Shoulder the Sky

by Lesley Choyce

  Somebody slapped me on the back. “Back to the hellhole,” Bill said.

  “What it is,” someone else said.

  A couple of girls pulled out mirrors and lipstick as they walked. For the first time in my life, I was viewed as being at least semi-cool by the other kids in the cafeteria as I walked back into the school with the smokers. And I felt a kind of pride.

  My mother would have been appalled if she could have known. It had been a rapid descent from tofu and brown bread to this tobacco wasteland. My father would simply not have believed I smoked, even if I lit up in the living room and inhaled a pack of Marlboros, puffing smoke in his face with every lungful. The truth is that I didn’t like the smoking part, but I felt pretty good about the camaraderie. I wished that non-smokers could sneak off into the woods to stand around and not smoke and that this would somehow be considered dangerous and even sexy. But the world is a funny place, eh, and things don’t always work out the way you want them to.

  And you’ll be disappointed to learn that by the time I got back to math class, where Heavy Metal was tuning up his Fender for geometry, I felt let down that smoking had not made me feel angrier about anything. I knew I was still holding it all back, a great dam against some flood that Dave explained should come some day, a flood I needed to be prepared for. But it wasn’t today. My mother was still gone from the world and I had somehow accepted this fact with only a lingering twinge of self-pity. I was still acting way too normal for my own good.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When I told Dave about the smoking, he looked concerned at first but then cleared his throat and said, “I think this is actually a good thing. A few more bad habits and we’ll have you cured.”

  I knew that Dave was not like conventional shrinks. He said he tried to come up with creative approaches to problems, approaches that might seem totally whacked to some. But he was confident that he was on the right track with me.

  “What exactly is it you’re trying to cure me of,” I asked, “aside from my problem of being so normal, or at least appearing to be normal?”

  “Sheesh,” Dave said. “Maybe cure is the wrong word. I’m just trying to help. It has to do with your mother, remember. You must miss her a lot.”

  “I do. Every minute of the day.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It is?”

  “You loved her?”

  “Of course; she was my mother. Did you love your mother?”

  “I still do.”

  “She’s alive?”

  “Yes. Nearly eighty. She still tells me I need a haircut every time I see her.”

  “You do need a haircut. For an old guy, you look a little flaky with that shaggy mop and those sideburns.”

  “You think I should look normal?”

  “No. Maybe not.”

  “Meanwhile, back at the ranch...” he said, which was Dave’s way of trying to get back on subject — this issue of me and the fact I’d been acting so seemingly normal, which seemed to upset everyone so much. “How do you feel about this smoking thing?”

  So we did that one long and hard. Maybe I was acting out my anger and my hurt. That was the theory. Dave didn’t have to give me a lecture about the fact that my smoking career should be short. From the start, I knew I couldn’t commit myself to the smoking lifestyle. I was pretty sure it wasn’t worth lung cancer and sexual dysfunction.

  My only true commitment to the smoking world was love of the foray into the woods at noon hour and then right after school, a quick couple of puffs with the gang at the designated spot near the bus garage followed by running for the bus with nicotine breath. Sometimes it was me keeping pace with Scott Rutledge, which must have raised a few eyebrows at the mingling of such strange companions.

  I gave smoking a full two weeks of my life. It was a five-days-a-week thing. No weekends. What was the point if I was not with my squint-eyed smoky tribe? So it was ten days, four smokes a day. Mostly I bummed cigarettes, but nobody would have put up with that for much longer.

  I tried to tell my father that I started smoking. He was watching golf on TV. During golf my father was visible but pretty much comatose. It wasn’t from drinking or anything. It was his own special narcotic state of half sleep/half golf. He didn’t even like golf but he liked the hue of the greens, the hushed crowds, and the well-appointed golfers selecting woods or irons. It was another world for him. My father had no bad habits that I knew of, and the Saturday afternoon TV golf/semi-sleep seemed to be enough to transport him from the real world into a dimension akin to a heroin high. I’m just guessing but I think there’s truth in it.

  “I’ve started smoking,” I told him. He was lost on the seventh green somewhere outside Atlanta.

  “That’s not a good idea,” he said, drifting, I think, somewhere above the Georgian treetops.

  “No kidding.”

  “You really are?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’ll be darned.”

  That was it. I don’t think he believed me. It just wasn’t the sort of thing his son Martin would do.

  Opinions

  Trees deserve more respect and credit than we give them. Nobody should be allowed to cut down a tree, any tree, without being charged a fee or a tax or something that would then go to health care for poor people. The tree tax would have to be passed on to consumers and that way we’d know a tree had been sacrificed every time we bought something that was part tree.

  I was thinking about trees because of the days spent in the woods with the smokers. In the end, I liked the trees better than the puff fiends. Smoking had been part of my quest for healing. I wanted to damage myself somehow, Dave had suggested. But I think that was just the shrink in him talking. I wanted communion with someone and the smokers took me in — or out to the woods, at least.

  But I had to give up on being part of that squint-eyed but oh-so-cool squad. My breath smelled bad — my teachers said so — but that’s not why I gave up on smoking. I could have taken that flack. It was the smokers’ conversation that did me in. The complaints about teachers and homework. How creepy the principal was. Older siblings who were getting in trouble with the law over petty crimes and automobile offences.

  I’d try to initiate new subjects. I started pointing out different trees one day. “This old oak here must be over a hundred years old.”

  The girls looked at me like I’d arrived from Jupiter. Finster and Hubbards, both older and more threatening than the other guys, looked somehow offended. “How do you know?” Finster asked in an intimidating manner.

  “Yeah,” Hubbards asked, “what are you, like some bloody tree expert?”

  I could tell they weren’t interested in my thoughts on the maples, oaks, gums, birches, poplars, or any of the shrubby undergrowth. Instead, the conversation turned, as it always did, back to cigarettes. Which was the subject that drove me from the fold.

  “I really could have used a cigarette during that test in math,” Cindy said.

  “I nearly died for a smoke towards the end of history. It was like so boring.”

  “I don’t think it’s fair we can’t smoke in class,” Scott Rutledge added, fine-tuning his agenda for the race for class president.

  “God this tastes good,” Finster said, dragging smoke into his lungs.

  “Do you believe they’re raising the price of a pack of smokes again?” Hubbards asked the elms.

  “I smoked two whole packs on Sunday,” somebody else confessed with pride. “My folks were gone.”

  Etcetera.

  And so my smoking career ended of its own accord. Whatever it was supposed to do for me, it wasn’t working. It didn’t make me angry or release my emotions. I wasn’t edgy and nervous with chips on my shoulder like the rest of the gang, and I think eventually they would have simply told me to stop hanging out with them. The simple comment about the age of the tree had set off a lot of mistrust. Finster and Hubbards were beginning to think I was some kind of mole or snitch. So I faded from their liv
es as quickly as I had entered.

  And then I woke up one night soon after, remembering something.

  I was twelve and my mother and I were sitting in the kitchen. She was peeling potatoes, and I liked watching her do this — graceful, artistic, long spirals of potato skin being released from the spud, revealing a cold white flesh beneath. Out of the blue, she said, “You know, I smoked one cigarette in my entire life.”

  “You did?”

  “I was about your age. An older boy gave it to me. I didn’t smoke it then but took it home and lit it up behind the house. I was all alone. I sipped at the smoke. I didn’t haul it in like most amateurs do. I never coughed. I liked it. It made me feel important. There was no filter. I smoked it down until it burned my fingers. And then it was over. I loved every minute of it. I especially liked the way that the world looked through the smoke that was right in front of my face.”

  She saw the stunned look on my face. She was scaring me because she was revealing something of herself that seemed very private.

  “That’s why I never touched another one. Don’t you ever start, okay?”

  The final parental caution seemed like it was tagged on as an afterthought. Obligatory. She wasn’t really trying to give me a lecture. Remembering that one-sided conversation brought her back to me for a brief moment.

  “Claude Monet,” she had said, “was a French painter who said that he did not paint the object but the space between the viewer and the object. That was where the smoke took me.”

  And that was part of what was happening in her paintings, I soon realized. Whether it was Asia or other worlds, the air was thick with diffused colours. It was a beautiful distant place my mother went to when she painted. But I don’t think any of us in the family ever went there with her. The paintings themselves had created barriers, or maybe we had created them ourselves.

  I was beginning to wish I had asked my mother more questions when she was alive.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Advice

  My advice to you today is to shut off your computer. Maybe there are two kinds of people: those who live life and those who are just an audience. We’re all becoming lazy and stupid because of our machines. Get out of the house and do anything that does not involve electricity. You don’t want to hear this, but it needs to be said.

  Dave said that Lilly was right on track with her anger. “She is working it out,” he told me. But Lilly was rebellious and angry before my mother got sick, while she was sick, and now Lilly was still angry. She had pierced her nose recently, which would make anyone cranky, I would think. But she was proud of it. And she shaved off all the hair in her eyebrows. I don’t know why a person would do that, but she must have felt it was important. “It’s a statement,” she told me. Whatever that means.

  Lilly had given up smoking herself, but she still stayed out late with people who seemed odious to me. Her “friend” Jake had bleached blond hair and wore a black leather jacket with little metal things stamped into it. Apparently, people, including Lilly, thought Jake was really something. But I wasn’t impressed. He always had a look on his face like he had just done something really nasty and felt good about it. I’m sure he had been working on that look for many years. Lilly thought he was “deep.”

  If you asked him what he’d been up to he always answered, “Not much.” In that regard, I think he had some sincerity.

  Jake, along with the others, encouraged Lilly to stay out too late doing “not much,” but so far it hadn’t seemed to do her much harm. I think hers was a crowd that tried to be nasty, cruel, and even hurtful — but they couldn’t quite pull it off. So they wandered around in some cynical limbo world of what someone once called “quiet desperation.”

  I explained this all to Dave and he said that this was a “common malady” of many young people today. (Not like when he was growing up and young people knew exactly why they were angry and who they were angry at.) Anger, even frustrated anger, Dave would explain, is better than apathy. Dave was a real stickler when it came to apathy. He ranted about apathy. Just to get his goat, I told him I was apathetic about apathy. He almost lost his cookies until he realized I was messing with his head.

  “Good one, dude,” he said, finally taking a breath. “Physician heal thyself. Right on.” Then he tightened the rubber band on his little ponytail and we continued talking about me and my problem of acting so normal.

  Disappointment with my short-lived smoking career sent me back to a traditional cafeteria lunch with Darrell. Darrell was a loner like me, and when two loners go separate paths, well, you just have two individual loners instead of two loners who hang out together.

  “I felt forsaken,” Darrell said. I know that doesn’t sound like anything a kid would say, but neither Darrell nor I have ever spoken in the same manner as our contemporaries. This is why sometimes we were referred to as “intellectual snot” — or “snots” if we were being referred to in the plural.

  “It was just an experiment,” I said.

  Darrell understood all about experiments. “How’d it turn out?”

  “I had high expectations, but it didn’t make orbit.”

  “Been there, done that. Got the T-shirt for it.”

  We liked to mix idioms. In fact, we liked the word “idiom” a lot and fantasized starting a band called the Idiom Idiots, just Darrell and me and about a hundred thousand dollars worth of computerized music and sound gear.

  While I’d been trying to learn how to smoke, Darrell had been up to his own experiments. I noticed he was wolfing down a tuna sandwich: whole wheat, heavy mayonnaise, sliced pickles protruding from the edges. “Martino, I thought long and hard about your alliance with coffin nails and came to the conclusion that I too need some way to break out of this shell I’ve created for myself.”

  Heck, we were both a couple of geeks but, I had always thought, well-adjusted geeks, in a world that was soon to be ruled by geeks like us: non-smokers, smarter than we let on, not particularly attractive to girls or women, young men who handed in acceptable homework assignments and went to bed early.

  Darrell offered me half of his tuna sandwich. His mother always cut it in half to form two rectangles. My own mother never failed to cut corner to corner, creating two perfect triangles. If she made tuna fish, she would always put fresh dill or fennel in it. I accepted the tuna fish and Darrell brushed his hands theatrically, leaned over, and pulled a dozen eggs out of his book bag. He placed the egg container in front of him and, like he was opening some box of precious jewels, he lifted the lid.

  “I’ve come to the conclusion I was leading a much too sheltered life. As you know, I studied the Klingon dictionary and became somewhat proficient in the language. But it wasn’t until I found myself staying up late conversing on a chat room in Klingon with people all over the planet — for up to two hours at a time — that I realized I needed to get out of the house and do something a bit more ambitious with my life.”

  “Now you’re raising chickens?”

  “No.”

  “Ukrainian egg decorating?”

  “Get serious.”

  “I give. What are you doing with the eggs?”

  “Revenge,” was Darrell’s one word answer.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Stuff That May or May Not Be Important

  Human kind has never perfected alternatives to war, but there must ultimately be alternatives. Simple co-operation between people and countries is probably not sexy enough. Deep inside the grey matter of our brains, they say, we are still basically lizards. If you dig further, we are probably just amoebas, but we don’t think like amoebas anymore (the exception being the writers and producers of most TV sitcoms).

  Our reptilian brains seize on territorial notions, convincing our weaker rational brains that we have legitimate reasons for organized violence, and we become aggravated and aggressive.

  It is my contention that we are not evolving into anything more advanced than we now are — at least our brains are not evol
ving. We may end up without a little toe or a thumb but we will still have urges to do harm and to wage war.

  Since evolution will not save us from ourselves — in fact, it may make us more aggressive — we must seek alternatives.

  Darrell really didn’t have that many enemies. He was more enamoured with the idea of revenge than with any Edgar Allan Poetic obsession to do harm to those he hated.

  Holding up a brown egg in front of the intergalactic screen saver on his computer, he said, “Behold, the perfect creative weapon.”

  “Some would see it as a food source.”

  “That troubled me at first. I was buying at the supermarket and wondering if there were alternatives. I asked the guy working the aisles what they do with old eggs.”

  “Old eggs?”

  “Ones that have been in the store too long. Unsold eggs. They must go somewhere. It turns out there’s a company that buys them — dirt cheap. I tracked it down and found the place. Went there on the bus. They use old eggs to cook up and then freeze dry or something. I was afraid to ask too much. But I asked the guy if I could buy some old eggs from him. I said I was doing experiments. Research. Now I have a guilt-free source of cheap eggs.”

  On my own, I would never have achieved the same drive and passion for focused or even random egg violence that Darrell had, but I was still on my quest for an emotional outlet and here was an opportunity not to be passed up. It was a vice far more addicting than tobacco, and we both quickly passed from focused acts of egg revenge to random acts of egg aggression.