Beauty of the Broken

by Tawni Waters

  I jump up and start to kick the crap out of the Reverend Winchell snowman. Pretty soon, Xylia and Henry join me. After placing Henry’s glasses carefully on the porch railing, we punch Reverend Winchell’s fat face until it explodes in a flurry of snow and pebbles. Xylia puts the hat on her head sideways, and on her it looks sexy. Henry slips on the striped jacket, and it sets off his ugly scarf just right. I wear the only snowman clothing left, the faded button-up shirt, and then we push the snowman’s body over.

  “Sayonara, motherfucker!” Xylia yells.

  Henry and me laugh.

  “We gotta get a picture,” Xylia says, taking out her cell phone.

  We all stand in front of the decimated snowman, smiling, our arms around one another, wearing our Goodwill clothes. Xylia reaches her arm out far in front of us, the flash goes off, and there it is: our blasphemy saved forever.

  “I’ll e-mail it to you guys,” Xylia says. She takes off the hat and sets it on the porch railing next to Henry’s glasses. She puts her phone inside. Then she falls into the snow and starts making a snow angel. “I’ve seen this on TV, but I’ve never done it before,” she giggles. “It’s wondrous!”

  Wondrous. She used my word for her. I fall down and make an angel of my own. Henry joins us too.

  When our legs and arms are too tired to move anymore, we lie there in the freshly fallen snow, three blasphemous angels, laughing and gasping and catching snowflakes on our tongues. I think, I am tasting God, and even though it’s the wrongest thing I’ve ever thought, I feel closer to heaven than I ever once have in church. Closing my eyes, I grab Xylia’s hand. Her warmth seeping through my glove feels like the Virgin of Guadalupe’s smile.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE SNOW MELTS QUICKLY, AND true spring finally comes. I have detention again, this time for calling Elijah an asswipe loudly enough for Mr. Farley to hear. In my defense, he deserved it. He was acting like a crazed ape, shrieking over the picture of Michelangelo’s David in our textbook. Never mind that the editors covered David’s private parts with a little black square. The very suggestion of genitalia sent Elijah into a frenzy.

  I’ve industriously scrubbed the blackboards and the coffee cups in the teachers’ lounge, as Mr. Farley instructed, and emptied all the trash cans.

  Finally Mr. Farley says I can go. The bus is long gone, and it’s a couple of miles home. It’s not so cold. I enjoy the feeling of the fresh air rushing in and out of my lungs and the sounds of the world going on around me. Bees buzzing and cows mooing and the wind gently whooshing between trees.

  I’ve almost started to look forward to detention because it gives way to these lone walks. Mostly I spend the time thinking about Xylia, about all the funny things she says, or the smart comments she makes about God and life. I love listening to her talk. She’s like a preacher, only a nice one that says “fuck.”

  Best of all, when I walk home, I don’t have to see Elijah Winchell. On the bus he always makes sure to get behind me and say things about my butt, which makes me want to smack him.

  Today, however, as I am cutting across the woods toward our farm, I hear voices yell and stones roll, as if feet are scrambling over them. I stop to listen.

  “You might as well quit running, Ringworm!” It’s Hannah from school.

  “Yeah, you might as well quit,” Keisha echoes.

  Henry’s in trouble.

  “I’m gonna make you pay for ruining my shoes!” That voice can belong to no one but Elijah.

  “We only want to make sure you’re a boy,” Hannah taunts.

  “Yeah, we won’t hurt you. We just wanna look.” That’s Keisha.

  More rocks clatter, and I imagine Henry stumbling down the hill up ahead, trying to get away from those evil people. I break into a run, heading toward the sounds of their voices.

  “We only want to take your picture!” Hannah shouts.

  I burst through a stand of trees and see them. Henry’s foot catches on a mossy stone. Down he goes. He tries to get back up, but they’re on him. Elijah squats above his head, pinning his arms to the earth, and Keisha kneels on his legs, giggling. Hannah crouches beside him, fumbling with his belt buckle. When he kicks, Keisha stays on like a bull rider, holding tight with her knees.

  “Hey!” I scream, running faster. Either they don’t hear me, or they don’t care that I’m there. Keisha tosses his belt to the side.

  “No!” Henry’s voice comes out shrill and weak, like a little girl’s. “No,” he says again. “Please.”

  Hot adrenaline surges through me, and I have all sorts of terrible thoughts. I think of smashing in their skulls with stones, but what I actually do, when I reach them, is swing my backpack as hard as I can, slamming it into the side of Elijah’s ugly face. “Get the hell away from him!”

  Elijah falls to the ground. “You bitch!” he wails, swiping at the blood trickling from his nostril. When he sees red on his fingers, he looks like he might start to cry.

  “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” I’m itching for a fight.

  Hannah gets in my face as Henry scoots away from us, trying to button his pants.

  “Bitch!” she screams.

  “Bring it, fatty! You think your rapist ass can handle me?”

  She must decide she can’t, because she and her stupid little sidekick scamper off into the woods, shouting ugly words.

  “Keep running!” I yell, watching them go, and then I pick up a rock and toss it at their retreating forms for good measure.

  “You want some more?” I say to Elijah, who is still sitting on the ground, looking stunned that he can bleed. I swing my backpack at him again. “Get the hell out of here before I break your head open with this thing.”

  Elijah’s eyes go dead, just like my daddy’s do. “You’re gonna pay for this.” He reminds me so much of my daddy that, for the first time in my life, I’m scared of Elijah. But I have the good sense not to show it.

  “You might wanna bring a bigger posse to our next fight, then,” I say. “You sit there one minute longer, and I swear to God, I will bash your pimply head in.”

  He stands and dusts off his jeans. “Just wait.”

  I hold my backpack poised to strike again as I watch him stumble away through the woods.

  When I’m sure he’s gone, I look to Henry. He’s sitting, his face buried between his knees.

  “You okay, Henry?”

  He doesn’t answer, so I sink down beside him and put my arm around him. I wish I could think of the right words, but I can’t, so I don’t say anything.

  When Henry finally looks up, his glasses are foggy. “I hate them,” he says simply.

  “Me too. They make me sick.”

  “It was like this at the reservation, too,” Henry tells me. “All the kids hated me. Why does everyone hate me?”

  “I don’t hate you,” I say. “I think you’re pretty cool.”

  Henry takes off his glasses and cleans them on the edge of his shirt. He puts them back on and stares off into the distance. “Would you like to come over for dinner?”

  “Well,” I say, “I’ll have to call my momma when I get there, make sure it’s okay, but sure.”

  Henry picks up a dead beetle and looks at it. It shimmers in the sunlight. “I should warn you, my father’s a little strange.”

  “I should warn you, my father’s a freaking psycho,” I reply, and we laugh together.

  “Is that where you learned to fight?” he asks.

  “Something like that,” I say, helping him up.

  “Will you teach me?”

  I think for a second. “Not sure how to teach rage.”

  We walk through the woods. Some of the junipers have little purple berries on them.

  Henry says, “Sometimes I imagine eating them by the handful.”

  I laugh. “You’d better not. They’re poison.”

  “Oh, I know,” he says, smiling. “It’s only a pipe dream.”

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “That’s what Fa
ther calls things that can never be. I did taste a juniper berry once, just one tiny nibble.”

  “What was it like?”

  “It was bitter. Disgusting, actually. But there are other berries you can eat that won’t poison you. Also piñon nuts when the time is right. And even ants.”

  “Ants?” I’m completely grossed out.

  “They’re surprisingly sweet.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I say. “Why would you eat ants?”

  Henry looks at me, screwing up his face a little, like he’s trying to figure out if he can trust me. He must decide he can. “Sometimes my father forgets to buy groceries. He’s not bad. He just gets sad sometimes. About my mom and my brother.”

  My stomach hurts when he says this. “I’m sorry.” I put my arm around Henry’s shoulder again. We walk like that for a while, then Henry pipes in with, “Some of the things you can eat are as purple as the juniper berries. Cactus fruit, for example, is also purple.”

  Henry is nuts, but I like him. “I tried eating cactus fruit once,” I tell him. “I got a mouth full of stickers.”

  Henry laughs. “Rub the spines off on your jeans next time.”

  “Will do.”

  The shadows fall low and cool now, slanting down through the branches and making stripes on Henry’s speckled jeans. The sun’s going away. In school they said that stars burn brightest before they burn out. That’s the way it is with the sun. It blazes orange and then disappears behind the hill.

  Soon I smell something thick and sick-sweet. It makes my throat close tight. As we walk, it gets stronger. Before long I can see what’s making the smell. A dead coyote is lying in a lump by a fence not far away, its downy, brown fur swaying in the breeze. Its mangled paw is clamped in the steel jaws of a trap. There’s a dark brown, crusty spot on its side. Henry and I walk closer. Its eyes are sunk into its head. Flies buzz around its ears. Some farmer probably caught it and shot it for eating chickens.

  “Someone was sick of this old coyote lurking around,” Henry says sadly. He sinks down on his knees, and even though the smell is strong, he reaches out and touches its snout with trembling fingers. “There, there,” he says. “There, there.”

  I stand silently beside him, taking in its brown fur and clotted blood. Its black-purple tongue lolling to the side.

  “Mean kids tried to take pictures of me, coyote,” Henry whispers. A fly buzzes up from the coyote’s face and lands on his hand. He doesn’t brush it away.

  Henry is really weird, but watching him talk to the dead coyote, I realize that I like him just about more than anyone in the world, besides Xylia and my brother. He gets it. He gets how sad it is when things die, how beautiful life is.

  We sit there like this for a while, me, Henry, the coyote, and the fly, and we think about life. We think about why things have to be the way they are. The light in the sky starts to fade.

  “Henry, we should get going,” I whisper.

  “Thank you very much for listening,” Henry says to the coyote. He stands. We are silent during the rest of our walk. When we open Henry’s front door, he calls, “Father, I have a guest.”

  “Oh, good,” his father calls back. “I told you you would make friends here.”

  There are no decorations anywhere. The walls are plain white. Everything is perfectly clean. The books on the shelf are arranged in alphabetical order.

  I follow Henry to the kitchen. His father stands at the stove, stirring something, his back to us. I can see the bumps of his spine through his T-shirt. His jeans sag around his backside. He has braids like Henry.

  “Hello, Henry,” he says, turning to smile at us. His teeth are big and white. “Soup’s on.”

  “Father, this is Mara.”

  “Hello, Mara,” Henry’s father says. He wipes his hand on a dishtowel and picks up a spray bottle from the counter. He walks to Henry and me and squirts us both. The air smells like bleach.

  “We’re going to go to my room now,” Henry says.

  “All right,” says his father. “Dinner is in an hour.”

  “Sorry about the bleach,” Henry whispers to me as we walk to his room. “Father is afraid of germs.”

  “I remember you told me that,” I say. Henry’s father’s as weird as he is, but I like him just as much. There’s something about both of them. Something that makes you wanna squeeze them and tell them everything’s going to be all right. “What kind of soup is he making?”

  “Oh, it’s not really soup. I don’t think Father has ever made soup. ‘Soup’s on’ is just how he says he’s making dinner.”

  After I call Momma and make sure it’s okay that I stay for dinner, Henry and I play chess in his room. I can barely remember the rules, but Henry’s a pro. He checkmates me twice in forty-five minutes. Then we get bored and lie down on his bed.

  “Henry, can I ask you something?” I gaze out the window at the stars that are just starting to twinkle in the sky.

  “Sure,” Henry replies, his hands woven together behind his head.

  “Those kids. You know they pick on you because they think you’re gay, right?”

  “Right,” Henry says. He keeps staring at the ceiling.

  “I know you told me you weren’t gay, but do you think there’s anything wrong with it?”

  “What could be wrong with it? In my tribe, gays are honored.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course,” says Henry. “We aren’t as crazy as you guys.”

  I smile. “So, like, if you found out someone was gay, you would still be their friend, right?”

  “What a silly question,” Henry says.

  “Still, could you answer it?” I pick at a hangnail.

  “Yes,” Henry says. “I would still be their friend. Of course I would.”

  “Well, Henry, I need to tell you something,” I say. When I was little, I used to roll down steep hills with Iggy. When I’d stand up, the world would be spinning around me. That’s how I feel now, about to tell my secret for the first time to someone who’s awake and listening.

  “What?” Henry says. “That you’re in love with Xylia?”

  I look at him, stunned.

  He laughs. “It’s rather obvious.”

  “It is?” I panic. If Henry knows, then everyone must know.

  “Well, it’s obvious to me,” he clarifies. “I pay attention more than most people. You know what else is obvious to me?”

  “What?” I am almost afraid to hear his answer. How many of my secrets does Henry know?

  “That Xylia’s in love with you, too.”

  CHAPTER 14

  AFTER HENRY TELLS ME THAT Xylia loves me, I’m too excited to eat anything for about a week. He’s a psychic, after all. If he says Xylia loves me, she loves me. I imagine all the different ways we might say “I love you.” Maybe we’ll write it in letters. Maybe we’ll say it over pizza, watching some movie from the sixties about giant, people-eating ants. Maybe we’ll be . . . Oh, who knows? The point is, any minute now she may tell me she loves me, and that keeps me too occupied to eat anything.

  Of course there may be other reasons for my lack of appetite. Science class, for one. Mr. Farley titled this month’s science section “The Timeless Beauty of Dissection.” He gets a thrill out of cutting up dead things with his sharp silver knife. Frogs. Birds. Sheep. As far as he’s concerned, slicing and dicing are the ultimate peek holes into the mind of God. And Mr. Farley is a man of science. Anyone can see that by looking at his glasses thick as ice on a February pond.

  “I wish we could afford for everyone to have their own crawdad,” he apologized on Monday. “But I’m afraid our school just doesn’t have that kind of budget.” Then he dissected a crawdad in front of the class and had us all stand in line to take a look inside.

  “I almost threw up,” I told Xylia as we were walking home from school that day. I didn’t have detention. I could’ve taken the bus, but Xylia and me decided we’d rather walk.

  “Maybe you’re less
scientifically inclined than the average person,” she told me, grabbing my hand. “Artists often are. Next time, try thinking of something pretty.”

  So on Tuesday, when Mr. Farley cut up a frog in front of the class, I looked out the window and thought about the pretty blue wildflowers growing down by the river. On Thursday, when he cut up a cat, I thought about the little tadpoles about to lose their tails. And the next Monday, when he cut up a sheep, I almost felt like I was there by the water, wiggling my toes in the gooshy, sweet-smelling mud. Still, the smell of formaldehyde in the classroom was so strong, I could never escape completely.

  Today though, as I enter the classroom, I don’t smell formaldehyde. A little puff of relief escapes my lips until Mr. Farley says, “Take your seats. We’re going to have a slide show.”

  I slump into my desk. Mr. Farley has a gift for digging up the most disgusting slide shows known to man. Last month we saw a slide show about diseases of the foot. I had no idea how many funguses and molds could grow underneath a person’s toenails. But today it’s even worse. Mr. Farley turns on the projector, and there’s a picture of a naked dead guy sprawled on a metal table. He’s so white, it looks like he’s made out of porcelain. My throat tightens.

  I’m so busy thinking about the fact that he’s dead that I don’t worry about the fact that he’s naked until Elijah whispers, “We’re watching a porno.”

  “If that turns you on, you’re even sicker than I thought,” I whisper back.

  The rest of the class laughs, and Elijah gets mad. I look back at the screen.

  Months ago Mr. Farley promised us all a trip to the medical school to look at the cadavers. Unfortunately, we ruined our chances of that when we sang “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” on the bus during our field trip to the bread factory.

  “If you think you will get to visit the cadavers after your disgusting behavior today,” said Mr. Farley, “you’ve got another thing coming.” No one seemed very disappointed. I think today’s slide show is Mr. Farley’s happy medium. We don’t get to see cadavers in person, but we still get to see some dead-guy slides. Lucky us.