Three
Scenes
by Drew McNaughton
Posted: January 15, 2003
One boy is around six, one
around nine years old, and they are sitting on the angled slab of
granite that the waterfall has slimed with green algae like a tongue.
It must be six, seven feet down to the shallow water, the bouldered
stream, beneath them. The old man, who I know is the same old man
who tried to touch my sister once when he was drunk, is yelling
something at the boys which I cannot hear over falling water. The
oldest boy stands, cups his hands to holler something back, does
a hip-wiggle taunt that drives the old man to rise from the lawn
chair. Drives him to step onto the waterfall itself, where the boys
never think he’d dare come to scold them. The smaller boy
stays seated and the older runs, but the old man tries to lift the
boy from the slippery stone and his foot whips free of grip and
his body does the same hip-wiggle move that the nine year old boy
did before he loses to imbalance and falls as a tree falls to the
rocks below and it is the only sound I remember when the weight
of all of him came down on his wrinkled, frightened head.
I had to run from where I was sitting, across the road, over a
small chain with a sign warning against just this type of thing,
climb down the loose rock wall, and step about three feet into the
water where the current was strong and running brown/pink/red, before
I got to the body. He was already so cold. He was too heavy for
me to lift with twelve year old arms, and when the other man who’d
seen it jumped in to help me I had already tried to lift the body
from behind and felt the cracked eggshell feeling of the back of
the skull and I may have already realized there was nothing, now,
to be done. That there was still the body to be lifted from the
water had not occurred to me yet. That I would have to answer questions;
this also, hadn’t crossed my mind. I was thinking of those
two boys, who I did not know, wondering what in the universe they
would, years later, call this day.
*
“You stabbed me in the ass,”
I say.
And what happened is my brother stabbed me in the ass. I’m
fourteen, he’s sixteen and a half. He’d been chasing
me in circles - through the kitchen, around the chimney, through
the dining room - holding the knife. When Crash, our German Shepherd,
stepped in front of me, I stopped. That’s when the knife,
a kitchen blade with a seven inch long, inch-wide steel blade split
through my Levi’s and sunk itself an inch into the meaty part
of my left cheek.
Outside of the bathroom door, that I’ve locked behind me,
my brother hears me start laughing. And this is it: I’m standing
on my tippy toes with my pants off twisting to see the cut which,
wiped clean, looks like a little mouth. It is a small mouth, speaking.
Tonight I learn in conversation with my father that if Bush gets
his way, my brother Ian, 110th Mountain division at FT Bragg, he’ll
be on the first plane to Iraq. I see clouds of gas forming rainbows
of chemical magnificence, my brother chasing someone around and
around under this haze he doesn’t see and I can never ever
get his attention. And I spin around that day at home that my parents
still have never heard of because everything we’ve learned
about each other happened at the end of that knife.
*
The mind can capture something
like 25 images a second. I read that somewhere. What does that mean?
What is an image? And then I remember.
On a street in Chicago downtown headed for the Checkerboard Blues
lounge. Crossing the street, our Japanese friend, Atsutaro, points
at an approaching car and the thing about it is the car’s
door’s open and the voice that is screaming in what is pain
or fear is a woman’s and all I can see, all my memory allows
me to ever see, is the leg in a fishnet stocking holding open the
door of the car and the stiletto heel so sharp and there is someone
strong holding her back by the throat but not hard enough to strangle
her voice which pleads OHMYGOD PLEASE HE IS GOING TO KILL ME and
what on earth can we do? We can chase the memory of the car around
the corner because it has already left us; we can remember that
the leg was part of a woman who was beautiful, it clear to me that
this leg was part of something beautiful. But we can’t catch
a thing like that, so fast we can’t quite capture anything
but this leg, this gorgeous leg jutting to hold the door, a strong
shadow hulking in the driver’s seat, the memory of a voice.
I have formed my memory of Chicago around this night. We went into
the Checkerboard, there’s this guy there playing amazing guitar
and singing in that deep throaty way they do. There’s beer,
which doesn’t taste right, but helps. You have to realize
that her voice, her leg, is all I have left.
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