Scott Cheshire - High as the Horses' Bridles

“It’s scripture, what else?” He squeezed my hand and grabbed hold of the chair again quickly. His hair fell and covered his eyes.

I said, “Please. Let me go and get us some dinner.”

“No, no, you go ahead. I’m gonna go lay down.”

“You literally just got up.” Or maybe he was right. He just needed rest. I didn’t want to call someone and make too big a deal. He’d start acting like the Dad I knew, eventually, in the morning maybe. In the meantime, the house needed cleaning, and he needed a shower and shave.

“I’m tired and I take it when it comes,” he said. “Tomorrow will be better, I promise.”

I combed back his hair with my hands, so I could see his eyes. Still green.

He took a set of keys from his pocket. “So you don’t get locked out.” I followed him as he walked to the bathroom. He opened the door and the red light peeked from around like a fire. I tried to peer inside but he deliberately blocked my view.

“You’re going to lie down?” I said.

The white cat snuck by and went in. He actually allowed this.

“Wish me good dreams,” he said.

I let out a sigh. Relented. “Good dreams.”

He took up my hand to his mouth and he kissed it. I don’t think he’d ever done this before, kissed my adult hand. There was a pink swelling around his mouth, maybe from holding back a cry. His chin quivered. “I’m fine,” he said. “I promise.” He closed the door and he locked it. Shuffled about inside. There was a trickle, a scraping whine from the plumbing, and then a falling jet of bathwater. I figured he was taking a bath. Good for him. I needed to clear my head. A walk. A long walk, outside, in the open air. I opened the door, and whispered a brief prayer for the first time in years.

I walked back and forth on the sidewalk out front, around the corner, and all I could think about was Dad. And the cats. How were there so many cats? And what in God’s name was going on here? Dad wasn’t sick , as far as I could tell. But what did I know? Maybe he was. Even though he looked terrible, I didn’t want to believe he was physically sick, and I was nervous and totally undecided on how to proceed. Plus all of a sudden, here in this house, I was thinking of Issy, and I didn’t like to think about Issy. I thought of how that same year, in the fall, his father was sort of back in the picture when Issy disappeared, and his mother was getting herself straight, I think. Such a long time ago. I thought hard about it: a Sunday morning, and Issy went to get his dad a newspaper and a gallon of milk. But he never came back. On the news, the neighbors said they saw him come home, paper bag in his arms, and that he was last seen talking to a man in a pickup truck right in front of his house. Which does seem pretty memorable for Queens, because when did I ever see a pickup? But also an old woman from next door said she never left her porch, and she saw him leave that morning and never saw him again. What was it in the eighties? Kids were disappearing like it was some mini-Rapture. One minute they were here, and then poof. Ten years of grainy milk-carton photos and weeping mothers begging for the return of their kid on the local news.

Like it usually went, Issy’s dad was a suspect at first, but he was cleared. I seem to remember this ruined what was left of that marriage. I definitely remember Mom sitting me down to tell me about Issy. She said she had some news to share with me, and that I needed to be a “young man” about it. She called me that, a young man. And this made such a powerful impression on me, because I’d been called a young man by the elder brothers in our congregation ever since I started giving sermons and scripture recitals at church. “ What a fine young man … A fine example for the other boys…”

But, until Issy, I was just a boy to Mom.

He and his mother hadn’t been to church that week, which wasn’t so strange a thing because, like I said, sometimes he went with us, and sometimes his dad dropped him off and he went by himself. Sometimes he wouldn’t go to church at all. But by the time Mom talked to me, the whole congregation was already whispering about his disappearance. It was on the local news, in the papers.

She said, “Young man, this world is sick and tired and broken, and one day our Heavenly Father will fix it. But until then, bad things happen. What you’re hearing about Issy is one of those things, because no matter where he is, it’s not where he wants to be, which is home and safe with his family. I want you to pray for him, okay?”

I remembered her makeup, and how much she seemed to have on while she talked to me, how there was a lot more on her face than usual, and how the ceiling fan in our foyer was spinning just above us. I came to know the word “foundation” around this time. Makeup fascinated me, because I figured I was supposed to like it on girls but I really didn’t, the UNO girls on the roof wore no makeup, and wasn’t it sort of like paint? This made me suspicious. I used to wonder what would happen if you kissed a girl who had a lot of makeup on. Would it get on your face and your hands? On your shirt? I thought girls mostly wore makeup to hide problems on their face. Issy’s mom, for instance, wore lots of makeup to cover the pocks and marks. Mom, though, just looked so tired. I looked up at her and I considered the safety of ceiling fans, wondering whether the speed at which they spun was quick enough to take off somebody’s head. I was confused.

Mom and I talked — I don’t think I said much — and then Dad led me into the garage when she wasn’t looking and asked me where Issy was.

“Tell me,” he said.

I thought I was in trouble. “But I wasn’t with him. How could I know?”

He asked me to concentrate, and said, “I don’t mean know where he is like that.” Dad asked me to think of Issy, only Issy, to try and reach up to God. He asked me to see if Issy was in Heaven.

He said, “You need to take this seriously.”

“Commune,” he said. “It’s in your blood.”

This only made me more confused. So I was relieved when Mom suddenly took me away by the hand. She glared back at Dad, and led me into the house. I couldn’t know what that glare was about, not really, only it appeared Mom and Dad thought differently about some things. About me. They were different people. I don’t think I really knew this before. From then on I wasn’t surprised when they had opposite opinions, or when my mom got mad at Dad for whatever reason. I think it was then, when Dad told me to commune, and when I did try to do it, later, in my room — I seriously did — that I began to question what had happened onstage that summer. Maybe not in some clear way, but I certainly asked myself how what Dad called communing with God was different than praying to God. I prayed to God and I did ask Him to tell me where Issy was. So many times I asked this. I also recall hearing my own voice asking for an answer and I remember making a small sound. A kind of “Oh.” My voice. I heard my voice, it was me. Dad asked me again, later that week, in a roundabout way, and I said I couldn’t do what he wanted. I didn’t know how, and I asked him to please not be mad at me. His face fell. We never talked about it again.

I want to say such sad and harrowing news of Issy made me cry, made me weep, but it didn’t. Kids are too self-involved. Or I was, anyway, in the way that young kids can be: life will never end, and my parents will always be here.… But there was something. I didn’t know what, a disturbance in my system of things, a first ripple in the unbothered water. Things did not add up. Where did he go? I asked myself that a lot. I prayed about it, thinking maybe I did have special access to God. But He never answered. One afternoon, I went out back and I cut at the one of the maples with a steak knife. I slashed at the tree. I threw the knife at the dirt at the base of the tree like I was throwing a hatchet. I pulled it from the dirt and I looked at the small hole I had made, and I punched the dirt as hard as I could. There was a small rock there and it cut the back of my hand, and like a bruised piece of fruit I now had a soft spot.