The Shark Curtain

by Chris Scofield

  I think Frog Boy and I could have been friends. Physically, he must have gotten stared at a lot; girls my age get stared at too—we have that in common. Only where my legs and arms reach each nook and corner of my bedroom—stretching like sticky octopus tentacles, preventing me from leaving it sometimes—Frog Boy’s tiny arms and legs, his big belly and surprised incomplete little face, kept him from nothing. He was small and Floyd took him everywhere, and everywhere the world called him a freak and thought how ugly and pitiful he was. While no one spits at me like they spat at him, Frog Boy saw the world through the same eyes I do.

  Inside we’re even more the same: our hearts were born broken, our brains on fire.

  Each week my OE class draws straws. Long straws “orate,” that’s what Mrs. McGivens calls it. I drew a long one this time, which means it was my turn to stand in front of the class while every inch of me crawled with clammy nerves, and my voice cracked, and I pretended I’d memorized my assignment so I could recite it in front of twenty- . . .

  Five.

  Kids.

  (Gulp.)

  I walked to the podium in front of the blackboard and, while some kids were graded on “Eye Contact with Audience,” “Confidence,” and “Projection and Tone,” Mrs. McGivens simply said, “Just read it, Lily. Don’t worry about the class.”

  I felt their eyes and restless bodies when I did.

  Oral Expression

  5th Period

  Mrs. McGivens

  April 12, 1968

  Essay: FROG BOY

  “Frog Boy” (cowritten by June Boy) tells the story of Frog Boy’s life after pulling himself out of the primordial ooze of the popular La Brea Tar Pits, and dashing (as much dashing as he could do covered in tar) through traffic to a sideshow tent across Wilshire Boulevard. There, he was first observed rolling under the tent skirt like a sneaky tumbleweed. “Observed” because no one except his future wife June or his manager Floyd Halverson EVER had a relationship with Frog Boy. He wasn’t around much so you didn’t make a coffee date with him or run into him at the store. One year in one town was enough, and he hid out between engagements.

  It looked like Frog Boy would be a bachelor until a stage bit in Reno when he was wheeled out on a platform (a gift from the Fortuna Flea Circus) and Floyd held a microphone to his tiny mouth. When the room fell silent he sang “Somewhere over the Rainbow” without accompaniment. His voice was small but in tune and crystal clear. No cameras were allowed so only newspapers told the story of how a parade of bare-chested showgirls introduced him as “The Biggest Little Man in Reno” and with a hand on her sequined hip, each kissed the whiskery knobby little head of chinless Frog Boy. He made a purring sound when they did, which the paper insisted was proof he was either a deformed cat or a windup toy. When showgirl June (a former magician’s assistant) said his whiskers felt like armadillo hair, Frog Boy fell in love with her immediately.

  “It was her honesty,” he wrote later. The broken pieces of his heart instantly melded and his heart grew to a threatening size in his teeny-tiny chest (a pushpin could have killed him). It stayed that big all the years they were married.

  They dated quietly first, of course, until a midnight wedding ceremony under a sandy tiki lamp on Padre Island. “You’re dead to us,” wrote June’s embarrassed parents of their only daughter’s only choice, though they sent a nice punch bowl the following week.

  There were rumors that FB hung out with movie stars, was the toast of Hollywood parties, had a star outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and was carried around in drunk women’s cleavages—for someone the size of a guinea pig with water retention, that would have been dangerous. No one really knows how old Frog Boy was when he died, but he was a performer to the end. His shows were rare but celebrated: six months of highly publicized performances in the Curtis Wilkin Freak Show, private parties in Boca Raton and Acapulco where he performed in the living rooms of drunken millionaires, and three Las Vegas shows (opening for Jack Jones, Dr. Irwin Corey, and Tiny Tim), before disappearing into the desert of the American Southwest with June.

  “I feel safer in the open,” Frog Boy wrote of all that sky and not-much-else. Nobody knew where that was until a lone Australian tourist turned down a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. With a dust storm on his tail he almost didn’t see the rusty mailbox painted “F. and J. Boy” or, in the distance, the geodesic dome they called home. June made the stranger dinner but FB wouldn’t come out of the workshop where he was building more bookcases.

  When Frog Boy “croaked” nobody knew his real name or even if he had one. For some reason the Retired Circus Freak Association (RCFA) wanted nothing to do with him.

  June remarried several times but always unhappily.

  “Rib-bit,” someone said from the back of the room

  A few kids giggled and I felt myself turn red.

  “That’s enough, class,” our teacher said, standing up.

  Tanya Richards, who’s also in drama and debate, waved her raised hand. Without being called on, she blurted, “Mrs. M., Mrs. M., is that a real essay? Because it kind of sounded like a book report, and then—”

  “Yes, Tanya, all right.” Mrs. McGivens promised Mom she’d treat me like any other student and not “sugar coat it,” which sounded ominous (threatening; inauspicious, Oxford Dictionary). She paused to gather her thoughts. She does that when she really likes something (or doesn’t). “You have a wonderful imagination, Lily, but I asked for an essay. Your piece starts off as a book report then changes into a short story. Only it reads like reportage. You’re all over the map with tense, and—”

  Huh? She didn’t like my essay?

  “It’s not a short story,” I interrupt. I wasn’t nervous now and stood taller behind the podium. “It’s nonfiction. Essays are nonfiction. Frog Boy is nonfiction.”

  “Lily.”

  The whole class would have laughed if our teacher hadn’t just lectured us about picking on the handicapped and retarded kids in school. The kids rolled their eyes and looked at each other with nervous smiles, confirming that I was seriously odd, which is kind of like being retarded. While she wrote the definition of nonfiction on the blackboard, the rib-bit boy said, “Rib-bit,” louder than ever.

  This time Mrs. McGivens ignored it.

  Back home, Dad was out of town and Mom didn’t have time for my essay. She was finishing a painting of a dead bloody soldier and couldn’t get one of his dead eyes right. Lauren and I had learned there was no budging her until the last detail was done, plus thirty minutes of her walking around the easel talking to herself and smoking.

  She was in her studio for hours this time, so Lauren and I did our homework, made ourselves dinner, and took baths. Before going to bed (on time), I placed “Frog Boy” on her nightstand.

  Her door was closed in the morning but there was a plate of french toast and scrambled eggs staying warm in the oven, and Lauren and I loaded up.

  “If I don’t fall in love,” my sister said to me, “and I’m poor and don’t have money for my own house, we could live together.” She traced Mrs. Butterfield with her sticky finger. “Maybe you won’t fall in love either, Lily. I could take care of you.”

  Lauren wants to be a nurse after winning a scholarship as Miss Oregon (but losing Miss America) and working in a veterinarian hospital every summer she’s in high school.

  “No thanks,” I answered. Frog Boy needs taking care of, not me.

  Lauren and I heard the stairs squeak when Mom snuck upstairs to her studio, and when we opened the front door to leave for school she called down, “Have a good day, girls!”

  I checked her nightstand before going. “Frog Boy” was still there, only with an ashtray and wineglass stain on top.

  Mom says love is sometimes stronger when the “object of affection is gone.” Or dead. She always misses Dad when he’s gone; she paints like crazy, never makes their bed, and they have long phone conversations in the middle of the night. I hear her cry sometimes when they talk.


  She says Jamie’s fiancé Kevin is more in love with Jamie now than he ever was. I hope she was really dead when they buried her. I read that back in the 1870s, people sick with cholera were buried alive all the time.

  Jesus was buried then rose from the dead. He died so we would have Eternal Life, but He really meant Eternal Death because we have to be dead to get it.

  If Kevin loves Jamie more now that she’s dead, would I love Jesus more if He were alive?

  Did June love Frog Boy more when he was just a framed photograph over a teeny-tiny casket?

  I lifted Mom’s ashtray off my essay.

  Oh well. Jamie will like it. Even dead she’ll like it better than Mom ever would, and I grab a big manila envelope from Dad’s desk, and even though it won’t get there, even though there’s nowhere to get, I address it:

  Aunt Jamie

  Ethiopia

  Africa

  Southern Hemisphere

  Earth

  The Solar System

  The Milky Way Galaxy

  The Universe

  God

  Heaven (if it isn’t a lie)

  Chapter 26

  Nails

  At the end of St. Rita, not far from our beautiful magazine-featured house at the foot of Crawford Butte, is the woodsy candlelit grotto.

  Nuns run the souvenir shop but there are never enough personnel to chase the horny teenagers away. They start making out the minute they park, then nearly run over the contemplative Catholics moseying along the narrow paths serving the fifteen Stations of the Cross.

  Between Stations Nine and Ten a deer path veers off into the bushes, one of the more popular necking locations in the grotto.

  Station One: Jesus is condemned to death.

  Station Two: Jesus carries His cross.

  Station Three: Jesus falls the first time.

  Station Four: Jesus meets His mother.

  I read that Mary stood in the crowd with three other Marys, weeping as Jesus walked by dragging the cross. He paused to say something to them, but later, in the New Testament, neither Matthew, Luke, nor John could agree on what it was.

  If I were Mary, Jesus’s mom, I’d have left my girlfriends at home, and as Jesus stopped to say goodbye, the crowd would step back. It’d be just the two of us then, and I’d look at Him and finally say a few things that needed clearing up. Like, I’m here and I’ve always been here. I love you so so much. And, That stuff about being a virgin? It’s crap. I’m as human as you are.

  Maybe I’d say the rest with my eyes so no one else could eavesdrop.

  Station Five: Simon (or Simon of Cyrene) helps Jesus carry the cross.

  Station Six: Veronica wipes the face of Jesus with her veil.

  I don’t know Simon from Station Five (or the Bible or the trail placard noting the stations and park benches), and the only Veronica I know is comic book Archie’s girlfriend (old comics Mom gave me when I’d read every book in the house) who’s probably Jewish (because she’s pretty like Mom).

  Station Six says, Veronica wipes the face of Jesus with her veil, but when she felt Him trembling and saw the fear in His eyes, she’d have followed Him to the Mount too. No one should be that frightened and alone and I’m right behind her. We’re all there: Mom, Jamie, Veronica, and me.

  Maybe a Roman soldier would tell us to move and the four of us would say, Hell no, we won’t go, too loudly, too sure of ourselves, and people would stare and complain so the Romans would arrest us and throw us in a cave that no one would walk by, check on, or write about later because women were second-class citizens, especially back then.

  Somewhere, among the grotto’s Stations of the Cross, there should be another cave and through its tiny Flintstones window, people passing could see the four of us crowded together ignoring the cries of our hungry babies and husbands because the voices inside us are louder. Jesus’s body was gone in three days, but our bodies are still there, huddled together like those ashen figures at Pompeii. Mom, Jamie, Veronica, and I didn’t go anywhere, except to die right there and be delivered to the ground and the ground was sacrosanct (too important or valuable to be interfered with, Oxford Dictionary) and we were its offerings.

  Station Seven: Jesus falls the second time.

  Station Eight: Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem.

  Station Nine: Jesus falls the third time.

  Jesus fell three times on the way to Cavalry. At least that’s how the story goes. Three times for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost? There’s something about adults falling and skinning their knees that’s sad and pathetic and Jesus falling three times as He carried the cross makes me especially sad. The meanest people threw spitballs, peed on Him, and called Him names; soldiers poked Him with sticks. “Stand up, you piece of shit!” someone yelled, and everybody wondered how the Son of God could be clumsy. God wasn’t clumsy, was He?

  Jesus fell for the last time, knowing He wouldn’t do it again and nothing would stop Him from reaching the crucifixion mount. And even though millions of people would someday go, Wow, He loved us that much! and Jesus could have cried His eyes out and it wouldn’t have mattered, He didn’t. Men are private and proud and stuff their feelings down inside themselves (which is why they die younger than women), and Jesus loved being mortal—at least that’s what He told me—so He choked back His tears too.

  The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi taught the Beatles deep meditative breaths, so I vibe Jesus to do the same.

  Except for the cruelest of the cruel, the crowd wept when He finally stood up under the weight of the cross again. Helpful hands flew out, but their bodies stayed with the others, like canned sardines or pencil boxes, and not a single fingertip touched Him.

  Maybe they were afraid that what He had was contagious, that whatever was wrong with Him was already living inside them and if they touched the naked weirdo it would burst out of them, like spores exploding under pressure, pollinating everything. Jesus could have fallen five, seven, eleven times (all prime numbers), even more, but He didn’t.

  Still, each time the purpling bruises spread across His legs and arms and as the sky rumbled and the storm mounted, He realized He was already dead. And rotting. It started when God condemned Him.

  God gave Jesus life then took it back, gave Him the chance to go fishing and eat chocolate cake and kiss pretty girls and bust up the marketplace, then took it away from Him. I’d have yelled at God from the cross too. Even louder.

  Station Ten: Jesus’s clothes are taken away.

  Station Eleven: Crucifixion—Jesus is nailed to the cross.

  Station Twelve: Jesus dies on the cross.

  Station Thirteen: Jesus is taken down from the cross.

  Station Fourteen: Jesus is laid in the tomb.

  Station Fifteen: Resurrection—the resurrection of Jesus.

  The Romans didn’t need to take His clothes (Station Ten), leaving Him embarrassed, skinny, and cold in that big origami diaper. Wasn’t it enough that they were killing Him?

  If I were Jesus, and knew what was coming, I’d have sent my disciples all over Jerusalem buying, stealing, and hiding the nails.

  Still, Jesus said it had to be nails because it had to hurt; it had to hurt so much that people got sick to their stomachs just thinking about the pain. It had to hurt so much that nobody killed anybody like that ever again. It’s like naming your baby Adolf Hitler—no one ever did that again either.

  The really bad stuff shouldn’t be repeated, though during Word War II President Truman bombed two cities in Japan, one after the other, wiping out everyone and everything. Dad said it had to be done to end the war. He said more bombings were planned if the Japanese didn’t surrender, though that was a secret at the time.

  On the school bus, boys talk about the war in Vietnam and pipe bombs full of nails; they mimic exploding sounds, laugh and fall back against their seats, pretending to puke blood and die. They talk about their fathers and brothers “in-country,” how the jungle is a massive clusterfuck but furlough i
s the best with its boo-coo drugs and poontang. They say they can’t wait to be drafted and fight the gooks.

  I close my eyes and see bloody nails everywhere; they’re shot out of cannons into rice huts. They fly through bus windows—we walk over them on the way to class.

  Jesus stands next to my locker ready to help with the lock. It’s not that I forget the combination, it’s that once I turn the dial and feel the tumbler click, so many combinations are possible. “You’re going to be late,” He nags.

  He’s mad at me; I see it on His face. “You worry too much,” He says. On the way to first period, He takes my books.

  The books aren’t heavy, the nails are.

  Yeah, we’re going to be late. The halls are empty except for chubby sneezy Brian who’s in the “slow” class upstairs. He runs past us going beep-beep like the roadrunner.

  “So we can’t talk about the Why hath though forsaken me moment?” I ask Jesus.

  He shakes His head no.

  Everybody has their secrets.

  I have mine too.

  Making out with Luca, the Swedish exchange student, is one. He didn’t know many kids but he’d said he liked me. He was only going to be in town three more months, and he stood up for me in class, so when he asked me out I took him to the grotto. I’d rather have made him a shoe box than kiss him, but we had no choice. Parents forget that there are things teenagers have to do—whether they want to or not—even weirdos like me. Maybe especially weirdos like me.