David Bottoms

Look, above the creek, hummingbirds in the trumpet vine. Not too close, wait. See the green blurs stitching the leaves? Here at the edge of the millennium I don’t imagine you’d call them anything as archaic as angels. But aren’t they agents of a sort, and secret, dissolving and solidifying, spying from their constantly shifting perches of air, always nervous of us, risking only a stab in a bell of petals? Don’t look so stunned, lay your pack in the needles and catch a breath. I know, you thought you knew me, and now to hear me talk this way ... I’m glad I’ve stopped pretending to love people and the cities where people can’t love themselves. This is what the quiet accomplishes, and the water trusting the shadows to eventually peel back to the trees. Small wonder the angels are said to despise us. Still, without them how do we account for our meanness? Look at that, what else can promenade in the air? And how easily they’re alarmed, revving off into the mist.

We have all seen them circling pastures, have looked up from the mouth of a barn, a pine clearing, the fences of our own backyards, and have stood amazed by the one slow wing beat, the endless dihedral drift. But I had never seen so many so close, hundreds, every limb of the dead oak feathered black, and I cut the engine, let the river grab the jon boat and pull it toward the tree. The black leaves shined, the pink fruit blossomed red, ugly as a human heart. Then, as I passed under their dream, I saw for the first time its soft countenance, the raw fleshy jowls wrinkled and generous, like the faces of the very old who have grown to empathize with everything. And I drifted away from them, slow, on the pull of the river, reluctant, looking back at their roost, calling them what I'd never called them, what they are, those dwarfed transfiguring angels, who flock to the side of the poisoned fox, the mud turtle crushed on the shoulder of the road, who pray over the leaf-graves of the anonymous lost, with mercy enough to consume us all and give us wings.

On the rough diamond, the hand-cut field below the dog lot and barn, we rehearsed the strict technique of bunting. I watched from the infield, the mound, the backstop as your left hand climbed the bat, your legs and shoulders squared toward the pitcher. You could drop it like a seed down either base line. I admired your style, but not enough to take my eyes off the bank that served as our center-field fence. Years passed, three leagues of organized ball, no few lives. I could homer into the left-field lot of Carmichael Motors, and still you stressed the same technique, the crouch and spring, the lead arm absorbing just enough impact. That whole tiresome pitch about basics never changing, and I never learned what you were laying down. Like a hand brushed across the bill of a cap, let this be the sign I’m getting a grip on the sacrifice.

Twice through my bedroom window I’ve seen the horned owl drop from the oaks to panic the rabbit in my neighbor’s backyard. Last night he paced for an hour across the top of the cage, scrutinizing the can of water, the mound of pellets, turning his genius to the riddle of the wire, while under him the rabbit balled like a fat carnation in the wind. Both of the terriers yapped from their porch but the owl never flinched, pacing, clawing the wire, spreading wings like a gray cape, leaping, straining to lift the whole cage, and the cage rocking on its stilts, settling, and rocking again, until he settled with it, paused, and returned to a thought. And the rabbit, ignorant of mercy, curled on itself in that white drift of feathers? Wait, three years and I haven’t escaped the child I saw at Northside the night my daughter was born, a little brown sack of twigs curled under glass, eyes bulging, trembling in the monitors, and the nurses rolling the newborns out to nurse, and the shadows sweeping the nursery.

In the woods at the corner of our yards we hang the plywood squares, the Magic Marker images of pronghorn, panther, grizzly, whitetail, and step off the paces we use to measure our skill. Here in the soft light filtering through needles and cones, green shifting membrane of poplar, hickory, live oak, white skin of dogwood beginning to flower, we heft the blades, grind points on stone, gauge the fine balance between what is real and what is imagined, the knives bringing all the animals to life and killing them again as our throws bury steel deep in the heart of the quivering wood and the blades tremble back through their bones. In our own hearts we love what they might be, their shapes frozen in brush as though, suddenly, they had turned from wood and caught our scent drifting in a wind-shift. So we hunt this suburb, whet our aim to move among them in the little wilderness beyond the bricked-in beds of azaleas, sunflowers tied against tall sticks, the half-acres of razored grass, trellised vines, boxwoods manicured by wives.

Sometimes my old man’s hand flutters over his knee, flaps in crazy circles, and falls back to his leg. Sometimes it leans for an hour on that bony ledge. And sometimes when my old man tries to speak, his hand waggles in the air, chasing a word, then perches again on the bar of his walker or the arm of a chair. Sometimes when evening closes down his window and rain blackens into ice on the sill, it trembles like a sparrow in a storm. Then full dark falls, and it trembles less, and less, until it’s still.

When I sat for a moment in the bleachers of the lower-school gym to watch, one by one, the girls of my daughter’s kindergarten climb the fat rope hung over the Styrofoam pit, I remembered my sweet exasperated mother and those shifting faces of injury that followed me like an odor to ball games and practices, playgrounds of monkey bars and trampolines, those wilted children sprouting daily in that garden of trauma behind her eyes. Then Rachel’s turn, the smallest child in class, and up she went, legs twined on the rope, ponytail swinging, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five feet, the pink tendrils of her leotard climbing without effort until she’d cleared the lower rafters. She looked down, then up, hanging in that balance of pride and fear, then glancing toward the bleachers to see if I watched, let go her left hand, unworried by that boy with the waffled skull, stiff and turning blue under the belly of a horse, or the Christmas Eve skater on Cagle’s Lake, her face a black plum against the bottom of the ice.

Through the orange glow of taillights, I crossed the dirt road, entered the half-mile of darkness and owl screech, tangled briar and fallen trunk, followed the yellow beam of Billy Parker's flashlight down the slick needle-hill, half crawling, half sliding and kicking for footholds, tearing up whole handfuls of scrub brush and leaf mold until I jumped the mud bank, walked the ankle-deep creek, the last patch of pine, the gully, and knelt at the highway stretching in front of Billy Parker's house, spotted the black Chevy Camaro parked under a maple not fifty feet from the window where Billy Parker rocked in and out of view, studying in the bad light of a table lamp the fine print of his Allstate policy. I cut the flashlight, checked up and down the highway. Behind me the screech growing distant, fading into woods, but coming on a network of tree frogs signaling along the creek. Only that, and the quiet of my heels coming down on asphalt as I crossed the two-lane and stood at the weedy edge of Billy Parker's yard, stood in the lamp glare of the living room where plans were being made to make me rich and thought of a boat and Johnson outboard, of all the lures on a K-Mart wall, of reels and graphite rods, coolers of beer, weedy banks of dark fishy rivers, and of Billy Parker rocking in his chair, studying his coverage, his bank account, his layoff at Lockheed, his wife laboring in the maternity ward of the Cobb General Hospital. For all of this, I crouched in the shadow of fender and maple, popped the door on the Camaro, and found in the faint house-light drifting through the passenger's window the stripped wires hanging below the dash. I took the driver's seat, kicked the clutch, then eased again as I remembered the glove box and the pint of Seagram's Billy Parker had not broken the seal on. Like an alarm the tree frogs went off in the woods. I drank until they hushed and I could hear through cricket chatter the rockers on Billy Parker's chair grinding ridges into his living room floor, worry working on him like hard time. Then a wind working in river grass, a red current slicing around stumps and river snags, a boat-drift pulling against an anchor as I swayed in the seat of the black Camaro, grappled for the wires hanging in darkness between my knees, saw through the tinted windshield by a sudden white moon rolling out of the clouds, a riverbank two counties away, a place to jump and roll on the soft shoulder of the gravel road, a truck in a thicket a half-mile downstream.

1 Lord, what are the sins I have tried to leave behind me? The bad checks, the workless days, the scotch bottles thrown across the fence and into the woods, the cruelty of silence, the cruelty of lies, the jealousy, the indifference? What are these on the scale of sin or failure that they should follow me through the streets of Columbus, the moon-streaked fields between Benevolence and Cuthbert where dwarfed cotton sparkles like pearls on the shoulders of the road. What are these that they should find me half-lost, sick and sleepless behind the wheel of this U-Haul truck parked in a field on Georgia 45 a few miles north of Damascus, some makeshift rest stop for eighteen wheelers where the long white arms of oaks slap across trailers and headlights glare all night through a wall of pines? 2 What was I thinking, Lord? That for once I'd be in the driver's seat, a firm grip on direction? So the jon boat muscled up the ramp, the Johnson outboard, the bent frame of the wrecked Harley chained for so long to the back fence, the scarred desk, the bookcases and books, the mattress and box springs, a broken turntable, a Pioneer amp, a pair of three-way speakers, everything mine I intended to keep. Everything else abandon. But on the road from one state to another, what is left behind nags back through the distance, a last word rising to a scream, a salad bowl shattering against a kitchen cabinet, china barbs spiking my heel, blood trailed across the cream linoleum like the bedsheet that morning long ago just before I watched the future miscarried. Jesus, could the irony be that suffering forms a stronger bond than love? 3 Now the sun streaks the windshield with yellow and orange, heavy beads of light drawing highways in the dew-cover. I roll down the window and breathe the pine-air, the after-scent of rain, and the far-off smell of asphalt and diesel fumes. But mostly pine and rain as though the world really could be clean again. Somewhere behind me, miles behind me on a two-lane that streaks across west Georgia, light is falling through the windows of my half-empty house. Lord, why am I thinking about this? And why should I care so long after everything has fallen to pain that the woman sleeping there should be sleeping alone? Could I be just another sinner who needs to be blinded before he can see? Lord, is it possible to fall toward grace? Could I be moved to believe in new beginnings? Could I be moved?

Under the fire escape, crouched, one knee in cinders, I pulled the ball-peen hammer from my belt, cracked a square of window pane, the gummed latch, and swung the window, crawled through that stone hole into the boiler room of Canton Elementary School, once Canton High, where my father served three extra years as star halfback and sprinter. Behind a flashlight’s cane of light, I climbed a staircase almost a ladder and found a door. On the second nudge of my shoulder, it broke into a hallway dark as history, at whose end lay the classroom I had studied over and over in the deep obsession of memory. I swept that room with my light—an empty blackboard, a metal table, a half-globe lying on the floor like a punctured basketball—then followed that beam across the rows of desks, the various catalogs of lovers, the lists of all those who would and would not do what, until it stopped on the corner desk of the back row, and I saw again, after many years the name of my father, my name, carved deep into the oak top. To gauge the depth I ran my finger across that scar, and wondered at the dreams he must have lived as his eyes ran back and forth from the cinder yard below the window to the empty practice field to the blade of his pocket knife etching carefully the long, angular lines of his name, the dreams he must have laid out one behind another like yard lines, in the dull, pre-practice afternoons of geography and civics, before he ever dreamed of Savo Sound or Guadalcanal. In honor of dreams I sank to my knees on the smooth, oiled floor, and stood my flashlight on its end. Half the yellow circle lit the underedge of the desk, the other threw a half-moon on the ceiling, and in that split light I tapped the hammer easy up the overhang of the desk top. Nothing gave but the walls’ sharp echo, so I swung again, and again harder, and harder still in half anger rising to anger at the stubborn joint, losing all fear of my first crime against the city, the county, the state, whatever government claimed dominion, until I had hammered up in the ringing dark a salvo of crossfire, and on a frantic recoil glanced the flashlight, the classroom spinning black as a coma. I’ve often pictured the face of the teacher whose student first pointed to that topless desk, the shock of a slow hand rising from the back row, their eyes meeting over the question of absence. I’ve wondered too if some low authority of the system discovered that shattered window, and finding no typewriters, no business machines, no audiovisual gear missing, failed to account for it, so let it pass as minor vandalism. I’ve heard nothing. And rarely do I fret when I see that oak scar leaning against my basement wall, though I wonder what it means to own my father’s name.