On the Divinity of Second Chances (4 page)

BOOK: On the Divinity of Second Chances
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Next to me was a calendar. The July fifth square had five tally marks and the number 537 scribbled on it. I pointed to it and looked at Lightning Bob.
“I’ve been struck by lightning five hundred and thirty-seven times now, five times that night. Oh, don’t worry—it hits the lightning rod and doesn’t hurt me, but boy, let me tell you, all my hair stands up. One of my friends who also works in a tower thinks it keeps us young. Look,” he said as he lowered his head and began to part his hair in different places for me to examine. “No gray. I’m forty-nine and I still have all my hair. Look for yourself—it’s all there. All my other friends are bald and gray, but I’ve still got a full head of hair, not a trace of gray.”
I tried to give him my best fascinated look.
“Yeah, five strikes on July fifth—weird, huh?”
I raised my eyebrows and nodded my head without looking at him.
“Yeah, that was a wild night. I wrote a poem about it. I like to write poems. I always have. It’s a gift.” He stood up, took two steps, and grabbed a notebook from under his cot.
“ ‘The Storm’ . . .” He glanced up from his notebook at me. “Most of my poems have that title.” I nodded. “ ‘The Storm,’ ” he began again dramatically.
“The sky rips open
The sky, it cracks
It almost gives me
Heart attacks.”
Truthfully, I was not particularly moved by the poem, but I was genuinely fascinated by Lightning Bob. He was unmistakably different.
When he excused himself to go to the outhouse, I bolted.
 
Jade tracked me within days of my disappearance, but not in the way you usually think of tracking. She used to do this when we were little. No one ever wanted to play hide-and-seek with her. I guess I should have expected her, but I didn’t. She brought me a backpack with nuts, oats, a first-aid kit, a water purifier, a slingshot, a sleeping bag, and a tent. She also gave me a twenty-dollar bill, a spiral notebook, and some pencils. When I saw her walking toward me, I ran to her and flung my arms around her. “What am I going to do?” I asked her over and over. “What am I going to do?” It was the first time I had heard my own voice in a week. I broke away from her and dropped to the ground. She looked at me with such deep concern, I knew she didn’t have any answers either.
“What have I done?” I asked.
She looked so sad as she shook her head.
We sat side by side for nearly four hours, neither of us talking, each deep in our own thoughts. A couple times I saw her cry. I needed her to come up with answers, for her to help me undo what I had done—I knew if there was someone who could, it would be Jade.
“There are no answers,” she finally said in the same way she would have said, “There is no hope.” She looked at me matter-of-factly. I was crushed. “Write Mom and Dad a letter,” she said. “I’ll put it in the mail so they don’t know I know where you are. They need to know what’s going on.”
I had no idea what to write to my parents. I couldn’t bring myself to write the words “kill” or “murder.” Eventually, I settled on keeping it simple: “Dear Mom and Dad, I have done something very bad. I can’t come home, but I want you to know I’m okay. I love you, Forrest.” Jade handed me an envelope. I wrote the address that used to be mine, but would never be again. I slipped my letter in the envelope and handed it back to Jade.
“I’ll be back,” she said. Then she gave me a big hug and rocked me a little, back and forth, back and forth, like the aspens around us, swaying in the breeze. And then she left. As I watched her walk away, I realized my life as I had known it was over. My self, as I had known me, was gone.
Thirteen years later, here I am two ridges away from Lightning Bob in my primary tree house, still in my self-imposed solitary confinement. I wonder about setting myself free sometimes, but it still doesn’t feel right.
Jade on Childhood
(May 18)
In my old room at the parents’ house, there’s a crayon picture I drew when I was five or six. Mom framed it. It’s of Grace and me dancing to
Soul Train
. Both Grace and I have our hair in cornrows. Grace’s hair is black, and her skin is brown; my hair is orange, and my skin is fuchsia. I must have had one of my many sunburns when I drew it.
A memory of returning from school rushes back to me. I was six years old. I passed Olive, then eight years old, who was playing on her Donny and Marie drum set. “Hi, Olive. Hi, Chief,” I said to Olive and her guardian, Walks Far.
“Stop that! There’s no one else here!”
“Yuh-huh,” I argued. “He’s sitting right beside you drumming. Good thing, too, ’cause you white girls aren’t known for your sense of rhythm.”
“You’re a white girl! You’re a white girl, too!” Olive yelled as I walked away down the hall.
Mom was playing Barbra Streisand in the living room while she ironed. I winced at the sound of Streisand. Forrest, four years old, was playing with blocks near Mom. “Hi, Mom,” I greeted her.
“Hi, sweet pea,” she replied without looking up from her ironing.
I walked back to my room and shut the door. Pictures I had drawn of Grace hung on my wall.
“Oooh. Look at you, girl. You got to be better about wearing that sunblock,” Grace said.
“Grace, how did I end up in this white girl body?” I asked.
“It’s good to experience a lot of things, child,” Grace said, doing her best to comfort me.
“I don’t know if I’m going to make it,” I told her. “I think my momma’s white girl music just might kill me. How could Donna Summer do a duet with that Barbra Streisand?”
“Turn on your radio, child. I’ll play you some Sly.” Grace knew this always lifted my spirits. I turned on my radio, and Grace made Sly and the Family Stone come on with “You Can Make It if You Try.” We sang along and got down.
Now I study the picture I drew as a child. “Jade and her imaginary friend, second grade,” Mom had written under it. Imaginary friend. Around the time my second grade teacher suggested I get a schizophrenia screening, I stopped talking to anyone about Grace. Grace told me it would probably be best if I kept quiet about that which others did not understand.
When I was even younger, some members of my old congregation from a previous lifetime used to show up and play chase with me. They would run through walls, though, and I would smack right into them. I’m pretty sure my parents thought something was wrong with me then, too.
I had called my congregation “ghosts,” but Grace corrected me. “They aren’t ghosts! They are spirits! Nothing offends a spirit worse than being called a ghost! A ghost is a soul that is too confused to leave the Earth dimension and go to Heaven just yet. A spirit is a soul that has gone to Heaven, but has come back for a quick visit to check on you. You see the difference?”
Today I look at myself in the mirror. I don’t look much different than I did in my second grade self-portrait. Like Grace, I still have cornrows, but now I wear them in a ponytail to keep them out of my face. My skin is not as fuchsia now. I couldn’t get waterproof SPF 40 in the seventies. Even though I can get it now, I’d rather just have my old skin back, my beautiful dark African skin.
Phil on Being Benched
(May 18)
The BMW had an oil change a thousand miles ago, and the Mercedes fewer than three hundred miles ago. Neither needs new oil. I study the spiral notebooks I keep in each car where I record every maintenance and repair, every oil change, every fill-up. I calculate the mileage to make sure the cars are still running efficiently. The mileage shows no change. The cars are spotless. This task did not take up much time. I take out my daily list of goals and cross off “Check cars for anything.”
I look around for something to do. I rummage through immaculate cupboards for something to organize better. Garden tools. I can put nails in the cupboard on which to hang each tool in alphabetical order. Shovel comes before spade. Then comes trowel. Rake comes before shovel. But what do you do with tools that have a modifier? Should the bamboo rake be under
B
, or should I phrase it “rake, bamboo,” which would precede “rake, metal”? And should the flathead shovel be under
F
or “shovel, flathead,” which would come before “shovel, spade”? I decide to go with the latter system. I know, though, that it really doesn’t matter much.
I used to be an investing genius. Yes, genius. How do I know? Millions and millions of dollars—that’s how I know. Do I flaunt it? No. Sure, I have a BMW and a Mercedes (parked in alphabetical order), but that’s because they’re the best-made cars in the world. Heck, I’ve had the BMW since 1978 and the Mercedes since 1972. They’re still going strong. They were sound investments.
My family doesn’t know exactly how much money I’ve made. Best that they not. They know I’ve done well, but they don’t know the details. I’m very protective of my wealth. Wealth is like a delicate orchid few know how to keep alive and healthy. I, for one, never want to be poor again. I grew up poor, and hated it. Times were always tough, but when I was in high school they got tougher and my parents lost their farm. At first they moved to town and lived off welfare. I’ll never forget the humiliation of being sent to the store with food stamps to pick up milk and flour. Eventually, they moved to Bridge-port, Nebraska, where my dad worked in the oilfields and my mom got a job in a diner. They both started drinking a lot. I watched them change from people I knew into people I didn’t know, all because of a lack of money.
I like nice things, and I like to share them with Anna, sure, but I don’t like waste. I don’t like the feeling of my wealth slipping away. Plus, I want my kids to find their own way in this world. It’s important to a person’s character to overcome obstacles. It’s also important to learn the value of a dollar. Yes, some could argue that I hoard my wealth, but from my perspective, money in the bank is simply a report card, something to prove that my judgment is superior to most—something to show my epic success. Why would I want to invite my family to spend my report card? Sure, I have some trusts just for tax purposes, but no one will know about them until I’m dead and gone. You know, I got in on the ground floor of some big ones. Big. Wal-Mart, for one. Wal-Mart has made me very wealthy. Most of my wealth was made in futures, though. Do you know how many people can pull that one off ? It takes an investing genius to do so.
And although Anna doesn’t know exactly how much money we have, she knows it’s a lot and she knows I spend a significant amount of time checking on it. She knows I get cranky and sullen when the market is bad, and that my stomach hurts when it gets really bad, and that apparently I have heart attacks when it gets really, really bad.
And so now, at Anna’s insistence, most of it sits in Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac, where I can live very comfortably on dividends and not have to watch the stock market. She wanted me to put it all in a regular old savings account. Can you imagine? A savings account! Millions of dollars not earning jack squat in a savings account? She threatened to leave me if I didn’t, saying that she did not wish to watch me kill myself with my bond market addiction. We compromised on these stable, federally insured bonds, where it earns higher interest than it would in a regular savings account, but where I don’t have to worry so much about the economy going to hell.
It was corn that did it to me. When it hit the press that genetically engineered StarLink corn contaminated other American corn, no country wanted to import American corn. I found myself in bad shape. Didn’t see that one coming. For a while, it looked as though an obscene number of bushels of corn would be delivered to my house. I had to unload this corn, even if I had to give it away. I felt the pain in my chest shoot down my left arm. I knew what was happening. Three decades ago, when I was a young hotshot living in Chicago, I saw at least twenty men drop dead right there in the Mercantile Exchange of the same thing. Still, I couldn’t afford the luxury of a heart attack until I unloaded that damn corn. If I was going to drop dead, I wasn’t going to trouble Anna with an obscene amount of corn delivered to our house by default.
Now, here I am, like a racehorse that injures his leg and never races again. I’ll never play the game like I used to. My genius is going to waste because my body can’t stand the stress any longer. I’m lucky to be alive; Anna insists on pointing that out to me all the damn time. Do I need someone to remind me of my mortality all the damn time? Do I need my wife to remind me that I have passed my prime and am now degenerating rapidly? No. I hated those weeks following the heart attack when Anna was nursing me. Indignant, to say the least. I had always been in charge. I had always been on top. I had been a man my family could depend on. Then, one day, I woke up to find she was stronger than me, and I was dependent on her. Where do I go from here? How do I get my pride back? By organizing garden tools in alphabetical order? No. How pathetic! What kind of man am I now? Worthless as all that corn. Sometimes I wish someone would just plow me under.
I reach into one of my toolboxes for the latest
Forbes
magazine, take a good look around, and, confident that Anna is immersed in her painting, crack the magazine open. Ahh.
Forrest on Footwear and Cribbage
(May 19)
Jade gave me a tent, but it was too hot to sleep in, and besides, I figured I’d better save it for the times when I really needed it. I slept in the open on the ground near some aspens and cottonwoods that grew near a spring. In the morning, I stared up at the beautiful branches of an old ponderosa pine and wanted to be held within them. I crawled out of my sleeping bag, took my jeans in my hand, and wrapped a leg around each side of her trunk. With one leg in each hand, I took a couple steps up the trunk and shifted my jeans higher. I took a few more steps and shifted the jeans again. Before long, I was in the crook of her first large branch. I felt at home. That’s how my idea for a tree house began.
BOOK: On the Divinity of Second Chances
13.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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