and I were sure they weren’t gonna say anything with my dad there.

  The giant looked at the rat who was looking at us, who then looked back at the giant as he ripped off the loudest fart I had ever heard. Their eyes shot into the truck cab and the rat started to squeak out a laugh, which he pretended to cover with an apology. My father already had my donut and was grabbing my mother’s and opening the cab door muttering how he believed we’ve lost our goddamn appetite, and then fired the donuts at the head of the rat.

  They stood to their full height as my father flew up to them. They were making eye contact with witnesses and acting like responsible citizens who were confused and outraged by my dad’s unprovoked assault. They hadn’t taken into consideration that my father had stayed up for two nights with an abscessed tooth which was yanked yesterday, had a Rainier Ale headache, and had just been arguing with my Mom.

  Dad stood between them, dwarfed by the giant who was pulling a ratchet out of his back pocket. The rat muttered something to him. Dad rose up on his toes while Mom was saying to herself “Oh, no.” Then he clocked the giant with a solid fist to his jack-o’-lantern head. One of his huge boots started to lift off the ground as he listed to one side. Dad hit him again and the giant fell and rolled over on his hip. The rat had his knife out, demanding to know what the fuck was my dad doing — for the benefit of the witnesses.

  My mother was screaming about my father’s parole, and the rat was backing up as my Uncle Pete came out of the thrift store with a hydraulic jack. The giant was trying to lift his stomach off the ground high enough to get his knees under him. Pete stood over him and the giant stayed down, pretending he was having a delayed reaction to Dad’s punches.

  The rat started talking about calling the law and what trash our family was, and how lucky Dad was he didn’t cut him up right now. To which my father replied, “Come on.”

  The rat swung the knife around in the air, moving in on my dad. A few spectators began to make noises. My father was talking quietly telling the rat that if he got the knife, he was gonna show him a couple things he didn’t know about yet.

  I was so embarrassed. All this right out in town for church people to talk about. All the thriftstore shoppers, mouths open, smelling like piss from going through the clothes racks. Holding broken toys and useless appliances in their hands, staring out the fly-spotted windows, hoping to see something real awful to talk about for a few weeks. And my dad, white with rage and staring bug-eyed, jumping like a matador while the rat swung toward him. Dad showing no sense whatever. Mom getting mad, yelling, “Go ahead you fool! If you think it’s worth it!” She’d tell Dad on the ride home she was yelling at the rat. But I saw her face, I knew what she meant. Dad was losing it again.

  The rat put the knife away and strutted around in a circle, making face-saving threats as my dad got in the truck. He drove us home with Uncle Pete and my mom in the cab and me riding with our dog in the truck bed. I watched them argue. Mom taking it from both sides. When we parked in front of the house and the doors swung open, Uncle Pete told my dad that Sam heard the Hoeks been jack-lighting deer over near our place.

  Two nights later, I was trying to conceal from my two uncles the effort it took to keep up with their long strides. It meant walking as fast as I could, then jogging along, then walking, then skipping into a run again. It was their hunting pace; they weren’t going to slow up. Pete was a little clumsy, so I’d have to make sure to give him plenty of room or he’d poke me with the end of his bow and hiss, “Stay out from under my goddamn feet.”

  We’d covered about half a mile toward the back road behind the farm. Behind me the silos loomed in shadow. The barn and farmhouse were dark shapes squatting on the ground. The next time I looked back, I saw nothing but tiny stars.

  Sam let his brother lead. It was as though he had invisible reins attached to Pete. Pete would wear the face of a man in control of serious events. But he’d stop when it came to creek crossings or changes in the terrain. He’d wait and Sam would mutter or grunt, and Pete would make his decision, always in favor of Sam’s advice, and plunge ahead. Pete would pretend to think during the pause when Sam was actually thinking. Pete’d turn slow circles and rub his neck. He would pretend to offer a suggestion or opinion, but long ago he had learned his stated views were sources of embarrassment for him. So he would get the “light bulb” look on his face and then slowly scowl and “change” his mind in silence. If Sam pondered something for more than ten minutes, Pete would pull his-idea-no-never-mind act five or six times. It made me grind my teeth. His dull eyes would squint at me. I was twelve now and had begun openly risking the result of shaking my head at him in disgust. This was acceptable within the family, if it didn’t undermine Pete’s position as one of the Burnett brothers in public.

  Sam always had his mind set on action. He completed what was before him then moved on to the next thing. In a day’s chores on his farm, you could see that Sam planned for the future. He saw the workings of each day and adjusted the rate and sequence of chores, completing more of them than any man I knew. Sam’s crops were rotated to market price, his livestock thrived. His disposition was even and his judgments were fair. He had a practical patience with life.

  You’d think as close as they were, all the brothers would see more of each other. But they had sort of paired up according to their ages. Sam and Pete were a year apart. While Sam had made a name for himself, Pete was widely considered a fool. Sam handled Pete as one would a ferocious dog — affectionate and firm. Right now they were both absolutely pissed off.

  We were crossing our longest pasture, kicking up and slipping on cow pies here and there, soaking wet above our boots whenever we crossed off the path. Pete asked Sam why the hell did I have to come anyway.

  “Because his father is in jail.”

  “So?”

  “So he has to be here.”

  We walked in silence for a couple hundred yards. Pete started in on how I always brought up questions about what made people tick. His head spun on his long neck and his face dropped about two feet out of the sky, one eye cocked and squinting at me. It was malevolence designed to instruct. He did not want anyone figuring him out before he had a chance. He thought he had secrets. Jesus, I thought he was stupid. A throwback to a line that could not have survived without tolerant assistance from brothers like Sam. Pete hissed at Sam. Did he think I could keep my mouth shut? Sam shrugged.

  “Ask him. Don’t ask me.”

  They sped up unconsciously to get some distance from the irritation between them. I trotted behind Sam.

  Pete pushed it, saying, “Well . . . ?” in a tone that demanded an answer.

  I did not say a word.

  At the same instant, Sam and Pete stopped in a fraternal choreography worked out over thirty-odd years of stalking game. Frozen mid-stride, mid-breath, mid-heartbeat for no reason other than something they automatically understood between them. They towered above me, posed like shadow conjurers. The scimitar moon staked over Sam’s shoulder, reflecting the silver in the strands of his long gray hair. Pete put his finger to the side of his nose and fired a clot of hay fever in a heavy wad out of his head, missing me by about a foot. Whatever had stopped them was now permitting them to move. Sam had already disappeared.

  “Well can ya?” Pete moved to grab me as I
followed Sam.

  Sam stopped. It was time to get Pete’s mind off this issue. He walked out of the dark and stood over me, his head turned to the side and looking out of one eye. He had always looked like a bird. The moon backlit his profile, his nose beaked like an Egyptian drawing I’d seen of a man with a hawk head. Pete felt he had a confederate in Sam in the demand that I answer.

  Pete shifted his balance and cleared his throat. I got ready to duck. He asked again.

  “Eddie, can you keep your mouth shut? I’m not talking about little jerkoff secrets now. I mean you gotta be able to. . . .” Sam interrupted him by turning his eyes on him.

  I looked at Pete like I had no idea what he was talking about.

  I heard the baritone growling up from the snot in Pete’s throat, which usually preceded violence.

  Sam sounded disgusted from the dark.

  “I guess his mouth is shut.”

  I could hear the long grass whisking his jeans as he moved on. Pete looked at me.

  “I don’t want you answering nobody’s questions. You ain’t here.”

  He examined me up close for the slightest sign of sass. I looked at the ground around me. We started walking again.

  I was tired of explaining the basic shit to my family and it seemed to me that now that I was twelve, if I didn’t stop doing it, I’d be explaining myself to somebody for the rest of my life. I relied on the Sams of the world to see the obvious and not have to tell it to them again and a-goddamned-gain. I wanted to deal with people who had ideas of their own, not those asking for answers and explanations from somebody else. It looked like a fairly lonely ratio but I was already past giving a shit.