by Ryan Gattis
Back home I was nothing. I was Cue's punching bag. I was always supposed to shut my mouth because I didn't know anything, that's what my big brother told me. The summer before, Cue accidentally broke my leg by jumping off the bed and trying to scare me but he slipped as he was jumping and fell on me funny, on my left tibia bone. It broke through the skin and bled a lot. Mom freaked out and screamed at Cue that he was trying to kill me.
"Girls are gentle! Girls are different from brute boys!" She screamed those a couple times each. Women were soft and kind and worthy of respect. She screamed that too. Something like it anyway. Cue was a perfect gentleman until it fully healed.
Well, my mom and Jimmy's parents thought it was great that we had become such close friends. They actually encouraged us to spend all of our time together. So it was okay for me to watch him train as long as I didn't disturb him, Mom said. That was where it happened, in the hayloft.
It was a typical late summer afternoon on the plains, hot and dry. Jimmy confirmed it. Felt like the hay up in the loft was going to spark up around me it was so warm with the heat rising up from the ground and getting trapped in the upside-down "V" angle of the wooden ceiling so close above us. Jimmy was working out as usual. A few solid forms and he was sweating, bare-chested, having discarded his shirt. He'd put his towel next to me so really he was leaning over for it and I thought I'd be helpful by picking it up and handing it to him but he wasn't looking at me. He was just leaning over, setting his water bottle down, leaning toward me, and no, it wasn't one of those things where we didn't mean it to happen, nothing that lame. I knew exactly what I was doing when I grabbed him and kissed him. Right like Melinda showed me. I pulled the back of his head hard toward me and I sucked on his lower lip before putting my whole mouth over his, but never with tongue.
Coming in to tell us about lunch, my mom stopped dead just inside the entrance. I'll never forget the look on her face when she saw us from down below. I saw her. Jimmy didn't, he was facing away, toward the barn wall. But he noticed when I stopped kissing him, kept my lips on his, just stopped completely. It was like she pitied me, like there was something wrong with me and I just couldn't help myself from ruining the golden boy. Obviously, it was all my fault. It was my compulsive nature, my lust, and my internal corruption. It was the same look she gave mice that were foolish enough to get stuck in one of the traps Dad would lay in the old garage.
We left the next day. That was the last time I saw Jimmy before he just waltzed into the house that night. It'd been almost four years since we kissed that I saw him and I could still feel my mother's look in the lining of my stomach like an animated wrestling ring that collapsed inward to take revenge on the bad, bad wrestlers trying to pin each other.
Mom died two months after that. I used to wonder if I killed her by doing that, made her unstable somehow, made her head break. I used to think about it a lot. I used to feel guilty.
MY BACK
"How'd you do it, Jimmy?" I asked as the muscles in my lower back tightened at his touching. That must be low tide.
"Do what?"
"Disappear," I said, "against The Bulgarian."
"I didn't."
"Yeah, you did."
"When did you get this tattoo?" he asked in a whisper. His fingers kept gliding over my ink in circles, real persuasive in changing the subject, Like he was creating twin whirlpools on either side of my spine: each going in opposite directions. The right went left. The left went right and he shifted to the palms of his hands, to rubbing.
"I got it last summer, it's still kind of new," I said.
I was glad that I wasn't facing him because I was flushed and getting worse, I could feel it more than I could see it in the darkness of the living room. "Took like sixteen or seventeen hours total, had four different visits, one for each shoulder and then one above each hip but he did the boat and the fisherman all at once at the end."
"Did it hurt?"
That was by far the most common question of all. I knew it was coming eventually. The good news was I didn't have to answer it all that often. Nobody really knew I had a tattoo because foot. it always stayed covered. Then again, most of the people I hung out with didn't really think to ask if it hurt or not. They just knew it did. Seems to me that tattoos are entrancing like scars are entrancing, being real visible reminders of pain. Certainly Jimmy was mesmerized.
"About as much as getting stitched, but by a sewing machine and not by hand."
Since Jimmy didn't say anything, just kept rubbing, I kept talking, blabbing, I guess. Like we used to do in the barn: him asking questions and me answering.
"It hurt worse when I didn't look though. When I put my head down on the table, it was just an anonymous pain, something I was going through that didn't seem to have any purpose, so I just looked into this double mirror that was set up for me to look into, one that reflected another one that I could see my back in. Cue was there the whole time. He always adjusted the second mirror so that I could see the needle going into my skin, sewing that ink in, you know, see the purpose of it." I stopped talking because Jimmy was poking me like his fingers were needles and he was making the lines that were already there. I tried to imagine where he was touching me: the crest of a wave rising above my kidney and guiding the other waves to the boat. But I couldn't be sure. When I couldn't see the art, like a map in the mirror, it just felt like skin.
"Over the spine though, that hurt. It rattled the bone underneath and all the other bones near it. It feels a little like getting shocked but not too bad. A little bit of breath control and endurance and it's no big deal, blood and needles never bothered me though."
I kind of trailed off when the thought occurred to me that I'd have to check Dad for bedsores in the morning. He'd been in bed for almost two days by then. And it was getting colder too. I'd have to get the gas back up and running, call the company, arrange a payment. Still, it could take a week or more. I was hoping the weather would get warmer or the oven wouldn't give out when Jimmy spoke into the air that still smelled like casserole.
"I like changing the shape of the waves, distorting 'em and then watching 'em go right back to where they were before."
"Why's that?"
"I don't know. I guess because it's comforting," he said, and he hadn't stopped rubbing. It was a full massage now and my neck was getting the treatment from his warm, strong hands.
"Comforting because there's a pattern to it? Just sitting there underneath what you can touch, keeping things in order on the surface," I said, and I knew as soon as it left my mouth that Cue would've laughed at me, but Jimmy didn't.
"Yeah, like fate or karma or whatever, just pulling things back to where they need to be."
"And the skin can die and flake off but the pattern stays there as a map, right?"
"Yeah," he said, working his knuckles into my lower back but with his other arm around me, in front of me, wrapped around my collarbone and in front of my neck and over to my other shoulder that he held in his palm. He was holding me up. It felt natural.
"Don't laugh," I said, but even before saying it I knew he wouldn't. That he wouldn't even reassure me, he'd just sit there and listen, waiting for me to say whatever I was going to say. "I used to think that everything was destined but then I thought that we all had free will but then I thought that something big and god-ish had to account for all possibilities, ya know? So I guess I just figured that there was such a thing as fate with a little f, and Fate with a big F, a capital letter."
I hoped he was following me, because I just kept going. "So there's fate with a little f that we can change, right, like free will, right? But then Fate with a bigger F actually takes that into account, because it's so huge that every single decision you could ever, ever make with the little f fits into the big F. All possibilities are accounted for. And because of that, big F was still in control over the little f, like it was a big abacus in the sky that never had to adjust because it knew of and kept track of, every single choice from the
beginning, like even before you were born. Even decisions that led to my parents getting together and having me."
I was seriously full of shit. I couldn't help it. It was dark and safe to talk and my brother was gone and I was trying to understand something, anything, so long as it was giant.
"The truth is I don't know how I did it, Jenny."
"What? How you did what?"
He stopped rubbing.
"I don't know how I disappeared, I just did." He was talking real slow. "Really, I didn't believe it, I thought I just moved around him, I mean, I focused on where I wanted to be and then I moved my body and I was just there behind him."
He got quiet. I could hear the cranking of the rusty oven fan in the kitchen. One of its propellers was probably crooked. I tried to focus on that sound, instead of how near Jimmy's skin was to mine.
"I talked to everyone who was at the match after, the judges and masters from the other schools, and I saw the television footage and I didn't even know I'd done it. It freaked me out bad. Real bad. For a little while I believed what those priests said about me. That I was a reincarnated evil spirit, the devil, all that stuff."
I listened, feeling his every little shift in the lumpy busted couch.
"I don't know. It's like everybody makes such a big deal out of the promise, that it's all legendary now, me giving up on fighting, like I'm some great guy who saw the light. But really, I'm just scared. I don't know how I did it, vanished." The way he said the V-word put a new flock of goose bumps on my neck. "I just did. I guess I was happy to promise my mom that I wouldn't fight anymore. What if I disappeared for good next time?"
The logical, realistic, Mom part of me wanted to reassure him that it would never happen, that it wasn't possible. But the guy had already disappeared once. There was photographic evidence. What could I say to that?
"You know my mom made me promise not to get involved with you? That was a condition of my coming." Jimmy changed gears and I was fine with that.
"Serious?" I thought it was kind of funny, really. Then again, I was pretty surprised to see him when he showed up. No one in my family ever talked about it. I never told Cue but he knew somehow. They all kind of looked at me strange after that, especially Mom. Like I had something following me, or hanging above my head. I was forever trying to make up for it, 'til Mom was gone anyway.
"Yeah. I guess she figured she was on a roll with the promises thing." He leaned close to me but the hands I expected never came. Instead, I felt the tip of his nose track up the base of my neck as he breathed out, up to my hairline before brushing east/west across it like the skin beneath my hair was a mountain path that needed exploring. He smelled me, bumping his forehead into the base of my skull like a playful dog.
"So you promised." I hoped he didn't hear me breathing any heavier.
"Yeah."
"That's good, because this isn't right anyway, right?" I had the heels of my hands on my hips and I was just pushing down, reminding myself of my body boundaries. I let go of my shirt to do it.
"Right," he said, and he moved his nose, replaced it with his lips, softer than I remembered.
"So why's it not right again?" I was afraid my voice was cracking.
"Because it's taboo." He stopped kissing my shoulder clouds to say it.
"Oh, right, yeah. Taboo." I had to close my eyes. "Because why?"
"Because we're related and people who're related aren't meant to be together, you know, for the gene pool." He pulled away for just a moment and when he pushed back against me his chest was bare and I could feel his heart beat against my back.
"Right. Inbreeding bad," I said. And it was, very bad. Webbed toes and pale skin, weak constitutions, Poe stuff.
"So what's left for us then?" It was his turn to ask a question.
"I don't know," I said, and I really, honestly, 100% didn't.
NO
Two minutes later I had a pretty good idea though, and that's why I slept on the couch alone even when it was uncomfortable and a little cold without him. It wasn't because I didn't want to, because I did but also, I didn't. Confusing, all of it. It was easier that he was behind me when I told him because if I'd seen his light brown eyes right then, flamed up in a sliver of back porch light, it might've been a different morning. Jimmy was good about making it sound like it was our decision, the two of us, not to go through with it. But it was my decision and I think he took it kind of hard. The kid was in love with me. Said it himself last night: "Jenny, I love you, I've been waiting for this moment for so long..."
And the scary thing was that it wasn't bullshit. If it was, I think it would've been easier for me to laugh off Somehow in those words I knew that he'd probably never kissed another girl or if he did, it was only in China, across an ocean and a long time ago. That he really did love me and that he really had been waiting since that last kiss in the hayloft gym freaked me out.
So of course the thing that did it, convinced me it was a terrible idea, was Keenan Helford. I saw her small-chinned face in my mind right when Jimmy said he loved me. Keenan was a skinny little girl with huge energy that could punch for an hour straight without stopping. Big blue eyes fixed just under short poky hair that stuck out in all different directions, she looked like a girl from a Japanese video game. I don't think she showered much but all the guys liked her anyway. Like guys love dangerous dogs and raise them up to be mean, to bite. That was Keenan.
Well, after Mom died, Cue took up with this Keenan girl. She was one of the youngest Waves because she had skipped a year in school, but she was real tough. She almost beat me up once when she was over at our house and she would've too, if Cue hadn't been there and looked scary angry. Of course their relationship got real weird, real fast. Cue soon found out that Keenan had daddy issues, among other problems, but he still kept saying he loved her and wanted to marry her and she ate it up. Kid was fifteen when he was saying these things. Well, it eventually occurred to my big brother, after tons of talks with Dad, that this Keenan chica just wasn't right in the head so he had to end it quick. Took him two weeks to actually do it though.
By then she was showing up at the house randomly. She'd call at five thirty in the morning or follow him home from Kung Fu so he'd have to run in the house and lock the door behind him. She'd write long letters and accuse him of stealing her diary and all of her socks. She said she had three miscarriages and their children were now spirit guides in heaven. She said she was going to kill herself if he didn't get back together with her. That it would be all his fault if she died. As if these kinds of things would make Cue want to get back together with her.
It was a sight though, watching Cue transition from the boy who cared too much to the warrior man he was. He was like that his freshman year at Kung Fu. Started out soft. He'd come home and cry a lot before and after Mom died, and even after he dumped Keenan, but only in his room and with the door closed. If I went in to see what was wrong I got a smack. So I left him alone. That continued for about three months, then he just stopped. No more crying, ever. He said he cried himself out. Nothing touched him after that. Like he just decided one day that it wasn't his fault anymore and that he was going to live his life how he wanted.
In the end, Keenan didn't kill herself, just got sent to live with her grandparents in the mountains of North Carolina. But maybe that's the same fuckin' thing. Later, after all that mess was over and Cue had some time to think, he told me that he shouldn't've jumped into a relationship so fast after Mom died because he didn't even know what he was doing and he was just trying to fill a hole that couldn't, and shouldn't, be filled by someone else. I only understood about half of what he said, but I did understand that relationships were bad.
It was so easy to get sucked into that around Kung Fu though, the sex and the relationships: a drop of comfort in a coffee cup of living that always gave you sugar in lumps. Girls were always dropping out of Kung Fu because they got pregnant. You make it to graduation alive, relatively intact and without having g
otten someone pregnant or becoming pregnant yourself, you're in a tiny minority.
So I thought of Keenan when jimmy said it, and how that sounded a step away from craziness to my ears. More than anything, I didn't want that to be me, or worse and more probably, Jimmy. So I said no and he respected it, even if he made a show of it. But it was nice for a moment there when I couldn't see his face or hear his voice. When it was just strong hands on my back and me talking and I guess I let it get further than it should've because it was just nice to be touched in a way that didn't involve fists, boots, or elbows.
After Jimmy had gone to sleep in my bed one more night, I thought of Mom. Brain cancer is about as bad as it gets. Out of nowhere, Mom started puking a lot, like Exorcist a lot. So I thought it was me. I thought I made her sick with what me and Jimmy did. Every time it came to mind, I apologized, and every time Mom tried to make me understand it wasn't me and that everything was going to be okay. But everything wasn't okay, and the fact that it wasn't my fault didn't sink in 'til I went to Kung Fu and had my own breakdown, my own baptism, just like Cue.
But that didn't change what happened. Dad always had two buckets by the bed and he was emptying them, cleaning them out, like a one-man fire brigade for Mom's puke. "I'm just the Nancy Fire Brigade," he would say, and laugh like it was funny. Nancy was my mom's name. At first, they thought it was really, really bad stomach flu that she got from some beef she ate at a restaurant and so they let it go two days before the headaches started. But we had insurance then so Mom got checked into the hospital so we didn't have to deal with her illness, with her dying. We were shielded from most of it. I guess after having been through so much stuff with Dad, taking care of him and all, I just look back and wish that Mom had died at home. So we could've had more time together, so I could've taken care of her, as naive as that is. Hollow Jen strikes again.