Last Summer of Childhood

I am three-years-old and have a 104-degree fever burning off my hearing but it will be a year or so after I kill my mommy before anyone notices. Mommy is making me take an ice cube bath. She calls the doctor once or twice a week about stuff but he don’t listen to her no more. He just tells her I’ll be fine, to fill the tub with ice and plop me in till I cool off. So that’s how Daddy finds us, me all over blue and Mommy on her knees crying next to the toilet. Daddy takes one look at me then we are running every light and sign on the way to the hospital but the more scary thing is how Daddy is yelling at Mommy.  He says the doctor don’t believe her on the count of her being a ‘damn hipe-no-driac’ or something. He’s yelling is so loud I can barely hear my mommy crying. At the hospital I tell Daddy it hurts when he squeezes me, so he lets go a little bit but mostly he just rocks back and forth saying he’s sorry over and over. Daddy is crying a little and that is the scariest thing yet. Later I wake up and everyone sounds far away and under water, like those old people from Charlie Brown. Like I said, it’s gonna be a while before anyone figures out I can’t hear good.  By then it’s gonna be all the scars and stitches that people notice mostly.

I am like five and we go ridin’ on the motorcycle with my mama and daddy all the time.  I get to sit on the gas tank and put my hands on the handle bars. I like yelling “Look daddy, I’m driving!” This time we are going to San Isidro and this dumb old lady turns right in front of us. My daddy is looking at some old car on the side of the road so he doesn’t see her. I don’t think five-year-olds understand they aren’t in control even when their grubby little hands are on the handle bar. I panic thinking I should do something, anything, but instead I freeze up like a scared little baby so we crash. I smell the peanut like smell of oil as the forks crumple on her fender. I feel the shove as the bike spit us out over her hood and I see the face of the mean old lady, full of lines at pinched lips and dull eyes, it’s a teacher’s face. In the jumble I catch sight of Mommy as she flies over me, reaching for me. I hear the oddly musical twang of the barbwire when they are plucked loose of the fence posts as her body is ensnared in them. They sound like nothing so much as uncle Joe’s banjo before he tunes it. So hateful that sound.

Now I’m sitting on the side of the road, next to someone with nice hands. They are stroking my forehead and hair. I am asking for water and my mommy. I can’t see my mommy on the count of that person is sitting between me and my mommy. Days later I am in the hospital room where I am whole up wrapped like a mummy from all the skin grafts when the doctors and nurses come silently filing in looking like nothing so much as an absurdly tall version of Missus Garza’s class when she walks us to the library or lunch room.  They all bunch up in our room and there is some talking but I don’t really understand it so I asks my daddy what it’s about. He says they are saying Mom went to see Jesus and can’t come home with us no more but I can’t cotton to it. I don’t think five-year-olds understand death either. Not really, not till much later.  When in a moment of forgetting they come racing into the kitchen with a skint up knee looking for cool wash cloth and a warm hug and instead are assaulted by a dark, hollow room. My dad does his best but he isn’t Mommy and he works in Kuwait so he had to quit to take care of me on count that I killed my mommy.

In second grade my dad meets the nicest lady in the world. She has a daughter my age and her daughter doesn’t like me much.  So that isn’t great but the nice lady likes me and that is just about the neatest thing ever. Her daughter is pretty and popular too, but I’m not, not with all the scars and angry red stitches that can’t quite heal; no one talks to me but to run up jeering, “Hey melted man, it’s the melted man!” before tearing off, back across the playground, to the other kids with their cheers and laughter of welcome. One day the nice lady asks me if she can be my new mommy and I want to scream yes but instead I just start crying like the little baby I am. She hugs me and says I can cry as long as I need to ‘cuz she isn’t going anywhere. I’m getting another mommy! So stupidly I cry even more hard.

A few weeks later my new mommy shows me some books with this girl holding a magnifying glass on the cover and says she liked to read them when she was little. I tell her I can’t read none. She says that is okay because she is going to show me how. She reads the whole book with me that week, and how I hate stopping to eat or go potty or to bed!  When she opens the covers of the book to read, she also opens the door to a world where I’m not a broken boy, I am not a school yard joke. When she reads, I’m not scared. When we finish, I ask her to read it again, but instead she just points to the first word. She shows me what the letters sound like, what they feel like, what they taste like. I want so hard to make her happy and I try so hard but I am just dumb like they say. In the end I get out a whole line and she says that’s enough for today, but later I steal the book to stare blankly at the black ink on the white page till I want to rip all the book apart. The next day, she shows me the next line. So it goes for the rest of the summer. My sister doesn’t have no trouble reading. I don’t know if it is about beating my sister or making sure my new mommy doesn’t leave me or maybe I just really do want to know if Nancy Drew ever figures out who stole that necklace, but when I start school next year I can read on my own. It’s around about this time they figure out about my hearing loss. Did you know it’s called a Frisbee, not a Crisbee? ‘Cuz I didn’t.

In fourth grade I am a voracious reader of anything that is within my grasp; cereal boxes (collect 45 box tops and send them in for a secret decoder), tax papers (combine fields 4A and 21F and enter on line 35), even shampoo bottles (…repeat as necessary). Even when I am playing hide and seek I’m running around with a book so I can read while waiting for others to find me. As it turns out I need the book because I’m such a good hider. I figure I must be as no one ever seems to find me. Mostly I don’t have to worry about it too much as I don’t get picked for much when the kids are told to go play. It’s just easier to live out my time in a book then deal with others. When school finally lets out that summer, I take the same old meandering route home though back alleys. Alleys are good because I don’t have to dodge traffic or bullies while I read books. Mostly nonfiction by now. Being the son, grandson, and great-grandson of preachers, I’m not allowed to read any book that glorifies smart mouthed, disobedient kids who sass their parents (which is most of them). Nor can I read any book where the parents or adult figures are portrayed as dumber than the children (which is the rest of them). Spooky, supernatural paranormal goings on in book form? Right out, thank you very much and you knew better than to ask. Which is true.

I know better than to ask when on the first day of summer break between fourth and fifth grade I find just such a book while cutting down a back alley on the way home. Peeking out of a half shredded Hefty garbage bag was the corner of a familiar shape. Some desperate night critter must have torn at the sack hoping for a tasty morsel but only found dry pages instead. After surreptitiously glancing around in a manner I imagine would have done James Bond proud, I gently enlarge the tear to see what is on offer. The very top book is The Shining by Stephen King. I pull it free and it seems to burn my fingertips in a way that isn’t wholly the result of the baking South Texas sun. After a moment I drop both The Shining and my current book to the ground.

Oh bother, guess if I’m going to be such a butter fingers, I should just put my book in my bag and if the other one goes in too, well, who can think straight in this blast furnace of a state. I saunter to the end of the alley way, again very Bond like. I make the turn then my cool breaks; I run like gangbusters for the safety of the public restrooms in Archer Park. If anyone comes in demanding I return the book, I will just leave it on the floor of the bathroom and say it isn’t mine. Yeah, that will work. In retrospect taking a book from a pile that had been set out next a trash can doesn’t constitute grand larceny on my part, but then soon-to-be fifth graders aren’t well known for their reasoning capacities.

I sit in a stall listening to my thudding heart for what seems like hours while looking at the half-torn cover. I savor the slowly cooling heat of it as it rests on my palms. I wonder if it truly is just the cooling off or is its presence slowly inoculating me to objections of my upbringing and conscience. The whole walk home I war with myself over what I have done. I know I am not supposed to read something like this but I justify it saying until I start, I am not disobeying my parents. I want so much to be a good son; I know I ruined my dad’s life and while I love my new mommy, I know it would be easier for her if I could be more like my sister. Still, when I get home, I stuff it in a corner of a treehouse I haven’t played in for years and studiously don’t think about it. I don’t think about it at dinner. I don’t think about in the shower. I am still not thinking about it while I toss in bed that evening.

The next morning, I decide I will take the book back. As I walk it occurs to me that I can’t get into much danger if I just read the first page. Inside is a little voice telling me that I know better. I read the page anyway. Then I close it and walk on. Pretty soon I am sitting under an overpass wedged up in the corner were the older boys sometimes come to look at nudie magazines. It seems right, that I should be indulging in so illicit a thing here among the graffitied declarations of undying love from three-week long relationships and other things best left unnoticed. I read for three hours until with a start I notice a particularly brave rat has come to investigate my presence. I decide I need to find another place toot sweet and while Archer Park doesn’t offer much in the way of shade it is0 better than getting rabies from some sewer rat!

This becomes my new normal, I sit on the bench within ear shot of the municipal pool where the older boys rule the deep end and try to peak down the bikinis of the older girls and splash them when they get caught all to the tittering of them both. My mom asks why I am away from home so much, she asks if I even read that book I wanted her to pick up from the library? I mumble something about making new friends. I think she is just happy that I’m ‘making an effort’. The only thing I’m making an effort at is understanding how this book is so much more real than any other. I wonder at the simple turn of a phrase and how it feels in my mouth and mind. I wonder that the pace of action is controlled as much by the syllable count as it is by the verbs. I am scared that when I set the book aside for a moment my hand idly reaches for it unbidden. I sneak it into the house and sleep with it like it is a security blanket. I feel myself changing, thinking new thoughts. I put off eating to read. I put off chores to read. I wonder if what the more zealous members of my grandfather’s church say is true, maybe King’s books are inspired by demons. I am lying to my family, keeping my obsession a secret but I’m not sure if it is to avoid getting in trouble or because I am frightened by this compulsive craving. All so I can read these greedy little words that seem to devour me as much as I devour them. Each sentence wraps its composition around me like ethereal tendrils. I think I might be hurting myself; it is the itch I’ve scratched raw and scratch still. I know I will hurt my family if (when, no if, just when) they find out. All this I know while sinking ever deeper into each character until I have become them. I am the father who wants desperately to do right but too weak to overcome addictions. I am the mother trapped by the willful blindness of past decisions. But mostly I am Danny. I am a small, scared little boy with an overly active imagination confronting things wildly bigger and more powerful than he. Things whispering of peace and oblivion. This is when it happens.  My fear is absolute, my belief is visceral. My experience is transcendent. I’m not the reader anymore.

Breathing heavily, I slam the book shut. “It’s only a book, it’s only a book”, the mantra I chant to the timing of a slamming heart. I am between worlds. In one I sit only peripherally aware that my legs are full of pin and needles from the hours long trance. In another I stand on a dark precipice. Black ink, white page, misplaced conscience; how can this be happening? The turmoil in me is as real as the chill making my hair stand on end despite sweltering Texas sun. Slowly it dawns on me that I haven’t burst into flames for reading this book. The realization births something new and horrendous.

Why have I been denied this? Why have I been locked into the pastel worlds of Ramona, Narnia, and Charlette’s Web when here is one so much more vivid and vital to explore! The exasperation swells, rebounding on itself. It courses up my chest and throat, the demonic inspired self-righteousness that is rage!  Rage is good, rage doesn’t hide. I can do something with rage! Not like fear. I know fear. I know loss. All those nights listening to a slumbering house and asking why didn’t I save my mommy? Why can’t I have friends like my sister? Why can’t I be normal? The nightly lamentations I cried out to the dark. From this red mist, something answers back.

“Surely if you eat this apple, you will not die…” 

The whisper so soft and alien it could be the rustle of long dead leaves in a lethargic August breeze; it is a thunderous command echoing up from the yawning maw within me. In a half-realized moment of willfulness, I have stepped outside the protective hedge offered by a mother and father knowing best; I have separated “me” from “us”. Right or wrong, I have reached for the forbidden fruit, I can never return to the garden.

That was forty-five years ago.  I have walked hand in hand with authors whose ethos I despise and works I love. They have sometimes led me down dark and difficult paths, the wanderings of which have left well-worn trails I can trace like growth rings of a soul. Yet when I thing of that moment a life time ago, I am overcome with the sheer otherness of it. It is a moment I live still. 

I am a little boy whose eyes won’t focus as a sad fullness of unexplored knowing settles and takes root.

“Oh,” sighs a soft little voice before an infinitely larger world.