“Sure, Dad. I believe in you.”
A little groan escaped his lips, and he managed to jam the soda straw in his mouth to block it.
“Don’t ever stop believing in me, son. That’s all I need. All I ask.”
It was more than I could give him, though.
More than I could give anyone for a long time.
* * *
“Jeez, that stinks,” Charlie yelped, yanking his head back and waving his hands a little prissily in front of his face.
I had to agree. The smell that wafted from the coffee can was dense and wet and rotten. It was equal parts decaying grass clippings, oozy mud and concentrated frog slime. Even for a young boy schooled in all things gross, it was repellant. So we leaned in, sniffed it again.
“Ughh,” I groaned. “Smells like your underwear drawer.”
He half turned to me, his eyes narrowing. “Been sniffing my underwear? How else would you know?”
“Give me a break!” I said, opening the next coffee can. “I smell ‘em from here.”
Soon, we had all six cans open, and a veritable mini-plague of frogs was let loose on my front lawn. Charlie and I attempted to corral them as I explained my sorting system.
“The toads went into their own cans. Three to a can. Two cans. Then, the leopard frogs, two to a can since they’re bigger. That’s four cans. Then, Armstrong gets his own.”
“Armstrong?”
I pointed at the green mound squatting motionlessly amidst the hopping clamor.
“You named the bullfrog ‘Armstrong?’ Cool.”
I helped him hose out their living quarters, pulling fresh grass and recapturing the frogs. Lids went back on, and we placed the coffee cans in the shade.
This was several days after the dinner with my father. In that period, I hadn’t heard a peep from Charlie. I tried to visit many times since that day we’d read comics sprawled out on his floor, showed up dutifully on his front porch.
Every day, I was sent away by his mom, not ungently, but with perhaps too fine a sense of control. It was as if she were the gatekeeper of Oz, denying access to the Wizard. Or a priest guarding entrance to the inner temple of a secret god.
That morning, though, Charlie had shown up at my door. He looked smaller than usual, thinner, paler, as if someone had spent the last few days first erasing, then lightly re-sketching him.
He was breathless from his short walk to my house, and the hectic red spots normally brought to his cheeks were a disturbing yellow-gray. The only color at all on his face came from his two blazing blue eyes, which shone out from their bruised sockets like baleful stars in a dark winter sky.
Tucked in the crook of his arm was a thick, wire-bound composition notebook, an assortment of pens clipped to its cover.
“Ready?” was the only word he was able to rasp out.
I was still in the t-shirt and shorts I wore to bed. Sleep encrusted my eyes, and my King Vitaman cereal—my mom’s cheaper replacement for Cap’n Crunch—usually indestructible, was now, I knew, turning to mush in my bowl.
“For what?”
Charlie smiled, and that smile is the one that I remember every time I think of him now. The day I snapped open the paper and scanned his name in the obituaries, that smile floated in my mind, smeared through my tears though it was.
That smile was all it took to get me moving.
“For the experiments! The astronaut training program begins today!”
* * *
The composition book was filled with empty charts. As he paged through the notebook, explaining what he’d done, I imagined him in his Spider-Man pajamas, propped up in his bed, pencil flying as he mapped out the course of his idea, which had been in his head for the last few years.
He’d divided the testing of our candidates into six main categories: Isolation, Stress, Acceleration, High-G, Altitude, and Recovery
Each main section occupied several pages, with descriptions of each test and spaces for notes about the candidates, identified only as “Subject 1,” “Subject 2,” and so on.
Charlie unclipped one of the pens, then, on the page of the first test, “Isolation,” he wrote “Armstrong” under “Subject 1.”
“I figure since you already named the big guy, we should go ahead and name ‘em all.”
So, this is how we ended up:
Subject 1: Armstrong
Subject 2: Buzz
Subject 3: Collins
Subject 4: Bean
Subject 5: Conrad
Subject 6: Shepard
Subject 7: Mitchell
Subject 8: Scott
Subject 9: Irwin
Subject 10: Duke
Subject 11: Young
Subject 12: Glenn
Subject 13: Kirk
Subject 14: Spock
Those last two, I admit, were my idea, and Charlie met them with cool silence. But having no alternatives himself, he noted the names in the book, shaking his head.
Once this was accomplished, we sat on my front porch for a little while, so Charlie could rest, regain his strength. He was breathing harder than usual, even though we hadn’t really been doing anything strenuous. As I looked at him, I saw his thin arms and legs, pale as frogs’ bellies themselves, were covered in a constellation of yellow, green and purple bruises.
“Are you okay?” I asked, both realizing and not realizing what I was asking. The obvious little question of right now and the vague, bigger question that seemed to go on and on.
“I’m fine,” he snapped, not looking at me. He’d answered the little question, but I knew he wanted me to think it was the bigger question.
Right there, sitting on the porch and feeling the emptiness of that answer, the angry, phony defiance, right there is when I first became afraid.
“Isolation will be the first test, ‘cuz it’s the easiest.” He solemnly opened the notebook, inscribed the date under “Isolation.”
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“Got a shovel?”
That afternoon, in the cool shade of the side of my house, near where the metal box of the air conditioner shuddered, I dug holes for seven coffee cans. As Charlie crouched beside me, I buried each of them up to the rims, leaving about an inch of the metal above ground. Then, I fitted the plastic lids, secured them snuggly, and enlarged the air holes to ensure the frogs had plenty of air.
“What’s the point of this again?”
“When you’re in space,” he began, in the huffy, professorial tone he sometimes adopted, “you have to spend a lot of time alone.”
“They’re not alone, though.”
He shot me a veiled look.
“But they’re pretty isolated, aren’t they?”
I had to give him that.
“So…ummm…what are we looking for?”
Charlie stood, wobbled uncertainly, bent to wipe dead grass from his ghostly knees.
“Well, we leave ‘em here for a day or two…and see if…well…if they’re okay.”
I considered this for a moment.
“You mean…if they’re alive?”
Charlie seemed uncomfortable, then color, the color that had been missing from his face this morning, flooded his features.
“This is the easiest test of all. If they can’t even live through this, what’s the point?”
I hauled myself up to ask him what the heck was wrong with him, but found myself looking at his painfully thin back, his shoulders hitching as he stalked back home.
* * *
That night, death was very much on my mind.
My experience with death, at that point, was limited to distant relatives who meant little or nothing to me; matronly great aunts or senile third cousins left to dawdle toward death in yellowed, antiseptic nursing homes. I remembered funerals, the powdery smell of flowers, the vibrato of organ music, the dark clothes, the shuffling of feet.
And the tears.
It always made me feel a little scared to see my mother cry. It unnerved me t
o some extent, not knowing from where that depth of emotion rose. As with any child, it never occurred to me that my parents had a life before me or outside mine. If I barely knew, or as was more often the case, never knew at all, great-aunt Alma or cousin Henry, my parents couldn’t have known them all that well, either.
And if those emotions—those raw emotions shed between the viewing and the somber meal of ham and cheesy potato casserole and macaroni salad—were so strong, so deep, how much stronger, how much deeper would they be for someone known, someone loved?
I thought about Charlie, about his doctors, his unspoken illness, his pale skin, his hurt eyes.
I thought of his death, what it might be like without him. Playing hot box or reading comics. Or walking through the woods without him, without stopping to rest or leaving early. Going where I wanted at my own pace.
I felt the tears start, hot and unwanted, and I threw the covers off.
I crept outside in pajamas and bare feet, went to the garage.
Quietly, I emptied the largest box I could find, took it outside.
I dug up the seven coffee cans and let the frogs come out and hop around for a while, until I could not keep my eyes open any longer.
I placed them all inside the box, curled up beside it.
I fell asleep, the clear sky flickering above me, the damp grass soaking through my t-shirt.
I thought of death no more that night.
* * *
“Can you believe it?” Charlie crowed after we’d opened all seven cans and released our trainees. “All alive!”
He practically shouted that last word as we watched them hop all over the thin slice of yard between the two houses.
I didn’t tell him, never told him how I’d awoken at dawn, soaked with the cool dew that slicked the grass. How I’d decanted all of the frogs back into their isolation chambers. Took the huge box to the garage. How I’d silently washed my hands and feet, toweled off in the bathroom, slipped back into my own bed without waking my mother.
He snapped the composition book open and happily scrawled something in the first box for each subject.
One word. Alive.
I saw that word, and knew it had a bigger meaning for Charlie. Charlie had his own construct of beliefs he was building. The survival of these frogs meant more to him than what it meant to me. I knew that even then.
We let the frogs stay outside for a while, filling a depression in the yard with water from the hose and letting them soak in it. We ate our lunch there, keeping them corralled, eating with fingers that smelled of fishy mud.
“One more night,” he said as he crumbled his garbage into a ball, stuffed it into the empty brown paper sack.
“What?” I asked, less because I didn’t understand him than I’d hoped that I hadn’t heard him correctly.
“One more night,” he repeated. “They’ve got to show me they can do it. I’ve got to believe they can live for one more night.”
I knew I was in for another mostly sleepless night in the side yard.
* * *
Over the next two weeks, everything accelerated, moved toward an end that seemed increasingly to have been there from the very beginning, burning at its secret heart.
The frogs survived their second night, spent mostly out of their coffee cans with me sleeping beside them on the side yard. The next morning, Charlie seemed satisfied with that part of the testing, uplifted almost, and began excitedly checking both the “Isolation” and “Stress” boxes beside each frog’s name.
“Why are you checking both boxes?” I asked, not wanting to disturb the mood.
“What’s more stressful than spending two days in a coffee can jammed in with other frogs?” he said.
I couldn’t disagree, so I left it at that.
“Now, next on the list is Acceleration,” he said, tapping the tip of the pencil against the page. “How do we manage that?”
“We’ve got to get them moving fast,” I offered, peering over his shoulder.
“Yes, that’s exactly what ‘acceleration’ means, Einstein.”
I shrugged and waited for him to find the answer.
“Your mom…”
“What about her?”
“You mom…her truck…we need to go for a ride,” he said excitedly, racing around to the front of the house.
His idea, revealed in breathless spurts of information, was ridiculous but workable.
It involved half a dozen large, plastic Formula One cars we’d bought from the dime store years ago. Each was about a foot long, with fat plastic tires and a molded plastic driver glued to the seat.
We removed each plastic driver, replacing it with two frogs to a car, jammed into the seat in a sitting position and bread-tied into place. Armstrong was exempted, on account of his not being able to fit into a car even by himself. Spock was exempted, too, for no good reason.
A length of rope was knotted to each car, looped around the front end.
Next, we had to ask my mother to go for a ride in her truck. When she was in a good mood, which was getting more and more rare those days, she’d take us out in the truck, just a little Chevy, letting us climb into the open bed once we were out of eyeshot of Charlie’s house. If Charlie’s mom had ever seen him standing in the bed of that truck, speeding through the subdivision, getting onto the highway, standing there with his hair blowing in the wind, his eyes as big as dinner plates, his thin hands clutching the roof of the cab, she might very well have preceded her son in, well, you know.
We secreted the frog-filled racecars in the bed of the truck, went into my house and cajoled my mother into taking us for a drive. After several minutes of begging, she finally gave Charlie a long, hard look, grabbed her keys without a word and stood.
“I suppose you could come with me to the liquor store,” she said, crushed her cigarette out in an already full ashtray and motioned us out to the driveway.
* * *
We lost six of them that afternoon. Two shot out of their cars when he heaved them off the back of the truck and onto the road, their ropes uncoiling like umbilici. One other popped out when his car struck the pavement, ejecting him like a villain in a James Bond movie.
Those three were lucky, well, not as lucky as the out-and-out survivors, but luckier than the other three we lost. They ejected and hit the pavement rolling and seemed, at least from our vantage speeding away, to be okay. If, that is, they weren’t hit by cars once we lost sight of them.
The remaining three suffered fates that were, well, horrible. We didn’t torture them or butcher them or anything. I mean, we weren’t serial killers in training, but we were boys, with all that Lord of the Flies shit and everything.
We comforted ourselves with the thought that those who’d died had sacrificed themselves so that the others might live.
That’s what Charlie said, anyway.
Sacrifice.
As if that ever helps.
Well, suffice it to say, then, that the other three were lost in more horrifying ways. Two involving the bottom of their car literally scraping away when it lost three of its wheels. Concrete is not kind to soft plastic, or to even softer frog flesh. The sixth fatality involved the breaking of the rope and the small plastic car and its single amphibian driver disappearing under the wheels of a larger truck, a semi, bearing down on us and honking and honking for a reason my mother never knew.
* * *
Three tests down, and our crew of astronauts was reduced to just eight. After the High-G test, which involved tying them by their legs and swinging them around at rapid velocity, there were only five left. Unfortunately, three subjects—Armstrong among them—upchucked all of their guts during the test, literally. And then there were five:
Subject 5: Conrad
Subject 8: Scott
Subject 9: Irwin
Subject 10: Duke
Subject 11: Young
And just one test left. Altitude.
Unfortunately, I failed to notice that Charlie’s
health continued to worsen during the three days it took us to get through these tests. I’d been fooled by the energy, the passion that was burning through him, choosing to see it as such when it was really only one thing. His disease.
Passion is a fuel that doesn’t consume what it burns. Disease, though, burns the whole fucking house down, torching anything within, taking everything with it.
He had grown noticeably thinner over those three days, when I hadn’t thought that was possible. His skin had taken on a thin, insubstantial quality, like vapor. It was the color of smoke, too, grey and ashy. His eyes were receding into his face, and veins began to show in his arms, his legs; pale blue lines like the routes on a map leading someplace you didn’t want to go.
But his energy remained high, and his mother continued to let him come out with me when I showed up on their front porch each morning. She held the door open for him as he sidled past her, carefully negotiating the single step that led from inside the house to the concrete pad of the porch. On more than one occasion, I caught her eyes as he eased himself out of the house. She wasn’t watching him. She was watching me, and her eyes held a complex mixture of deep, deep sadness, gratitude and bitterness, anger, I think, at my having this time with him—time she would never have. And all if it counted against her own.
But she let him go, until that day.
I showed up that morning as usual, a box of Ziploc bags tucked under one arm, a kite under the other.
She came to the door, looked momentarily confused at the items I carried with me, then cracked the door an inch or two. She didn’t move her face or body into that crack to talk to me. It was done merely to let out her voice, which she kept low and whispery.
“Not today, Brian,” she said, wincing at my name. Maybe it was because she was afraid that he might hear her talking with me. Maybe she loathed saying it because it was the name of a boy who would live. Her son, his name, would die. Mine would go on, and she was on the verge of never being able to forgive me for that.
The End in All Beginnings Page 4