The light moves us through our days, it rises and falls over each one like a slow heartbeat. Kids, filled with energy and life, push their way forward through the brightness. Jay and I bicycle through the middle of a day full of summer heat, aspiring for experience, living in the rhythm.
We joke as we bicycle by the cemetery, eleven-year-olds laughing, passing the grassy covered tombstones, feeling the hot wind up from the valley, as we tear around the curving downhill corner towards the shallow summer river. Nothing to be scared about. In the graveyard’s winter twilight, we’d talk each other into terrified. But not today. I even slow down to read some of the tombstone names and dates. We tear around the last few potholes, coast to the bridge, and rest our bikes against the wooden edge, then without a word, just knowing, we walk together down to the water, take off our clothes and swim.
Above us, a car or two goes by, but it’s never busy along the valley, we forget time and place and worship the water, up to our necks splashing, I push myself to the sandy bottom, the current carries me to the cool rest there, I open my eyes and see green swirling, then I curve up again and surface.
If there was nobody in the world but me, in the womb at the bottom of the river, I would want to stay. But there’s so much to figure out, to explore, to reach and make real. Now, a movement forward, the river tunnel forces me up and away, curving through the barrier between water and sky. There’s the good, and there’s the bad, and I am to understand both.
**
Up on the bridge, two tall, older boys lean. One has an oblong head, and his hair falls forward, he says “What are you doing on our river?” the other is square faced and clown smiling, he spits and the spit falls to the water.
I know these guys, sort of, Calvin and Chuck LaLeffe, guys always missing a lot of school, their Dad limping out of the house, then lunging forward with his long black cane, yelling at a small stocky woman, likely Mrs. Laleffe but nobody knows for sure. The LaLeffes’ brother Martin is in my grade and once I saw him open his lunch, two pieces of bread with a shine of margarine between.
Jay and I swim and push for the shore, as the two bullies laugh, “Don’t you know people can see you?” They lift their heads, jump down from the railing and grab hold of our bicycles in a show of possession, move them to the top of the path, and block our way. “We found some new wheels!” grins the oblong headed one. He studies Jay very closely.
“Where you from, black boy?”
“I’m not black,” Jay says.
Jay’s been a friend a long time, it seems, but for a child time is ambiguous. Last night can seem a year away from today, depending on what happens. All that time, I never knew Jay was any different, no more than the usual factors that pass for difference, but the way the bridge boy talks I know they’ve singled him out….for an uncommon reason. Something they perceive. And up til this time, it was unclear to me what this reason was. It’s not because he’s black – he’s not – he’s a kinda brownish colour…. they watch him from up atop the path as he turns away from them, leans from the white stone lined riverbank, falls back into the slow-moving water and ducks his head under.
**
The tallest bully boy has something funny about his mouth, it’s hanging sideways. His friend keeps grinning, he tilts his head to one side and blows snot water out of one nostril, says to Jay “You look black to me.”
“Those are our bikes,” I shout.
The two boys laugh, they mimic “Those are our bikes!”
Jay stands up to his waist in the current, the droop mouthed boy lets my bike drop, it slides partway down the path.
“We’re gonna spank you up.”
I know some kids like like to show top dog, what I wonder is why they pick on Jay. And if I wasn’t so scared, I’d hit them with a rock. That thought kind of just flies by without effect, at first. This Calvin is no cemetery ghost, he’s a living individual who wants to cause trouble, to push the day towards an enjoyable ending, which for him seems to mean hurting what is weaker.
I step out of Calvin’s way, he lunges by, his arm shoves and I lurch to one side, almost fall but for my hand out to stop. The square faced Chuck ignores me, both the boys grab J. who’s trying to run through the water. They dunk him several times “Gonna clean the dirt off you!”
I right myself, sit up, my pants half on. Jay’s runs out at the other side of the river. He picks up a rock.
“He’s really mad” laughs Chuck, and Calvin yells as if noise gives them even more power, but then Jay throws the rock and it just misses. Jay plunges his hand down, scoops another stone, one of an orangey red, shiny in the light. Everything happens in flashes, in beats of action, one moment pixilating off another.
“He’s a pretty slippery one!” Chuck giggles, and Jay runs into the river and pushes him backwards. Chuck loses his ground in the current, staggers a bit and falls back, swimming with the current. He stands and wades to the shore as Calvin scoops some sand and throws it half-heartedly in Jay’s direction.
Jay stands naked on the far bank as his two assailants move back up the hill, run right by me, wet faced and laughing, holding Jay’s pants. Jay regards me from the far side, standing, pointing wildly, yelling “get them!”
I think of myself sliding under the river water, not able to surface…life and light held back by a heavy hand….but I pick up that rock I’ve been looking at and toss it towards Chuck and Calvin, it bounces, misses, they glance, then laugh back “you can’t even throw!”
They give our bikes a couple of kicks, lope on down the road. They throw Jay’s pants in the ditch, and I go and retrieve them.
Jay and I pull our pants and shirts on, mount our bikes, and talk of revenge and what we’d like to do to those boys. My hands shake, I can barely hold onto the handlebars. Shame runs through my head, anger at my missed rock throw. Beside us the high corn fields go by under the summer sun. Jay swears as he rides, doesn’t talk to me, muttering to himself, pedalling furiously along the straight road, heading for the shadows of the mountain ahead… and then I shout towards him, ask the question I’ve been wanting to ask for months and now it runs through my head with an unstoppable urgency “How come you’re a different colour from your mom and your brother and sisters?”
He turns around, says nothing, and keeps riding. I shout it again. We ride our bikes in silence for a long time. Jay keeps his face forward, so I can’t see it, and stops at the top of the big hill overlooking the valley.
“Step on it!” he yells, and we ride down the other side screaming as loud as we can.
**
A few weeks later, in early September, I’m riding the school bus and there’s a skinny boy at the back who never talks, his face features heavy black eyebrows and a shy grin, he’s always grinning … he doesn’t talk even when spoken to….and a tall boy on the bus laughs, tells everyone within earshot “Yeah, Archie here was swimming by the bridge and two guys threw his bike in the water,” and this quiet Archie guy looks down and away, and the tall boy continues laughing “the current took it down under a logjam.”
I move, sit in the seat in front of Archie.
“Where’s your bike?” the kids taunt. “Cat got your tongue?”
I look at Archie turning away and tell him “Don’t listen to them. It doesn’t matter.”
He keeps staring out the window, the side of his face pressed against the glass.
I didn’t understand before, how this happens, how we join the crowd, or do not, how we select our allies, and our enemies, but I’m choosing right now, on this school bus, as I tell Archie one more time “Don’t listen to them.”
In life we travel forward, sun energy pulses every brilliant, linked day, we ride into the world, our actions and reflections on its surface and in its undertow forms what we hold inside, and what we value. For the gain or for the loss.
***
Looking for your next book to read? Consider this…
Women, the exhilarating novella by Chloe Caldwell, is being reissued just in time to become your steamy summer read. The Los Angeles Review of books calls Caldwell “One of the most endearing and exciting writers of a generation.” Cheryl Strayed says ‘Her prose has a reckless beauty that feels to me like magic.” With a new afterward by the author, this reissue is one not to be missed.
***
Our friends at Corporeal Writing continue to offer some of the best programming for writers, thinkers, humans. This summer they are offering Midsummer Nights Film Club: What Movies Teach Us About Narrative. Great films and a sliding scale to allow everyone the opportunity to participate. The conversation will be stellar! Tell them we sent you!
