Leaves

by: p. botte

They brought him to the end of the block.  They – the ones who could walk, who played football every fall and basketball every winter and baseball every spring.  All-American.  They brought him.  Him – the queer kid in the wheelchair, the kid who had no people, no team – the strange kid growing up in a strange land.  They, the ones with a team, with deep-voiced coaches, would taunt him: “How can you do that to a guy without moving your legs?”  They’d taunt him and laugh at him and he would have no quick answer.  His answers were all too long: I long for the feel of a man’s finely-haired arms around my neck, his thighs (muscled like mine) along my own thighs.  His answers all ran like warm sun over fields of grass, like the individual whiskers of Whitman’s beard along a slowly-stroking palm: an anthology of reasons, of wherefore-and-whys, of soft laughter and kind eyes.  Answers that were too poesied and heady for All-American boys.  And so, they would taunt him.  And on this night, they taunted him all the way down the jack-o-lantern-lit street.  Kids screamed and laughed, trick-or-treated.  The kid in the wheelchair didn’t want to make a fuss and so it was that no one really noticed as they brought him to the end of the block.  All-American boys.  And… queer kid in a wheelchair.  “Take ‘im to the end,” they’d said.  Their voices were bright and feverish in the chill of the night.  The night was for fevered children.  Feverishly fun.  Sugar-fueled.  As they rolled past the last house, the queer kid (yes, he has a name: Garvin) remembered being ten, remembered – before the muscular dystrophy pummeled his limbs, robbed his wind – remembered riding his bike down this block.  He remembered riding down to this house that surely had once been painted yellow with blue shutters, remembered thinking (even as a child): how can time destroy a thing without killing it?  Even seven years ago, the yellow and blue house had long-since faded, drained, exhausted itself into an interminable stretch of years.  Curtains (grey) were always drawn.  The lawn, overgrown, seemed thick-stalked and coarse, a bastardization of grass.  In the heat of summer, the cicadas (which seemed to churr from everywhere and nowhere) were always loudest around the house.  Mr. Branlow lived there.  Mr. Branlow was always drunk.  Stumbling-down drunk.  And even if he was ever not drunk, his brain was gone, dissolved by the sauce, and so he wouldn’t have been able to walk straight anyway.  “Stay away from the Branlow house,” Mom would say on his way out the door.  He’d nod and then he was gone.

It’d been years since he’d thought of Branlow.  Years and years.  And now his All-American entourage was wheeling him around the side of the old Branlow place.  Grey, all grey, beneath a moon that was the shape and color of a rotten egg.  Squeals came from farther down the street.

Waist-high grass moved past Garvin’s knuckles as his hands gripped the wheels, struggled to slow his inevitable progress.  All-American hands pushed the wheelchair and would not be denied their progress.  Westward progress; manifest destiny; national exceptionalism and all that.

This story was one in which the shadowthing that lingers in that now-abandoned house rises behind the boy with the brown hair and the letterman’s jacket and (with a tool used to drain old gasoline from the bowels of a ’78 Firebird) drains the bowels from that All-American boy, a boy who’s seen less than twenty rotations of the Gregorian calendar.  And then, in that story, the shadowthing moves to the next tall, good-looking, upstanding American boy and uses the same articulated aluminum hose to stab through the viscera at the base of this next boy’s skull.  Blonde hair turns dark red.  And the blonde boy who is usually so glib turns slack-jawed as his last joke – something about a nun’s genitalia – dribbles out over his drooling lower lip: “her labia… her labia… labia… labia… labial,” he tries to make sense of the joke, tries to bring it together, but it is impossible with aluminum tubing working its way up through his cerebellum and into his temporal lobe.  Slowly, brain functions are corrupted, lost, and his words disappear and all that is left is drool which itself disappears as his muscle function collapses and he is left quivering with a vague, tearing pain behind his eyes.  In that story, the others succumb to the shadowthing, too, until only the queer kid in the wheelchair is left.  And because the hunger of the darkness has no discretion, holds no prejudice, the queer kid is annihilated also.  The indiscriminate justice of an ‘80’s slasher film.

That was the story.

But that story has changed so that the All-American kids finish their job.  Uncle Sam wants them, after all.  He yearns for them, hungers for their righteousness and their small-minded rage.  And so it is that in this story, the boys dump their wheelchaired freight through the bulkhead of the basement, hear Garvin grunt as he tumbles off of the top step and into the flooded darkness below.  There is no cry, only a thick and garbled effusion of bubbles as the Garvin’s air leaves his lungs.  And then the flooded basement is once again silent; is once again just a flooded basement.

And then they walk away.

In this story, there is no shadowthing that brings eternal justice to all souls.  There is no industrial retribution upon the flesh of a nation’s youth.

There is only a flooded basement bequeathed unto the world by a dead drunk.  There are the antics of boys who have been raised under the mantra, “boys will be boys!”  And these boys have been boys.  And there is a dead queer kid bobbing beneath the morass of a flooded basement.

There are men made for domination and others made only to rot.

There is no more horror than that.  Nature is the moon: yellow, rotten, oblong.

Winter will come in a couple of weeks.  Flooded basements will freeze; boys who have the world by the tail will sleep soundly in well-heated rooms.