by Paul Guest
“Whose idea was this?” I asked miserably. “Who thought of this?”
Neither of my parents replied. I don’t think the idea was theirs, but they knew it would happen when we pulled off the interstate. Someone else, a friend of the family, a wildly misguided soul, someone with no gift of sense had devised it. All to welcome me back to my home and family and back to my life. I felt murderous, embarrassed, ready only to vanish.
When we turned at last into our driveway I could see our house. The sloping front lawn with a wild dogwood in its center and the backyard, fenced in, shadowed by the limbs of a large pecan tree. A ramp had been built, long and turning at right angles, rising until it reached our porch. A cement path led through the lawn, uphill to the ramp. All this was new. I’d enter and exit our home this way. Taught well the expense of everything my injury could ever touch, spilling ever outward, I knew it must have cost thousands, and my heart slumped in my chest. Some nights after my accident I would dream of sepia-tinted mushroom clouds. Seen in the old newsreels shown to us in school, to show what the end really would look like. I woke from those dreams startled, in a contentious sweat, no no no. Sitting there, imagining storms of fissure sprout around our house like weeds, I felt my heart slump in my chest. If I could be transparent, unseen, then I would not feel so bad.
People began streaming from the house and from inside the garage. They held signs above their heads and were applauding. People I knew from church, adults and their children, and relatives, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and friends from school I had not seen since before my accident, some close to me and some not. Some that had been at my accident. Adam. Jody wasn’t there and wouldn’t be in the future: I saw her once more, though she didn’t see me, years later, shortly before she died of cancer. Neighbors. Friends of family, who had tirelessly raised money and babysat and cooked, the sorts of things small communities are programmed to do when there is awful news. When there is a death.
Here I was, their tragic occasion, their almost death. They clapped in the growing dusk while my parents lifted me from the car seat and into the rented electric wheelchair. They shook their glittered signs at me, saying notice. Shouting praise Jesus and amen and weeping where they stood in the grass and I drove through them, nodding stiffly, making eye contact with no one, up the new ramp while everyone clapped all over again, as if there had been worry over the successful navigation of it all, clapping and clapping and clapping like a congregation of fools and for the first time since breaking my neck, I thought, I want to die.
chapter SEVEN
I rode the short bus, awful slang for a bus intended for children with special needs. Every morning, just past seven, the short bus lurched to a wheezing halt in the street, a frenetic suburban artery. Cars waited in long chains on either side as I was raised from the ground by a screaming hydraulic lift. When I had been belted in and my chair strapped by the driver, she rammed forward again, jolting all her passengers to the bone. I hated it. Hated the everyday exposure to the plain impatience of all the drivers who waited, sometimes querulously honking their horns. Hated the ensuing jostle, the careless velocity through every pothole and over each speed bump which had the temerity to appear in our path. And, though I was ashamed, a part of me hated the other passengers, who were blameless. Guilty only of their parents’ poverty, or the faulty replication of DNA, they greeted me with loud hellos, or wordless recognition, waving, clapping silently, laughing, turning to me to chat when the short bus began again. One girl, her voice all twang, who lived on a hill above a Church of God of Divine Revelation, always wore the same shirt. She always asked me the same question.
“Do you know who Ricky Van Shelton is?” she cooed. I didn’t. Her shirt showed me: he was mostly cowboy hat and serviceable pout, brooding with his guitar. A country singer, a knockoff of better, more authentic artists, but to her he was Elvis. Elvis reborn, I guess.
“I’ve never heard of him,” I said, trying to be honest. She suggested I listen to him sometime. “I might do that. Thank you.”
At first, this satisfied her, but only for a while. Soon, Ricky Van Shelton hardly mattered. And Elvis was a footnote. Older than me by a few years, she would sit in the rear row, to my left, and flutter until we reached school a few minutes away. I don’t know what was wrong with her, or what had happened to her, if she had been born impaired or, like me, in some way, injured, frozen in time. She was breathless, already sexual, though she was unaware. I stared ahead or at the roof of the short bus while we bounced about and she glowed.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” she began to ask me every morning. At first, uncomfortable, I said no, which again was the truth.
“I would be your girlfriend,” she said, so plainly that it hurt. Her eyes were large and dark and her hair a knotty, untended brown. “If you wanted me to be your girlfriend.”
That word was fraught for her. Girlfriend. However much she understood of herself, she knew that there could be more. She knew desire.
Finally, after weeks of her eyes, her sad entreaties, I began to tell her that I did have a girlfriend, one who was very sweet. The same grief always took her face and changed it, and when I lied to her I longed for what I said to be true.
“That’s OK,” she would say, turning to the windows. “I’d still be your girlfriend, if you wanted me someday.”
I had not wanted to return to school two days after my discharge from Shepherd, but I did. Two weeks, I’d asked for. Time enough to return home and make sense of living with my family again. Time enough to prepare myself for a new school, junior high, with new teachers and new students. It loomed large in my mind. But my parents insisted, and had already made plans for my enrollment. I didn’t struggle with it. There were no arguments. Despite my desire for two weeks’ respite, I knew it was the best thing I could do. November had come already. The air outside had begun to chill and become faintly brittle at night. The school year would soon be half over. Too late to salvage. I’d lose time, be held back, and that loss would be greater than the two weeks I wanted.
The junior high was old, built on a hill. Two stories but no elevator. Between classes, in rain, in sleet, I had to rush in a circuit around the campus, up a road, and back into the building. For two years I did this every day.
The school system provided a paraprofessional to write for and otherwise assist me: to help me at lunch and empty the catheter bag I wore around my calf, inside my jeans, when it filled up with urine. Her name was Louise. She was funny, outgoing, and had a gift for knowing when I needed her help and when to be transparent, to hang back, without inserting herself into my new life. It was only some years later that I realized how crucial that was, how lucky I was to work with someone like her.
I had harbored amorphous worries about my return to school. Beyond the early hormonal waves of fear which swamp every adolescent, when fitting in is everything, I fretted over what it would be like to enter class that first day, to be regarded by so many strange faces, how it would feel to join an already defined group. A class. A school. More than anything, I wanted to be invisible.
Those fears, multiplying in my blood, viral in their growth, were quashed by the teacher of my first class. I sat there before class began, before the haranguing clatter of bells in the hallway, while students who I didn’t know filed into class, falling into their desks like surrender. When the hallways were empty, of students and noise, but before class began, she came to me, kneeling to make eye-level contact, usually a gesture I hate because it changes nothing that is different between us, and quietly said, “It’s good that you’re back and I’m glad you’re in my class.”
That was it. Nothing unctuous. Nothing grabby or glad-handed or intended to inspire me or notify me that I was an inspiration.
And it was true: it was good to be back and I was glad to be in class.
Ronnie began to ride the short bus not long after I did. He was lean, with long arms and splayed fingers. His hair, dark and slick, drew back from his fo
rehead as if in retreat. His face narrowed to a point like a wedge and was scab-wet all over, malignant with acne. He wore heavy denim and his long-sleeved shirts were always stained. He never spoke. Not a word. I’m not sure he could speak and no one ever explained him to us, except to announce his name like a warning.
He lived in a trailer with adults I never assumed were his parents. Stooped and leathery, they rarely appeared, except to stand balefully beside the mailbox, smoking thoughtfully while the bus shuddered to a stop and the doors slid open for Ronnie. When the driver had seated him, they went back inside their home, having said nothing.
When the short bus started up again, Ronnie would rock back and forth where he sat alone. He made noises. Little whimpers. Snuffles at first that might have been troubled sleep. None of us spoke while he rode with us, watching him lurch.
Once, when the driver had stepped off the short bus and no one’s eyes were on him but ours, Ronnie leaped up from his seat and moved lithely towards the back of the bus, where I sat. An obese girl, who was mute and had difficulty walking, sat across the way. He took her head in his arms, locked one around her throat, and was yanked away by the driver. The girl, weeping wildly, coughed and mewled and thrashed at the air.
He would take his fingers in his mouth, two or three at a time, and bite down on them, still rocking, until they bled from his mouth and down his chin and onto his shirt.
Still rocking.
A squeal now like the rasp of a saw through wood.
Still rocking.
And then, through all the short bus, through all its confined space, the stink of his shit would go, while he smiled and bled.
Every day for a year this happened.
We all tried not to breathe. To deny that air.
Every day on the short bus from which none of us could escape.
chapter EIGHT
When school was over, the short bus would lower my chair by hydraulic lift into the street. At our front door, my mother waited for me to come up the long ramp to the porch and let me inside, though there was little room to freely move about. The hallway to my bedroom was so narrow both sides of my wheelchair dug long trenches into the sheetrock. So that I could enter and exit my bedroom the frame around the doorway had to be removed. Inside, there was a hospital bed with rails pushed up against a wall. I had a small desk, high enough for me to roll under, and an old typewriter. To the right, the other wall. If I turned around in the room, I had to be careful of my toes: they would hit the bed or the desk or the wall.
And there was less room when Chan began to sleep on a small mattress on the floor beside my bed. Every night for almost a year we slept this way. The room had been his. It had always been his. Downstairs, where the den and my old bedroom were dug into the earth and were always dark and cool, he had never been comfortable. He was a child, eight years old, quiet and shy. One night, soon after my return, he wanted to watch a late-night movie with me. He never left.
At home, my mornings began, even earlier than they had at Shepherd, with exercise while I was still in bed. First, my mother stretched my legs as best she could, straightening them, rocking my hips from one side to the other. Then she helped me raise my knees and immobilize my feet: I lifted my bottom from the mattress by flexing my quadriceps. It was hard work for me, and harder for her, a small, compact woman. After thirty minutes she dressed me and because the bathroom in the hallway beside my bedroom was too small, I brushed my teeth in the kitchen sink and washed my hair in a plastic basin on the kitchen table with thick towels wrapped around my neck and in my lap to catch all the spillage. It was no good, but it was the best way we had.
Across from the cramped bathroom I couldn’t enter, on the wall hung a rustic frame, and in that frame was a painting of an old tree, its limbs arthritic and dense with foliage, standing a crooked guard beside a dirt road which rutted off into a dark distance. Carved into the tree’s scarred bark were my parents’ initials: JG & PG. James and Paula. When I was a boy, awake before everyone, I would sometimes stand on the tips of my toes to better consider it. Their names, right there, set into both the wood and the paint, fascinated me. Warm with the breath of a heating grate, I could not be hurried from them.
The town they grew up in is dead now. Dead, though it’s caught between the last gasp and whatever follows after it. Or doesn’t.
Along its main boulevard, used car lots loiter beneath ragged banners. Adult bookstores wait behind mandated facades, identified by their facelessness. Pawnshop windows dump neon light into the sullen day. Check-cashing services promise not to take your car.
But on the corner was an ice cream shop, a greasy spoon, the sort of place in which all things were sallow chrome and smelled like grease, grease forever, and onions and beef cooked in common on a grill, right there in front of you, by some kid who, as the story goes, is going to get out of here, somehow, some way, or an old woman with her silvering hair bound up in a net, with her arms like hams and her face not much different and her cough rattling around inside of her like a baby’s toy.
When I was a boy, I would go with my father to vacuum his car. Loose coins in the blue hoses clattered and I loved that noise. A fastidious hail. Perched on a block while he worked, I waited for him to be done, to take my hand and lead me across the street to the ice cream shop, which seemed ancient to me, a relic from outside everything I knew and was.
We ordered swirled soft-serve vanilla, injected into sugar cones, and sat atop stools with swiveling seats at the grimy bar. The hiss of grease sang out.
Outside, in the quiet street, a lone car might trundle past, slowing, almost as if the driver were lost, searching about for crumbling landmarks, a sign which pointed away.
Another image, this time a photo of my parents, senior prom, my father in rented tuxedo with wing-wide lapels, and my mother, seated, her hair longer than I have ever seen it, a dark wash down her back. Fake backdrop behind them, they’re beautiful. Untouched. Burdened by nothing.
When I was seven, I begged for cowboy boots until my mother relented, and then I slept in them and would not stop, though I woke every morning with feet soaked in sweat and my body so hot I felt ill. Too expensive to subject to the playground minefield, the boots stayed behind when I left home, old sneakers on my feet. I loved the boots, and had wanted them after months of comic book back cover advertisements. In them, O. J. Simpson struck an unbothered, post-disco pose, and whatever he said, whatever pablum devised by copywriters, meant nothing to me, except that these boots, all leather heavy, were what I wanted more than anything in that world.
Never very good at most sports, not baseball, slow enough that I vanished into daydream and caught nothing, and not basketball, which proved physically foreign in a way I could never master, every shot comically errant, I could, however, play soccer. The local recreation league games were held on autumn Saturday mornings, when dew was still on the grass and the sun was low in the sky. I tended to slip into the stiff cleats, having left the laces loose, and when I struck the ball one cleat would sail across the field like an oblong bird, shot mid-flight.
When my first season ended, and there was no tournament future for us, we were invited to a party at the coach’s house. He lived in a neighborhood that rolled up and down, every lawn and driveway a minor slope. After food, after blistered hot dogs and canned pork beans served cold to us on paper plates, we went down into the garage to find ways to pass the time because, really, we hardly knew each other, appearing once a week to run around in half-coherent fashion and be yelled at by a stranger, some man who acted as though he had power over us, and when the inevitable realization came that we were children, and not him, not him at all, the yelling faded out and the game ended soon enough, just as the day grew warm.
His son had a skateboard and began surfing down the driveway. A few times before others joined in, rolling to a stop in the gravel, jumping off, tumbling, laughing and running back up the driveway to start it all over again. I watched, laughing, hooting for th
ose who kicked the board’s nose up and ground its tail into the asphalt, stopping.
I knew this was nothing I was any good at. Boys waved to me from the bottom of the hill while one of them ran back up the hill with the skateboard held out in his arms.
Come on! One time! Chicken!
I took it from the boy and considered what to do. I wanted to do it because I loved velocity and plain motion. I loved to watch the movement of the world: cars blurring past our home in hot gusts of wind and boats splitting the waters of a river and the shifting procession of clouds in the summer sky. I felt called to it, always.
I lay down on the board and pushed off from the launch of the garage, rolling low to the ground, faster than I had expected. All the boys yelped: none of them had expected this.
My face was inches from the asphalt and my arms hugged the skateboard to my chest. There was now the question of stopping and I had no answer for it.
Later, when the party had ended and our dispersal had begun, I climbed into my mother’s waiting station wagon. It was dark, night fallen fully down in the crisp air. I entered through the front seat, the car’s dome light igniting as I climbed over the front seat and into the back. I was tired, bleary, already tugged at by sleep as I tumbled into the back, propping my boots on the passenger side’s headrest. As she turned to back up, her eyes fell on the ravaged toes of my boots, burned through when I had dragged them like anchors down the driveway.
The car stopped and she roughly turned the boots to her face.
“What did you do to these?” she demanded, looking down to where I had fallen behind her seat. “Take them off, give them to me, let me see them now.”