My mother called me Early. My father apparently tried to stick with James, but it became obvious fairly soon that James didn’t fit. Oddly, neither did Early, but my mother won the battle anyway. She had a secret weapon in such battles. The weapon of indifference. Impossible to counter. Virtually invisible, but nonetheless lethal, like a small daily dose of poison. It’ll wear you down until quitting seems right.
My mother was unnatural, removed, artistic, and dramatic. We looked at her a lot and sometimes she looked back, usually extraordinarily busy with some project or another. She would paint entire rooms and then paint them again, a different color, the next day.
My father would come home from work and ask, “Christine, wasn’t the dining room blue yesterday?”
Usually, my mother wouldn’t answer such questions. I think she believed she was truly a special person born in the wrong time and place. I called her Christine because she said it was her name, and it only seemed weird when I turned four or five years old and none of the other kids called their mothers by their first name. Around other people I would say “Mom” in a very low voice at the beginning of my sentences.
“Mom, can I have a popsicle?”
“What?”
“Mom, can I have a popsicle?”
Outside I would say, “My mom likes to give me popsicles,” emphasizing “mom.”
My father was the opposite. I remember him as warmth, a smile. He was very human, but of course, in retrospect, I know my father’s memory enjoys the benefits of death. He died in a car accident when I was eleven years old, leaving me and my mother alone like two strangers connected and disconnected from my father.
It changed me, as you can imagine, forever. One day he was there before I left for school, and then he never came back to us. I couldn’t possibly forgive him. I understand it wasn’t his fault. I understand he didn’t drive away and live somewhere in California.
My father was hit by a train. One of those cross-cutting events. We watch TV while somebody down the block miscarries. We eat a piece of pie while a man dies across town in a pool of his own blood. But sometimes, the events cut across our lives like the time the train killed my father while he sat in his car listening to the radio, drumming his hands on the steering wheel, with a big black train bearing down.
If he did it on purpose, it was an inefficient way to die, but brilliant. It leaves everybody thinking, would a man kill himself with a train when he could take a handful of pills, or blow a hole through his head? If he wanted it to look like an accident, he might.
I can barely read my own handwriting. After my Dad died I wrote down imaginary conversations we probably never had.
Dad: When you’re having a bad dream, Early, just remind yourself it’s only a dream.
Me: I don’t know how.
Dad: You’re smart. Just say, ‘Hey, it’s only a dream. I can do whatever I want because I know I’ll wake up in the morning.’ And then punch the monster in the nose, or light the bad man’s hair on fire, or stand on the train tracks and watch the engine run right through you.
Me: Somebody told me, if you die in your dream, you die in real life.
Dad: And how do you suppose the person who told you that could know? They couldn’t ask anybody who ever did it, right? Because they’re all dead. You’re a smart boy. Be in charge of your own dreams, real and unreal.
The story of the Winters brothers is another example of one of those cross-cutting events. The boy could have gone to another house, another window, but he didn’t. He could have died at the wreck scene, or shown up two minutes later, but he didn’t. His life-ending event coincided, collided, with my life-beginning event, and nobody planned it that way.
My mother made a big deal out of Thanksgiving. It was really weird. Birthdays were uneventful. Christmas, Fourth of July, Easter, just another reason to be out of school. Most of the time she was too busy to pay any attention to us at all, but when Thanksgiving rolled around, it was a different story. We had to have all the excess, the biggest turkey in town, three kinds of cranberry sauce, mincemeat pies. It was some sort of trade-off I never really understood and still don’t. But who says I’m supposed to understand everything anyway? And who says I need to figure it all out?
If I breathe deeply, eyes closed, for three full minutes, it suddenly doesn’t seem so important anymore. Nothing can endear one person to another like allowing oneself to be saved. Or demanding it. Or requiring it. Vulnerable, spread-eagle emotionally, like my mother, I’ve remained detached and efficient the majority of my life. And like my father, I’ve allowed the world at times to be too much with me and prayed for the train to come. This balance, or imbalance, is the essence of my person.
Eddie Miller was my best friend from ages five to seven. He was one year younger and soft, like a chubby marshmallow. Eddie would do anything I said, follow me anywhere I went. He was getting hurt all the time, once falling off his bike in the road carrying a Coke bottle. The bottle busted and Eddie ripped a gash in his chin. Of course, he was getting the Coke for me. I was three blocks away in a tree fort, waiting impatiently for my cold Coke that never arrived.
Mrs. Miller asked me to step outside one day.
“Why did you tell Eddie there’s no such thing as Santa Claus?”
I played dumb.
“Answer me,” she said, louder.
I said, unapologetically, “I thought he should know it’s a big lie.”
The scowl on Mrs. Miller’s face left a deep impression.
“Well, Mr. Know-it-all, we’ve got one or two good Christmases left. If you ruin it, I’ll whip your bottom red. I don’t care who your parents are.”
At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to the last sentence. I immediately went back to Eddie in his room.
“Eddie, that stuff I said about Santa Claus wasn’t true. He’s alive, and he’ll probably come see you for two more Christmases. After that, you’re on your own.”
Eddie didn’t listen. He just stood up and peed in his toy box like he always did. He told me I could pee in the toy box, too, if I wanted, but it never seemed right so I didn’t do it.
My other best friend was Jake Crane. He was a year older and the complete opposite of Eddie Miller. Jake’s mom was wild as hell and good-looking. I knew she was good-looking even before I knew the difference, mostly by the way my dad acted around her.
Miss Crane was black-headed and wore tight pants with high-heeled shoes. She laughed and smacked her red lips. There were rumors she took a shower with Andy Bradshaw’s brother who was in college, but who knows if that was true.
Jake’s grandmother lived in his house. She was the meanest woman I’ve ever known. The first time she backhanded Jake’s little brother I froze in fear. The kid was lifted from the floor and rolled across the room, his nose bleeding, like a boxer. And for nothing. Just changing the television station. That’s how they lived, in between the sexual energy of their mother and the violence of an old woman.
Jake stole cigarettes from his mom. He taught me how to cup the cherry so nobody could see it at night. One time we were in the dark outside his mom’s bedroom window smoking one of those long, skinny cigarettes when she came into the bedroom. Neither of us said anything to each other as she took off her shirt, reached around to unhook her bra, and stood before us naked from the waist up. I had never seen such a thing, and truthfully it scared the shit out of me, but I didn’t turn away. Thank God she went in the bathroom to take off the rest of her clothes or I might have passed out in front of Jake Crane.
People wanted to be near Jake in elementary school. There was a power about him. A loose energy field. But it was the best he’d ever be. At sixteen, all of his good days were mostly behind him, his loose energy dissipated into the air of the world. It’s like an airplane. It has to reach a certain speed to lift from the ground and take flight. That was the reason no one before the Wright Brothers could invent the airplane. Such speeds weren’t possible. Once they were possible, gliding in the
sky was a given. For Jake Crane, he never quite reached the speed of lift.
three
At around age four, I started having dreams of a scary circle on the floor. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’d awake from those dreams in terror. The circle was black and a few feet across. In the middle of a perfectly good dream, the circle would appear on the floor. I never knew if it was a hole or what. I only knew the monster was the fear itself.
Other people running around in the dream couldn’t see the circle. I’d yell. I’d warn them. One time I pulled a kid away from the hole. Nobody ever stepped inside. Besides being weird, there were no signs the circle was evil or dangerous, but I knew what it meant. I knew what the black circle held.
My grandfather was a very patient man. He was from a time before the world became too busy to enjoy, and we went fishing sometimes in a pond out in the country. I was maybe five or six. Paw-Paw would spend hours gathering together two cane fishing poles, red-and-white plastic corks, crickets, cheese sandwiches, and a little cooler with two grape sodas. The ritual was part of the event, as satisfying to him as the fishing itself, and I would watch him thread the thin, clear fishing line through the tiny hole in the hook, the knot just right, imagining the tug of the fish swallowing the kicking cricket.
The pond had lots of turtles. Paw-Paw let me push the boat away from the pier and the little motor would take us to parts of the pond my grandfather was sure the fish would bite. I learned catching a fish wasn’t really important. For Paw-Paw, the importance seemed to lie in the silence. Watching a turtle sunning on the bank. Staring at the red-and-white plastic cork floating on top of the coffee-colored water. The beauty, for my grandfather, was in the wait. For me, the wait was agonizing. It would always be. It was hard to understand anything except the joy of seeing the cork bob, and the line pull tight, and the unfortunate little fish dangling from the hook through his lip.
It must be frightening for the bream. His wet google-eye scanning for something familiar, but instead seeing big round faces, and grape soda cans, and the hand that wraps around the body and holds tight while the other hand unhooks the hook from the lip.
My grandmother was very different from Paw-Paw. Nanny was small and quick. She laughed hard and found certain things funny I didn’t find funny at all. She cooked and sang little songs in the kitchen, laughing sometimes at herself, and finding a rhythm in the work. Paw-Paw took her fishing with him once, and afterwards they both agreed never to do it again. Apparently, she talked incessantly about turtles, and ripples in the water, and all the other things in which my grandfather found such solace. However, there was no solace to be found in the discussion of these things, only in the things themselves, and besides, Nanny told me, “One stick of dynamite in that stupid pond, and we could eat fish for a year. What’s the point in trying to trick the silly things into biting a cricket on a hook?”
My grandfather heard her make that particular statement as we sat at the kitchen table eating biscuits and honey for breakfast. The old man rolled his eyes at me and sipped his coffee from the saucer. After his cup was empty, he had a habit of lifting the saucer to his mouth and drinking all the coffee he’d spilled from the cup. The low slurping sound sticks in my memory and makes me wish I could see my grandfather one more time.
When I was seven years old, I had my worst asthma attack. I was with my grandfather just after we pulled the boat from the pond. It was springtime, and all the weeds were in bloom. For some reason I decided to run around the other side of the pond to see a bullfrog I’d seen from the boat. I couldn’t find the bullfrog, but when I arrived, there was a wheezing in my chest. It wasn’t until I ran back to my grandfather that the tightness began. It was like the devil had wrapped his big red hand around my heart and started to squeeze, and squeeze, until there was no room for the air to go inside.
My grandfather saw the look on my face. He dropped the cane poles where he stood and carried me to the car to get my inhaler. The car was parked under a shade tree, and he put me on the backseat. I’d had asthma attacks before, but the one at the pond was the worst. I was afraid I’d die, and as my grandfather got down on one knee next to me at the car door, he started to pray.
“God, hear me pray now. Today we need you to put your hand on Early in the backseat of this car here. And loosen the grip on his lungs so he can breathe your air freely. And if you feel the need, take me with you in return, but I’ll stay here if you want, and I promise to never sneak another sip of scotch whiskey.”
He spoke the words so slowly it was like the world had fallen into slow motion. I watched the leaves on the trees up above swaying gently in the breeze, and I started to feel the panic subside, and with the panic gone I felt my chest loosen. I could breathe again.
On the ride home, Paw-Paw kept looking at me in the rearview mirror, afraid to take his eyes away from either me or the road for too long. It was probably the day I began to struggle with the idea of God. Had He truly put his hands upon me, as my grandfather prayed, and loosened the grip, or instead, was my grandfather’s prayer itself soothing and calming, allowing me to escape the panic and provide time for my body to return to normal? And what kind of God would care to trade my life for my grandfather’s secret whiskey sips? It just seemed enormously confusing, and my abilities of perception—
usually so helpful in crawling inside the minds of other people—actually seemed to complicate the idea of God. Nothing in my young life really compared to the day my father died. Up until then, things were moving along fairly well. Besides Eddie’s mom yelling at me about Santa Claus, the occasional asthma attack, and the lingering questions concerning my conception, life was pretty good. By age ten, I’d already made a conscious decision to be average. It seemed much easier than the alternative. The truly gifted, original, unique people in society must be prepared to suffer and fail as miserably as the ungifted, lazy, and idiotic. We like to pretend our culture embraces originality, but in truth we embrace repetition, familiarity. We only appreciate originality in hindsight, when it’s no longer original.
It’s much easier to decide to be average. The expectation level is mild. Disappointments are infrequent. I imagine the suffering of unacceptance is highly overrated. How easy can it be for a person to know they’re better, but endure ridicule from a lesser man, a lesser man defending lesser men? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not some self-suppressed genius. I’m probably average anyway. I just cut short the discovery process. I was unable to figure out how God could take my father away and leave me with my mother. It didn’t make any sense at all, from any direction, so I figured hiding amongst the average was the safest place to be. I wish I could say I had a cold shiver up my eleven-year-old spine the moment the train killed my dad. I was at school, probably chasing somebody around in the dusty schoolyard during P.E. class, or picking my nose in the back of Mrs. Eubanks’ room, or thinking about something stupid when it happened.
When the principal came to the door of the classroom I thought I was in trouble for pushing Missy Jesup earlier during a softball game. It wasn’t much of a push, but I was afraid she’d told on me and the principal, Mr. Walker, might be at the door on Missy’s behalf. I was afraid I was in trouble. Instead, my father was dead.
My mom stood beside me in the principal’s office with her hand stiff on my shoulder.
Mr. Walker said, “Early, I need to tell you something.”
The door was closed and the window shades were shut.
“Missy Jesup exaggerates,” I said.
Mr. Walker got down on one knee. He was a tall man, and on his knee we nearly looked eye to eye. I remember he wore a white button-down shirt. The sleeves were rolled up, and his tie was loosened a little at the neck. The skin around the collar was red and bumpy, like chicken skin.
I don’t know why my mother didn’t tell me. I don’t know why she just stood there and made Mr. Walker say the words.
“It’s not about Missy Jesup, Early. It’s about your father.”
That’s when I felt the world turn a little bit.
We looked at each other hard for a few seconds, and I could see the redness in his eyes.
“No,” I said, “it’s not about my father. It’s about Missy Jesup. I pushed her.”
Mr. Walker looked up at my mother. The hand on my shoulder didn’t twitch. It was like a deadweight, a sock full of brown sand.
“There’s been an accident, Early. Your father passed away.”
I remember thinking, “Passed away? What a strange way to put it. Like he vanished into thin air.”
I managed to say, “I don’t understand.”
I didn’t look up at my mother when she said directly, “Your father died today. He got hit by a train.”
Mr. Walker and I were still face to face. Like some sort of interpreter, he nodded his head and said softly, “It’s true.”
My father was dead. I’d seen him that morning before I went to school. And the next time I saw him he was dead in a coffin, propped up like he’d fallen asleep watching baseball on television. I wanted to touch his shoulder, wake him up, remind him it was time to throw the football in the yard. But he didn’t wake up, and they buried him in the ground.
A few days after the funeral I went into my mother’s room. She was sitting up in bed reading a book. We looked at each other for a long few seconds.
I finally said, in a flat voice, “I just don’t understand. Why would God, the same God who made us, kill Daddy with a train?”
My mother didn’t answer. She just looked at me.
I said, “When I get older, will I understand it better?”
My mother continued to hold her book open on her lap like she hoped the conversation would be short. “Probably not,” she said.
The words seemed to pass slowly from my mother’s mouth to my ears and then inside me. They were very final, but I couldn’t leave it.
The Wait Page 2