Free EBook Samples: Free ebook sample of "Illyria" by Thomas F. Cook

Just before my oldest friend was executed, I was hit by a rush of memories that was so powerful I nearly forgot that he was about to be killed. They were just memories of us, three close knit boys from Illyria, and how we grew and grew apart, and then returned to each other as the circumstances demanded.

But chief among these memories was one that did not involve Steve or Byron or any of my other friends. I was a child, sitting on the couch next to my mother while she "rubbed the moons" of my fingernails, as she put it. When I asked her why she had to do this, by which I meant, why did I have to put up with it, she said it was to stop the real moon from falling out of the sky.

I know now that she was just pushing back my cuticles. She was a manicurist, and she probably couldn't help herself. But I was of an age when I believed in the irrefutable connection between cracks and backs, navels and graveyards, my cuticles and the moon in the sky. Ineluctable, invisible threads connected the exceptional to the commonplace; bodies to planets. I was a part of this universe; and as long as the moons never grew off the beds of my fingernails, the greater moon would always rise.

Now I'm an adult, and that kind of enchantment has abandoned me. I'm at the Cosi Sandwich place in Greenwich Village, the Southeast corner of 13th Street and 6th Avenue, New York City, in the rear seating area, sitting on the black naugahyde banquette against the wall below the large mirror, at the table in the corner, farthest to the right, typing at a black IBM Thinkpad laptop which is wirelessly connected to the Internet. I come here daily.

I'm tall, male, with a still-thick head of brown hair, homosexual, 44, alone, and an unpublished writer, a phrase given to me by Edmund White when I met him at a reading he gave in the East Village a few months ago when I was going through what some call a "rough patch." I had always admired his writing but was especially taken with his autobiographical novel The Married Man, which I had just finished. I wanted to meet him and thank him for writing it. After the reading, which was sponsored by Granta in a small second floor space, I introduced myself. "Are you a writer too?" he asked. Never having felt deserving of that designation I said, "I wanted to be, but I was lazy." "Then just tell people you're an unpublished writer," he said and smiled, ready to move on to the next fan. But before he could greet someone else I said, "There is something I've been wanting to write. Something that happened that I feel I have to tell. I just don't know how to start." "What's it about?" he asked. "The execution of one of my friends," I said.

Edmund has a very open, honest face and at first he looked too startled to answer. But he recovered quickly and after a few probing questions about my background said, "I think you should start at the beginning of your lives together. Tell it all." He wished me good luck.

He told me to tell it all but for months I've been resisting him, spending my time instead on the queer quest of photographing and writing something about the 125 tree species that are known to grow in New York City. In Ohio, I would have felt guilty spending my time this way, and even though I escaped Ohio more than two decades ago, I have a tendency to allow that place to assert a moral authority over me which it doesn't deserve and has done nothing to earn. In other words, I feel guilty; I have always felt guilty; I am guilty.

I had ridden my bike up to Fort Washington Park, along the Hudson River just below the bridge, where a couple of centuries ago George Washington was driven out of Manhattan by the King's army, and where, now, there grow a pair of Eastern Cottonwoods, side by side, like conjoined twins -- each crown mingling with its partner's, creating the illusion of one from two. The cottonwood is a fast growing, short lived tree that I was always fond of back home in Illyria. After reminiscing over the pleasant sound its leaves make when the wind moves through them -- a sound like light rain on a slate sidewalk -- I rode farther up the westside, and I was going to take the path along the Henry Hudson Parkway, to Inwood Hill Park, at the northernmost tip of Manhattan, where there remains a small patch of old growth forest in an area they call The Clove. Immense tuliptrees, black, white and red oaks, and bitternut hickories fill this grove, and when walking through it, it's hard to believe that this island is also one of the most constructed places on earth.

But I never made it to Inwood yesterday, because as I approached the 181st Street footbridge, I saw that an enormous century-old retaining wall had collapsed onto the highway, which was now closed and full of emergency vehicles, flashing lights and officials who stood next to boulders -- some as large as themselves -- gesticulating, running hither and thither, and shouting orders at struggling subordinates as they worked to determine if anyone was buried underneath the boulders and dirt.

It had been a tremendous, magnificent old wall -- one hundred feet tall, made of huge granite boulders and covered with ivy and mosses and lichen. With the turrets and parapets at its top, it looked like a castle wall that had just been breached by an enemy. The housing complex that owns this wall, in fact, is called "Castle Village," and parapets have been built along the tops of those apartment buildings as well, which added to the feeling of it being a fortress under attack by the bored suburbs of New Jersey.

But from another, less medieval, perspective, it looked as if something within had vomited, because the wall and the earth behind it had collapsed in an outer direction, as if it was sick and had to throw up.

And from a third, much less interesting perspective, it looked like absolutely nothing: just something that needed to be cleaned up... or not.

But while I watched the commotion this dreadful feeling came over me. The city, which is such a forged and fabricated thing, and thus, very fragile, seemed to have finally succumbed. The walls behind which I have lived so comfortably for twenty-odd years have been breached and the sad old suburbs are advancing on us, graciously bringing to New York their gifts of grass, car and murder. We're running out of time. So here I go.

*******************

Chapter 1

There were two people in the front. One was driving and talking. The other was listening.

"I know you," I said in my brand new language. My vocabulary was about 120 words.

"I know you," I said again.

That one was my mother. She turned around and smiled; waved at me with a little flutter of her fingers. She had pretty blue eyes, brown hair, straight and down to her shoulders. She was in a sleeveless white dress that day and her arms were slender. There was a jingly bracelet on her hand and a gold ring on her finger. She looked at my father and said something in a different language.

That one was my father. He turned around to look at me too, but he didn't wave because he had both hands on the wheel. I don't know how to describe him except to say that he was a good and conscientious driver. He always signaled when he turned; started to brake well before the traffic light; accelerated carefully. He wore a seat belt and made me wear one too. His hair was combed.

They laughed for some reason, and all I could see was the back of their heads and my legs sticking out like twigs in front of me -- barely making it off the end of the seat -- my feet hanging in the air in ugly black shoes.

Darkness.

I was older now and taller and playing a game with some friends that required much running around, hiding, catching, escaping, tagging, bending of rules and the invention of new rules, cheating, lying, bruised shins, bruised feelings, and ultimately forgiveness, when I suddenly realized that I knew these two boys. They were boys named Stevie and Byron and they were my friends. I knew who they were and that we lived near each other. I knew the name of the place where we lived too.

It was called Illyria.

It was 1957, I believe, before we were born, when what had once been a large empty field of dandelions and crabgrass was turned into a neighborhood. Town planners drew the new roads on blue paper, argued about where to put a bend or a turn, and had contractors bury lines for sewage, gas, water and drainage, after which they poured, in only a few days, all the blistering white concrete of the roads that would become our neighborhood. After the roads were poured, telephone and electricity poles went in, and street lamps at widely spaced intervals. The planners named all our streets for English counties or cities: Sheffield Court, Yorkshire Terrace, Westminster Drive, Essex Street, Canterbury Road, and others I've forgotten. Some person with a miserable job went around with a stencil of numbers 0 - 9, and painted street addresses on the curb in bright yellow and white, so that prospective buyers would know which of the muddy plots belonged to them and their future home.

Other than the layout, and the "Windsor" elementary school at the neighborhood's center, it wasn't a planned community like most developments are now: there were no rules about what types of homes had to be built, or the colors they had to be, or whether the roof was mansard, lean-to, flat or gambrel, or how much gingerbreading was allowed. The houses were built in whatever style the person desired. Most of the homes were ranch, painted a diatomaceous white or beige, and in all other respects, horribly dull.

Lawns, shrubs and new young trees were planted, and against all attempts to make the world perfect, nature immediately began to age it. Cracks began to appear in the concrete road as people began driving on it. Basketball hoops were planted next to driveways and quickly rusted overnight. Wives, gardening, discovered the land was all clay just a few inches below the surface. Homes were found to be inconveniently small and the compact kitchens were discovered to be nearly unuseable for anything except heating tv dinners. And into this world of 1960 my friend Stevie was born first, a Leo, and then, probably wanting to catch up with him, I was born a month later, a Virgo, and then Byron finally, was born in Libra. We knew each other before we began. We woke in each other's eyes.

Of the three of us, the strongest was Stevie Mezer, a square faced naturally tanned boy whose lovely dark hair, the color of a coffee bean, was obscured by a military crew cut his father insisted he wear. I knew Stevie was a Catholic and went to Catechism, but I didn't understand what that meant and why we couldn't also go. He was bossy, always coming up with plans and solutions for problems that were usually created by him.

For Byron Pavonine, I had an extra fondness when we were in our single digits, because he often took great pleasure in teaching me things, particularly about science, geology, and the solar system. He was a towhead, his blonde hair kept at an acceptable length by his parents – just above the ears. Byron's twin sister was Patty, her hair just as blonde as his, but Byron rarely spoke about Patty and as we grew, I often forgot that she even existed. He seemed to be somewhat embarrassed that he was a twin at all.

As housing was never built on speculation in those years, a number of those plots went unsold for decades, and I remember that when we were seven years old, during the height of summer, we were playing the wrestling/tag kind of game I told you about in one of the unsold lots that was thick with tall grass and made a kind of camouflage because we weren't taller than the grass. I was almost taller than the grass, but I was still short enough that the other boys would disappear from view when there was only a few feet between us. I don't remember the specifics of the game, but Stevie was much better at playing any game than either Byron or I, and so when the game began Stevie managed to tackle me almost instantly, knocked me face down to the ground and then threw himself on top of me to keep me pinned.

Byron had raced to the opposite end of the lot, which was about half an acre, and was hiding in the tall grass over at that end, so he couldn't have seen Stevie tackle me and he wouldn't have seen us disappear into the tall grass with Stevie on top of me. I squirmed and tried to wriggle out from underneath him to get away, but he was very strong, and heavier than I. He was lying on top of me like a shadow of myself, holding my feet down with his feet, my arms with his arms, and pressing his head down onto the back of my head; and he kept saying, with a strange forcefulness, "Don't move. Don't move. Don't move."

At first, of course, I did just the opposite. I squirmed and struggled and tried to escape. I was laughing and I thought it was all part of the game. But Stevie wasn't playing a game. He was determined to stop me from moving, to dominate me in a slightly angry way, and he kept repeating, "Don't move," into the back of my head, so near the center that his voice sounded as though it was inside my own head. "Don't move," he whispered again and again until I obeyed him, and stopped squirming beneath him, and I relaxed my arms and my legs, and I gave into him. I stopped moving altogether. Then, I felt him ease up and he relaxed a bit, also, and didn't hold me to the ground as firmly, though he still had his entire body covering mine.

And we stayed that way. I felt him breathing on my neck. His nose was in my hair. I started to speak. I started to say, "What are you doing?" but I didn't get out more than "What are..." because he said, again, "Don't move. Don't move. Don't... move."

So I didn't. I waited. It was quiet and strange. I saw nothing but the flanks of grass where they entered the ground, and I was drawn into a kind of concentration on breathing -- his breath on my neck, his chest pressed against my back pushed against me in rhythms as he breathed in and out. I had to work harder to get a breath in because he was on top of me, but for what seemed like a very long time, we just stayed that way, like one statue lying on top of another.

But then Byron, bored with hiding, came running up and jumped on us, as if we were football players -- and he knocked the air out of me very badly. I couldn't get a breath in, and I panicked because I thought I was going to suffocate and I thought, "They're going to kill me."

Until, of course, they rolled off and I could breath again and hadn't died. But later, while eating supper with my parents and trying to listen to another of my dad's long-winded stories about the oil industry, a subject with which he was obsessed all his life, my thoughts kept wandering back to that moment when I thought I was going to be extinguished, and I couldn't help but feel there was something awfully strange about being alive. It was as though having become aware of life, life became my possession; some kind of object that belonged to me and to no one else; and that could be stolen because it -- life -- was not actually a part of me like my fingers or teeth. Life wasn't actually a physical thing.

It made everything seem unreal: the food on my plate, the yellow wallpaper of our dining area, the words spewing out of my father's mouth about the thermal cracking process or Mr. Rockefeller. I began to float away, up in the air for a moment, and then I was magically drawn backwards out through the window and the house altogether, and I had it in my mind that I was going to drift up to the moon to have a look, but then I heard, as from a muezzin, in that my mother said this nightly, "Joe eat your peas please," and I was back at the table in my chair, staring at those little green wrinkled balls. Reality, spawn of mothers, had forced its way into my life once again and was about to make me eat a vegetable I detested.

*******************

Chapter 2

"Did you get a refund?"

Why I should remember this question asked of my father by Stevie's from so long ago, I can't say. But it's like the joke, "I remember everything if I don't forget it."

Mr. Mezer, my dad and Byron's father Mr. Pavonine were standing around a red barbeque grill and I had just been sent by Stevie to ask, "How long?" because he was hungry. I came running up just at the moment Mr. Mezer asked that strange question. "Did you get a refund?"

School was over and we thought this barbeque was to celebrate that wonderful fact. But actually it was Memorial Day, 1969. It was just a day off for the grown ups. The mothers were at a picnic table near the grill gossiping about someone. Byron and Patty were inside the house putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

The day was clear, tumid, slow. The air was still and the smoke from the barbeque drifted slowly up and over the roof of the Mezer home. All three dads had Schlitzes and Mr. Mezer waved his barbeque fork all over the place as he talked to the other two. Stevie was at the other end of the lawn, near a tree that grew between his house and his neighbor's. I looked back across the lawn where he was trying to spin a basketball on the tip of his index finger. Just as I looked, I saw his older brother Brandon pull himself up into the tree and disappear in its cache of leaves. His sister Bess was nearby watching him climb into it. I turned to Mr. Mezer, who was doing the cooking.

"Stevie wants to know how long?"

Mr. Mezer answered me without looking, while he turned the steaks and made the flames flare up and growl. "Tell him he can get off his butt and ask me hisself."

I ran back to Stevie and repeated what his father said. "He said to get off your butt and ask him hisself... yourself."

Stevie made a dismissive wave of his hand and a noise like, Pfff. "If I went over to ask he'd tell me to quit buggin' him and smack me. Watch what I can do Joe."

He tried to spin the basketball on his index finger and then pass it under his upraised leg, but failed. "Dang it," he said.

"Why is your brother in the tree?" I asked.

"Don't know," he answered and picked his ball up and continued to practice his trick while I ran over to the tree to see what Brandon was doing.

Our fathers had been Illyria high school buddies: all three in the same graduating class, like Byron, Stevie and I would be one day (Class of '78). All three of them got jobs at the Ridge Tool Company right after they graduated (Class of '55), and all three moved to this new neighborhood when it was developed.

Mr. Mezer was a very skinny man -- almost emaciated. He was clean shaven, but had a dark shadow across his sunken cheeks. I knew, because Stevie had told me, that he had a bad temper and always yelled at the family throughout supper. They accepted this as routine and simply ate as quickly as they could so that they could turn on the television, which, like a toddler, always made him be quiet. He'd yell at his family about everything that was bothering him that day: his job, his car, his father, the political situation in Washington, the war in Vietnam. Whenever I ate over there I would try to listen and understand him, but his was just a general hatred of life which his family compounded with its existence. He believed there was an "other" life: a life he might have had, had he not made the choices he made, and this other life tormented him with an unrelenting constancy of imagined proximity.

Byron's father Mr. Pavonine had sloping eyes which made him look unusually kind and sweet. His sweet eyes, however, masked a coldness in his personality that spread to his marriage too, for I don't think we ever once saw him hug or kiss Mrs. Pavonine in public, nor either of his attractive children, and in middle school, Byron began calling his parents The Ventriloquists which I never quite understood but thought was appropriate.

My dad was thin also, but not as thin as Mr. Mezer, and he usually had a happier expression than Mr. Mezer, a cheerful kind of countenance. Except that he was lately not always happy looking -- I would sometimes come into our living room and find him sitting on the edge of the couch and staring at nothing, but with a very troubled look on his face, as though he was trying to remember something he had just forgotten. A couple of times, while lying in the dark and trying to fall asleep (something which has been a lifelong problem for me), I heard him crying in their bedroom and wondered why and what my mother was saying to him in those quiet tones that seeped through the wall.

Looking back at my father beside the barbeque grill, where he's nodding at Mr. Mezer and occasionally looking down at the ground and rubbing the grass with his shoe, I could see an unhappiness there, that hadn't been there before -- a kind of fear. Later, I learned that it was because his dad had died earlier in the year, and it had hit him unbelievably hard and of course I couldn't have known it then, but he was undergoing some radical spiritual changes that were brought about by the terror he experienced when my grandfather died.

Brandon, Stevie's much older brother, scared me. He was a hippy and had long "natural" dirty blond hair, which meant uncut, unwashed and unbrushed, and which he constantly referred to as his "fro." For clothing, he wore tie-dyed shirts and torn bell bottom jeans which he had covered with black marker and ink drawings of peace signs, the astrology symbol for Scorpio, a skull, a gun, a knife, the alliterative but redundant words, "Booze, Beer, Boobs," and a picture of a notched palmate tree leaf with the name Mary Jane written underneath. He had also written something about the president on one of the thighs, but which, because he had forgotten to take off his pants when he added this tattoo to his jeans, was upside down to anyone looking at him, but after awhile I was able to decipher it: KILL NIXON, it said.

Looking up at him as he climbed higher and higher, I feared and secretly hoped he was going to fall, but he was very nimble and athletic, and climbed from one branch to the next easily, until he was probably at a height of about 25 feet. Then the reason became apparent why Brandon had climbed to such a height. He stopped and positioned himself in the nook of a branch, reached down, pulled his big bell bottoms up, removed something from his sock, lit it and began smoking. Bess, Stevie's older sister had been waiting for the opportunity.

"I'm tellin' dad," she shouted up at him, but Brandon either didn't hear or didn't care because he said nothing and puffed away like contented young man. "Dad!" Sissy screamed, "Brandon's smoking!"

"He's gonna get an ass whuppin' if he is," Mr. Mezer shouted from across the lawn, even though he also smoked. He made no move to investigate his son and continued gesticulating with his barbecue fork.

Beyond the men, at the picnic table, sat Mrs. Pavonine, Mrs. Mezer and my mother. Mrs. Mezer was a large woman with dark messy hair and she was always a bit careless about her appearance, while it would be safe to say Mrs. Pavonine was never larger than a size 4 and always conscious of a wrinkle or spot on her garment. By temperament, my mother strived to be like Mrs. Pavonine (dutiful, thin, proper, held together), but often said private things in front of me that made me think she thought life was a ridiculous burden of pretense and that she was more like Mrs. Mezer at heart. She was sort of between those two. "Silly Woman," for example, was one of her favorite things to say after a guest left the house or when she hung up the phone, but she always made an effort to be polite to these same ladies.

I left Stevie, Sissy and Brandon to go find Byron and Patty inside, but what I really wanted to do was loiter near the picnic table to find out who the mothers were gossiping about. At first I couldn't figure out who it was:

"She and Reverend Gates have been seeing each other," my mother said.

"Who told you that?" asked Mrs. Pavonine.

"No one... but it's obvious after church during Bible discussion. We sit in a circle and she always sits opposite him – exactly opposite. It's too... what's the word I'm looking for?"

"Planned?"

"Yes. Something like that. It's not an accident. And then sometimes they catch each other's eyes – and they both have that look?"

"Lovesick," Mrs. Mezer said, "Yuck. I married for love and look what happened," and the women laughed.

"But is that allowed?" Mrs. Pavonine asked.

"Is what allowed?"

"For Priests to have affairs?"

"Episcopalians don't have priests," my mother explained, "we have ministers. He's an Episcopal minister."

"We have priests," Mrs. Mezer added, "and they're celibate. Or they're supposed to be anyway. If you ask me some of the nuns is as bad as whores," and she roared with laughter again. She was often quite funny, I thought.

"Norma Mezer!" Mrs. Pavonine was easily shocked, or pretended to be.

My mother covered her mouth and laughed with Mrs. Mezer, then said to Mrs. Pavonine, "Yes Episcopal ministers are allowed to marry."

"But not have affairs?" Mrs. Pavonine asked.

"No, of course not Patty."

"But Reverend Gates is?"

"I'm almost certain."

"But isn't she married?" Mrs. Pavonine asked.

"I don't think so," my mother said.

"Well what about that house? How did she get that house if she's not married?"

"Oh she's loaded," Mrs. Mezer said, "I heard it from Barbara Williams herself. She told me that woman's got a million dollars sitting in her account."

"A million dollars!"

"Are you joking?" my mother asked.

"Not even a little bit," Mrs. Mezer answered, "She can drop a thousand dollars on a piece of furniture without even blinking. And she's got that special color revolving charge plate at J.C. Penney's. I seen it myself. Means she can charge as much as she wants."

"I didn't know there was a millionaire in Illyria," Mrs. Pavonine said, "If she's not married, then I wonder how she got it?"

"She probably inherited it," my mother said, "She told me that she was from Connecticut. They're very wealthy there."

"Not as wealthy as Shaker Heights," Mrs. Pavonine said.

"More."

"More than Shaker Heights? That doesn't seem possible."

*

The women were talking about a woman we boys knew because we played in the woods near her home. Her name was Mrs. Bishop and she had a beautiful stone house deep in the heart of those woods with a fantastically long winding driveway. Her house, which looked a bit like our Episcopal church, overlooked a lake, which we called Bishop's Lake because we knew Mrs. Bishop had created it herself, by having a dam built in the appropriate place, with a concrete spillway for spring floods, and then adding a large flagstone retaining wall that made a long harp-shaped curve, running from the dam, all along the length of her property to the other side of her home and then disappearing in the woods beyond where we boys played and argued.

She was obviously wealthy -- her long driveway seemed rich in and of itself, and being sons of the factory class, we initially, before we came to know her, made assumptions about the woman who lived in that house. Our assumption was that she was snooty and mean. Her house looked frigid and perfect and cold, because of all the stone, and it said something to us about the person inside.

But Mrs. Bishop wasn't like our impression at all. The inside of her house, in fact, said much more about her than the stone exterior, which is oddly what I thought of years later when one of my remarkably incompetent teachers threw out that boring adage about not judging a book by its cover. Our impression of her house belied her. Like the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, it was imposing but full of natural light inside. I don't remember the first time we met Mrs. Bishop, but I'm sure it was a happy experience because she always allowed us to play on her property and walk along the top of her lake's retaining wall. She would often leave her house on her way to do some shopping, and give a wave and a shout if she saw us standing there, yelling at the water, brandishing sticks for weapons, and imagining dangerous seas. "Hello boys," she would shout, "don't fall in. I don't want to have to go fishing for bodies again." Then she'd laugh, hop in her car and drive off to do her shopping in downtown Illyria, leaving us round-eyed and distracted about that word, 'again'. She had dark straight hair, a round face, and she was slightly portly. She often wore large round sunglasses, and she always wore slacks. I don't remember ever seeing her in a dress.

She often invited us inside to have some snacks, or because she wanted to show us things. I remember books, and oil paintings, and huge beautiful dark furniture, a personal brass elevator, and old rugs. And another thing, in particular, was a giant globe she had, which was as large as I, and she would have the three of us look at different places on the globe -- other countries -- and try to explain how that part of the world was different, and what the people did there, and what colors they were and the shape of their eyes.

But what I was most impressed by, were the French windows of her living room that looked out over the small lake she had created with her dam. Because of the position of the house and the retaining wall below it, the lake came very close to the house at that point, and I could understand, when I saw this view for the first time, why she had decided to position her house in such close proximity to the lake. The entire property was built for this one view, for it gave you a dizzying feeling of living upon the open silent water; as if you were lying on a large floating leaf. The opposite shore of the lake was thickly wooded, and conveyed to me the mysterious sleeping presence of nature. To me, all the woods contained this slumbering presence, a presence which periodically opened up to me and exposed itself like a giant eye, then closed again without the slightest hint of malevolence or intention of will.

The first time I stared through those sashes and saw that invisible presence, I must have gone into another of my open-mouthed trances, because I remember Mrs. Bishop touching my shoulder and saying my name quietly, then turning to look at her, as if I had been somewhere else and was suddenly back. She was smiling at me, kindly; and Byron and Stevie stood behind her staring at me, still eating the cookies she had given us. I looked down at the floor because I had dropped mine. She reached down to pick it up. "Sometimes there's a mist rising off the water," she said, "it's even more beautiful, then."

*

"Grub's ready! C'mon you hogs! Soo-wheee! Soo-wheee!" Mr. Mezer hog hollered us all to the table, and all came descending or running like hungry farm animals to grab their dogs, burgers, chicken, spud, and 'pop'. Since this was Mr. Mezer's home we played by Mr. Mezer's rules, which included the Catholic grace spoken in a bizarre monotone:

Bless_Us_Oh_Lord_and_these_thy_gifts_

which_we_are_about_to_receive_from_thy_

boun_ty_through_Christ_our_Lord_A_men.

Grace was followed by an absolute PLUNGE into the food. Our family never ate like the Mezers and I'm sure the perfect Pavonines were stunned to see the ravenous way the Mezer family fed. But the Mezers were used to being screamed at during supper, so although Mr. Mezer was behaving like a regular human being in front of guests on this special day, their training was stronger and they ate their food like Pavlovian trained piranhas.

After the disappearance of the food came some talk of politics where we learned from Mr. Mezer that there was a crook in the "white house," and although I had a vague sense of politics and what it was, (mainly the person named Nixon who Brandon wanted to kill), I had no idea what he meant by the "white house," and could picture nothing except a version of our 4 room "starter" with a masked bandit inside. Mr. Mezer also told us that this same crook was responsible for killing Kennedy, but that assertion drew protestations from the other adults around the table. "I have proof," Mr. Mezer insisted.

Steve bade me to follow him elsewhere and I did. I have, for as long as I can remember, always done what Stevie told me to do. In this case, it was to sit in the grass and watch him spin the basketball on the tip of his finger. I wasn't the slightest bit interested in this trick, which he could do only fairly well, but I was interested in his face; the way he held his tongue against his upper lip, or the moue he'd make with his mouth when the ball fell, the small nose he had; the freckles on his cheek bones; his brown eyes and that awful crew cut. I enjoyed looking at him.

Back at the table the adults were arguing -- we could hear them but couldn't really understand anything. I saw Mr. Mezer stand, angrily wave his hand at them and go inside his house. I wanted to know what had happened, but could see by the puzzled expression of my father and Mr. Pavonine that they didn't know what had happened. Mrs. Mezer gave a wave of her hand to indicate something like, "Don't pay him no mind," and started picking out more potato salad from the bowl with her fingers.

"Joe look, watch me," Stevie said and I watched again this time, as he successfully passed the spinning ball under his leg, then flipped the ball up into the air and caught it with his other hand. I started clapping and he stood there, beaming at me, as if he was basking in the applause of a huge audience. He took a big satisfied sigh and I continued to applaud while he stood with a proud boyish grin at having mastered a trick.

Who made this man

that stands so still

front of heroic pillars

Who made this silent man...

I often wonder if this will be my last memory, too, so ingrained has he become in my consciousness -- so traumatized by our circumstances. Yes I always did what he told me to do. I watched.

*******************

Chapter 3

There's a road which runs north from Illyria all the way to Lake Erie, called Vale Road, which, because Lorain County is a relatively poor county, has never been made wider, but has remained, more or less, the same as when I was a boy: two narrow tarred lanes that are probably just a few steps wide and don't seem very well suited to carry today's SUV.

This road begins at the old Illyria cemetery, which is full now, passes small homes, the worst junior high school in America, more small homes, and then makes a deep and sharp s-turn down one side and up the other of a large ravine. It would probably be more accurate to call the ravine a valley, but for a reason that's probably lost to time or fire, the road was built in the steepest and narrowest part of this valley -- the part that plunges straight down and right back up again. In addition, this road makes the first turn of its S-curve at the top of a 30 to 50 foot cliff. Stevie, Byron and I were playing in the woods on a lovely June day shortly after that backyard picnic, when we suddenly heard, coming through the verdancy as if there was an enormous metal creature back there, the horrible screaming sound of a doomed car: the big brown Buick Station Wagon or the Pink Pontiac as its wheels screeched and shrieked for help while careering from one side to the other, leaving fruitless tire scratches on the road as it followed its fate over the cliff and plunged to the bottom.

After hearing the screech we ran through the woods, further down the ravine to the bottom of the V where there was a small brook which emptied into Bishop's Lake, which was close to the site of the accident. We ran down Vale road and circled around the bottom in order to see the accident up close: to see if the driver and any of the passengers were dead or bloody or limbless or headless, which would have been "tough," our word for everything.

Yet of the three or four times that I can remember hearing a crash and then racing through the woods with my friends to get a look at it, we were never allowed, by one adult in particular, a woman I've already mentioned, to see the actual gory results. Once and only once did we get a good look, because she, Mrs. Bishop, the millionairess in the woods, had not arrived in time to stop us.

The car had landed at the bottom of the cliff in an area that was completely free of trees. There were some small shrubs and bushes growing at the foot of the cliff and off to the sides, but this part of the cliff was bare and stood out over the small flood plain for the west branch of the Black River, so the car had fallen freely, so to speak, unimpeded by any trees that might have reached out to catch the car. It had sailed over the edge of the road, flipped 180 degrees, trunk over hood, and then landed upside down on its roof. Steam was leaking from something, there was a periodic spark, and oil or gasoline was splattered everywhere. What we could still see of the mangled machine was light blue -- and it looked to be a small four seat sedan -- very boxy looking. Neither Stevie, nor Byron, nor I would venture near the car. We had the idea that the car was going to blow up or burst into flames -- probably because we had seen it happen on television -- so we stayed at what we thought was a safe distance, which was about twenty feet and not safe at all.

We saw no one in the car, nor any movement. It was strange that it should be so quiet after the shattering sound the car made when it died, but even nature seemed quiet at that moment -- no birds sang around us; no insects tried to bite us; there seemed to be no wind and we three boys were as quiet as the nature all around us. It was as if all things, except the sun, chose to stop.

Stevie whispered to us that the driver had been thrown from the car -- but he was often a liar. He was always making up facts that he knew he had observed, while Byron hardly ever believed his own eyes without first measuring it and putting the measurement to paper. None of us knew what had happened to the driver, but then, we all saw it, through a window of the car, a hand reached out -- covered in blood. Stevie and Byron screamed and ran as soon as they saw the bloody hand and I learned later when I caught up with them, and they recounted all that happened as if I hadn't been there myself, that they saw a completely severed hand, still alive, crawl all the way out of the car by itself.

But had they not run away, they would have seen, as I did, that there was a whole person attached to the twitching hand, who was just as bloody, and concious, at least for a minute or so -- just long enough to pull himself part of the way out of the car -- just until he had his head out the shattered passenger window. I stared as the arm and the head of this person crawled across the broken glass, and then the struggling man looked up and saw me. It looked as though half of his face was gone, as well as his left eye. All I could see was his right eye -- a single white eye in a field of red staring at me, returning his gaze. He didn't scare me, his condition, I mean. The blood didn't scare me, nor that much of his face and his left eye was no longer there. After looking at me with his one eye, he dropped his head to the ground then, and stopped moving altogether.

From my angle, I couldn't see anything else of the man, and I started to walk closer, uncertainly, by fits and starts, to see if I should try to pull him out by myself. But I was very unsteady about what I was doing. I didn't know what I was supposed to do other than stare at him. There wasn't anything strong inside of me telling me what to do, because obviously my friends knew exactly what they were supposed to do. Their bodies and their minds told them to run, and they had. But I didn't get that feeling. I didn't need to run, but neither did I have a strong sense that I was able to do something about it, or even supposed to; so I hesitated and crept toward the car.

But I then started to feel a stirring, a kind of gathering inside, which I felt developing just beneath my ribs, and I can only say now, as an adult, that this feeling was one of courage and ability. It was a feeling that if I gave into, I would go over and pull that man out of the car by his hand. In another five seconds, I believe that is exactly what I would have done, if I had just been given another five seconds. But from above -- where the car had gone over -- someone shouted, "Joltin' Joe, you get away from there right now, I've already called the ambulance," and I stopped and felt that inner stirring dissipate, never to return ever again in my life. Like a flit of wind, my sense of confidence instantly vanished, and I was a child again, upset, and panicky, and I waited for the person who had called me and was now running down the road to come down to the bottom.

The only person who called me Joltin' Joe was Mrs. Bishop, and I never knew why she did so, but because these accidents happened on the opposite side of her driveway, she was invariably the first person on the scene whenever one happened; she was always the person to call the ambulance which she always did before she came to investigate; and she was always the one to stop us boys from getting a good long look at the bloodiness. So I didn't move any closer that day, or try to help that man, because I obeyed her and waited for the interminably long time it took her to run down the road and then over to me. I've often wondered if my life would have been different had I defied Mrs. Bishop that day and done something to help that man; if I had given in to the rapture of courage.

Mrs. Bishop was dressed in white that day; white pants with a white top. Pale yellow flowers fringed the waist and sleeves of her top and the hem of her slacks. She trotted up to me, panting, as I yelled at her the entire time and pointed at the car, "He's trying to pull himself out of his car." I shouted, acting panicked and helpless and tearful, now that an adult was with me and able to take care of things, but Mrs. Bishop didn't develop any plan, or try to help the person, which seemed strange to me. "I can already hear the ambulance," she said, "they'll take care of it."

I held my breath to try to listen for the ambulance. She was right. The slight pule of its siren was audible -- perhaps helped along by the wind. It was probably a few miles away -- probably racing past the cemetery at the start of Vale Road. So we stood there, Mrs. Bishop and I, staring at this awful accident with the unconscious bloody person part way out of his car, but mostly still in it. I kept looking at Mrs. Bishop and then back at the car, as if I could will her with my gaze to do something about helping the man, but she just stood there with one hand on my shoulder and her other hand over her mouth, shaking her head back and forth in that pitying tisking way that always troubles me now, perhaps because of what happened this day. Then, while I was watching her, Mrs. Bishop blanched, and lowered her hand and said, "wait a minute..."

The only other time I've seen somebody's face change color like Mrs. Bishop's that day, was this friend of mine who had drunk too much whisky and was quite suddenly ill. The pink and rose of Mrs. Bishop's face vanished, right before my eyes, as if it had been sucked out of her cheeks with a vacuum. The flush from her running disappeared, and she was suddenly gray -- ashen -- cadaverous. Her wrinkle lines showed through like sharply drawn shadows, and it would not have surprised me if her hair, which was dark brown, like mine, had suddenly turned instantaneously white; and crackled as all the life force was sucked from it. "Wait a minute." Oh God I can still hear it. The horror in her voice when she said, "wait a minute." She seemed to become a crone; an old witch, in a single second.

"Thomas!" she screamed, "Thomas!"

She clutched at my shirt where she had been holding me, unknowingly digging her fingernails into my shoulder, then let go and ran toward the car and the immobile body half in and half out of it. But before she could get to him, something in the engine caught fire, just as my friends and I had feared would happen. I covered my ears -- the first time in my life I had that strange response. It was all too late -- it was one of the most cruel things I've ever seen in my life. A little flame rose up, very small to start, like the first tiny campfire made by a scout, but it spread across the car almost as quickly as the flame spreads on the flange of a stove, until the car was completely engulfed in an inferno. It was so fast it was hard to believe it happened.

Mrs. Bishop had been able to grab the hand of the man while screaming "Thomas" at him, and had tried to pull once, but she was unable to dislodge him, or pull him any further out of the car, and she had slipped and fallen and gotten very dirty, covered in the same grime or oil that was all over the car. And then the flames quickly covered the man in the car, too, as if they were consciously attempting to devour all the evidence, like an artist who cherishes his work so much he can't allow anyone to gaze upon it. "Mine," the fire seemed to say, "Mine!"

She had to back away, or she would catch fire herself, and by then, everything was in flame, the oil around the car, and the body of this man. I had to back away from it too, because the heat was so unbelievably intense, but I could barely move my legs, I remember. I felt as if all the blood had drained from me just as it had drained from Mrs. Bishop's face. It is the most nightmarish thing in the world to see a person consumed by flames. It took me nearly a decade to get over it. I don't know how Mrs. Bishop stood the heat, because she kept screaming and trying to get back to the burning man, but her efforts were futile. The last thing I remember is Mrs. Bishop in her filthy outfit after having given up and surrendered to defeat. She was bent over, holding her arms across her stomach, and screaming at the ground while dark, filthy phlegm dripped from her mouth.

*

When I was much older, about 16 years, I became obsessed about the person who died that day, because no one told me who died, or explained what happened, including Mrs. Bishop when I saw her later in the summer. But many small towns like Illyria have this secret building called "The Public Library." I would never have been able to learn about the person in that car, the man that Mrs. Bishop had called Thomas, without Illyria's public library. With the help of my wonderful librarian Mrs. McGinnis, I was able to look up the The Illyria Chronicle's account of that accident, and read the news that the Most Right Reverent Thomas Gates, the minister of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, (the church we attended), burned to death in a fiery crash when he drove off Vale Road, which had been the site of numerous fatalities and injuries. Investigations pending, &c.

Then, in a "Oh My God" sort of moment, I remembered wondering where the other man had gone the next time we were at church for a service. But I didn't make the various connections between this accident and the changes in our lives for many years, not until I read this article and felt momentarily faint from the realization that this man had actually been a test -- a test that I failed. Even a child shall be known by his doings (Prov. 20:11). It's right there in the Bible. I didn't know, when I hesitated for those few seconds to save him, that I was altering the course of my own life, and the lives of others. My hesitation -- my indecisiveness that day was my hamartia.

The newspaper article didn't say anything about Mrs. Bishop, of course, but given what I overheard at the picnic, I am certain my mother was right: that she had been having an affair with him -- she could not have had that much pain without there being love involved; love for him. There's no pain without love. And there is no love without great pain. I think of this whenever someone preaches the love of God or the love of Life. The irony of her name (the Bishop was having an affair with the Minister)... is just... too sad, actually. What might be even sadder, though, is that I have never spoken about this accident to anyone, until now.

*******************

Chapter 4

I had been waking nightly during the week after the accident from bizarre nightmares about talking cars or yellow flowers that were always ignorant of some looming disaster that was patently obvious from my point of view. In each of my nightmares, I would always see this ignorant talking object, and always, I would hesitate before reaching out to alert it, or to pull it back to safety -- safety being a relative term, in that it always meant "with me."

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