Skylark (2 page)

You put on shades, big-ass shades.

    
The windows go black.

You think you're looking out, and

    
no one's looking back,

that no one's looking in, at your

    
murk and mess and sin.

You try so hard to look so hard, but

    
you're soft inside,

like yolk in an egg, you're yellow

    
and afraid

that someone's gonna crack you,

    
crack you like a safe.

You swagger down the street in your

    
combat wear, danger and dare.

Dogs snap and growl as you

    
draw near.

They've got your number, fear's an

    
easy cipher.

And you're glad those dogs are

    
leashed.

You're glad those dogs aren't free.

That isn't courage.

Look at me. Look into my eyes.

I was brave. I opened my heart.

    
I looked in the mirror until its

    
silver poured from the frame.

    
I stood there, unashamed.

The toughest people have the

    
clearest eyes.

The toughest people have the

    
clearest eyes.

The toughest people? You see right

    
inside.

The bottoms of my feet tingled. My scalp buzzed. I was electrified. At the end of his piece, the guy went silent, adding to the quiet, but it was too much silence for the air to hold—it burst into applause and whoops. People even stomped their feet.

I turned to Mom and Clem, eyes wide. “Wasn't that the most awesome thing?” But they just smiled weakly and went back to their conversation.

The guy shrugged under the spotlight, then sauntered off the stage. A woman about nineteen years old, twig-thin with bouffed-up black hair and red lipstick, leapt to the mic. “Thank you, Aaron, our reigning slam champion. Aaron's won five weeks in a row. Who's going to knock him out of the ring?” The woman checked a list in her hand. “Violet. It's your chance. You get five minutes to show your stuff.”

Violet looked about fifteen. She was dressed simply, in jeans and a sea-green blouse. She had straight brown hair and no makeup. Her poem thing was nothing like Aaron's. She spoke quietly, all in one tone, but her voice beckoned. Everyone leaned forward in their seats, turning their heads slightly to make a straight path between her mouth and their ears. The girl talked about grasshoppers and loneliness and a field “where mercy grows.”

the rain is mauve

the sun is sweet

the dirt is dark and live

the air is a prayer

that you breathe deep

and hold

long

inside

so you don't forget

but you do forget

the field behind the old fire hall

a mile from the 7-Eleven store

where we hang these days

getting hurt and mean and tall

that field behind the old fire hall

where we used to go

where we used to play

    
in the weeds where mercy grows

When Violet finished, it was like everyone breathed out at once. The air relaxed. The applause was gentle. I felt dreamy. Violet's poem had opened little rooms in my mind, some that were dark and smelled of dirt, and others that were brightly lit, surgical as a 7-Eleven store.

“Awesome, Violet,” Twig Girl said, taking the stage. “And that brings this week's slam to an end. The judges will confer and announce the winner in a jiffy. So, chill for a bit. Get another coffee, talk with your friends. Or start composing your entry for next week's slam. Same time, same place. Sign-up starts at six thirty.”

I looked at Mom and Clem. They were in another world. Clem was talking about a BMX competition coming up. Mom nodded along, her eyes a little glazed. It was like she wanted to encourage him but at the same time couldn't, because competitions cost money, and where would that come from? Five minutes later, the judges—two Spiral baristas—took to the stage and announced that Aaron was again the slam champion. He won a can of squid “in natural ink” and a retro penmanship practice book. The prizes were jokey, but Aaron's smile was real. Violet placed third and won a latte.

Back in the car, moving through the city, my thoughts were like chants. Everything I saw was new and urgent and meant more than I'd ever imagined.
Streetlight, autumn night, every drop
of rain clearing us of blame. Looking
for a place to park, a piece of street for
tonight's bedframe. Noah's ark, Skylark,
keeping us afloat in the dark
…

The words just kept stringing through my mind. As soon as we parked—in our favorite place, under the big willow on the gravel cul-de-sac behind the Adult Education Center—I opened my binder and wrote until my knuckle was sore and dented from the ballpoint pen.

At midnight, Clem kicked me—hard
.
“For the last time, turn off your stupid flashlight.”

I tucked my binder into my backpack, shut down my flashlight and stared into the black soup, wondering if I'd really be able to step up to the mic, stand under the spotlight and pour out my words the following week at the Spiral Café.

Landlord

What happened was, Mom fell off a ladder when the rung under her feet snapped while she was washing windows at a house in Fairfield. And then she couldn't work because of the pain, but she couldn't get workers' compensation because housecleaners don't have that. We stopped paying the Bruces first, and finally we broke on the rent.

Our landlord was all business, even though we'd lived in that place for seven years and weren't loud or messy. As soon as we were three days late with the rent, a note went up on our apartment door, threatening eviction. Public humiliation, Mom called it, and she scrambled the rent together, scared up an ounce of extra work, borrowed a twenty from a neighbor.

But the following month, we were late again, and
bang,
the note went up, crisp and formal on the dirty door. And the following month. I'd trudge up the stairs after school—Mom didn't let us take the elevator because it was dangerously old—only to be greeted by that stupid white rectangle, a brand, a badge of shame. I learned to rip the page off the door the way Mom did—disdainful, undefeated. Shrug it off, hustle up the money, beat it.

Clem and I would go out in the evenings, pedal our crappy bikes through the city's neighborhoods to rummage Blue Boxes for returnables, stuffing the sticky cans and bottles into the emptied schoolbags that swung from our handlebars.

One of those evenings, Clem swiped a gleaming bike from someone's garage and left his own in its place. Did his rounds on that good bike, filling its titanium basket and leather panniers with bottles, ringing its silver bell as he rode down the center line of the city's dark streets. After dumping the night's collection at the apartment, he headed out on his own, telling me not to worry. I thought maybe he was going to sell that bike, but he came home on his old five-speed. He'd returned the rich kid's bicycle and retrieved his own. It wasn't the last time Clem borrowed that kid's bike though.

He was always careful with it. Never did a slide or a skid and not one bunny hop. Mom, meanwhile, scrambled up work with ads on Craigslist and posts on Facebook. She'd weed someone's garden for a few hours or help paint someone's front stairs, but her back would act up and she'd lie on the couch in pain for two days afterward. She applied for jobs too, but pickings were slim, partly because there just weren't a lot of jobs and partly because she had never finished high school.

Finally, she got a job at Sandwich Shack. The owner is nice and lets her sit on a high stool to build sandwiches, which saves her back. He also gives her leftovers for Clem and me. But he won't give Mom more than three shifts a week. Mom says nobody hires full-time because then they'd have to pay for their employees' health insurance and other stuff.

Clem begged to get a job to help out, but Mom gave him the look. The you've-got-homework-to-finish-because-you're-graduating-high-school look.

We couldn't chase the white page away permanently. It kept landing on the door like it was a ghost that wanted in and that was that. Once, I came around the corner after school just as the landlord's teenage son tacked it to the door. I looked at him, hoping that maybe if he was caught in the act, there was some rule that he had to take it down. He smiled, but his lips were tight. He squinted as if he couldn't quite see me. As if I was so small. He left the notice on the door and walked away like he was angry, not saying hello.

I've thought about that notice of his and how it was so mean. Now, I fill my own pages—blue ink on loose leaf. Which is stronger? His scolding legalese? Or these rhymes that find each other with ease?

Gloves

At the BMX track, Clem and I are known as The Kids, but Clem's The Star. The Champ. I like to ride, but mostly I sit on the fence and watch Clem. I gulp when he catches air. My stomach knots when he does his daredevil moves. My eyes hurt following him as he whizzes past—a streak, a blur, a smudge of color. I've heard that the Earth turns fast, spins a thousand miles an hour. Most of the time, that's hard to believe. But not when Clem pumps around the track. Speed is what he is.

Three years ago, the neighborhood association put in the BMX park, along with a basketball court and a community center that has kitchens and meeting rooms but no gym. They put in community gardens too, down the hill from the BMX track. There was a waiting list for the garden plots, but Mom said we weren't good at being on waiting lists. She tried to sound like she was joking, like she was lighthearted.

Mom wandered down to the gardens once when Clem and I were biking. She came back excited. “I've seen community gardens before,” she told us, “rich with leaves at this time of year, kale up to your knees, tall garlic stems, peas winding upward—but these garden beds? Nothing. One or two, sure, have lettuce and chard. One even has stepping stones and a wicker chair. But most of those gardens are struggling. Some of them are empty, with nothing but dirt and dandelions and thistles
.
”

So Mom logged onto the library computer and she Twittered and Facebooked and Craigslisted for tools, plants and seeds. Because we had a “rolling address,” she gave people the Sandwich Shack coordinates to mail stuff to. And if the stuff was too big or difficult to mail, she said to take them by the BMX park and leave them with The Kids. Clem and I were to be at the park from four to seven every day for a week.

Well, people reposted Mom's post, and word got around. By the end of the week, Mom had a rake and a shovel and a bunch of hand tools and plants and packages of seeds. While Clem and I biked the circuits, Mom worked in her “found” community-garden plot. Just one month later, we had parsley, lettuce and kale. We set up at a picnic table in one of the city parks and cooked the kale on our Coleman stove, with olive oil and sesame seeds sprinkled on top, and it was good. Really good.

One problem though, was Mom's hands. She couldn't get the gunk out from under her nails. You can't serve sandwiches with grimy hands and wrists scratched up from blackberry canes. So Clem and I did a special bottle run—a big one, three hours—then biked all the way to the depot with what Clem called our Blue Box booty. Two hundred cans and bottles in one afternoon! Twenty dollars. We bought Mom a sweet pair of gloves. Leather, and they would not let a thorn through, the salesman told us.

Clem had his biking. Something he was good at. And I'd sit on the fence and watch. But after seeing that first slam at the Spiral Café, I had something to do too. I had somewhere to be. In my head. In my heart. In my fingertips, drumming out the beat. In my mouth, feeling out the shapes of syllables. In my ears, listening.

Two days after that hot chocolate at the Spiral for the first time without Dad, I sat on the BMX park fence with my binder on my lap and my hand ticking across the page, pen scratching, ink looping, the lines on the loose leaf like tightrope wire, my words its acrobats.

“What did you think? Angie? Yoo-hoo! Snap out of it.”

I looked up. Clem was breathing hard. His ginger freckles glimmered on his flushed face, matching the ginger hairs that curled out from under his helmet. I didn't really want to snap out of it though. I liked where I was. I was swimming in warm water, netting fish, most of them alive and colorful, a few white as bone and eerie.

“Did you like my new trick?”

I bit my lip. “I didn't see it.”

“Let me do it again.”

Clem pedaled off down the path between the bushes. He wound his way out of sight, then soared up in front of me. The bushes shook in his wake. Their tiny green buds were like little lanterns. There were hundreds. The longer I looked, the more I saw. It was like Clem's freckles, or the stars when we parked on the edge of town where it's dark—more and more, and
more
of them the longer you stare. I looked down at my notebook. Each letter on the page was a bud on a tree, or a dark star in a white night… “Angie!” Clem called.

“Yeah!” I yelled back, my voice a lie, a shallow puddle. I stirred it up. “That was great!”

Clem pedaled up the next rise. I pretended he wasn't shaking his head in exasperation. No, he was just getting his ginger curls out of his eyes.

Dad

My father has the widest shoulders I have ever seen. One of his friends calls him Popeye, because that's him—skinny legs, narrow hips, long back and then
wham
, those wide shoulders. I rode on those shoulders plenty of times. It was like sitting in an armchair. Dad would hoist me up with one hand.