Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

When I heard the door open, I thought nothing of it — except That must be somebody —that silly little thought. So I didn’t turn — planting the seed for questions later— what if? I always like to believe that up to that day I had been a happy boy— so full of light —but I know that’s not true. Whether I was already wounded, had already been bleeding all that light slowly, I don’t know. I had already been questioning myself, my value, my capacity to hold light, but in the way a small boy does — feeling it in my guts— What’s wrong with me? I could trace some of it to my skin, to my parents, and later to alcohol — the completeness it brought me when I drank, which spoke to the fact, magnified when sober, that there was something missing. Perhaps what I’d felt as a boy were the things that would be coming — premonitions in the child guts, mute but still calling — a silent wail of dread and bile.

So when he smashed my head — one, two, three — against the tile wall, it felt right. I remember seeing my blood up there as he dragged me back — up there on the wall like a smear in a cave, the abandoned gesture of an ancient mind and hand. He punched me. He kicked. He was enormous, reassuring — a confirmation of evil. No more wondering about specters and boogeymen and the devil. I had proof — empirical. He stank like the old food on dental floss, the pop released with the decaying meat between molars. Like long-dried sweat. Like the grave — body, moss, and soil. I tore inside, so deep that I could taste it. And it was so strange, the things that flashed in my mind: why my father left; why my mother wanted me dead. And I wished that they had told me, but how could they have? Everything you ever were will gush from you through a breach, and everything you would have been will be gone. The tear in your anus a symbol denoting the eternal, fathomless gap. No one has ever reached that. I know no one ever will. The scarred brow, stigmata to remind you and them that you will never be whole. And I know it’s so feeble, but I wish it would all go away — but it is me: the line of Ham, the line of Brown, the crooked soul finger, the jagged keloid scar that everyone eventually points to. I wish I would go away, but I shoot through everything — the tree, the dappling on the log, the voices that seem to rise up out of the bay. Everything begs for meaning, for origin, for redemption, and I can’t do it. I know that I’m too damaged. I’ve seen signs and confirmations — evil, chaos. Never good. Never a sign of pure, lasting, invulnerable good.

I don’t startle when Houston crashes through the honeysuckle, looking up, as though he was following the trail of the ball to this spot. He sees me standing there, shoots a curious look over, then continues tracking his line. He points at the ground as though he’s found some secret tunnel out of a place where we’ve been lost a long time.

“I’ve got it!”

I shuffle toward him like a zombie. He’s straddling a log. What a handsome kid, especially since he’s free with me here in the bush — all the tension needed to hold the mask in place is gone. His face has opened. He takes off his cap, revealing the loose naps that have been pressed into the first two layers of a ziggurat. He looks at me quizzically, wondering, perhaps, why I’m not rushing to him. Then he looks back down and shakes his head.

“Terrible lie.”

It’s buried under twigs and leaves, with the log between it and the fairway. Only the top sticks out. There’s no way to play it.

“What are you gonna do?”

I close my eyes, spread my arms weakly, and list back and forth. He looks at me harder, questioning again, but this time reversing the roles, as though he’s asking if there’s something I don’t understand. He looks down at the ball, feels the balls in his apron pouch, then turns to the fairway, to the clearing he’s come through.

“If this log wasn’t here, you could punch right through that hole and have a chance at par, maybe birdie— if this log wasn’t here.” He taps at it gently with his foot and stoops. He turns his eyes back up to meet mine, and he’s a boy again, in the kitchen with the cookie box, waiting for the nod from me because his mother, in the next room, has already told him no.

“What do you think?” He turns, ducks to peer under the branches. He whispers, “Are they down here yet?” He takes one more look at me and then walks away — mutters, “It’s cool.” He stands in the opening and gives me his back.

“Yo!” yells someone on the other side of the leaf wall. We both spin nervously to the voice. It’s Buster, peering through the foliage. “What are you guys doing in there — huh? Private party?”

“His ball’s in there,” barks Houston, a bit too stridently for the both of them. Buster waits for him to lower his head, then turns to me and the log.

“That’s not your ball.” He thumbs over his shoulder. “Your ball’s out here.”

I squat to examine it, and when I do, I feel something tear inside. I pick up the ball. It’s not mine, but I can’t get up. I think I’m bleeding.

“Come on, we’ve already hit.”

I don’t stand. I dab at the back of my shorts, but I don’t feel anything there. Houston has already left the woods, marching almost, with my bag, in the direction Buster had pointed.

“You all right?”

I start crying again, so I cover my face, rub my temples with my thumbs. I stand slowly, trying to find a voice for him.

“I’m just a bit dizzy. It’s gone.”

“You’re hungry,” he states surely. “You should have let me get you something back at the turn.”

With that point made, he leaves me in the woods. I sit down on the log and close my eyes. I feel sleep coming. I want to stay on the log, in the woods, in the dappling, slowly bleeding, and have the underbrush, the ferns, the buzzing, the moss and mushrooms cover me. These are good woods. They need a good haunt. And the golfers, the members, gambling, could tell their guests, their sons about the spook who disappeared. From the seventeenth tee, pointing down below— When the wind is right, you can hear him — above the gulls, the yellowjackets, the sway and rustle of the branches. When the sun is right, you can see him sitting, waiting — there, that mushroom patch on the log. They say he had the hands of a giant, hands that could swallow you whole.

Buster comes back. He looks angry. I wipe my eyes with my baggy shirt and square up, fists clenched at the hip. He sees them and stops two strides away. His face relaxes, then reforms into the expression he wore in the car this morning; he knows me.

“Here.” He holds out a candy bar. I stare at it. “Allergic to nuts?”

“No.” I keep staring at his hand.

“Sorry, it’s all I had in the bag.” He looks closer, into my face, like it’s some curious symbol he doesn’t understand.

“Your eyes are on fire, man.” I cover them with my hands, absent-mindedly rub at them.

“You’re making it worse.” He pushes the candy at me. “Here.”

I have to take it. I open it and offer him some. He refuses. “I just had one.” He nods for me to eat. I do. It’s not candy. It tastes like dried mud. I try to swallow, but I’m spitless. He keeps watching me, some bizarre nursemaid with me in the forest primeval.

“That’ll take care of one problem,” he says. “Come on, everyone thinks you’re lost.”

I pick up the ball and pocket it. Buster waves me out of the woods. Marco looks both worried and embarrassed when he sees me. They’re gathered around my ball, and they look to Buster to explain it all with his face. He doesn’t. He looks up the fairway at the flag.

“You got lucky,” says Marco nervously. “You must have hit a tree or something.” I can’t tell if he’s nervous for me or himself.