Rules for Becoming a Legend (20 page)

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

JIMMY KIRKUS, SIXTEEN YEARS OLD—NINE DAYS AFTER THE WALL.

I
t's 5:30 and everyone is tuned in to KMUN. A call-in talk show with a crazy host. Chris Fogg. Guy who regularly produces can-you-believe-he-just-said-that audio clips. A forum where opinion is shaped for the entire town. Something not to be missed.

I'm Chris Fogg and you're listening to the Weather Report on KMUN Community Coast Radio. Let's hope Santa brought you all the good stuff you'd been hoping for. New TVs and stockings full of chocolate bars. Probably not, though. Probably you're all sad from this tinseled day of cheer and ready to blow off some steam counting it down to New Year's!

I've got a big one to start off. Our sponsor Les Schwab is giving free beef again with any new set of tires. You know how I feel about free beef. You can't beat free beef. So even if you don't got a car and you're just getting new bike tires, go get some free beef . . .

Hey, and speaking of beef, looks like Jimmy Kirkus is back into basketball! He put on quite the show at Peter Pan Courts. There's video of Jimmy's ten-opponent smack-down all on the YouTube, but I suspect foul play! A Christmas gift? A Christmas hoax! The shots are grainy. Gray. Who knows? Couldn't some prankster have Photoshopped that YouTube? Can't be real, can it?

So Jimmy Kirkus. He's got a nickname now. Kamikaze. It's way better than Jimmy Soft, which, I'm sorry, could give the wrong ideas to the ladies! I like Kamikaze. It's close to the kid's heritage. Sort of rolls off the tongue. Kamikaze. Means “a divine wind” in Japanese, my producer tells me. Which, as some of you know, is me. And Google. Me and Google. I produce my own show. But, moving on . . . I'm sure you've all read the blog, this Missteps thing—the pot has been stirred!

Anyway, we're taking your calls for the top half of the Weather Report, so give me a jingle, let me know what you make of Jimmy Kirkus playing ball again, him running into a wall and if Coach Kelly should let him back on the team! Let's get the conversation going here on the Weather Report.

Hello, Chris? This the Weather Report? Jimmy Kirkus should be booted off the team. He can't. I mean, just coming back whenever he feels like it. Like I was saying to the guys at work, you gotta commit one way or the . . .

I had Jimmy back when he was in third, no I think it must have been fourth grade, and he wrote this most beautiful little poem about a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. I think it speaks to what this poor kid is going through. Metamorphosis. Becoming that beautiful butterfly and . . .

He doesn't deserve the purple and gold . . .

The kid is reeling. Can't anyone see that? I mean, I swear to god people are blind. He's what, all of sixteen? This is not a grown man playing professional basketball, this is a high school kid. Does nobody get that? Oh, I forgot, just because . . .

Hello, hello? This where Fultano's pizzas? I want one cheese, and, ha ha, two orders of . . .

It's embarrassing, I'll tell you that much right now. Seaside's got Shooter Ackley gunning through the league and we're so goddamn, oh, excuse me, Chris. Didn't mean to cuss on your show. But we're so desperate to put up a fight last year in 6A we gonna get a frickin' head case suit up for us? We that desperate? God bless the kid, but we might as well go trolling for street people. I mean he's got issues. Kirkus Curse. That blog thing was right. Less we hear of Kamikaze Kirkus, the better . . .

You weren't there, Chris. You might as well stop calling him Jimmy, 'cause that wasn't no Jimmy. That was Kamikaze, just like his nickname say. Can't deny it if you were there. He's a player, boy, he's a player again. All people calling in who weren't there should shut it. 'Cause if you were there, then ho-ly . . .

He needs help. Have you seen the video? There's a part of him missing . . .

•   •   •

Carla turns off the radio. She leans back into the big, run-down couch that is as ugly as it is comfortable. A present from the parish. Her father and mother and siblings are out for the night service. She's begged to stay in. Told them all that she was feeling ill. And maybe she is. She
does
feel a little warm.

Her dad was all, “Carla, honey, are you sure?”

And she snapped. “It was an accident, OK? I had a headache and I took too many, and it was an accident! Gosh!” They'd slinked off after that. Taking too many pills and being admitted to the hospital has given her more power than she's ever known.

She gets up and checks her e-mail. There's a new one come in with subject line:
HOLY FUCKING SHIT
. Her face blooms hot when she reads that. She curses herself and urges the blush to die. How's she ever going to fit in if any cuss turns her into a tomato? She checks over her shoulder even though she knows she's alone. There, at the bottom of a litany of comments from the people it was forwarded to before, is a QuickTime video. She clicks it before reading anything.

It's Jimmy and the wall. Just as she's imagined it from what people have said. When Jimmy disappears below the bottom of the frame, it is as if she feels the hit. Every time he comes back on to camera, it's a little slower, a little more wobbly. His blood shows up black on the monochrome security footage and this helps dull the reality, a little. Then again, there's so much of it that when she imagines it as its true red, she feels faint. She remembers his head in the hospital, and then later, at Peter Pan, his hand. Him on the phone. His voice didn't hold what she sees in this clip. Was whatever drove him to this still in him?

Seeing that grainy video wakes up something inside Carla, something she has to get out. She fights it for a moment, this urge, and then lets go. If she doesn't scratch, this itch will bug her all night. What she wants, more than anything, is to just tag on some generically shocked line similar to the others, just to get her in the game, and be done with it. Have the easiness the other kids she sees around live their lives by. A by-product of continuity, she assumes. But she can't do this. What she's just seen is too heavy to just flip off down the road. She's cried at Dove soap commercials before, so this, this needs something more.

Plus, he asked her to write him something, and he's cute, kind of. So, whatever.

She gets out the stack of
Columbia City Standard
newspapers her father collects for sermon ideas. She's looking through headlines.
When she gets to one on Jimmy, she runs her finger through the article until she finds a word she likes, something that has enough weight in it to make this all seem more real. Then she carefully cuts it out. Then back to the newspaper. Soon she has enough. She arranges them on a white page, pins each in place with a bit of tape. It's a poem, of course.

She sits back in the couch. There was a time, when she was younger, that she didn't think of her family as the red flag they've become. She didn't smell the mustiness on the hand-me-down clothes that the other kids seemed to be able to pick up at great distances. She didn't mind her mother's crisp, just-so hairstyle, and thought her father's jokes were as funny as he did. Then something happened and she could see herself and her family how others must see them. A collection of ill-fitting, well-intentioned but not-to-be-taken-seriously spiritual vagabonds who would be rotated back out in three or four years—off to some other poor town to start all over with an awkward coffee-and-cake morning hour in a pink-aquarium room somewhere in the church basement, smelling strongly of papier-mâché from last year's divinity play.

So for Carla, even more than other kids her age, fitting in is the big goal. She doesn't do well with the scattershot questions of beginning relationships. Little chip-offs of her self as she answers poorly, or says something stupid. People are scared of her earnestness, her immediate care. It takes months to ease past that. Get down to who she really is.

•   •   •

Jimmy's in bed. Halfway through Christmas Break. It's raining outside. Too warm for snow, too cold for anything else, gray everywhere. Columbia City's painter's pallet smudged for sure. He has to avoid his pops and the Flying Finn and all their leading questions for seven more whole days before he can go back to
school, ignore everyone, and just think. After the Nine Games, wandering the woods doesn't feel right, but home isn't exactly a sanctuary. All his pops and grandpa want him to do is talk. Like him talking is the only way they'll know if he's all right. It's too much. He's quaking and stuffs the edge of the pillow into his mouth. He hasn't showered in days. He smells sour. He's crying. Howling. A great emptying out that he tries to bite off on the edge of the pillow but it keeps coming. He doesn't feel an end inside him. Cars are imperfect machines. The risk that comes from getting from one place to another seems a bad one. And for a stupid payoff. Shallow. The world is a shitty place. For as good as he'd felt at Peter Pan Courts, it's all gone now.

Last week he met twice with Mrs. Cole at her home, Pops waiting in the running van. Both times it was she who broke down weeping, swept him into her chest and gripped the back of his head, saying all the while how it would be OK. With time, all would heal. Strange, but both times he felt that just talking was helping.

His pops knocks on the door. “Hey Jimmy?”

Jimmy coughs. His pops heard him crying, for sure. “Yeah?”

“Can I come in a sec?” Even his pops thinks if he's left alone he'll start slamming his head into a wall again. Like he can't wait to do it. Like it hadn't been a last resort.

“Whatever.” His voice is still husky from crying. He wishes it weren't, it would make lying about how he's perfectly fine easier.

“Hey, buddy.” His pops looks around his room. It's a mess. Jimmy in a tangle of sheets with dirty laundry flung about. His pops takes out another one of his peppermints. Cracks it in his teeth. Everything must taste the same to him for how often he eats those. Like peppermint must be the flavor on everything for him. Sweet even when he doesn't want to taste sweet. “You OK?”

“I'm fine, pops. Coach call?” And while Jimmy doesn't care
about basketball, or rather isn't sure if he does, he knows this question will set his pops back so he asks it. Because of the Brick Wall Incident, the school isn't sure he should play, his pops isn't sure he should play, even Coach Kelly isn't sure he should play. And Jimmy himself? Well, that's what all the thinking, and crying, is about. How much does it actually matter if he plays against the best? It's a game. A stupid one. And yet.

“No, Jimmy. Nobody called.”

Jimmy knows what's coming. He just directed the conversation there after all. But all he wants is to sleep all day. He rolls over in his bed so he doesn't have to watch his pops give whatever variation of the Basketball Might Not Be for You speech he's worked up to today.

He manages to ignore the first bit, but by the end, his ears can't help themselves. “But look, you shouldn't be waiting around. Could be better you don't play? Whole town's nothing but vultures, I can tell you that firsthand, why you want to play for vultures? A good life doesn't have to have basketball in it. Right?”

“Right.”

“Right?”

Jimmy rolls back to look at his pops. “But. I still maybe want to play. So . . .” And it's true and not true at all, and how is Jimmy supposed to make his pops understand both those things?

•   •   •

Looking at Jimmy in the eyes sends a chill through Todd.
Those black hole eyes
, he thinks,
Jesus.
Same eyes as when he told him to turn the van around. Get the Flying Finn. He couldn't say no to him then.

He sees in his son an echo of what he himself has battled ever since Suzie and the beach. This recognition makes him all the more desperate to snap the kid out of it. Depression is insidious
because it clouds the ability to look upon oneself, take stock. If Jimmy isn't careful, he'll wake up and half his life will be gone.

A floor up, the Flying Finn drops a tin bowl. It clatters loudly. Todd imagines pancake batter spilled everywhere. The Flying Finn giggles wildly. “Order up, hot, hot, hot.” Todd doesn't want to be stuck cleaning up again. He has to get up there and catch the old kook before he skips the house for the day to avoid the chore. He knows he should be patient, stay with his son. But hell, the whole thing is shot through with holes. Hardened pancake batter, coating the cracks in the floor, no thanks. It would be easier if he could just have some time away from looking after his son, if he could just get a break. He can't. He has to keep constant watch. In the couple years before the wall, he'd let his focus drift. Jimmy coming home with random cuts on his forehead, knees skinned through ripped holes in his sweats. Boys being boys. Not anymore. Those all added up to something terrible. Now he needs to keep track of all the information he can get from his son, do the arithmetic fast, and get out in front of the equation. “Well, look, the reason I came down is 'cause this girl Carla, you know her?”

Jimmy narrows his eyes. Todd sees the gears stick, and then roll again. His son is remembering. He's noticed how his boy's mind catches like this since the wall. Sad to see. A side effect of blunt-force trauma to the head, maybe.

Jimmy's body becomes looser. He sits up. Wavers. “Yeah.”

Todd smiles, a human reaction coming from his boy. Red-blooded. A girl. “She dropped this off.” He holds up the poem. “Any idea what this is?”

“No, I—” Jimmy says quickly, a hand on his forehead.

“It's a poem.”

“Well, give it.” He's already swinging his feet off the bed.

“Come up to the kitchen, it'll be on the table,” Todd says,
turning away, happy with the hook he's set. “Grandpa's cooking breakfast.”