It caught me off guard. “Nowhere,” I said.
“What?” you said.
“I’ll tell you later,” I said, and I felt my face get hot, so I turned away and scurried into the bus shelter, behind the map. I apologize for my extreme awkwardness-bordering-on-rudeness. But you and I don’t, technically, “tell” each other things, do we? We write them, but it would have been even more bizarre for me to say “I’ll write you all about it later.” And anyway, truth be told, I didn’t want to tell you about my bike. Its name was Nelly, a.k.a. the Fagmobile (so christened by the butcherboys the first time they saw me locking it at school). Suffice it to say that Nelly has met with a violent, homophobic death and now lies, hopefully finally at peace, in her watery grave. Drew Saarinen, whose brother Michael hangs out with Dowell, told me in Civics that they dumped Nelly in Cherry Valley. I went down there yesterday to fish her out, but she’s in the spillwater portion of the creek, half sunk in the mud and dead leaves, and those six feet of water appeared bone-shatteringly cold. I couldn’t tell from the embankment, but I imagine the butcherboys probably slashed the tires and cut the brake cables before they dumped the bike, anyhow.
Enough! On to a pleasanter topic: Today the blackboard invites us to Describe your Inner Sanctum. A portion of the class began sniggering when Ms. Khang wrote this on the board, because they’d somehow managed to read the word as scrotum. There were a lot of jokes—“Mine is wrinkly and has my balls in it”—that sort of thing. Thanks all the same, Alex Federsholm, but there’s a mental image with which I really didn’t need to be saddled.
My Inner Sanctum is my bedroom, because it houses my two most prized possessions. The first is my record player, a 1970s made-in-Holland Philips that Lyle had refurbished for me for Christmas when I was thirteen. I have a few favorite artists, of course, but Lyle’s vinyl collection is so massive that I feel as though cultivating too intense a loyalty to certain records would be premature at my age. When I get home from school, the first thing I do after taking off my shoes and backpack is head directly upstairs to my room, close the door, put on a record, and climb into my tent.
The tent is the second reason my room is my sanctuary. Instead of a bed, I sleep on a double mattress on the floor of an old army tent. Another of Lyle’s youthful castoffs, this heavy canvas-and-aluminum structure was his and my mother’s Inner Sanctum back when his band was too poor for motels, and they’d pull into whatever highway rest stop was closest to their next gig and pitch the tent on the grass. Lyle set the old beast up for me a few years ago when I was going through a period of insomnia for some reason or another, and it hasn’t come down since.
Yours truly,
Jonathan Hopkirk
Friday, October 9
Dear Little Jo,
Somehow it’s not the biggest shocker that you sleep in a tent. It gave me a laugh picturing you curled up in there with your flashlight and your poetry books or whatever.
At one point my bedroom was decorated with all kinds of football stuff. But once I was off the team I took everything down and trashed it. I figured, no point dwelling on it.
So it’s bare walls, faded green carpet, an old piece-of-crap computer, a bed too short for my legs. Not exactly an Inner Sanctum. Except for this one thing I sort of like because it’s so ugly. It’s a quilt my mom and her mom, my babcia, made for her hope chest. She had a hope chest, like an actual chest made out of wood to hold her wedding stuff. Dishes and towels and silver spoons, that sort of thing. Anyway this chest came with my parents when they immigrated, and this quilt is put together from pieces of things that got too worn out or full of holes to use for anything else.
There’s something about this idea I like. Things getting used till they’re not useful anymore, and then cut up into pieces and put together into something useful again. I mean it is a horrifically ugly quilt. There are orange and pink and brown bits, and the bits that were probably white originally are all various shades of beige. I like it exactly for its ugliness though. I like how my mom, and my babcia before her, and so on, back a bunch of generations, must have been thinking one hundred percent about warmth and bed coverage and not looks.
Sincerely,
AK
Friday, October 9
Dear Kurl,
A quick note between classes, because I forgot to ask you to please not mention anything about Nelly (my bicycle) to Shayna. Lyle bought me that bike brand-new for my birthday, and Shayna spent her own money on a seat upgrade for me after the first one was stolen a month later. Honestly, I just don’t have the heart to tell my family that their effort and hard-earned money was wasted.
Also, I keep forgetting to answer your question about the word butcherboys. It’s Walt’s term, of course. One of the American “roughs” he observes as he goes about his day is the butcher boy. When I first came across it last year, something about the description reminded me of Dowell—the dullness, the meatiness, the fists. I don’t think I told you, but Dowell and I used to be friends when we were younger.
Anyhow, I paged through “Song of Myself” after you first asked, but I didn’t find the reference to the butcher boy, and I only just remembered your question now. I’ll find it eventually on one of my rereads.
Yours truly,
Jonathan Hopkirk
Saturday, October 10, 2 a.m.
Dear Little Jo,
I get this one nightmare every couple months. Whenever it happens I know I’m not going to be able to sleep again the rest of the night. We’re doing a roof, and the rule on a roof is always lean forward, but in this dream I stand up and instead of leaning forward I lean back. The others all give me these looks like, Now you’re in for it. My whole body clenches up trying to correct it, trying to lean forward again. I mean my guts are like a fist, they’ve clenched so tight. But of course nothing works. My arms start to wheel around and my feet pedal air and I fall. You know that thing about dreams where they say that you always wake up right before you hit the ground? Not me. I hit the ground and my head bursts open. I mean I can feel hot liquid pouring over my skull and out of my ears. I feel each of my ribs stab through my chest. Lungs deflating. Leg bones pleated like accordions. Then, only after all that, do I wake up. My stomach muscles ache the whole day after one of those roof dreams, like I’ve done a thousand sit-ups the night before.
So now it’s 2:30 a.m. and I’m supposed to be ready at 5 a.m. to leave with Uncle Viktor in the truck. That’ll be about two hours total sleep tonight.
To be honest, Jo, I sort of hate roofing. Not just my uncle power-tripping on me all day long either. I hate everything about that job. I hate the grit of the shingles and the stench of tar. I hate the pounding of our hammers all day going in and out of sync so that it can never become rhythm, only noise. In summer I hate the way the heat beats down but also gets absorbed by the tarpaper and boils up from underneath. Burned shoulders, burned knees, burned hands. Drinking water all day but still feeling thirsty. In spring and fall I hate the cold wind that whips across the housetops from all directions at once.
I’m glad my dad isn’t around to hear me saying this. I mean I doubt he was crazy about the job either, but I don’t remember him ever complaining.
I was just picturing you asleep inside your army tent. Your Inner Sanctum. I have to say it made me feel a bit better, that mental picture. Thank you for giving me all those details about the records you listen to et cetera. It’s actually making me smile right now, sitting on the rug on my bedroom floor.
I guess maybe what I have is an Outer Sanctum instead of an Inner one. It’s this stretch near my house along the railway tracks. Mark and I used to go there a lot as kids, before they fenced it off and put up all those NO TRESPASSING signs. We used to ride our bikes down the middle of the tracks, between the rails. Mark got so he could ride right on the rail, but I never got the hang of it.
He made this sort of sled out of plywood that we could pull along the tracks. We would pile rocks or branches and slide it along the rai
ls. Once we found an armchair in the ditch and put that on the sled, and he would let me sit in it and pull me along. For some reason it was the biggest thrill.
They’ve fenced it all off now so you can’t go right up to the tracks except through this one area where the chain link is rolled back. Recently they put in an asphalt path for bicycles and dog walkers et cetera. But it’s still fairly wild down there. Grasshoppers everywhere. Unmowed grass, that kind Walt Whitman says sounds like So many uttering tongues in the wind. And I don’t know. A feeling of being on the edge of things. A dividing line between the city and wherever those trains are heading.
Sincerely,
AK
Tuesday, October 13
Dear Kurl,
Well, I can say this much for the Kurlanskys: Your family certainly knows its way around a roof. Two men were tarping the front steps and shrubs when I left for school yesterday, and by the time I got home you were nearly halfway across with the new shingles already. I figured you must have been part of the crew when I didn’t see you at school. My apologies in advance for lecturing you, Kurl, but I hope you don’t make a habit of cutting school for work. It’s not very conducive to passing your courses and graduating.
Anyhow. When I walked up the driveway after school, you waved down at me and I waved back. Bron and Shayna were lying on the living room floor doing homework—or, more accurately, Bron was writing something on her laptop that might or might not have been homework, and Shayna was paging through a back issue of Rolling Stone. I went up to my room, but the hammering overhead was more intrusive on the second floor, which explained why the girls had taken over the living room.
I kept thinking about how you confessed you hate roofing, Kurl, all that noise. I could hear it exactly as you’d described it, the hammers beating out of sync, someone barking orders—I assumed this was Uncle Viktor—and lower, quieter voices murmuring that I assumed were yours and Sylvan’s. It wasn’t too hot a day, but I thought about making lemonade, maybe bringing a tray with glasses and a pitcher out to the bottom of the ladder. But we don’t have a pitcher, and I don’t know precisely how to make lemonade. More to the point, I couldn’t think of a more blatantly gay thing to do for a bunch of roofers. I try to recognize and not succumb to my internalized homophobia, as Bron would put it, but there are times when it simply freezes me in my tracks and I just give up. After trying to read in my tent for ten or fifteen minutes without success, I went back downstairs and joined Bron and Shayna.
It started to rain just after Lyle got home with Cody Walsh, the Decent Fellows’ bassist. You Kurlanskys had quite a difficult time tarping the roof—the wind had kicked up along with the rain, and there was lots of shouting and swearing and scraping of ladders along the siding—and then Lyle invited you all in for a beer.
Your brother Sylvan is like a shrink-wrapped version of you: several inches shorter, narrower across the shoulders, less muscle mass overall. Wiry and deeply tanned. Your uncle Viktor is yet another variation: broad like you but meatier, almost squat-looking, with slightly sloped shoulders and round belly. But you all have the same strong brow, broad cheekbones, straight nose, severe mouth. It made me wonder about your middle brother, Mark. Does he manifest all those same Kurlansky genes?
“Sit down, sit down,” Lyle said. So you stopped protesting about your wet clothes and dirty hands and sat, Viktor on a dining chair, Sylvan on the sofa next to Cody and Lyle, you on the floor with the girls and me. I tried not to stare but kept thinking of what you told me Sylvan had said about you being “bunched up under your skin.” You sat in an approximately cross-legged position, but as though your quad muscles couldn’t quite conform to it, so that actually, only your ankles were crossed in their wool work socks, your knees in their soiled denim pointing diagonally to the ceiling and your forearms pinning them in place.
I’m afraid that after the few initial, polite exchanges—how long have you been roofing, what do you think of the new “lifetime” roofing products, what does Lyle do for a living, what sort of music does the band play—you Kurlanskys didn’t have much opportunity to participate in the conversation. You and I were probably the most conspicuously silent, Kurl. Conspicuously is the wrong word, since no one else noticed. Perhaps even you didn’t notice how silent we were. It just occurred to me now, writing this, that we’re both the youngest members of our families. Something in common.
Anyhow, with two of the Decent Fellows in the room, I suppose it was inevitable that bluegrass would be the topic of conversation. At Sylvan’s request, Lyle demonstrated a basic bluegrass forward roll on the banjo.
Bron then told us, “One of the sustaining myths of bluegrass music is that it’s an exclusively white tradition.”
“That’s not a myth,” Cody said. “Bluegrass was white hillbilly music right from the start. Black music was jazz, gospel, and blues. Two totally different things.”
“Before the Civil War,” Bron said, “poor black and poor white people shared most of the same spaces and activities, including their music. The banjo is an African instrument, originally, right, Lyle?”
“Sure,” said Lyle, always affable. “But the banjo didn’t invent bluegrass. Bill Monroe did, and he was white.”
“Bill Monroe is part of the myth,” Bron insisted. “He took all his riffs and picking patterns from the people playing around him when he was growing up. In his biography he makes it crystal clear he didn’t invent anything. He just absorbed, and copied, and then got recorded and popularized and canonized as the father of the whole genre.”
“Really, we’re all a bunch of rednecks,” Lyle joked.
“Maybe you are,” Shayna said, disloyally. “Maybe you’ve raised Jojo and me to be rednecks, too, Lyle.”
“I was just using the Decent Fellows as an example,” Bron said. “Your band is certainly not the exception, when it comes to the erasure of black history.”
“I’m not a redneck, I don’t think,” I said. I was wearing my robin’s-egg blue velvet bow tie and my suede vest, so I knew this would get a laugh.
So I suppose I did contribute one point to the discussion, Kurl. And so did you, now that I’m thinking of it. The pizza arrived, and we passed around the paper napkins and lifted the gooey slices onto our laps. Your brother helped himself to the Meat Lovers’ Supreme, but when you leaned forward to take a slice, your uncle Viktor said, “No, we’ll wait to eat at home. Your mother is cooking.”
I suppose Lyle could see you were starving. “One piece won’t ruin his appetite, right?”
“No, that’s okay, I’m okay,” you said, and sat back, twisting your napkin and stuffing it into your back pocket. You hadn’t touched your cola, either. There was a moment of silence, and chewing, and then Uncle Viktor stood up and said you had better be going.
“How about an official dinner invitation, then, for tomorrow?” Lyle said. “Whatever time you finish the roof. We’ll do Tex-Mex or something.”
He and your uncle shook hands, and then you and Sylvan shook his hand and Cody’s hand, too, and it was “Nice to meet you” and “See you tomorrow” all around.
Sylvan mentioned that you weren’t needed for the rest of the job and you’d be at school today, so maybe I’ll see you at some point this afternoon—but I hope you’ll come by tonight for dinner as well?
Yours truly,
Jonathan Hopkirk
Tuesday, October 13
Dear Little Jo,
Khang just told us she’s through with offering suggested themes to use in our letters. Not that you and I have been using them lately anyway. Khang said that as we must know by now, all writing shares something of yourself. So share away, she said.
Memories though. A memory can’t be shared even when you write about it. Words won’t transfer a memory anywhere or help you reabsorb it. It just sits there, the memory. Pooled up under your skin like a bruise.
For example, I remember there was this bird down by the tracks that hated Mark and me. All black except for a flash of red
on each wing. It would come diving out of the trees and flap right into our faces. It left a scratch once under the hair on Mark’s forehead. Its chirp sounded like stones smacking together.
You’re right that you and I didn’t say anything last night over pizza. Once or twice we looked at each other. I thought maybe you were a bit uncomfortable with us there, but maybe that was just in my head. I guess if you don’t talk you can’t really tell.
Give the people what they want, Uncle Viktor says. If they want the cheap shingles, give them the cheap shingles. Cheap shingles is how he underbids AA Roofing, who stole a lot of Kurlansky customers after my father passed. Don’t worry, Jo. We used good quality materials on your roof. The thing about Uncle Viktor is that it’s better just to keep your head down and do what he says and let him think what he thinks. Most of the time I remember and catch myself in time. Like with the pizza at your house. It might seem like a dumb thing. Why can’t I have a slice of pizza? It might be a dumb or embarrassing thing but it’s a little thing. Definitely not worth turning into a big thing.
Mark thought it was hilarious the way this bird kept attacking him but to be honest it creeped me out, how interested it seemed in hurting us. It reminds me of how in ancient wars they would smear crows with tallow, light them on fire, and free them to fly over the enemy walls. You could burn down a whole fort with these firebirds. A whole town.
I found a bird guide in the library and looked up this murderous bird’s name. Surprise surprise: Red-winged Blackbird.
I spent a lot of time at your house yesterday trying not to stare at everything. I’ve never been inside a house like yours before. There is no decoration anywhere that I could see. No drapes, just bare windows. No pictures on the walls or things sitting around on shelves. None of those extra pillows to decorate the sofa. The kitchen has no cabinets, just open shelves with dishes stacked and some mismatched sections of drawers with a plywood countertop.
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