The light changed and he never even slowed down. He went through,
and watched the other side, flat red, tremble in his rear-view. He thought about
the stop light where he grew up, how his mom tried to show him a rabbit's shadow
in the yellow. Like everything, he told the bartender, it changed too fast.
Once though, at an art gallery full of Jackson Pollocks and Frank Stellas,
he realized he'd been looking for the wrong shape of rabbit the whole time and
felt so sorry for his mother he went into the first strip bar and spent fifty-five
dollars in forty-five minutes.
He told the bartender it's how you look at things.
He just watched the red light in the mirror too long. Until it was a pin-prick
in the glass. A little spot of dried blood. Until one would argue over the shade
of red.
And no one expects a posse of bicyclists, fluorescent yellow and green streaks
with their own rules veering at each flank, banking, screaming purple faces,
a shiny black shoe kicking the side of the passenger door. No one expects that.
He was hard on the brakes and there was no making sense of the orange-vested,
orange-flag-waving blonde women in blue jeans, or the orange cone flying over
the windshield, or the circular thumping at one wheel.
Then a steamroller, steamrolling.
One of the bicyclists wobbling up on his pedals giving the finger in the reflection.
He hit a curb or a hole, something jarred the radio up loud, and the song was,
"Just my Imagination," and he remembered how his mother loved The
Temptations except, "Papa was a Rolling Stone."
He remembered the time his Daddy'd called the day after his birthday, and the
kind of familiar voice said, "I love you," and he'd wondered how does
he know.
The fleshy face of a woman he felt he'd seen before flashed and filled
a passing window. She put him in mind of ice skating at six, maybe seven, his
mother watching over coffee, her smile more warming than six, maybe seven, sunshines.
He told the bartender about this once and the bartender told him everybody's
mother's smile is like that, then thought a minute and said, no, that's not
the case is it? "Wouldn't be all these wars and shit," he said,
and threw an ashtray into the garbage overhand.
Sliding in his car, he felt on top of things. If there was nothing he could
do there was nothing he could do, and he let go, and it didn't surprise him
when the wheel turned on its own.
Once, when his dad had been there for some reason, he'd gone along to the car
wash where they were pulled along through water jets, spinning brushes and dangling,
clinging fabric.
And the steering wheel turned on its own.
He'd reached over and grabbed the wheel and it jerked clean from his fingers.
His daddy laughed like an older brother.
They'd stopped for hamburgers on the way home and he studied how his daddy
ate, how he took bites and chewed, how he swallowed and everything looked hard
going down.
His dad held his hamburger one-handed and steered with his other wrist rested
on the wheel, and even with his knee when he reached for a drink of his soda
or a French fry or to change the radio.
He felt, in his hips, his back wheels coming around in front of him and even
thought to look to his left and see could he see the light directly but couldn't.
One bicyclist stopped near a flag-waver, who held up a cone like a cheerleader's
bullhorn. He wondered had anybody ever cheered him anything.
He knew he was the worst thing she could imagine, but he looked for her, looked
to her for something, and she was gone.
The steamroller wasn't rolling any more.
He remembered the face of the woman he'd seen at the window a moment before
and wondered what she would say about all this. He thought for a minute he might
place her in his past but instead was put in mind of these things from his childhood:
Jots
The Jungle Book
Flying fish
When he felt the start of the soft press into the wall he felt relief at the
moment defined. It would end like this. With a crash. It would end like this.
The only thing now was what "it" would be.
What would end with the crash?
What would he tell the bartender?
Amid the crushing he realized he'd say how everything he knows about life he
learned from songs on the radio. It's all there if you listen he'd say.
He'd tell the bartender everybody's mom wants to smile like sunshine and warm
their children.
With the beginning of the tearing, the jarring and rattling inside, he realized
he would hurt and for the first time how all this would've never happened had
he stopped at the changing light. This hit him like a brick wall.
At least he hadn't hurt anyone else. He'd know if he hurt somebody else. He'd
be able to feel that. And he couldn't feel anything now but his body moving
in ways it never had before.
The crashing reminded him of the crushing crescendo of a holiday orchestra
tuning up, little bursts of half-notes and drawn out full-notes moving around
and through the chairs, through him, and how the tuning was his favorite part.
"That's not even the music," his mother'd said, and he said, "It's
all music to me," and she said, "That's just something you heard somewhere,"
but he believed, then and always, she understood better than that.
He asked his mother did his daddy like music. She said not the way you do,
like that was supposed to make him feel good, but didn't, but he acted like
it did.
Now with his face flinging for the future faster than the rest of his head,
he felt a tug at his soul, and thought, that's that then, we have souls.
He liked using the word "we" like this, speaking for the "we"
who've gone before, the "we" yet to be. If this was his soul pulled
through the holes in his face then he could do that, speak for everybody, and
with authority, about the greatest mystery of all.
It was a position he'd never been in before. And he thought about that.
He thought how car wrecks probably replaced disease in the population game,
and how if this was a hundred years before he'd be bed-ridden and the light
would've been fever burning in his head and chest and eyes.
He wondered how many times that redlight had ever changed and the light became
brighter and the thinking catching up with itself spread into a silvering in
his eyes, and a tunnel opened up for him through.
***
"So," she asked.
"What's that?"
"Thought any more about it?"
"About?"
"The whole Lazarus thing."
"Not something I'd recommend," he said.
"You never recommend anything,"
"I told you about the Chinese place," he said and put the phone face
down into the bed beside him. She'd be home in a matter of minutes.
He smiled at the picture he'd taken when he was little, the black streak, the
snake in the air, behind his mom.
She was wading ankle-deep through the rough of the golf course they lived near,
looking for lost balls in the grass.
They found a lot some days, none others, and even when they did find them they'd
hit most away with an old-five iron they got in a yard sale for a quarter. They'd
bring the best home and store them in egg cartons to sell alongside the fairway
one day.
And sometimes they'd find the same balls they found before. Sometimes roused
a real snake so the one in the picture, hanging in the air, seemed familiar
even if it was a blemish as his mother claimed, like that meant anything.
Even years later when his mother'd catch him staring into the picture she'd
ask the same question. She'd ask, "What do you see in that snake?"
And he'd say, "The true outlaw."
And she'd ask, "What's that snake doing in my picture?"
And he'd say, "Jumping out of himself."
"How's that?"
"Dancing on the heat."
His mom would tell him he should study poetry or something and he'd hold up
the picture for her to see.
Sometimes she'd say, "That's a trick of photography."
He wanted to tell her poetry was a trick of words. He wanted to tell her he
learned as much looking at that picture as he could in classes and books.
She wanted to take him and go see where he'd wrecked.
She always wanted to go see where he wrecked.
They could be on the way home from seeing where he wrecked and she'd gladly,
at any point, turn around and go back and see where he wrecked.
At first, they'd go. She'd stare into the place his car'd hit and say the words
the policeman said, "No one survives a wreck like that," and the doctor,
"We brought him back."
She'd touch bricks, sometimes leave little notes tucked in cracks.
He never read one though she'd look at him like he ought to at least
want to.
She left flowers once but he told her it made him feel like he was still dead.
"I was dead for one minute, twelve seconds," he said to her, "We've
been standing here longer than that."
She cried and it wasn't long after that he stopped going with her.
So she gave updates on things that went on at the wall.
"They finished the roadwork," she'd say.
And, "Sometimes when I leave things they're rearranged when I come back."
Whenever he thought about driving a car again it never ended good. He liked
walking, and would wave at anyone in a window who would wave back. He liked
counting steps but never got them to add up to anything.
He told the bartender about his mom and the wall and the dying thing.
The bartender said, "You always think you've heard it all."
"Not me. Not anymore," he said.
"When you were away I couldn't tell you'd died," the bartender said,
"Ought to be a way of knowing, a feeling, when someone goes through something
like that."
He told the bartender about in third grade a new kid got hit by a car and nobody
in his class knew how to feel, only how they were supposed to feel, how it looked
like the teacher felt. Then somebody at recess laughed that laugh that makes
kids know everyone's a little wicked on the inside and later on want to go back
and do something heroic.
He told his mother, "This morning I dropped a glass on the kitchen floor.
When it shattered I felt whole again," and wished he hadn't said
anything.
She looked at him to say more.
He couldn't imagine what more could be said.
She told him sometimes people just talk.
He agreed and said, "It's not like you learn more about living from dying."
She turned her head like that was a far away thought.
"You only learn about dying from dying."
She asked, "What then?"
He asked did she really want to know but didn't wait for an answer. He told
her dying wasn't what he'd drawn in school when they drew what they were most
afraid of about death.
He'd colored his whole page black.
The principal called his mother in and asked him in front of her why.
He'd said he'd been asked to do it. "For art class," he said.
After going through the wall though, he told his mother death was more a page
of light wrapped around and away from him. "One without writing,"
he looked up and said.
His mother brought him a piece of the wall and put it on the mantle beside her
picture with the snake in the air. "This might help," she said. "I
thought about making a necklace of it but didn't think you'd wear it."
He thought the piece of his past appropriate sitting there between pictures
of his grandparents who didn't die but passed away, all within ten months of
each other when he was ten.
He told the bartender about hearing his mom's mom, one day out of the blue,
say how she avoided the mirror because it made her feel old and his grandfather
said the mirror didn't scare him, but he insisted all the pictures of him be
put away..
He told the bartender wasn't long after they started passing away.
The bartender said how everybody's going to die and that's a hell of a thing
isn't it? "Ought to be something you can do," he said.
"There is, I'll have another."
"In all there's 1846 bricks if you count half bricks as halves,"
his mom told him.
He asked how else you'd count them.
She said she used to think the halves were ends of wholes until she saw the
edges of the hole he went into.
"It's all how you look at things," he said.
"Learn something every day," she said.
"I don't," he said, "Not anymore."
There was this mudslide in ninth grade that took out a whole family everybody
thought was perfect. The family, not the accident. They thought the accident
was horrible and the whole town attended the funeral and kin came from all over
the state.
He fell in love with one of the dead kids' cousins and they kissed behind the
church though he never knew her name.
She tasted like potato chips.
She said because she'd been crying though she didn't know them. "Family
and all," she said.
She asked questions about mudslides. She couldn't picture how it could happen.
He told her it's better that way and felt five years older.
They kissed one last time.
He told her about when they went on a field trip to Sacramento and her cousin
that got covered over in mud, the boy, Joel, was his buddy and they kept up
with each other all day through the art museum, and at lunch in the mall food
court, and that afternoon when they went to the park. "It was the only
time we were friends," he told her and she cried again.
Her mama came around the corner swinging a baby big enough to walk at her side
and said everybody'd been screaming their heads off for her.
She walked off without saying good-bye.
He cried until nobody came looking for him. He walked around front by himself
and the church felt bigger from the outside. Adults were standing around smoking
cigarettes. The kids were playing in the perfect church-grass, but he went inside.
He'd never seen church this empty. One grandmother of the kids that got killed
sat in the front pew staring at the big picture of Jesus in the stained glass
behind where the preacher stands.
He walked down the aisle, and as he got closer he heard her talking to the
Jesus up there that never looked like any other Jesus he'd seen before.
He told the bartender once," There's as many Jesuses as Santa Clauses."
He kept toward the grandmother. She rocked gently and wiped at tears.
He looked around for the preacher or somebody but it was only them and the
Jesus.
He never stopped or, he told the bartender more than once, he would have turned
around and gone out and played with who'd play with him.
Even when she looked up and saw him, he kept toward her. Even as he heard his
name called somewhere outside, even as she opened her arms like he was one of
hers, and he climbed up on her lap and they cried together for so long he forgot
who came and got him.
"They're going to tear down the wall," his mother said.
"Old building," he said.
"But that's your wall."
"Seems more like your wall anymore," he said.
She looked at him like he'd given back a present.
"Just something I believe in," she said.
"You believe in that wall?"
"I do."
He said, "It's a brick wall I ran into and happened to live through it."
"You do."
"What's that?"
"You live through that wall."
She was there when they knocked down the wall. Bricks tore at her fingernails,
but she picked up the pieces preciously and piled them perfectly in the trunk
until the car sat all the way down on its haunches.
She had to take out some bricks and put them on the front floorboard so the
trunk would close and drove around that way while she figured out what to do.
When he first saw what she was doing he cried like on the dead kids' grandmother's
lap.
He wanted his mother to stop and come inside and catch him that way, but she
kept laying bricks according to what she'd see when she'd close her eyes and
what she'd read from some big book with broken bricks holding open the
pages.
The beginning grew up out of the middle of their backyard, and she had her
trowel and her wheelbarrow of mortar and her hose run out to her like she built
walls in their backyard every day.
He watched until she didn't come in. He went outside and took her a glass
of water. He sat her down on a lawn chair, took the trowel, and worked on the
wall. When he finished, in the changing light of time, he took pictures of her
standing there in front of the wall, and set the timer and got in one with her,
and they smiled without anybody telling them, and the prints came out picture
perfect, and the wall's still standing now, keeping nothing out and nothing
in.
Craig Wright teaches fiction at Southern
Oregon University. This is his first story for Lime Tea.
