How It Was / Spring: Where It Was

(Here’s the first excerpt from the first booklet in the How It Was series. I do not plan to post the entire book this way, in regular blog posts spread out over time; what I do hope to do, I explain here.)

——

Deep in his being, The Boy knew that somewhere out there existed a world wider than his own, and what The Boy thought he knew about this wider world was this:

Somehow, weirdly, this other world continued to spin on its axis even without The Boy at its core. Presidents, artists, convicts, detectives, and saints walked on this strange world’s uncracked pavement (their mothers’ backs forever safe). It was a world where movie musicals were filmed, where automobiles functioned as their manufacturers promised. A world where eating caramel candy by the bagful led straight to smiles — yes, as in The Boy’s own world — but never to a dentist’s chair. A world where he would fear neither the shadows of the night nor the heavy climbing rope of gym class, a world in which no one he loved would ever die, and there was no ham.

The people in this wider world spoke in exotic tongues, their melodic speech lacking the sweetly nasal twang and erratic rhythms to which The Boy was accustomed. Their hair (even beneath the helmets, war bonnets, and coonskin caps which many of them wore) was combed and coiffed immaculately. Some of these people had children, or were children themselves, some of whom were children that The Boy might eventually (in that murky future when he and they had ceased to be children) come to know and even to love.

This wider world lay not miles but whole light years of imagination from the town where The Boy lived, remote and untouchable, far beyond the range of his parents’ battered car (any of their half-dozen sputtering, wheezing, gear-grinding cars) which bore The Boy and his family through his own world’s dark heart.

Yet The Boy knew deep in his own heart that what separated that wider world from his own was not geography, but ignorance. Its people, even its children, knew nothing at all of his world. They did not (and would never) know of the boundaries of his life: the town, the neighborhood, the intricate web of human eccentricity which cross-hatched the map of The Boy’s daily wanderings.

They knew nothing, for starters, of the river and the creek which framed his existence.

Just two blocks from The Boy’s house flowed the broad river. Like the night sky, it was too huge and too dark even to contemplate. But unlike the sky (which was always up there but could never really touch him), the river could not be ignored. Its fact was inescapable. He would lie awake in bed on warm spring nights, the windows of his bedroom open, and he could hear the river behind the chirping of crickets and the rustle of new leaves. Uhhhhhhhhhhh, the river said, a ceaseless whispery vowel like the roar of a crowd in a distant stadium, a double-bass purr of satisfaction (no doubt) at its daily meal of mariners, driftwood, empty brown-glass bottles, and boys like The Boy himself.

The houses along the river (like the river itself) could not entirely fit into The Boy’s mind. The gods who lived in those houses all patronized the same quarry for building materials, the structures themselves immaculate white-painted and broad-porched edifices which clearly belonged to another century. He never dreamt of straying onto their combed lawns, but always kept carefully to the sidewalk until arriving at the public riverbank itself. There he would stand on the concrete flood wall — never in The Boy’s whole life had the river even come close to flooding, so whatever the flood wall did, it obviously worked — and he would look straight down.

If the tide was out, even just a little, there’d be a strip of gravel wide enough that he could jump down and patrol the bank. If the tide was up, wavelets slapped against the wall, inches from his feet, making a gentle but loud kissing sound (seductive counterpoint to the Uuuuuhhhhh) which required all The Boy’s willpower to resist. Then he’d look up and across the water.

That broad gray band – about twelve miles across, by The Boy’s reckoning — was divided roughly into thirds. Here and on the far side were silvery slow-moving shallows. When the tide was out, sand bars formed in these shallows. Gulls would circle and land on these sand bars, then they’d cock their heads and look at The Boy and his friends standing on the riverbank, throwing rocks and broken glass ineffectually in the gulls’ direction, and the birds would call out mockingly, Here, we’re here here here!

And between the shallows, running up the middle of the river, was a strip of churning, dark-gray menace. The channel.

Like the undertow, about which The Boy was often warned whenever his family visited the seashore, the channel consisted of some mysterious substance (a fourth state of matter, neither solid, liquid, nor gas, but X, the unknown). Its primary characteristic, like the undertow’s, was that it tugged selectively at young bodies whose owners had foolishly let their guard down.

But The Boy imagined death by channel would be far worse than death by undertow, because the latter (as the name implied) would merely tow you under until you stood on the bottom, amid shipwrecks from whose shattered portholes sprouted sea anemones, rose-colored coral, and rusting cutlasses. Death, yes — whatever death was — but death of a peculiarly romantic, even harmless sort. Death via gravity, and an eternity in a colorful slow-motion afterlife.

In the channel, on the other hand, you would not sink at all: instead, surrounded by all that white-capped dull gray — the sullen hue of molten lead, of The Boy’s father’s work clothes — you would float heartbreakingly out of reach past everything that mattered to you, and nobody could reach you to help, and then finally the river would get to wherever it was going and (cackling madly) hand you over to the undertow for disposal, by which point you’d be spent, too wretchedly exhausted to appreciate shipwreck or coral.

So the river was a horror. But on the other side of the town where The Boy lived was the creek, which although much narrower than the river occupied many more vast unexplored tracts in the acreage of The Boy’s nightmares.

In the first place, the creek — lacking a magical flood wall — overflowed its banks at least once a year. The flooding was deceptively passive, like the flooding of the bathroom floor when the toilet was clogged with too much paper. Although he had never witnessed the exact moment it happened, he could see it clearly in his mind’s eye: the dark waters surging up and over the banks like the North Korean army across the Canadian border, insanely and utterly taking possession of all the low ground first — everybody knew the heights were more valuable, why not shoot for them first? — and tormenting The Boy’s father with the need to plan complicated alternate routes to the next town, routes which zigged and zagged all over the map.

(At the wheel of the car, his father, as though in great pain, could be reduced to an endless stream of explosive monosyllables by such inconvenience. Meanwhile, The Boy’s mother sat at the right end of the bench seat, staring out at the floodwaters and sucking at the inside of her cheek in what The Boy assumed to be wifely sympathy.)

Second, by some fluke of nature, the creek was all channel, ugly gray, too swiftly flowing to be natural. Almost all the gulls wanted nothing to do with it. (All who felt otherwise had been swept out to sea and towed under.)  The only thing keeping marine scientists from studying this unnatural wonder, The Boy imagined, was fear.

Third, the bridges across the river all carried you up high, as though in the hands of God. You could almost (almost) forget there was water down there, and just contemplate the pleasures of arrival at wherever you were going. But the bridges across the creek were low and apparently floated on pontoons so that when you looked down you could see not merely the channel as a whole, but every single ravenous surging molecule of it. The frames of these bridges vibrated with the water’s force. One of them was even wooden — dubbed The Scary Bridge — and cars approaching it from opposite directions would pause to let each other through first in what was supposed to be courtesy, but was actually an insistence that the other vehicle test the planking’s strength.

And finally, you crossed the river only occasionally, and then only for celebratory functions like Christmas shopping and vacations and picking up your globe-trotting grandmother at the airport. But you had to cross the creek nearly every day just to shop for groceries, attend Sunday School, visit your aunts and uncles and cousins and the less-mobile grandparents, get gasoline for the car. (Older children in The Boy’s town even had to attend school in the next town, on the other side of the creek. He supposed this to be a daily rite of passage, devised by sadists, into the terrors of adulthood.)

At winter’s end, the ice which gripped the creek bridge pontoons would start to buckle and snap and, predictably, in a clockwork of disaster, at least one drowned child would be reported in the newspapers and over the dinner table. Another child channeled to death.

The Boy never understood what drove such children to venture onto the bridge supports, still slick with early-spring frost. Were they crazy, or stupid, or idiots, or what? One boy his own age, a boy named Wayne, fell into the creek early on a Saturday. The Boy’s mother’s lips remained pursed for the rest of the weekend.

(She had warned The Boy about associating with Wayne, who was “a troublemaker” though scarcely into second grade. And now, see that? There he was. Channeled. Wayne’s fate had nothing to do with his recklessness, her grim visage seemed to say, or even with simple gravity or the random way the cookie crumbles, but with justice. The Boy nodded gravely — adults knew about such things — and performed eager favors, unbidden, for months afterward.)

So The Boy generally avoided both the creek and the river. But his style was not cramped, for within mere blocks of his house was more interesting dry land than he could ever hope to map, let alone really know.

Most distant — and most dangerous — of these pleasures of dry land was The Sand Island.

It had once really been an island, but at some time during The Boy’s early years huge dredging machinery had prowled the river like mud-sucking brontosauruses, gouging up sand and gravel from the riverbed and disgorging it into the narrow waterway between the mainland and the island. Now it was an ex-island, but no less dangerous.

The Sand Island was dangerous, first, because it was located at the juncture of creek and river; its sandy soil absorbed from their waters a hybrid aura of doom which (when you looked in that direction from the second floor of The Boy’s house) made the sky glow like the atomic pile in a reactor.

And The Sand Island was dangerous in its own right, too, as a place where hobos were reported to gather. (The reports of the hobos came from The Boy’s mother, who seemed to anticipate such dangers by instinct.)

The Boy knew of hobos what he had learned from cartoons, which was that they (a) never shaved (but somehow never grew full beards, either) and (b) always wore tattered clothes. Supposedly they engaged in unspeakable practices, whose nature one did not ask about. In general, The Boy imagined them to be something like the Masons, a secretive fraternal organization to which his father belonged; in his mind’s eye, he saw them sitting around an enormous campfire roasting hot dogs and marshmallows, identical Emmett Kellys dressed in tattered silk aprons and cummerbunds, exchanging signs and ritual gestures and playing hand after endless hand of pinochle.

Luckily, not all the dry land at hand was as foreboding as The Sand Island. Closer in than The Sand Island, more accessible in every way — on The Boy’s very block, in fact — was The Lot.

It was the only nearby vacant and apparently unclaimed property which was not wooded. Wooded lots were strange dark places whose air was soggy with decomposition and soft-bodied insects (rather like the basement of The Boy’s house, in fact), but The Lot — while overgrown with tall grass — was open to the sky, open to the sun, open to a thousand varieties of fantasy.

“Cars” was one such fantasy. “I’m goin’ down The Lot, Mom,” The Boy would say. “Playin’ Cars.” He’d meet Lindsay there, or Harry, or Ronnie or Jim or Jimmy or Richard, maybe small boys in the so-called “real” world but omnipotent giants while they clutched their tiny metal cars and pushed them through the intricate trenchwork of roads scooped out of The Lot’s earth with rocks, broken glass and grimy, determined, little fingernails.

“Okay, watch this,” The Boy might say, and with a mighty shove he’d plow his favorite car (a silver 1960 Chevy Impala, fins flaring like the wings of a supersonic airplane) smack into a pile of dirt and veritable boulders. The drawn-out monosyllable he made to accompany this wreck was something conjured up from genetic memory of caveman language, from the days before vowels had been invented, but unmistakably the sound of every single flaming high-speed automobile crash which The Boy and his friends had experienced:

Pppppkkkkkkkkkkkkkwwwwww!

“Ha ha, now watch this,” the other guy would say, standing up, lifting his red 1958 Ford pickup waist-high, and dropping it nose-down onto the roof of The Boy’s Impala. “Pppppkkkkkkkkkkkkkwwwwww!” he’d cry, too, maybe putting a bit more throat behind it to underline the subtle escalation in the level of violence.

“Ha ha!” they’d both shriek simultaneously, maddened by competitive spirit, picking up their vehicles and flinging them at each other’s heads. “Now watch this!” Inevitably this concluded the day’s round of Cars; either they would both run screaming to their respective houses, rubbing the welts to make them more obviously near-fatal, or they would both collapse onto their backs, giggling uncontrollably and staring up into the bottomless joyful blue of the spring sky.

And then there was the day on which The Boy did not invite any playmates at all to join him at The Lot.

“Goin’ down The Lot, Mom,” he yelled over his shoulder as usual.

“Cars?” she called after his rapidly-dwindling form.

The Boy did not answer her truthfully, although he did not precisely lie, either. What he replied, at the top of his lungs but as mealy-mouthed as possible, was something like, “Ayruh!”  Something ambiguous and suggestively meaningful, letting his mother draw from it whatever she wanted.

He could not level with his mother this time, because this time, this very afternoon, he was going to The Lot on a secret mission. To fight… the enemy.

If you tried to pin him down, The Boy could not have described the enemy to you. They were a faceless, shadowy, anonymous bunch. Maybe this was what made them seem so threatening — how could they even see without faces? surely some kind of devil’s company — but this did not render them any less real. There were thousands of them this afternoon, massed across the street from The Lot. Thousands. Too many to be picked off one at a time using a bayonet, a Luger, or even a well-thrown 1960 Chevy Impala.

Fortunately, on a recent tour of The Lot’s grounds The Boy had observed dozens of explosive weapons scattered among all the grass and rocks. They resembled mere soda and beer bottles, but The Boy knew (with his innate male sensitivity to the varieties of mass destruction) that they were really grenades. This wasn’t going to be pretty, but someone had to do the job. The neighborhood could not be left to… the enemy.

He crouched among the tall grass, parting it with his tiny fingers and peeking out from time to time. He didn’t want to tip his hand, warning the enemy away before they’d gotten within reach. They were out there, he could sense them, their voices rising in an impatient hubbub which dropped to a whisper whenever a car drove by. (They didn’t want to tip their hand, either.)

The universe paused, ominously. The earth wobbled a bit. Starlings stopped in mid-air, eyeing the battlefield-to-be and daydreaming that they were buzzards.

Without warning, the enemy stormed The Lot.

“Cover me, men!” The Boy shouted in his head.

The Boy’s “men,” like the enemy, were vague and indistinct in form. Unlike the enemy, however, his men had righteousness and purpose, pure and diamond-hard. In fact he had borrowed his men from Robin Hood; they still wore their green tunics and leggings and monk’s robes even though their weapons now were not longbows and quarterstaffs but Browning Automatic Rifles.

His men opened fire and The Boy leapt to his feet, repeatedly stooping, pulling the pin, hurling grenade after grenade into the center of Third Street. Each one exploded with a satisfying “Pop!” (it would have been “Boom!” but these grenades were fitted with silencers) as it landed in the enemy’s midst. “Pop!… Pop!”

The enemy could not take it for long; their forces were being decimated, plus traffic on Third Street was picking up at this late afternoon hour. Shaking their fists at The Boy, shrieking curses, the survivors fled in cowardice back where they’d come from, into their sanctuary hidden in the elderly and unapproachable Mr. and Mrs. Cook’s back yard.

The Boy sneered at the enemy’s fleeing backs, then turned to his men. “Well done, men!” his mind called out to them. They raised their BARs and shouted in unison, “Huzzah!” (The Boy had never heard anyone but Robin Hood’s men shout that, but they shouted it all the time.)

Later, barely had The Boy and his family sat down to dinner when a knock came at the door. And there, for the first time in his life, he confronted Uniformed Authority: a police officer.

The Boy pleaded silently with his parents: No, no, don’t you see what this “policeman” is up to? He’s one of them! He’s all blue-gray uniform, he has no face!

But it was to no avail. Fifteen minutes later, The Boy was out on Third Street with a push broom, dust pan, and trash can. Sulking. Sweeping up fragments of shrapnel and the enemy’s abandoned body parts under the watchful eye of the “policeman,” the corners of whose mouth twitched in a suspicious manner (semaphoring a progress report to his cronies in Mr. and Mrs. Cook’s garage, no doubt).

And a half-hour after that, The Boy was in his room on the second floor of his house, sent there without further supper. He was supposed to be lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling, presumably immobile, ideally remorseful. Confined until he confessed.

But he’d never talk, and they’d have to staple him to the darned bed if they wanted him to stay there. Instead, he stood by the window, gazing down on Third Street. The orange light of the setting sun slanted lengthwise along the street. The Boy would have found great satisfaction in the glint of an overlooked fragment of grenade, but the sunlight was doing him no favors tonight. Perhaps the tide of war had changed.

He brightened suddenly. “Don’t worry, men,” he thought with a smile, “the enemy won’t be back tonight.”

For through the screen window, The Boy heard nothing but the sounds of nature. No awful machinery of battle, no cries of angry men. He realized that in fact the enemy had not (as he’d assumed earlier) stopped in their retreat at the Cooks’ back yard, but kept going until they’d reached the other side of town. And there they had taken one fatal step further.

He had heard through the open bedroom window, sifted through the screen, the dull roar from far off — the ceaseless whispery vowel — of the enemy being channeled out to sea.

And as he finally sat on the edge of his bed, then lay down and looked out the other window, to the west, The Boy saw (just before shutting his eyes) an orange glow in the sky. Tonight its source wasn’t just the setting sun’s light, wasn’t just The Sand Island’s own creepy irradiated glow, but also the glow of the hobos’ campfire.

“What was that?” said one hobo, lifting his toothless mouth from his tin plate of baked beans and hot dogs and looking off in the direction of the creek.

“The enemy,” replied another. “The Boy got ’em today. The Boy and his men. All the rest of ’em ran for their stinkin’ lives, ended up in the creek.”

“Yep,” said a third hobo, and he scratched his stubbled chin. “I hear he used grenades. The only thing that works on the enemy, those bums those cowards those crazy stupid idiots.” He paused and looked at his comrades, frayed black silk accessories glinting in the firelight. It was a look heavy with meaning, and he smiled and led them all in a brief prayer of thanks for The Boy’s heroism.

It was a special prayer, reserved for only the holiest of occasions, a prayer cast in the secret symbolic language of hoboery. It began, “Whose bid is it?” They all bowed their heads, and clasped their grubby hands before them.