Always wanting to know more, I asked what would happen if they stop doing things that made sense. And that’s when I got the only explanation I ever would about Max and my dad’s belt.
“Son,” he said, “if a disobedient dog who is supposed to be serving you by guarding your house, starts chewing the inside of it to pieces”—he would always get a faraway look on his face, like he was remembering or he was talking about something that had already happened—“well, then you have to remind the bitch who she actually works for, because if you don’t… Once a lazy mutt gets used to eating all your food—being fed for basically doing nothing—she figures she can do whatever she wants whenever she wants.
“And if you let her do that, pretty soon she thinks that’s the way it’s always been. And then, when you don’t like something she’s doing, she doesn’t even care. She just ignores you—pretends you don’t exist. Until you try to stop feeding her. Then, there’s only one thing she ever does—she gets real mean and starts taking things away from you. You don’t stop her cold after that, pretty soon you won’t have a house to live in … or one thing left for her to chew up.”
Remembering it, I thought he was talking about the State, because I was young, but even then I knew he wasn’t talking about Max. Now, knowing what you and I both do, I know he was talking about God.
And it wasn’t long before I got another firsthand look at her in action.
— CLXI —
NOW, I KNOW you think I’m going sideways with my story again. Maybe everything they all say about me is true—I lose my train of thought—and I do throw down a little too much State swill. But my eyes are perfectly… Heh-heh, you got me there. But I’ll remind you again, act of a god.
I’ll tell you about how my eyes happened. It’s as good a place as any to get back to the point.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, I was what they used to call home-graded. Before State outlawed home grading, and before Protection made sure that kids went to the conditioning campuses like they were supposed to, I didn’t even know there was another way to learn. Not until I was playing with the other kids after one of our Sunday church trips.
My mom was busy drinking tea, eating carrot cake, and talking about whatever church ladies like to talk about after a good long sermon. All the kids were rampaging around the playground behind the church. For some reason churches always had playgrounds. The ones we drove by anyway.
Swings and monkey bars and slides and climbing rocks, probably built just so the ladies could stick around and have tea and gossip after church. But they were always joined by the priest, so who knew what they talked about.
After an hour of hearing himself during morning mass, the fact that a priest could listen to himself talk some more, spoke of a faith in his own words that was unshakable. I know the real reason now.
I asked the Colonel what he thought they talked about after church. He said that people who talked too much rarely had anything important to say. That made me smile. I never recounted that to my mother.
When we were all done with that long day—the priest preaching, my mom chatting and me playing—and after the whole other ordeal was over, I had learned that I wasn’t what those other kids considered “normal.” They were all middle graders and I was a home grader. And the way they said it made me sound like some kind of freak. But even that wasn’t as bad as what they did to me when the church ladies and the priest weren’t looking.
It doesn’t take long for a bunch of kids to turn into a pack of wild animals. And the thing with wild animals is that there has to be a pecking order. And a pecking order has to have a bottom. “You don’t want to be on it,” my father told me. I should’ve listened to that piece of advice a little closer.
It was just play at the time, I think, but somehow I ended up beneath the pile of kids with my face smashed into the bark and sand beneath all the playground equipment. But what was meant to protect kids from injury, rough-housing and rampaging on all that equipment, didn’t work quite like that for me.
I could taste the sand and smell the cedar chips and then I couldn’t breathe—trapped beneath nine other kids, it’s hard to get air—and I was trying to scream for my mom to help me, but that just sucked in more sand, and then I was choking and then I couldn’t choke anymore. I stopped breathing.
That was the second time that I went completely black. It was also the second time that I saw an angel.
He was a big muscular-looking … bird was the only way I could describe him after. He had a smile like my dad after Max fetched back a duck we had shot along the river.
He had red wings and big blue eyes, and he smelled like when we burned the weeds on our field. And when he spoke, the cawing sounded a little like this black crow that used to swoop down on me and Max, cackling at us when we would scout for ducks along the river dike. I will never forget what that angel said to me.
“You are riddle to me, priest,” he crowed, “you and that dog. Never boring, however … observing you both. Bid the day to Monica for me. Inform her that you may require more penance, old boozing bastard that you are. I must say, when she names one of you monkeys, it certainly suits you.”
And that was it. I could make no sense out of his words. The only thing I understood at all was my mother’s name. But that angel, calling me a priest? I didn’t even like church. I never told my mother that part.
Then he grabbed me and two huge spikes of pain went through my upper body and I tried to scream out, but no sound left my lips. And it felt like something stabbed through both sides of my chest and the light flashed brighter than I had ever seen.
When I woke up, I was staring at a doctor’s flashlight in the State Med-mart downtown. My mom was looking down on me and a nurse was looking down on me and that doctor was shining his light.
I don’t have to tell you, looking up at a pack of grown-ups, all looking down at you like you are supposed to be dead, is more frightening than actually being dead. I should know, I’ve died enough times by now.
That’s what the doctor told my mom happened to me—I died. It wasn’t so bad the second time.
But a throat full of sand and then bark in my eyes, by the time all the kids got off me and the group of tea-sipping church ladies stopped listening to the priest long enough to notice that I wasn’t getting up, I was dead … for the thirty-three minutes that it took them to get me to the med-mart and revive me. Though I found out later that wasn’t exactly how it happened.
We stayed at the med-mart for at least another hour. Doctors asking me questions and nurses taking my temperature, picking and poking at me with God knows what. Somehow I knew not to say anything about seeing an angel.
I don’t think that any of them knew what to do with someone who was just dead, but now seemed to be perfectly fine. Adding the hallucination of seeing an angel to my case wouldn’t get us out of the med-mart any faster.
It wasn’t a place you wanted to be. My mom told me that. I always thought that the med-mart was where you went to get well. That’s what the news people said on the PIN. But my mom told me med-marts were built to take care of sick people—they had no interest in well beings. So the quicker we got out of there the better. I could see that on my mother’s face.
The doctors wanted to give me some kind of shot, but my mom was once again “adamant” that they would be doing no such thing, especially since they wouldn’t tell her exactly what it was they wanted to inject into me. That was before they weren’t required to tell you.
Back then, you didn’t want to get between my mom and her “adamant.” There was a time when I thought she might have nicknamed a lead pipe or an axe or something that she kept hidden somewhere. Whatever the secret behind it was, once she swung that word at someone, that was the way it was going to be.
They even took my mom into a room next to the one I was in, so I couldn’t listen to her screaming at them. I could see through the glass that they were threatening her with something.
I’
d seen my dad try that on her before. She picked up her big cast-iron pig-frying pan and it pretty much ended right there.
They left a doctor in the room with me when they took my mom in the other one. I don’t think she realized anyone was still with me. That doctor told me I needed a vitamin shot to help me recover from being “unconscious.”
I watched through the glass at my mom while the doctor gave me a little stick—it hardly hurt a bit—and once my mom was satisfied that those people in the other room understood her, she came back in, packed us both up and in five minutes we were on our way home, rolling my dad’s guzzler down the tollway.
On the way home, my mom told me that when the doctor shined his flashlight in my eye, I just woke up with a big gasp.
Thirty minutes? It seemed like thirty seconds—no longer than a minute, for sure. But I had gone somewhere, and that place was as real as that witch-angel I saw with the big black eyes.
My mom acted like I should be afraid—she certainly was—but I was just curious.
It wasn’t until we hit Issaquah—about halfway home—that my vision got blurry and I got a splitting headache.
My mom made me recline in my seat, close my eyes and tell her what I remembered from being gone. I don’t think she ever used the word “dead” to describe it. Not when she talked to me about it, not when she told the eye doctor the next day, and certainly not when she told my dad what had happened.
They sat at the kitchen table that night, thinking I was asleep, and they talked until very late. My mother was saying something to my father about “the life they had lived”—I could barely hear with the door to my room cracked and Max’s head lying on the floor next to me, whimpering softly like he had to go outside to do his business.
The next day, I had new glasses—things were colorful but blurry without them—and they made me look even more “freakish.” Though I would have to attend the aftermath of one more Sunday sermon for those kids to inform me of that.
I thought for sure that my mom would roll some kid’s head for my accident, but nothing happened to any of them. And the next Sunday we were back at that playground like nothing ever happened. Kids are like that, but I didn’t think my own mother…? The church ladies were back listening to the priest’s after-sermon again. She listened, too.
That priest must have had something really interesting to say, because they all gathered around him like Max waiting for me to put down his bowl of pig-sprinkled food.
When I told my mom about the angel I had seen and that he knew her name, she kept asking and asking for more details, but there wasn’t enough of it to take up more than a minute.
Surely there had to be more? In her mind I had been gone for over thirty minutes, but what that angel said and how he knew her name and what I was supposed to tell her, was all there was. That made her scared—her voice was nothing but fear. And that scared me more than the med-mart did.
I never told her about the doctor who gave me the vitamin shot.
— CLXII —
THERE’S WIND AND then there is wind—howling, haunting, hating fury that shoves over everything in its path. Wind that pushes like a big drunk roughs his way through a crowd when he’s headed for the toilet. Trust me, I’ve seen that.
I’ve seen some seriously belligerent wind, too. In the Northwest Quarter, the wind lifts up the waves of the sea and blows wherever it pleases. You can’t tell which direction it’s coming from or where it’s going most of the time, and you have to go a bit farther north than Duvall to see the worst of it—Mount Vernon has it pretty bad.
All that cold ocean water in the Pacific and Puget Sound has to go somewhere. So when God gets really mad… You ask the Plains citizens, they’ll tell you the truth, you haven’t seen the wrath of God until you’ve seen him—sorry, her—use wind.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that on our little five acres of the free world … everyone earns their keep. Max was no different. Ducks? The Colonel didn’t consider chasing ducks and falling through the ice work, so Max needed a real job.
My dad figured out pretty quickly what Max was good at, besides mopping up pig parts, that is.
My dog could feel a storm coming on a bright bluebird day. Though, who couldn’t—in Seattle, the gray of the day didn’t yield to baby blue too often. Predicting a weather change from nice to nasty didn’t take much. But Max would tell us just how nasty an impending wrath was going to get.
A day before a big arctic blast of cold and castrating wind blew down from British Canada or our last outpost, Yukon Alaska, Max would start whimpering. And depending on how bad it was going to be, he got louder. If it was going to be a real rager, he howled from under my bed. None of us could get him to come out.
Of course, the Colonel tried once and got some wild animal snarling and snapping back for his trouble. Another moment I felt positive that the belt would be brandished again and yet there was nothing.
“Yep,” the Colonel said, jerking back his hand from Max’s clamping jaws, “she’s gonna break the wrath out of the storehouses tomorrow, Benito. Batten down the barn, because the bitch is gonna blow.”
Max only hid under my bed twice, and both times I thought our house was going to rip off its stilts. I figured we were going to go “Dorothying” up into the sky, like that ancient cinewave actress who visited the fake Emerald City with her own dog.
“Castrating?” Well, I described the storm that way, because I had only heard one howl that even approached the hideous wailing of those two windstorms, and that was a calf on our neighbor’s little five acres of Heaven on Earth next door.
The Colonel took me over there one day, probably to teach me some lesson or another. I watched from the top of the corral fence as the calves were castrated. It did not look pleasant. But like I said, my father never squandered an opportunity to impart his wisdom.
About the time the third or fourth calf was getting cut, he turned to me and said, “If you think growing a pair of balls is tough, try getting them cut off.”
Time. That was all it took for every lesson I learned from my dad to pay off. Losing my nerve, or worse, never growing any courage in the first place, was not his recommended path. Another lesson I had learned a little too late.
I thought about it one time—it would have been nice to get a manual for all the stuff he was teaching me about life. A lot of things would have been easier. But looking back on it, I think the difficulty was his point. Struggle was growth to the Colonel.
Back to my wind.
The first gale we endured was brutal—it blew out three of our windows—but that second time… I helped the Colonel build shutters to solve the breaking windows problem, but our house wasn’t the structure that threatened to uproot and fly off to Oz. After all, the pig barn wasn’t built on top of stilts buried eight feet down.
About twenty minutes into it, though it was probably more like five—relativity of time, you know—I asked the Colonel, “Why don’t we have a cellar?” The girl in that cinewave had one, and this wind sounded like it was going to put the Plains Quarter to shame.
There were no storm cellars in the Northwest Quarter like there were in the Plains, I was informed. The way the Colonel explained it seemed remarkably literal to me at the time. Though, I think that the impending windstorm had him less than himself.
“You don’t want to drown down in a dungeon of death for this,” he said to … probably my mother and me both. “You’ll be damned for sure. You have to think, Benito. Do you really want to be underground when that bitch decides to break the dike?”
I just shook my head, wide-eyed and scared this time.
“You might not be able to see the wind,” he chuckled to himself, “but if that dike breaks, this valley will be underwater. Besides, this is number three.”
I had no idea what that meant, and neither he nor my mother would tell me any more about it. I didn’t have long to beg for an answer, because just then the pigs in the barn started squeali
ng like they were being castrated. Guess who got “volunteered” to go check that out?
I was completely surprised that my mother didn’t say a word when the Colonel squeezed on my shoulder and helped me to the front door.
I remember gripping onto the rope that my dad tied from the front porch steps to the fence around the pigpen. He was prepared like that. I swear that I lost my footing at least twice and flapped in the blast of wind like the sheets on my mom’s clothesline.
I could hear the pigs, screaming and screeching inside the barn like they were being slaughtered slowly. And I pulled on the rope, got my footing, and willed my way to the barn door, leaves slapping my face and sticks hitting me everywhere as I went.
The tops of huge Douglas fir trees bent over and cracked and snapped off like the sounds of a raging campfire. I narrowly avoided a couple of them as I struggled for the barn.
Whatever was causing this gale, and one thing my parents were in total agreement on was that only God showed this kind of rage, it was a force of nature nonetheless.
The boards on the barn were rattling and banging against each other, and the wind howled through the gaps between them like a wolf about to kill a pack of sheep.
That’s the way my father described the sound to me before ushering me out our front door. Seems like a just way to recount it, though I’ve never heard the howl of a wolf that was about to kill a—well, now that I think about it, maybe I have.
The door to the barn opened in and when I removed the two-by-four we had secured it with, the door flung open and I flew inside the barn with it and went tumbling across the dirt floor.
I slammed into the side of one of the pig stalls and fell in the middle of the aisle. The pigs were screaming and it was hard to think, but I jumped up and ran back to the door. The wind blew my face so hard and a big fir branch slammed me in the chest and I fell back, gasping for air.
Back on my feet, I covered my face with my arm and looked across the corrals at our house. It was weird, because I know I helped my dad nail all the shutters tight, but when I… The Colonel and his wife stared out an open window, across the yard at me, like there wasn’t a hundred-mile-an-hour wind blasting the windows in front of them. And I stopped for a second and stared back. They didn’t even wave.
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