Steve Tem: Onion Songs

She looks quite familiar. But then all the young women look familiar to me. By the time a man reaches my age he has stockpiled the blueprints of a thousand young women in the caves of his memory, ready for somber perusal during the long, lonely hours before dawn.

The young woman’s eyes lock with mine and she slips in a quick smile. My heart speeds as a long stem of black insect leg darts from one corner of her mouth and scratches futilely at her chin before her dark red tongue can usher the leg back inside her mouth.

I look away as if with mere embarrassment, as if some part of her garment had slipped away and revealed more than might be decent. When I look back she is gone, but the ground where she stood appears blackened and torn.

Joseph injures himself again. His eyes are always filling with tears and then he can’t see more than a few inches in front of him. He runs into things and then he falls down hard. Clarence Senior is always trying to help by convincing him that he isn’t really hurt. “See, no blood!” Clarence Senior shouts with no small measure of delirium. He says this every time, even when there’s blood gushing from the wound. Everything is A-OK in Clarence Senior’s world, even though Clarence Junior hates him, even though he has the worst nightmares of us all.

“Throw me the ball! Me me me!” George cries, his belly moving independently of his leap. Benjamin, the retired carpenter—perhaps the best coordinated of us all—throws the ball and George drops it. No one laughs or complains—it has always been George’s job to drop the ball. He staggers back and forth as he attempts to pick it up, frustrated to tears because his knees will not bend properly. If someday he were to magically acquire competence there would be considerable tension generated in the group, for only by comparison do the rest of us remain competent.

Benjamin shuffles after the ball like some huge, shaggy toy run by remote control. No one knows very much about Benjamin—he started playing with us one day as if he’d always been here. He has never spoken. I get the impression that he simply has nothing to say and will not pretend. A far better way of being in the world, I think. The rest of us speak constantly, fueled more by anxiety than idea.

We toss the ball and drop the ball, we run around things called bases, worshipping at each one briefly before being urged on by the impatient cries of our companions. The bases are old schoolbooks, interestingly shaped stones, and stakes ripped from the hard hearts of trees and driven almost flush into the ground. Who among us would have the power to execute such a pounding? It has always been here, driven ages ago by some comic book hero or other. It would be nice to linger, but our fear is that to stop even briefly, to stop at all, would be to invite the fragments of black into our mouths, into our ears and eyes and anuses, until all motion is stopped forever.

So this tired old group of us, we play and we play and we play, pretending to have fun until, like toddlers run amuck, we collapse into the arms of our mothers at the end of the day.

But, of course, our mothers are not there at the end of the day. Most of us cannot even remember how our mothers died, or how they’ve otherwise left us. But we think about our mothers often, during these last, long days of play in the park, for we are still the melancholy boys we always were, late for dinner and crying over the day’s small, misplaced treasures.

Late in the afternoon Samuel arrives from his job by bright yellow taxi, his favorite mode of transportation. He is the only one of us to continue in a state of gainful employment. He sits down on the graffiti bench (“Peggy loves Frank, but what about God?” “Sing and play all day, but whatever you do don’t go past the path at night.”) for his daily cry, the rest of us gathering around him for our daily pretense of comfort. “They act like I’m stupid!” he complains. “Like I’m too old to learn anything new!”

We all pat his back and his knee, more fiercely now, agreeing vigorously although we really have no idea what we’re agreeing to. We have never been to Samuel’s work and most of us haven’t worked a regular job in years. Still, we know how it can be out there. Any man knows, past a certain age. The world is something new every day, something you’ve never seen before, something you feel hopeless to understand. The colors of the world shift their spectrum with each rising of the sun. The mouths of the world mutate the words of the world even as they are formed. “Damn bosses… damn wireless whatevers… damn computers…” We all nod our understanding. Damn whatevers, indeed.

Then there is Willy, standing in his corner of the field waiting for the ball to come to him. He would wait all day if we let him, and more often than not we do, for we enjoy observing his profound patience.

“It’s not patience,” Jacob declares. “He’s just an idiot.”

If there is truth in what Jacob says we do not want to know about it. Willy does not appear to suffer the fears that bother the rest of us. Willy has no need for hand-holding. Willy does not appear to need at all. Willy simply stands, and waits, watching for whatever comes next, a ball, or a butterfly, or fragments broken off the shadows and stealing across the lawns.

We try to prevent the ball from coming Willy’s way. He would not know what to do with it. He is a watcher, you see.

“He has about a thimbleful of brain,” is the way Jacob so delicately puts it. Jacob thinks it is shameful the way I let Willy groom himself: unshaven, hair long and stringy, greasy. Jacob has even brought shampoos and razors to the park from time to time, “To take care of poor Willy. Shameful the way we’ve let him go like that.” As if Willy were an unkempt yard or a dog in need of a trim.

But I always wave Jacob away. Willy is not exactly happy, but he is stable the way he is, and some things should not be tampered with.

Again I see the pretty young woman at the edge of our area, watching. I cannot keep my eyes off her. The beauty of young women is something I truly miss, being able to touch them, to admire them openly. Not that there is no beauty in older women, or that the feelings I’m expressing are primarily sexual. But so much is recalled when I see the newness in them, the untutored look as their eyes open up to the world.

A sudden breeze lifts her hair revealing a sheen of brittle membranes close to the skull. Small nodules like eggs nestle around her ears and above her forehead. Tiny shapes pulse and jerk in the sacs. As one begins to erupt into a flowering of dark, segmented parts, the breeze mercifully drops her hair back over the assemblage.

We are all supposed to be having fun here. Even though sometimes we try a little too hard, laugh a little too hard for comfort. But what are you going to do? Far better than the alternative. That is what everyone says. That is what all the old people say.

At five o’clock we line up and the designated adult checks the pockets of the others. We stand at lazy attention with our hands stretching our pockets inside out and sideways so they resemble a pair of large ears. Clarence Senior always requires some encouragement, Willy has to have his pockets turned inside out for him, and nine times out of ten George will be hiding something, so we have to watch him especially carefully to make sure he does not do anything that is going to get him into trouble. More often than not I am the designated adult, a fact that I often resent and can be quite bitter about. In those instances I always have Jacob check my pockets—I never keep anything in there besides some hard candy for the others.

By eight o’clock we are well into drowsy, although most of us will fight sleep with our last breath. We sit up on our bedding and talk about the day’s games and share memories of our mothers, now and then twisting our heads around to make sure that a particular piece of night remains respectfully in its place.