WALK BACK TO A BONEWHITE SUN, by Michael Buckley
The boy is a counting of sorrows. You knew it when Angela called out of the deep plumb of nighttime and shortly after you held him in your arms. It had been three years. She was no different than she’d been when you last saw her.
The boy is as a conduit – that night you held him in front of Angela as she explained that he was your son. You had broken up that last time and made love in the slushy light of a cloudy day cast through your apartment’s windows. She walked away with part of you and fell in love with another man two days later. She told you about his ferocity and the struggle that was their love and how she hated you after that last time in the apartment. And you held the boy. Through him you felt her trials: the rejection of the man she’d loved so briefly and incandescently, the grief-filled labor of raising a child, the daily work that keeps her fingers worn down to nubs.
The boy was heavy like a sack of something expensive; he lay in your arms; he did not crave roaming. He pawed at your face as if it were a thing beyond his vision. There was a puckered scar just within his hairline.
“T. B. I.,” Angela told you, and later she said Traumatic Brain Injury. “A nanny dropped him when he was a baby and his head hit a – what do you call it? – a letter opener.”
Letter opener? The shine of steel, the downy warmth of a baby’s head. You think about it even now and you’ve dreamt but your dreams of it have ceased. The last dream you had you remember the letter opener standing miraculously straight up, unsupported, waiting to lobotomize a dropped baby that fell, in your sleep, in slow motion. You’ll never understand how it really happened.
Part of the reason is because Angela brought him to you because she was going to jail. She had been drunk and stoned and plowed her car through a playground empty of children. She left behind crushed jungle gyms, misshapen giraffes bent at the neck and leaning as in prayer, unsprung hobby horses tossed into nearby trees. A settling plume of sand – and she only came back once after, to bellow drunkenly through a closed door. You stood between the door and Raymond, the boy, frozen. The boy was transfixed, knowing his mother’s voice.
He’s thirteen now. Tall and strong and rebellious, he will become consumed with rage and bite and scratch when he can’t have what he wants. He has peppered your arms with pink, curved scars and deep bruises from the bites. You have been worried about him attacking you in your sleep, but he never has. He cannot speak. He has one good leg – strong, as thick as one of yours – and one bad – shorter, weaker. He has some moments of calm in which he looks past you and smiles and holds his hand up and flexes it into an adolescent fist. Changing his diapers was difficult for a long time but now you’ve done it so many times you know his body as if it were an extension of your own. He has one bowel movement a day – usually gargantuan in size – and it often happens at school. You know that to give him milk is to invite two or three more bowel movements.
You’ve smoked in front of him since he was little. At first you were reluctant but then you thought – with all of this boy’s problems, what’s a little smoke gonna do? You, dinner eaten, finishing a beer, looking at Raymond covered in his own dinner. Up to his wrists, in a spilling arc down his chest and onto his pants. You wanted to smoke.
So does he. You sat at the table once after dinner and he tapped your pack of cigarettes and brushed his hand over his chest, his word for please.
“What?” you said.
Tapped again and brushed. Please.
You gave him one as a joke told only to yourself, like the time you gave him a hot pepper and you both rolled on the ground, him from the heat and you from watching him smack his chest. You gave him one and he leaned forward to have it lit and you lit it, thinking boy better keep his face back from the Zippo. He smoked it in little puffs, peaceful, looking strangely mature with it between his fingers. Nothing else he does is this delicate.
You sought out the source of his habit because you were afraid it was you. It wasn’t. It turned out to be an aide who worked with Raymond, an ex-tank soldier whose pension was eaten up by his wife’s cancer. His vices were cigarettes and open air, so when he walked with Raymond, teaching him to stop at stop signs and red lights, he smoked. He gave Raymond some because he felt bad for him. The sharing of vices in the open air was something the man knew from his tank days, from old wars, from interminably sweet and boring peacetime. When you found the reason for Raymond’s addiction you had the soldier fired. There was an uproar and the soldier was mystified.
Now you sit and watch Raymond smoke with you after dinner. To deny him cigarettes causes an outburst, thrown plates, hands dug into flesh, yours or his own. You denied him his pleasure for a long time, and then you became tired. He is so peaceful as he sits and smokes. He is completely still except for his breathing and his left hand and all you can think is I am not blameless, I am not blameless.
A girl and her family live down the hall. She attends the high school Raymond will go to when he graduates from junior high. Because her mother has seen you walking down the hall with Raymond lurching beside you, and because she once worked in Special Education, she stops to talk. She stands at a safe distance from Raymond’s hands and directs questions through him to you.
“Is your daddy working too hard?”
“Doesn’t your daddy have any lady friends?”
She sends her daughter over too, to help you clean once a week. Her name is Yvette and it seems perfect to you, as if it were a verb rather than something to call a young girl, as if Yvette was something she did in shaded passageways that smelled like lotion and cream rinse and candles, as she does. Your designs are half hidden in the welling emotion you feel when Yvette is around, the choking, cloying desire. You feel fatherly things – protection, you want to be the thing that glows most brightly for her. You also want to guide her through complete darkness to a bedroom and pull her cotton clothes off of her. You want to examine her bra and panties in the morning, as she still sleeps, changing your room from a place where a man lives to a place where sweetness moves.
She offers to sign your newspaper one day.
“I’ll be famous,” she says. She is absolutely confident, she is telling the future in certain terms.
“Please,” you say.
She moves around Raymond carefully. You’ve asked her to do so because although Raymond hasn’t noticed girls yet in the way that thirteen-year-old boys will, you expect his sexual maturity to come like an assault, a clawing with uncertain goals. Yvette is unprepared for this. She claims she’s strong, has friends that are boys and on the wrestling team who have taught her dangerous things. This seems so innocent, there’s no real understanding of violence in her words, no real understanding of what Raymond will become when he is a man.
You’ve imagined her so many times walking from your bathroom to your bedroom, coming back to you. The girl clothes. The silences because she’s not good at knowing what to say yet. One day, without meaning to, you tell her that she can come over any time – to eat, watch TV, whatever she’d like. She doesn’t for a long time but then one day, unannounced as you’d hoped it would be, she enters your front door.
You’re in your room and you don’t hear it. The day outside is so brilliantly lit that its elements stand out and are absurd when taken alone. You are blowing smoke between yourself and the window; it falls like cream through water and makes the clarity of the sunshine less sure.
And then you realize silence. Raymond had been watching TV, but you couldn’t hear it anymore. You don’t hear his footsteps. Raymond and daytime silence are a bad combination: he’s either left or found something to rip apart or broken the TV. You put out your cigarette and leave the room.
You find him in the living room – as filled with daylight and the blue sky beyond the city as was your bedroom – he has one of his hands full of Yvette’s ponytail and the other pulling at her shirt. They are laying back on the couch and she is silently crying. Raymond looks contemplative. He has bloodied her lip.
You move quickly to pull Raymond’s hands off of her, but when he sees you getting close he pulls his handful of hair closer to him and Yvette’s mouth yaws open in a quiet scream. Without thinking you lay a chokehold on Raymond with your forearm. He claws you, and Yvette, ponytail let go and free, gets up and moves to the door, straightening her shirt and sniffling.
“I’m sorry,” you say. You’ve taken your eyes off of Raymond to watch her go and he uses that to grip the flesh of your chest with his fists. He is enraged and his grip brings tears to your eyes. The urge is to choke harder, roll his eyes back, hit him on the forehead. You don’t. You pull yourself off of him and yank his fists off of your chest. You dance backwards. He leaps in place, still mad, feeling cheated.
You light a cigarette and when he rubs his chest please you walk past him, away from him, to your room. You don’t care what he does.
Sitting and smoking you are taken with the image of Yvette’s bra, the strap along the back which you saw when Raymond pulled at her shirt. It was the very thick, wide strap of a training bra, unnaturally flesh-colored against the light brown of her skin. You can’t understand how a girl as sophisticated as Yvette is, as calm, as naturally sexual, still wears a training bra. But she doesn’t seem those things when you think of her, not like she did before. She is slim, afraid to scream because Raymond is hurting her.
You’re flushed with anger because briefly you think that she may have tried to seduce Raymond. Tried to awaken the flowered gardens of want that he hasn’t felt yet – and the bra again, her signature on your newspaper – luv ya, rock on, Yvette. Her young hands and her uncomprehending eyes as she fled your apartment. You’ve put too much on her. Your loneliness has warped her into something not woman and not child, and maybe she felt that and came back again and again to be in your living movie about a girl who smiles as if her teeth were made of pure light. She’s an intricate tabernacle full of shiny things and first times that you realize, sitting on your bed, is simply not for you to have. She’s only a little older than Raymond. It could’ve been her placed in your arms by Angela. It could’ve been her; and you feel her need to be famous move within you as if it were your own need. It hurts you to think about what you expected of her.
Within this hurt you remember an afternoon you spent with Angela fourteen years ago. She still wore bras like that, even though she was twenty, sturdy bras made for streamlined breasts. You both went hiking together and descended along a wooded path that led down, down through switchbacks to the rocky origin of a low river. You passed that and found short waterfalls and cold, black mountain pools. You barely knew each other then; she’d brought a bottle of red wine that you both drank quickly from. You lay on a blanket and laughed with each other then swam in your underwear and clumsily made love for the first time, naked in the open day. You made love and from the pleasure of it she ceased to be herself and your last thought before you ceased to be you was that you were afraid someone far up the mountain was watching, but also that you craved that, because the love between the two of you was so striking and pure that the act of love on the blanket was a proclamation, an ecstatic scream made physical.
You dried in the sun. You left that day and went back to Angela’s house because her parents were on vacation. You made love again then fell asleep very late.
And you woke up in the middle of the night. You walked to piss. You looked out the windows near the front of the house and the moon had become a bonewhite sun, casting a chiaroscuro of shadows so fiercely contrasting in black and white that you just stood and stared and felt as if you’d wandered out of a dream to see that outside the world itself was dreaming too, tormented, prolific, and silent as moonlight.
Michael Buckley’s first published story, “The Meticulous Grove of Black and Green,” appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review and was selected for inclusion in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003. “Walk Back to a Bonewhite Sun” is his second published story.