Boy With Wings

PART I: 1926

CHAPTER ONE

Dark, and some close things. The smell of cut boards and dirt.

His hands meet walls, his arms and head and knees, his feet. It’s a box more than walls, pinning and cramping him so that he can’t turn or stretch. He bucks and squirms—though she hates his squirming—his back twitching and sweat running, and when he yells his voice springs like a twig slapping at his face and neck. A blankety thing wraps his legs.

He pushes out and up, down, kicks his feet. She warned him, he remembers: to be still and quiet, to sleep and to hide. Wasn’t he a smart boy, a good son, the best hider? He lies flat—is he hiding? He lifts again and bumps his head. It’d take time, she said, again and again, before. Her voice was curvy. You must wait, wait for me to come back and the men to help then. He hates to wait, though, and his cries settle down on him, bouncing off the wood like beneath her old bed, the hardness below him, the darkness so deep. He wants his things now. He wants her back! He wants to hear laughing or barking or anything else. But he’s stuck in this cramped and strange quiet. Alone.

At night at home, he can see things around him, shapes made of the floor and of the covered bed, but here he can’t seem to. Did he lose his eyes? Goose bumps—that’s what she calls them—swell up, something hard in his throat, too, and though he tries to hold it, he pees. The awful warmth comes and the smell soon behind it, and he hears things now or thinks them, whispered things like songs or words. She held him and rocked him before the cloth wrapped his face, and when he slept, he dreamed bird dreams, of darting and pecking and flapping and swooping, feathers up, feet down, claws out. Sparks flash when his eyes shut. Be brave, she whispered. Be calm when you wake. I will come and get you, release you. Stay quiet and still.

Still. Why? This was shushed, finger to lips. Grown-ups do this. He is six. He makes lists of the things he knows: that he lives in Florida, before that in Alabama. That the car they rode in once was a Model Z. Or was it P? (He mixes his letters up.) That butterflies are first bugs. That the sun comes up and stars come out and men can touch wires on a box and make it sing. He knows that eggs are laid and will break, that in the sky there is heaven. He knows of mothers and fathers. He doesn’t know why he can’t move or see.

He cries or he thinks he does, his face and neck wet with it, and her crying comes too, from before: the sound past the doorway, the talk coming through that he knew was of him. A new voice—Mr. Paul, who owns the house, or maybe Mr. Tom—his words of noses or hoses, of being able to breathe, of how this trick would be made to work. (Necessity. What is necessity? Maybe a secret or a made-up word.) They talked about him this way, whispers that jumped like winged beetles or rabbits, and there was the time the man stared down at his back.

Devil. The word whistled.

It’s just a mark. Lots of people have them. It’s nothing. Her voice with bright lines. He’s looked at his back in the mirror or tried to, the purple splotch forming a hill or a springy knife. It doesn’t hurt and he can’t touch or reach it, and he thought that everyone had one until he found out they don’t. He asked his mother about it.

Don’t worry. Her face frowny-small.

Mr. Tom spoke some more, his yellow hair shining, not white like the boy’s but close. "You’ll have to do something, Lena. You’ll have to go. Them people down at the church, they ain’t gonna . . . The word’s out. It’s, well, it’s just they believe this is . . . ! I even heard it at the jook joint when I took things out that way. You know—"

I’m sick just now, Tom. Her low voice, the one that’s like clouds or mud. I can’t run just yet. It ain’t nothing with Johnny, nothing bad! People gotta accept it. And you, telling me this. You’re believin’ it too, are ya?

I’m just sayin’ what I heard. Pastor Mills called it—said that mark could cast a pall, that the whole . . . Kids have died. Why, they’ll burn . . .

Voices rise, high ones like children, and he listens but they go away. They could be near or far, and maybe he knows them, though he knows almost no one. They’ve moved a lot, and at his few times at school, the others laughed or turned away from him. Or called him names: Ogre! Freak! He had to ask her what these meant. Some wanted to touch his hair, even one of the teachers, Mrs. Wickham, rubbing her hand through it, brushing and lifting his shirt. I’ve never seen anything like . . . Your eyes are like emeralds. Are you an albino? A rhino? He shook his head.

Others asked of his powers—other children, some adults. We heard you have powers, they would say, their faces scrunched. He fell from a cupboard the one time he tried to fly. He’s not strong like the soldiers in the picture books she brings home. He can’t spit far or whistle or jump high or even swim. So he asked her. She answered calmly, in her softest voice: You are yourself only. Don’t worry on what others think. You’ll do more when you’re older. But if he were older, he’d break the box, lift the boards off like his toys, and toss them up and far away, and he’d have powers then, like a bird that gets bigger and flies. Maybe. Sometime, when he’s older. Or after a while, or maybe not. He doesn’t know.

He cries again, loudly. She won’t like him crying. He has friends, pretend friends, Robert and Buster, and for a time they talk. He asks what they are doing (Buster: listening to the radio; Robert: playing with his toys) and tells them of the darkness, his hiding, and the box, at least until he grows tired. They don’t care that he peed.

He won’t be . . .

He won’t let . . .

He won’t stay . . .

He tries to hear more but he can’t, his breath loud, and he screams some, gasping for air until his throat feels raw and red, banging his arms and feet till they’re numb. It’s as if he’s under the water in the tin soaking tub, everything pressed around him and squeezing, making things blurry, the sound soft then gone, and how could she leave him, alone here in this cage?

He was cold before but is hot and things stink, and maybe he sleeps or dreams. He knows that things die and maybe now he’ll die too, and he bangs on the box again, pushing each side of it. A spray of dirt washes in that he flicks his tongue at and breathes. His coughs rise the way hers do, a crumpled tail to them, and when he closes his eyes this time the dots fade, smoothed to thin ribbons, black and forgotten like something from long before. From far off a clink comes, voices again in the dirt and the dark, and he trusts and believes none of it, calmed now by the darkness, the closeness, until something heavy strikes the box. There’s a tilting and scraping, the low sound of grunts and the hiss of breath blown. He stays still as she told him, waiting and not waiting, and when the top is ripped open in a flash of light, he is quiet still, cooled, saved. Seen.

Revealed.

CHAPTER TWO

Lena

Run, stumble, scurry. Stagger, skid, plunge and fall. What day of my life have I not spent in running, in dodging and hiding, seeking my own selfish, mean escape? First from my father and his fury and drinking, the madness that followed of my bland, burdened ma, the city and heartache and finally to this battered house. Running: from sickness but also from myself, from landlords and lawyers, innocence and prayers, from weather and hunger and anger and the blinding dark. From the people who want to find J and kill him, to take him from me forever, my reason to live gone. My only son.

I’ve tried telling J and explaining, offering up my glum regrets, and it could be that I’m muddled or loony. Maybe flat insane. I’ve sought to hide and to guard him, to assure him of my love up and through my life’s end, but does he understand this? With him it can be hard to gauge. From the day he was born he’s been tricky. Even the old midwife gave a huh when he dropped, spurting out of me in a rush of skin and blood. It wasn’t just the birthmark or the shock of white hair but the way he looked at things when his eyes finally opened, the way he smelled like wet grass, iron, and clay. He never cried or cooed much, never nursed. His eyes were blue before they became green as leaves. He talked and ran when it appeared that he ought to, and he wasn’t creepy or spooky, just distant and dreamy, distinctive. Unique. All mothers may claim this, but I had no one to relay these things to, no one to question or match up with or compare. J grew and was happy—isn’t he happy still? We’ve survived. We are a team formed and shaped, joined and merged and still living. Life is a strangeness we struggle through every day.

The midwife must have said something. How else could the word have spread? People coming to watch him and touch him, coworkers and neighbors I had never seen or met. At this point I lived in Eastpoint farther down the coast, shucking at an oyster house after I left Tallahassee pregnant. Shucking was a brutal and nasty job. All the heat and salt and stink of those creatures, all day on my feet, but it was work and money we needed to buy food. I’d cleaned houses in Tally, which is where I met Doyle, where I first let my fantasies get in the way of any normal life. Who would have thought it—a junior high grad tied to a lawyer with a wife and kids? I suppose I was pretty then, still am in a wretched way, still prone to get looks if not approaches from crazy men. I thought to tell him I was pregnant but then never did so, and when he found out it went as poorly as I figured it would. The last time I saw him he wanted me to drink some vile something, and when I wouldn’t, he forced me. Thank the Lord it didn’t take. I went to Tennessee, to Charleston, and back to north Florida, never asking for nothing, wanting to make it for me and J on my own.

The thought of Doyle’s face now sets my head near-on flaming, my breath rushing in and out. He’s running for council or office; I saw a sign with his name big when I rode down Highway 12. I want to ask or to warn people, to tell of his slyness and lies, but I don’t talk much now to no one. I don’t seek out trouble, dig in the past, or even read the weeklies for the death notes there and news.

Staring at J now, I touch his stubbled head. I’ve cut his hair short to hide its strangeness in case anyone sees him, which they shouldn’t, as he’s dead. He stays in the cupboard we’ve built and holed out for him, and I play the grieving mother, which ain’t hard to do. I sigh and cough so much that I can barely stand up straight, to where they’ve threatened to fire me at the bait store where I work, though I think Mr. Williams feels pity or something smutty toward me. I keep the stock tidy and balance mixed-up receipts, at least when I’m not chasing off thieves, bums, and giant rats. At night J and I go over his letters and numbers, and he writes things, he spells and reads. As soon as I’m well, we’re gonna leave this sad place, go north and start over—run and do sidesteps and hide out somewhere else. I know about starting over.

I have dreams, Momma.

This worry plagues me—of what the death ploy could have done, of the odds that existed then of his being truly harmed. How could a mother put her child through such strain? It was so mad and so risky, though they swore it was a parlor trick and the whole thing completely safe. I’d felt like a mouse in a trap, what with word getting around and people talking about him, seeking him out. Asking and threatening. Wanting me to show them his back, which I wouldn’t.

Everybody has dreams, son, I say, and it’s true. Mine are mostly of searching and running, of hiding and capture. Grief building to collapse. I rarely sleep.

Will you die? he asks, his face jumpy and squinty.

I will. You will too. Everyone, one day.

He pauses. When?

I smile-shrug and cup my hand around my eyes, as if peering far into the murk of the advancing wet fog. The house sits on a pond that stinks all year except in winter, and I wonder if my coughs make him fret. I wonder what it is that children know and truly feel. I’ve got to get healthy, or at least well enough to run, as the days will soon shorten here into rain and cold, the shack damp inside and never quite warm enough, wind sneaking in like a thief. J stares out too, into the trees that stand like soldiers, the pines waiting on orders to charge forth or retreat. I try to see into his thinking but can’t, his mind as he grows so much more his own. As for myself, I fear that I’m sinking backward, to girlhood and childhood and on to my birth and the darkness before. Like a prophet or child, I feel danger creeping: a fox searching and skulking as we sit blind as to what will come.

His head tilts and wags. He’s used to folk wanting to see him, to the dodging and hiding and moving and claims, the lack of any fixed home, and blame for this falls to me: a guilt I could push further back but I won’t. I have dreams where he’s taken, where he’s killed by plan or neglect or merely chance, where he leaves me mistakenly or of his own furious accord. Awake, I see him grown: a banker or lawyer or some government boss like his pa, and he senses this somehow and puts a hand to his head, frowns in a clown face and asks:

Who is he, my papa?

I snort out my laugh. I want to say that if his pa even knew of him, there’d be pain—that if he knew of his . . . difference, there’d be worse. He’s a man.

Is he alive? So many questions, so few truths and signs. Mosquitoes buzz, constant.

I think so.

Can I see him?

I don’t think that’d be wise. Let’s talk of other things. I touch his back without planning to, jolting and tensing him, his head lifted up and about like a bird’s. His eyes are his father’s then, accusing and ravenous, and have I supplied him my rage in return? A single lasting, draining gift? When the preacher ripped his shirt off and pronounced him a devil, J only stared up in wonderment. The tantrums and tempers came later, over days and many stormy months. I seethed for us both when others warned me that they’d kill him, that when a little girl down the road got sick, he’d be blamed, and he was. We never discussed this; he never asked, but it could be that he heard it, hard as it is to keep secrets in tiny burrows and two-room shacks. The word came, more than once, that their plan was to burn us.

The death-faking scheme wasn’t mine. They claimed there was no choice, that it was for the boy’s sake, that nothing else could stave off this harm. Only two people know of it: Tom, who built the box and dug the rigged grave, and Paul, my sometimes lover. They’re brothers: the Rowans. Tom had done this in a show. I don’t imagine they’ll snitch, but as I think on it now, do I wholly know this? It brings forth the terror from when the deed was finally done, the worry then of whether the ruse and lie after would work, the faith required in it, the fear and crippling shame. It should have been me in that box! I say this over and over and over to myself, a hymn sung or promise. I prayed enough to hurt my head. The relief on its opening brought me sobbing to my knees—him sweat- and piss-stained, big-eyed and silent—and I swore to myself after that we would never part for long again. J has been quiet and mopey ever since, stuck in his closet and indoors all the time, unable to run around and play in fresh air. It’s unnatural, I know it; I hate it, but he’s alive. But for what we did, I don’t know that I could make that claim.

A car purrs outside, its tires swishing like insects. Paul? I motion J to his cupboard, which he enters with a duck and frown. I think to freshen myself or at least brush my hair, but steps come with a knock that strikes a coldness inside me. Paul or Tom wouldn’t stop and knock. I cough my way to the door, the floor tilting so that I must hang on to the wall to stay upright, the grooves worn there, the rot and stains. There’s a space between boards we’ve stuffed with socks to block snakes. I peer out at a tall man, a stranger. I crack the door.

What is it?

The man holds a hat in one hand. The other hand, and his arm up to the shoulder, is gone, the light falling strangely around him, slanted somehow and made shiny, bright. He’s taller than me by at least a foot, thin-mouthed and staring like a bird looking past its beak. I think of the preacher, but this isn’t a preacher, no collar or cross or speck of kindness to be seen. The preacher put his hands on me at the burial, my tears drained away then, my questions boiling up unasked: What is God to be more than this love? Is a miracle to you one to me? Who is it that gauges sin? I hate preachers, you see—hate them every one.

You Lena?

I squint. I haven’t seen him before, and I’d remember a man with no arm. He isn’t one of the neighbors. I don’t open the door.

May I come in?

What do you want? The chill works to my spine, across to my chest. I draw back.

I’m from Tallahassee. He smiles or tries to, but it comes off as hurtful. His eyes are as gray as a cat’s. I’m a friend of your friend. He nods at the door again. Please.

I make no move to open it. Friend?

He pushes past, not rough but quick enough to get by me, creaking the floorboards in the pitched and beaten shack. He spins around. I hear you got a son. Johnny.

I’m unable to speak. Then: I did. I swallow. Sniff. He’s dead now.

The man turns back, eyebrow raised. Hhmm. That so?

I’m struck dumb, unable to blink or to breathe. What if J makes a sound? He’s done that before, and the walls here are so thin—he’s only six years old. Seven.

When did that happen?

I sigh. A month back. My legs bend and I sway with it.

What did he die of?

Same thing I got. I cough to show him, long and with hills and bumps. He takes a step back then.

He buried here?

I nod. Tears form and fall in plops. I hear scuffling from the cupboard or twitching or breathing, and surely the man hears this too. I sniff the tears back.

Where?

Back of the church down the road. The graveyard.

I’ll stop by. His eyes take in the walls, the small room, the scuffed and bulging cupboard. He pushes the room’s only door, his body slanted without the one arm, looks at the bed there, the clothes scattered. I’m sorry, he says. But he doesn’t sound it.

Another coughing spree spirals, long and with color. I notice a toy, a tiny train, left on the floor as if spun off its rails, misplaced there and glinting.

The man seems to stare at it. You take care, now, okay?

I will. I shift and murmur, cough. I want to dance and wave my hands at him, distract from the rest.

You know, he says, turning, we heard he was . . . special. That so?

I look up at this man who wants to take something from me, something vital and heavy and much more than his missing arm. The thought comes to hurl punches or insults or slit his throat. Course he was. Special as the moon and stars. I should shout this up at him, flinging my anger through his nose and to his brain, but instead my voice is soft, still and emptied, cold. I would give up my life. He was my son.

The car door slams, the motor snorts like a dragon, the tires swish again in the grass.

My back heaves and tears slide down my throat. I cough brownish clots into a crumpled and gritty rag.

CHAPTER THREE

They leave the house on a Saturday. Her coughs have grown worse, but she says that they have to go now. She tells him to pack his things up in a box, his color crayons and books, and he does, though he hates boxes. She puts other stuff in the crate she calls a valise, warning him to keep his head low till they’re past the town. Mr. Paul gives them a ride, the three of them up front and their things behind them, and they board a boat to cross the big river—he can barely see the other side! Then an automobile; it’s the boy’s second time traveling in a motor car. The weeds and sticks on the roadside flash and blur as they pass, and he waves at a girl walking, but she doesn’t wave back.

The car’s engine sounds like the wind pulled through the house, sometimes louder or softer or chuggier, the air cooled and pulling at his head. He doesn’t know where they’re going or how long they’ll be gone, but he wants to go faster, to smear things and dizzy them, to reach out and touch the sky, the sand, the trees, the sun.

He sits between the two of them, but it’s her touch he feels the most. She has grown thin, white lines scattered now in her hair, and when she coughs her neck can become red and splotchy afterward. Sometimes she can’t seem to gulp in any breath. Mr. Tom asked her before they left: Lena, what’ll you do? but she didn’t answer, saying only that they must leave and soon. He can smell her, if he thinks on it, and smell Mr. Paul sometimes too: his being more of an oily-type odor, his breath blackish, salty, and sour-sharp. Mr. Paul smokes cigarettes he rolls up with one hand, and often the tobacco gets caught in his mouth, little skins hanging there that he spits out in a rush. The boy likes to watch him smoke, his breath making the end red and the straight cloud from his mouth, and it smells good unless the wind blows it back on them. His mother once yelled when she saw Johnny pretending to smoke.

How much ya got? Mr. Paul asks, looking down the car seat. They’re nearer to the ocean, the salt smell crisp and strong. The boy looks for waves but can’t see them. The sun has gone high and hot.

Not enough. But we’ll manage.

He reaches into a pocket, causing the car to swerve. Holds some bills out. Take ’em.

She waits but then does so. Another cough splurts, one of her bad ones, her eyes watering and face pinched like she needs to spit something awful out.

Jeez, Lena.

I know, I know. It’ll get better.

The boy has heard this. He hears more than she thinks he does, even from before the dirt box—but he tries not to go back to it: the warning of others coming and threats made in turn, the claim that this danger was due only to him. Then the man with one arm, looking and wanting to know all these things. Who was the friend? He wanted to ask her but knew she wouldn’t say. She’d say that boys should be quiet, listen up good, and not ask fool questions. He always has lots of questions. He bites his lip some to keep from asking more. He reaches out now and takes hold of her knobby hand.

The car hits a bump, and his back rubs on the seat. He twists at this bouncing, an itch there with a burn to it, but she has warned against scratching, and he makes himself still. If he rubs it on something, he feels a squishy lump, and when he asked her, she sighed and said he was born with this thing, that it was okay, that he shouldn’t worry much. Then would say nothing more. He’s not to mention it to anyone or to pick at or scrape it, as that could make it hurt or get bigger or spawn something somehow worse. Instead, he sits up and starts on his counting, as he likes to group and count out different things. He likes to read, too, and hopes there’ll be lots of books where they’re going. He’s read the ones he has now and knows all their words. She’s told him of libraries—buildings holding nothing but hundreds and thousands of books—and he hopes they will see one; maybe they’ll see one! Things could be different now, better. They’re going on to somewhere new.

What’s your plan? Mr. Paul taps the steering wheel.

She shrugs. We’ll figure things out.

We gon’ meet again?

A pause. I don’t know, Paul. I . . . I don’t know what’ll happen. I got to watch out for the boy here, okay?

The man squeezes him once on his knee. Mr. Paul reminds him of a preacher—like the one who had stared at him, his voice ringing out and loud—maybe due to his size or shape or his firmness about things, or the way he uses his words. His mother said Mr. Paul was in a circus once, that he had done things like magic tricks, but Mr. Paul looked away when the boy asked him to do one.

Johnny knows about preachers, about Jesus and God and angels and the Word, despite having never been taught this and never going to any church. He had a storybook once—about Noah and the ark, David and Goliath, Daniel with the lions—that he liked to look through, though at some point not long back the book disappeared. He asked his ma about this, even cried over it more than once, but she said she didn’t know where it might have gotten off to. When he asked her about devils, she told him to forget he ever heard that word, to never mention it to her or to anybody else again. Which he hasn’t, though he hasn’t forgotten it. The preacher’s voice had shaken like a branch when he said it, like somebody had pushed him and the words bubbled and broke or leaked.

They see the water now, bright like a bluer sky, and the boy cranes his neck to look, still with his hand in hers. The white gull-birds dive and screech, the smell of the salt grown even stronger, like trainloads of the stuff have been dumped out into the air. At spots the sand piles up high, shaped by the wind or by some giant’s hand, and he sees himself running and jumping upon these, landing in softness and springing back up again. The sand covers the road in places, the car swerving and tipping them about like a top as it steers around it, and he wants to do this forever, to ride and sway with the sun beaming and wind rushing, but when he looks up at her he sees that her lips are white and firm. She stares not at the water or sand but instead straight ahead of them, at the road twisting and entering the shade of stretching trees, its curves like a big squiggly snake. She brings a cloth to her face and turns almost away from him, as if she doesn’t want to be seen, like she wants to become small and masked and invisible. He ducks his head then, as he knows this and thinks this. He wants sometimes to hide like a spooked turtle in its shell.

They cross a long bridge of a type he has never seen. He tries to count the things it stands on—gray posts like poles or blocks—but the car is moving too fast. A cloud forms above them, white and fluffy and sometimes covering the sun, so that they seem to drive through big clumps and dots of cloud-shadow down below it. More cars are out now, slowing them and passing by, and occasionally people will look or wave. Buildings take shape: a filling station; a diner; another building that has no door or sign. A few houses as well, farther back with sand driveways, their roofs stained orange and chocolate brown. Then more woods, more houses. They’re away now from the beach. An old truck pulls in front of them, hauling what might be pillows or chickens, white feathers spreading behind it like dust. Mr. Paul slows, then goes around this, the boy watching the man’s feet work, the one hand on the lever, the car groaning and humming as he shifts the gears.

Lena, what if I was to come with—

No, Paul. Her voice is firm. We’ll be okay. I’ll write to you when we get there.

Write . . .

Well, I will.

And from where?

A pause. I got kin in Tennessee. We’ve been through this, haven’t we? After the boy and I get set up, why, you can pay us a call!

Her words end on a fibbing high note. Nobody says much after, not until the man pulls into a dusty lot and the boy sees the train tracks, the train behind a building with people standing and walking before it, parts of the cars black and parts painted red. His heart catches