Holding Pattern (7 page)

Want to hear something? Cosmo asks.

What?

This one time, I ate a whole bar of scented soap. For the heck of it.

What happened?

For a whole week, my turds come out white and smellin like expensive perfume.

Seven o’clock. Hatch rushes to his door, parts it a little. Cosmo approaches from down the hall, underclothing tucked against his side, suit trailing behind his shoulder, old-man shoes untied, genitals swinging.

Fully dressed an hour later. Breakfast on the table. He eats in one minute flat.

Gon choke to death one day, Mamma says. Eatin like somebody crazy.

Yes’m. He kisses her cheek. Leather satchel in hand, clean dungarees folded over his arm, he rushes out to greet the new day. Walks bent forward, like somebody pushing through slanting snow.

If you gon be a pilot, how come you tinkering with that lil-bitty engine?

Cosmo cracked his knuckles, popping one at a time. Look, I ain’t gon be no pilot. That’s a lawn-mower engine. And, those there, Volkswagen. I’m studying power-plant mechanics. I overhaul air-cooled engines. He went on, sounding like one of his books.

Hatch kept his distance. Drew his water pistol and considered firing.

Cosmo looked him in the face, grinning at the threat, liquid danger. Opened his arms and gestured, expansively, his smile wide. These are machines for living.

Ain’t you gon be a pilot?

I never said that.

What did you say?

Cosmo frowned into the bowl of his hat. I’m gon be a mechanic, a power-plant mechanic. See, they got this program at school that’ll low me to get both my power-plant license and my body license.

You got five schools offering you scholarships, Mamma said.

Cosmo snapped the brim of his hat.

Dad looked steadily at him, pulling his silver-streaked goatee with long strokes of his fist.

I like to fix things.

Where you go last night?

Ma’am?

Are you deaf now too? Where did you go last night?

Nowhere.

Nowhere?

Drivin.

Drivin where?

Just drivin. Nowhere in particular.

Nowhere in particular smelling like cigarette smoke?

Cosmo keeps his eyes lowered, fedora in hand.

I don’t know what path you’re on, but I’ll tell you this: don’t swap horses in the middle of the stream.

The room shines with the shimmering of the street. Cosmo stands rigid, lean face in shadow, following with a blank look his pacing father. Though he maintains an appetite, eats his meals in greedy helpings, he has a polelike appearance, skinny arms, narrow shoulders, and no hips or buttocks. And that hungry-ass face. The only thing big on him is his hands. He looks like some mechanical figure from one of his aviation books.

I don’t understand why the boy so skinny. Look like somebody over in Africa.

Dad quickens his pace. Hatch’s skin grows warm with fear and excitement. Dad halts and looks Cosmo straight in the face. They are watching each other, separate nightscapes of parked vehicles and moving traffic flowing across each face.

Cosmo.

Yes, sir.

Either shit or get off the pot.

You know where babies come from? Cosmo’s feet make no sound on the garage floor.

Uh-huh.

Where?

Out they navel.

True. And don’t let nobody tell you different.

It was a lot like sighting through a hole made by your thumb and forefinger, the metal door lock cold against your brow:

Dad lay facedown on the bed, arms around his pillow. The blankets heaved powerfully. Soft morning light painted on the shaded window. His scalp glowed with the strength of the approaching day. Mamma put her cheek on his shoulder.

I’m an angel, she said. I could dance on the head of a pin.

Hatch crawls into the bedroom and hides at the back of the closet with the door slightly ajar. A wedge of vision. Mamma rushes out of the bathroom, fully dressed. Halts before the full-length mirror, body shaking with the shock of the sudden stop. Screws her tam down well over her forehead, checks her bangs. Straightens out the things in her purse, lifts coat from the bed. Exits, buttocks seesawing.

Sargent, how come you ain’t dressed for church?

I don’t think I can make it today.

Sargent.

I am perfectly serious. Sincere. My joints are stiff. He demonstrates.

Sargent, please stop actin a fool. We gon be late. Don’t spoil my one day of the week.

You don’t understand. My joints are stiff. From the cold.

Mamma stands there with something flickering hot behind her eyes. She spins on her heels and quits the house, door slamming behind.

The batter hits a pop fly into center field. The camera tracks another player as he moves into position, glove at the ready.

I hope he misses it, Hatch says.

Why?

They always catch it. Why can’t they miss sometime?

Cosmo rises from his seat next to Hatch, his audience his rundown collection of engines. In his brother, Hatch sees a prophecy of his physical-self-to-be. Mamma has dressed them like twins for church. Tall skinny Cosmo and short plump Hatch, his ventriloquist dummy.

Rest assured, Cosmo says. He flicks off the television, baseball in permanent flight. Anything you think of has happened.

What?

Anything you imagine in your brain has happened, sometime, somewhere.

Anything?

Yes.

Really?

Yes.

A woman of biblical proportions, Sistah Turner turns her back to the class and begins to chalk a lesson on the blackboard. Cosmo, in a low voice: Look at that fine ho! Hatch and fellow students double over in their seats with laughter. Sistah Turner spins. Scans the class. Cosmo casts a few mean looks to silence would-be traitors.

Sistah Turner summons the students to her desk for punishment, one by one. Sign your name on her licking stick, then assume the position. Discipline, Sistah Turner says. Say it. Hatch says it. Sistah Turner’s hard paddle works on his soft butt. Later, when he arrives home, he rushes to the john, shuts and locks the door, slips down his draws, and cranes his neck, trying to see if his name is emblazoned on his behind.

Much weeping and wailing. Hatch, bottom tender, watches Cosmo angrily, contemplates betrayal. Cosmo sits with his eyes firmly shut, tightening in and out of dreams.

After class, Mamma takes her sons into a dark corner and tests for recalcitrance, extending one thin knuckle before each boy’s forehead and letting it hover there, humming, seeking the necessary evidence in their eyes. She raps the guilty party with the knuckle, force and number of raps fitting the crime.

They follow Mamma into the church, her white ruffled dress billowing about her legs, waves. They glide down the red thickly carpeted aisle. Hatch steps carefully, afraid his feet will sink into the raging floor. He stumbles. Recovers his balance. A classic delinquent, Cosmo whispers to Hatch: Satan fell. The greatest disaster in the history of world aviation.

They seat themselves on a hard wooden pew, brightly polished, like a canoe. Hatch’s feet dangle above the carpet’s red bloody waters. Cosmo sits beside him, jaw rigid, face flattened, as if pressing into glass. Words cascade from the preacher’s wine-aged lips. Hatch searches for something firm to grab on to.

Sit up straight!

That bitter and poisonous apple, that hot coal of lust in Adam’s belly.

Cosmo’s fingers twitch, the urgent pulse of awakening life. Cosmo whispers into Hatch’s ear, I drank from a jawbone.

Hatch takes him immediately for what he seems.

The collection plate comes around for the third time—Hatch doesn’t remember sitting on the pew for so long, but he has—coins like sparkling eyes, fish scales. A repetition of images, mechanical proliferation.

Out of the eater come forth meat, and out of the strong come forth sweetness.

Cosmo jerks as if to sneeze and spills his half-digested breakfast into the collection plate.

We
discussed it. Mamma holds Cosmo in her gaze. Don’t use the car no mo on Saturday nights.

What? Cheek black.

Cosmo has devised a new trick: he can hoard air inside his lungs, then blow it toward tight lips, causing one cheek to expand while the other remains flat. That paradox matched by his gait, neither a walk nor a run but a clumsy advance, leaning forward a little with his chin thrust out, straining to see something in the distance, the inflated cheek black with the heat of the straining engine inside his jaw.

Hatch watches Cosmo through the garage window. Cosmo circles about from corner to corner, crashes into the walls, bug to glowing lamp.

Hatch entered through the kitchen, trying not to make any noise. He raised the water pistol and moved on. What he hoped to avoid awaited him. Cosmo was standing to one side of the chandelier, facing Hatch but staring through Hatch at some vision that Cosmo alone could see. His physical appearance confirmed what Hatch had long suspected, that a strange new life was flowering inside him. One hand jerked as if shaking dice, while the other squeezed and relaxed like tweezers opening and closing or castanets snapping.

Hatch spun and rushed back in the direction from which he had come. He bounded down the back-porch steps, almost crashed into the corner of the house as he turned, stumbled through the lawn area, cut sharply again, and leaped onto the front-porch steps. The porch light made the darkness strangely comfortable. The water pistol warm in his hand.

He could feel something cold rising up in him and thought to turn back. The house taking shape as he watched from his command post in a tangle of bushes and hedges on a low hill. The darkness his shelter. Then he realized he was actually seeing an expanding architecture: the house, the garage, the street, the church, the neighborhood, the jagged-leaved trees that ate the horizon. With this small but significant finding, he felt a new confidence. In time he would face his brother.

You think you grown? What time was you sposed to be in the house?

But Cosmo been aggravatin me.

You a tattletale now?

The sun is a silver penny pasted onto the sky. A slow rain descends indifferently. Cosmo and Hatch race down the street, their speed a challenge that the sky accepts. A steady downpour. Hatch catches water on his tongue and drinks it. Cosmo hops off the curb into puddles, splashing his pointed old-man shoes, frenzied sharks.

The rain comes in gray swaths. Hatch and Cosmo cut into a doorway where others have also sought refuge. Hatch’s soggy sneakers fart whenever he wiggles his toes. Cosmo turns, faces the crowd from under his fedora. Spreads his arms wide, greeting the rain. We are gathered here today …

Rain transforms the streets into angry rivers, swirling eddies. Hard wind slaps hats off heads. Hair flattened into a flying wave, Cosmo ducks under an awning, shoves others aside to squeeze in, create his own little bit of space, elbow room. Together they stare out silently into the street at a curtain of performing rain and a swollen gutter. Police officers wrapped in plastic direct almost stationary traffic. Cosmo shivers, building up energy for an illumination, which does not come. A full hour before the rain eases. A mocking peck of blue sky.

Morning light fell slant upon the couch, where Cosmo lay under several layers of blankets, feverish—throat clogged, eyes shut in pain—and holding his stomach like a pregnant woman.

You may be sick, but you better keep an eye on yo brother when he get home from school, Mamma said.

Sure.

Make sure he eats his dinner.

Sure.

And don’t aggravate him.

Sure.

The moment the door shut, he rose from the couch, red robe and slippers flaming about him, and stood rigidly in place, the sole of one foot clamped behind his knee, and the palm of his hand masking his eyes. One cheek black and puffy, the other, colorless and tent taut. The morning opened around him and he stood erect in its center, a stamen.

A ripe day. The sky so near that Hatch drew back from its heat. The sun blinked a drunk’s red eye. Red clouds stumbled. He withdrew into shadow, band upon band, bar upon bar. His hands crimson wings.

Constellations as pale as milk. Stars banged against roofs. Hatch passed the lit windows of houses, perhaps a face or two looking out from them. Then home. The porch glowed with light and softened the darkness. He moved cautiously upon the black stairs. Opened the door. Fire shot through the back of his neck.

The hard wooden floor sagged under his waterlogged spine. He squeezed back burning tears. His legs stiff. His neck stiff, caught in some unseen bear’s honed teeth. How long had he been here? He turned his head and the bear bit harder. Two spotlights gawked down at him from the ceiling. A third fixture cast a cone of light on a large white sheet draped along the long window like a sail and flapping freely. The room was completely bare, all furniture gone.

Punk, get on up. I ain’t got all day.

He could not see Cosmo, only hear him. He explored the back of his neck with cautious fingers, trying to pinpoint teeth, triage physical damage.

Forget yo neck.

My neck is fine!

The unseen bear teeth clamped down.

Then get up.

I ain’t.

Get up.

No. You play too much.

I ain’t playin. Cosmo moved somewhere in the room. He stepped into the cone of light wearing a robe and slippers, the same red robe and slippers from earlier. Eyes wide. Skin taut like burns freshly healed. And the swollen cheek, an unwanted growth. His shadow shimmered against the sheet.

Wait till Mamma see what you done. The furniture.

Cosmo stood there, eyes wide spotlights. He spread a slow grin.

I’m tellin. You gon get a whupping when Mamma get home.

Cosmo watched him for a moment. Then he tightened the cord of his robe. We got some business to take care of.

I ain’t doing no business with you.

Shut up.

You can’t make me.

Cosmo moved across the room with his new walk. Didn’t I tell you to shut the fuck up? Bones creaking, Hatch raised himself to hands and knees. The bear matched his resistance, lodging its teeth into the bone, asserting claim. He tried to rise but found that his legs too had come under new allegiance, chained and posted traps around his ankles. He dragged himself backward into the corner, the most he could do. Cosmo reached him, slapped him upside the head.