Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet

by Joanne Proulx

  The day on the shore wasn’t a major blast, but I have to admit it was a change from being stuffed in my room. I was pretty happy with the new T-shirt gig, and despite Stan invading my space, I’d managed to forget the pills in my pocket. But I can’t give my mom all the credit for getting me to kick my prescription drug habit. I went back to the full-dosage drill on Monday, when I headed to school.

  But the Trazon just wasn’t cutting it anymore; no, it wasn’t even coming close to stopping life from kicking the total shit out of me on a fairly regular basis. I figured I’d probably developed some sort of immunity to it, some resistance or something, I didn’t really know. Whatever it was, that Monday morning I wasn’t even halfway to Jefferson when the trouble started. When I came across the bird. Lying on the sidewalk, just a little fart of a thing, half-frozen, one red-tipped wing cocked at a crazy angle, one yellow eye blind. Its legs were twigs. Its legs were a complete joke. Still, I couldn’t step around it. I couldn’t move past it. Even with a bitter wind pushing me along and a couple fresh pills cushioning the march, I had to squat down and run a finger up the bird’s soft belly. And when I did, it quivered, man, a quiver that shot up my arm like a fucking electric shock.

  My hand jumped away. The bird’s clawed feet contracted then released, the softest scratching noise ever, a stick-drawing scraping across cold concrete.

  I don’t know where I found the courage to pick the bird up, because usually I’m not good with shit like this. Normally, with only a bit of bite in my gut, I’d have pretended it didn’t exist, that I wasn’t leaving it behind for some neighborhood cat or some heartless dude’s big boot or some practical guy’s steady hands. But this time I did it, I scooped it up, cradled it in my palms. It was the bird’s lightness, its near weightlessness, that got me. I straightened the broken wing then gently pressed my thumb to its toothpick rib cage. There, like some fragile miracle, a pulse, a heartbeat.

  I’m not sure how long I crouched on that strip of sidewalk, freezing my sac off, waiting for that bird to croak. Thinking what? That my just being there would help it along? That I was special? That it was my duty to watch it go? To witness its death? To feel its life?

  It was a strange brew of mercy and madness that had my thumb moving from the bird’s chest, had both thumbs moving to its neck. And I squeezed it tight so I could press down hard, hard enough to feel the snap of hollow bone, the last beat of unsung song.

  Breaking its neck was easy. Killing it was hard.

  Seriously. It was pretty messed. How, after everything, one little shit of a bird felt so huge. How it blew me to pieces. How, two eyes blind, it made me bawl.

  I DIDN’T GET ANY FARTHER that day. What I did was stagger back home—pitching the stiffy bird over a fence somewhere along the way—before falling into the old homestead, where, wham, I caught an eyeful of myself in the front hall mirror. I was shuffling along like Ozzy, man, all slack-jawed, with one hand trailing the wall to maintain balance, tears streaming down my face. It wasn’t a good look. It wasn’t a look that said “totally together” or even “completely spaced out.” What it said was “freaked out.” Freaked way the fuck out.

  So I dumped the rest of the pills down the can and decided to take control. One of the first things I did was grab a clean piece of paper and a pen and start a list. I put Stan on the first line. To the right of his name I wrote the time and date of his death: 8:37 A.M. , October 8, 2002. About a third of the line was still empty, so I made another column and jotted down a few details: skateboard, van, 7-Eleven. Underneath Stan went Mr. Bernoffski along with his stats. Then, what the hell, there was a lot more page, so I added the maybes. No names or times or good solid details, just the suicide chick, just the old dude who’d pinned me to the floor of my room. Shit, I even threw down the bird.

  Sitting at my desk beneath the taped-up posters of my rock gods, holding that list in my hand, I started to see things a lot clearer. For the first time I thought I had some clue which way this whole thing was headed. I hadn’t turned on any music when I’d sat down, and the house was perfectly quiet. I could hear my breathing, could feel the rise and fall of my chest, gases seeping across nothing boundaries. I watched the warm CO2 ripple the paper in my hand and, yeah, I was pretty sure I knew how things would end up.

  Still, I was a coward. I didn’t have the balls to put my name on the list. Instead, I shoved the paper into my bedside table drawer, right on top of the phone number I’d never bothered throwing out. Right on top of the handout from my buddy’s funeral.

  TEN

  I stared down the tunnel of my hands and on through the cold glass of Delaney’s sliding door. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the basement still looking like an advertisement for a couple dozen of the carnal sins. Stuffing leaked from a fresh rip in the couch, a multitude of empty beer cans poked from underneath its ratty fringe and there looked to be a hash pipe resting precariously on one arm. Center stage, a bag of Lay’s had spilled its guts and a halo of chip crud decorated the dirty carpet.

  My breath was fogging up the glass, so I had to wipe a spot clean to see the La-Z-Boy in the corner. I wasn’t expecting to see Stan sitting there. I’d gotten past that particular delusion. Still, looking at the recliner, which was occupied, I felt the pre-concert buzz that had carried me over to Delaney’s evaporate.

  Fang was perched on the edge of the seat with his head hanging down and his hands clenched between his knees, as if he was praying to the crusty beer stain on the floor or trying hard not to yack or something. Shit, even dead, Stan could have mustered up more energy than the body in that chair. I didn’t knock. I just stood there staring. The stereo wasn’t even on. Or the TV. Just Fang, hunched up alone in his skanky basement.

  Fucking Fang. Fucking Stan. God, I swear if he’d been standing in front of me at that moment, I would have killed him all over again. I mean, how was I going to escape this without him? How was I supposed to become some great guy, the one he’d dangled in front of me, without him to show me how it was done? Jesus Christ. I had to press my forehead against the frosty glass, had to deep-freeze my brain and ice down my anger before I could even lift my arm and rap on the door.

  When my knuckles hit, Fang’s head snapped up. His eyes were wide and startled, and it took a while for him to even look behind the knocking. He finally spotted me, and a pained smile spread across his face, but he didn’t make a move, he just sat there nodding. It wasn’t until I grabbed the handle and shook the door that he finally clued in.

  Coming across the room, Fang looked scrawnier and more heroine-junkie-ish than ever. Even with the long hair, the big dark circles under his eyes were evident, and I saw how his hand shook as he unlocked the door. I think even Steven Tyler would have been a little disappointed at just how bad Fang looked. The only thing about my buddy that wasn’t completely messed was his shirt. It was new. It was a Hilfiger. Ultra-fresh, ultra-red-and-white. Ultra-sharp creases racing-striped the sleeves.

  “What’s with the shirt, man?” I asked as I stepped inside, but if Fang heard me, he didn’t let on.

  “Hey, Luke,” he said, wrapping his arms across his chest and hunching up against the blast of cold that followed me inside. He watched me out the corner of his eye as I stamped around trying to warm up. If I hadn’t known him so well, I’d have thought he was uneasy about seeing me after everything that had happened, but, like I’ve said before, Fang had looked at everyone sideways since he was a kid, trying to cover up his teeth and his shyness and his bloodshot eyes and whatever else he was trying to hide.

  Besides, we’d already discussed our recent hassles. After kicking my Trazon habit, I’d become aware of just how rank it was to have zero friends and I’d finally broken down and called up Fang. I’d been pretty up-front about what I thought of him spilling his guts to Lance, told him I was super-pissed. He’d said, yeah, well, he could understand that, but about the interview, seriously, he didn’t have a choice, the reporter was fucking pushy, had practically held him ho
stage inside the van until he agreed to talk. I knew where he was coming from, but still, I suggested it would have helped me out if he’d given a definitive no to surfer boy.

  “Yeah, well, I’ve always had a bit of trouble saying no,” he’d said, and we’d both laughed at that because it was the total truth. Then I’d mentioned the extra concert ticket and he’d said cool, he liked the Peppers, even though he probably didn’t. So there I was a couple days later hanging with Fang, who, although obviously stoned, also seemed sort of tense, which was unusual. Normally, when Delaney was stoned, he wasn’t much of anything.

  “You okay?” I asked, trying to get a good look at him, which was never easy.

  “Yeah. Why?” His arms were still locked across his chest and he was shifting from foot to foot.

  “You look, I don’t know, kind of tight.”

  “I’m fine.” He gave me a rigid smile. “You want to smoke before we head out?”

  I shrugged, said maybe we should just get going. I hadn’t taken off my jacket and I was definitely feeling edgy in the basement with the unoccupied easy chair.

  Fang didn’t seem to notice. He grabbed his tin of weed, settled himself on the couch and started rolling. I sat at the opposite end, didn’t even realize I was jiggling my knees until he shot me one of his rare direct looks, letting me know I was hindering his creation of the perfect joint, which was one thing he took seriously. When he’d finished, he held out his masterpiece so I could take a look— tight white cylinder, small cardboard filter inserted at one end— then sparked it up. Like usual, we didn’t say much while we smoked, just settled back and let the dope work its magic like it had a thousand times before.

  I did what I normally did when I was in the basement getting stoned, which was ponder all the stuff Fang and I used to do before we dedicated ourselves to drugs. Bombing around town on our bikes, looking for shit to climb. Filling shoe boxes full of pictures of ourselves high on something other than weed.

  As far as I knew, the last time Fang ever climbed anything was at the end of freshman year, one day prior to this mammoth math test. He and I had been dicking around in the cafeteria, trying to study, and we’d both been in serious danger of flunking. We started going on about how much easier it would be if we just had a copy of the fucking test. We knew where the tests were: stacked up and ready to go in the supply room at the front of Mr. Thorp’s class. And given that we had math last period, we also knew that, while Thorp always locked the classroom after school, he usually left the supply room open.

  We waited until that night before making our way back to Jefferson. From outside the building, it took a while to figure out where the classroom was, but when we did, Fang started to climb. The school is made of this phony stone, and the mortar joints are deep and wide, and it took him all of about fifteen seconds to get to the second floor. He crawled through the window at the back of the class, the one I’d casually unlocked before final bell. A minute later he dropped the test out the window. It floated down, right into my outstretched arms, like some beautiful white bird coming in for a landing. Right away, I started checking out the questions. I never even saw Fang climb back out the window. When he called me, he was already on the roof.

  “Hey!”

  I craned my neck and there he was, three stories up, rocking back and forth on the ledge like he was standing on a curb or something.

  “Think I should go for it?” he shouted, leaning out over the edge and glancing down.

  This wasn’t new. The last few times we’d been out on a climb, Fang had turned into one of those Jackass dudes and had started jumping from higher and higher up whatever he happened to be clinging to at the time. I guess it gave him a thrill, but seriously, it scared the shit out of me. I mean, I was used to seeing him get higher and higher and smaller and smaller. He made it look so easy, I’d never been too freaked. I didn’t believe in Fang falling. But he was a climber, not a jumper, and I knew he could only leap from so high before his gravity-sensitive superpowers failed him.

  “What are you doing?” I whisper-screamed. “Get down here!”

  “Am I awesome or what?” His laughter came in bursts. He raised his arms above his head and howled.

  “Fang, shut up! Get the—”

  “Tell me I’m awesome, Luke.” He was practically yelling. “Tell me I’m fucking awesome.”

  “You’re fucking crazy! And this isn’t fucking funny. Now get down, Fang.”

  He spread his arms wide and dropped his head so he was looking right at me. I could see the toes of his shoes, flat and dark, hanging over the ledge, but I couldn’t see his face.

  “I’m so fucking awesome.” He laughed this weird, hysterical laugh and rocked forward, and God, I was sure he was going to swan-dive off the roof. “Don’t you just love me?” He stopped rocking. “Tell me you love me.” This time he said it so softly I could barely hear him.

  “Fang. What the fuck … Fang.”

  We stood motionless, caught in a long, freaky silence, locked together across three stories of night air. Then Fang stepped off the roof.

  His arms circled backwards and his knees were bent and he looked like he was jumping off the high board at the Y. He landed in a bush, was laughing in a wild, pained sort of way when I dragged him out. He got up and hobbled around for a while, all hunched over, howling and moaning like some injured werewolf. Then he collapsed on the grass, curled into a ball and started gasping. I thought maybe he had cramps from all the laughing, but I wasn’t sure he hadn’t punctured a lung, and I was trembling as I bent down to check him out.

  He was bawling, full-out bawling. I kind of panicked and started shaking him, asking him if he needed help, but he pushed me away, told me to leave him alone, so I did. He stayed down, rocking and crying, for another five minutes at least before he got up and we walked home like nothing had happened. Except for a bit of a limp, it didn’t seem like he was even hurt.

  We both ended up acing the test, but that episode kind of took the excitement out of climbing and pilfering tests and pretty much everything else. Soon the only thing we had any fun doing together was getting high, which seemed a lot less dangerous than hurling yourself off a building in the middle of some mental breakdown. I guess that’s how we worked our way into full-timestoner status, how we ended up where we were at that moment, sitting in Fang’s basement, smoking up on his refugee couch.

  We were already passing a small roach back and forth by the time I noticed the empty shelf under the TV.

  “Where’s your DVD player?” I asked. Fang had been the last kid in Michigan to get a player. His mom had finally bought him one last Christmas with some of the back pay she’d received after convincing some doctor that, seriously, she had a repetitive strain injury. She was now on long-term disability from Kalbro, where she’d worked on the line for fifteen years or something like that.

  Fang claimed there was nothing really wrong with her and the only repetitive strain injury she had was from bringing a bottle to her lips one too many times. Still, he’d been happy with the new equipment.

  Fang coughed up a lungful of smoke and shook his head, staring at the empty shelf in disgust. “Someone stole it.”

  “Someone stole it?”

  “Yeah. One of the guys.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “Do I look like I’m joking?” At that moment Fang looked like he could barely slide off the couch let alone come up with some convoluted lie to amuse a friend. “That’s why the door was locked. Someone stole the fucking thing.”

  “Who?”

  “Probably Dwight. I think he pawned it. He showed up with a big bag of shit a couple days later. Was in a pretty generous mood, too.”

  “Fucking Slater.” Now it was me shaking my head in disgust. “He would.” I took a minute before glancing over and asking the next question. “So, I take it he’s not hanging out here anymore?”

  “Nope. None of them are.”

  I let the news that I hadn’t been missing
any parties settle in. “So what have you been doing?”

  “Hanging out. You know. Nothing much.” Fang shook his head so his hair fell over his eyes. “Hey, did you see Slater’s brother on TV the other night?”

  “I saw a clip. Not the whole deal.”

  “Did you hear what he said when that asshole reporter asked him what the most important thing he was taking to the Gulf was?”

  “No, what?”

  Fang readjusted the joint between his nails, which he kept a little long for the purpose, had another toke and held it out for me. I waved him off. He took his time exhaling. “Wet Ones,” he said through the smoke.

  “Wet Ones?” I laughed. “I thought he might have said his gun.”

  “Nope. Wet Ones. To keep himself tidy.”

  “God, you should definitely kick the shit out of Dwight.”

  “Yeah, but it could have been my mom.”

  We guffawed over that for a while, although the idea of Fang’s mom trading his Christmas gift for booze wasn’t much of a stretch.

  “So why don’t you kick the shit out of her ?”

  Fang sucked what was left out of the joint, crushed the roach into the ashtray, then gazed at me in this really long, steady way, like he’d finally gotten up the nerve to let me take a genuine look at him in his crispy new shirt. “Luke,” he said slowly, “do I look like I could kick the shit out of either one of them?” We laughed again, because we were stoned and because it was the total truth and because we both knew it wasn’t funny at all.

  Our hee-hawing was kind of cut short by a glassy smash from above, followed by a loud bang as something heavy hit the floor overhead. My eyes flew to the ceiling, slapped with dirty white paint and a fresh, ringing silence. “What was that?”

  “Nothing,” Fang said flatly, his face blank.

  “That wasn’t nothing, Fang. That wasn’t fucking nothing.”

  “Fine,” he said in a pissed-off tone. “I’ll go check it out.”