ESSAYS
Like BreathIOWA CITY, IOWA 17 June 2008 |
|
We’re walking together along the trail beside the river. After a late winter the low hills are still green and there are wildflowers even now. The air smells of sage and dust and pine and if you look north up Highway 75 you can see mountains capped with white.
We’re bare-chested wearing sandals and shorts. It’s my father’s birthday today. He’s fifty years old, six feet tall, thin. His dark curly hair has lightened from the sun. There are patches of grey at his temples.
I’m shorter than he is with dark hair on my legs and arms, hair that my father found unsettling when it first appeared at fourteen - a feature, which seemed to him impossible. It must have been a terrible reminder of time passing. How could this boy with the big brown eyes and the round cheeks be sprouting the body hair of a Sicilian?
Once while the two of us were on the couch watching a baseball game, my legs on his knees, he asked, laughing, “Where did all this hair come from?”
I stared at the screen.
This summer I’m back from a year in Australia. It’s the first time in six months that he’s has seen me without my shirt on and I see him register the new hair on my chest.
I’m home for a few months living in my old bedroom. The same smells. The same posters on the wall. I know it’s my father who won’t take them down and that my mother would like to make my old bedroom into something else, something new. She pushes forward, she tears things apart, moves furniture around. She pulls her husband along, forces him to make decisions, spins through their house on the river, telephone to her ear, making plans.
I think about the night to come. After the three of us have dinner and a bottle of wine, after my father opens his birthday presents, I’ll put on my shoes, find a jacket and go out. I’ll meet some friends from high school at a bar in town. And after I kiss my mother good night and she goes upstairs to bed, my dad will follow me outside and stand with me on the driveway.
He’ll say, “Have a nice time, sweetheart.”
And I’ll say, “Ok, I will,” and get into the old Land Cruiser that he bought from a helicopter pilot in Boise for three thousand dollars, a car that he’d wanted since he drove one in Africa twenty-five years ago where he climbed to the top of Mount Kenya. I imagine him there at the summit, his eyes clear, feeling invincible.
He’s young, newly married. He breathes deeply and feels the purity of conquest, the certainty of his life. He stands there with a hand on the iron cross hammered into stone. He feels heroic and powerless standing atop a great mountain in Africa with all the wonder and sadness of real joy.
Tonight, he’ll stand in the driveway, and the sprinklers will beat time, and the moon will be half full, and I’ll start up the car and turn on the radio. I’ll ignore the vague feeling of irritation. It’s not as if I’m going off to war. Why can’t he just say goodnight? Though I know the answer somehow.
And he’ll stand in the driveway in his slippers and his robe. He’ll want to say something about the choke, about not flooding the engine. He’ll catch himself. And instead he’ll watch me glide up the driveway, slow at the street, turn left and vanish into the night.
We turn down off of the main trail where it begins to cut away from the river. I lead us along a small path, which ends at a rocky bank. The river has made a sharp turn here and left a deep green pool. Above it a knotted rope hangs from a tall Aspen. The bank descends fast.
I drop my towel on the rocks and climb atop a pile of felled trees. I lean back pulling the rope to my chest, taking in all the slack. I jump and sail out above the water, where I let go and plunge through the air. My father watches me fall.
When I come up I’m down stream with the current. Grinning, I pull myself onto the bank and walk back towards my dad, my skin drying fast in the sun and warm wind.
He smiles at me, proud and then dives easily off the bank and lets the river take him.
* * *
The afternoon my parents were to arrive in Sydney, I got to the airport early. In the cab on the way there I imagined how I’d appear to them. My hair was nearly to my shoulders; I was tan and strong from surfing everyday. I wore new clothes.
Waiting outside customs I imagined what they’d think of me, their son and his suede jacket. I leaned coolly against a pillar and waited with limo drivers holding signs, men nervously shifting bouquets of flowers from hand to hand, mothers holding babies.
Then the doors slid open to reveal my parents. My mother looked mostly the same, big brown eyes; she was beautiful, explosive, bright, her hair cropped a little shorter, deeper lines at her eyes.
But my father, for the first time in my life looked old. He was pale from the Idaho winter, tired from the flight. There was more gray at the temples, more gray everywhere. Even his skin seemed gray. Shocked, I didn’t immediately go towards them . Having been so prepared to be observed, it threw me to find that I was the observer. The sight of my father scanning the busy terminal for his son briefly paralyzed me.
All morning I’d been imagining this moment but not once had it occurred to me that it would be my father who had changed. And then I realized that not once in my entire life, not in twenty years, not really, had I considered for an instant my parents would ever change.
I watched them: My mother grinning slightly, squinting into the crowd. And my father, mouth slightly open, chin tilted upwards, eyes darting from side to side. Finally, I stood up straight and smiled at them. Immediately they saw me, my mother’s jaw dropping at the sight of my long hair. My father strode quickly towards me and we hugged each other hard. Whatever plans of aloof cool I may have had were gone. Holding my father felt briefly as if I were holding him up.
Nearly immediately he looked healthy and young again. Once he had spent a day on the beach, smelled the air, swam in the ocean, slept, run along the cliffs at Coogee, he no longer appeared frail.
* * *
Six months later we’re standing side by side on the log pile. I have the rope pulled tightly to my chest.
You just lean back, you make sure you bring both your feet up right away and let the rope take you. When you get out over the pool you let go. Easy.”
“Be careful,” he says.
I glide out and drop. When I come up I say, “Your turn, old man.”
He’s still standing on the logs.
“I think I’m going to skip this.”
“Oh come on,” I say. By now I’ve climbed up next to him and placed the rope in his hands. “It’s not difficult. I mean if you’re not old.”
“I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Ok,” I say, “Let’s go home and play cards grandpa.”
He exhales loudly, looks at me and shakes his head as if admonishing both of us. He tightens his grip on the rope. He leans forward keeping his feet planted on the logs. He reaches out and up with both arms as if he’s reaching for something lost, something far away, as if he’s standing on a chair straining for something too high to touch.
His weight transfers outwards - arms, shoulders, chest and, only when they have to, his feet come off the log so that they swing fast beneath him making a gentle sweeping arc from log to sky. It’s as if he’s preparing a backflip but he is preparing nothing. He is entirely passive, waiting for this thing to be done.
The first lesson he ever taught me about fielding a ground ball is to charge. Go towards it. Act. Do not be acted upon. The first rule of all sport. The first rule of everything.
His feet swing upwards higher into the air. He’s still clutching the rope as it slackens and when he begins to fall it snaps tight and tears from his hands. He falls through space. He could be piloting a rocket, roaring upwards through the atmosphere.
But he is falling down.
When he hits the shallow water his arms are still extended upward. The back of his head slams hard against smooth round river rock.
I look down at him. He’s unconscious, eyes closed, the water pulling gently at his body. His head is resting on the stones while he trembles slightly with the current. He looks delicate, fragile as if at any moment he might vanish. He looks like a body in the water, a body caught in an eddy after floating for hours.
He looks dead.
I leap from the log and scramble down to him. In the moment it takes for me to get there, he’s slipped further into the water so that the weight of his head on a single stone serves as the only anchor. I slip my arms through his and pull him onto the bank.
There is a moment of absolute quiet. I’m kneeling. I’m holding my father. I’m looking down on him. There is a small trickle of blood from the back of his skull.
* * *
The three of us used to go camping in the summers when I was still a boy. We’d set up a large army camp tent at the edge of a lake. There was a cooler in the back of our old Toyota Corona, a green Coleman stove and a lantern. At night we’d sit around a fire and drink hot chocolate. And then my father would take me to the edge of the lake to look at the stars.
The two of us would stare silently up at the sky. Eventually I’d get cold and impatient. He’d always insist on staying a little longer. It smelled of pine trees and smoke.
“You have to always remember to wait,” he told me once. “You have to think about where you are before you can leave.”
“I will. I do.”
We’d turn back to the low fire and walk slowly toward my mother and our camp. The three of us would sleep heavily together, side by side.
* * *
His eyes flutter open. The first thing he sees is my face looking down at him. He sits up slowly. I put my arm around his shoulder and he breathes deeply. He touches the back of his skull. He looks at the blood on his fingers and raises his eyes to mine. There’s something foreign in his expression, something I’ve never seen in his face before.
Terror.
Slowly we walk along the trail towards the house where my mother will be reading.
We’re silent for a while. I can’t shake the dull, heavy sound of his body hitting the rocks or the sight of him lying unconscious in the water. I hold tightly to his shoulder.
At the house my mother looks at the two of us.
We put him in bed and call his doctor. He should have a CAT scan. Concussion maybe. Bring him in today.
My mother shakes her head. “What in the fuck were you thinking?”
She touches her hand to his cheek and waits until somewhere in his expression she finds something; assurance perhaps, a promise and then she walks downstairs to make him some tea.
I sit on the edge of my parents’ bed. I touch a warm washcloth to the back of his skull where he’s been bleeding. We sit in silence looking at one another, my father smiling weakly, the color drained from his face.
That night I stay home. The two of us walk slowly to the edge of the driveway. The moon is half-full. The air smells of wet grass and clay and for a few moments we stand together looking up. And then we turn and walk back towards the house lit up pale.
The next morning he wakes with a pounding head. The fall has given him some bruises on his back, a sore neck. The doctor calls. None of his vertebrae are cracked; his spine is unharmed.
But swept away by the river, along with the slight bit of blood that trickled from his head, was also his sense of smell. As his skull cracked against the stone it was gone, flowing from his body like water, like blood, like breath.
|
||
Related Posts |
No comments yet.