Post #4 - The Lost Story

Preparation is everything.  Ask any Scout (boy or girl), they'll tell you.  Before you decide to put up all of your old writing (and promise to do so), you need to locate it.  Because sometimes you switch computers or you throw out all of your old floppy disks (once you buy a newer computer that doesn't use floppy disks), and before you know it things have gone missing.

Which is not to say that anything lost cannot be recovered.  Just with a lot more effort than you'd like, that's for damn sure.  Anyway, long story short: I had a piece of short fiction published in the Spring 1993 edition of Poetry WLU (from the folks at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario - it appears the publication no longer exists, but they do continue the tradition as a student group).  It never migrated onto my current memory stick, so I had to: 

Scan the 3-page story on the computer in the basement, which is attached to the copier/printer/scanner.

1. Email the scanned .pdf to myself so I could manipulate it on my laptop.
2. Use MS Paint to copy into a .jpg file, resize and post to the blog.

Always transfer your data to new media when you change format.  That's what I'm trying to say. 

And be prepared.

* * *

The sound of flight

i'm talking to a friend at my locker after school; he mentions a drifter, a stumpy man with a sugar sack full of his things, just passing through town. The image is clear to me, of a man ready for the road, crossing the goldenrod field. This time he would be approaching. this time he wouldn't be my father and he wouldn't be leaving and i wouldn't be crying. i picture a single bird on a mustard—coloured sky, careening toward this spot, coming to land where i'd be standing; i'd be standing in the field near the crab-apple tree looking for garter snakes or just beating hell out of milkweed pods.

'what you doin’ out here?' he’d ask, putting me off. i'd imagined the question placed more gently on his tongue. his gaze would travel the length of my body, like a window shopper's.

i'd have answers, clever comebacks, but, not willing to waste a single one, i’d reply 'nothin.’ his eyes would fall to the scuffed toes of his shoes peeking from a curtain of frayed pant cuff. 'where are ya from? i'd catch him off guard. ’ain't ya got a home?’: if i had him here i’d want an answer to that question. it'd be a clue, a key to other stories. i'd watch his cautious eye, not unlike other eyes above a twitchy mouth that let out some weak lies about having to go away, for everybody’s good.  the mouth would squirm, he'd be embarrassed. maybe i'd feel bad, maybe i'd try to make up a story for the drifter in the silence. he wouldn’t look like an out-of-work cowboy, or a farmer who fell on bad times. no, his kind of dirty look would be hard to place. i'd watch those careful eyes of his feel their way along the unfamiliar horizon like a pair of shaky hands; dad’s brother, uncle Frank hands after he dried out. mom says Frank got the DTs bad when he didn't drink. those eyes would still be making slow progress when i’d recognize him for what he was: a full-time drifter, a man who took to the road not to get somewhere, but to get away from where he was.  a man who had to keep moving, a yo-yo on a very long string. he might come back, but he never stays put.

he wouldn’t be able to answer my questions (i wouldn’t cry this time — he’d just be a stranger, a drifter -- but i'd know what to expect next); he’d have to heft his sack again and turn to walk away. 'see ya round, kid.’ people are like that when they don’t have the right answers.

so now i really am standing in the goldenrod field with my weed-smacking stick when i think up this scenario, one i've played out before, like some sort of revenge, always with the same ending. this field is going to be townhouses some day. they’ll face my house when they're built – i live across the road in the house with the yellow aluminum siding and the brick that don’t quite match. i live in that very house with my mom, just the two of us since dad left with the good silver and my college money. have to get out, he said.

i cross the street and walk up the lawn. from the front step, the houses on our side of the street seem lonely facing the empty field that runs half a mile back before the bush starts. they seem to be looking across that field, looking after someone that left or waiting patiently for someone to return. i walk into the house and pause in the front hall: mom’s in the basement – i hear her voice singing off-key ("Darling, it's incredible / that someone so unforgettable / thinks that i’m unforgettable, / too."), amidst the banging of nails into wood. band, band, "unfor-" bang, bang — she's building the bird feeders and mailboxes that pull in a little extra money. she’s drinking beer from a can and hammering together the odds and ends of lumber we find on building sites so i can have gym shoes and the occasional movie. i don’t know why people buy her lop-sided feeders (pity, maybe), but they do.  some of the more generous households sport three or four. the hammering stops for a moment: clang — the hammer hits the floor. 'ssshhhit!' her hiss steams up between the floorboards. she picks it up, pounds twice, three times with little force and then a long silence — no singing, just the hammer limp in her hand, and a sobbing i can only imagine because she has always tried to keep it private. it’s sometimes too much for her — forty hours ringing in groceries at Calbeck's, twenty more a week in the basement with hammer and saw. cooking and cleaning, too, when she’s up to it. i help out, but not enough. i can never be enough, and dad not here.

there's a pan of congealing eggs left on the stove for me. i fumble around in the dark cupboards -- it' s nearing sundown, shadows skulking into the corners of everything, but i don’t turn on a light -- i manage to find one freckled banana. in my other hand i take a glass of koolaid with some of mom’s vodka in it and quietly climb the stairs to my room, passing the basement door without breathing. in my room I place the banana and the glass on the dresser and search under my bed for my drawing book. here it is, a stub pencil from the miniature golf course stuck between the middle pages. it’s just a mildew green notebook that i never wrote in. i down the spiked koolaid and eat around the mushy parts of the banana. dinner finished, i climb out the window onto the porch roof with my book and pencil. this is where i draw.

i say draw; i mean try to. i just do it because i like it and i don't think so much when' i'm doing it. the sun is sinking fast, sliding out of sight behind the tree line. i'll have to draw by moonlight with a little help from the streetlights. i decide to draw the gull i saw above the field today; it caught my eye, a white 'V' circling on a shiny, new-looking afternoon sky, a gird going nowhere and not landing. it’s hard to get it right with a lead pencil on lined paper. the hardest part is the sound. The gull was not the only thing on that sky. to get it right i need the sound of a plane flying at the same time. the sputter of the plane didn't fit with the gull’s gliding, but it was there. i have to draw the sound. i don't know how. i don't know who to ask.

mom won’t know. i’m sitting here with the street slowly drowning in the night, the streetlights like fireflies on the watery surface, and i imagine the drifter would know. mom says he drew, but he's not here. i could talk to the drifter; he might tell me.

i conjure him up again, just as he’d be turning away from me. i'd call to him, make him stop. 'uh, excuse me.' he’d turn, eyes still trying to look away. if he’d look at me i'd know those eyes, i'd know the places he’d seen, the trains, the people.

i'd know the answer to my question; i'd know who he was and where he came from.

'what?' his tone is abrupt, a tone i know from a harsh goodbye. ('i gotta get out. it’s for the best.') his eyes would approach mine, cautious, coming at me on a strange circular path; his eyes would meet mine for a second. a second too long. I know those eyes and where they came from now, what they left behind. (the drifter runs away from things, not towards them.) i'd like to ask him how he feels about the people he abandoned, ask if being alone on the road makes up for the lives left hanging. the eyes have it. they show the clattering whirr of a small twin-engine Cessna out for an afternoon flight; a jaunt over the countryside, headed no place in particular. i'd like to ask the wandering hero how he' d draw the sound of a plane, but he only hears his own footsteps going away, he only sees the directionless spiral of a gull, spiralling inside his eyes, around a blurring centre. he wouldn't draw a sound. he’d draw the gull on a cold, empty sky. he’d be my father. he’d never answer, never come home.

i learn the key is to draw things as you know them. my father wouldn't draw a sound, he’d leave the ugly mechanical noise out of the gull's lonely dream.

for that reason, and because i have his eyes, i put the plane's grating hum in a bottom corner, write it into the picture. even on a sky scarred with blue lines, the gull's twisting looks aimless. never landing; a wobbling circling. the pounding of my mother’s hammer is the pulse of this house; i can hear it from the porch roof like feeling the blood rushing through my own ears. she is building more bird feeders, shelters, trying to create a centre. the mute bird on the page circles away, a broken gyroscope on the night’ s string. circling, circling away in a lying silence.