We Come to Our Senses (7 page)

THEY SAID I
had to do it. They drank Schaefer beers and ashed their Dorals on the apartment carpet. Cleared their throats and spat at the ceiling to make “stalactites” dangle. They were a few years older, more men than boys it seemed, and they told me there was no other choice but to take Lee outside and pound him. (He was in the bathroom down the hall when they decided this.) No other choice after what he'd done, they said. After all, that guy had been a guest in my mother's home, in
my
room.

In the dark of my room, his pallet on the floor beside my bed, Lee and I would whisper about everything, like brothers. He'd run away because of his father. Quit high school and hitchhiked all the way down from Chicago, and was terrified about things that happened to him en route. He confessed them to me one night, and I'd never imagined people doing such, and never again imagined men the same way. With every description his body had become more complicated. After that, looking at him was like looking at one of those old 3-D wiggle pictures, where two related hologram images
appear from different angles. Clown with eyes open; clown with eyes closed. American flag flying; American flag with eagle. The boy whose body was consumed; the boy whose body was me.

Lee was sick about missing his sophomore year of high school. They said they'd get GEDs if they ever needed to, and then join the goddamned Army. The music in their apartment was always the same: screaming. They threw their empty beers at a tall, full trash can in the kitchen. Their living room was exactly like Mom's and my unit, only there was not a beige couch and small upright piano. There was instead a large Styrofoam cooler, several aluminum-frame outdoor chairs, and a wooden industrial cable spool used as coffee table. A Confederate battle flag tacked on one wall. The snot they spat at the ceiling desiccated into thin yellow strings that were as gnarled and brittle as worms on a sidewalk. The boom box on the floor had been taken as a payment. (They bought eight-balls of cocaine. They'd snort half, then stomp the other half full of baking soda, then stomp anyone who complained about being sold weak drugs. They'd ask me, Free cocaine, kid? and I'd say, No, thanks, and be nervous, and think about that nice cop who warned us about drugs in junior high.) They sported a gallery of tattoos, some incomplete. A forearm of half-inked panther; a flesh-colored Iron Cross amid a banner of crimson. They bragged about getting sex for blow from high school girls. They said I had to do it.

Mom had found Lee a couple of months before, in the laundry room on premise at our complex. He'd been sleeping in a hard plastic chair, his head down on folded arms across his bare thighs. His only pair of jeans in the dryer, the zipper
scraping the drum. She woke Lee up to kick him out, saw that he was my age, and instead told him to get his gear together, to get on to our apartment for a bite and a bath. From there, a day turned into a week, and then he was just with us. Mom adopted Lee, sort of, because he was scrawny and put the plates away. Did chores while I was at school, and promised to re-enroll, ASAP, ma'am. He told her he wanted to go home but that his father, a senior chief petty officer, retired, would not condone him. Lee tried to dress tough, and would sometimes borrow my boots. I once decided to walk in while he was taking a bath.

He went down the hall to take a piss. In his absence, they said he was a faggot, then called out, “Ohhh, Leeee-eee,” in a sissyfied voice. When I didn't chorus in they said he was my girlfriend. I fumbled around for a way to deflect this, before blurting out, No way, y'all; that asshole made long-distance calls on our phone without permission; a whole bunch of them. (I was not angry about these calls, of course, nor was my mother.) Their response was that he was stealing from a single mom, and that I had better step up and be a man. They said I couldn't let people abuse me.

Lee came back from the bathroom and they laughed and said, What's up, faggot? and when his eyes dropped they said, Just kidding—lighten up, ha ha. He tried to hold a smirk. I was so nervous that my mouth got watery, like before vomiting. He went to grab a Schaefer from the cooler and they said, Hey, give us some money for that, and Lee said, I don't have any money, and they said, Well, then you don't have any beer. They then looked straight at me and said, Want a beer, kid? and I said, Yes, and did not look at him. They winked
and handed me one and they laughed and asked, How are we ever gonna drink all these fokkin' beers? Lee was bony, and I thought I could do it. They did not hurt inside. There's no way they hurt inside. They finally handed him a beer, then pulled it back when he went to take it, then gave it to him for real. Laughed when his fingers jittered with the pop-top, then looked at me and motioned that it was time.

My father's
parents
considered me a legitimate member of his family, though he had gone to astonishing lengths to avoid me. His lawyers had called me “one night and one bad judgment,” arguing that his sole responsibility was to send my child support checks on time. Over summer break I would visit his parents, my grandparents, and stare at the photos of his other boy on their wall.

I thought of my father when I said, Hey, Lee, let's you and me go outside for a second. They snickered. He looked around the room, dropped his shoulders, and said, Okay.

I slid the patio glass door open and walked out into the overgrown lot behind the apartment complex. Lee plodded behind me, said he was going to go home on the Greyhound. Said he and his dad had talked on the phone a bunch, had talked of his joining the Navy after high school. I didn't respond, only kept walking through the tall spear grass, worried sick about how to throw a punch.

Lee said his dad was a hard-ass but all right, really. He then told me he wanted to go home.

My father's lawyers wore poplin suits. I wanted to try cocaine.

It was hot and dark out in the field, and the tall grass swished against our jeans as we walked. The framed yellow
lights of the apartment fell away, and, convinced that the others could no longer see us, I stopped. Lee stared at me and started to mutter something pitiful, then trailed off. He cocked his head like a dog and turned up his palms.

I said, You stole from me, man, what the fuck? which didn't sound real.

He said, I'm, I'm sorry . . . I was calling my father, I've been trying so hard to—

I don't care, I said. My mother took you in and you
stole
. (I was still not angry, and wondered if anybody ever really was.)

Lee stepped towards me, arms out. Just let it go, he said. It's me, man. I'll pay you back for—

I said, Get off me, faggot, and shoved him, and this sounded more real, and he stared at me like I was a grotesque, a murder.

He said, You don't have to—, and I swung and hit his forehead.

Lee righted himself, repeated, You don't—

I stepped forward and hit him again. The blows were awkward, which made me try harder. Neck and head and cheek, again. Lee held up open hands. I demanded that he swing back.

He finally went down. I looked around, hesitated, then kicked him in the mouth. He curled up like a pill bug and screamed into his belly. I kicked him again, and again, until he finally shut up. I circled him. Spat.

As our panting subsided, he bolted up and ran off through the dark field. I crouched, and began to strike myself in the thighs and neck; I clamped my mouth shut with one hand and struck myself with the other, until I could no longer draw
breath through my snotting-up nose. I took my shirt off and wiped my face, then slung it over my shoulder and walked back toward the light of the apartment.

Done? they asked when I came back inside.

Faggot spilled my beer, I answered. They howled in laughter and reached into the cooler and handed me another one. Feel good? they asked. I said, Sure, and slid my hands across my sweaty chest, as if I were sore or muscular. You know why he's not here, right? they asked, and I answered, What? because I didn't understand the question. You know why he's not standing right here with us? I tried to think of an answer but then just said, No. They snickered at this, said, He's not here because he's a bitch. A man would have taken his blows, walked back to the party, shaken your hand, and then got you the beer himself. Cunt, they said.

Bird (on Back)

AT DAYBREAK, A
bird flew into our bedroom, smacked the wall mirror, and fell on Darla's back. She slept on. The meds really wipe her out.

Only minutes before this she was cheating on me, in my dreams. We'd moved back to the city, into a crummy third-floor rental. Darla was the only one of us who had a job (of course), so things were testy. And one night she went to a work party and never came home, and I sat on the apartment's worn linoleum for hours, frantic that she'd been killed, or run off the road by rapists, or everything else you can imagine that keeps you awake and a wreck in a dream. She came home the next morning, swearing she'd just been too drunk to drive.

We both knew she was lying. It was, after all, my mind. Yet the more I begged for reckoning, the more she clung to her story. “Take it. Leave it. Whatever,” she said.

From the pain of this lazy lie I awoke, in our puny town, in the South. The room felt like a sweat lodge. The quilt was
kicked to the foot of the bed, and the sheets beneath us were damp. I looked over at Darla, a vague ridge of shadows and dawn blush, and reached out to wake her for an argument.

The sound of the birds outside cut me off. A river, a symphony, I'd never heard anything like it in full daylight: layer upon layer of birdsong. Its construction made me think of my art, my process, and how I might capture this sound as diorama. For that matter, I wondered, what
is
diorama, when devoid of adequate light? When constructed primarily of sound? Can there even be an “-orama” without the seeing, the “di-”? Further, if my art can't be seen, then what control do I wield? Who
am
I?

I drowsed in ambitious creative thought . . . until something clanged from the other room. Bolting into the den, I found that Dim, the cat, had knocked out a window screen and fled. I figured that cat would be demolished in the street. I knew that Darla would blame me forever. I was the one who insisted the windows be left open, to save money on air-conditioning. I was the one who was unemployed—even in his dreams.

I was the one, always me.

I got back in bed and stared at the rose-lit ceiling. And THAT was when the bird flew through the open window, hit the mirror and fumbled onto Darla's lower back.

I was terrified that the bird's talons might break her skin, injecting some otherwise run-of-the-mill bacteria, and sending us straight to the emergency room, again. The bird, a big black one, stood up and stomped in place. Darla bore no thoughts of her sickness, or sepsis, or hospital; she didn't budge. If anything, she probably reckoned it was Dim
skulking atop her like always, kneading invisible biscuits with its de-clawed paws.

Teeming with anxiety, I moved only my eyes. (Such self-control is difficult, you know, when a bird is pacing Darla's back.) It was a grackle, which I knew from many hours of looking at backyard birds while consulting the
Sibley Guide to Birds
, likewise scanning the book for birds I wished would visit Mississippi. It was missing one eye, and its feathers gave off a blue-purple hue in the sunrise.

Its dead socket stayed on me until I sighed, at which point the grackle whipped its head around, revealing a stark, corn-yellow eye. It cocked its head and blinked.

My God, I thought. What can I do?

I tumble around town a neglected dioramist. Though I constantly sketch, map, and
digest
every inch of our environment—town square to Yarn Barn to A.M.E. church, Civil War Memorial to Vanity Fair Outlet Mall—not one of the town's seven thousand residents has ever asked me, seriously, about my artwork. If the subject even comes up I am generally lumped in with the cousin who carves melon sculptures at the Dogwood Festival, or invited to some snoozy brown-bag at the county library. I call my artist friends back in the city to complain, using an accent that Darla says is cheap and unfair and not even close. “‘Varmints' abound in the South,” I declare, describing hawklike mosquitoes and vole infestations. “Ever'body down here smiles while talkin' to you. But because they're smilin' they cain't be confrontational. No suh, you must avoid unpleasantness at all costs!”

My old friends laugh at me. They use their own shucks-y accents to describe southern stupidities that I've never
witnessed, and I indulge this, and it's like I'm still with them, still a part of the scene.

In the city, Darla had been all mine (devotionally, not propertywise). She crunched budgets for young designers and had support groups to go to, and I had gallery representation, and site-specific commissions that would prop me up for months at a clip. Darla would surprise me with Zuni animal carvings bought from this Native American folk art boutique; I could easily find pancetta and cook us carbonara. In early spring, songbirds made nests in the tiny trees that grew in plots along the sidewalk. You would not believe how beautiful our life was, among the throng, insignificant. Strangers there didn't smile like maniacs, or stop you to remark on something pretty, or ask who “your people” were. They were simply mean or indifferent. Yes, the city drove Darla and me together, against the jerks.

I have found no job since my nasty split with the town's Oriental rug shop. A few weeks ago, I was passed over for a window dresser position at a women's boutique on the square. Though demoralized, I decided that the right opportunity would find me if I just held out, just held on. I shared this optimism with Darla when she got home from work. She tore her navy blazer off, said, “Gee, man, it must be tough having tons of time and no expectation. Thank god we can't have children.” She then laughed at her own sorry situation, infertility being one perk of her illness.