David Means - Assorted Fire Events - Stories

Four score and and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal …

Until the sludge gave way and he sank up to his knees — the train behind me still lugging away but slowing enough to make his cry audible now over the rattle — in a thick ooze of dioxin and pulp, of solvents and irredeemable chemical compounds. Like Christ walking on water and failing, his frail, miserable legs cracked the edge of the pulp as he waded back to me, the stuff gunking and caking on his jeans. One shoe (or boot) was missing when he finally got out.

Trudging back over the tracks, across the road, he scraped the crap from his leg with a stick and made me vow never to disclose what he’d done to anyone.

You won’t willya? he kept saying.

I won’t. I swear to God. A stack of Bibles. My mother’s wedding gown. I won’t tell anybody. It’s between us.

I’d tell everyone I knew. It was a story too good to hold to my vest. I’d transform the world with the image of Sam, poor fucker, going down into the gunk up to his knees. Except in my version of the story, I’d make it his waist, or have him swimming through the stuff.

Amy called my own name, Means, and I turned to see her waving frantically to me across the parking lot.

They found Rondo, she said, running a single finger along the inside of her jeans to release some ill-adjusted tension of her underwear waistband; I tried not to look. I was awaiting the news of Rondo’s life or death while, at the same time, drawing into mind and memory the image of Sam in band class right after I slammed my palm into the bell of his cornet; he had the perplexed and bewildered eyes of someone newly hurt, just before the pain releases itself into a huge gush of agony; his eyes showed, I like to think now, that long wide leap to redemptive grace. Two of his front teeth were lost to the rim of the mouthpiece moving inward; all that force translated along the curve of the bell and through the tubing and concentrating onto the metal edge of the size 7c mouthpiece; I knew when I threw the open palm of my hand into the bell of his horn the physics of what was going to happen. I can’t deny it now the way I did then. I didn’t know at the time where my anger came from, but now I do. The lesson I draw from my own actions is clear: I was guilty of many sins before this kid, who, in band, in seventh grade, had already grown his hair long and was wearing stolen leather jackets. I like to think I broke his teeth over my shame; I had told the world about his house, about his father, and about his falling through the crust of sludge (after walking Christ-like on it for a good five seconds).

He’s fine, she said. He was so drunk he didn’t know where he was going and ended up in the campground sleeping next to the pit toilets.

She put her hand on my thigh as if to gauge my balance on the fence rail.

The great roiling swells of sand driven upward by more sand, compiled against itself; the eternal days and nights of Lake Michigan currents and the constant pounding winds rolling grain upon grain; the fronts staggering listlessly across the lake from Wisconsin like drunken louts, picking up moisture over the great body of water and pounding the coast until from nothing grew something. What did the Ottawa Indians think, wandering this moonscape, praying to their beloved Sleeping Bear as he lay prone on the great expanse of otherness, huddled against the lake? All along this side of the state the beaches were being taken away by the currents; houses tumbled down in slow-mo on the news, tag teams of bright yellow bulldozers attempted to rearrange fate, and we smoked our cigarettes and drank a last beer and sat in a little alcove of razor grass and laughed at our fear, at the idea that we could worry that Rondo, all taut muscle and hockey arms, might be dead.

It was turning out to be a brisk, fall-like day. The front had swung through a giant line of anvilheads. Out of the firmament, the ceaseless drive of wind, Sam came to me once more: that day in his house alone in that room with the soft linty smell of furnace heat (What’cha wanna do? Don’t know); the event with the trumpet. And of course his death — his death most of all — taking the whole high school by surprise. His cocky fuck-you’s dead and gone. By that time he was completely one of those fringe beings, absorbed by the vast riptides of misery we pretended didn’t exist; there but not there, a vanquished ghost of a boy barely making class but somehow hanging on, not expelled or in jail. The word around school was that he’d moved out long ago from the house on Burdick and was shacked up with some woman and her baby.

My lamentation began right then, taking a toke on the cig, blowing the smoke into the wind while Rondo and Amy tumbled back behind a clump of grass and Ricky did wind sprints up and down the beach to get the blood flowing back in his shrunken skull. I’d get up and walk alone down the shore and let them finish whatever they were doing. I’d get in the car and drive home with them laughing in the backseat; we’d turn the trip into the butt of a long, endless joke about our fear, and that joke would go on and on for the rest of our lives; but while all this was going on, I’d be considering those last frail moments of a life, and how maybe if I’d embraced him, coming out of the sludge pit, given him my shirt to wipe the paper pulp from his legs, perhaps things would’ve been different. I’d have changed the world; I’d have changed everything.

Yo, fuckhead, Rondo came down behind me and began drilling my back with the tip of his index finger. He wanted me to turn, to grab his shins and take him down. I was sitting right up near the water. The waves, good six-footers, were licking the tips of my All Stars.

Shut up, dickhead.

Yo.

You remember that kid, that kid Sam whatever, you know the guy who was, like, buried here in the sandslide?

No, Rondo sighed. It was a final no, a terminal no, the end-of-conversation no. He’d say that no and wave his fingers through the long flax of hair that hung down in his eyes; it was the dead-end no of Columbus’s ship falling off the idea of a horizon.

The force of the mouthpiece against his teeth drilled his two front whatever-they’re-called back a bit, damaging the dentine and the gum and nerves enough to kill them. The enamel turned gray over the course of the next few weeks and then, a month later, they both fell out. It was an accident, I told Mr. Tear, our band teacher. Blame was put on Sam’s shoulders.

You see, it was like this: he disappeared, like Rondo did that morning, except he really left this earth — lifted, unfolded his angelic wings, and flew across the great lake to Wisconsin. He was with some friends (that much I know), four other poor kids from our town, smoking dope, fucking off, doing what they do; he was with them and he went off on his own (or so they said) and then disappeared for a week. We didn’t know this. If one of us had disappeared it would have made the papers, but for guys like Sam, to be gone from the earth for a short while was to go unnoticed. (He hitched to Chicago to see the Dead. His old man took off with him to the U.P. to go fishing.)

But eventually somehow they figured things out and sent search parties out to the dunes to poke and prod the sand. Men with long poles stabbed here and there, working in teams, marking quadrants with stakes and string. They were probing for the softness of flesh, for the give of a corpse. It took a week. There was a lot of ground to cover.

This is how I imagine it, and I like to think that it is more than just part of my lamentation. That it really happened this way.

It was a guy named Mel, a worker for the State DNR, a guy with long jowls, drooping eyes, and a perpetual smoke between his lips; a guy with sad eyes who lived in one of the trailers the state provided near the Sleeping Bear campgrounds; a man content at being alone with the sand and the constant sweep of wind through the slopes. He was doing a double-check of a quadrant. He had his own suspicions about the body’s location. Years and years of being a ranger had given him a sixth sense about the way the sand shifted; he felt the areas that were waiting to give, the places where slides might occur. He went to his spot and looked skyward before putting the probe into the sand. There were four gulls marking the dark sky of late evening. He took a deep breath and said a wordless prayer and put the probe down into the sand a few feet and felt the soft give and knew right then that it had been his destiny to discover the dead boy’s body; knew that he’d stand to the side while the rest of the men — the forensics folks and the experts — came in to finish the job, their spades making hissy sighs while he had a smoke and watched another clump of gulls come in to feed on the fish, dead from the hot wash of the power plant a hundred miles downstate. He’d finish the smoke, say so long to Mike, his boss, and walk slowly down the trail to the back of the park. (He could’ve driven but preferred to walk the thin wobbly trail alone.) On the way he’d think of his own son, living with his wife in Paw Paw, and how much he feared for him in the same way that he was sure some father, somewhere, had feared for the soul of his poor boy. He’d stop for a moment, hearing something in the brush, a tern, or a sparrow, or maybe some kids making out, and in that moment he’d say a kind of prayer for the dead soul and bow in his own way before the great forces of nature that had produced this huge swell of sand along the mitten of the state, and that had somehow conspired to find a way to kill a kid who was probably in no way expecting to die in a sandslide. What is fantastic about this moment, I think, is that in it Sam will have received more love than ever before in his life: that great profound love of the father for the son that we all need, a love greater than I, or his own nasty father, or anybody on the earth now living ever provided him.