The Hunley fills fast. We stop moving in the swell, and I have the sensation of diving without diving. When the water’s at my waist, I wonder if we’ll make it to the bottom of the harbor before we drown. I imagine a gentle cessation, silt and mud pillowing out and up, then settling. I imagine rust and barnacles, inquisitive fish. When the water’s at chest level, Frank mumbles something and puts his head under. No one restrains him.
When the water’s at my neck, my father appears. He asks me if I know that, one hundred years from now, the Hunley will be found and fished out of the harbor by an expedition costing millions of dollars, and, once salvaged, will be paraded through the streets of Charleston by young men dressed in gray uniforms. He asks me if I know that they’ll find a boot and a button, and verify that Arnold had been one of the men aboard. That, eventually, they will find Lieutenant Dixon’s gold coin, dented in the middle, and a great effort will go into finding out what happened to his fiancée—whose name, it turns out, was Queenie—but that her story will prove mysterious, no beginning, just an ending, as it is with us. He asks me if I know that, despite sustaining over seven million pounds of artillery, Charleston will never succumb to Union occupation.
“Did you,” he says, “ever wonder at this?”
I tell him that at every turn our understanding of what was happening around us had been mitigated by such a clanging abashment that we’d become rock-like as far as expectations go. It was pick-up sticks in the middle of a hurricane. It had never occurred to us to wonder about much of anything.
He tells me that we will be remembered mostly for our optimism. I tell him it isn’t optimism that gets you aboard something like this. He says, Still.
I ask him what we’ve done beyond proving our own uselessness? What are we but a spectacle of self-defeat? He answers that we are an expression of an intangible truth that has plagued victors for thousands of years. That immolation as a form of confrontation holds irreducible power.
I tell him he has it backward, and if it had been approval we were looking for, we would’ve kept diaries.
There is another explosion above us, the keel of the Housatonic seizing in on itself, collapsing, and my father disappears. Through the darkness I feel the iron hull on my back. I feel for the crank handle and grasp it. Carleton is frantic. Augustus is standing so his head is in the small hollow of the conning tower, which will be the last place to fill. Someone is screaming at a pitch both familiar and thoroughly distant, a keening that only stops, and briefly, in surprise when our stern hits the floor of the harbor and our bow follows, scrapes a rock of some kind, and rests.
summer boys
Friends, two boys, stare at each other and themselves in the slightly warped mirror in the second-floor bathroom of a small house in Laurelhurst, shorts on, shirts off. It’s the summer after fifth grade, and school, for them, is already beginning to seem like a dream that belongs to someone else. It’s in their slipstream. Gone. The days are beginning to get hot hot, there’s a Popsicle man somewhere, but right now? They don’t care. They’re almost exactly the same age—their birthdays are four days apart, a cosmic near-miss that in their calculations brings them just short of being brothers, twins, the way things were supposed to be. One of them, the older-by-four-days friend has a younger sister; the other only parents, and, standing next to his friend, in his friend’s house, he feels a deformity calmed. Their chests are concave; their feet are growing. Their arms are marbled with the musculature of tiny woodland creatures. One has an innie, the other an outie. No one is home.
One of them, the taller one, holds a hair clipper that belongs to his father, a clipper that has been rescued from the dank recesses of an upstairs closet in the Laurelhurst house, a closet that smells like soap and shoes and motor oil and is as dark as dark gets, and he is saying to the other that now is the time to do this; now, while his father’s at work in the motorcycle garage where he’s employed on Saturdays; now, while his mother is at the market getting groceries that will include, per the boys’ special request, Fruity Pebbles, Gushers, Dr Pepper, and frozen pizza (which is the reason they are always at this house; the other house is nothing but wheat germ and raisins, wooden cars and make-your-own-fun, early bedtime and no TV, ever); now is the time, he says, now is the time. It is 1987, and Brian Bosworth, the terror from Oklahoma, has arrived in Seattle to play for the Seahawks; it’s time to make the magic happen. They love Walter Payton, they love Jim McMahon, they love the Bears (mostly because one of the boys’ fathers, the father they idolize, loves the Bears), but it’s more accurate to say they loved, because now the Boz is here, a hometown hero, an eleven-million-dollar man who will unify the city and bring a form of gilded greatness to the Northwest, and his arrival has obliterated everything else in their orbit of likes and dislikes.
Think of the Boz, the boy holding the clipper says. The haircut was his idea. Think of the Boz, he says again, as if they were capable, at this moment, of thinking about anything else. He’s theirs now. The Boz, picked in the supplemental draft, belongs to them. He has hair from the future, spiked on top, bare on the sides, and in back a flowing river of awesomeness that sneaks out from under his helmet. The Boz wears his torn jersey outside his pants. The Boz marks his ankle-tape with his college number, 44, because the NFL won’t allow that to be his official number, which is 55—an echo, certainly, but a pale one. The switch is flipped; the clipper’s mosquito hum fills the second floor. This will not be just any haircut. This will be the haircut, and with it they will become part of something bigger than themselves. This, one of them thinks, is a pivotal moment. It’s a jumbotron experience, a statistical miracle, and they are doing it together. It’s not about being like someone. It’s about becoming him. And with a few swipes and a scalp reveal you can make it happen. They are tender, precise with each other. They take turns. Concentrate on the line. Hair falls to the tile, dirty snow-clumps on the bathroom floor.
Do they look like the Boz, with their torn jerseys and markered-up shoes? Do they look like the Boz, when they have brown hair and he’s decidedly platinum? Does anyone care? Before this, they were just friends, certain of their affection, uncertain of its expression. Before this, one of them, the worrier, was afraid that his hours in the Laurelhurst house were numbered, that he would overstay his welcome, that he would be exposed as an interloper, but that worry is now gone. The haircut is proof. The haircut is a leveler. So do they look like the Boz, who could curl their combined weight without so much as a lip-twitch? Who cares! They look like each other, and that, for one of them, is good enough.
Their hair clogs in the sink; they leave it there. Hair, impossible, at this point, to say whose, is on the counter; they leave it there. Hair, little splinters of it, covers every bathroom surface, including, somehow, the mirror, and they, the two of them, are down the stairs like future linebackers, swinging their weight around the shoddy banister, obliterating the weak side run. The grandfather chair on the first floor becomes Bo Jackson. The screen door is the Broncos porous offensive line. Outside the sun is high, and the front yard is the Kingdome. Plays are called, random numbers, slow huts, sharp hikes, and the trees lining the street, the great oaks and elms that have been watching over this particular block for who knows how long, who have seen how many plays called, how many errant, throwing-starred punts go up on the roof, who hold, in their branches, a generation’s worth of Aerobies too high to knock out—these trees, who have enjoyed, for centuries it seems, those magical on-the-lawn hours when balls are drawn heavenward, who have stood in rapt attention for those endless minutes before the car-door-slamming parents return from the outside world to ask their kids what the hell, just what the hell is going on, these trees, they whistle their applause.
Stop rubbing your dicks together, says the boy’s father when he gets back from the garage and sees their hair, he’s not that great. They are sitting at the dinner table, he has just pulled up a chair, and his voice is like the phlegmatic roar of a garbage disposal. Each word a li
fetime of cigarettes. One of the boys is used to the sound of this voice. The other is not, but wishes, thinks, he could be. The two of them take all criticism delivered from the mouth of this man seriously, this man who rides motorcycles and has promised to teach them, soon, to ride, this man who carries in his limbs the promise of casual violence and who wears a look of weary surprise upon entering the rooms of his own house as if he can’t quite believe what his life has handed him, this man, they are attuned to him—but this time one of them can’t take what he’s said seriously, because he’s just heard the word dick said aloud. Inside! In the presence of a mother who doesn’t bat an eyelash as she slaps the molten pizza on the table. To his relief, he sees his friend is already laughing. Words like this send the two of them into hysterical revelry. Butt, crack, nuts, ball-peen, these words are everywhere, and they’re hilarious. A family history of angina, the recent and casual mention of it, was close enough to the real thing that the one boy’s mother told them to go ahead and get it out of their system and then knock it off. The father’s more indulgent, telling them now through monstrous bites of pizza that their one and only Brian Bosworth received the Dick Butkus award not just once but twice, and try saying that five times fast. They try, of course they try, and the effort almost brings them off their chairs. Later this father buys his son a Land of Boz poster to replace their now unloved and forgotten Jim McMahon on his bedroom wall. Their tank-topped hero: wide-stanced, implacable, and domineering in wraparound shades. Across his chest it reads “Monster D.B. 44”—defensive back, the father explains—and he’s flanked by menacing kids their own age wearing shades, a menacing Tin Man, a stepped-on Scarecrow, and a Dorothy pinup who has laced her small arm around his just so, in that perfect way. It’s an invitation that for now does nothing for the two boys, not just yet, because directly below where she has placed her hand in the crook of his elbow the Boz is palming a football helmet, his fingers dug in, the helmet an egg, the helmet not going anywhere. The father hadn’t been leveling criticism, judgment, at all, the boys understand. It’s just the way men talk to each other. The friends stare at the poster for hours, and imagine that instead of there being only one Boz standing guard at the foot of a road that leads, behind him, to a spired and mysterious Emerald City, there are two.
Weeks pass and here’s how the boys talk to each other: What do you like? What do you like? Is that something we should like? Every day is a disputation of taste, and nothing ascends without the explicit approval of both. When they wrestle, one wins. The next time they wrestle, the other wins. Some things they can do nothing about (chins, eye color, hand size); others (shoes, hair, room decoration, lunch box) they can. For one of the boys, the unworried one, this equilibrium seems a natural, effortless state; for the other, it’s become everything. What do you like? I like what you like. Up in one of the trees in the yard, on a climbable but out-of-the-way branch, they’ve carved their first names followed by a last name they made up.
These friends, two boys, they spend their days—all their days it seems, the one boy’s mother wondering what’s wrong with this house—in Laurelhurst, going to the beach, swimming, jumping off the high platform, mugging for each other on the way down, playing rag-tag in the water with a sock-covered tennis ball they peg at each other like Norwegian berserkers. They get splinters from running on the old dock, wooden shards they extract, painfully, with the mother’s tweezers. They roll the log-boom for hours, so good at it that eventually their suits actually dry in the sun. They scrape their elbows on cement, they hyperextend on trampolines, they tear their baseball pants sliding in the rec-field diamonds, wounds that weep clear liquid and require rubbing alcohol. They mis-time their tree-climbing dismounts and roll their ankles, they play butt-ball off the garage door until their backs are patterned with bruises, swing pillows like merciless cudgels, chuck super-bounce balls into traffic from the cover of shrubs. Their days are long and they are war buddies, forging experience. Long days, and enough time to explore the texture of friendly violence without consequence until one of the boys, while running, kicks playfully at the other’s back foot and sends him sprawling. An accident, an accident, he wants to shout even before his friend hits the ground, his arms so surprised by the physics of what is happening to him that they don’t even consider reaching down to break the fall. Accident, as one of the boys lands hard on his face, scrapes the bridge of his nose, blackens his eye, and screams like a bird of prey until his mother hustles from the kitchen to hold him in her arms; the other, unhurt, standing, guilty, numb, listening, is surprised to find himself wishing not that it hadn’t happened, but that it had happened, instead, to him. Back in the kitchen, he hands his friend an ice pack, and then takes one for himself; he puts it on his own uninjured face, and pushes it into his eye until it hurts the back of his head, says, oh, shit, ow, a thing so dumb to do, an action so transparent, that everyone at the table laughs. All is forgiven. It was a mistake. He will not be sent home. The pain subsides.
The next morning, in the garage, they trick their bikes out with Spokey Dokes and then pedal out into the neighborhood, jumping curbs, careening down stairs, and calling out their favorite parts of their new favorite movie, Rad, which is about BMX bike racers who jump over things larger than curbs until Jeremy, an older cousin, released to his own summer and suddenly present, tells them bike riding’s for faggots, since bike is German for dick, and so then what are you doing when you ride your bike? Neither of the boys are German, this is information they hadn’t known. Jeremy, and his rumbling skateboard, here to deliver the news. They are open to it, to this attention from Jeremy; or, at least, are interested enough to hear what he has to say. He’s about to enter high school. He’s got hair that is not buzzed, but ratty and long. Though he lives only a few blocks over he’s never once expressed even a passing interest in either of them; they are eager to prolong this exchange, and even feel, on this day, strangely blessed by it. They watch him kick-flip his skateboard. They watch his loping leg-push, and his deep lean as he carves back toward them, kicks again, and stops a few feet away. What’s wrong with your eye? Jeremy says. What’s wrong with your hair? What, he says, is with the matching sweatshirts?
They are caught off guard by the certainty of this questioning. They stand silently astride their bikes, one boy waiting for the other to speak up, not daring to defend the two of them himself. Jeremy is not his cousin. But his friend does not speak up, and the worry returns. Have they been wrong this whole time? Is their closeness being called into question? The thought hovers, takes hold, then disperses as Jeremy kick-pushes lazily down the street, back to his house. Hey, rich boy, he calls over his shoulder. Can you do this? Try copying this. The skateboard flips under his feet, once, twice, catching the sun like an airborne, twisting fish, and then is pulled out of its orbit and expertly stomped to the concrete by Jeremy’s mismatched Converse high-tops. I’m not rich, one of the boys says to the other when Jeremy is out of sight. It’s not a bad thing, the other says back. As they walk their bikes home, one of the boys runs his fingers through his hair. The Boz, somewhere, looks out disapprovingly at the prospect of his short career.
Soon bikes are out, Spokey Dokes are out, BMX movies are out, Velcro crotch guards are out, wheel-pegs are out, and skateboards are in. It’s not only Jeremy telling them this. They’ve just seen Back to the Future on VHS, where Michael J. Fox goes back in time and invents the skateboard, which he then rides while holding on to the back of a car. All information received from the movies they watch is stored and internalized and mulled over until it reemerges as want and necessity. How come we didn’t see this earlier? one of them says. The back of a car! the other says back. They beg for the same skateboard, a Nightmare III model available only at one store, a store that happens to be near the motorcycle garage. This is the model Jeremy has.
When the skateboards are delivered they plaster them with Garbage Pail Kids and spend hours on their butts, luging down hills, braking with their heels—burning heel rub
ber, they call it—trudging back up to do it again. They carve great slalom curves in the asphalt, bracing themselves against the sound of the wheels on the concrete and the streaming wind. They are doing this for themselves, for the joy in it, for the concrete-streaking pleasure of it all, but who are they kidding? They want an audience, and at the bottom of every hill, they are looking for Jeremy. He is becoming part of their summer. In the driveway, they spend a weekend trying to unlock the secret of the ollie, which Jeremy can do but won’t explain, opting instead to rub his knowledge in their faces by ollie-ing anything available—curbs, footballs, tipped over garbage cans. One of the boys, the one who is related to Jeremy, watches Jeremy kick his board, sail over a patch of grass, and land in the street, and tells him that, for that maneuver, he gets the Dick Butkus Award. Jeremy eyeballs the two friends, sitting on their own useless skateboards, and says, that better be a good thing. They assure him it is. He’s three years older, and they want to love him the way they love each other, they want that to be allowed; they want him to love them, to need them, to show them everything he knows about everything because surely, surely, he knows. All Jeremy wants to talk about, though, are boners and how many girls he’s fingered, and how he’s going to bag-tag a pinup someday, just like the Boz, in that faggoty poster, hanging above the bed.
Jeremy, called home, ollies a football in the driveway, leaving in his wake a vapor trail of effortless superiority. The friends feel a relief in being alone again, or, at least, one of them does—unobserved, by themselves on their skateboards as the dimmer switch on the day is gradually lowered—but there’s also a new feeling of absence that bombards them atomically, nickels of doubt streaming invisibly sideways like a radio frequency. The sun is down, the streetlamps flicker on. But it is only the middle of summer, and an ocean of days stretches in front of them like an endless and gently whispered invitation, and they return to their hill to luge, strobe-lit, through the neighborhood.
The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories Page 3