The Way We Bared Our Souls

by Willa Strayhorn

  The horse bucked and cantered dangerously close to spectators, who ran for cover behind refreshment stands. Several cowboys tried to get near enough to throw a lasso around her neck, but they weren’t having any luck. Then Rattlesnake leveled her muzzle toward a little boy who stood, frozen, near the exit to the restrooms. The horse snorted and pawed the ground purposefully, then charged directly at the boy.

  Without thinking, I ran into the horse’s path. A rodeo clown would’ve tried to distract the enraged horse from the periphery, but I stepped directly between Rattlesnake and the boy she seemed dead set on trampling. I was powerful too. The horse tried to veer around me, but I moved with her, and instead of stomping me to death, she dug in her hooves and braked. A cowboy ran up to us with a rope and threw it over Rattlesnake’s head, shoving me out of the way. I landed flat on my butt in the dirt, and only then did I realize I had a giant smile on my face.

  “Consuelo!” Thomas shouted from somewhere. But I didn’t look toward his voice. I was mesmerized by Jack Dynamite, the cowboy who’d restrained Rattlesnake. He handed off the horse to rodeo authorities and then helped me to my feet.

  “You could’ve been killed,” Jack said.

  Then Thomas’s arms were around me. “Consuelo. I thought you were a goner. You can’t pull stunts like that. You can’t. . . .”

  “What happened?” Ellen said. She and the others had joined Thomas and were all standing around me now.

  “Nothing,” I said. My adrenaline was pumping, and I felt that if we stayed any longer I might do something crazy. Well, crazier. “Let’s go.”

  Kit tried to put his hands on the snorting horse being led away, as if he wanted to be a part of whatever it was I’d started.

  “Don’t touch him, kid,” Jack Dynamite said.

  “Jeez,” Kit said as we walked toward the parking lot. “What an asshole.”

  “Grow up,” Ellen said. She made her way for the exits, and Kit tripped after her.

  Kaya was quiet, but as we walked I thought I saw her scanning my body for bleeding and signs of bones out of place. Thomas gripped my hand tightly.

  “I’m fine, you guys,” I said. “Seriously. That was fun. Let’s do it again next week. After we get our matching tattoos.”

  18

  I DROPPED OFF KAYA FIRST, then Ellen. I’d planned to take Kit to Thomas’s house, but he told me that he’d moved back in with his parents, so I took him home after dropping off Ellen at her mansion, where all the windows were dark, as usual. Of course it made the most sense for me to drop off Thomas before Kit, then head back to my neighborhood, but thankfully everyone seemed too preoccupied to note my byzantine driving decisions.

  Finally, Thomas and I were alone in the car.

  “You feel like coming over for a little bit?” he said halfway between Kit’s house and his.

  “Sure,” I said, trying to sound calm even though my heart was racing like one of those rodeo sheep. “I, um, heard you have a trampoline.” He smiled.

  “Word gets around.”

  Ten minutes later he was jumping in circles around his younger siblings. As much as I wanted to show off my front flips, I’d been duly chastened by the look Thomas had given me when I’d tried to mount, so I stood on the tramp’s metal circumference, just watching.

  “I don’t think so, Lo,” he’d said, tugging on the back pocket of my jeans. I hadn’t argued. He was probably right to be protective. Also, I sort of owed him some downtime after the rodeo.

  It was fun to watch him with his kid brothers and sisters. Though he’d told me in the balloon that they should be scared of him, I didn’t see any evidence of that. He was so good with them. Dreamy and thoughtful, but he could also put his own perpetual state of apprehension aside to do silly things to make the children happy.

  “Bounce us!” they shouted. And he did, inexhaustibly, but never too high.

  I was surprised that happiness came so easily to Thomas’s siblings, to be honest. The Dents had universally adopted or fostered children with complicated backgrounds. One girl had cerebral palsy. One boy was full-blooded Native American whose mother had committed suicide on the rez. One was born into a brothel in South Korea, and another had been adopted from one of those anemic Russian orphanages.

  I often speculated about what it must be like to have so much painful experience in one household. And yet when I saw all those Dent kids climbing into a minivan in the Costco parking lot, or going out for ice cream in the Plaza, or crammed into a single pew at St. Francis, they all looked pretty content. Especially now, as I watched their joyful heads spring up and down, shouting for their big brother to bounce them.

  Thomas jumped off the trampoline, panting.

  “Those kids wear me out.” He grinned. “Every time.” His dimples were showing again. His smiles were so rare, and I wanted to melt into this one. He stared at me for a moment as if he wanted to say something, then he abruptly dropped and rolled underneath the trampoline. His younger siblings continued to bounce above his head. When the biggest child—a boy named Matthew—jumped, he came within a foot or two of Thomas’s face. I knelt down onto the grass and then crawled on my elbows like an infantryman into Thomas’s shifting chamber.

  “So what are we doing here exactly?” I asked over the sounds of rusty springs and children squealing.

  “Sometimes I just like to lie here while they jump.” I flipped onto my back so I could see what he was seeing. We watched the children depress dark pools over our heads. “Careful,” he said. “Stay low.”

  “It’s kind of cool down here,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think I like it because . . . I don’t know. I guess I don’t feel threatened here. In a way, from here I can see death approaching. I can’t be surprised. And I can do nothing to stop the inevitable. If I sat up, I could break my neck. . . .”

  “Don’t sit up,” I said. “Please. Stay in the trenches.”

  A particularly chubby sibling bounced over Thomas’s face.

  “Fire in the hole,” he said, and I laughed.

  Mrs. Dent opened the back door. “Bedtime for anyone not in high school!” she shouted. “Thomas, you’ve got thirty more minutes.”

  “Good night, guys,” I said to the kids as they all crawled under the trampoline to give Thomas kisses on the cheek or wrestle him with hugs.

  And then we were alone. I realized that even though Thomas and I had spent the entire afternoon together, we hadn’t really interacted at all. I’d been too busy laughing with Kit and dodging angry broncos. He’d been too edgy from the rodeo events. Now it was getting dark, and Thomas felt infinitely far away.

  “Let’s get back on the tramp,” he said. He sounded slightly awkward all of a sudden, which was unusual for him. “So we can see the stars.”

  “Are you sure I’m allowed up?” I said.

  “Well, it depends. Only if you follow the rules.”

  “Which are?”

  “One, no jumping.”

  “Gotcha. And two?”

  Thomas looked at me with exaggerated seriousness. “No hopping.”

  “Okay. What about tramping? Can I do that?”

  “Absolutely not. What do you think this is? A plaything?”

  “Fine. I’ll abide by those rules.”

  He helped me onto the black nylon fabric, making sure I didn’t snag any body parts on the metal springs.

  Once we were on our backs, Thomas scratched his fingertips across the surface of the trampoline without looking at me or saying anything.

  “Is something the matter?” I said.

  “I’m sorry to be so moody all the time,” he said. “I’m not like Kit right now. Or . . . you. It’s hard for me to feel . . . solid, you know? Things have been all up and down since Sunday morning. I’ve been remembering more from my past. All these intense memories I thought I’d left behi
nd. I’ve been thinking they shouldn’t just be exclusive to my poetry. Maybe I should talk about them too. But . . . not to Ms. Vega. To you.” He rolled over onto his side, facing away from me. “But you probably don’t want to know.”

  “I do,” I said, pulling him back and looking him in the eye. “You have no idea how much.”

  “I’m like a broken record. I’m sorry to keep burdening you with this stuff. It’s just that . . . you’re easy to talk to. In that way you remind me of my little brother, Henri. In Liberia. Or at least, being with you makes me think of him. And these past few days, I can recall details from my past without being floored by them. I recognize them as memories without having to relive them, like I’m actually there. And for the first time, I guess I want to . . . share the things that happened. With someone I trust. With a friend.” Thomas squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, as if he was worried I would reject him.

  “That’s great,” I said. “Huge. I’m proud of you, Thomas. And I would be honored to hear your stories.” His stiff posture began to relax.

  “Kit told me something interesting the other day,” he said. “Did you know that before the Apache went to war, they did rituals to protect themselves from bullets? Back in Africa, when the militia recruited me and other kids for battle, the chief told us to drink this sour-tasting concoction that would make us omnipotent. ‘Drink the potion and you won’t feel pain,’ he said. ‘Drink the potion and you’ll never die.’ We were just boys. We didn’t appreciate danger. We’d lost our families. We believed him entirely.” For some reason this made me think of Ellen.

  “Omnipotent,” I said eventually, running my finger over the trampoline mesh, wishing it were Thomas’s skin. “You know, that’s kind of how I feel now. Since the ritual. Like I drank some superhero potion. Except it’s actually sort of true in my case. If there were a war, I’d be on the front lines because no bullet could hurt me.”

  “Maybe,” Thomas said. “But you would still die.”

  “Aren’t you at least grateful that you survived the war?” I said, then immediately felt that it was the wrong thing to say. “Maybe not the potion, but something protected you out there. From death, I mean.”

  Thomas fingered the scar on his neck. “Sometimes I wish I’d been murdered with my parents that day in Liberia. At least their terror was short-lived. I hope they saw me and my little brother running away from the fire. I hope they died believing that we’d escaped the carnage, even though it’s not true.”

  “You did escape,” I said. “You’re lying on a trampoline under the stars in Santa Fe. You’re here with me.”

  Thomas threaded his fingers through my hair and tugged my head closer to his. His eyes were bright and fervent, even in the dark. “I can’t protect my friends,” he said. “And it feels terrible. Last night I lay awake, paralyzed by fear. I heard noises everywhere. I envisioned prowlers, banditos. Rustling or wind, footsteps or dogs barking, they all meant the same thing. Imminent death. I convinced myself that soldiers were coming on a raid. It all felt so real. I imagined people attacking me, the Dents, Kit . . . you. And the worst part is all the attackers were versions of myself.”

  I draped an arm across his chest and nestled my chin on his strong shoulder. We lay like that for a long time.

  “You’re still not afraid of me?” he said finally. Maybe he was still a killer, but now I was starting to understand how someone could careen headlong into battle. The adrenaline washed over you, and before you knew what was happening you were in the center of it all.

  “No,” I said. “Especially when you give me access, when you tell me things. But I guess . . . maybe I don’t understand one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How a person could just . . . stop feeling altogether.”

  “I’ve thought about that a lot too. I think that certain emotions can compromise you when you’re at war. If you stop to mourn the dead, or even to breathe in what you’ve done, you’ll be dead as well. Your brain goes to a primitive region, one inaccessible to feelings beyond pure anger and pure fear. Your brain is reduced to two impulses: fight or flight. Kill or be killed. No room for more delicate feelings. No room for a soul. All you’re thinking about is how to maneuver your body in space so it will survive.”

  “That’s sort of how I felt when I was sick,” I said. “In the worst moments. When I just wanted to avoid pain. It was hard to care about anything else. At least care like I used to.”

  Thomas nodded. “One of the strangest outcomes of this whole crazy Jay situation is that I suddenly feel this flood of emotion,” he said. “All those things I wasn’t able to feel before . . . like love, for instance. . . . They’re back now. I feel almost like I did when I was really young, before the war, but now with all these horrible experiences between me and the good heart I once had.”

  “It’s still good,” I said.

  “I don’t know. It’s so weird to be worried for people again. It’s scary and overwhelming to feel this . . . affection for my friends. I thought I’d lost that forever.”

  “I know. I love our weird little family.” And like Thomas, I felt responsible for all its members.

  We went quiet for a while, thinking and looking at the stars. I marveled at the worldwide wheel of fortune that had brought Thomas to my town and me to this trampoline. If there hadn’t been a second civil war in Liberia, if Thomas had never picked up a gun—or whatever crimes he’d perpetrated in Africa—if I’d never gotten sick, the two of us would never be lying beside each other right now.

  Circle home, Lo.

  “Thomas,” I said, “can I ask you something?”

  “Shoot.” Hearing him copy my speech patterns made me grin involuntarily in the dark.

  “Well, I . . .” I want to kiss you? I think I’m falling in love with you? Suddenly I felt almost frightened by the intensity of the moment, and I wanted to neutralize it. “Not to change the subject,” I said, “but I . . . um . . . don’t think it’s such a good idea for Ellen to go to Weekends on Wednesdays tomorrow. Or for any of us to go, for that matter. MS symptoms can spring up out of nowhere, but so can flashbacks, borderline psychotic episodes, relapses, et cetera. All of our current excess baggage. What do you think?”

  “Actually,” he said, “I think we should go to the party, all of us together. As long as we’re there watching over one another like we promised, it’ll be fine. Together we’re safe. Like right now.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I was positive you were going to say we should all stay home and, like, take bubble baths instead. Are you sure?”

  “Am I that much of a killjoy?”

  “Not at all! Someone’s gotta look out for the rest of us crazies. And you’re right. I think. Let’s just go to the party.”

  “Kit will be happy, anyway.”

  “Is he ever not happy these days?”

  “Kit.” Thomas sighed. “The Kit I know puts up a punk rock exterior, but that boy is emo to the core. His heart is like flypaper. Do you have that here? For the bugs? Anyway, it’s like any girl can come along and stick to Kit. He trusts, loves, and so is left open and vulnerable to getting his heart broken again and again.”

  “I resent being compared to a fly,” I said, smiling.

  “Butterfly,” Thomas said. “Anyway, I get why you two got together. Not that I want you to get together again. But I understand. You and Kit are sort of similar. The way you’re both so . . . open. To feeling. To experience. Even if it hurts you in the end.”

  “He’s your best friend here, huh?” I said, not wanting to think about experiences that could hurt me in the end. Thomas nodded.

  “I have to confess something,” he said. “Today, watching you two at the rodeo, I felt a little jealous.”

  “Jealous? Why?”

  “You two have a connection. You have history. If you want to be with him. . . . I mean, I just want you t
o be happy.”

  “Kit’s my friend, Thomas. I’m glad that he’s in a good place right now. But my heart is . . . elsewhere.”

  “Do you know what drew me to Kit in the first place?” Thomas said after a pause.

  “What?” I asked.

  “He’s interested in justice. That’s one of the reasons I was able to reconcile my participation in the war as a kid. I wanted to avenge the deaths of my parents. I thought I could. But soon the idea of justice was wiped out. There was no such thing as true justice when everyone was just trying to retaliate and destroy each other. But Kit still believes in it. Like how he wants to make things right with the Indians. And now, sometimes, it’s a comfort to be near him, just to hear his faith that wrongs can be corrected. Because a long time ago, when I thought I’d lost my soul, I stopped believing that they could.”

  “Wrongs can be corrected,” I said. “People can start all over again on any given breath.”

  Thomas pulled his hoodie over his head and blinked. His eyelashes were long. He smelled of lilac and metal.

  “In Liberia they already locked up everyone they’re going to lock up,” he said. “I wish they’d locked up people like me. At least then I would know for certain whether I was good or bad.”

  “You’re good,” I said. “I know that you’re good.” I wanted to touch him, to run my finger down the scar on his neck, to try to feel his pain by proxy. “You were a victim, Thomas. You did what you had to do to survive.” Just as I had done what I had to do, by enlisting four others in my dubious experiment.

  “I know,” he said. “Intellectually I know that. But since the ritual, now that I can see my actions at one remove, I hate myself for them. I don’t experience the trauma firsthand, like I used to, but the memories are still vivid. I see myself with knives, guns, playing with people’s lives, Consuelo. And now that I can experience emotion again, I can imagine what my victims felt. It’s like now I’m able to empathize with their fear as they faced me, a killer. It’s . . . agony.”