Short People (2 page)

“And there’s monsters with sharp teeth behind you. They keep coming closer. You have to be really tight to the wall or they’ll bite you.”

That’s a Jason thought, silly and unrealistic, but Billy thought it. Billy said it. Maybe he
can
be like Jason. Maybe the world is more mysterious than science can ever explain. This must be what it’s like to be Jason, unrestrained by the rules of reality, closer and closer to pure imagination. Billy relinquishes his questions why, his rules of logic. Closer and closer to the edge of the pool. Fear is the knowledge of danger. Billy, who has lived in fear since he can remember and has buffered himself against it with facts, suddenly and arbitrarily now discovers another, a preferable way. Imagine that you’re indestructible. Then when you pound your chin on the cement, when blood stains the water and your jaw throbs, you won’t care. Imagine yourself a winner. Billy, the frail, the once frightened, calmly walks to the lifeguard stand.

He grins. So this is what it feels like to be at one with the world. Four stitches. A scar to last a lifetime.

Billy and Jason—grass-stained, kool-aid-tongued, starbursting in a limitless world—smear dandelions across their cheeks and foreheads, their forearms. They climb trees and pick crab apples, which they then whip at each other like darts. Nothing can harm them. They scratch at welts and scrapes and scabs that appear on their bodies in places that they don’t remember banging. Billy leans way back on the teeter-totter and suspends Jason high on the other side, holding him hostage until Jason tells him that being up there in the air is more fun than squatting and straining for leverage way down on the ground, at which point Billy slides off the edge and watches Jason bounce on the dirt. Or they hang from the monkey bars and turn the world upside down. Sometimes they play less rambunctiously. They overturn rocks and expose the Byzantine villages bustling with ants underneath; they drop pebbles on roadways and crumble bridges, careful not to hurt the ants, less interested in destruction, in their own ability to destroy, than in the construction that they provoke, in the mystery of creation. They sit and they spin and they spin, and they don’t ever come when they’re called. They don’t even hear adult voices, not now. It’s summer. Grown-ups don’t exist in summer, not really.

Billy knows about the past and the present, but Jason has learned something new. It’s a secret. Jason knows that the world gets bigger, but it gets smaller, too. He knows there are things he does not want to know. He knows his dad was an engineer once, and now he’s an unemployed. He’s going to be an inventor after summer is over and move the family away to a new city, Jason knows that too, but he can’t tell anyone. Jason knows about the future, now. You can be one thing and another and then another and another and on and on, but the things you become sometimes wash the things you once were away. Jason knows what he wants to be when he grows up: he wants to be friends with Billy.

Jason is younger than Billy. But Billy lags behind as they walk to the park, shuffle-steps, falls over his two feet trying to keep up.

Billy, too, has a secret. He spills it when they reach the park. The fossil Jason found isn’t a fossil. The museum people looked at it and said it was just a rock. Billy protested, defended Jason, said, “Yes it is, look at the squiggles and gouges like something scratched it,” but they told him these markings could have been caused by anything, friction, a pickax, a Caterpillar.

“Do you want it back?” Billy asks.

“No.”

“Well, what should we do with it?”

“I don’t care.”

Scientists should be dispassionate, but Billy is sentimental. He puts the rock back in his pocket. He wants it to be special even though it’s just a rock. He wants meaningless things to have meaning. He’s starting to suspect that he doesn’t like all this learning about the world. He’s starting to falter, to be less sure of the protection he thought he could find in science. He doesn’t know this is what he’s thinking—the subconscious is 687,500 bits faster per second, immeasurably smarter than the conscious mind, science has proved this—what he knows is he’s no longer sure what he wants to be when he grows up.

Jason and Billy, awkward and quiet. Billy doesn’t know why. Jason does, but he’s forgetting it, trying to. Maybe then he’ll be able to stay here. If you can imagine it, it can be true. If you can forget it, it’s gone. If Jason can make right now be forever, the future will never come. That would be good magic. But there’s bad magic, too. Like the way, even though they’re best friends, Jason and Billy are weird with each other today. Why do things change without anything changing? Some bad witch blew toad dust on Jason and Billy and made them different than they were before. If Jason could be a magician, he would fight the witch, he’d boil a pot full of gooey things, old rubber bands and melted crayons, and he’d chase the witch away.

Maybe that’s the witch there, pretending to be a mommy duck. She’s leading her children on a tour of the concrete pond. They straggle behind her, and how do they know to form a V like that?

“I don’t know,” says Billy.

“Hey, Billy, you know what else? That mommy duck? She’s a mean witch.”

If Billy believes him, the future will change. They’ll be Jason and Billy exploring the eternal present again. Jason and Billy, alive and thriving, restrained only by the limits of what they can think of. The duck’s looking at them. She knows.

“And she’s casting a mean spell on us right now.”

“She’s just a duck.”

If Billy won’t believe, there’s no way they’ll conquer the world. But if Jason believes that Billy believes, eventually Billy will stop trying to think—just for a moment—and see. The duck is a witch. Meanwhile, Jason goes searching for pebbles on which to cast his own anti-witch spells. They’re hard to find along the edge of the concrete. He roots around in the tall weeds.

“Billy, help me look for pebbles.”

“No. I don’t feel like it.”

“How come?”

“I just don’t.”

Here’s one and here’s one and here’s one and there’s one. A handful of pebbles, no help from Billy.

“Eben-ku-deeben-ku-dooben-de-beetle-boo.” He casts a spell on the pebbles, then throws one at the ducks. It plops in front of them and they chase after it, craning and lunging, mouths open. The mother duck, too. The pebble is a hunk of poisonous bread. Jason is feeding them, tricking them, saving Billy and himself from the future. He lobs another one. Another. Another. The ducklings crawl over each other to get at the bread. After they eat enough, Jason is sure, they’ll get scared, for no reason, and run away. The mommy duck will go poof—Billy will see—and turn into the witch she is. Then she’ll swim away, too, and take Jason and Billy’s weirdness with her. It’s magic.

“Look, Billy. Lookit, they’re eating the pebbles.”

Billy won’t admit he’s fascinated. He pretends he’s bored, flips the rock that isn’t a fossil from hand to hand, trying to look like he isn’t looking.

Jason sings a song he knows they both like. “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, his name is my name too.”

Billy feels like he’s forgotten where he put something, but he doesn’t know what that something is. He wonders, hey, why not sing along? Because he can’t find the thing he can’t remember. He has to keep searching until he finds it. He wishes he weren’t in a bad mood. Look at Jason with ants in his pants, maybe he’s not faking it, maybe he’s just like this, maybe his life is simple and sweet. Billy wishes he knew Jason’s secrets.

“Whenever we go out, the people always shout—come on, Billy, sing—there goes John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.”

But no, it’s a stupid song. If that were his name, he wouldn’t be Billy. It’s scientific. And he can’t be Jason, either. Anyway, he doesn’t want to be Jason anymore. Jason’s changed. Jason is no longer silly, he’s fake silly. Okay, he
is
still silly, but doesn’t he know that sometimes you have to be sad?

“Stop it, Jason.”

“No. I don’t have to.” Jason sings louder. “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, na na-na na-na na-na . . .”

The ducks watch and listen. Jason hops up and down, shouting the refrain. “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.” He throws pebbles, one at a time. The ducks go wild, hungry for more.

Billy bites his lip. He covers his smile. Jason’s a magician, drawing the joy out from inside of Billy, until finally, he can’t hide his laughter.

“See, Billy? It’s magic. You try.”

The rock that isn’t a fossil is slightly larger than a pebble; maybe an inch in diameter, thin as a skipping stone. It sails slightly higher and soars slightly farther than Jason’s pebbles, then lands on the back of one of the ducklings. The duckling squawks. It swims in tight circles, flutters its wings. Its mother watches. Its siblings scatter. The rock sinks unnoticed below the surface.

“You didn’t say the magic words.”

“Did I hurt—is the baby duck okay?”

It fluffs its feathers, swimming in a wobbly line toward its mother. The duck is okay, shaken up but okay. Children need ten hugs a day. A kiss will make it feel better.

The boys are both silent. What do they know?

The mother duck is preening over her young. She smoothes down its feathers. She pecks at its shoulders, pecks and pecks. No kisses. She clamps her beak over its neck. No hugs. It bobs and struggles. A frenzy of batting wings, of splashing water. She’s jerking her head. She’s breaking its neck. A piercing, full-throated moan, and then the mother duck gathers her ducklings into formation, swims away with them, leaving the limp one behind; its soft belly and webbed feet glisten in the sun.

“Jason, we killed it.”

“No, the mean witch killed it.”

Summer is waning, the days growing shorter, not even magic can stop it from ending.

Jason tells Billy he’s moving soon. School looms ahead, dark and ominous. Billy is scared of all he doesn’t know. He’s scared of what will happen after Jason’s gone. The neighborhood reeks of bad science.

Jason rides off toward his father’s new job. He twists in his seat belt and waves out the window. If you run at supersonic speed you can keep up with the car as it drives away, and you won’t get tired even if you have to run for two and a half days without stopping except to get gas and go to the bathroom. Run, Billy, run. Come on, Billy, keep up. But Billy, the smart one, the older one, can’t keep up. He veers off, sputters out on the side of the road. He huffs and he hunches. He waves.

Jason crosses the highway into the who-knows-where.

When he looks at his fossils, Billy sees Jason. He knows Jason’s gone, though. You can’t hold your friends forever in limestone. That would be magic. The fossils are boring now. The traces of life he finds in them are much too constrained, dull, dead.

Goodbye, Jason.

Billy is far away, like the park and the pool, the ducks and the pile of gravel, the big kids who can use the diving board, Evergreen Plaza and its parking lot, the asphalt, the concrete, the crab apples, the teeter-totter, the Big Wheels and bike trails, monkey bars, training wheels, dandelions, ants, east and west, north and south where he never went. The map in Jason’s mind is useless now, but soon he will draw a new one. Who knows what will be on it. Buried treasure.

’Bye, Billy.

THIS LITTLE LIGHT

Shawn Casper dons his new gray suit, clips on his one tie and rides in the back seat of the family Festiva toward the church, a pyramidal shed sided in brown aluminum that rises at steep, oblong angles; it looks like an immense arrowhead piercing the ground past the parking lot.

An usher takes him from his mother and father and leads him to a closet-sized annex behind the baptismal pool. The usher hands Shawn a plain white robe—a sheet cut with three holes, one for his head and one for each arm—then closes him into the darkness. The room has no windows, no switches, no bulbs.

After his eyes adjust, Shawn sees how spare the room is: one metal folding chair and a small shelf. He unties his brown fauxleather dress shoes. He removes his socks and folds them in half, laying each one in the heel of its corresponding shoe so he won’t be confused, so the germs on his feet will stay separate. He strips off his suit, folding and refolding the jacket, slacks and shirt, aligning them in a neat stack on the shelf according to bulk, then spreads his tie flat across the top to give the appearance that it’s still clipped in place. He leaves his underwear on. His scrawny body embarrasses him, and the thought of the whole congregation—his elders and peers, he’s not sure which is worse—seeing his private parts terrifies him. Hoping his body transforms with his spirit, he shimmies into the white sheet and, minding his posture, sits on the cold chair to wait.

Goose bumps rise on his flesh. He closes his eyes, pinches his tear ducts, attempting to concentrate on Preacher Dan’s sermon.

“I was reading my Bible the other day, thinking about how special this day is for our young friend, Shawn Casper, and I happened on a verse from Luke—Luke 3:22. Do you all remember that one?”

Shawn repeats the words in his head as they’re spoken, tells himself,
Pay close attention, this is important,
but the desire to listen occludes comprehension. He catches a few phrases—“. . . in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from Heaven . . .”—and in trying to discern the mass of their meaning, he misses whatever comes next. Eventually the words stream past him entirely. His mind wanders toward more prosaic things: the itchy texture of the cotton robe, how hard it is to clip his cat Isaiah’s claws, what it would be like to be color-blind. He starts counting things—rivets in the wall, the minutes until he will be born again.

For he is about to be accepted into the body of Christ. He is about to be saved from his suffering. He can’t imagine what that will feel like. Will it be warm? Will he be like Jesus in every way? This is what he strives for. To Shawn, the world is either/or: either you’re saved or you’re not; either you’re good or you’re bad; like his father says, “Either you’re part of the problem or you’re part of the solution.” Right now, and for the next twenty minutes or so, Shawn is part of the problem, the bad, the unsaved, locked alone in the darkness just like all those others who haven’t accepted Christ into their hearts. A little over a year ago, his parents announced that he was old enough to make the decision that would define the rest of his life—whether or not to be baptized into the faith. They couldn’t choose his path for him; the responsibility was his alone. They urged him to establish his own personal relationship with God before making up his mind, to speak with Jesus through prayer and listen carefully to what the Savior had planned for him. He prayed frantically, as per their instructions, but Jesus never answered. At church he had been told repeatedly that anyone who asked would be accepted into Heaven. Shawn was sure that he must be asking with an impure heart, must not mean it, because if he did, Jesus would say, “Welcome home, I have been waiting for you.” Then, Shawn could say, “I am ready,” and know he was telling the truth. Finally, in desperation and still with no answer, he requested his baptism, ready or not. His hope is that from this day forth, when he prays, Jesus will miraculously respond.

The door is opened, and Shawn steps humbly forward, his head down, his face red, out of the darkness and onto the stage. He climbs the portable stairs behind the water tank—as big as a coffin, glassed in on four sides—until he stands, terrified and exhilarated, on a thin, carpeted platform next to Preacher Dan.

He looks out into the congregation, finds his mother and father, holding hands. His mother waves at him. His father whispers something in her ear and softly pulls at her arm. She waves again, this time with a waist-high flicker of fingers. Shawn grins and blushes.

Behind him, Preacher Dan kneels in the water and whispers, “Lie prone, now. Relinquish your body into my hands.” Preacher Dan is a vessel of the Lord. Quick with sympathetic nods and mild jokes, he carries an unassuming personality inside his beefy body, a protective authority that his parishioners trust absolutely. His hands are thick and calloused. Shawn lets them buoy and cradle his head. He breathes deep and bobs on the water’s surface.

The question, the dare, “Do you, Shawn Casper, accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?”

“Yes.”

“Are you, Shawn Casper, prepared to die with Christ, who in His infinite kindness sacrificed His life to save you from sin?”

“Yes.”

With his right hand, Preacher Dan braces the back of Shawn’s head. Preacher Dan is built like a football coach, barrel-chested, square-jawed; a sandy mustache cut perfectly straight partially masks a hairlip scar. With his left hand, he presses a towel over Shawn’s mouth and nose. He squeezes his hands together around Shawn’s head. Shawn can’t breathe.

“I baptize you in the name of Jesus Christ, your Lord and Savior.”

Submerged, Shawn clenches his eyes shut and waits for the change. Now that Jesus is about to arrive, Shawn wants to cement the misery and confusion of his past life into his heart forever. That way, when he’s out planting seeds, he will know whereof he speaks. He tries to call to mind the totality of horror and fear he’s felt in his nine years on Earth, but the chill of the water, the clamp of the towel, the second-by-second deoxification, all these things are overwhelming. He squirms. He is drowning. He knows, from years of public-pool competitions, the exact number of seconds he can go without a breath: thirty-two. To press his lungs further makes him dizzy. The blood rushes to his brain. He didn’t think he’d actually
die.
His heartbeat echoes in his ears. His lungs burn and tremble. He doesn’t want to
die.
He grasps at his face, but the preacher’s thick arms are like boa constrictors—Shawn can’t reach around them, the elbows block and overpower him. He kicks and splashes. His knees beat against the glass.

Jesus, please, if I die now, forgive me for all the sins I have done. Forgive me for not eating breakfast this morning—it was just because I was nervous. And forgive me for . . . for . . . You know what I mean, Jesus, everything, even the sins I can’t remember. I’m so scared now, Jesus. Make me go to Heaven. Please, please, make me go to Heaven. All I wanted was to get baptized. Please, help me, God. A-men.

Shawn stops struggling and lets his body go limp. He can feel himself leaving it behind.

Then he is coughing and gasping, back on the surface. Alive.

“As you died with Christ, so you are born with Christ.”

He gulps down air. Everyone claps and the shallow vibrato, the preprogrammed beat of the electric keyboard, starts in on Hymn 162. Wet needles of hair poke at Shawn’s eyes, filling them with water every time he blinks. He flips the hair back with a jerk of his head and slaps at his ear, trying to pound out the sluicing, logged water. The laughter this elicits from the congregation humiliates him. He gazes out at them. Except for his mother in her Christmas dress and his father in his best tan suit, the parishioners are clothed in t-shirts and jeans, khakis and short-sleeved button-downs minus the ties, tank tops, tennis shoes, primary colors, logos and slogans for businesses big and small. They all look the same as they did before. Black tears weave clotted webs along his mother’s cheeks. She wiggles her fingers at him again and beams. His father, chin in his chest, shakes his head at short intervals as if he’s shooing a fly away; when he looks up—yes, Shawn knew it—his eyes are rimmed red; he nods once, a hard, taut expression on his face, the bitten lip betraying the pride it holds back.

Shawn wonders when the feeling of transcendence will kick in.

Preacher Dan hugs him and whispers, “A heck of a ride, huh?” before delivering him into the hands of the usher with a congratulatory wallop on the back.

At Camp Corinth, where Shawn spends one week each summer playing Frisbee golf and Red Rover and watching puppet shows about God’s abundant love, he and his fellow campers revel in passing around warm fuzzies, homemade yarn Koosh balls that hang from strings, to be draped, with a hug, around each other’s necks. Warm fuzzies, like God’s love, are best when given away, but Shawn likes the warmth of receiving them better. He likes knowing that he’s accepted and special. Preacher Dan has always seemed to embody the traits of a warm fuzzy, soft with love and humble understanding. Now Shawn sees something chaotic and tense roil under the calm on Dan’s face. He wishes he could ask:
Why did you have to hold me down so long? Why did you have to clap me so hard on the back? Were you trying to hurt me?
But no one can question Preacher Dan.

Back in the dressing room, Shawn searches his body for physical changes. Here on his wrist is the mole by which his mother has always said she would identify him if he ever suffered a disfiguring accident. And here are the scrapes he received last week while riding his bike no-handed, the scabs white and spongy on his elbow now. His belly button is still an inny. The veins on the back of his hands run the same way they did before. Changing his clothes, he checks his thing and sees that it’s still distressingly circumcised; he’d hoped that after his baptism it would start to look like his father’s. He’s the same. Nothing’s changed. He’s the same.

There must be a reason. He can only assume that he’s somehow done something that even Jesus, who supposedly forgives everyone, can’t forgive.

For a couple of weeks, Shawn despairs at his lack of transfiguration, but before this despair can shatter his faith, he makes a pact with himself: try harder, be better; only with perfection will Jesus talk to you. There is a right and there is a wrong and Shawn dedicates himself to rooting through all the morsels of his life, until he’s rid himself of the bad bits. He imagines what would happen if he succeeded: God reaching down, placing a finger to Shawn’s forehead, a radiant light spreading through his body, ascendance, briefly, then touchdown and a continued life of walking through a world that can tell he’s a Christian by his vibrant love. On the first day of Advent, he helps his mother arrange the crèche. His father sets up the Jesse Tree, a spindly, dead-looking thing at the start, but as the days progress toward Christmas, it fills out with paper leaves. Each references a different Bible verse, with a short study plan on one side and a really well-done, three-color potato print that relates to the verse on the other. Shawn and his parents sit by the fire for an hour each night before dinner and study the day’s lesson. His father reads the verse out loud and they, as a family, follow the study plan, answering the questions and extrapolating meaning from what before were just words.

“Why did God allow His people to fall into sin as they waited for Moses to descend from Sinai?”

“What can you do not to turn into a pillar of salt?”

“How should you react if God treats you the way He treated Job? Think of a moment in your own life when you felt like God was testing you with painful trials. Did you respond like Job?”

Shawn’s father’s eyes tear up as he grapples for an answer to the Job question. He flashes Shawn’s mother a look full of trepidation, and she responds softly, all wide, caring eyes, silently cupping his hand between her palms, kissing the fleshy base of his thumb. He breathes deep and exhales through flapping lips, a lawn mower engine running out of gas.

“Shawn, now that you’re baptized, I think you’re old enough to talk about this. You know, I didn’t used to be as good as I am now at providing for you and your mother.”

“Uh-huh.” Shawn is transfixed by the incremental separation of bark from branch as the log in the fire burns.

“Shawn, pay attention. Your father’s telling you something important.”

The bark curls in on itself as it pulls away from the hard wood underneath. It pulses orange and red, like it’s breathing.

“Do you need a moment with the Lord?”

He tells himself to stop watching the fire.

“Shawn?”

His mother takes his father’s hand again and squeezes. “Chad, he’s paying attention now.”

“Okay, I’m thinking about the story of Job and I’m thinking, when I was a kid—up through, Jeez, till I was twenty-three, twenty-four years old.” He looks to Shawn’s mother for help with the facts. “Twenty-four. The third one was when I was twenty-four. I was inside for my twenty-fifth birthday.” She nods supportively. “All through that time, Shawn, I felt like Job. That’s exactly what I felt like. I didn’t handle it all that well, though. I didn’t have any faith and I thought I had to do it all myself.”

“You didn’t have any faith, like you didn’t believe in God?”

“That’s right.”

“You didn’t believe in God?” Shawn’s eyes bulge. His mouth hangs open.

“Listen, Shawn, it was a . . . I got in a lot of trouble.”

“Like you were a Devil worshipper?”

“No. Well, in a way, but I didn’t know it. The, uh, the Devil’s minions, um, ran through my bloodstream, I guess you could say.”

Shawn scoots in closer and peers at his father. “You worshipped the Devil?”

“I’m saying—”

“No, Shawn, your father did not worship the Devil.”

“I’m saying I used to drink sometimes. And things like that.”

The image of his father drinking is preposterous. Shawn slaps the floor. He rolls on the floor in laughter.

“Shawn, this is serious. This is the Jesse Tree.”

“It wasn’t a good thing. You’re lucky, Shawn. You’re lucky to have a father now who isn’t—who can take care of you. The thing is, Shawn, there were—I was like Job. I felt like the whole world was out to get me, and there were some people whose love I really needed who didn’t treat me all that well. And that’s why I was destroying myself like that. Do you understand what I’m saying, Shawn?”