Setting Free the Kites

by Alex George

  “Who is this?”

  “Lewis? This is Robert Carter.”

  “Robert! How are you?”

  “Uh, okay, I guess,” I said. “Although I had a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Do you have a record player?”

  “Sure I do,” said Lewis. “I even have some records to play on it. Do you want to stop by sometime for a listen? You missing all that bebop from last summer?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I was wondering if I could bring some records of my own.”

  There was a pause. “What kind of records?” asked Lewis.

  “They used to belong to my brother,” I said, carefully avoiding the question. “And now they’re mine. Only I’m not allowed to play them in the house anymore. So I was wondering if I could listen to them at your place.”

  “You should come over,” said Lewis.

  —

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON Nathan and I walked to Lewis’s house after school. He lived in a small single-story house on the west side of town. We walked up the narrow path that led to his front door and rang the bell. When the door opened, Lewis stood there in a pair of corduroy trousers, a faded plaid shirt, and an immense cardigan with leather patches on the elbows.

  Lewis clapped me fondly on the back. “It’s good to see you, Robert,” he said. “And you must be Nathan.” Lewis shook Nathan’s hand. Nathan’s eyes grew big as he peered down at Lewis’s toe. An old black Labrador wandered over. The fur around the dog’s mouth was mostly white, and his pale brown eyes were fogged by the milky sheath of old age. He blinked up at me and wagged his tail.

  “This is Dizzy,” said Lewis. “As in Gillespie.” He saw my blank face. “Trumpet player?” I shook my head. Lewis sighed. “You had a whole summer of jazz, Robert, and you got nothing to show for it. Between them Diz and Bird pretty much invented bebop,” he told us. He paused. “I had a Bird, too, but he died. Diz here is getting along, too. He doesn’t see too good.”

  Nathan finally spoke. “You had a dog called Bird?”

  “Yes I did,” said Lewis. “You ever heard of Mr. Charles Parker, Nathan?” he asked. “The greatest saxophonist that ever lived?”

  “Nope,” said Nathan cheerfully.

  “No,” muttered Lewis. “I didn’t think so. Well, come on in.” There was a large couch in the middle of the living room. It looked worn and faded, gently hillocked by years of use. Dizzy clambered up and curled himself against one of the armrests. He closed his eyes and let out a small sigh. “Did you bring your records?” asked Lewis.

  I reached into my backpack and handed him the albums I’d brought. He fanned them out in his enormous hands as if they were playing cards. He held up the cover of Back in the USA by MC5.

  “Are those people men or women?” he asked.

  “Men,” I said.

  “Huh,” said Lewis. He handed the album back to me and led me over to the record player. “All right, then,” he said. “Let’s have a listen.”

  I took the record out of its sleeve and placed it on the turntable. A few seconds later came the first notes of the opening track, a bright and raucous cover version of “Tutti-Frutti.” It was much quieter than we were used to, but it seemed rude to turn the volume up. The three of us sat on the old couch and listened to the music. Lewis thoughtfully scratched the grizzled fur beneath Dizzy’s chin. After a few minutes he asked, “How long does this go on for?”

  “The whole album? Maybe half an hour,” I said.

  Lewis stood up. “I think I’ll see you in about half an hour, then,” he said.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “I just remembered, the dog needs his walk.” Lewis tapped the side of his head. “And my ears have started to bleed. Oh, and my brain is rotting, too. But you boys go ahead and enjoy yourselves.”

  With a backward wave Lewis left the room, his dog trotting behind him. We heard him in the hallway, pulling on his boots and coat. “Come on, Diz,” he said, “let’s go sing ourselves some real tunes.”

  The front door opened and then closed again. Nathan and I looked at each other.

  “Now what?” I said.

  Nathan walked over to the stereo and turned up the volume.

  —

  I’D NEVER LOVED LIAM’S music while he was alive, but now it offered me a way back to him. I was greedy for every unpolished note, each raw crash of the cymbals and messy guitar chord. As the music poured into Lewis’s living room I thought of my brother rocking back and forth in his wheelchair. Those familiar three-chord frenzies filled up a hole inside me. Rather than being submerged by my usual sense of loss, I found myself grateful that I had such a happy image to remember him by.

  When the record finished we sat in silence. A few moments later I heard the front door open, and then Dizzy padded back into the room and took up his old post on the couch. “Is it safe?” called Lewis from the hallway. I wondered guiltily if he had been standing outside, waiting for the music to stop.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “The coast is clear.”

  Lewis reappeared. “You didn’t put on another record?” he asked.

  “One was enough.” I pointed at the albums I’d brought. “Can I leave those here?” I asked. “And is it all right if I bring more next time?”

  “You have more?” Lewis looked appalled.

  “We don’t have to listen to them,” I said, hurt.

  “Tell you what,” said Lewis. “For every album of yours that we play, I get to play you one of mine.”

  “Would that be Dizzy and Bird?” asked Nathan.

  “Oh yes,” said Lewis, beaming.

  “He made me listen to that stuff all last summer,” I warned Nathan.

  “Come on, Robert,” said Nathan. “I want to hear Charlie Parker play.” He grinned. “I want to hear Bird take flight.”

  “We’re going to have ourselves a barrelful of fun,” said Lewis, rubbing his hands together.

  The thought of having to suffer through yet more saxophone solos dimmed my enthusiasm for future trips to Lewis’s house, but it was a price I was willing to pay.

  “How’s your father doing, Robert?” asked Lewis.

  “He seems sad. But he keeps it to himself.”

  Lewis nodded. “I wouldn’t expect anything else from a good Mainer like him. He’ll bottle it all up and soldier on. Don’t know that it’s healthy, but it’s what we do.”

  “Maybe things will get better once the season starts,” I said hopefully.

  “Maybe so,” said Lewis. “Are you looking forward to the summer?”

  “As long as you won’t make me listen to any more jazz,” I said.

  Lewis looked at me. “We won’t be working together this year, Robert,” he said.

  “What? Why not?”

  “It’s time for you to learn new things. You need to know everything about the place, work each job. Your father’s grooming you for greatness, you know.”

  “I don’t want greatness,” I said. “I want to work with you.”

  “Oh, I think I’ve taught you all I can.”

  We both knew this wasn’t true. “What’s he going to have me do?” I asked. I glanced at Nathan. “Not the kitchen,” I whispered.

  “No, not the kitchen,” said Lewis. “The Ferris wheel.”

  “Really?”

  Lewis nodded. “It’s what we in the trade call a signature attraction.”

  “I suppose I’d better start practicing my English accent,” I said.

  “No more a pixie,” sighed Lewis.

  “What about me?” asked Nathan.

  “You, Nathan,” said Lewis, “are going to be the park mascot.”

  “The dragon?” Nathan was unable to hide his delight. He turned to me. “How did your dad know I wanted that job?”

  “Because
you told him about a million times,” I said, grinning.

  “I’m sure you’ll be a fine dragon,” said Lewis.

  Nathan looked pleased. “I can go wherever I like in the dragon suit, right?”

  Lewis nodded. “Where the crowds are, you follow.”

  “This is going to change everything,” said Nathan.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Faye spent all last summer with her back to me while I worked the grill. At school I only ever see her for a few seconds at a time. But in the dragon suit I’ll be able to go and see her whenever I want.” He grinned. “And you know what’s best of all?”

  “What?” I said grumpily. I already knew that I wouldn’t hear about anything else until Memorial Day.

  “What’s best of all,” he said, “is that she’ll never know that I’m watching her. She won’t see me at all. She’ll just see the dragon.”

  Lewis snorted. “Being able to look at this girl all day won’t help you much if she doesn’t know it’s you in there,” he said.

  “I don’t want her to know it’s me,” said Nathan.

  Lewis frowned. “But if you’re keen on this girl, you need to—”

  “You know, Nathan has a plan, and he’s going to stick to it,” I interrupted. I didn’t want Lewis putting suicidal ideas into his head. I looked at Nathan. “Right?”

  “Right,” he said.

  I sat back, satisfied. Nathan had no business talking to a girl like Faye. No good could ever come of it. The longer he stayed hidden inside the dragon costume, the better.

  NINETEEN

  For the rest of that spring, Nathan and I returned to Lewis’s house once a week. Each time I brought another of Liam’s records. Every visit followed the same routine. I would put on the record I’d brought; after the first track, Lewis would stand up and whistle at Dizzy, and the two of them would escape for a walk, leaving Nathan and me to turn up the volume as loud as we liked. When Lewis returned, he would bend down in front of his record collection and trace his fingers along the spines of the cardboard sleeves until he found what he was looking for. Each visit we listened to a different musician. Clifford Brown, Max Roach, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Sonny Stitt—to my dismay, there were far more than just Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker to contend with.

  The music Lewis played made no sense to me, but Nathan was listening carefully. He read the liner notes on the backs of the record sleeves—long, abstruse essays full of strange hipster jive. I scoffed at these. What sort of music, I demanded, needs all those words to explain itself? At least the Ramones could say what they needed to say in three minutes, with no further elaboration necessary.

  Even I had to admit that the jazz albums looked more elegant than Liam’s records. They had abstract designs in muted colors, hip winks to those in the know. The photographs of the musicians were monochrome studies of cool. Men with saxophones slung low around their necks stared away from the camera, calm and remote. As the music played, Lewis showed us old programs he had saved from jazz clubs on Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan, from just after the war—Jimmy Ryan’s, the Three Deuces, the Onyx. He had seen many of the legends in their heyday, he said, and he told us stories of those long-ago New York nights. Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot, quitting his post at the piano to dance in front of the audience while the band played on. Dexter Gordon, strung out on heroin, hustling up to the bar between sets and hitting up star-struck customers for drinks. Kenny Clarke, hungrily eyeing the passing waitresses from behind his drum kit. Nathan listened to these tales, rapt. Just as I had sat unnoticed on Liam’s bed for evenings on end, now Lewis and Nathan forgot I was there.

  —

  IT WAS SOMETIME DURING that spring that Nathan began to smoke. We were walking out of school one afternoon when he produced a pack of Winstons from his pocket. I watched in astonishment as he struck a match.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “Where did you get those?”

  Nathan blew smoke into the air. “My mom buys cigarettes by the crate. She won’t notice if a few disappear.” He took another puff.

  “Oh, I get it,” I said. “The jazz musicians.”

  Nathan looked at me. “What about them?”

  “They all smoke. Those photos.”

  “You think I started smoking because of those guys?”

  “Well, didn’t you?”

  “Robert,” said Nathan, waving his cigarette at me. “This is work.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m going to be a dragon, right? And you know what they say. There’s no smoke without fire.”

  I frowned. “So?”

  “So I’m going to blow smoke out of the dragon’s nostrils.”

  “Tell me you’re joking,” I said.

  “It would be kind of a neat effect, don’t you think? Realistic.”

  “Nathan, you’re going to be walking around in a crummy dragon costume made of fur. Nobody’s going to think you’re real.”

  He pursed his lips and exhaled a long, thin plume of smoke. “That was a better one,” he said. “More dragonlike.”

  Of course, it wasn’t Nathan’s way to go at things in any mode other than full tilt. He began to experiment with different exhalation techniques. He was particularly delighted when he worked out how to blow smoke out of his nose—just like a real dragon, he told me jubilantly. (I let that one go.) As the weeks passed, he began to smoke with a roguish panache, carelessly flicking ash behind him as he walked and inhaling lungfuls of smoke with relish. He no longer looked apprehensive when he pulled the pack of cigarettes from his pocket. Instead I saw a needful glint in his eye. He became restless in class toward the end of each school day. He couldn’t get out of the gates fast enough to light up. His fumbling hands betrayed his craving. By April Nathan had become as much of an addict as his mother.

  —

  OUR HOME HAD BECOME a museum of unwanted memories. My brother lived on in the tiniest nooks and crannies; he lingered in the shadows. Every time I walked into a room, I couldn’t escape the sensation that his wheelchair had rolled out just moments before. I was caught in a macabre game of hide-and-go-seek, hunting a ghostly quarry I could never catch. Liam was everywhere, yet always remained tantalizingly out of reach.

  Then, a few weeks after Easter, the mailbox began to fill with responses to the college applications that Liam had sent off the previous fall. My parents had forgotten to tell the universities that he was dead. The heavy, grandly embossed envelopes sat in a pile on the kitchen counter. One morning when I came downstairs for breakfast my mother was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee in her hands. She had spread out the envelopes in front of her. I sat down.

  “Pick a card, any card,” she said.

  I pointed to a cream-colored envelope edged in gold. My mother pulled it out of the stack. I did not recognize the name of the school. The return address was somewhere in California. I couldn’t imagine anything being further away.

  “Look at them all, Robert,” she sighed. She held the envelope I’d chosen up to the light. “I wonder what this one says. Is it a yes or a no? What would Liam have studied? Who would he have met?”

  “You should open it,” I said.

  My mother shook her head. “There’s beauty in the unknown, Robert. Beauty and hope.” She tapped the envelope with her fingertips. “If I open this and discover that Liam was accepted, or won a scholarship, or something else wonderful—well.” She was silent for a moment. “Sometimes life can be a little more bearable if you don’t know all there is to know. I’m not sure if I have room inside me for any more regret. Not right now.” She smiled at me sadly. “All these different futures,” she said, “and Liam isn’t going to get to choose even one of them.”

  As the weeks passed, the stack of envelopes gr
ew. I would have hidden them away, tucked them out of sight, but my mother kept them in full view. Sometimes I saw her gaze drift toward them while she stirred a pot on the stove. Every day she could have opened those envelopes, and every day she chose to turn away from whatever information might be inside. Each act of denial was also an act of self-preservation. My mother was reasserting control over a life that had spiraled out of her clutches, and she was getting stronger every day.

  And then everything started to go wrong.

  TWENTY

  One afternoon in early May I arrived home from school and saw my father’s station wagon in the driveway. It was unusual for him to return from the park so early. I slipped my backpack off my shoulder and opened the front door, wondering what was going on. As I approached the kitchen I heard my mother speaking.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said.

  “Well, I’m not,” answered my father. “I’m not ashamed at all. Those things were piling up like a tombstone, Mary. It was morbid. It was another damn grave, right here in our kitchen.”

  “There was no need to throw them out.” My mother sounded disappointed rather than angry.

  “No, that’s exactly what was needed. I don’t want to be reminded that our son is dead every time I get a cup of coffee.”

  “It was just some envelopes.”

  “But they weren’t just envelopes. They were a reminder of all the things Liam won’t ever learn, of the future he won’t ever have. Every time I looked at those letters all I could think was, Well, that’s a terrific waste of postage. And anyway, you didn’t open a single one of them!”

  “I was going to. I just wasn’t ready. And now I can’t.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “Why would you want to know? This fall thousands of kids will go off on new adventures at those splendid educational establishments. They’ll read a bunch of books, make new friends, drink too much, sleep with unsuitable people, and have the time of their lives.” I heard my father’s voice catch. “But Liam won’t be one of them. And nothing that any of those letters say will change that.”