by W. S. Penn
I couldn’t stay for dinner. I didn’t want to because of the fish heads staring up from the vat on the stove and because I knew that mother had gone to a lot of work preparing wienies. I did sit in the Schneider living room and drink some lemonade, wondering what to say to Bernie the ambusher.
On the mantel was a silver candlestick with nine candles, two of which were lit.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Bernie explained that each candle on the menorah represented the days of creation. When I asked why there were nine candles and not seven, Bernie got a little angry and said because it took nine days.
Even though later I learned about the festival of lights, I decided at that moment that Jews had it all over Protestants because their God had taken 48 extra hours to create their world. The difference in the myths was the difference between the people: Protestants are always tinkering with the world, trying to finish off what their God didn’t while they envy Jews because their G-d took the time to put on the finishing touches. Secretly, I preferred Grandfather’s version in which the creation of the Real People took only one mysterious and accidental day. I believed that my life was the result of spontaneous generation from the blood of a monster.
“I’ve got to go,” I said to Bernie.
“Say hi to Tommy,” he said sarcastically.
“I’m going home,” I said.
“Come back. Eat with us,” Mrs. Schneider called as I left by the back way, picked up my bike and pedaled home. I punished my bike by riding down and up the square curbs at each street I crossed.
4.
Grandfather had tried to prepare me for school, telling me a tale about the creation of Nu-mi-pu, the Real People, in which Coyote, hurt when people shunned him and angry when they shot at him, met up with the monster Ilpswetsichs, who was casually devouring the world. The first few times, Coyote ran from Ilpswetsichs. He tried to warn the people by howling in the distance when the moon was dim. They ignored him. When the monster had eaten all the people and half of the world, Coyote hid a knife between his legs and let Ilpswetsichs catch him and eat him, too. Coming to in the darkness, he began to cut his way out of Ilpswetsichs’ stomach. The monster ran east and west, north and south, dripping blood and roaring with pain, begging Coyote to make a deal with it. Coyote refused the deals the monster offered, sawing the wound ever larger until at last Ilpswetsichs was dead and the hole was big enough for Coyote to escape. From the blood that fell on the not-yet-eaten earth sprang human beings; from the blood that fell where the monster had taken out bites rose the seas and in them the salmon which came once a year to spawn and be caught by the Real People. When Grandfather was finished, all I could say was, “I see,” even though I didn’t. For all the good it had done me, he may as well have been describing the distance to the trading post or the art of cursing, or attempting to explain the differences between love and death.
That summer, when my cousin and I went to Chosposi Mesa, I said to Grandfather, “This school thing’s a real bitch.”
“I know,” he said. “I had only three years of it at Haskell from people who didn’t want to teach us a thing. But I know.” He said nothing for a long time. Finally he said, “You’ve got to learn, Alley. What, I don’t know. But you’ve got to learn.” Again he was quiet and I watched sad resignation steal across his big face like fog across a werewolf’s moon. “Learning keeps you out of things,” he said. “Like wars.” I knew then he was thinking of his son the ex-pilot. My uncle.
Unlike father, who because of his education had been drafted into the petrochemical industry, uncle had enlisted in the Army Air Force, serving in World War II willingly with the hope that by serving, the stigma of his Indian blood could be purified. Uncle had found out otherwise. A pilot, he had been promoted to Squadron Commander because of his daring and skill.
The details after that are hazy, purposely hazy.
He received orders to send his men and their fighters on a mission from which he knew the precise Japanese would never allow them to return. There was no way. He was not to go along—as much as he would have liked to—and on a drizzly December morning, he stood, watching his six best friends arc up and away from the air base like the frogs his son would throw into the air, doomed to pass from one reality to another in one exploding mixture of flesh and metal. Now, he would say, “None of them was ever heard from again,” phrasing it that way in order to create and maintain the possibility that one or more of them fell to earth and took root, living out his life as a tree, a rock, a frog.
Then, he said nothing. For two days he stood outside the aircraft hangars and watched the sky. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. His face and posture told everything to anyone who wanted to know. And he would have gone on standing there until he collapsed from hunger or exposure or, as he probably expected, until his heart broke. But the military, while it can accept a vast range of erratic behavior, glossing over the occasional rape or murder, cannot tolerate for long the commander who stands breathlessly in the open air, his face sunburned and his eyes blinded by the sun he stares at, waiting for the voices he hears inside himself to return to base. Regretfully, the Air Force was forced to replace the commander. Two burly men in doctors’ lab coats lifted him up like a fardel of two by fours, turned him so he was horizontal, laid him on a stretcher, and drove away as quietly as possible on the third day. Everyone pretended he had gone on leave. Instead, he was shipped home aboard a hospital ship. Each day, two different burly men came to his cabin, picked him up, and carried him to the deck, where he was propped against the ship’s rail to stare at the sky. Each night, he was returned to his cabin and given an injection of vitamins; then the burly men sat around the poker table and tried to imagine what could possibly have happened to make a Commander into a carrot.
What those men could not understand was that in his absolute silence my uncle was waiting for what he believed to be there to be revealed to him. If he spoke, the men he had sent into the air that day would be dead. If he did not speak, then they remained suspended like sawdust in the container of his mind. It took a nurse who was used to working with vegetables to understand; or pretend to understand. With her practical diligence and the shock troops modern drugs, the carrot was slowly and painfully made to forget everything he had thought or felt on that day, to make the details hazy, and a month after he was released from the V.A. hospital in San Francisco with his vast collection of model fighter planes, he married his nurse. She even allowed him to hang the thirty-odd balsa wood models in his “study” in their new home. But she kept the room closed off from his family, because in each of the thirty fighters was a carved figure. Six different faces and ranks repeated five times: the same six men he had mailed into the guns of the Japanese. Even she found the expressions too ghostly to look at more than once.
Those model fighters would hang in that room, turning gently on the currents of air, until the Christmas my cousin was given a toy anti-aircraft gun with two rubber-tipped darts on either side of the rangefinder. My cousin and I slipped the lock on the study and practiced, unnoticed for hours, playing Japanese gunners, removing the rubber dart-tips first. Between the two of us, we got them all.
It was my first trip to Chosposi. I must have been seven. The age doesn’t really matter, although it makes me curious how memories gather around certain ages like spirits to a vat of blood. My cousin had come with me well-supplied with firecrackers and cherry bombs and a bottle of his mother’s toilet water, and we spent the first few mornings out in the nearby desert in search of tadpoles. He placed them in a jar of water before dropping perfume into it and watching the tadpoles swim up into the slowly dispersing poison and fall, swim up and fall, swim up—and then with a certain resolution, sink to the bottom and die. If we were able to catch adult frogs, he liked to stick firecrackers into their mouths, light the fuses, and throw the frogs in an arc across the stream, clapping his hands in literal joy when they exploded, showering us with entrails, eyeballs, and little shattered bones with snippe
ts of flesh still clinging to them.
“Not high enough,” he shouted, as I half-heartedly tossed a frog in the air toward some rocks. My scalp began to itch.
The frog came down splat on the wet rock and, taking a moment to reorganize its interior organs, leapt into a shallow pool. My cousin lit a cherry bomb and dropped it into the pool and waited for the explosion to make the frog float.
“I love to watch things pass away,” he said.
I didn’t.
To divert my cousin, the next morning, when Grandfather left for Johnny Three Feet’s Trading Post, I made him watch as I picked the lock of the adobe hut stuck like a wart on the side of the house.
Careful not to damage the files Grandfather used to make brass wind chimes, I found a screwdriver and unscrewed the sides of his powersaw and pried it open. I was sure that inside it there had to be a baggy or a compartment that held the sawdust until it was sucked out by the spinning blade of the saw. We didn’t find it.
Needless to say, when my cousin and I were done with the saw, it was ruined.
Grandfather understood. “It happens,” he said, laughing.
Father, when he heard about it, didn’t. He made me turn right around and come home, and when I got there, he made it plain that it would take the rest of the summer for me to earn enough to pay for the ruined saw.
My sisters only laughed, like Grandfather. “Gargantua strikes again,” one of them—probably Elanna—said.
Mother put up with me, watching me drag about the house and yard doing chores, until she couldn’t stand it any longer and she called me in alone beneath the antique ceramic rooster on the mantel. “Don’t mope,” she said. “Hard work builds character.”
5.
Unless you count my cousin’s frogs, I didn’t see Death again until I was ten, and even then He was only a shadow of rumor hovering around the mention of mother’s mother. I could have cared less. I felt no connection to the woman mother called mother and all I remembered of her was a featureless face and lace-up black shoes. Disapproving of miscegenation, she had visited us only when her being in town and one of father’s business trips coincided. A trouble-shooter for petroleum refineries, father made numerous trips, but mother’s mother lived some 500 miles away and I hadn’t seen her since I was four. So when Death re-entered our house as a tone of voice, it took Elanna and Pamela to remind me of how mother’s mother had always greeted them kindly, saying “I have a quarter for you,” passing one to Pamela, who saved hers, and one to Elanna, who spent hers on edible seeds with the relish of a squirrel in a bull market. Then she would gingerly lift the edge of my blankets, smile and nod like a character out of Dick Tracy, and tell Pamela and Elanna they could take me away.
As mother boarded the Starlight passenger train to attend her mother’s funeral, placing her hands lightly on each of her children’s shoulders in turn, she tried to give us words to live by while she was gone. Squeezing me at arm’s length, she said, “You’re worth all the turkeys I’ve ever had to cook.” I couldn’t recall mother’s ever having cooked anything resembling a turkey and when the conductor called out, “Aaaabooard,” what mother said next was lost.
When mother returned a week later, she looked dazed. She gathered the three of us together beneath the antique rooster on the mantle in the living room and gave each of us a book.
“This,” she said solemnly, handing me a small leather-bound book, “is for you. My mother was saving it for you.”
It was Personal Investing, a self-published volume of her mother’s advice.
Turning to all of us, she said, “As you girls know, intellect is not given to each of you equally, though your conditions are the same. Albert, I fear, will have to use reason to control his passions. Above all, Albert, learn to speak plainly. Work hard, make up for what you are and you can make something of yourself. Or you can avoid hard work and ruin your future.”
Pamela accepted mother at face value.
I had difficulty caring about my future and I didn’t know what in hell mother was talking about.
Elanna, still knowing herself to be smarter than boys, especially brothers, gave mother a withering look.
“We got copies of Emily Post,” she said later. Her green eyes were sharp, ready to cut me to pieces, but not without warmth. I was, after all, her baby brother.
“I’ll trade you,” I said. “Or you can just have mine.”
These Rooster Talks, warning us about the ways of the world with the darkness and doom of a John Birch Society film, became a habit. Collecting us once again, mother said, “Now, You Know What.” This was the talk she could launch like a Vanguard missile at any time and place, convinced as she was of the abundance of men and women who hung around schoolyards and drugstores waiting for little boys and girls, offering them candy or comics and taking them to out-of-the-way places to use for You Know What.
I didn’t know what.
“Sex,” Elanna whispered. Pamela said nothing and settled for looking thoughtful. “Mother means when a man makes a woman have sex with him.”
“What if he doesn’t make her?” Pamela asked.
“Don’t be silly, Pam. How else would it happen?”
“What if the woman makes the man?” I asked. Even though I remembered the lies I’d invented about Marily Avi and me in the cloakroom and felt as guilty as if I’d made her, I felt compelled to defend my sex.
“Fah!” Elanna laughed. “That’s impossible. You’ll see that, soon.”
Curious about this thing called sex, I took to creeping around the house and spying on our parents. At night, listening to my father’s voice through their bedroom door, I learned nothing about sex and a lot about begging. During the day, I popped up beside mother’s stove like a tart from a toaster or hid out in father’s garage. My ears grew large like an elephant’s, recording each and every unspoken thought my parents might have.
On Saturday mornings, as father washed the car, I sneaked through the side door of the garage and hid, not making a sound. Without turning around or even slowing the rhythm of the circular strokes of the washrag on the car, father would surprise me by calmly asking, “What do you think you’re doing there?”
Mother, on the other hand, never seemed to sense my presence and instead of calmly asking what I was doing there, she would scream “Aaahh!” when she came upon me in the broom closet.
Uncertain whether or not this was an essential difference between men and women, I tested it out on my sisters. Pamela never seemed to notice my creeping into her clothes closet. But then she was often there ahead of me and would surprise me as much as I tried to surprise her, finding her hunkered up beneath the coats and slacks with the sliding doors closed. Elanna kept company with Death. Down the street, near the dried-up river bed, was a small graveyard, large enough to bury the local Catholics but too small to bury Protestants or Jews alongside. There I would come upon her, leaning back against the cool of a gravestone, her small mouth moving slowly, almost, you might say, lovingly. Her eyes were closed and at first I was afraid she’d found religion and was praying.
“What are you doing here?” she asked without opening her eyes.
“What are you doing here?” I asked back.
“Talking to grandmother.”
“Mother’s mother is dead.” I wondered why Elanna wanted to talk to mother’s mother.
Elanna opened her eyes and smiled. She said nothing. The embarrassment of it was that I was so stupid as to go on and say, “She’s not even buried here.” She continued smiling as though to say, “Poor lad.”
“So what are you doing here,” she repeated.
I held my hand up to my ear and replied, “Phoning Grandfather.” Grandfather didn’t have a telephone. He thought they were unnatural and he didn’t like the idea of his voice being lost in a crowd of voices bumping and pushing their way down wires above and below ground. “I don’t want to sound like everyone else,” he’d told me. “Neither should you. Besides, you and I don’t need a
telephone to talk.”
“Grandfather doesn’t have a telephone.” Elanna said this with the arrogance of the several years she had over me before she realized what it was I had done and she blushed.
In the year following mother’s mother’s death, when the weather was nasty, I would visit Pamela in her closet. But on balmy afternoons, I’d creep off to the graveyard to be with Elanna. There I’d rest my head in her lap and she would scratch it, always careful not to interfere with the imaginary telephone I held to my ear. And so, for a time, Death became nothing more for me than a reason for having my head scratched.
CHAPTER TWO
6.
The next summer, a thick, brown cloud settled over the City of Angels and people staggered under the weight of the air. At first, I didn’t notice anything other than the glowing orange sunsets—which I treasured until mother told me that the orange was arsenic in the air, a poison a lot like the perfume my cousin had used to drop in jars of tadpoles—and an annoying tightness in my chest as I darted from hiding place to hiding place, playing War once again, now that Bernie Schneider had been included because of Tommy’s frustration. Unable to find and kill me once I refused to wear pigeon feathers, he wanted another enemy and a Jew was as good as an Indian to Tommy.
When I noticed my pet hamster’s loss of speed on his exercise wheel, I took the wheel off and oiled it, believing that hamsters only had one forward speed; still Custer slowed until, like a Ford motor car, he seemed to slip into reverse. One morning, I had to pry his little claws loose from the wire of the wheel, which had ceased to creak with his jogging. With intricate ceremony, I buried him in Wounded Knee, the dirt lot behind our garage that was set off from the rest of the yard by a chain-link fence.
Summers always had been a time to escape helping out around the house; but when I overheard Mrs. Schneider discussing summer camps with mother, I suspected that my life was going to change. I hid out in Wounded Knee munching dog biscuits with the obsequious puppy purchased to replace Custer and waited. When the old lady who lived behind us collapsed and died while collecting mulberry leaves for her silkworms, my parents packed my sisters off and all too soon I found myself being loaded onto a yellow bus headed for Lake Arrowhead with twenty-seven excited, brown-bagging campsters.