Consider the Sky
Matthew Dillon

McCabe, Nebraska - August 27, 1976

Today there is this: a green field turns black as stout clouds clot the sky. Along the field a highway runs, lost in the horizontal plane where earth and sky meet; a highway unseen but for a single set of headlights already glaring in this late afternoon, their light a portent of the darkness that the storm carries. On far edge of field in the remnant of a windbreak, a cottonwood tree stands, and in this is a tree fort where four boys look at Playboys and talk of Bradley's mom Lacey, and how her nipples must be as big as baseballs; those nipples they all saw at the lake last week for just that moment, when she surfaced from a dive, and her suit had slid from her shoulders. She surfaced shaking her head and husky breasts, unaware of their ogling, and it was Bradley with his asthma and bloody noses and too thin wrists that signaled the revelation with a whisper and dark eyes pointing - "Mom".

Four boys - two being brothers, Jeremy and Calvin - are in a tree fort, looking at Playboys and talking of Lacey while they fidget in their swimsuits, trying to be comfortable with a rising pressure that is not just of the moment but also of the season. This pressure of the storm moving and of blood swelling and of life, what little they knew of it, about to shake itself loose as that breast had done, about to shake and roar and thunder itself into a season unforeseen and unnamed. Today there is this, in the late afternoon, in eastern Nebraska, in the final week of August.

And there is this: A man - father to Jeremy and Calvin - who is not yet old but of the age at which nose and ears thicken, blood vessels burst and hairs sprout from both appendages. Hands once like that of his boys, awkward and unskilled, are now calloused and fidgeting. Eyes burnt pale, once blue, now rain gutter tin gray and dripping - not weeping but thick with red rimmed wetness. Knees bend and arms lift, parts and pieces at least hinged if no longer perfectly oiled. A man not yet old is driving a truck of age and decay similar to his own, so that the hulk contains him, while he wears it as an emblem of himself. He drives with headlights on while watching the sky, and though born to this place, regards the sky this day as if he were a stranger in its presence, as if he was a thief and it was a sentinel too large to ignore.

And this: Another boy - Bradley - wrists thin and body waning before it ever waxed, prone to nose bleeds and asthma attacks, nearsighted and awkward. No father to be seen and a mother with all the strength and beauty that is his deficit and yet, like him, she is a curio, an oddity to the town and as such, a burden onto him. A boy moving slowly across a field of corn, hesitant, stumbling on clods of earth and flinching at each brush of stalk or leap of insect. A boy carrying Silver Surfer comics to a tree fort and fantasizing that he, like the hero, has a body pure and strong, reflecting the cosmos in its metallic mirror bright shine; a boy walking while day dreaming, swelling with imaginary pride at deeds of bravery and strength, dreaming of a body of brilliant light circulating through the tenebrous unceasing sky. He, if not friendless, is rarely included; fatherless, but mentored by a heroic ideal that feels as active and alive as any man; mothered, but ashamed of the radiant maternal fleshiness that she so liberally exudes.

And she is there: His mother - Lacey - the fullness and beauty that no sleek magazine or ardent fantasy can invent. The particulars not lost in their mundaneness, in their being parts of a greater whole: breasts, hips, legs - all one motion - sinuous yet staid; eyes too light for brown and too dark for gold; hair matching eyes; lips a natural flush and swollen and mute - mute lips - so that one could only imagine the luxury of the voice that might have passed from them; and hands, hands that spoke for and of her, hands that when she touched the boy with too thin wrists, when she bent to kiss his forehead each day after walking him to the bus stop, when she bent to kiss and touched those hands to his cheeks the other boys winced and imagined them both cold and hot, both shocking and soothing. When they spoke of her nipples, they longed for her hands.

She stands alone at a window, watching the horizon broken by a lone cottonwood at edge of neighbor's field. One vertical spike showing distance and perspective in an otherwise flat world.

Calvin

The ground was dry. It had been this way for forty-seven days when the rain came, first in slow warm drops that snapped hard when they hit, then increasing like popcorn in a skillet that's heat has peaked and the grease is spitting and the kernels explode faster than you can count them, with dust leaping and the earth popping and it not only soaked the ground but oiled our parents who had been talking on and on in mythic tones about the similarities between this year and the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, and the entire tale sounded to us like some make-believe told in generations past by other parents, told so that children would be grateful for the liver and onions on their plates or to entertain them on nights when the radio was on the blink.

The rain, it oiled them. They got drunk and laughed, and later tried to hush their moans and squeaks. They forgot for a moment that the crops were already ruined, the bills already in the hands of the unforgiving and unforgetting, that the year was 1976, and no one was happy.

Jeremy, Rhea, I and a poorly tuned television, sat in the living room of a doublewide trailer that our family had anchored to this land six years before - when he was eight, she was six, I was seven - and visions of ponies and lambs and sunflowers were all that we knew of a farm except that our father had been raised on one and suddenly had an irresistible urge to return. In the kitchen of the trailer our parents opened another can of Pabst while we acted as if we were intently and contentedly watching the television. We were in fact focused on their laughter - a sound more foreign than this slapping hard rain, and somehow more terrifying than the tornado warnings that periodically trailed across the screen.

When their laughter spiked Rhea turned to Jeremy and me with a look that implored us to do something - punch each other, change the channel before the show is over so we can argue, start making fart noises with hands and armpits that mom hates and will pinch your ears if you don't stop making them. She looked so sick. For a moment I thought she might start something, but that would have been more unnatural than the mirth from the kitchen. For Rhea was a good child who hid anything unsightly, somehow knowing just what might offend our parents, and was generally sweet to my brother and me even when we prompted her to righteous attack. She was the type of person who sang in the shower because you were supposed to do it, not because she was ever moved by an irrepressible spark of joy or blues that demanded release. She was a good girl who pretended to be a happy one.

We sat in front of the television and waited for them to tell us it was time to go brush, wash, pray and prepare ourselves for bed and "Not another word about it." We were ready to fall into some normal form, some familiar ritual that would return our parents to their arid mediocre selves. Selves that had never been cruel as much as incapable, and lacking in some quality - I still do not know what to name it.

Jeremy ground his jaw so loud it nearly drowned out their chatter. He tore tuffs out of the always shedding shag carpet. Once or twice he looked into the kitchen, and in those moments I believed he might just stand up and march in on them, stand right up to the table and demand an explanation for how this rain made any difference, how it salvaged a single seed of corn or forgave any of their usual weary miserableness. But he stayed seated.

"Kids," our father bounded into the room and stood blocking our view of the television. "I want to show you something I've been working on. Was going to surprise you with it later when I'd had more practice, but tonight just seems like the perfect time."

He stood above us, cartoon like in his drunken excitation, expecting us to interrogate him as to the surprise, to leap and squeal and beg its revelation. He stood beaming a smile and waiting for a reply. We sat silent. Storm warnings peeled across the screen. Finally he ran a shirtsleeve over his humid sweating brow and then reached back to flick off the television, "Go into the kitchen with your mother. I'll be back in a jiff." He threw open the door and ran into the rain towards the tool shed.

We moved reluctantly to the kitchen table and sat at chairs. The cracked vinyl upholstery immediately stuck to our heat soaked thighs. Our mother, having returned to her usual quiet, was staring at the beer can in her hand. She gave up the can and began to twist her wedding ring. Slowly she looked up and smiled the shyest of all smiles, as if she were meeting us for the first time but had heard so much about us, and was both nervous and excited to finally make our acquaintance.

"Can you believe this rain?" She paused and giggled, raised the can to her mouth and then without drinking put it back down. "I just can't. Felt like it would never come. All that worrying just seems sort of silly now."

Her face hardened, as if the word 'now' had reminded her of times recently passed, and the folly of forgetting vanished that quickly. She remembered, and she spoke again in her worn stringent fashion, "You three are up way past your bedtime. As soon as Ryan - as soon your father gets done with this lolly-gagging you're all off to bed without a word. You understand me?"

"Yes Momma," Rhea smiled slightly, lighting up as normality momentarily regained control. I began to pick my nose. Rhea asked me to please stop and my mother reprimanded me. Jeremy glared at us all.

"Are you ready for this?" Our father flew in with a painfully wide grin, and the room that moments before had been reverting to its usual rhythms now ground to a stall. In his arms he carried a glitzy red accordion.

He came across the living room without wiping his muddied boots and our mother said nothing. Rhea glanced at me again. He grabbed a dishrag and dried off the accordion, pulled a chair out from the table with a squelch of linoleum, and sat at its edge. Our father was a second generation descendent of Irish immigrants, but on the occasion when he drank hard, he would mysteriously lapse into a brogue that was so awful as to be comical, although he did not intend it as such.

"I picked this beauty up at Patrick Donahue's farm auction a few months back. My granddad played a little squeeze box when I was but a boy and he taught me a good bit. He played little dance jigs and dirges with a fiddler and tin whistler at all the weddings - and funerals for that matter. I can remember when my great Aunt Iris died and," he paused and furrowed his head as if he'd forgotten something, and might need to dash back to the tool shed. I looked to my mother, whose new but recently departed smile had returned, this time with less confidence.

"Well, I bought this at the auction and I been practicing when I could so as you all wouldn't hear me - was going to surprise you with it when I got a bit better, but tonight seemed as good and magical a time as any." He winked at Rhea. "Let me try to play you something or another. Irish tunes don't sound so right on this fancy I-talian machine, but I'll give her a go."

He cleared his throat and the room became silent and I could hear that the rain had slowed to a light hissing drizzle. He began to play "Danny Boy," a song that I recognized from his having sung it at our Granddad's funeral the year before. This time he did not sing, but simply closed his eyes and pursed his lips and began to rock back and forth in the chair as he pulled and pushed and the accordion moaned low and long and the room grew quieter with each breathy chord. It seemed so beautiful to me that I was struck with a desire to go kiss our father on the cheek and hold his hand. I began to cry, and I looked to our mother and she was crying and our father had two fat drips stuck in the corners of his still closed eyes. Rhea was smiling and staring intently at the accordion as if she was hearing it play some happy pretty waltz that was more suited to its festive, red, sparkling skin. And Jeremy glared at us all.

When the song was finished Rhea broke into mad applause and laughter and our mother rose from her seat and went to our father, stroking his head and whispering between sobs. He sat with a stunned look, the accordion still open and moving slightly with the rhythm of his breath. Jeremy jerked his chair violently back from the table and stomped to the one bedroom we children shared, and this commotion went unnoticed by our parents. Rhea and I silently followed him. It wasn't much later - after we'd tucked ourselves in and Rhea had scolded me for not praying - that we heard the sighs and taut whispers and aching moans that our parents could not contain, and I could not sleep even after a silence returned, only an occasional drip falling from the tin roof into the gutters and somewhere a neighbor's dog barking at coyote or rabbit.

*

In the morning I heard our father start off to town on errands. Mother slept in. Rhea cleaned the trailer and Jeremy and I went out into the bright but muddy day. In the afternoon a new storm arose. It came thick and slow on the horizon, much like the thundering rumors of so many storms in the previous weeks. Rumors that spoke of a rain that no longer held utility.

While this second storm gathered, we (Jeremy, Darin and Kip, and I) sat in our tree fort paging through wrinkled Playboys, recalling the memory of Lacey from the lake the week before. Our fingers traced flat glossy images and a hunger for curvature and texture uncoiled. We had almost outgrown the fort, built as it was when we were all ten or under. It had become not only a pinch to our bodies, but also a chink in the armor of our rising maturity; teenagers did not hang out in clubhouses. Jeremy had recently decided that we needed a new venue. He knew of an abandoned farm six miles away. Next spring when he earned his learners driving permit we would move to a proper hangout. No more little boy tree fort. But for now, stunted like carp in an ornamental pond, we gathered there.

"He should be here soon." Jeremy struck a match and played it under his palm.

"Why did you invite that weenie Bradley to hang out with us anyway?" Darin was using the centerfold as a model, carving crude naked figures into the fort's floor.

"How else are we gonna get a chance to sniff Lacey's panties? We need to make friends with him so we can get into their house and steal a pair."

He looked to me for confirmation of this plan. I forced a laugh, and so gave agreement.

"Yeah. Lacey's tasty treats." Kip shouted and flicked his tongue spastically over his lips. We all giggled. It was only after our laughter that we heard the loud rustle of corn. I looked out the rifle slot we'd built three years before - just in case the Russians, Cubans or Vietcong arrived - and there was Bradley in full retreat from the fort, dropping comics and stumbling through the corn. I was sure that he'd heard us. I nearly called out to him, but Jeremy sensed my shame and scowled at me and so I simply shrugged and said, "Well, there goes that plan."

"Don't worry about it," Darin hadn't looked up from his carving project, "We can steal a pair off of her laundry line."

Jeremy leaned over and charlie horsed him in the arm, "The panties are suppose to be dirty - fag - that's why you smell them." And everyone laughed, and Bradley was forgotten.

Minutes later the storm broke and we decided to make a run for our homes. On the way Jeremy and I passed by Lacey and Bradley's house which bordered our land. In the front window was her silhouette, and this backlit image made my stomach and groin tighten and loosen with an undulant motion, a feeling still new but quickly becoming familiar.

I was worried about being late for dinner, but when we entered the yard the truck was not there, and when we entered the house Rhea looked up from a book and her smile was not as it should have been. In the kitchen our mother sat sipping coffee, paging through an old Sears catalog.

We waited for him, with the same television and the same crashing rain as the previous night. And when it was getting close to our bedtime we - hungry and quiet - were finally allowed to eat. Our mother had broiled thin, gristly, round steaks that were tough and salty and even drier than usual as they had sat so long warming in the oven. The green beans fell to pieces when we tried to spear them and it took uncommon strength to chew the tiniest chunk of meat. No one spoke as we ate, except Rhea, who told us the story of a friend at school who was going to Indiana for an ice skating competition, and she had promised to teach Rhea how to skate in the coming winter. She had told us this three nights previous, but it was no less enjoyable than the dinner.

After the food had been attempted and then pushed around the plates, I helped clear the table without being asked. Before we could argue about who would do the dishes our mother told us to wash and get ready for bed. Rhea spoke without thinking - a rarity - saying that her science teacher had warned that laying down after a meal was bad for your digestion. Mother said nothing, but motioned her hand as if swatting at an insect. Jeremy hadn't looked up from his food during the meal and now, the plate gone, he turned his eyes to her and asked, "Where is he?"

"To bed with you I said." She tried to raise her voice, to give it weight, but her words fell soft and broken. My brother - who I know not for his compassion - may have shown some in that moment, or he may have simply been as scared of her answer as I was. But fear was equally anomalous to him. Regardless, he rose, and we three went silently to bed.

Laying in bed, I thought I could hear my mother holding and releasing her breath in the kitchen, cleaning and putting the dishes away with great restraint, trying not to sigh or sob, determined not to show a sign, to let china clash, to mingle breath with emotion. Eventually I heard her sit down at the dining table, and I have imagined that she could smell the previous night's beer as well as the rain and salty tears and passion that drowned a moment and finished drying up what remained of a life. I waited to hear gravel crunching under rubber, screen door squeaking, boots shuffling, whispered questions and explanations. I waited all night and only that night. That was all, never expecting a return.

© Matthew Dillon