Freddie Owens - Then Like the Blind Man - Orbie's Story

“Remember this place son?” It’s Daddy’s voice. The man standing in front of me is Daddy, his face back like it used to be, the crow’s face gone. A happy feeling swells up inside me. Daddy smiles. I run over to where he is and hug hold of him. Daddy laughs and hugs me back. I feel his claw hand go through the short hairs on my head. “Whatever you put your mind to, you can do,” he says.

We start to float up in the air together. We float up to a ledge where a fan in a casing big as a garage door sits with three motionless dusty blades. We land on a metal catwalk next to the fan. Daddy grabs one of the fan blades. “You got to pay attention, son. Even in dreams.” He gives the blades a spin. First they go slow, then faster, then faster than faster, blowing so powerfully Daddy and me sail off past ladders and machines and steel mill workers into a huge warehouse space of echoes and lights and black metal walls — a gigantic railroad station — where ingots are standing in long motionless lines on rail cars on tracks stretching far away. Daddy used to work on ingots. Tall triangular shapes with their tops lopped off. We sail down to one. Daddy takes up a push broom and begins sweeping the glassy slag off the top.

Above us a black ceiling of catwalks and factory lights shines down. Like before I see men in yellow helmets, walking, climbing up and down. I see a huge steel beam, moving along on tracks under the ceiling toward Daddy and me. Two arms hang from the beam; they are holding up a gigantic rust colored iron pot, black smoke boiling out the top. It floats along toward us — like the bow of a ship — so hugely quiet you wouldn’t know it was there unless you looked right at it.

I’m tugging at Daddy’s arm and shouting, “Look Daddy! Look!”

“Time you was going, son,” Daddy says.

I feel my feet lift off the ingot. “Please, Daddy! Pay attention, you said! Look!”

“Take care of your Momma son,” Daddy says. “She don’t see things all the way through.” He laughs and waves his bird claw hand. “I expect you know that already.”

I float away from him and down onto the cement floor. The beam with the giant arms and the pot rolls over Daddy’s head and stops. At one end of the beam is a cage with a white tiger inside. The tiger is pacing from one end of the cage to the other. It lets out a roar. The men in the yellow helmets turn into monkeys. The ladders, catwalks and machinery turn into jungle trees with long branches and vines. The white tiger roars again. The monkeys scream and run upward along the branches of the trees. A door opens at the bottom of the iron pot and a yellow liquid fire comes pouring. Daddy tries to jump out of the way. The fire knocks his helmet off, burns over his shoulder. He tries to struggle, to knock it away but the fire takes him down, crushing him against the top of the ingot. I’m screaming as loud as I can but no sound comes out of my mouth. I look again at the cage. I see a giant unlit cigar, slowly turning, pointing like a weather vane ornament — floating, floating, turning behind the bars.

I’m crying. I look up into a craggy black face, shiny like coal. Two black eyes stare back at me, diamond eyes that see right through me; that will not let me go. I can’t stop crying.

Moses rubs my forehead with the flat part of his thumb. It’s all sandpapery and stiff. “Rest you, little one. Rest you.”

I can see Fable and Vern, sitting up on the back porch rail, sniggering and poking at each other, trying to make each other fall off. Willis stands next to Moses, a worried look on his face.

“It was Victor done it!” I cry. “Victor!”

Moses moves his thumb over my forehead. His words go like a seesaw, high and then low. “Shhhhhh. Rest you little ONE. Rest you.”

I roll over on my belly. It is like the whole world is in a bad trouble and I can’t stop crying. I cry for Daddy and I cry for Momma and I cry for Missy. I even cry for Victor.

“Good,” says Moses. “Good.”

I can feel his hand, rubbing between my shoulder blades. When I stop crying, it is quiet. Moses’ hand is gone. I turn over and open my eyes.

Willis, Fable and Vern are standing over me.

“I cried a long time,” I said.

“Shit,” Fable said. “You wasn’t gone but two seconds. You didn’t cry.”

I sat up and looked around. I looked at Fable. “But you and Vern were sitting right up there on that rail. You saw me! And Moses was here.”

Fable looked at Vern. Vern looked at Fable. Then they both looked at me.

“Mo not here,” Willis said.

“He was. He put his hand on my back.”

Vern and Fable and Willis all looked at each other again.

“You wasn’t gone two seconds,” Fable said. “Time it take a fly to jump.”

I was looking for crawfish, turning rocks over with Granny’s big butcher knife. It’d been over a month since Momma’s first postcard. Thunder shook the ground.

da Doom! Doom! Doom!

It did that most afternoons. Thunder but no rain. No water. The creek bed was almost dry. You could see how wide it would be if it was full. Now it was mostly just rocks with crisscrossing little streams down the middle.

I dug a rock up from one of the streams. A crawfish squirted out. I tried to pinch it from behind like Willis showed me, but it squirted away.

I had me five — no, six. Six crawfish in a Maxwell House coffee can. They were all lying quiet down there on the bottom, gray pinchers like hands inside mittens, beady black eyes. I held the knife in front of me, it’s point bent from where I’d worked it between the rocks.

Blue light flashed above the trees. More thunder. Then giggles, teensy weensy little midget giggles like in a cartoon. They were coming from way up where the creek made a bend — where water trickled through a wall of muddy logs. On the other side was the swimming hole. I’d left Willis there a while ago before I went looking for crawfish. Again I heard giggles. I thought it was the Kingdom Boys, maybe they’d come down to the swimming hole to play.

I picked up the can and started running along the creek bed. The rocks were sharp but my feet were already thick with calluses. I had the thought I might be like one of those crane birds on TV that could run or fly away fast when crocodiles come in the water. The ground in front of the log wall was just mud and sand. From the swimming hole came a ruckus of splashing water and swearwords.

“Nigger freak!” somebody shouted. “Cripple!”

The wall butted up against an old cottonwood tree. The tree had knots and hollowed out places you could grab onto, easy to climb. I set the can of crawfish down and, Granny’s butcher knife in hand, scooted and climbed my way up to a place where the branches forked apart. I could see everything from up there, the branches of the tree and the tire we used as a swing. Water spilled over a miniature-sized rock ledge on the other side of the swimming hole. Willis was on the side closest to me, not far from the tree and on his hands and knees, naked, looking out over the swimming hole. He was crying and his coveralls were floating in the water. A bare-chested boy stood over him, his skin tanned dark orange with splotches of yellow. He wore blue jeans without any belt and a pair of brown work boots. The jeans had slipped down around his hips. He was scrawny looking with a sunken-in chest, but tall, way taller than me — or even Fable — a big mashed in skeleton with splotchy orange skin.