Winged Shoes and a Shield

by Don Bajema

  “I can get it.”

  “OK, then.”

  They turn together to face the next wave. The backwash swirls past. His ankles are again in the vise-hands of the uncle. The boy drops, bracing his fall with an outstretched arm. He bounces from the kelp wall, his eyes focused on the starfish, and he twists his return to land beside it. The fingers of both hands slipped under the edge of two legs and pry the starfish loose. He hears his uncle counting three and the sound of fear in his voice. He shoots a glance at the oncoming wall. The starfish hangs in the boy’s outstretched hands.

  “I got it!!”

  He realizes he can not help the climb back up and hold the starfish at the same time. He feels his body begin to rise slower than it had the first time. The wall of water bearing down.

  The boy blows his breath out and takes a huge lungful of air. He feels the hand dig viciously into his back, desperately pulling. His ribs catch the edge of the rocks and a sharp line of skin tears over his bony chest. An arm surrounds him and pulls him from the edge, rolling him over onto the sharp tide-pool edges. The entire space swells with a foot of water. The crash against the rocks sends backwash rolling over them, the uncle clutching the boy, the boy clutching the starfish. The water recedes. They get to their feet.

  Eddie holds the red starfish the size of a hubcap in his hands. His uncle looks down at it and whistles. “That’s a beauty,” he says. The boy spins it over an oncoming wave, watching it fade from the surface and disappear.

  Adrian turns and walks back toward the International. Eddie follows him at a distance, and then runs until he catches up. They walk hand in hand until they see a narrow path leading them to a cliff. Adrian sweeps his arm from the ground to the cliff edge above.

  “Lead the way.”

  Eddie runs along the cliff wall, dodging cactus, tufts of grass, his feet dislodging volcanic debris, sending stones bouncing over the side and falling into the surf. When he reaches the top, he looks down at his uncle slowly rocking his long strides up the incline. Eddie stands as close as he dares to the cliff edge and closes his eyes. He thinks he feels himself falling forward. He feels his balance adjust and doubt thrills him. He smiles to himself.

  “I’m not gonna fall.”

  He opens his eyes and looks down, yelling, “C’mon Uncle Adrian!”

  The old truck always takes a few tries before starting. Adrian lights a cigarette and stretches his arm along the top of the front seat. He squints through smoke and coughs.

  “Eddie, you were born in June, huh?”

  Eddie nods. “The eleventh.”

  Adrian repeats the date. “June the eleventh. And you’re eleven, ain’t ya?”

  Eddie nods.

  Adrian pauses and stares through the windshield in concentration, exhaling little clouds.

  “Well, see there? Hank Williams made his debut on the Grand Ol’ Opry on the day you were born.”

  Adrian tries the ignition again. The engine turns over and dies.

  “First time he sang ‘Lovesick Blues.’ Goes like this. . . .”

  Adrian takes a deep breath, twists the ignition. The truck rumbles and he sings as though he was standing at the back in a tent at the county fair.

  “Ah got a feeling called the bluuuees, oh Lord since my baby said goodbye, I don’t what I’ll doooo. . . .”

  He thumps the steering wheel in time.

  “All I do is sit and cryyy, oh Lord, I got so used to her somehow. . . .” He licks his lips, looks out the side window and puts the truck in gear.

  “Or something like that.”

  CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO . . .

  My father’s destroyer was due to return to San Diego from a nine-month Cold War cruise. Postcards, letters meaning very little, sent home. Mother always counting the days, then crying herself to sleep when he left again, and me wondering why. They never treated each other like anything but distant uncomfortable relatives after his first few days home. Awful awkward silences during television commercials. I’d do annoying things to break the tension and was usually spoken to harshly by both of them. Making them agree on something. I missed him. I missed something he was supposed to provide, and the fact that I didn’t know what that was made the longing greater.

  We waited on the dock. The sun was shining bright and my mother was drinking coffee from a dock canteen, sharing a powdered donut with me provided by the USO cart making its way up and down the dock. We saw the USS Isherwood pass the line of silent ships at mooring. My heart jumped and we waved at the sailors in formation standing on the deck of the ship in the distance. Minutes crawled as the ship made its way to the pier and shaded us in its shadow. Piping whistles, thrown lanyards, horns, and the ship’s band playing the Navy Hymn. I saw my father walking above us along the cable barriers on the edge of the deck. I could recognize his walk anywhere. My mother intoning, “There he is.” We waved as his back dressed in blues and his Chief’s hat disappeared into a hatch.

  The plank was lowered and the crowd of dependents moved up the plank and onto the ship’s deck to hug and kiss their men, sobbing smiles, introducing babies. Solemn handshakes from boys to fathers. Down the gray ladders, down the gray halls and into the Chief’s quarters. Finally released, my father was permitted to leave ship and return with us to our house for a few months until the next cruise would take him around the world.

  My father at the wheel of the Oldsmobile and my mother turned toward him in the front seat speaking about details of life beyond the scope of a third grade boy just happy to smell the diesel on his clothes. The smell of manhood.

  Then the hours changed to days and the monotony got to my father, bringing back the tension, which eventually drifted downward toward me. My father tried to reestablish his fatherhood by using discipline. I wanted to be taken in his lap and held, lifted into the air, taken on walks. Invited into the garage to smell the wood burn on his table saw, watch the spinning blade whirl near his thick skillful fingers. Instead, I played down the street and left him alone with his depression and his boredom. Conversations about trespasses I’d committed in the days of his absence led to lectures and punishments. Reduced television privileges. Boring busywork after school. Disappointed looks directed at a sailor of nine who was not making the grade.

  My mother and father sat stunned in catatonic silence watching the fourth steady hour of regular television programming. I wandered from the cupboard holding a handful of Oreos and an orange. I laid down on the floor under the blue television light and was thereby noticed by my father.

  “Go take a bath.”

  Just that. Deadpan.

  I kept my eye on the screen and said “No.”

  Silence. The mindless dialogue droned on the set.

  “I’m not going to tell you again. Take a bath.”

  My mother made an unintelligible noise of protest, a groan or something. My father wasted no time.

  “Go get a belt.”

  I stuffed another Oreo in my mouth and walked past the stares coming from the couch. I turned on the light in their bedroom and opened his dresser drawer. Pulled out a plastic braided belt I’d made for him when he was overseas. I walked out into the front room and held it out to him.

  My legs were bare. He went for them. He swung hard enough to count but not really committed to damage or to venting his anger. The sound wasn’t too impressive, but it hurt like hell. He waited. He hit me again. I gained some kind of strength from it and I knew I’d be OK. He shook his head like a television character about to shrug off some homily. But he didn’t say anything. He hit me instead. I thought how stupid he was not to know that my leg was getting numb. He was really getting upset.

  “Get your ass into the bathtub or. . . .”

  He hit me in the other leg, let it glide past me and backhanded me on the other. He did it again. The pain was
constant and harder to stand. I got a little scared that I wouldn’t be able to hold on. But his eyes were tearing up, and he was losing heart. He hit me again. My mother said that I was bleeding. I was crying on the outside, but not on the inside. His shoulders sagged. His hand dropped to his side. His eyes were full of tears. My voice sounded so calm it startled me.

  “I already took a bath.”

  MY DAD CURED ME OF GUNS

  Christmas at the Mexican-American border usually brings a heat wave. The temperature peaks around one o’clock at 90 degrees. The sunlight is bright and the air is crisp; it’s absolutely beautiful, shining and clear. The air shimmers. The winter sun doesn’t burn; it blesses.

  Waking up in the early morning, Eddie examines what is wrapped for him under the tree. Being eleven, he is in the limbo years of his youth. Between the playground and his first car, the no-girls-allowed-club and his first crush. His place in the future is a source of anxiety. Who is he? Who will he become? Is there a way to affect the outcome? His assessment of who he is today is embarrassing. He is tired of childhood. Next spring, he wants a spot on the baseball team; to find out if he can hit the curve, take one for the team, hang in there, play the field, get low on the ball, steal second and prove that he has what it takes to become a teenager. Right now, any thirteen-year-old could easily bulldoze his life.

  One present has a note written in his father’s formal hand. Lifting the package, its weight and density triggers his curiosity. The other presents under the tree lift easily. They rattle; they lack dignity. Presents probably containing toys and games that will prove his parents still regard him today as the child he was last month.

  Eddie’s father and mother have taken their place on the couch. Eddie opens the front door and sunlight streams through and leaves the faintest trace of tiny squares on the floor. A sunlight so bright, sharp, and clear that it seems like music. His father clears his throat. Eddie turns, watching his mother stretch and yawn behind one hand.

  “Let’s open them presents.”

  Eddie stands looking at these familiar strangers. Two middle-aged figures slumped beside each other like Martians, a canyon of alienation between them. The distance between the man in his boxers and the woman in her robe so vast that she begins to hug herself as though she were cold. Eddie walks to the Christmas tree.

  “I been wondering what could it be that was in here.”

  His father fixes him with a mocking challenge.

  “Well, then you better open it and see.”

  His father takes his mother’s hand. She shifts uneasily.

  The present is even heavier than he remembered. Something in it makes him open it slowly. He’s eleven; he doesn’t just rip the paper anymore.

  “Read the card, Eddie.” Her voice is admonishing.

  “I did. Says ‘To Eddie, Christmas 1960.’”

  The cardboard box is open at one end and the blond stock, blue-grey barrel and bolt of a Remington .22 Savage slides slowly onto the carpet. Astonished, Eddie looks at his father. His large arms are folded against his chest; his mother’s abandoned hand trails absently through his long black hair and down his neck to rest on his shoulder. He takes on something more manly than Eddie has seen in him before. A look as though he were letting him into the clubhouse. A reassuring smile that could be saying:

  “Had you worried there for a while. Didn’t know where ya stood didja? Welcome to the first stair to the man’s world, kid. Ya made it.”

  She seems pleased and tries to participate in the admiration of the weapon, but her comments are drowned in the solemn instructions of gun safety as the weapon is assembled.

  Eddie is over-attentive and over-respectful, feeling phony, but the strange occasion carries such weight and is so reverent that the delirium of this new passage forgives his corny effort at maturity. He can almost hear the theme from Bonanza playing in the front room, Pa intoning in serious sermon the principles of men. His father standing with feet wide as a cop’s, assembling the rifle, breaking it down.

  “Now you do it, Son.”

  Eddie frozen, the gun offered in his father’s outstretched hand. Eddie thinking, “He’s never called me Son.”

  He takes the bolt, sets it on the table, places the barrel beside it, takes the stock and fits the barrel to it. His hands shake. He waits for his father’s humiliating comment. But he remains silent while Eddie fits the bolt to the barrel.

  His father gets up for a refill. Eddie’s mother hands him another present. A black mohair sweater with athletic stripes at the biceps. Perfect. She opens the photo album. His father returns with the coffee and opens the series of blades and bits for his power tools — neither gift a surprise, both of them acting as though it were. The room opening into a chasm of lonely phoniness that years of practice has made excusable.

  Christmas 1960 passes through the crucial phase. No one has broken the suspension of disbelief. Cheeks are kissed, thank yous are muttered, embarrassments are left unexposed. Eddie’s father heads for the bathroom. His mother begins pressing the wrapping paper into neat folds to be put away to wrap presents next year. Eddie heads out the screen door.

  The sun amplifies the greens, golds, and blues outside. Everything shines. Eddie walks barefoot in the cool grass, the sun warm on his back. The street is silent. Birds swoop to the wires hanging over the house, change their minds and settle in the jacaranda tree across the street. A neighborhood girl flies past, her chin over her handlebars, her legs motionless, having pedaled as fast as her Schwinn’s gear will torque. Her hair streaming behind her, face ecstatic. Eddie whistles through his teeth and her hand waves behind her, the spokes of her bike glistening.

  Eddie walks into the front room. His mother is on the phone checking in with relatives, feigning interest in each other’s gifts and in the dinner plans for later.

  Eddie stands there watching. His mother taps ashes into last year’s present, nodding on the phone, already bored with her call.

  Eddie can never locate reality. It keeps slipping into these deceptions between all of the people he lives with. No one tells the truth. Television means more than any of his close relatives. Conversation means nothing; affection is forced and painful. No spirit, no soul, no pride anywhere. And where is the appropriate place to deposit this anger? On the woman on the couch, pretending she cares about the next twenty-four hours? Is she so stupid she can’t see that she is slaving for a son and husband who can’t see her? What can his father do but go to sea, take orders, come home, and wait to ship out again? What does this make Eddie? Eddie does not want to answer that question yet. He does what he always does — watches them and stalls for time.

  Eddie knows this Christmas was intended as a rite of passage. He walks into his bedroom. It has changed. The rocket ship wallpaper is childish. The toys are embarrassing. He has a gun.

  The water’s running in the bathroom sink. His father leans into the mirror examining his neck and tapping the whiskers from his razor. His words are distorted as he cuts the stubble on the side of his mouth. He asks if Eddie would like to take the gun out into the canyon.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Eddie never calls him sir.

  They’re walking along a dirt road that’s twenty minutes by truck from the house. His father pulls a box of shells from his jacket. Eddie carries the rifle in the crook of his arm, balancing it like a television mountain man. He lowers his voice when he speaks, struggling to deepen it within his rib cage. They walk along, talking in mature, slow tones, struggling for subjects worthy of manly discourse. Not much to say. They fall into the gulf of father-son relationship. They slip a .22 Long into the bolt. Eddie is taught to squeeze the trigger at beer cans. In a few minutes, they spin under the impact of newfound ballistic acumen. Eddie examines the holes tearing through the metal. He struggles to find some noble imagery. Frontiersmen bring home food for the young.
A Bud can is the sternum of a bear, pawing the air in his last seconds of agony. Eddie’s friends behind him, reloading after their panicked shots have missed; him saving them from the giant clubbing claws.

  Eddie’s father sights and shoots. Reloads, shoots, reloads, shoots. His smile is bitter as the last shot slams into the dirt. Eddie cannot find a disarming comment to ease his father’s embarrassment.

  Slipping another bullet into the bolt, his father is muttering.

  “Rusty cans don’t mean shit.”

  Eddie follows his father beneath brush and tangled sycamore. His father’s tattooed hand parts a green sunlight-speckled branch. A blue jay nods, bright-eyed, head tilting, wings ruffled and shaking back into place. The barrel levels and Eddie’s father’s jaw sets, his eye widens, his breath stops. He squeezes the trigger.

  “Merry Christmas, bird.”

  POST PERFORMANCE

  A train robber and a fourteen-year-old girl are left following an unsuccessful attempt at stopping a train. The horses wheeled, the guns fired, bullets whizzed, a few of them splattered through men intent on defending or stealing money. It ended five minutes ago. The girl and the thief remain in the aftermath.

  She sees his torn, dusty jeans, dried sweat, dirt encrusted, hollow-eyed exhaustion. He is high on adrenaline and the euphoria of escaping death. His bleeding cracked lips are smiling. There is no skin on his right forearm, shoulder and hip. There’s a blue knot on the side of his head; bramble has torn an ear. His canteen is three-quarters empty. They are thirty-seven miles from bath, food, lace curtains, and a wide bed where his woman turns over on her hip sleeping deeply, dreaming about shady canyons with fire running along their ridges. He looks at the girl. The first words out of his mouth are an excuse, or an explanation. In either case, she will miss the point.