The Slide: A Novel (17 page)

“Old man sitting next to me,” she said. “Dear old man in my car.”

I felt her downshift into a curve and accelerate out in second gear. The kids who’d thrown toilet paper at her house might have had no other option. They were only doing what they could to keep up. I clutched the rubberized handle above the window so I wouldn’t have to think about where to put my hands.

“Where are you taking me?”

“You and I are going for a drive because we’re neighbors. Stop being suspicious.”

My legs were crossed tightly enough to hold water. She had one hand on the gearshift, the other draped over the steering wheel. Hair ponytailed neatly. I wiped a palm on my thigh.

“Left,” I said.

“Well then.”

The evening was cool enough that we didn’t need the air conditioner. The odor of barbecue hovered thick and smoky everywhere we went. Grilled MEAT. Zoe ejected the CD and tossed it into the backseat. I chose a case from the floor mat and quickly scanned its song list. Once again I was appalled. What nature of person would combine these songs? I slid the disk into the player and went to track four.

“Go right,” I said.

“I like this one,” she said. “Who is this?”

“Johnny Cash, one of a select few men who could get away with doing Taco Bell commercials. Apparently one of your suitors has good taste. I say pick him.”

“I’m not
pick
in
g
any of them. These CDs don’t represent a catalog of potential mates. They give them to me. Sometimes I listen.”

There were very few cars on the road with us, and those we passed seemed energized in a way I wasn’t used to. They were more determined in their goinghood, drivers eager, I guessed, to get home and cook meat. Summer nights like this can be counted on fingers in St. Louis, they are the exception to the rule of mug and weight.

“I got my license from the DMV in that strip mall over there,” I said.

“I don’t think that branch exists anymore. It’s been closed for a few years.”

“I’d be happier if we didn’t think about that.”

“You’re really not all that old, you know. Also I wish you’d realize how little it matters.”

I replayed the Johnny Cash song and said, “Turn into here.”

It was a small parking lot for a small public park, empty but for a dark blue station wagon tucked alone in the back corner. At one end of the lot was a group of picnic tables beneath a kind of wall-less barn. Beyond were baseball diamonds and soccer fields. To our right was the reason I’d brought us here, the Rocket Slide. Zoe parked us facing the playground area, and for a moment we sat in silence, taking it in. There was the red, white, and blue spire painted to look like a rocket, the system of ladders and bridges that spiraled around it, the three slides and unsteady wooden bridge and jungle gym components at its base. The swings and other attractions were off to the side, several gravelly steps from the heart of the Rocket Slide.

“Beautiful,” she said.

“My parents used to bring me every week. For a long time this slide was the single scariest thing in my life. The rest of the park I loved, but that main slide, so steep and final. Pure childhood mortification.”

“I can’t believe I’ve never been here.”

We got out of the car and approached slowly, stepping heavily through fine, crayon-brown gravel. I felt my feet sink and drag as Zoe and I split from each other. I ducked through a short archway into the base of the main tower and climbed the lower rungs of a narrow ladder, cautious with my head and elbows. I was far too big, but I kept going. She went to the opposite end of the thing, away from the rocket portion of the slide. I heard echoes of her bouncing loudly across the bridge. I reached the top of the ladder and stared down the long, skinny, steel walkway, flanked by an enfilade of whitewashed chain-link. Just above was the biggest of the slides. Soon Zoe was crouched next to me.

“Each slide has its own character,” I said. “The really short one is more for ascent than anything, a ramp. The mid-level one off to the side of that ladder that just bruised the hell out of my knee is where kids begin. See the gentle bumps? Perfect for your novice slider. Once you mastered that one, you’d move up to this one here, which is really the focal point of this place.”

Next to us was the dark mouth of the curving, partially covered slide. Cicadas went
skee-her, skee-her
beneath or beside the sound of Zoe’s little breath.

“I’m embarrassed to say how long it took me to get the nerve to go down this thing. I had no problem with the medium one, which is actually steeper and faster than this one. I think it was the darkness that scared me. The tunnel curves around the pole so you have no idea where you’re going once you’re in. Jesus, it used to scare me.”

“There’s definitely a metaphor there. Scared of the dark future.” She patted my elbow.

“You’re not allowed to patronize me.”

“Oh no. I’m with you on the scariness thing. If the hot older neighbor is scared, I’m petrified.”

She looked at me, her eyes a blue like Stuart’s lighted pool at midnight, then swung herself neatly into the tunnel. I followed close behind, but lost momentum before I reached the bottom. She laughed and made her way toward the swings while I squirmed down the last few feet of slide and followed.

Once she was seated on the swing, her smile turned immense.

“I love to swing. Love it.”

I nodded and took the swing next to her. The simple fact, though, was that I was a very bad swinger. I had never successfully worked out the physics of it, and this made me mad. It was gravity, after all, and yet I was hopeless.

“In fact I can’t think of a single thing to compete with the reckless joy of swinging,” she said, and suddenly it was as if she had entered a new plane of existence. Two quick steps and she was going like kitchen fire, soon eclipsing three and nine o’clock while I plodded slowly along like an old pet. Her chain slackened as she reached an apex, then stretched taut with downward acceleration.

“I don’t understand how you’re so much better than me.”

“You’re trying too hard,” she said. “Or not enough.”

Her hair streamed behind, paused, then collapsed around her face. And again. I felt that semi-aquatic form of small astonishment that comes during the early stages of a new relationship, when every small lesson of a person’s wonder turns the air between you more viscous. I hopped from the swing for a better view of the miraculous swinging angel, taking a seat in the gravel. The sweep and arc of her movement, the leaning, how her body’s shifts worked in perfect concert with natural law—these her gifts to the world. She went on for quite some time before riding one upswing to its peak and leaving the swing behind, briefly flying, then landing back in the gravelly earth with its rules and constraints. She joined me in the gravel.

“How’s the studying?” I asked.

“Words, words, words. I like
natation
. The act or skill of swimming. My mom says she’ll pay you to tutor me. She and your mom have already discussed it. Wheels are turning.”

As cars passed by, we heard bits of stereo against the underlying and constant cicada buzz. Just south of the Rocket Slide, Hanley Road changed to Springer Road where it entered into Webster County and became more residential and curvy and tree-lined. Roads did this in St. Louis, spontaneously switched names without warning. Zoe smacked a mosquito that landed on her arm, then showed it to me on her palm, bloodless.

“
Ebullience
will be on there. I personally guarantee.”

“Oh, I
like
that,” she said. “Eb-boo-lee-ents. Another one, please.”

“
Marasmus.
A wasting of the body associated with insufficient intake of food.”

“See, this deserves pay. You could be on the clock right now.” She threw a handful of gravel at my legs.

“I don’t have any sort of teaching certification,” I said. “There could be surprise inspections. Who knows what sort of trouble I’d be in.”

After a few minutes she said, “I think there are insects living in this gravel,” and we drove back home.

july

three

t
he noise that woke me was thunderous and singular, contained to a small region just above my head. In the otherwise black of middle night, big green hexagon numbers glared tauntingly from my bedside clock. Now I heard a drastically different sound, small and softer. Sounded almost like the chirp of a bird but muffled, with a note of restraint. Sounded like a bird in the attic.

I opened the closet and moved Christmas decorations and winter coats into the hallway. I climbed the ladder into an attic I hardly recognized. Everything was brighter. It seemed that the top box of the stack I’d constructed in front of the window had fallen, and now light poured in from the streetlight outside and I saw more of this room than I had in weeks. I could see distinct shapes where I was used to blackness, including what appeared to be a bird perched atop a box near the window. And Freddy, except this time he was wearing only a Speedo and no water wings.

“The box I had to move the box to let in light it was too dark up here.”

I had promised myself if I ever saw him again I wouldn’t look, a promise just self-defeating enough I thought maybe I had a chance. Our last meeting had been cut short, and fault was entirely my own. A valuable lesson learned:
do not look
. I took a seat on my makeshift bed and watched the bird sitting by the window, its head antsy and curious.

“If you stare I have to go away.”

“I promise to not stare.”

“Going away is the closest I feel to pain not pain exactly but it feels odd and so please do not this time don’t stare.”

“Promise.”

“Are you willing to cross your heart and hope to die?”

I had a feeling that this line, this artifact joke left over from his life as a five year old, was a test. And now my urge to look was compounded by a fresh and crushing understanding that my brother Freddy had at one point been a
human being
. This ghost swimsuit Freddy was once a person, with flesh and hair and bones. Freddy the son and Freddy the brother, who really only wanted to retrieve his ball. A little person who wore
shoes
. How in the world had I gone twenty-two years without thinking of Freddy’s feet?

“It’s a cardinal too did you notice that part probably yes you did because you seem to notice everything.”

My stomach went tight. I folded at the waist and rocked gently back and forth, clenching. When the feeling subsided, I sat back up on the box and looked to the bird in the window. It had the triangular beak and distinct head plumage, chest puffed out in round contention.

“I thought you would appreciate that since baseball and how important baseball is to you.”

“Thank you, Freddy.”

“It’s too bad we never got to play catch later you were good at it when you played your arm could have been stronger and sometimes you swung too hard with two strikes but overall you were a real addition to the team.”

I had thought myself well equipped to meet Freddy again; I had devoted hours to solitary rehearsal up here. I had questions planned and conversations plotted. Now all I could think of was a scene in the apartment kitchen, me the infant strapped into my high chair, babbling and waving hands as my mother stands at the counter, head craned around to the table where Freddy sits and waits for lunch. Carla asks what he would like on the sandwich and Freddy says
cheese and mayonnaise, please
. I babble incoherently and wave my hands. Family of four, father at the office. She turns to the table and sets a plate in front of him, and he looks into her eyes and says
thanks, Mom
. I babble louder and pound hands against my high chair. Freddy finishes the sandwich and goes outside to play with his ball. Carla says
be careful, sonny boy
. I whine for another spoonful of formula.

“I’ve been waiting to hear your voice,” I said.

“It’s hard to talk to you because you don’t listen to anything I say.”

“But I do. I’m sitting here hanging on every word.”

“Then why didn’t you do what I said? It was so easy Potter appreciate Mom and Dad simple appreciate them and let yourself love someone and don’t smoke stupid dumb killer cigarettes and you ignored all of it.”

“I’m working on the love part,” I said, and accidentally ran my eyes across his form. “I’m going back over memories like an old film reel. I have all day in that van to review. Stuart was supposed to help, but he’s forgotten. But I’ll get there. It’s either love or it’s not.”

“Calling something love saying the word does not make it love because words you know this part you learned at school words come apart they are empty signifiers these words.”

Freddy, glossy and frail and very much deceased, bent down and examined one of the boxes. For the moment he was occupied and I allowed myself a sustained look. When he stood I quickly dropped my eyes.

“Love is motion Potter love is forward movement but you said yourself the memory reel backward it’s all backward with you. You are stuck back there because Potter you don’t let yourself move forward your eyes get stuck on things and people.”