After a good run, I normally throw myself on the hardwood floor, stretch out, stare at the ceiling and listen to the silence. But this time when I close my eyes, I hear Lila’s voice. A kid’s head appears at the screen.
“I’ll introduce you, Peter . . . patience, honey.”
A sandy-haired, seven- or eight-year-old boy stands on the step, gives me a mile-wide grin. “Something wrong with you, mister?”
“Nope.” I kneel up, stand.
“Honey, let’s see about getting you settled in at Daddy’s.”
Peter leaps, dashes about the room with a prong-horned giddiness—bandy-legged excitement a kid in the country develops, having run free most of his life.
He stops, his cheeks flushed, and pants. “You that man . . . from prison . . . huh? Mom loves you.” He spins on his heels, laughs.
“Peter. Peter, hold on for second. Good to meet you,” I say.
He smells like sweet grass along a forest creek.
“I know where the fish are,” Peter declares. His eyes are green moss. In the sun rays they turn soft blue.
“I’ve never fished,” I tell him, “but I’d love to. It’s always been a dream. Will you take me, show me those ponds your mother wrote me about?”
“Good!” Peter claps his hands as if to announce something, helicopters around. On each pass, he confides in me with whispers, “I know . . . where Confederate . . . ghosts are too. . . . Seen ’em walking in the woods through the trees. Bet you never seen that!”
Peter’s older brother, Bruce, about ten or eleven, comes in then. Without a word, he goes into his bedroom and comes out carrying a laundry basket of his belongings. He pauses long enough to glare at me and tells Peter, “Let’s go.” The tenor of his voice festers with resentment at my presence.
“Well,” Lila says, “I got errands.” She kisses her boys. “I’ve got to pick up Mom’s medicine, get wine and cigs. Be right back. Come on, boys, get a-moving.”
I stand at the screen door, watching them cross the road. Peter and Bruce make several trips hauling their belongings. Emotion wells up in me while I force myself to fight back the tears, thinking how I’d been at their age. I ran away, lived on the streets, moved room to room in dozens of scary boarding houses. I was wary, beyond the reach of lawyers, bankers, politicians or businessmen roaming the premises at night, trawling for kids to indulge their sexual debauchery.
Hawks circle the fields for rodents, deer come out of the forest to grub on shoots. The autumn landscape is ragged like leftover greens on the cutting board.
I worry about getting a job, try to concentrate on what it is that I need to do to get going with my reentry. I have no training in this kind of stuff, the stuff called free-living— getting up, working, talking to people, doing what people do. I don’t know how to move with them in crowds, in classes, in socializing groups. I have no experience of any kind being normal. The days are coming and going in uneventful succession. I sit still, reading, thinking, worrying, doing nothing. Time moves fast in freedom; if you aren’t up on your game, it leaves you behind.
It’s the middle of September, and life seems to be idle. You can see the colors changing, but all else stands by. Wednesday morning, I carry my toast and coffee into my office, a cubbyhole to the right of the front door. It has a small window looking out on the pump house, beyond that black-top country road and woods. There’s a spindle-backed chair, a desk with knob-handled drawers, a Royal typewriter, an ashtray, a stack of typing paper, a screen cylinder basket with pencils, white-out, an eraser, typewriter ribbons, envelopes, stamps. There’s a four-drawer steel filing cabinet to the left, a plank and brick bookshelf to the right lined with Irish and Mexican poetry books.
There is this poet Denise I met while I was inside. She writes me from time to time, tells me that reading can help with my reentry, socialize me. I can use it as an important key to open doors that in the past I didn’t understand how to open. So I try to read with the hope that it might help me order my thoughts, make my thinking clearer.
I make a baloney sandwich and notice Lila has taped a new excerpt from our letters on the fridge:
My love grows in ferocious growls for you
I fend for no one but a wound in me, a wound
so great it’s taken on a being of itself
breathing and speaking in my blood
my hands clench your hair, the fangs of my fingers
want to tear you apart, I have so much hunger for you.
I should be proud that she thinks enough of my poem to post it on the fridge, but there is a wariness, a mistrust of this act. In the furthest reaches of my heart, I know whatever I do is somehow contaminated. A suspicion arises in me that she might be trying to tell me something. It’s just a feeling one gets when something doesn’t seem right. Maybe it’s nothing, maybe she just likes it, is proud of me.
I make another sandwich, another cup of instant coffee and return to reading hoping Peter to come flying in, gusting about the main room, sweet-headed, human butterfly wanting to take off fishing. Eventually he does come in, but I’m wrapped up in work ideas. He keeps himself busy on the floor of the main room.
In my office, I write down a list of jobs I should apply for on a yellow legal pad: dishwasher, car wash attendant, etc.
In the middle of figuring out my strategy for filling out employment applications, UPS drops off the boxes I sent to my sister from DYA. Peter and I go through them; nothing special, really: notebooks with tattoo sketches, poems, letters. Cheap scribbles.
I peer into one box, full of stacks of love letters between Lila and me. There are some from Denise too. Two very decent women whose affection placed me at the right hand of God, the brother of Aztec kings. Because of them I’m standing toe to toe with Mayan gladiators.
Denise sent me books. Welsh mother, Russian-Jewish father, she was a no-mess-around person. She didn’t hesitate to share her disdain for the Israeli occupation/oppression of Palestine. Until we wrote each other, I had never heard of Palestine nor Israelis killing Palestinian civilians, nor Nazi concentration camps, nor politics in general. I’d send Denise a few things I wrote—not even poems really—just half pages of a diary or a journal, excerpts or pieces of a letter I was writing. She’d direct me to a book to read, historical figures, slave writing, white supremacy killers . . . stuff I needed to know in order to think and understand the sources of the issues I faced in DYA.
Unlike with Lila, Denise and I never once trekked into erotic territory. Our correspondence was all about books, learning and plans to get my GED. I was amazed by the way she wrote, making her spirit rise from between the words, making a sentence kind of levitate off the page. Reading her words, I could feel her very close to me.
The words she wrote me also had wings and hands. Often I was down on one knee in an attitude of surrender: to give up my attempt at the straight life, instead live the criminal life, be done with trying to better myself. I was fooling myself. I didn’t have the self-esteem or courage to become a better man. But no, her words took me by my arms, raised me up on my feet, shook the dust off my clothing and pointed to the road ahead. She pushed me forward, writing in that special way of hers: “The journey’s just begun, Orlando. You must continue.” With each of her letters and postcards, I felt my life get clearer in meaning, in possibilities.
Denise spent half her time in Mexico, in Oaxaca. The cold was getting to be too much for her to bear in Somerville, Massachusetts. She felt restless, doubled her anti-war efforts: writing, giving speeches, marching against Johnson, Nixon, eventually the Reagan administration. She shifted her poetry from pastoral lyricism to defiant politics. Once she read in Central Park, her eloquence of opposition tolling like a bell at dawn, drawing millions of converts to the religion of activism. The example of how she lived her life and the poems she wrote resurrected me. I was a Chicano Lazarus got up, strutting down the road.
Her poems brought back memories, painted vivid pictures, transforming my cell into a buria
l site in El Salvador she had visited or a lavish palace where billionaire Saudis bought young girls for their pleasure. I found myself trying to mimic her, writing free-verse protest poems—they honestly were not very good.
Her envelopes bulged with images of farmers, peasants massacred by soldiers. She made me lean toward taking a civic role, that of witness, of resistance. I found myself breaking up fights, telling kids not to talk about “Blacks and Mexicans” in a racist way, urging my homies to read books, get their GEDs. My heart felt like every atom had been split. No longer could I just dream about making money or partying, no longer could I simply observe life or trust the appearance of things. I learned to question authority. Every alphabet carried the presence of God. I was no longer the child sounding my vowels in a classroom with a nun at the orphanage. Now, the words attached themselves to a woman’s tears, a child’s hunger, a white man raping a brown woman (my sister and cousins).
Somehow, she understood the prisoner’s plight. How she was able to go from her reality, her world—dining with world-renowned poets, speaking at the United Nations on behalf of oppressed peoples—into my world with such compassion was beyond me. Somehow, that dark-haired, browneyed, Essex-born Welsh poet, teaching a yearly semester at Stanford, recognized in me a common heart capable of appreciating the suffering of others and expressing it.
She inspired me to be fierce. My letters became my lyrical storm surges. I could feel my voice, with pride, a renewed sense of solitary purpose, soaring above the indifferent, complacent kids and guards all around me. While others skedaddled from the fight to the sidelines, never standing up for human rights or protesting a wrongfully accused kid, she rushed out to engage the enemy. But still, because so many had promised to do things for me before, I did not believe her when she wrote me promising to be there for me when I was released.
It’s a blustery, cold Autumn afternoon. I’m in my cranny office, reading aloud to Peter about how to make fishing flies. The red wall-phone with the long extension cord rings in the other room. Lila answers it. Peter and I get ready and take off. By day’s end, we’ve caught six bigmouth bass, each around twelve to fifteen inches.
As we walk back, I tell Peter, “Hey, I started some ideas about a poem I’m writing for you.”
“Really?”
“It’s still in my head.”
“Yessss! Let me hear one line. Please!”
“Okay, here goes. This is only the beginning, but here: ‘There was a little boy named Peter, who, when it came to fish, was a real eater. But when it came to beans, he was a real farter!’”
Peter laughs, repeats it until he memorizes it to tell his friends at school.
“Come by tomorrow, we’ll look for a new pond,” I say.
“Okay.”
As he heads for his grandpa’s house, I carry our fish to the pump house, where I scale and fillet them for cooking later. I have to admit that despite my lack of employment and my general unease with doing nothing but depending on Lila for everything, I am enjoying a blissful succession of days.
When she comes home from her job at the Durham newspaper, where she’s a columnist and editor, I take her on long walks. That’s followed by an a hour or so in bed reading to her. Sometimes, when it’s warm out, she takes the day off and we picnic in a forest clearing where spring waters trickle over stones and fern. On weekends, we pack a bottle of wine and fried chicken and drive to artist colonies. Wild-haired men and supple-bodied women work clay and teach me how to make yogurt. We go to movies, museums and bookstores, linger on the back steps in silence, gazing at the dusk until the stars come out.
Our affection has taken a soft turn, gradually moved from slam-dunk sex to soup-spoon sips: smoky cuddles, wispy caresses, sucking, nibbling, fingertips touching, earlobe nipping and napping to classical music in the late afternoon.
One night when we’re in bed reading, she places her book open on her breasts and says, “You love me less, don’t you?”
“I don’t think so. Just watching you walk around the house in your panties gets the juices running in me.”
“But why don’t you make love to me? You know, the way you used to? Is it that night, the whips?”
“I don’t know . . . I mean, not really . . . but it gave me a spin. Did you know your panties smell like buttered toast and cinnamon? I smelled them. . . .” I blush.
“Orlando, you smell my panties?”
“I’m not a pervert.”
“No, there’s nothing wrong with that. You can smell my panties anytime you want. When you’re sleeping,” she goes on, “I sniff your arms, your chest, your face. You have a wild, smoky scent. It reaches down into my soul and I want to go wild on you.”
“Why did you choose me, a guy ten years younger? I mean, you could have anyone. It wasn’t mercy or pity, was it, or some kind of weird thing with bad boys?”
“Well, I do have a soft spot for bad boys . . . but I don’t care about the age difference. It’s stupid. If you like someone, what the hell does age have to do with it?”
“So what was it?”
“I didn’t know our letters would go the way they did. It was something you needed. You kept toying with the idea, hinting that you loved me . . . wanting to talk dirty. I helped you admit it when you were too scared to. Anyway, I got your name and address from an art newsletter that said incarcerated kids needed pen pals, so they gave me yours . . . and here we are.”
“But why did you go for me?”
“Actually, I wanted to encourage you to believe in yourself, to know that there are kind people out here. I was willing to help you, but you turned that desire of mine into a desire, for me to tell you how much I wanted you, sexually. You, my sweet man, sexualized our friendship. That’s okay . . . you needed it. But it was, is your innocence, your imagination that really attracted me, turned me on. In fact. . . . Your letters were beautiful . . . made me believe in love again. Healed my heart.”
“I don’t know what got a hold of me. I went crazy with sex, masturbating every night after I read your letters, imagining us messing around in every position . . . never had a woman that let me do that, you know, talk about it open like that . . . and it just went. . .”
“I was amused when you first moved in. It was chilly outside, but you wouldn’t adjust the thermostat. If a window was left open, you left it open . . . or during the day when a light was left on, dishes in the sink, you didn’t close the window or turn off the light or wash a dish. You left everything like it was, almost as if you didn’t know how to do things. It was very odd. Then I realized you were not used to making decisions . . . that was done for you for years.”
My outdoors routine gets better after Lila buys me a fishing vest, tackle box with all kinds of cool fishing bait and a rod. I get up and read, write letters to my brother and sister or to a couple of friends in DYA, then make a Spam sandwich, read, nap and fish the rest of the day. I especially enjoy exploring the forest, going for miles through thick brush to discover a beautiful hidden pond. I stand there all day tossing out my bait, looking at the water. Sometimes until the moon comes out.
Doing this heals something in me. It is a good time. I drift emotionally into a zone where all my worries are set aside. Then one day, my fear of impending violence returns, grips me in its bitter throes. Just after I return from a run, I find a community newspaper on the doorstep. A note is attached:
We don’t take to Mexicans mixing with
our white women—KKK.
I ask Lila what these White nationalists are capable of, but she dismisses them as ignorant meth heads.
“But are they violent? Will they come in the middle of the night, to burn us out? I’ve seen that kind of stuff in those movies with Sidney Poitier.”
“If they try, they’re dead. Frog King’s reputation is fierce enough to keep them from acting stupid. If they had their way, they’d ban you from sharing the air they think they own, much less just living with me and walking the country they walk.”
“They’ve gotta do better than throwing that rag on the doorstep to make us break up.”
“DYA had skinheads, but we kept them in line . . . they never caused problems, except among themselves. They were crazy, had no code, no honor, did anything for money or drugs . . . killed their own brothers.
“My friend Sickle was cool, though. He acted like he hated us Chicanos. I asked him why one day, and he said that his White people were going extinct, they needed to strike back at us, take back what was theirs. We all laughed at him in his funky Star Wars psycho, but he wasn’t as paranoid as some of the others.”
A couple days later, on a warm sunny morning, I pick up the grocery list and money Lila has left on the table and jog down to Green Mill grocery store. When I pull up in front panting, resting hands on my knees to catch my breath, there’s a bunch of guys in plaid jackets, feed-store caps and hillbilly overalls. Two of them are on their knees, one leaning his weight on the back of a turtle, hands firmly planted on its shell. The other guy has a pair of vise grips on the turtle’s beak and he leans back pulling as hard as he can to stretch the turtle’s neck out. Another man above him swings a hand ax down; it can’t cut through the turtle’s neck. It keeps bouncing off, and they continue to struggle, holding the turtle in place while the man with the ax continues to swing.
I do all I can not to intervene, which will lead to getting my ass kicked or going back inside. I just watch, wanting to tell them to leave the turtle alone. I now put a face to the type of man who would throw a KKK rag on my doorstep—just this type. I imagine grabbing one of them, showing him how it feels to have someone swing an ax on his neck. Instead I stand with growing contempt.
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