Marian Palaia - Given World

Mick’s motorcycle jacket hangs from the door handle. I wonder why Mom would put it here, and then I remember: she didn’t; I did. Spirited it out of his room just before he went away. He would have taken it, but I had it too well hidden. He knew it was me, but I wasn’t giving it up. He left anyway. Without it. I pick it up and press my face to it. It smells old. It smells like Mick. It smells like when I was a little kid, just learning how to cuss, and everything, everything , was right with the world. I put it on and go for a ride.

The school has been shut down now for decades, though I guess sometimes they still use it for stuff like meetings or bake sales, so it doesn’t feel completely abandoned. The solstice is two months past, the days noticeably shorter now. It is late afternoon, maybe five, and the sun is a few degrees farther south than it would have been when I came back here. This century is only a few years, now, from becoming a collective memory.

The fence around the playground is still standing in most places, though the equipment is largely useless. I have taken off my boots and Mick’s jacket and am dribbling a ball down the court, barely managing to avoid the most gaping craters in the asphalt. The first shots I miss by miles, but I keep getting closer, so I keep trying. Something else I never told Darrell (something far less critical, but still) was that I had played a fair game of basketball in school too, but had given it up for volleyball, a game I could play when I was high on mescaline and could watch the trails crisscross the net like shooting stars.

Darrell is watching me from the other side of the fence, hands grasping the metal bar at the top. We rode here together after I found him parked at the foot of our driveway, leaning against his truck, bouncing this basketball off the hard-packed dirt.

“You are one sneaky Indian,” I said, because I couldn’t think of one single other thing to say.

He said, “That’s redundant,” and threw me the ball. “Let’s see what you got.”

I threw it back. “Okay, let’s. Get on.” It would be a little while before I could put more words together. I didn’t have to ask for time.

What I’ve got isn’t much, but once he comes around the fence to join me, it looks like we’re a little more evenly matched than we once were, since his one leg seems to want to buckle if he doesn’t plant it just right. He’s still almost impenetrable, though, and there’s no way I can shoot over him, especially not once he gets those long arms up in the air. All I can do is try to get around him somehow, and to my basket before he has a chance to catch me. Even when I do, I miss most of my shots. And there’s no point in even trying to block him. He can shoot pretty much from midcourt, without really looking. But he’s getting tired, and the limp is getting worse, so I take the ball, go up to the school, and sit on the steps. He follows, sits by me.

“Come here often?”

Like we’re in a bar, and probably a whole lot younger. And totally different people.

“Not too.”

We’re both winded. We breathe in tandem, empty our lungs slowly.

I ask if he saw the obituary. He says yes, but he was afraid to come all the way in.

“Afraid?”

“Something like that. Nervous, maybe.” He shrugs. “Does it matter?”

“Nope.”

He says he’s sorry about my dad, and I say it’s okay, and that I am not any more prepared to process death than I have ever been, so I will be going at it slowly. We can talk about something else. Pretty much anything.

He studies the basketball court for a few minutes, yanks the cuff of his jeans up to pull a burr off his sock. He says, without looking at me, “Slim told me he met a lady on a motorcycle. He thought he might know you. He thought maybe you were one of his teachers when he was little.”

“I didn’t tell him.”

“I know.”

I feel a little sick, but I suppose that’s to be expected. I can’t tell if he’s mad at me. I have spent well over half my life thinking he would be mad.

“Do you think—?” It’s a dumb question, so I don’t finish it.

“Yes,” he says. And in case I have any more dumb questions: “I’m not going to do it, Ginger.”

“Tell him?”

“Yes. Tell him.”

“As soon as—”

“Possible.”

Of course I had not thought this through; had thought, if anything, Darrell would tell him, if it came to that, and then we could all just go on and do whatever it was we were going to do, whatever it was.

While I am busy thinking about what I had not thought through, Darrell is busy getting ready to say, “I’m not the one who left.”

I almost say, “The hell you weren’t,” but I don’t have to, because he hears me thinking it.

So this is the part where he is angry. As angry as Darrell gets, which isn’t very, or maybe it’s very, but it doesn’t hold. “That was different. And, yes, I should have told you. Do you want to play who should have told who what?”

“No,” I say. Because he did not say, “I’m not the one who left him .”

“Good. I don’t either.”

“Okay.”

He picks up the basketball, does that finger-spin thing with it, palms it back to earth, to the concrete space next to him. I ask what happened to his leg.

Multiple fractures, he says, while he was still in Texas. A bunch of white guys jumped him at a bar. Army guys, from the same base. “One of them stomped my leg with his shitkickers. No one even called the cops or the MPs.” He pulls up his pants leg and shows me the scar where the bone came through. I want to touch it, but I don’t. He spent six weeks in traction while it healed, which it did just in time to ship out.

“Except they were done shipping us out. They’d stopped the deployment. Just like that.”

“They what?”

“They stopped sending guys over there.”

“Enlisted guys? Or drafted?”

“Both.”

How could I not have known that? Because I had pretty much stopped paying attention, is why. For some years. For some reasons.

“So—”

“I was never going anywhere. Or I wouldn’t have been. Or, you know.”

Well, I’ll be damned. “So none of this—”

“Ginger. Don’t.” He’s saying we can’t go back, but that’s easy for him — I’m sure he’s already done it.

“Didn’t you?”

“Oh yeah.” He pauses. He drops his head backward and frowns up at the sky. “And you can if you want to, but it won’t change anything. It’ll just keep you up at night.”

I have two choices: believe him, or make myself crazy. Seems so simple. Flip a coin. Pick one.

I ask him if he wants to hear something funny. He brings his chin back down and turns toward me, raises one eyebrow. “Funny weird? Or ha ha funny?”

I say, “The first one, I guess.” I say I did end up going to Vietnam, looking for… things.

“Your brother?”

“For starters.”

“What did you find?”

“Not sure, but something.” I look down at my hands, thinking maybe it will appear there, like whatever the opposite of stigmata is. Are.

“Name it?”

“Not hardly.”

“Yeah.” He gets it. Me. He still gets me. Like when I was seventeen. I believe this.

But I still have to scout the territory, do some recon. Start at the beginning and creep up, or it will bury me. “Who was I then?”

“Ginger,” he says.

“I wasn’t really.”

“To me you were.”

“Exactly.”

He nods. Because, again, he knows. This is not something so easily sorted.

Ginger. Cupcake. Punk. Tinker Bell. Cookie. Stolen identities. Or borrowed. Some kept. Maybe all.