The Boy Who Couldn't Fly Straight (The Broom Closet Stories)

by Jeff Jacobson

  The fury seemed to descend upon him from his scalp while at the same time rise up from the floor, into the bottoms of his feet. The two forces raced toward each other, meeting at the epicenter of his chest.

  Charlie’s left arm, seeming to act of its own accord, shot outward, while his right arm held his mother against him to keep her from falling to the floor. The man reared back, preparing to deliver the next, possibly fatal, blow. The orange glow was completely gone now, and Charlie knew his mother couldn’t survive another hit.

  The fury narrowed and focused in his chest. Without knowing quite how, he let it rise into his voice.

  “No!” he bellowed, and more orange light began to pour forth, this time from the pendant in his own hand.

  Dog Man’s fist struck his orange light. This time his mother’s body did not shudder. Somehow the pendant’s light held firm.

  “No!” he yelled again, his voice stronger. The light barrier broadened and pushed outward, forcing the man backwards a step, as if Charlie had shoved him in the chest.

  He knew he couldn’t stop now. He had to finish this.

  Rage arose, red and fierce, taking over his mind, filling him with a potency he had never known before. He could tell that it was on the verge of exploding from him.

  “No!” Charlie screamed. His voice echoed with a metallic sound, amplifying around the room and ricocheting off the walls. He felt the heat in his chest pour forth. The light from the pendant narrowed into a thin beam and shot at the man, who had barely regained his footing.

  The beam of light lifted the man clear off the ground and tossed him high in the air, slamming his back up against the ceiling. He barely missed the overhead lamp that hung over the small table where Charlie’s unfinished homework sat. Puffs of dust and plaster particles sprinkled down like snow. Charlie and his mother slid down onto the floor together, their legs jellied and weak, eyes locked on the face of the man, now unconscious, glued to the ceiling above them.

  Chapter 3

  Charlie didn’t know how long he sat slumped against the counter on the kitchen floor. His mother was no longer beside him. He could hear her footsteps upstairs as she rummaged through closets and crossed again and again over the runner in the narrow, second-floor hallway.

  The red-hot rage had left his chest. He felt empty. Empty of energy, empty of thought. He stared at the thousands of pieces of glass scattered about the floor. The harsh light from the dining room’s lamp turned each one into a spark of fire. If he moved his head back and forth the sparks moved. Like the lights on a Christmas tree. Like the light above his head…

  He wouldn’t let himself look up, though he couldn’t quite remember why. There was something there he didn’t want to see. He kept his eyes on the glass and the tiny light sparkling within each piece.

  “The light that shines within,” he said out loud. The refrain from a pop song was stuck in his head. It felt good to look at the glass, and to let the words of the song float through his mind. Nothing else to do. Nothing really, but…

  “Charlie!” his mother called from the doorway into the kitchen. He flinched, and bumped his head against the rim of the counter. “I said, ‘Get up!’ I need your help!”

  He looked at her. Most of her hair had come loose from the rubber band tie she always wore. There were stains (Sweat? Blood?) on her T-shirt. One of her cheeks was swollen and waxy. She had two of his large duffel bags, one slung over her shoulder and the other in her left hand. In her right hand she held a small stepladder.

  “Charlie! Get up!” she yelled. His legs began moving, and he stood up slowly, feeling woozy.

  ‘Don’t look at the ceiling, don’t look at the ceiling…’ he said to himself, still not remembering why he shouldn’t. There was something…

  His mother dropped the bags on the floor and scooted the stepladder over near the dining room table. She began to climb up the steps, a look of hard determination in her eyes. He had seen that same look when she set traps for gophers in the garden.

  He watched her climb, and looked up. A man was pressed against the ceiling.

  How could a man be pressed against the ceiling, as if he were stuck there? As if the room had flipped and he were lying on the ground? But if he were lying on the ground, then Charlie must be…

  A foggy image pushed through the back of his mind. A large German shepherd sitting on the kitchen floor, glass exploding, punches.

  “Wait!” he yelled.

  His mother stopped halfway up the stepladder. Her arm was stretched out toward the man’s face. In her hand was something small and clear.

  “Wait, he’ll, he’ll…” Charlie couldn’t finish the sentence. Without warning, he burst into tears. His body began to shake as if it were the middle of winter and he was standing outside in the snow wearing summer clothes.

  “It’s okay, Charlie,” his mother said, her voice soft. “It’s okay.” Then she resumed her task.

  Through his tears he watched as she held the small thing just below Dog Man’s chin, then brushed it against his face. It was a container made of glass or plastic. Charlie saw a tiny bead of red blood brush against the lip of the container and slide down into it.

  “Gotcha,” said his mother, using her gopher-trapping voice. She climbed back down the stepladder, set the container on the table, then squatted on the kitchen floor, rummaging through one of the duffel bags.

  “Mom,” Charlie whined.

  “Now where is that thing? It was just here a minute ago.” The freckles on her pale forearms stood out under the harsh kitchen lighting.

  “Mom!” Charlie said again, more loudly. His chest was rising and falling so fast he wondered if he was going to have a heart attack.

  She kept searching through the bag.

  “Mom!”

  His mother’s head jerked up from where she sat squatting on the kitchen floor.

  “What? Charlie, I’m right here. You don’t have to yell.” She spoke quietly. As if they were arguing about tomato vines. As if things were normal.

  “Mom! What…what is…what is all this? Whu…what happened? I don’t…

  “Charlie, listen to me. There isn’t time for this, okay? There just isn’t time. I need you to stay put while I finish some things, and then we’ll go.”

  “Go? Go where? Go where?” He yelled again. He didn’t know why he was yelling. He wasn’t thinking about her answers or what they meant. He just grabbed on to her words and shouted them because it was the easiest thing to do.

  She ignored him, and his shouting faded as he got lost in watching her movements, forgetting what his questions had been.

  “Ah-ha!” his mother said as she removed from the bag one of the balls of twine they used to tie back bean stalks.

  “Now,” she said to herself. “Let’s see if I remember how to do this…”

  She walked over to the kitchen counter and rummaged through the same drawer where she had found the pendant. Pulling out a pair of scissors, she walked back to the duffel bags. The kitchen light flashed along the steel of the scissor’s blades. Part of Charlie was terrified that his mother was going to climb back up the stepladder and stab Dog Man in the gut. Another, newer part of him wanted her to, before the man could wake up and hurt them again.

  Instead, she picked up the ball of twine and cut about a three-foot length. She set the scissors down, then began wrapping the twine around her fingers.

  “I think if I just…” she muttered to herself. He watched as she formed shapes around her hands. It looked like a complex version of cat’s cradle.

  “Oh, shoot, I forgot to grab the…Charlie, hand me that little vial.”

  He looked at her. He couldn’t understand what she said. Did he even know what the word “vile”meant? Wasn’t it something bad, something evil, something with a rotten smell?

  “The glass vial on the table! Over there!” she said, motioning with her hands now bound together in twine.

  He saw the small container with the blood in it. He di
dn’t want to touch it. But he was afraid his mother would yell again. He walked over, picked it up, and tried to put it in her hands.

  “No Charlie, I’m sorry. I didn’t do this right. You’ll have to pour the, the uh, blood, out onto my hands.”

  He began to cry again, only this time with snot coming out of his nose. He felt ashamed. He couldn’t stop his shoulders from shaking.

  “It’s okay, honey, it’s okay, you can do it,” she said, her lips forming into a smile even while her eyes looked desperate. “Just tip it over a little bit. Come on now. Everything’s going to be alright.” Charlie could hear the growing urgency in her voice.

  His hands shook, and his chest kept heaving while he blubbered, but he managed to tilt the vial so that its open mouth faced downwards. The blood started to move slowly. He thought of a ketchup bottle as he watched the smear of red slide along the side of the small glass container. His stomach lurched, and for a split second he thought he was going to throw up.

  “That’s right, that’s it.” He hated her fake soothing right then, hated what she was making him do. He wanted to yell, he wanted to hit her. He wanted to run outside.

  “Just a little more,” she said. A groan came from somewhere above them, and Charlie looked up. Dog Man’s lips moved, as if he were trying to say something.

  “Charlie! Don’t look at him! Look at me! Charlie!” his mother yelled, hard and sharp.

  His eyes snapped back to her. Now she was all business.

  “Do not look away. Look at me, and just do as I say. That’s all you have to do. Nod if you understand!”

  He nodded. Looking at her was the sanest thing for him to do. He knew her face, knew the lines along her mouth, the pale red hair and the wide, brown eyes. She had always been skinny, and even though people had teased her, he liked her thinness, liked how he could see the bones in her cheeks. Even today, with the yellow bruises forming, he liked her face, how normal and close it was to him. It was familiar, and it gave him something to focus on.

  “Good,” she continued. “Now tip that vial over again.”

  He hadn’t realized that he’d brought it upright. He tipped it over, and once again the blood slid toward the opening of the container. He could hear raspy breathing, but didn’t know if it was his, or his mother’s. Or maybe…

  “Just listen to my voice, Charlie, that’s it. Focus on my voice.”

  He did. It made it easier, instead of thinking.

  A small drop of blood, barely bigger than a pinprick, swelled onto the lip of the vial.

  His mother brought her hands up so that a small section of the twine touched the blood. Charlie watched as the red bead sank into the twine, as if the binding material were thirsty.

  “A quicker picker-upper,” Charlie said. He didn’t know why he’d said it.

  “What? Oh, oh, yes, that’s right, a quicker picker-upper,” his mother said, and laughed a little. “That’s good Charlie, yes, that’s right. Now, just give me a moment, okay? I have to concentrate.”

  The lines deepened on her forehead. She moved her mouth, but Charlie couldn’t make out the words, just an odd, windy sound. The word “susurration” came to mind. He remembered it from a seventh-grade vocabulary quiz four years ago. He kept his eyes locked on his mother’s face, her lips moving quickly, her eyes staring hard at her hands.

  “Damn it,” she muttered. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever heard her cuss before. He found it oddly thrilling.

  “Damn it,” he said back.

  “Charlie, don’t use that word. It’s not polite.”

  Her lips began moving again. This time the words seemed thicker, multi-layered, as if someone standing just behind her were whispering the same sounds. He shivered.

  She did this for another minute or so, and then stopped.

  “Okay, okay. I think that might do it. I think…” she said, smiling. Then she looked up, and her face became stern again. “Gosh, I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

  She moved her fingers, releasing them from the twine.

  “Well, I don’t know. But here goes,” she said. She lowered her hands below her waist, then tossed them up into the air. The twine sailed upwards and hit Dog Man, squarely in the middle of his chest.

  His mother yelled something that sounded like “Moogy woogy!”

  The bunch of twine stuck to the man’s chest instead of falling back down. Charlie heard a whipping sound as the twine stretched out and grew longer, and thicker, turning into heavy rope, wrapping itself around the man’s belly, his arms and legs, even his feet.

  “Oh goody!” his mother clapped, laughing like a little girl at a piñata party. “It worked!”

  With that, there was a cracking sound, and the man’s barely breathing body broke loose from the ceiling and came crashing down toward them. His mother grabbed Charlie around the waist as she dove out of the way. Together they fell to the kitchen floor. The strong scent of damp lumber filled the kitchen.

  They screamed together for quite some time.

  Chapter 4

  The black night sped past them as his mother ground the gears of their old Toyota truck and they careened along the mountain road. The windows were rolled down. The breeze felt good on Charlie’s face, which was still swollen from crying.

  He looked over at his mother. There was more of that same steel set of determination in her jaw and chin. Thin strips of hair whipped around her face. Occasionally she would let go of the steering wheel with one hand to tuck the strands behind her ear, which never stayed in place very long.

  The road curved out of sight ahead of them. His mother yanked at the gearshift on the floor, pushing them down into a lower gear.

  Just a few months back she had begun to explain driving to him, how in a manual transmission vehicle like the Toyota truck, the driver needed to be aware of how much power was needed. He was fifteen years old and would be getting his driver’s permit soon.

  “Are you going up a hill?” she’d asked. “If so, you’ll need a lower gear for more power. Are you driving on a flat surface and needing lots of speed, like on a freeway? Then you’ll need a higher gear.”

  It had made sense to him back then. She’d even let him drive a bit along the dirt road leading to their house. Only with her in the cab, of course. It had been bumpy. He hadn’t known how to manage the clutch and gas pedals at the same time, let alone the brakes. They had lurched and stopped, lurched and stopped, five times before she’d said that the engine needed a break. She’d seemed pleased with his progress, though.

  Tonight, none of it made sense. He couldn’t remember what anything meant. The whole idea of knowing what you needed in order to maneuver around the road up ahead, a road you couldn’t even see, seemed impossible to Charlie. How could you do that? How could you know what you would need around the corner?

  How could you know anything, when a dog crashes through your living room window and starts talking…

  He tried to erase the image from his mind by looking down at his mother’s hand. It just seemed to know when to grab the gearshift. It was dark, so he couldn’t see her feet, but he knew they were moving down below, pressing and releasing pedals, pumping on them like an old church organ. She could do things, his mother. She could fix fences and repair cars, make unguents…

  “Mom,” he said.

  She kept looking straight ahead, watching the road, eyes fixed and hard.

  “Mom?” He tried to keep the sound of a whine from his throat.

  “What, honey?”

  “Mom, what, what was that? What ha…what happened back there?”

  “Not now, Charlie. I have to concentrate. We…”

  “Please Mom? I need to know!”

  “Charlie, I have to get us out of here. We’ll talk about this later.”

  “But you said that back at home! You already said ‘not now!’ When will it be now? When?” He started crying again. He sounded like a belligerent child who just kept complaining and crying. He knew they were in danger, and
he knew his mother was doing her best. He was trying to hold on to reality, even though reality seemed to be at best a moving target. His mother obviously had answers, and if she’d only give him some, maybe he could hang on for a little bit longer.

  He heard himself scream, “If you don’t tell me what the hell is going on, I’ll open the goddamn door and jump out!”

  The truck skidded across the gravel on the road’s shoulder before coming to a stop. The only sound was the wind through the windows, and the strange echo of Charlie’s voice floating through the air. He’d never yelled like that in front of his mother before, and he’d definitely never said “goddamn” in her presence. He worried suddenly that she was going to ground him.

  When he turned to face her, his worry changed to fright. Her eyes were pinpoints, her lips were pulled back, exposing pink gums and clenched teeth. She didn’t look like she was going to ground him anymore. She looked like she was going to eat him alive, right there on the side of the road, on a warm evening in late August, in the foothills of Northern California. All in one big gulp. And no one would ever find him.

  “You want me to tell you what’s going on?” she said, her voice low and frightening. “You want me to let you know about all this, Charlie? Is that it? Do you really want to know?”

  “Ye…yes,” he stammered, his voice having lost its conviction.

  “Well then, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you some things, Charlie. So listen up. I have been protecting you for quite some time now, and apparently I have failed at my job. When you needed protection the most, they came and found us, they broke in to our home as simply as if they just turned the goddamn door knob and walked in! As if they were invited over for potluck!”

  She was yelling now. Spittle flew from her mouth and hit him in the chin. He was too transfixed to wipe it off.

  “I thought I had what it takes. All this time I told myself that it was working, that I could leave Seattle and hide out with you in the foothills of the Sierras,” she said, gesturing out the window as if he’d forgotten where they were.