Untitled Excerpt # A Billion

The first section of a larger project.

I.
It was a Sunday morning in June with sunlight everywhere—so hot that the trees were shedding their leaves as if it were autumn when the colors of dawn were just beginning to get bleached out by stronger light. It was too early for how hot it was and too early for the boys standing out on the corner. Twenty years old or maybe nineteen: one yawning with his big hand white and uncalloused, barely covering his open mouth while a second hit invisible dirt off his shoes with a baseball bat in a lazy updown motion. There were three others. Younger, they looked at the ground ashamed of something, sucking at their cigarettes. Their faces were soft and unscarred but with bags under the eyes, an unnatural state of purple, plums left to scorch in the heat, the product of fists instead of sleepless nights, so pronounced that you could make them out later on in the broadcasts that cycled for weeks in 24-hour cafes and people's homes. None of them spoke. They seemed to be suspended apart from each other while, at the same time, held in a shared state of anticipation, carrying their bodies like fathers-to-be up in the waiting lobbies of hospitals praying for life and not for death—for delivery. Somewhere in the surrounding neighborhood the noise of an engine became audible and grew, twisting around the professionally stained fences and through the textures of manicured bright green lawns. Throats tightened and cigarettes were put out. Two of the younger boys turned toward the bat-bearer, perhaps looking for the word but any command on his part was unnecessary. The youngest was already moving, performing what was rehearsed and walking out into the street, resolute on tiptoes, the stretch of asphalt that met his shoes transfigured to a tightrope. This boy, he was skinny and handsome with the kinetic energy of youth, about to blossom into infamy and light up the nerve systems of the entire country flaring into every seamless screen and monitor. And while he walked out into the fresh pitch black of that road, I was half-asleep, alone in bed, waiting to wake up to the radio broadcast accounts of what had taken place. I was dreaming of a girl I met the week before at a party, riding a powder blue roller coaster in a tangerine colored dress that billowed around her body with the wind. She twirled and the hems of that dress spun in rising circles at the peak of their climb blessing me with white flashes of lace trim underwear as she danced in a plastic safety harness that would never hold her, not ever. I was twenty-one that morning, waking up in Texas for the first time in three years without expectation, emerging from a deep and ignorant sleep the color of strong coffee.

When my clock radio turned on, the news reports told me that the officer who pulled onto the block that morning was 36 and a devoted father to two blue eyed children, one of whom had recently spoken her first words. It happened on Sycamore Avenue, an individual road in an entire neighborhood named after trees. His name, Patrick Sharp, was repeated over and over again as if he were Kennedy and it had always been a symbol for something greater, something so resonantly American. In an hour, after I showered and dressed, the television screens were playing back footage scavenged from the mounted camera on the officer's dash. In the soberest voices, the anchors advised that all of the parents who were watching ask their children to leave the room. There was a brief, ceremonious pause as they waited for families to sweep their children out of dens across the nation, something that must have only happened on the rarest occasions, perhaps more often during those first few days of broadcasts but less and less after that. And then the networks would show it: that young, beautiful boy, first just an indiscernible shape in the road but the image sharpening as the car drew closer, his arms splayed across the concrete and the boney architecture of his chest heaving up and down and up and down and up and down. The sounds of breaks screeching, the car thrown into park, a door kicked open so forcefully that it threatened to ricochet closed again. Oh how blond that officer was as he ran to assist the kid, the light catching in his hair illuminating only the sparest traces of service earned gray, how brave. With every new screening of the grainy footage the whole country would hold their breath as he bent down and touched the boy's shoulder. The reporter's would snarl in whispering voices—can you believe what an actor—the collective viewing population biting lips and clenching jaws, teeth on teeth, as the other kids crept into the frame, the shadows they cast across the officer's urgent crouching body like the wingspan of great, predatory birds. The tension would snap. Not even a flicker of hesitation before the bat fell, perfect and heavy in the depression between his shoulders, the sound like a branch giving under its own weight and his body pitching to the earth. A rustle of motion. The boys flipping the unconscious body onto its back and extracting the pistol from its holster with hands too soft for such stern metal. The oldest with his giant's yawn turned and walked, practically moseyed up to the door of the car because it had been so easy. His face was covered by a ski-mask now and the sweat formed bright wet rings around his eyes that glimmered in the sun. He ascended into the car through the open door and spoke into the officer's two-way radio, across every police channel, the simplest of phrases: nothing rehearsed or oratorical, more mumble than manifesto but enough to change everything, to take what would have been an anomalous act of violence and turn it into a declaration of war.

I'm sorry, but ladies and gentleman, you are no longer safe in your homes.

They always stopped the tape before the kids shot him out in the street. In the kitchen, I turned off the television set on the Teflon counter top and finished putting my parents' monogrammed coffee mugs into a brown cardboard box. I had packed away most of their other things by then: the golf clubs, the clothes, in and out of dry cleaning bags, the books and all the rest of the shit that still boasted tool-marks of their ownership. With the exception of my father's beat up recliner, I kept the furniture; the beds and the dressers, the armoires and the bureaus. All those shining, chrome kitchen appliances. It felt okay to hang on to some. The one-size-fits-all variety that never really belonged to them anyway—or did, maybe, but only in the same capacity that they belonged to everyone. I got rid of the rest of it. Their possessions were a paradox. They were tangible manifestations of absence like piles of dirt left behind when you dig a hole or a grave. I handled that dirt for two weeks. I carried it into Salvation Armies, second-hand stores, post offices. I sold it, shipped it away, tried to wash my skin clean of it. Now, the mugs in this box were the last of my parents' material survivors. These would be thrown away I was neither interested in, nor capable of searching out a market for “Erin and Matthew,” E&M commemorative dishware. There was something decidedly morbid about that anyway.

I carried the box through the garage and out to the side yard where the air had the stillness of held breath. This was the same city that housed the boys and, until mere hours ago, that officer. They lived in a different neighborhood, farther north on the other side of town, but it may have well been the same, existing under the same sprawling Texas sky. What a strange place for violence, the South, but at the same time fitting. It was so difficult to feel relevant against the backdrop of so much rough country that couldn't even begin to care for you—cultivated now into cities, of course, but nothing could be done to get rid of that timbre to the land, the sheer heaviness of the sun. Here, the relationship of individuals to their environment was analogous to that of every failed marriage. One part subsistence, one part adversarial--toxic but passionately so. It was the story behind every suburb built, every band formed, every attempt to forge some great love or perfect family. As if to say, make something human matter, here, where nothing else does. I let the mugs tumble one at a time into the open mouth of one of the plastic trash bins but not one of them broke. Silent, porcelain bodies resting on a small bed of newspaper that one of my parents had been too lazy to recycle weeks earlier. I thought of the boy with his face pressed into the dimpled texture of the asphalt. The motion of the bat arcing against blue sky. A home run, the perfect jump shot. I imagined how his body might look from the inside, reacting to that incursion. The cratering of bone and the fractures spiderwebbing outward, a pebble jettisoned from the underside of a tire into the glass of a windshield, an earthquake producing the fault lines instead of the other way around. He was sanctified when his body was extinguished, on that suburban tarmac. And was it the same for my parents? Rolled in so many tons of Japanese steel from black concrete into limestone white and spring green, into the intermediary grave of that road-side embankment. They were not martyrs, but it may have absolved them, in the way that, if there is no God, death absolves us all to the extent that it destroys us. Would they have rushed into the road like that, for some nameless neighborhood boy? Or ran for me the same way, speed churned out from a mixture of love and stupid heroism. Of course. Saying it out loud, in their now overgrown side yard, looking down at those mugs who might have been, like me, their children. It was the smallest courtesy I could extend to the dead.

I put the empty box in after the cups and fished through my pockets for cigarettes. I closed my eyes. The sun illuminated the blood in my eyelids and that deep red brightened as I took in the smoke. I was crying. Not a tempest, nothing hysteric, but a gentle trembling and shining round drops dragging down the patchy stubble I had let populate my cheeks. I gripped the side of the can and opened my eyes, peering down at its new occupants, trying to press down whatever was rising up, trying—and Jen's beemer slid up into the driveway on skates, its engine murmuring and its 70's red paint job coming through the mottled, wooden geometry of the decaying trellis fence.

Jen was a dynamo, she was lit-up. A hundred boys in tow because, well, what else did you expect just looking at her? The way she checked her lipstick in the rear-view before she saw me, offered a small smile, a languid wave as if coming through the membrane of a dream. I went back through the garage to open the front door for her.
Coming through the door, taking off a pair of loved black heels and putting them on the rack, asking Had I heard about what happened? I had, of course, but wasn't sure how to react to it. It didn't seem real yet. It felt real enough to her, though, even if she wasn't quite sure why. The news hadn't surprised her, she said, but instead came across like the fulfillment of an eventuality. How so, how did she mean? She didn't know, couldn't put a finger on it—moving her hands to illustrate this, tapping at something in the air with her blue nail polish. But did I have any coffee? That was something she did know, that she needed coffee. She hadn't slept very well the night before.

We moved to the kitchen and she sat on the counter and watched me as I ground up the beans and put them on to brew. You should come out tonight, she says, and I ask where to? There's a party at some fancy house up South. A plush two story place—mahogany banisters, hardwood floors, private library. Jeremy's parents' place. Remember him? I'm not sure that I do, but Jen says he went to high school with us, that people used to think they were related being the only two gingers in the whole school. Ring any bells? It didn't. But, well, anyway he lives downtown and works at some bike shop now. His parents are on vacation, taking a cruise, and they didn't invite him, so he's having it out at their place. Sort of a spite party, she thinks. Hmm. And besides, wouldn't be interesting to see how people are reacting to the news? And that girl you met the other night, remember, the brunette with the eyes, the sultry smoldering one, Jeremy invited her too. Look at that. Even mentioning her gets you flushed. Come on, please? You've been such a homebody lately.

I poured out our coffee into wine glasses. There were no more mugs.