So Shelly (20 page)

Ashamed of the men’s disrespect toward his guest, and sensing a challenge to his command, Neolin feebly attempted to assert himself. “The floors and the steps in the house need fixing, and we need to turn over the ground out back for a garden.” It was meant to be an imperative statement, but it
came out declarative, like he was stating a fact rather than giving an order. No one moved. An awkward silence hung in the air. “Daniel? Benjamin? Aaron?” Still, not one of the men responded. “After lunch, then.” He tried to save face.

Without turning, he reached back, grabbed Shelly by the wrist, and pulled her past the men, whose laughter deeply wounded his pride. Shelly ran a few strides to draw even with him. He led her toward a heavily forested patch of land abutting the western edge of the property.

“Where are we going?” Shelly asked.

He didn’t respond but stormed ahead of her again and resumed dragging her after him. The path they followed was mostly overgrown. Thick undergrowth and low-hanging branches slowed their progress. More than once a deer suddenly burst from out of its resting place in the cool of the shade. Eventually, the sound of lapping surf meandered its way through the thick forestation. When they emerged, they stood on a patch of secluded beach with gray-brown sand. It was no bigger than a large outdoor patio and was surrounded on three sides by trees.

Unsure of Neolin’s intentions, Shelly stopped, dug her feet into the sand, and asked, “Why did you bring me here?”

But Neolin was pacing so frantically along the surf line and was in such a bad temper that he didn’t sense her nervousness or hear the question clearly.

“What?”

“Why are we here?”

He stopped and looked around as if to take stock himself, of where they were, and of why they’d come there. He pointed back in the direction of the camp and said, “Those … 
those assholes make me so angry. I mean, I get so frustrated … so pissed off that sometimes I come here to get away, to refocus.”

“It’s okay,” Shelly assured him.

“No! It’s not okay!” He said it a little too aggressively.

“What’s up with their names?” Shelly asked, trying to get his mind off of their insolence. “I mean, Daniel? Aaron and Benjamin?”

“What did you expect? Crazy Horse? Three Bears? Geronimo?”

Shelly’s shoulders shrunk at his sarcasm.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“But your name is so unlike theirs.”

“It’s not my real name. Neolin was a Delaware prophet who taught the Way and inspired the Odawa to resist the whites back when this was our home. My real name is Gabriel Smith.” He raised his arms and rolled his wrists outward, like Christ displaying the nail holes in his palms to the doubting Thomas. “Look at me. Do I look anything like a Smith?” After a dramatic pause, he said, “That’s what this is about. I’ve got to find myself, and I won’t—I can’t—do that inside some lousy casino in Oklahoma.”

“Then let me help you,” Shelly said.

He placed his hands on his narrow, almost girlish hips, laughed, smiled, and said, “You are one persistent pale-faced girl.”

“Buddy, you have no idea.”

Gordon and I made our way beyond the North Bass airstrip.

“I’d kill for a little bit of breeze,” I said.

“All I know is that when we get there, I’m dropping this damn boom box.”

“What’s with that thing anyway?” I asked. “Couldn’t we have used something smaller?”

“No way,” Gordon answered. “She insisted that we use this one. It’s the one that we’d use when we were kids, playing in her pool or sitting on the dock. I’m pretty sure it once belonged to her mother. I guess you could call it an heirloom.”

“Not much of an inheritance,” I said.

Changing the suddenly nostalgic mood, Gordon said, “The first chance I get, I’m jumping in the damn lake. I’m sweating my nuts off.”

“I don’t really like the water,” I said.

Maybe it was exhaustion, but at that point during my first
prolonged exposure to Gordon, I found myself in a confessional state of mind. Gordon looked at me as if I’d told him that I was some kind of alien.

“Keats,” he said through his strained incredulity, “you live two blocks from a Great Lake.”

“I know, but you’ve been to my neighborhood. Do we look like the yachting type?”

“You’ve got a point. The brothers aren’t exactly much for water sports.”

“When I was a little kid, my dad used to say to my brother and me, ‘Tom. Johnny. Let’s go check on the water. See if it’s still there.’ This is when he could still walk—”

“Whoa,” Gordon interrupted. “Still walk? What’s that mean? Is your dad handicapped or something?”

“Maybe he’s yanking my chain,” I thought. I mean, it had been nearly two years since the funeral. Didn’t
everyone
know my father had died? I couldn’t imagine that he’d make light of such a thing, but I’d already learned not to assume anything with Gordon. Yet the softening of his expression and what I know was sincere compassion in his eyes betrayed that we were—and I realize this sounds as corny as hell—sharing a moment. Go ahead. Snicker. Maybe it was our shared fatherless condition. I don’t know. He didn’t say and I didn’t ask. However, from that moment on, for at least the remainder of our mission, we were more than friends of Shelly’s. We were friends.

“Go on,” Gordon said.

“We’d go down to the bay,” I continued. “Tom and I would skip stones while Dad sat on one of the big slabs of concrete that had been dumped there as a breakwall. He’d
just sit and stare at the water like it was talking to him or something, whispering secrets. But we never went in, just played along the edges.”

“That’s sad,” Gordon said. “More than sad. Unnatural.”

Again, Gordon’s ambiguity made it difficult to pin down his meaning. I wasn’t sure if his “unnatural” referred to my father’s death or my landlubber status.

“What did you do for fun?”

I stared at him blankly. I’d never really thought of fun as being some kind of requirement for living. I’d always figured that fun was not for a child “intellectually advanced for his age,” as I had often heard myself described by teachers. Fun was not for a white boy forbidden to play outside in an otherwise all-black neighborhood. Fun was not for a kid with walking-dead parents haunting his house. Fun was not for a wannabe writer who was certain to have been granted too short a time in which to make an indelible mark. There had always been too much to read, too much to be afraid of, too much sadness, and too much yet to be put into words to be able just to go out and have fun.

By the end of that day, however, I would realize that all of the pursuits that I thought I didn’t have time to experience were the very things I needed to do if I had any hope of having anything meaningful to say, anything to contribute.

“I flew a kite once,” I offered pathetically.

“A kite? Was that after you’d finished a quick game of marbles? For Christ’s sake, Keats, it’s the twenty-first century.”

I ignored Gordon’s sarcasm and continued my recollection. “I was only seven or eight years old. It was April. Easter
Sunday. My dad was only just confined to the wheelchair. I had jelly beans and some marshmallow Peeps in my Easter basket, and this cheap paper Spider-Man kite.” I paused, then went on. “Most of the kids in the neighborhood had been dragged to church services and the corners were empty. My dad stayed on the porch, shouting instructions. I took off down the sidewalk with my kite trailing at shoulder height. Then the wind took it. It flew as high as it could go, and I walked back to my front yard, careful not to snag the string in a tree branch or something. We watched the kite. I felt the wind tugging at it. In my little kid brain, I thought the kite was trying to lift me up—out of that place. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t resist if it did.”

“Then what?” Gordon asked, pulling me out of my flashback.

“They shot it.”

“What!”

“Three guys, still wearing their church suits. Four or five quick shots. Obliterated the thing. It was probably a dare or something. Haven’t flown a kite since, but sometimes I still imagine that a big wind will come and blow me out of there.”

“Yeah. You and your dog Toto too,” Gordon said.

“Something like that.”

We were drawing near to the north shore. It meant that the culmination of our quest and our final farewells to Shelly were approaching. Bowed by the emotional weight of the past few days and the literal weight of lugging around her ashes since the night before, I simultaneously dreaded and looked forward to letting go of her.

“Do you think we’ll see her again?” I asked.

“See who?”

“Shelly.”

“You mean like in heaven or some shit like that?” Gordon said with his typical irreverence for all things sacred.

“Yeah.”

“Nope. Don’t believe so. This is it, Keats. One shot,” said Gordon.

“Me neither,” I said, before I hedged. “At least, I don’t think so.”

“No shit? I always thought you were one of the good guys. I’ll be damned.”

“Very funny.”

“Did you have some kind of revelation when I stopped to piss back there, or what?”

“No,” I answered. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot since Shelly died, and it just doesn’t add up.”

“Slow down, Keats. I don’t want any part of an ontological meltdown.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Sure you do. You’re a smart guy. You just don’t know you know.”

I was surprised, and pleased, to know that Gordon thought of me as smart.

“You’re talking about the existence of things—what we know exists and what we don’t know exists. How we know it, and what we’re even capable of knowing in the first place. You’ll hear it all in Fulop’s senior Introduction to Philosophy class.”

“Oh,” I said, pretending his explanation had cleared it up.

“It’s like you’ve burst some kind of existential cherry, and I don’t need to be blamed for it. I’ve already got enough blood on my hands, and I’m tired of being blamed for shit I didn’t do.”

Again, I had no idea what he was talking about. What was with Gordon’s obsession with cherries? “Anyway,” I said, returning to my thought, “I don’t believe any of it either: the soul, heaven, hell, God, the devil.”

“Whoa. Slow down there. Don’t get all Nietzsche on me. I didn’t say I didn’t believe in
anything
.”

“What do you believe in?” I asked. “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll?”

“Those are pretty good places to start, but even I’m not so shallow as that. There might be something more, some kind of power. I just don’t think it’s the dude they teach at school or in churches. As far as I’m concerned, ‘God’ is just a word, a metaphor for whatever the fuck makes you hard, and heaven’s a metaphor for the wishful thinking that’s actually the nothing that comes next. Like I said, there may be something out there, some kind of creative force or energizing spirit, but I don’t believe there’s some judgmental prick with a shitty sense of humor waiting for the last laugh. At least, I sure hope not.”

“That’s what Shelly said too.”

“Well, Shelly was weird, not dumb.”

“What if you’re wrong?” I asked, ignoring his sloppy characterization of Shelly.

“Then I’m fucked, but what if
they’re
wrong and by listening to them, I waste my life saying no to damn near everything that makes me feel good and alive? I need more
than men in black saying ‘Because I told you so,’ or some bullshit holy book full of more nonsense, contradictions, and God-sponsored cruelty than Homer could have imagined in a thousand epics. Nope. That shit’s not for me. I’m betting on the bird in this hand”—he actually grabbed his crotch—“and fucking every burning bush worth fucking. If you want to see Shelly again, take off that stopper and take a long hard look, because that’s all that’s left and all the reunion you’re ever going to get.”

I took the absence of an immediate and directed lightning strike as a point in Gordon’s favor, but I backed away a few paces just in case. (On the average, there are ninety fatalities each year in America due to lightning strikes.)

“What’s that?” Gordon said, surveying the hazy blue sky with both eyes and ears.

I mimicked his tilted head posture and sensory activation. “It sounds like …”

“A plane.” (You have a one-in-eleven-million chance of dying in a plane crash.) After he finished my sentence, he pointed over my shoulder toward the south and the mainland. “Let’s go.”

“We did just pass the airport,” I reasoned with him.

“I know, but it’s flying awfully low and circling without being in any hurry to land, at least not until it finds what it’s looking for, and I think that may be us. I don’t know; it just doesn’t feel right. We need to hurry. I can feel it.”

“Shelly’s dad?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

I felt Shelly swishing around inside of the urn as we ran.

I.
D
EATH IS HERE AND DEATH IS THERE
,
D
EATH IS BUSY EVERYWHERE
,
A
LL AROUND, WITHIN, BENEATH
,
A
BOVE IS DEATH—AND WE ARE DEATH
.

II.
D
EATH HAS SET HIS MARK AND SEAL
O
N ALL WE ARE AND ALL WE FEEL
,
O
N ALL WE KNOW AND ALL WE FEAR
,

III.
F
IRST OUR PLEASURES DIE—AND THEN
O
UR HOPES, AND THEN OUR FEARS—AND WHEN
T
HESE ARE DEAD, THE DEBT IS DUE
,
D
UST CLAIMS DUST—AND WE DIE TOO.

IV.
A
LL THINGS THAT WE LOVE AND CHERISH
,
L
IKE OURSELVES MUST FADE AND PERISH
;
S
UCH IS OUR RUDE MORTAL LOT—
L
OVE ITSELF WOULD, DID THEY NOT
.
—P
ERCY
B
YSSHE
S
HELLEY
, “D
EATH
”