by W. S. Penn
“You’re such a good little navigator,” she says with the kind of naive affection that irritates me because it makes me realize the vast difference between me and mother’s vision of me.
Only after the highway patrolman has ticketed mother for going too slow on the highway, and later, after she has stopped for gas in Gilroy, does the loss of second gear matter. The car gets up speed in first, and then the engine races as it tries to shift into second; races until it slams into third and lugs the Rambler up to speed. I have by then convinced mother not to shift through the gears using the buttons on the gear box, which takes some of the fun of driving out of the trip for her. I try to teach her to floor the accelerator pedal in first and run the car as high as it will go, then let the pedal up and pump it once quickly to make the car think it’s time to shift to third, and then accelerate gently between 25 and 40 so as not to make the engine work too hard. That is too complex. I clamp my eyes shut and hope first and third gears will last to Palo Alto.
Truck headlights race towards us, growing brighter, larger, and then vanish as the car is buffeted in the after-air of the tractor-trailer rigs. Dusk has made mother quiet, but the onset of night makes her want to talk as we pass fields, orchards, golf courses illuminated by streetlights, and a moon that seems pale compared to the lights. Along that road, the lamps are amber because of the heavy fogs that sneak in from the coast.
“What are you thinking about?” mother asks. She sounds like a lover who is worried that your silence means something like anger or despair.
“I know,” she says. “You’re worried. You’re missing your little friends. You’re wondering what Palo Alto will be like. I’ll miss my friends, too. You’ll make new friends, though. We’ll start a new life. You’ll see.”
It is easier to say, “I know,” than to tell mother the truth, that I am not missing my friends, little or otherwise.
“You’ll like your new house,” mother says. “It’s got a nice yard.”
“I know,” I say, wondering how large the lawns were, how much of a Saturday morning will have to be spent mowing that nice yard.
“The driveway is large enough that we might hang a basketball backboard over the garage and you’ll have room to play.”
“I know.”
“You’ll only have three blocks to your new school. Your new homeroom teacher is a very nice man, Mr. Mac. You’re growing up. Soon, you’ll be in high school like your sisters, and then you’ll be off to college.” Mother seems to be rushing things.
“Two doors down is a boy about your age,” she adds. “I’m sure he’s got lots of friends you can meet, and I’ll meet the wives of the people your father works with. We’ll get along okay.”
“I know.” I know, I know, I know.
I knew that Mr. Mac would be Chinese and his favorite story would be how he’d had to wear a large badge which said “I am Chinese” during World War Two, in order not to be beaten by any random all-American patriot on the street. Sometimes he would pause in mid-story and pull his citizenship papers from his desk to prove that he still carried them in case he was stopped and unduly questioned by official or self-appointed protectors of freedom for all. I could guess that the boy down the street would be named Pete Wright and would be a bully and that in order to ride my bicycle in peace around the neighborhood, I would have to be bullier. Or maybe Pete would live around the corner and two doors down would live a boy named Eric. It seemed that there always was an Eric in my life. The runt of the litter, he would follow me endlessly, in and out of school, like a retarded little brother, cheering me on each time I wrestled Pete Wright to the ground and sat on him, pinning him hopelessly with my advantageous weight, and threatening to pound him like cheap meat if he didn’t cry “uncle.” I knew that, despite my size of a beached baby whale and my Dreamer’s hair waxed as stiff as toothpicks over my unusually high and pontifical forehead, a girl named Karen Karenovitch would chase me down like the hobo from Bombs Away. She would be taller than any girl or boy in school, and her deep voice would remind me more of the Russian shot-putter, Tamara Press, than of a girl with untampered chromosomes. “C’mere,” Karen would boom and, locking her hand on my shoulder, she would drag me like a tackling dummy into a corner of the building and press her body and lips against mine. While it would be a somewhat terrifying experience, I wouldn’t mind all that much. Karen would have breasts, huge in contrast to the apricots of normal girls. Her gingham peasant dresses would be two sizes too large as if handed down by sisters of a different race, and my hands would slide around beneath those dresses without inhibition. Disregarding the black hair on her hands and legs, pressed against the stucco wall, I would close my eyes and imagine her breasts were actually those of Sue Thurmond, Nikki Winters, or—in the secret recesses of my own obsession—Marilyn Riekse.
14.
How could I know all of that? Pamela wanted to know, once she’d settled into her new closet.
The same way I knew anything. By closing my eyes and recollecting, listening to Grandfather. My past spitting up the strained vegetables of future all over my adolescent bib. People were always the same: There had been an Eric, and there would always be an Eric. Even if his name changed, which I doubt, he will always be there to pick up the bats and bases, and to take it in the shorts because of a freak accident.
“No tabula rasa, then?”
“What?”
“Blank slates. We learned that our minds are blank slates at birth upon which are inscribed the designs of our developing characters.”
“Characters don’t develop,” I replied.
“Ours haven’t,” Pamela said dejectedly.
“Like blank checks written in invisible ink, they only reveal their worthlessness. The amount remains always the same,” I said, ignoring her. “Mr. Mac was Chinese. Mr. Mac did wear a badge. If I had paid close attention, I would have known that he would be arrested for molesting little boys before the year was out.”
“Sometimes you … to play around with your dreams, … the world is … created in … way you … live with, if … going to … character who … survive the sleeplessness of now,” Grandfather said.
“What?” I said. I could barely hear him because of the static interference in the ether between Chosposi and the stars we bounced the transmission off of, in the region I called the Absence of Angels.
I’d spent the first summer in Palo Alto crawling about on my belly beneath my father’s new house, trying to discover a way to connect my imaginary phone lines to Ma Bell’s. It was a silly and useless effort, but I was frightened by the distance between Grandfather and me. Palo Alto was the farthest I’d ever been from him, and because of the way my friends from the City of Angels had dissolved, I was worried that my connection with Grandfather wouldn’t suffice.
All I succeeded in was establishing a working relationship with Black Widow spiders. Grown fat with the ease of northern California life, their cavernous sloth a contrast to my underground fear, they would drop down on their slender filaments and stare at me, blinking in the brightness of my flashlight beam. They scared me, not so much because their venom was so poisonous as because they seemed so matter-of-fact.
Giving up on my underground telephone lines, I took to sending messages to Grandfather by bouncing them off the moon at night or the stars during the day—the stars which we had learned in astronomy were always there, even though we couldn’t see them with our naked eyes. Possibly it was the fact that the stars were moving away from me as the universe expanded daily; or it might have been the continent’s inching its way toward Europe, or the interference caused by the paramilitary detritus the American and Russian space agencies dumped into the atmosphere. The end result was that sometimes when I spoke to Grandfather, the connection would shift and static would buzz through the Absence of Angels.
At night, as I lay there on my bed, pale and fat from all the days I had spent beneath the house, my feet growing towards the end of the bed, I worried.
&nb
sp; “Grandfather,” I said, “even the angels are dissolving,” by which I meant Bernie Schneider.
Closest to me in spirit if not in dream, it took the concentration of a weightlifter to see even the outlines of Bernie anymore. It wasn’t a case of time seeping into the cracks of memory and causing the images I had of Bernie to rust. He was dissolving. He would appear in my dreams with water cascading off him as though he had just emerged from the water on which he seemed to be walking.
“Alley,” Bernie said, “help me. I’m going down for the third time.”
I could see his feet dissolving where they touched the water—he was sinking, not beneath the water, but into it, as though the water were acid—and in the sad look on his face, I could foresee the hopelessness of rescuing him.
“I’m failing Hebrew,” he told me. He couldn’t refrain from translating every feminine name as Tammy.
“Adam and Tammy?” his Rabbi would say, laughing good-naturedly. But when he began coming to the Schneider home regularly for dinner, the Rabbi’s laughter began to sound as hollow as Bernie’s voice. As the Rabbi ate the gefilte fish, trying to pay attention and to imagine a way to rescue Bernie, if only to toss a life ring to him abandoned on his acidic sea, his laughter was the dry laugh of a Catholic. Even that good woman who wore long-sleeve shirts on the hottest days, that woman whose house had encircled me like the desert around Chosposi, seemed to weaken in the face of Bernie’s intransigence, and instead of, “Stay. Eat with us,” I heard her say, “Come next week, maybe. The week after.” It was not for lack of love or kindness, but because everyone reminded her that she was losing her son, that all the Rabbis in the world couldn’t put Bernie Schneider back together again.
Long before Bernie was sucked into the forces of dream and time, his voice was silenced and only his lips moved; I couldn’t even be sure that he had tried to say, “Farewell, Alley.” The last I saw of him, his arm stuck up from the water, his fist clenched as though trying to hold on to his dream. Then his fist opened, and a cloud of crows rose into the brown air, becoming dots on the horizon as they flapped away.
CHAPTER FOUR
15.
Bernie dissolved long before mother took to waking her children for school by suffocation, pinching our nostrils and then clamping her hand over our mouths until our brains panicked and jettisoned us from our lumpy dreams. Sometimes I would awaken myself with laughter as I dreamt of Tommy A. guarding the gates of Los Angeles with a flaming BB gun, my family cast out by my father’s ambition. Other times, I cried out in my sleep, unable to wake myself even though I would open the door to the dream and walk in and look at myself and command me to awaken. Thank god for mother, then; I had begun to fear what would happen if I got caught in one of those dreams, like a man in a room of endlessly reflecting mirrors.
At school, Parkinson’s Law took hold, cloning vice-principals and deans of boys, to whom Mr. Mac sent me with the regularity of weather. Karen Karenovitch dragged me to and from recess, determined to win my acquiescence because I was the only boy anywhere near her height, except for William Barber, who insisted that I call him a black and not a Negro.
“If it happens,” grandfather said, “it can happen that way, too, when the world looks dark and the knife you recollect from a summer of camp seems your only way out of clover leaves and cul-de-sacs.”
William the Black became my best friend through basketball. Sports had not yet become more important than school itself, and our intermural contests were waged with the informality of inner city conflict. Instead of buses and coaches, we travelled to our away games on bikes, on foot, or in the cars of Spartan fathers who took the afternoons off from work to watch their boys defend the images they had always wanted to have of themselves. My own father seemed to lack the self-image other fathers had, and he never attended the games.
“He plays on a different court,” my uncle would explain years later, when he came to watch me hold down the bench.
For me, being sent out onto the playing surface was like being sent wandering across the desert. The roar of the crowd was like the roar of the full moon in daylight. The tracks left behind as the other nine boys raced up and down the court were like the tracks of kangaroo mice. Each time I found the trail, the mice had gone, and I was left standing at the wrong end of the court. Nonetheless, I was a Renaissance athlete. Good enough to make all of the teams, but not good enough to start, I gained a familiarity with benches and a flat butt.
The week before our first basketball game against Mayfield, my school seemed filled with tension. The teachers seemed to be willing to let the athletes release tension any way they could, and Mr. Mac even allowed me to move from my desk at the back of the room to a desk right behind Marilyn Riekse. Even when Mr. Mac caught me staring down Marilyn’s dress, he didn’t send me to the dean.
“What’s happening?” I said to William the Black one morning, as everyone stood around listlessly. Mayfield was an all-black school so William seemed the one to ask.
“What?” William said, distractedly.
“Why is everyone acting funny?”
“The game,” William said. “This Friday. With Mayfield.”
I failed to catch William’s drift.
As I arrived at Mayfield’s gym, a run-down quonset hut on the other side of town, across very real railroad tracks, Allen asked where my bike was. “I walked,” I said, starting to suit up.
“You walked?” Allen said. “Alley walked,” he said to the rest of the team in the locker room.
“Maybe he will, again,” Stephen said. Nobody laughed, and we carried our street clothes into the gym in our travelling bags.
“Listen,” William whispered to me as we warmed up. “After the game …?” He looked around as though telling me a secret. “Stay close. Okay?”
Throughout the game, I thought about how, when Allen had said, ‘He walked,’ Walter and Stephen’s heads had bobbed together like dashboard dolls with sprung necks. I began to suspect why when, with time left on the clock, I was left holding the ball. Literally. I began dribbling, wondering where my team had gone, grinning back at the black boys from Mayfield, who grinned in turn at me. When the buzzer sounded, I was surrounded.
“Congratulations,” I said. They were grinning; they had won. It seemed the thing to say. Their center stepped up to me, crowding the private region in front of my nose.
“What’s your name, boy?” he said. I sensed the danger in his voice.
“Alley.”
“Alley,” he said, taking a step backwards. “What kind a name is that?” I shrugged. It was a name, that was all, like William or Rachel.
“What’s your last name?” one of the guards demanded.
“Hummingbird,” I said, and it was as if the breath had been knocked out of the danger. They broke up laughing, bending in exaggerated laughter, grinning as wide as trucks at each other, until the largest boy caught his breath and said, “Come on, less go get the honkies,” and they disappeared as quickly as my teammates had. Outside, the school had emptied like a Protestant church on the day of the Rose Bowl and I wandered home, repeating my name over and over, trying to discover what was in a name.
When Mayfield travelled across town to play on our court and even the fans joined in the after-game skirmishes, William the Black and I stood half-heartedly on the edges of no man’s land, helpless. For me, it was less a matter of race and more that my name seemed to free me from that kind of hatred, a freedom I enjoyed and would later take advantage of.
It wasn’t until ninth grade that I got my nickname, Two Point. Standing beside the basket while my teammates defended the opposing goal, William the Black spotted me on the fast break and selflessly passed the ball to me.
I caught it.
“Shoot,” William yelled.
“Shoot it!” my uncle shouted from the sidelines. Without thinking, I put the ball up off the backboard and watched it slip down through the net.
“Two points!” William shouted, and it was
in the reverberation of his voice that I became “Two Point Alley.”
“Put in Two Point,” the fans would shout.
“Where’s Two Point?” the coach might ask, when I was late for the team bus. I became a team mascot, a good luck charm. When I managed to score two points, our team won the game. Coach Roach came to want me in the game early, have William feed me the ball and let me score, and then take me out before I got it into my head to try for four points. For the rest of the game, I’d sit beside Eric Engels, who’d made the team with persistence and tears, and watch the cheerleaders bounce and kick, their skirts swirling to reveal underpants untouched by human hands. Sometimes, I’d say something like, “I’d sure like to get between her bumpers. Wouldn’t you?” and make Eric’s arrested heart blush.
I didn’t mind sitting on the bench. No more had I minded playing tackle on the football team. Unable to understand why the other boys wanted to play positions in which one could make all of the visible mistakes, I was content to submarine the opposing tackle and lie there on my belly, waiting for Walter’s rubber cleats to run across my back as he dove for yardage. I simply did not understand that kind of competition, and on the way home from a surprising loss to a bunch of hicks from Livermore, I would sit at the back of the bus with William and the rest of the black athletes and pry a window loose from the bus, watching it flip silently into the darkness of night with more interest than I’d watched the game.
16.
Coming home from a Saturday’s roaming with William the Black, I found my uncle’s car out front. It was a warm afternoon. Father was wearing Bermuda shorts with dress shoes and dark socks. Uncle wore gym shorts and sneakers and padded around the yard after my father, talking to him about divorce. He asked my father if he had ever considered divorce, what with my mother. Father turned, his face rigid and blank with what my uncle took to be indifference and I could see was pain, and said to me, “Listen. I was thinking about you and me going on a fishing trip.”