She said I shouldn’t talk about it and that people would think I was off my rocker. They’d never believe me anyway, she said, since most people don’t believe in all that past life stuff. But I have to tell you about my wacky seventh birthday, when we drove up there and how I remembered it all—pulling it out of the mist—and the freaky, embarrassing craziness that happened after. It’s too weird to live through and have to shove back into some shadowy place in my brain and pretend it never happened.
They were arguing in grandmother’s bedroom. I pulled my bi-winged Fokker off and sailed it around the dining table, doing loops and stalls, and landed it on the linen dresser. I opened the deep top drawer of family pictures, mother’s face sitting right there on top, her grey eyes reflecting against pale mountains like dinosaur backs in blue haze. There were pictures of people I didn’t remember—great aunts, distant cousins. Grandfather sat in his triple-winged Sopwith in a foggy field. People stood on or dangled from wings of planes he piloted over checkered patches of purple countryside. Grandfather and I loved airplanes.
I slid a picture out, the first shadow I noticed was mother’s. She was holding a camera, photographing a tall, bearded man. It was her shadow in the picture, all right. The man was leaning against a red Ford pickup at the corner of a white clapboard house, tin barn roofs back sloping at a wood’s edge. A streetlight hooked over the yard like some long-beaked bird.
It was one of those places you recognize, but don’t remember where it was or when you were there. I recognized his pale, blue eyes. They were like mine; he was pigeon-eyed, even, like I am.
Between his dangling arms and mother’s shadow another figure lay in the grass like a statue. A face lifted from the shadow, the shape of her head, something familiar in the shoulders, the way her head was set. The way her chin was stuck up like she was the queen of something. I got this strange, bothered feeling. There was something about her.
Sliding the drawer out, I went through it looking for a real picture of her, digging through everything, separating some of mother from the rest, tossing them in piles, emptying the drawer. There was nothing of the woman in it, no snapshots of the house even, nor the bearded man. The only photo of the other woman was just that weird shadow. I picked up a couple that I’d put aside, and when it wasn’t there, I got nervous. I kept thumbing through them as I remembered the woman’s face, scowling or smirking at me. I needed to see it again. I was sorting through them. There were only so many pictures. It had to be here, I just had it in my hand; her face kept gnawing at me l a haunting memory.
I pushed pictures I’d looked at on the floor and was shuffling them in handfuls on the dresser top, stepping on them, scattering them. I crawled on the carpet, spreading them like a patch quilt. What was it? I thought. A photograph of a man and some shadows?
Then I was staring in the big dresser mirror with this feeling like I was being watched; hypnotized, staring at myself, thinking: who was she? Go ahead, remember her.
I felt something brush against me and the back of my neck prickling. It was in the room with me: this different set of things. That woman’s face, the streetlight in the yard, the barns, the house all of it coming into focus behind some invisible veil, memories you feel, as if you’re starting to relive them. I shifted and something crackled under my foot. I pulled the picture from under my left foot heel, staring at it a long time in a kind of breathless daze, like I was frozen between here and another time. When was it? I wondered, listening to mother’s muffled voice down the hall and the loud, slow tick from the living room clock.
*
I lay on the backseat, turning against clouds and trees, watching mother’s knotted finger on the steering wheel. I pulled up; we were flying along fence rows, farmhouses sliding down into hollows and pastures. Red cows stood motionless on hillsides around clusters of trees.
“Where we going?” I asked.
“Where we can’t be bothered the rest of the day. You’ll like it up here, don’t worry.” She inhaled, shoulders lifting. “I used to could breathe, Squash, believe that?”
“If you didn’t, you’re dead.”
“Oh, is that what it is?”
I watched wires rise, spread and flow, feeling the road roll as I worked the plane’s landing gear from my back on the floor mat. I knew where we weren’t from the billboard less trees, sunlight flashing along corridors of sky. I was half-asleep listening to the car droning, then felt like I was hanging, and woke in the shadows of rocks, looking down cliffs into sun-whitened trees, her hand feeling me over the seat.
“You with me?”
“Where are we?”
“Up here. Look at this, will you?”
In stretched S’s, road lines coiled under us like grey strings. Mountains jutted around us in flat-bottomed clouds.
“Where we going?”
“You’ll see.”
We were climbing under crows cawing and circling. A river wormed in the shadow of the mountain we were trudging up. A pale woman studied us from her yard of rusted cars and clay pots, sheets blowing in the wind, a baby clawing her freckled face as she stared us by. I lay on the seat watching mother’s hair feathering against wrinkled trees and rock walls. Next to us a vulture was tipping and drifting. I tuned and played with the window crack, opened it; my Fokker plane propeller wheeled down the car metal. Below us, a lake was sun-blinding behind peaks; there was a V-shaped boat trail in it, and then the woman’s house appeared under us, small enough to pick up in your fingers, smoke clouding it through the half-yellowed leaves.
Mother pointed to a silver heart lifting and rocking up like a waving hand, one of those helium-filled things somebody’d let go of, turning to a speck in the clouds. The view seemed familiar to me. So did the old road coming around rock bends. I hummed, and my ears changed. She held one eye shut across the seat at me.
“Happy birthday to Squash…”
“Watch the road,” I said.
The car was shimmying as we wound up a ramp-like incline, heading into these slow-moving clouds. We climbed another few minutes, rising over a hump in the road, then swung up a mud bank and rolled back, halting with the engine rocking us. She got out and tugged a log out of the way, hand-over-handing down the fender, got in and stared up into the trees. We scratched up with the floor bumping-scraping, sun trickling over the hood. I saw a deer kicking mud and leaves, its tail darting out of sight, then we were spinning in one place, digging toward some tunneled piece of light, the car nosed over it, and we hung there, creaking.
It was a white house; more grey-looking really in this shifting half-light, the roof crawling like a skin. We slid down with the engine off into thick yellow grass. A streetlight hung in the yard, two rusted roofs hunched back in the trees.
“How’re your ears?” she said, digging under her seat. “Check these wildflowers.”
“What is this?”
“It’s a house, dummy.”
“I mean, what is it?”
“Come on, get out, let’s scout around.”
She kicked her door open and swung her feet out. Insects were chattering like crazy. I was looking at the house—knowing I’d seen it before. I didn’t know what it was, but I could feel my head singing and buzzing. The yard and buildings, her back against them, I felt nauseous, again, this trapped, sweaty feeling I’d gotten once when some bigger kids stuck me in a barrel and rolled me around in it. I lunged across her shoulder twisting the key—the car lurched and groaned—she wrenched in the door, got herself around, elbowing me, and we wrestled over the seat.
“What…goddamn…what’re you…” She hooked my right arm, slinging me into the backseat. “What’s wrong with you! What do you think you’re doing?”
“Let’s get out of here!”
“Why?”
“Why’d we come here?”
“What…?”
“We lived here—when was it? I remember this place.”
She looked at me like I was seriously nuts.
“We never lived here. What the hell’s got into you, Jonah? Why’d you do that?”
“I told you, I wanna go. Start the car.”
“You’re flushed,” she said, pressing my forehead. “You wouldn’t remember where we lived before, I told you that. What if we’d been on a ledge just then, we’d be dead, buster. Don’t ever do that again, understand me?”
I was gazing around the yard. She took the keys, slid out and scooped her shoes off, slapping dust, her shoulders lifting one of those long, heavy breaths. “You getting out?”
“I’m gonna die here.”
“Climbing sickness ain’t fatal, Mister.”
“I’m not staying here. Please, let’s go.”
“Listen to the insects, they’re sensing cold weather. They make such a racket up here your head swims.”
Something sailed over us, its wide-winged shadow flapping down into low-standing trunks.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“Tell you what?” she chuckled.
“You didn’t tell me we were coming here. Let’s go!”
“We’re not going anywhere! You want me to leave you in that cardboard trap with your father, I’ll do it!”
“What do you mean?”
“Why do you think I brought you here? I figured it wouldn’t be so friggin’ hard to tell you
I’m leaving him. This is fun, isn’t it? I’m gathering flowers.” She stomped through the high grass. “If you want me, I’ll be down there, on the bottom side.
“You’re crazy!” I screamed at her. “I’m not staying here with you! You think I’m living with a liar?”
I watched her down-gazing head disappear around the corner of the porch, then turned to look at the trees at the back of the yard. My attention kept going back there. I took the picture from my pocket, and through my shoe tread and creases I could see everything: the house in the picture, sagging now, paint worn, flaked, weeds growing up over the windows; the same streetlight hooked over the yard. It was the same place, all right.
She knew we’d lived here. Why’d she lie about it? Why would she? I couldn’t figure what was here for me to be so worried about, but I was petrified. I didn’t know what it was.
I was afraid something was going to happen.
I stuck the picture in my pocket and crawled out the window, feeling runnish, so distracted I left the Fokker on the seat. I walked toward the house, the grass dry-crackling, and stopped on the steps. There was a familiar smell. A certain kind of wood smell. I’m haunted by smells.
High windows shafted light on the slate tile and leaves in the front room, the hall lined straight to it as I’d pictured it. I walked through dust-columns and spider webs, to a back room. A mattress lay in silty water, mangled coat hangers lay scattered from the closet.
Walking toward the kitchen, my steps ticking emptiness, the hall was covered with circling vines where a wrinkled print hung upside down of a woman on tightrope with a bodiless man’s head at her ear. A squash-like outline was stained on the kitchen wall above the eyeless stove.
I almost passed out. Everything went grainy-white for a minute; I felt I was inside some rolling time machine. I knew this place. I pushed a rotted door into another room, and it was what I expected. Sun glared through the webbed bay windows. Through the moving tangles of trees, I remembered the outlines and shapes of the mountains—not that tower or whatever was flashing on that highest peak—but the rugged blue line and crevices, the bare, wavy, white, treeless patches—like some pattern imprinted in my brain.
As I turned, I heard her voice under the windows. She was shifting a little in the leaves.
“Jonah,” she said, and I started to answer, but she kept talking, going on about some last conversation. She was standing there, she said, describing what was said and all, as if she were talking to herself, but I knew she wasn’t.
At first, I didn’t know what she was talking about, and thought, now she’s really bonkers.
Why’s she doing this, it’s embarrassing. Why doesn’t she just shut up, she’s nuts and she’s scaring me.
All of a sudden, I felt my body go limp. I knew exactly what she was talking about. I stepped right through a rotted board in the floor, was jammed down into a hole to my hip, trying not to make any noise. I could hear her moving away from the windows, her feet give way, a moan, and her voice breaking as she called out to me, thrashing around. She must’ve slipped down the bank.
I got out of the splintered hole, stood back, and was pulling farther from her. I heard her slip again, calling and grunting as she struggled.
I crept into the hall where the front door was shining dull-bright, and went up to the bath-room, feeling lightheaded. At the same time, I was sick and felt like laughing, maybe I was laughing, I can’t remember. I just know I felt stranger than I’d ever felt. I lifted on the sink, looking at my eyes in the dirty mirror, but when I saw something I stopped; my arms weak, I dropped to the floor, shaking. Did I want to see it? I thought, lifting again.
I was seeing into myself, like looking into another room on the other side. It was my other self, like I’d seen at grandmother’s. Another life, or whatever you want to call it, overlapping, moving in wing-like rolls and turns, the blues becoming powdery-white.
I collapsed on the sink, hanging onto it; it rattled the wall with me hugging it. I pulled the picture from my pocket, sunk to my knees, feeling it but not being able to see it. I couldn’t see the room either; it was rolling and turning with me, swinging like an amusement park ride. As I held the picture, I was flooded with an abandoned, dismal, rolling kind of pain that I can’t describe.
I must’ve crawled to the front door. Stumbling down the steps to my hands and knees, I gazed at an embedded rock, got up and weaved out onto the grass where insects were clashing like madmen. The old truck’s headlights watched me like eyes move toward the streetlight’s shadow, swaying as the pole blew and creaked.
I pitched into the oil tank buried in weeds, looking up at the glass eye gazing down. I remembered the halo from it, the yard around it, every line, tree, nook, everything illuminated.
I could see the grey-metal rooftops from overhead, the clearing like a bald spot in the top of a man’s head surrounded by blue-thick woods, light reaching out from it like a ghost into fog.
I kept walking back from the house. Under the stripped fruit trees along the wine-rotten ground, my shadow following a line into thorns between the barns, glancing at the grape trellis, the mountain rolling down under denser trees. Starlings flocked over, a long screeching wheel of them. An engine was loping and droning somewhere.
I was sure where I was going, in my head anyway, I could see an aerial view. The side of the mountain jutted into a canyon like the curved bow of a ship; I remembered the blankets of trees, soft-green-flashing dips in them like beds of craters. Maybe she wasn’t lying. Maybe she really didn’t know. I heard something crunching like footsteps. I listened and called out, but there was nobody there.
I went on down under short-needled pines, the mountain rolling into gullied shelves and steep-slipping rock banks. Even if I missed it, the spot, I’d feel it, I thought; I’d stumble on something. A pair of wings swung over me. I was climbing ladder-like down the trunks. The wind had turned cooler and limbs were raking, clipping through branches.
I followed a culvert shaded with walnut trees, the woods turning to high-leaved ceilings. My left tennis shoe ripped loose, dragging to a flapper. I pulled them both off and hurled them and then shinnied up a poplar tree to get a look around. I’m a good climber, but when I got up pretty high, I couldn’t see much, just tops of trees, layers of mountains stretching off under a thick-smeared horizon. Something flashed, drifting like a washed over grain of sand. I hung a minute, wind-rocking, flooded with all of it. Had I always known about this other life? Somehow, I had, I realized, but I didn’t know where I was, if I was dreaming it or making it up.
Forgetting where I was, I tumbled, scraping down through limbs, fingernails digging into the bark of a knot in my right hand, air rising grainy, climbing with the earth swinging under me. I hung on with my eyes shut and then slid down, feeling heart fluttery.
I started making side-to-side passes, backtracking along the mountainside under where I’d just crossed and kept going until I’d gotten a good way down. I was below it. I could feel it. I’d probably gone past it.
I started back up, weaving and climbing and circling, knowing it was in here, right in here. I could feel it. The sky above the mountain had a shimmer to it. There were bands of light in the chewed-up ground I’d crossed, making passes over the same areas where the leaves raked back and stick-dug holes were all over the place, trails along some of the scoured banks.
Coming into a clearing, I got a gut-feeling that made me break into a run. And then I was crawling into a piece of light I’d just tracked through. I kept hearing footsteps, like an animal or person stalking me. Every time I stopped, so did they.
My legs were giving out. I tripped to my knees. My head seemed disconnected from my body. My ears were buzzing, the ground and trees brightening. I wouldn’t let myself rest though. I was looking for this open place and needed light to find it. A clearing, not that big, broken trees, I could see it in my head. I hung to the trunk of a tree, occasionally. Light was slipping, I could feel it.
Stumbling on something dead and rotting in the downhill shadow of a rock, a black swarm of flies, I felt a blink. Wings like a hawk’s soared over me, again; I watched its slow crisscrossing. Black flashed across the silver moon on grey clouds. Insects working up to a higher, more insistent chain-whirring.
Was I on the wrong side? This had to be it. If I could come this far, remember all this….
No, I wasn’t wrong: I felt it. The angle off the mountain, as if it had happened ten minutes ago. I remembered it. What? I was getting delirious. I started to feel like a stupid kid. That’s what she’d call me if she were here. Maybe there was nothing to find. They’d hauled away all the mangled stuff from the crash—trees and weeds had retaken the rest. Everything was in my head, which didn’t prove a thing. I felt like I was chasing a ghost.
Something was happening, like a whisper on my shoulder. I looked around but couldn’t see any path or trails. I didn’t recognize anything. I didn’t know where I was, which direction I’d walked, if I’d walked. I didn’t remember laying down. I was staring up at quivering leaves. There was something almost peaceful about it. I heard a distant muted buzzing or moaning, a cloud of gnats whorled over me. I sat up and flashes of the house, the inside of it, filled my head. I had a clear picture of it, again, and for a minute thought we’d never left it—we never had, really. I could get up and walk up there and find it like it was, with all the things she liked. I could smell her cooking dinner, see the glitter of light through the trees, smell the wood smoke from the fireplace.
Then I was going up the mountain and yet unable to stand, holding onto tree trunks in a sort of white-aired dream, my vision glazing. I heard the droning of an engine. It was getting too close; I thought my head would explode with it.
The sound peaked. Something clicked and I was rising over the foggy mountains and treetops, rivers under me. I could see that hull of the ship’s side of the mountain as I crossed to the house again. I saw the streetlight, the three barns, coils of grape trellis, the fogged bed of green, and the pieces on the ground: a splintered propeller cover, strut-pieces, dials, the crumbled fuselage, fragments of tail section, glass, and wings.
I was a ghost standing in a clearing where I’d lived.
I heard steps again. Below as before but farther beneath. I was standing still in all these pieces, but walking, somehow. I realized the steps I heard were mine, even though they seemed somewhere around or behind me. I saw a shadowed face up in the trees, in the small, yellow, vertical breaks, looking down at me. Was I the ghost, or was she?
I was plodding up, the wind in my eyes, talking to her, then to mother; mother’s back to me. I was walking behind her for a while, it seemed, suddenly drawn into the light that was left there, my legs like rubber, the down-sitting trees seemed above me and I was falling up into them. Hitting my shins, I barrel-rolled, sliding headfirst, then to my side, up or down but a long way on slick pine straw—I lay there on my face just breathing and listening.
I heard the droning again. The woods seemed to tremble. I lifted my head, feeling impressions of needles on my face, wiping them away. A wide, bright-yellow-green patch shimmered beneath me in the still trunks. I lay a minute longer waiting for it to disappear but it kept glowing like green-colored fire. I could see something else. I slipped between rock tongues and stumbled on an owl—he flapped in a quick-dipping arc—I short-stepped between top-clipped trees, the sky pulling open under me, and slid down a ten-foot drop with a rotted tree in my arms into a garden of charred stumps. I had finally found it, stumbled over it, fallen right into it.
I couldn’t believe I’d jumped off that short cliff. I was on my knees with the rotted piece of tree, half the breath out of me. Crouched with my head in weeds, I could feel it; I was shivering, feverish-like. Weakness, fear, I don’t know, relief too. Anger and something impossible to tell. I sat, leaning back, looking through the limbs. And then I was laughing up through the broken-treed window.
I heard her voice; it was like a miracle, sounding a mile away. A deep, quiet echo fading on itself, coming again with the sound of three callers overlapping. Reverberations of birds were below me; I heard the droning again. I tried to pull up to it on a burned stump that fell apart with my weight. I stood, turning toward the sound; it sounded close but I couldn’t see it. I kept turning and stumbling, looking over blackened trunks. It was higher than I’d expected and farther up the mountain. Sky moiling like a vaporous river behind it, a bi-winged, red-striped, white Grumman, tilted slightly, dipping and nosing into waves. After half a minute it dropped over the clearing where I stood, and I watched it sputter back in a slow-easing roll across it, rising above me, drifting on the edge of the window.
It lolled into the sun, this plane, flashing dully. It circled out, banking and wagging, its shadow-like tail dragging through trees or something rippling under a dark surface of water.
The pitch of it building each time it turned as if it were coming down at me, wings flattening as knives, rising into half-finished loops, tumbling, and whining up and out again just above the clearing.
I was following it through the limbs, stumbling at a slant, my ankles hung in vines, burned trees showering as I spilled and fell, coming apart in my hands as I tried to hold onto them. I watched the Grumman climbing, tottering until it stood nearly over me like something dangling on a string, silently propeller-turning, drifting motionless against the creaking trunks. Gusts of wind blew like a voice inside my head. A rushing breath-voice speaking back to me, for me. There was a low-coughed, slow-rising moan and the plane fell down the mountain straight above me, belly-up with a staccato, wide-opening sound, up rocking across the treetops.
I was shouting my name. Maybe she was calling me, too, from the bottom of a well it sounded like, and I was repeating it. I turned to a flutter-bottom-pitched, unwinding sound, shouting around at it, clambering up, falling after it.
Outside a wall-thick window, I saw Grace was inside, the woman who was my mother now. I was pounding to get her attention, trying to pull her back. I banged my head against the window but couldn’t get through. And then this. And then I was here again.
I felt the shadow as the Grumman drifted over me, noiselessly rocking, banked so I could see his glasses shining down at me like bug-eyes. I tore into the burned stumps, clawing and kicking, tearing and raking and leveling them. I kept kicking them until there was nothing left standing, then I turned and clawed up the bank. I was slipping into the souring sound of the plane with the car horn, afraid I’d never get out of the woods. I’d be the permanent face of them crumpled in the sun.
I started running with a scared kind of a strength. I tripped, scraping and rolling, grabbing at vines and trees, anything I could hang onto. I ran into that blackened dead thing again, almost fell in it, reaching for the rock above it. I leaned over the maddened-flied sound, turned and held a trunk and hugged it, praying, listening to my heart pumping. I felt like I was being dragged down. I had to get out. I had to get up.
Leave us alone, I said to that other woman. You’re through with us. We’re finished with you. You came between us, and you never will again.
There were steps over solid ground to the horn that was lolling on, calling me up the mountain. I was on my hands and knees, pulling up under squirrels scratching through limbs, listening to it drifting.
A dark-curved heap sat in the yard. As I got closer, I saw it was my red pickup truck. There were baseball-sized holes in its metal. A mockingbird sat in a low tree, squawking at me. I tried to brush the stump soot off with leaves; it was all over me sticking to my sweat.
I walked behind the barns where loose boards were dangling in the wind, saw the edge of the house, and saw her standing under the rear eves. She was waving at the windows, talking to them; she didn’t see me at first. When she felt me, her face glanced, then changed. She stooped, her back gliding toward the car. I stood across the yard watching her put an arm load of purple flowers on the front seat. She reached for weeds by the front bumper, smiled, coming toward me with a mud-rusted bicycle wheel.
“Where’ve you been, Mister?” Then she turned her back to me, standing a minute, listening to the wind. “I didn’t tell you to run off and get lost.”
Except for insects and the light pole ringing, everything was quiet. With a swallowed sound, she turned and looked at me, staring at my feet. “Your shoes?”
“Out there.”
“What is it, Jonah?”
I was staring at her hand holding that warped bike wheel with muddy spokes hanging off, walnuts were clattering on the tin roof. I felt her eyes watching, seeing me: she knew me.
She already knew me, but now it was in a different way; I felt torn open like a naked man, like someone returning clean from the dead. Why didn’t she just say it?
She turned toward the house. She doesn’t see me, I thought. Is she waiting for me to say it? Say it then. Do it now. Tell her who you are—what’re you waiting for?
To the direction of a faint buzz, she turned again, this time scanning the treetops. A muffled sound came from the woods, hanging, like something drilling out of the ground, then hovering just above it. Gradually, it was defining itself, becoming a dull-pitched thrumming. It seemed to fade slightly, and then was gone like it had drilled back down.
The Grumman mushed up suddenly behind the trees close to the clearing, looking as if it was dragging some chain-like weight toward the sky, inching up slowly till it hung at the tether-like end of it. It turned and was coming toward us awry-angled, wing-wagging one side, picking up speed, making a full roll diagonally across the yard above the streetlight with its fish-like shadow rippling up the trees.
She stood glaring at it. It was rising in sinking loops above the yard. I followed her toward the car and she wheeled again. The plane was climbing and screwing up straight above us, wingtips flashing, its shadow blinking. She was smiling glassy-eyed as it fell into a stall-spin, pulling up again in a flat whine above the barns, and then she was running, stumbling toward it.
She floundered into weeds, hurling the bicycle wheel, which wobbled and fell against the barn planks.
“What do you want from me!” she screamed. “Tell me! What do you want?”
The plane made a quick, sharp-level turn. She stood watching it slow circling the treetops. Face drawn, she came walk-trotting unsteadily, fumbling the keys from her dress. She fell on the grass, pawing the ground, crawling.
“I’m him,” I said.
“Get in the car!” She was running and jangling.
I pulled myself in through the open back window.
Like something unraveling, the winged shadow was changing shapes in the yard—we were floating, the car spinning around in up drifted smoke.
And then we were dropping. I bounced off the ceiling into the doors and floor, kicked and slung all over the place. We reached the road and dropped in the opposite direction from the way we’d come up. From where I was braced on the floor, between the front and back seats, I could see sky and trees reeling; the sun disappeared and then swung up quickly.
She was mumbling into the steering wheel. I pulled up and was pitched across the floor, grazing my mouth on the ashtray. I held the seat, swinging side to side.
“Why do you want to kill us!” I yelled.
“You’re right, I’m sorry…”
The trees tilted fast, yellow light flickering through them, and we were screeching into funnel-like turns.
“Who do you think I am?” I asked her.
A white-haired man on a bicycle shot out in front of us, waving his arms, yodeling. I don’t know what he was doing but it looked like he was trying to tell us something.
Mother blared the horn, yelped, swerved, and we bounced past him fast onto the shoulder, rocks and brush pelting under us.
The man pedaled sweaty faced behind us, his arms like a puppet’s, flopping over his head like a drunken birdman’s.
“Lunatic!” Mother said, glancing across the road. “Why don’t they put him away!”
“I’m him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The man in the plane.”
“There was nobody in that plane—did you see anyone?”
“It was me. That was me, Mama!”
“Jonah, for Christ’s sake, stop!”
A backed-up car line snaked beneath us. She gunned past all the cars and the black station wagon at the head of it, mirroring trees, faces invisible behind dark windows. I watched glints of it falling, disappearing into the back-blowing curves of leaves.
After a few minutes, we were driving along past glass store fronts and yards, our reflection slipping across store panes. Three boys tossed a football over the road. Men on ladders were hanging up banners. An old man on the sidewalk was dragging a goat on a leash, the goat tugging the other way, the man looking perturbed like they were having an argument. We passed a laundromat, a burger place, a baseball field with a game on, winding under orange flashes into patches of fog. It was foggier as we went down; a black carriage that must’ve been a hundred years old came toward us through the mist, a blindered horse pulling it, loping along a black-speared fence. We swerved through the gate, looking down on what might’ve been a golf course, except there were no flat tops or sand traps. Tents and dots of statues were scattered over hills of loaf-like grass.
We turned down a one lane drive, passing a marble man standing on a pond holding up a bird; we circled and then drove up and parked next to a gulley. Flowers shivered on statues in slope-curved rows.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“None of your business. Stay in the car.” She slammed the door.
Carrying the Mason jar stuffed with purple flowers, she plodded uphill, weaving slowly, leaning a little, the wind pushing her sideways. Halfway to the fence, she stopped and put the jar down, looking at it, staring at something on the ground.
In minute, headlights glared into the gate. The long black car and its train of followers pulled along the fence. A crowd poured out on the grass, figures dragging a long, gold, bulky-looking box from the car, walking it into one of the billow-sided tents, the crowd huddled around it.
It was deafening quiet except for a few birds. I slid out with my plane to get a better view.
Mother stood stiff in the wind like a bowed stick. Dull plaques shown in the grass in places.
The wind was whipping her dress around. A pink-yellow glow was on everything. There was something familiar about this place, too.
I turned and looked past the car. On the pond surface ducks circled the marble man’s feet as he lifted a bird in up cradled hands. Hearing a noise that gave me the creeps, I looked around and saw mom on her knees where she’d been standing. Her head was rolling up and down, choked sounds gurgling out of her. I didn’t know what she was doing. If she was sick or hurt, I couldn’t tell. She was like a human whip thrown on her elbows, choked cries pouring out, banging glass on metal, slinging flowers.
Up the hill, I ran as fast as I could until I’d reached her. The way she sounded, the pain in her voice, made me feel weak. I saw the name by her knees that she was pounding on, the jar turned upside down, shattered, in her hands; she looked at them and the broken green glass between her fingers.
She jerked around on me. “Get out of here!”
“Who are you talking to?”
“I said, stay in the car! Didn’t I?”
“It was an accident.”
“It…” She looked at me. I was unfolding the picture. “What are you doing with that?”
“I’m him.”
“You?” she laughed, wrist-wiping her eyes. “Jonah David Curtis,” she sighed. “This
Jonah’s dead—Where’d you get that picture?”
“If I’d wanted to be with her—”
“Who?”
“Remember the halo?”
“Where’d all this black stuff—”
“On the mountain…the streetlight in the yard.”
“What?” She touched my neck. “Where’d all this soot come from?”
“My Sopwith.”
She sunk slowly and sat on her feet, blinking tears. “What are you talking about, Jonah?”
“Who do you think I am?”
“Who?”
“Him,” I said.
“My child.” She knee-walked toward me, smirking up close, pinning one eye at a time.
“And him.”
“Who’s this?”She pointed to the other woman’s shadow.
“You know her. Darian.”
“You didn’t know her,” she said, her face changing. “How’d you know the man in the picture?” She looked at me, bewildered. “Who told you these things?”
“She came between us. She lied to you and you believed her.”
“Us?”
“I’m him,” I said.
“What?” She knee-walked away from me. “Who told you that? What is this?”
I pointed in front of her. “We choose our parents. You told me that.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“You said I chose you. You’re right. I did.”
“Alright!” She looked at the Fokker in my hand. “What is this?” she asked. “I don’t need this today, Jonah, believe me,” she groaned, wiping her nose. “Even if it is your goddamn birthday, you don’t get to do this. You trying to cheer me up or something? That what you’re doing?” She laughed. “Where were you born, Mr., Mr. Coleman? I’d be curious…”
“Born?”
“Yeah. You don’t know where you were born?”
“Tennessee.”
“Memphis?”
“La Folette, I think.”
She chuckled, looking away. “How in the world…” She shook her head, and looked back at me. “Who started you flying? Who gave you your first lesson?”
“Your dad did.”
She frowned, swallowing, staring at me, wiping her nose with a tissue. She looked up at the sky and then back at me. “Who told you that, Jonah? Grandma?”
“You asked me.”
“Where’d we meet?”
“Some lake. I remember you diving from a raft wearing a white suit. With pink and blue checks on it. I was in some kind of rowboat.”
“This is ridiculous, but okay, I’ll play along. You gave me a piece of jewelry three days
later—”
“The crystal heart necklace you’re wearing. That thing. You said you’d never take it off.
You always wear it.”
Feeling its edges, she pulled it up from under her dress, her hand shaking. She was shaking all over, lips trembling. “We take a trip that year? Canada—”
“I don’t remember Canada.”
“Switzerland, Spain, Greece…”
There was a Spanish church, I remember. In those red mountains. Sanguesa? Those two women in dark robes were witnesses—”
“Stop it! Who told you this! Stop it, Jonah!”
“After our wedding, that orange car rolled over your finger while changing the tire—”
“Stop it!” She shook her head, sliding to her hip. Her knotted finger was pointing to one eye, and she was heaving loose-lipped laughter, burbling it out. “It isn’t you! Are you crazy? This isn’t…don’t tell me…don’t do this to me, Jonah. I can’t deal with this.”
I looked up at the crowd of faces on the hill. They were staring down at us.
“You expect me to believe this? What are you doing?” She knee-walked to me. “What are you doing here?” she said, squeezing my shoulders, face and hands. “Jonah? Jonah!” she yelled, looking me over, her face shaking like a person with palsy. “Is this really you? Am I losing my mind? At the hospital, I dreamed, I mean, I saw it. ‘Isn’t that you?’ I said. I did, Jonah.
Why’d…I believed it was you. I believed it. I was sure it was you, you’d come back, and I kept saying, ‘Listen, what good will it do if you hurt me having you? What good’s that gonna do? I left you, so you flew into a mountain, you’ve come back to hurt me, what good…’ I thought I’d lost my mind…”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“…when I made it through the delivery, I guessed I was delirious, or just so drugged—”
“It was an accident, momma.”
She sat blinking at me. “An accident?” She shook her head. “Accident? No, I’m sure…”
She bowed face-down in the grass, wiping her head side to side in it. “Accident?” She sat up.
“What are you talking about?”
I nodded.
“I’ll die of emphysema,” she said, taking long, deep breaths, her shoulders catching with each one. “You cracked up practically in our backyard on a clear day, after I left you, and you’re saying it was an accident?”
“Yeah, I didn’t mean to do it—”
“I’ve been punishing myself in this God-forsaken place, coming here eight years believing you killed yourself for me. For me, Jonah. And it was some goddamn accident?”
“That’s what it was, a bad stall—”
“This is your fault—”
“My fault…?”
“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
“I didn’t know till today, how was I gonna tell you?”
“How could you have an accident, that’s what I want to know! How could you have a goddamn accident, right then, practically in our backyard?”
“I don’t know…”
“…on the side of our mountain, Jonah, seriously?” She buried her face in her hands, shaking her head. “How is that even possible? Tell me!”
“Maybe you were supposed to learn something!”
“Learn?”
“Trust and stay and learn not to judge people so much! You don’t understand your own heart!”
“Watch it…”
“You never understand anything! You’re pigheaded and stubborn—just blind!”
“Watch it, buddy.”
“You’ve been coming to this place for yourself, not for me. I’m here now. Look at me. It was your fault not believing me in the first place, you let that crazy, sick woman lie her way in between us. Why didn’t you trust me!”
“Jonah…”
“I didn’t know who you were, where you’d gone, I didn’t know you. I was frozen up there for weeks. Where were you?”
“Afraid—”
I kicked at the flowers on the plaque in front of her. “This is a mistake!” I said. “What am I doing here? You haven’t changed any! That wasn’t any accident, maybe it was an accident the first time I saw you! I told you it was an accident and now you’re blaming me for it. I tell you what happened and you can’t even be glad I didn’t kill myself, that it wasn’t your fault!”
“Oh God…”
“You’re a selfish woman, always blaming everything on everybody else! You need to go to a hospital of preachers or die a few times yourself and see what it’s like. You never forgive anybody. I’m not wasting another life on you!”
She crawled up on broken knees, lunging for me, got up and was chasing me across the hill. I was zigzagging away from her hands. When I tripped, she grabbed and dragged me—I was sliding on my back looking up at the moon.
She was swatting my legs, missing into the door. I felt the Fokker crunch under my foot.
She plopped to her bottom, got up, funny-walking, wobbling sort of, around the car, and I crawled to the back floor and then we were moving and the door was flapping, trees and vases flying by.
I got up on the seat; the crowd on the hill above us was watching us bounce down across the grass. A tombstone shot under us. Chunks of marble vibrated on the hood. We weaved into a slew of small statues, slamming over them, rocks splatting the windshield, bone-like pieces scattering in raised dust. We rumbled down a whole marble row like dominoes, mowing and banging over them, each of them sounding like shots, swerving in and out of the trees.
I couldn’t believe this was happening. We fishtailed between some trees, bowling side-ways over a few more big rock pieces and started down another row. The car was bucking through gulleys and dips, and she was pressing the horn joined to this sound like graveled foam and this painful wailing she was making, and I was on the floor with flowers in my face, knowing she was going to kill us. We’d hit a tent of circle-wreathes and vases, rocks crunching and popping under us in near blackness. I couldn’t get up or see anything. I was sliding in flowers and the car jarring, shuddering me down every time I moved, lifted in midair, bouncing, the wheels feeling like they were shimmying off.
I was on my knees when we hit a wall and I catapulted into the ceiling over the seat into crinkling glass. There was hardly a sound for a few seconds. I was sitting there on my knees in the dark under dripping glass, heavy engine-dead silence, and we were creaking, slowly bumping backwards. The canvas tent slid off the windshield, off the hood, hung onto a tree, and we kept rolling, splashing backwards into the pond, the rear of the car sinking.
She turned, whimpering with her hand on her bloody nose. Something wet was on my elbow. She was staring at me with the most painful hurt in her eyes, seeming to come from a million miles away, like she was lost in it back there somewhere, her face frozen, crying without any sound coming out. She leaned forward and banged her head on the steering wheel, bumping her forehead against it harder and harder, crying with a childlike whine, holding her bloody hand out to me like a wand. Slumping to the door, moaning, crying in waves with her forehead banging the horn, making an awful, mournful sound, all while we were sinking slowly in mud.
The car leaned sideways, creaking backwards.
A crowd of people were coming toward us, streaming down the hill like a dark flock of sheep, some running. The floor was filling with water, and we kept sinking and tilting, the front of the car lifting. It felt like the water was going to swallow us up, but it wasn’t that deep, and then there were people all around us, looking in, yelling to each other and us, reaching in, trying to save us, I guess.
I can’t remember anything else from that day and it hurts too much when I try.
About the Author:
Ron Clinton Smith is a writer of poems, stories, songs, novels and screenplays, and an actor featured in such films as We Are Marshall, The Mist, Parental Guidance, True Detective, Hidden Figures, Boy Erased, Just Mercy, and Charming the Hearts Of Men. He began his acting career in standup comedy, moved to theater, and later to film and television. In 2012, he published the literary thriller, Creature Storms. His story, “A Pilgrimage to Dennis Hopper,” appearing in River Teeth Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2014, listed as one of the most notable essays in Best American Essays, 2015. He’s published poems and other stories in Upstreet Magazine, 2 Bridges Review, Litro Magazine, Black Fox Journal, and a dozen other journals. His second novel, The Sentry, will be published in 2024. He balances his time between writing and film acting. Follow him on Twitter/X @ronclintonsmith.
Learn more about Ron here: www.ronclintonsmith.com and on medium.com/@ronclintonsmith.
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