by Eli Godbolt
And if I close my eyes, Nels, would I be able to imitate those same brush strokes in my own life?
“Eli, you tell one now.”
A joke. They want me to tell a story that will make their pupils light up and explode supernova large. But I don’t know how. I don’t know how to turn the valve and open that part of me. Let black ink out of my lungs and let chandelier light in.
But Nels is there, looking at me with his cheeks that are red, red, rosy red.
And a story comes. An image. It is faint, but it is there. Solid like a iridescent-blue marble.
“Do you remember last summer, Nels? When Ryan’s rooster needed to be put down? Squawking at god-awful hours and pecking the hens all to pieces?”
The chandelier dust shimmers golden in the evening.
“And Donnie, Donnie has the brilliant idea of giving the rooster an honorable death. Remember that? Comes out of the bedroom carrying that huge samurai sword that Ryan bought at the mall for forty dollars?”
And as I tell the story I’m brought back there. The waning August sunlight playing on the top of Donnie’s head. Glinting, I’m telling you. Donnie with the curved sword that was cheaply made and sounded like tin cans when you accidentally knocked it on the wall.
“He has this rooster, this annoying pile of feathers, by the claws. I swear to God, he was more scared of that rooster than anything. And he takes the sword and…well…he flinches. Panicks. Lets go of the rooster and screams.”
And there is Donnie, running, sweating, huffing, katana sword bobbing up and down as he pumps his arms and is chased around the yard by an angry rooster. All feathers and clucking and he’s gonna get me, you fucking jerks! Stop laughing!
My face stretches there at Nels table. Not wide and red and chortling. His family is exploding again, and I am glad. Even if my face cannot stretch rubbery and be reddened with laughter, it is enough.
Ellie at the Football Game
You can’t help but look at her when the Friday-lights pour white-washed on her shoulders.
Ellie is a cheerleader. I tried to discourage it last year, when she was a freshman and Bobby O’Shaye was a senior. Told her it wasn’t the best idea. Not pleading. Nothing that desperate. But she knew why I wasn’t thrilled.
He was there for every game. Camouflaged baseball hat and the smile that was stained by cigarette smoke and weak coffee doctored with sugar.
And then he graduated.
But he still comes. Every damn game. Looking at her in that way that digs under my skin.
I hate him. Hate the way he sweats. Hate the way he wrings his hands and thumbs the left side of his nose. Hate the air around his body. Hate that he has a piece of my sister that he takes around with him at all times. That he can conjure up her face and be there with her in his mind. I don’t hate many things in this world, but I’ll tell you what; I hate the hell out of Bobby O’Shaye.
The November air bites and bites like it is ravenous for warm skin. It can’t get enough of it. The air soaks through my fleece pullover and nips. Ellie wears her woolly mittens and claps and kicks and is so damn brilliant you almost have to squint when you look straight at her.
She is not like the cheerleader you picture when you close your eyes. Different. Skewed in a way that is mysterious. A confidence in her that makes my spine stretch straight. Intelligence and sugar-Saturdays and late nights staying up reciting dumb movie lines to each other. But Bobby doesn’t see all that.
No. Bobby just sits and stares and chews his tobacco. Spits right on the concrete. Drinks his water bottle that I’m sure is filled with vodka. Slurs something to his friend, squints at the solar-flare lights hovering above the field like UFOs.
I want him to die.
And even as the thought crosses my mind, I feel the steam-rush of red in my cheeks. Embarrassment. All these people are flashing hot in my skull, looking at me disapprovingly. Billy Tanner and Scotty Charleston and Zack Tallman. All of them. All looking straight at me and shaking their heads because they know. They know how easy it is to die in a small town.
Geometry
Yumi Makinato is in my geometry class and has a smile that is otherworldly. Her English is fractured. A broken-winged bird of paradise that is always tripping clumsy. Cloth words that summersault off the tongue.
I have conversations with her that are on the brink of sign language. She asks, “How to proof this? Angle sigh angle? Yes?” Her mouth is painted on. Precise. I admire her, but from a distance. As if I’m looking at a canvas with oil streaks and impossible sunsets from behind a crushed red velvet rope.
She can’t understand me. I talk about the interior angles of parallel lines while her face is nodding but not receiving. She is back in Kyoto. Back where her parents have a garden that is balanced and sounds like breathing. Back where she can ask someone what they are doing for the weekend and flare up excited and say that she wants to go too.
“Yumi, do you like movies?” I ask as we finish a proof that serves no other purpose but as a catalyst for our conversation.
“Movie? Oh yes. Berry much.” She smiles, happy to cling to some kind of universal.
My mouth wants to move, but I have a cement jaw. She is lovely and meticulous in the way that she carries herself. Pink highlighter all over textbook pages and notes scrawled by a hand that makes all strokes identical. Exact and sweet and innocent.
I don’t know those things. I am a kid who has grown used to crushed velvet ropes and paintings that stir up pangs of longing in the chest.
She doesn’t know that. She knows manicured gardens and waterfalls that speak like distant dreams. And how it must be all the more painful to think on those things while she’s here for a year, in a town that smells stagnant.
“You like movie, Eli? What you like?”
I don’t have to think hard. “Funny movies, Yumi. Movies that make me laugh.”
“Oh,” she says excitedly, “I go to funny movie Saturday. Host sister. She take me.”
I would like to tell a different story right here. About how Yumi looks at me, right at me. Through me. X-ray eyes that burrow right into my chest and see how pruned up my heart is. And she feels something then. Not pity. Just an understanding. Sees it and sucks her breath in a little bit and then asks in her broken English, “You come? You come too, Eli?” She is nervous and lets her precise-painted mouth crack wide into a grin. Beautiful and golden-warm and flesh that you can touch and not oil streaks on canvas from ten yards away behind a soft, spongy rope.
It could never be that way. We smile at each other as we pack up our papers. I tell her to have fun this weekend and she nods in her slight and polite way. Riley shakes his head at me from the corner of the room and does not understand. Does not understand that Yumi is delicate and lovely and only here for a year. How I don’t want to smudge gray oil all over her delicate surface.
Riley will say that I’m full of shit, and maybe he’s right.
Or maybe I will go to the movies this weekend and try to throw back my head and laugh like Nels and search for Yumi’s hand that is thin and must feel beautiful like an equilateral triangle.
Chemistry
Eddie Kludtz. Thinning hair and chin that is straight like old-fashioned movies. He sways a little and fumbles around for change in his pocket as he tries hard to look Mary the Barista in the eye.
“I love you Mary. Every day. Every day that I see you and come in here to drink my caramel café latte. When I see you make it, I love you. When I hand you my two dollars that is wrinkled like my Grandfather’s forehead, I love you.”
He says these things with his eyes. I am across the room and stirring my tea which swirls and reminds me of the Milky Way, but I can see the electricity crackle blue in his fingertips.
And Eddie is right there. Slight brush of skin as the change is exchanged and the room muffles down to cotton-ball sounds.
In the low light of the afternoon with the paint on the window
s that shouts all neon and bold, with the floor that is gouged and the tea kettles that screech high, with the tables that have moisture rings and notches that people trace absentmindedly with their fingers, in the midst of all this stands Eddie who palms the back of his head with his right hand and says thanks Mary in a voice that doesn’t betray the fury and tumult in his stomach.
Because he is like me, after all. A great stained counter separating him from the rest of his life.
Eddie Kludtz sits and sips thoughtfully. Smiles at Mary and winces almost invisibly as his stomach twists in that familiar way. It is, after all, why he comes here every day.
Powder
I don’t want to tell this story. Let me start by saying that.
I don’t want you to see the river. The pillowcase that is soaked through and through and tumbles against great clumps of shale and goes around and around like a washing machine. I don’t want you to see the lone hand that juts through the ripped cotton and reaches out fingertips to a heaven that has turned away for a few dark minutes.
Chief O’Shaye is silhouetted by the dying afternoon light that bleeds in through single-paned storm windows. We are in his office at the police station because I vehemently refuse to set foot in his house.
He is a silent lump of marbled flesh. Shut down because the memory is too recent and too raw and too close. Because, you see, Chief O’Shaye’s niece is the reason I am here. His own blood morphed into something too monstrous to even contemplate.
Twin babies. Two weeks old. Stuffed in a pillowcase that was tied up at the top. Just cloth with floral patterns and limbs that beat and lungs that hiccough-cried and the shock of the January river. Unforgiving water. Chilled by the arctic wind snaking its way out of the Frasier Valley.
“What do you want from me, Eli? An explanation?”
“No, sir.”
“Then what?” O’Shaye’s eyes are dark and distant and narrowed. He feels cornered, and I guess I can understand why.
“Well, what more can I say than what you know? Why are you making this film, anyway? What’s your angle?”
“My angle, sir?”
His frown is constant. Set solid in his flesh. He is a scrapper of a dog, backed into a corner. The hair on his spine is raised, all frizzled and snarling.
“Your angle, Eli. What are you getting out of this?”
I have to think for a minute. Have to sit and breathe and be quiet so I can get this just right. I am always like this: quiet to a point of people perceiving disinterest. But it’s not that. I’m thinking, because I don’t want to have something stupid spew from my lips. Awkward speak that tumbles through the air like a crippled shooting star.
“I’m not getting anything out of this, Mr. O’Shaye. It’s not for me.”
He is confused. Suspicious. Shrinks his lips and looks away at the deepening November light. A softness comes to his face right then, and it is difficult for me to pinpoint exactly where it is coming from. In the silence that is tangible and opaque around us both, I begin to construct. Maybe he is sitting there whispering silently to himself, little lilting shadows in his brain. It will be Thanksgiving soon, he thinks to himself. Chief O’Shaye wets his lips and sighs audibly. He closes his eyes and can see the dinner that steams and the smells and the love that all waft in his nose.
Or maybe he thinks on his son. Bobby and his late nights and buttoned flannel shirts that smell like deep fried food and sour beer. How it is that he could love and loathe someone simultaneously.
Or maybe his mind is shooting back to being a boy. The modest house that sat like a snag-tooth at the base of the Millbury foothills. Riddleridge creek that chortled in his backyard and what it felt like to be barefoot on river-rock. A passing sigh. A temporary and fleeting Eden.
Or maybe his mind is quiet. Maybe he needs to sit and breathe. Just so he can find the words that are meant to come out at this precise moment. Destiny-words and the November light that cups everything like ashy palms.
“Mr. O’Shaye, have you ever felt compelled to do something just because it felt like the right thing to do?”
He does not look at me. Eyes plastered solid to the window. But his lips move.
“Yes. Yes, Eli, I have.”
“That’s what this is, ok? I can’t fully explain why I’m doing it, because I don’t rightly know. I keep seeing Scotty on the riverbed. I keep hearing the scrape of the rocks. It’s echoing in the back of my head, you know?”
I pause, and look out the window. We are quiet together, and we are not uncomfortable.
“You are trying to make sense of death.” He says. It is not a question. Not in the least.
“I suppose.” I wring my hands gently, a habit my sister hates. Says it dries them out. “But…”
“But what?” Chief O’Shaye looks at me and is searching for something. I don’t know what, but his body is tense.
“But that’s not the only reason. I think…I think I don’t want to forget. I don’t want anyone to forget.”
“Forget what?”
I try to stick the words together that are lumped in my throat. I want it to be profound and beautiful, because so few things are in a small town. I want my words to burn like a flare. Flare-words. Yes.
“I don’t want people to forget that there are things that are delicate. And that we don’t ever appreciate just how beautiful they make our lives until they are gone.”
Silence again.
And then the hum of the copy machine in the next room and the receptionist typing frenetic on her keyboard and the front door bell jangling as Mrs. Kirkpatrick ambles in to complain, once again, that her neighbor’s dog is shitting in her yard and how she’ll shoot the damn thing in the head the next time it happens. Life all large and boisterous is breathing in the next room.
A strange thing happens. Chief O’Shaye looks up at me and sighs and nods his head. Because he understands or because he is weary and wants to head home soon or because there is something in my face that pulls the words slow and methodical out of him.
“Eli, you don’t have to make sense of everything. Do you understand? This horribleness that my niece Karen did…I don’t understand it. I don’t want to. Do you get it? Because if I understood it, then somewhere in my mind I would be saying, ‘Ok, I get why she did it’. I don’t get it, and I don’t ever want to. There’s a lot of things in life that we’re not supposed to understand. And to be there – to get the call that morning from a hysterical Mr. Porter who was jogging alongside the riverbed – I mean, can you imagine?”
I don’t want to. And even as my mind goes there I am fighting it. So hard. But I can’t stop myself. My mind is shooting off to that morning and I am screaming at it to stop.
Mr. Porter is a lonely man with a barrel-drum stomach. Ex-military. Bomb squad. Steel nerves and even demeanor, because it had to be that way. Because the shakes were never an option. Divorced and forty-five with a son in college and always putting on the strong face so that no one would worry about him.
He is crouching by the water’s edge, rocking on his heels. Reaching for blue-skinned babies and recoiling his hand each time. Wanting to cradle the tiny hands in his because they remind him of the ones he never gets to hold enough. He is a steel wall that is collapsing with great grinding, screeching, tearing sounds. Wail-screams and tensed abdominal muscles and sucking in the frosty early March air.
Chief O’Shaye is right. I don’t want to understand it. Even as I am sitting across from him and hear the confessional timbre in his voice, I can hear the hysterical gasps of a weak strong-man. And it tears me down the middle.
Mr. Porter. Chief O’Shaye. They understand all too well about the delicate things that get ground down to powder.
Ellie and the Ocean
The water at Boundary Bay looks like frothed up clay, but Ellie doesn’t care.
Her feet dangle, dangle off the pier that has knots and splinters and split-ends and has been soaked by salt and showers and is faded becau
se it has been crackle-baked by the elusive Washington sun.
Bare feet in November.
She is slightly skewed, remember? I never really understood it when I was younger. Could never skate my finger over the tissue-thin pages of a dictionary and point to a definition that could wrap itself around her frame. It frustrated me then, but I love it now.
My sister who is strange and beautiful. My sister who cries at sunrises and sleeping cats and breezes that smell like summer and movies that are silly but romantic and fantastical. My sister who is my mother’s strength-beauty and my father’s humor.
My sister who sits on the pier at Boundary Bay, barefoot in the air that holds the promises of winter.
Can you see her there? The gray mist of the water swirling about in her hair. The gulls that circle lazy overhead and screech long and melancholy because they seem to understand the sadness that comes about in Washington when the winter drags and the sun goes away for months at a time behind the soup-clouds. The water that is chopped about by brittle winds and sounds like television static.
I want you to see her. I want you to understand why it is that every time, every time her hand stretches out for mine, I take it. Clasped all firm and secure in my palm that is warm despite the weather.
She is porcelain-strong. Simply intricate. And how could I not sit down next to her and let my stomach untangle? How could I do anything except cradle her hand and let the cold November air bite at my bare feet that dangle, dangle alongside hers?
Trust
I am awake at 2:15 in the black-tar night when I get the call from Riley.
His voice is a falsetto that mixes with gasps and throat catches and oh God I can almost hear his heart thumping through the receiver. “Nels, Nels, Jesus Christ Eli he wrapped his truck, his goddamn truck around a telephone pole just outside my house. I just called 911 and they said soon they’ll be here, but Oh Christ they said not to touch him or anything and Eli they’re not here yet, they’re not here.”