A Complicated Kindness

sixteen

This evening I tried to explain to Travis how it was that he found me lying on the shoulder of Highway 23. It’s my chain, I said. It’s faulty. It happened to me frequently. One second you’re flying down the highway to America, the next you’ve got your Wrangler flare pant leg caught in the chain and you’re down, stuck pinned to the road staring up at the clouds and picking gravel out of your skin, waiting for someone to come along and rescue you.

Usually it was a farmer passing by. He’d get my pant leg out of the chain and throw my bike in the back and give me a ride to the border. Once I got to shift gears for a carny named Snake. Now! he’d say. It was fun. He made me wear one of his hats with the carnival logo on it so if someone saw me riding with him they’d think I was a co-worker and not report him. He told me he was on antibiotics because he’d gotten the clap from the cotton-candy girl. He told me that a kid like me could make twenty-five cents per rat at any fairgrounds if I knew how to swing a bat. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. He told me he could not afford one more felony. I said man, tell me about it, although I was only ten and had never heard the word felony before. It sounded like a pretty girl’s name to me.

Travis put my bike into his dad’s truck and asked me why I didn’t tuck my pant leg into my sock. Somebody might see me, I said. I’d rather fall.

I made Travis promise me that he would never become the type of person who tucked his pant leg into his sock while riding a bike and he said I was superficial but he knew what I meant. He said he’d take off his pants and ride around in his underwear first.

Where would you put your pants, I asked. You’re not gonna have a carrier!

What’s wrong with a carrier, he asked and I said no, no carriers. Carriers are for little kids.

Well, then he said he’d get a clip for his pant leg and I said no, no clips, and he said my bike etiquette was extreme. I felt like an idiot for feeling good about knowing how to look on a bike. I had to get my driver’s licence soon.

He asked me if I felt weird lying beside the road under my bike. Now that you mention it, I said. He drove us to a field and we smoked a joint and climbed into the back of the truck where we could stretch out and stare at the sky. Just another hard surface to lie on while contemplating infinity.

Let’s talk more about bikes, I said. We talked about when we were kids and dressed up our bikes for the July 1 parade, which included a contest.

You don’t want to win though, I said. He agreed. (In this town, if you win something you’re dead.) Hey, we actually agreed on one thing, I said.

He asked me if I was warm.

Yes and no, I said. And I’m not on the Pill yet, I told him, which he said was cool but when would I be. Maybe two weeks, I said.

Should we take off our clothes anyway, he asked. I guess we could, I said. We lay in the open box of the truck like two dying fish on the bottom of a small boat. He told me I was cute in the moonlight. I wished he’d said beautiful. Cute made me feel like a garden gnome.

He said we should go to Europe together and I could learn how to bake bread and he’d sell his writing and we’d have this little place up hundreds of stairs in a building in Paris with a courtyard and we’d ride bikes everywhere and play in fountains and make love continuously. I said: I do ride my bike everywhere. No, he said, but in Paris, with a big carrier that could hold baguettes and wine and fresh flowers. I said: Baguettes? Then why would I have to learn how to bake bread? And hey, I said, what did I just say about carriers?

Nomi, it’s romantic, he said.

Well, but how would we get to Paris? I asked.

We’d save money from our jobs, he said.

What jobs? I asked.

Nomi, you have…

No, too many variables, I said. What’s that bright light headed straight for us? I asked. It could have been a seeder. It was some kind of giant farming implement bearing rapidly down upon us like the Apocalypse.

What the fuck is that, asked Travis.

It’s like we’re in Jaws, I said. He told me to roll myself up in the shag carpet in the back and then he jumped out and ran around to the cab and started it and took off. The field was really bumpy and I felt my bike fall on top of me again, although this time I was rolled up in a carpet so it didn’t hurt as much.

He drove to The Golden Comb’s trailer out on Kokomo Road and parked behind the purple gas tank and that’s where I emerged from the carpet like a cute but not beautiful butterfly and put my clothes back on. I had orange wormy pieces of rug in my hair. He pulled them out one by one. He was so gentle and sweet and he sang an Eric Clapton song in this weirdly satirical operatic voice but underneath he seemed to mean it so I put my hands on his waist and up under his shirt and we waltzed around, badly, and then we fell.

We sat in the grass and sang stupid nursery songs that had perverted hand movements. We tried to whistle “Crying” by Roy Orbison straight through without laughing. We loved Roy Orbison. Let’s name our baby Roy Orbison, said Travis.

Do we have a baby? I asked.

We will someday, he said.

Hmmm, Roy Orbison, I said. What if it’s a girl?

Nova, he said.

Nova? That’s a car.

No, it’s a star, he told me.

I don’t want to have kids named Nova and Roy Orbison, I told him. I liked the name Miep. Miep was the woman who had saved the letters of Anne Frank and had also done kind and dangerously heroic things for her. A real star.

Anyway, said Travis. We did this thing where I lie on my back in the grass and he stands at my feet really rigidly with his arms straight out like he’s on a cross and then he falls forward and I scream quietly and he puts his hands down at the last second, mere inches away from crushing my body. After that we just sat around sniffing purple gas for a while, lighting matches and flicking them off into the dark, and I asked him if he wanted to go halfers with me on Wish You Were Here. He said what if we break up which made me kind of sulk a bit and made him act tough like he’d have four thousand girlfriends in his life and I stopped talking except to answer his questions.

I hated the way I always wrecked beautiful moments. We saw The Golden Comb open his trailer door and spit and then slam the door shut again. Spitting is how people in this town both mourn and celebrate. It’s the standard response to everything that occurs. The screen on the door was covered with moths. Travis and I stared at it longingly. Do you have any money, he asked me. I didn’t.

What about the carpet, I asked. We could trade it for dope and tell your dad it fell out the back of the truck somewhere and we hadn’t noticed and that when we retraced our route we couldn’t find it.

Travis told me that when I was dying to get high was when I was the most together and brilliant.

Well, I said, it’s the dying part that makes me feel alive.

I asked him if we were waiting for something and then he got up and hauled the rolled-up carpet out of the back of the truck and we each took an end and walked over to The Comb’s trailer and banged on the door.

Oh my God, said Travis, they’re listening to Yes.

The Comb opened the door and looked at us. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and he looked pissed off. No, he said, I don’t want an orange carpet, but thanks anyway. He was just about to slam the door but Travis put his foot in the way, movie-style, and said it was a shag carpet with triple-thick inlay. The Comb came outside and rolled the carpet out in the dirt and lay down on it for a minute. We stood there staring down at him. He ran his fingers through the shag.

Well? I asked. Yes or no?

He got up and told Travis to roll it back up and bring it into the house. I stayed outside and leaned against the ripply aluminum outside of his trailer and said thanks, man, you’re a lifesaver. The Comb smiled and put his hand on my arm and then leaned over and kissed me on my fuckin’ lips and said he’d seen me getting dressed by the purple gas tank.

Hmm, bionic eyes, I said. I shrugged. He tried to kiss me again and I asked him if we were doing the thing or not and he said I didn’t really have much of a choice, did I, referring to the fact that there was nowhere else that we could go, and I said no, not much of one, but that Travis would be out very soon and shit, we had given him a carpet, so…then Eldon yelled something from inside about not being able to find the scales and The Comb said he’d be right there and Travis came back out and The Comb went in and I lit up a smoke and tried to act intensely nonchalant while we waited for The Comb to come back out again.

I hate that motherfucker, Travis whispered.

What does that have to do with anything, though, I asked him. On the way home Travis told me that when he was a boy he’d asked his mom whom she loved more, God or Dad. God or Dad! he said. God or Dad! She wouldn’t answer, just hummed. Then she finally said God already! and Travis was weirded out by that but he’d said: Thaaaat’s right. For some reason I laughed hysterically while he was telling me about it and afterwards I felt like an idiot.

We drove past my high school and the junior high and the track and the Sunset Diner and the cemetery and past a few houses and up onto my driveway which made a nice cracking sound that bothered Travis because he thought his tires were being punctured.

I was relieved to see my dad not sitting in his yellow lawn chair. We sat in the truck for a while listening to an American radio station.

Music really is the glue of our relationship, isn’t it? I said. Travis said yeah, shhhh, I’m listening to this song.

I mean really, I said. It’s brought us together, right? Yeah, it has, said Travis. He turned up the radio a bit.

Music’s probably altered our DNA so you and I are like twins now. You know? I said. I know, said Travis. We’ll feel the same thing at the same time even if we are miles apart, I said.

Can you be quiet for a minute, please? said Travis.

I shut up after that, thinking about the words salve and salvation. I got out of the truck without kissing Travis and said ciao for the first and last time in my life.

That night it rained softly. I could hear it through my screen. And then I felt it on my face, and it was warm, but it wasn’t rain.

In the morning I watched dust enter my room through a crack in my blind. No, I heard my sister saying, that dust has always been there. It’s the sunlight that illuminates it. I checked myself for bite marks. I wondered what it meant to bite yourself in your sleep. Would I soon begin to tear out clumps of hair? Would I be able to kill myself eventually without realizing it?

My dad and I used to dust with Lemon Pledge but when it ran out we stopped, although we talked about it a couple of times. Some pledge, my dad had said and I gave him credit for being funny intentionally.

Ray had already left for school. He had put his coffee cup on the counter, on top of the plate he’d used for his toast. I put them into the dishwasher and then I looked into the fridge to see if there was anything to make for supper. There was a knock on the door and I went over and opened it and the neighbour girl was standing there wearing her bathing suit and rubber boots.

Hello, I said, I have to go to school.

Can you play charades with me? she asked.

I said no, I didn’t have time, but she looked so sad and forlorn and kept saying please over and over so I said fine, quickly. I stepped outside and sat on the front step and she sat down in the grass.

Start, I said, hurry up. I’ll guess.

She didn’t move.

Are you doing it? I asked. She nodded.

Are you a…weird little kid? She shook her head.

Hmmmm, I said. Hang on. I went into the house and got my smokes and sat back down on the step and lit one up and said are you a rock? She shook her head. She was just sitting there in a vaguely square shape. God, I said. I blew smoke rings at her. Can’t you do some kind of action? She shook her head and started to giggle. Are you a book? I asked. She shook her head again. A fridge? She shook her head. Okay, forget it, I don’t know and I have to go to school now, I said. I threw my butt into the grass and went into the house and slammed the door.

Three seconds later she knocked again and I opened it and she told me she had been a Shreddie. Okay, I said, I’ll pour some milk over you and eat you, and she screamed and ran away. I thought probably I would not be a very good mother to Roy Orbison and Nova.

On the way to school I stopped to watch a group of twelve-or thirteen-year-old boys throw rocks into a new abattoir being built next to the junior high school on the other side of the highway. There was a twenty-foot wall of concrete cinder blocks around it and every day it got higher and higher, but the men were working from the inside so you couldn’t actually see them. I heard a loud clank like a rock had hit somebody’s hard hat and then an angry scream and five seconds later a bunch of the workers came flying out of an opening in the side and were throwing rocks back at us. Most of the kids had taken off but one of them got hit in the back and fell shrieking to the ground.

I went over to him and put my hand on his back and asked him if he was okay but he didn’t say anything because he was gasping for air.

Three or four of the construction workers came running up to us and they pulled him into a sitting position and said c’mon buddy, breathe. There were many occasions in this town where people encouraged others to breathe, it seemed. C’mon, c’mon, said one guy with no shirt. He was moving his hands around the boy’s chest, trying to get the air circulating inside him. There we go, he said. There we go.

The boy began to cough and cry. I picked his ball cap off the ground and put it on his head.

Do you know this guy, asked the construction worker. I shrugged. I know of him, I said. We all knew of each other.

I’ll take him to school, I said.

Hey kid, said the man, see what happens when you throw rocks? The kid nodded. Gonna do it again? asked the man. The kid nodded.

He means no, I said. He better mean no, said the worker. C’mon, I said, let’s go. The boy got up and we headed off in the direction of the junior high.

What’s your name? I asked.

Doft, he said.

Do you speak English? I asked. He shrugged. Are you from Paraguay? I asked. A lot of people who had left town for Paraguay for even more hardship and isolation than this place could provide, although we did our best, were moving back. The Paraguayan girls wore dresses over pants, and the boys wore suspenders and men’s shirts. He nodded.

Hey, I said, don’t cry. You’re gonna be okay. You had the wind knocked out of you, that’s all.

He wiped his nose with the side of his hand and pulled his cap down really low over his eyes. Do you smoke? I asked. It was all I had. He nodded. I handed him a Sweet Cap and lit it for him and we sat on the curb smoking with our backs to the front doors of the junior high. When I was finished I flicked my butt onto the road and Doft put his on the ground and jumped on it with both feet.

You should go in now, I said. I pointed to the door. Doft took his ball cap off and handed it to me. Please, he said.

His English wasn’t very good but then again none of ours really was. Then he did six or seven cartwheels in a row down the sidewalk and back again. I handed him his hat and said fuckin’ A, Doft. Bueno.

We waved at each other before he disappeared inside the school. I have made two children happy in the course of five minutes, I thought to myself.

I was moved in typing today for flippancy. Flippancy was the big sin. I should have realized the inherent gravity of fjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjf the fox jumps over the log. And how will this help me to kill chickens faster?

On our report cards every letter of the alphabet signifies a different behaviour problem and I always without fail get a big red circle around the F for Flippant Attitude. But I don’t really give a fuck. (Oh, funny, eh?)

Travis had phoned me in the morning, before the Shreddie incident with my neighbour, and said he was mad at me for saying he looked like Ian Tyson when he holds his guitar so high up, which had put me in a bad mood. I just like them better held low, I said. He told me I was shallow. First about pant legs being tucked into socks and then about how a person holds his guitar. Well, what the hell am I supposed to think about, I asked him. I told him he was fishing around for stupid things to be mad at me for because he knew he’d said a stupid thing last night and couldn’t just apologize and tell me we’d never break up because he loved me more than life itself. And then I hung up.

Five seconds later I phoned him back and said I was sorry and he said he was too and asked me what I was wearing and I lied and said his Blumenort Jets sweatshirt.

At lunch it was raining so I didn’t go home. I went to the gym and sat way up in the bleachers and watched Rhinehart Bachenmeir shoot hoops. Man, he was good. He was conducive. That fast break and all that spinning around to the left, to the right, and his arc, stellar, beautiful like one of those marine-show dolphins. Dribbling between his legs making all those three-pointers and left-handed layups and slam dunks. What a pretty shooter. The only thing missing was the ball. I clapped anyway and he gave me the finger because I guess he thought he was alone with Kareem Abdul Jabar.

At 2:30 the guidance counsellor came to my class to tell me I should talk to her. We walked together in silence to her office next to the principal’s office and she pointed at a chair and said have a seat.

She asked me if I had any specific goals or aspirations for after high school and I smiled.

Hmmmm, I said. Lemme think. I told her I’d thought about becoming a city planner someday. She asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of my life spacing fire hydrants. No, I said, but I like looking at cities and thinking about them. She told me I needed exceptional math skills for that.

Like, for instance, I said, that our main street has two dirt fields on either end of it is weird to me. Shouldn’t it lead somewhere?

That requires engineering, she said. I nodded. Any other goals? she asked.

I told her I’d like to be able to do one chin-up. One chin-up, she said. She looked at me. I mean that would be something, right, I said. Holding my entire self up by myself. Like, my self by myself. No? She was writing something down.

Nomi, she said. Talk to me about English.

English? I asked.

Your written assignments, she said. Forgetting about “Flight of Our People” for now. You’re having some problems getting them in?

I’m not having problems getting them in, I said. They’re not…

Mr. Quiring says the…

It’s just…I don’t know. She nodded. I blew my bangs out of my eyes. She looked at her watch. I shrugged. She wrote some more stuff down and then she stood up and said she had to see someone else.

Okay, I said. Well, thanks a lot. I stood up and she came around from behind her desk with her arms out like an extra in Night of the Living Dead.

Can I give you a hug? she asked.

I…it’s just…I mean philosophically a hug is a great thing, I said. But…I smiled and left quietly. It’s so good to talk to someone who cares. I had a doctor’s appointment after school.

On my way to my appointment I stopped in at Barkman’s and stared for ten minutes at a floor model of a plastic bird whose head goes up and down into a cup of water. I wondered if it would hurt Travis to know that I was more interested in plastic birds than in procuring the female hormone that would allow our love to “progress to the next level.”

How much is that, I asked Mr. Barkman. I thought maybe my dad would like it. It seemed like such a straightforward thing for that bird to be doing. Head in. Head out. It made sense. Mr. Barkman said it was six bucks so I bought it for my dad and Mr. Barkman gave me ten or fifteen Icy Cups and a parachute jumper on the house for taking it off his hands.

I left the store and bumped into two girls singing “Let My Love Open the Door” into microphones made from screwdrivers and tensor bandages.

There was a little kid, maybe three or four, walking down Main Street by herself with a doll’s stroller strapped to her butt. Every few steps she’d stop and sit down in it for a rest and then get back up and keep walking.

From the back all I could see was the stroller and two little legs. I wondered what she was thinking. I wonder what three-year-olds think. I wonder if somebody had told her she was too big for that stroller. I wonder if she felt the way I did about people who told you something that you knew was just not fuckin’ true and if she felt like screaming at them and hurting them and plunging herself into a chemically induced oblivion.

I admired this kid for keeping her cool. She just strapped herself into that doll stroller and took off walking, probably without a word. All the way down Main Street. She’ll show the whole town that no, in fact, she still fits into the damn doll stroller.

I took a shortcut to the clinic and bashed my head on the air conditioner coming out of the wall while reading the directions on the bird. Although you would expect the directions to a bird whose head went in and out of a glass of water to be fairly minimal, they weren’t.

When I got to the clinic all the chairs were taken by Hutterites, also not especially a groovy people except for the fact that they are allowed to wear only polka-dot clothing, and the women must wear kerchiefs and the men, beards. My dad buys eggs from them. They are another sub-sect of our larger clan, except they live in colonies. Kibbutz-style. We are all, though, knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door. The same door.

I sat on the floor and kept my face hidden in a big thick book of Bible stories for children. I thought to myself: Dear Jesus, please let me one day hang out with Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and turn all my grief into hits.

The doctor asked me if my dad knew about me going on the Pill and I said of course, you can phone him if you like. He should be at home right now — I can give you the number. I pointed at the phone on his desk and said go ahead. Then I stared at a dot on the wall and astrally projected myself into a Greenwich Village coffeehouse until the doctor said uh, that shouldn’t be necessary and my heart began to beat again.

I thought I had seen a book on his shelf that was titled How to Incorporate Mental Illness into Your Daily Routine. So, he really did understand us. Dr. Hunter was English. That’s what people in my town called anybody who wasn’t Mennonite. He might have been Estonian or Moravian for all I knew. In church The Mouth called him Brother Doctor Hunter and made snide comments about his fancy education. He had a reputation in town as a shit disturber because he believed in supplying birth control for the women here who by going forth to bed and multiplying often had ten or twelve or fifteen kids. He also liked to prescribe antidepressants. He’d written an article for the city paper that said our town has colossally huge numbers of depressed people. He talked about the emphasis here on sin, shame, death, fear, punishment and silence and somehow, God knows how, chalked that all up to feelings of sadness and galloping worthlessness.

The Mouth said the piece was fiction. He said we, the followers of Menno Simons, were used to being misunderstood by outsiders. He’d tried to shut his practice down a few times but that only strengthened Brother Doctor Hunter’s resolve. Either way, he wasn’t particularly cheerful about doling out birth control but then again he was a man on a mission, and missions aren’t supposed to be fun.

Any history of clotting?

Pardon me?

Blood clots.

No.

Do you smoke?

When I’m on fire.

Do you smoke?

Yeah.

Asinine.

Thanks.

I said that’s asinine.

Got it.

I have realized that my personal yearning to be in New York City, wandering around with Lou Reed in Greenwich Village, or whatever, is for me a painful, serious, all-consuming kind of thing and is for the rest of the world a joke. When you’re a Mennonite you can’t even yearn properly for the world because the world turns that yearning into comedy. It’s a funny premise for a movie, that’s all. Mennonite girl in New York City. Amish family goes to Soho. It’s terribly depressing to realize that your innermost desires are being tested in Hollywood for laughs per minute.