Winged Shoes and a Shield

by Don Bajema

  I’m already booking fifty yards across the bright yellow field. Mustard plants are snapping at my legs as I drive past, pollen from their heads exploding on me. Just jetting toward another road a half mile away, hoping to avoid a ditch here or a trench there. These guys will never catch me on foot. I hear the Camaro screeching off somewhere. I hope they don’t have a way to head me off.

  Just then the terrible things I do to my body begin to catch up with me. I’m gonna faint. No doubt about it. I stagger down to my hands and knees and try like hell to stay conscious. Nope, I’m gonna take a little nappy right here. The last thing I remember is rolling over on my side in a giant field of tall mustard plants. Everything settling down dark and quiet, the hum of a thousand of bees all around me.

  I heard later that the Camaro guys drove around for about an hour and the last place they thought I’d be was sleeping in the field. Maybe there is a God. Think so?

  Anyway, around Christmas the next year, one of the guys in the car bought me a few pitchers of beer and told me the tale. Fat fuck boxer guy was married to a woman I had been in bed with a week or so earlier. What he didn’t know and should have, was that she brought me home with one of her girlfriends. I was finished in about a half hour or so, but the girls went on all night. I couldn’t get any sleep at all until I moved to the couch and I still couldn’t sleep with all the racket. I think I made their scene hetero or something. When she had to confess her infidelity, she left out the part about the girlfriend. To the fat guy with his hurt feelings, I looked like some rival.

  In the late afternoon, the temperature in the field changed abruptly. The wind shifted bringing in the fog, which revived me. Headache. Worse than that. . . . Intestinal volcano.

  I hitched down to the coffee shop. Invited the waitress to the party. She gave me a ride. Slept it off. The night pretty uneventful.

  Next day at about three in the afternoon we’re having breakfast, sitting in some kind of breakfast nook, sunlight filtering in through the windows. Antique carved table with every kind of fruit, roll, exotic breakfast thing you can think of. There’s the movie star I told you about, the big-time surfer I told you about, and the movie star’s wife. She is trying hard to hold her family together.

  They have a five-month-old daughter. Mine is about a month and a half younger. His wife is pretty cool, but in what you might call denial. She thinks things are in some way alright; she thinks they have a family. It’s pretty sad. The sadness carries over to me. I have a wife. I have a baby girl and I’m out doing all this shit all the time. Stuff they’ll never know about, because once I get it together, I’ll rescue them and we’ll live the good life and I’ll have this colorful past to season myself with. I’ll be like a retired pirate, or like Turner in that Nicholas Roeg movie, so that I won’t be some kind of weakling that kissed ass and got to be this big success at whatever it was I was fantasizing about at the time.

  But right there at breakfast, things changed. I was still thinking I’d be a star somehow, since I was sitting there with one, and he wasn’t any real big deal, and he liked me and probably would use me in his next action movie because I was the real deal and blab blab blab. . . . So I rolled a few joints and listened to the stories about the movie these guys had just finished. Location in Mexico. About surfing and the dynamics of all the personalities, and the challenge. and the American values of men against nature and against the nature of themselves, and overcoming themselves to find a higher meaning for life as the sun sets on the giant waves that they surf to change their lives and learn about the beauty of the world and the stuff that Hollywood wants you to believe.

  Meanwhile, behind the scenes they’re doing all the drugs a pickup truck can deliver to the set and fucking anything that moves. These guys do get girls — women, wives, duchesses, singers, writers, brilliant talents and hard-living, hard-loving babes. This is their reality; this is how they live. The wives look the other way, not to forgive, but to blind themselves to it. Like I said, denial. Which was where I was at, since I was never gonna be any goddamn star. I was a sort of joke to myself, but I didn’t want to think that anyone else could see it. You should learn it now; if you can see it in yourself, then so can everybody else. There are no secrets, only delusions.

  So they started comparing the girls to dogs. The ones they had, you know, they’d think up a poodle here and a Doberman there. All bringing laughs. The surfer guy commented about the Chihuahua that my movie star friend had, cause she was so little.

  He looked at me, winking the sinsemilla out of his eye and tapping the ash, passed me the joint. His face was real handsome for that moment, and it had a bitchin’-looking killer sneer on it. It was easy to see why he was a movie star. He did a cool quick take over his shoulder to see if his wife could hear. The baby was patting the table in his lap and he looked at me real deep and knowing and said:

  “More like a Mexican hairless.”

  Hmmm. I felt my shoulders shrug, not getting it at the moment. But then I got it. He liked them young.

  I felt like making everything right again. Going back to a place that wasn’t full of shit, cleaning it all up. But I knew I couldn’t without destroying myself along the way. I’d have to stay this way a little longer, being in the habit of it, having what you’d call my identity a part of it.

  I got up from the table and walked back home.

  I lay on top of my roof, under a huge sycamore tree, with my baby girl sleeping on my chest. Wondering if I could get back what was left of my soul.

  REACH

  Eddie was walking until he found train tracks. He was drunk and feeling disillusioned. His youth was long gone, nothing could replace it. He’d pretty much screwed up his relationship with his daughter and wife. He turned out to be one of those men who secretly resents the ones he loves. They were in the way of his self-destruction, of living a way that had a few thrills to it. He hadn’t turned out to be one of those men who uses the ones he loves as a means for self-ruin. He loved them more than that. It was himself he was beginning to hate.

  Eddie had a hypothesis that he was trying to prove. He’d waited until the women were gathered in the kitchen, since he didn’t drink anymore, to spin the top off his tequila bottle. He hit it, and passed it to the guy next to him saying, “If they ask, tell ’em I’ll be right back.”

  The guy rehearsed. “Said he’d be right back.”

  Walking down the driveway, he sang under his breath.

  “I’ve grown so used to you somehow. Well I’m nobody’s Sugar Daddy now. . . . ”

  His wife was cheating on him. He was cheating on her. His daughter knew it. He was determined to make it out to the tracks. In ten minutes, his boots crunched over the gravel in the train yard. Along the way he’d reached back to some of the music of long gone days, when he sat next to his uncle in his old three-quarter-ton International pickup. Those were cowboy songs mostly, but his Uncle Adrian would stomp along with one of Sam Phillips’ boys too. Adrian would tilt his chin down on his chest and take deep breaths, singing with Johnny Cash. He’d beat the steering wheel with Jerry Lee, and if the drive was at night, you could see him taking private moments with Patsy Cline.

  Being drunk, it was easy to call up all those memories. In his blur, he could see them from another angle, which always made him feel like he was getting something done. The uneasy feeling that makes a person do things like leave a dinner party and wander down the hill was only getting worse.

  His wife, like any good liar, knew a lie a mile away. Constantly changing stories, going over old evidence, taking depositions, asking trick questions, and generally living each moment together in dread and resentment. They were locked in a struggle that knew no peace and gave no quarter. It was all about pain now. He knew she’d figure he had a woman on the phone or was meeting one someplace. He knew she’d never believe he was walking around the railroad tracks. He looked
forward to being able to tell her a reason that was based on the truth. The self-righteousness would feel good for a change. It didn’t matter if she believed him or not.

  He was on a mission to the train yard, hoping he’d hear the seminal sound of American rock and roll. A moment of ecstasy was waiting in the dark when those railroad cars rattled and clacked past. A beat fathering the bass line used by all those pointy-shoed, longhaired, duck-butted squawlers who played out their lives in halls, clubs, barns, hayrides, tents, and on frying stages out in the clearing at county fairs. All those songs Uncle Adrian knew by heart. Those songs he said were little lessons in life. Warnings on what to expect from the human condition.

  Words sung over the mathematics of music, making life a series of hints and equations. The addition of this loss, subtracted from that gain, the sum never making sense, the answer always wrong. Like standing next to these tracks. Waiting for the train to tell him if the culture that surrounded him really came from trains. If rock and roll, besides fucking in the shanty, also had something to do with leaving.

  Eyes closed, he approached the coming train, his boot tips butted up against the wooden tie. He smiled. There it was, the clackety bounce pulling him along the steel black path, promising him something better. Urging him to change everything, himself, the place he laid his head, the food he spooned in his mouth, the dog in the back yard, the shoes under the bed. Change it all, take himself somewhere else and see if he didn’t like it better.

  The train passed, leaving him with the memories of a hundred songs. Hearing his uncle’s voice. Remembering one time when the whole clan went down to Mexico.

  He was eleven, trying to laugh along with the wry wit and irony that his uncle’s songs seemed to contain. But when you’re eleven, you don’t see the humor in things like lost

  love and crazy consequences. You see your mother crying and your father slamming the door. You get up late at night and one of them is in the front room sitting in the dark waiting for the other one to come home. And they don’t. The house stays empty forever. Your love for them is beyond words; it runs the border of the unfathomable. You don’t have a grasp of time or a lick of the good sense a man or woman needs to take care of themselves in that bedroom, in those hushed phone calls, in those chance meetings, in those second glances, in those strange smiles that Momma wouldn’t like. It hurts. All that expectation, all that desire, and nowhere to go. Just something whispering that the whole world is in your young heart. But you stand there empty-handed, listening to someone fighting off tears, telling you to go back to bed.

  Sixty miles south of the Mexican border, down the coastline are a series of volcanic cliffs. Black protrusions jutting out into the Pacific. At one place, two fingers point out one hundred yards and the swells surge into the palm, exploding against its jagged edges. Geysers of salt rain and torn seaweed launch with a horrifying gulp and roar, beyond and above the expectation of any boy standing under the chilling mist, shivering as the echo rolls past him back out to sea.

  Uncle Adrian watches him scrambling over the tide pools, running barefoot over the volcanic mass, his feet nicked and bleeding. The rangy man stands wondering why his nephew has nothing consistent in his behavior. He raves and screams, stumbling along the ridges in one moment, then sits staring at the sky for hours. He has tried to settle the boy down, tried to find a way to communicate. Everyone has taken their turn, and the response is shrugged shoulders and raised eyebrows. From day one, he’s been a weird kid. No one in the family can relate to him. He walks over to hear what the boy is saying, but it’s a song he is singing to himself.

  The swells begin to come in thick walls. A huge wave blasts into spray above them, coming in like silent rushing trains, carrying secrets. The boy watching, wanting something, From somewhere.

  The uncle takes it on himself. He reaches back to another coast, in another world, and thinks about what he needed most and when he needed it.

  Geysers pocked the shore’s surface, whizzing shrapnel exploding the air around him. GI’s vomit on each other as the landing craft’s hull makes its walloping journey through artillery shells, to a beach. Spitting them out, to race through this metal rain. Strange popping sounds dropping farmboys like himself into the shallows. Running over men floating face down. Hitting the sand, weaving into a nightmare that stops them open-mouthed in wonder.

  Huddled together, faces white with fear, certain of absolutely nothing at all, wanting only to get out alive. One by one, he watched the boys beside him fall, until he dropped and watched his fingers tremble before his eyes. So he crawled and waited. A soldier beside him had assumed the posture of one of the dead. Lying on his back with his face twisted, staring at Adrian. Managing to get his attention with the desperation in his eyes. The soldier’s eyes looked upward toward the beach, then they stared at Adrian again. Then he understood the strategy. Wait until the next wave hits the beach and move forward when the machine guns strafe the troops behind them to pieces. He waited.

  Large guns opened up, their explosions hitting the beach behind him. The machine guns clattered before him, their aim over his head. The screaming behind him was incessant. He crawled. The soldier flew up as though an invisible hand had grabbed the front of his helmet and pulled him toward his feet. The boy dropped, the sand yellow and red above his neck. Adrian crawled under a cement bunker, heard panic in the voices inside. Tossed in a thudding explosion and then another. He made his way to the back hatch. A torso twitched in the doorway. He waited by the body, watching his sergeant lead up eight men. They stayed protected by the concrete while the war wailed past them. They waited all night, and the others told him what he had done.

  He thought again of the soldier who made him wait there in the sand. What would he be doing now? Adrian was on the other side of the world vacationing with his brother’s family, wondering how to reach a nephew he felt was becoming more distant with every passing hour. The soldier forever in a cemetery in Italy.

  Earlier that morning he stood leaning into his camper shell, rank with the smell of salt-caked, drying starfish. He reached for the burlap sack and found Eddie’s collection, stiffened in asymmetrical twists, some gripping the rough brown edges of the bag, some on one another. Sad remembrances . . . misplaced, forgotten, dead. Adrian wondering, “Where do we learn about life?”

  The boy sits, watching enormous silence roll below, rush past and explode above him. On the slick black surface, near kelp and seaweed, clings a huge red starfish. It appears for a second and then is submerged as the next wave rolls over. The boy stands peering down, anxious for the next glimpse of that beautiful and now impossibly treasured starfish.

  His uncle appears over his shoulder.

  “You want to get it?”

  The boy freezes. The air pounds with the latest and largest swell; the geyser lingers above them. The boy shouts in the rain, above the roar.

  “Yeah.”

  And then in the silence of the next wall looming toward them.

  “But it’s too far away.”

  “I’ll lower you down between the waves.”

  The boy can’t stay in the gaze of that challenge. His eyes look down into the chasm. It’s a challenge coming from a kind man. A challenge alone can be answered either way. Kindness combined with challenge has to be accepted.

  Adrian looks at the boy and imagines the surging wall yanking Eddie from his grasp, taking him for a long subsurface journey beneath the enormous surf into the black rocks. He sees himself leaping into the darkening sea, flailing against the mountains rising, tossing him with the boy’s frail blue broken body. He weighed this against the boy’s burlap sack.

  “If you miss. . . .”

  “I won’t miss.”

  “OK, then.”

  The boy squats down next to the man. He looks beyond the ledge and sees the dark mound rising toward him. He listens intently
as his uncle explains that after the wave breaks, and the backwash surges past, he will have his ankles in his hands and drop him down into the emptying hole.

  “Let’s count.”

  After six, right between seven, the sea rushes back in, and by eight it explodes against the wall.

  “I’ll be dropping you on one. You’ll be down there on two. . . .” Another larger swell rises and nearly overflows the edge. “By five, I’ll be pulling you up.”

  The air explodes, an avalanche of solid water douses them, filling the small pocked holes with white water and foam.

  “We really gonna do this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK, then.”

  “Next one, see the starfish?”

  The boy looks down to see the red giant.

  “Yeah.”

  He isn’t heard as a wave blasts high on the rocks and sends the next shower down on them. It suddenly seems so much darker. The backwash bounces beneath them. The boy scrambles into position. His uncle’s vise-like grip hurts. The boy rolls over the side and drops for a second that stops his heart. The boy lands hard against the cold kelp lining the inside of the wash. The starfish glistens a foot beyond his grasp. The boy stretches, hearing his uncle’s count of two. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the surging tide rising above him, a black rolling wall racing in, rumbling at his intrusion.

  The boy touches the starfish, his hand on the rough contour of its back. The animal is much bigger than he thought, larger than both his hands together which now pull against its grip on the rock wall. His uncle bellows four. The starfish starts to release. The boy feels his light weight raising and the wall of murky water looming above him. The heels of his hands fight for ledges to push upward, aiding the speed of his ascent. Fingernails tear into his back under his bathing suit as he feels himself yanked onto the rock edge, his one trailing arm submerged up to his shoulder under the surface as it rushes past.