Stuck in Neutral (9 page)

A moment later I felt a warm sensation under my chin. It turned from warm to hot very quickly. My brain stem started twitching me around. I heard them both laugh.

“Don't like the hot stuff, hey, Mr. Wizard? Can you say ‘Bic lighter' …?”

That was the last word that voice said.

I managed to catch only a glimpse of Paul as he came at them from around the corner. He moved so fast that he was just a blur. Their bodies seemed to explode when he hit them. I heard a muffled cry from one of the strangers and a huge gasp from the other. For the next minute the world filled with the sound of fists hammering into flesh. Within a matter of seconds I heard only the whimpering of one of the strangers, complete silence from the other.

My head and eyes shifted, focusing over and beyond them, but even my out-of-focus view saw something horrible. The bigger guy did not move at all, just lay facedown in a puddle of blood. It looked like he'd been shot in the face, not Hollywood or TV “shot in the face,” but really shot. I thought he might be dead. The smaller guy looked even bloodier than his friend did; his left nostril looked torn open. One of his eyebrows looked half torn off too, and his nose looked flattened, his eyes bloodshot. He was terrified.

The worst sight of all was Paul. He looked like a machine, pounding away at the guy still standing, turning away from him only long enough to kick and stomp the unconscious guy who lay motionless on the ground. I'd never seen such an expression on Paul's face before: The veins in his neck looked ready to pop; his fists, already dirty from the weeding, were covered with blood. He looked like a monster, barely recognizable.

In another few moments the shorter guy fell to the ground too, curling into a ball, whimpering next to his unconscious friend.

Paul ran to the side of the house, leaving them there at my feet. I could hear the smaller one muttering, “Adam, wake up … Adam, please … oh God.”

In only a few seconds, Paul came back.

“You like fire, huh?” he muttered, so low and cold that it scared even me. “You're going to walk up to my brother and burn him? You think you're going to do that?” He kicked each of them, hard.

“Burn my brother?”

It wasn't until then that I saw the gasoline can Paul had brought back with him. He lifted it up, quickly unscrewed the lid, and poured the contents onto them. The fumes almost knocked me out; waves of gas shimmered up from their backs.

“You're going to burn my brother and laugh?” Paul said as he finished emptying the can. He reached down and grabbed the arm of the smaller stranger. The guy began to whimper and tried to hide his hand under himself, but Paul jerked his arm out, then bent his fingers back until I heard a sickening crack. The Bic lighter fell to the ground. Paul picked it up.

“You like fire, huh?” Paul asked.

The guy who could still talk pleaded, “Please don't … please … oh God … please.”

Paul grabbed the back of the guy's mesh shirt and wadded it up, jerking it close to his other hand. The guy's body looked like a rag doll. The whole world smelled of gasoline.

Paul held the lighter against the gas-soaked wad of garment. He flicked the Bic. It didn't spark. His thumb went back to the little lever to press it once again.

I heard a scream come from behind me: “Paul!”

Cindy flew off the porch and pushed Paul, who fell back onto his butt. He was up instantly, grabbing Cindy by her shirt front. He pulled back his fist to hit her, but she screamed again, “Paul! Paul! Stop it! Stop!”

Something seemed to snap in Paul. He blinked his eyes hard and stared at Cindy for what seemed like minutes, really only a few seconds.

“Okay,” Paul mumbled, his voice shaky, even a little frightened. He patted Cindy's arm. “Okay, okay.”

Cindy looked down at the strangers. The big one sat up now too, both of them terrified, soaked in gas, one Bic misfire from death. They sat frozen, staring down at the ground.

Cindy said, “What's going on here?” She sounded just like Mom.

Paul's lower lip began to quiver as he spoke to Cindy. “They were going to hurt Shawn. They were going to burn him.”

Cindy looked at them again and said angrily, “You better hurry up and get out of here. If I let my brother go, he'll kill you.”

Without a word the two strangers managed to help each other up and scurried out our open gate. In ten seconds they were gone. We never saw them again.

I never loved and feared Paul more than in that moment.

Yes. Cindy knows what Paul means when he says that Dad would have to come through him to hurt me. Cindy understands. So do I. Yet each of us knows too that Paul can't really protect me forever. The fact is, if Dad decides that Earl Detraux is right, no one can protect me.

Shawn and I

are alone in the darkness
.

Shawn and I are alone
.

We are disappearing
.

We are disappearing
.

I
t's been five days since
The Alice Ponds Show
. Five days. I can't stop thinking about my dad. Is my father going to kill me? When? How? What's going to happen?

It's Friday afternoon. Yesterday Paul got on a bus with his teammates and drove three hundred miles to Spokane to play in a basketball tournament this weekend. He was really excited. Tomorrow morning, Saturday, Mom will go to Spokane too, driving Cindy and a couple of her girl friends over to watch the mighty Spartans take on the Fighting Knights of Spokane's Thompson High School. I'm having trouble getting caught up in the rah-rah spirit. Dad's
Alice Ponds
appearance has me pretty freaked out. Negativity. I've almost always been able to avoid it. Right now I'm floating in an ocean of it.

I try not to think about dying, but it keeps coming back into my mind. I bet condemned guys on death row feel like this, terrible, hopeless. My stomach is empty, my chest struggles to catch a breath, my thoughts are racing. I don't want to feel sorry for myself. Negativity and self-pity are useless. Mostly, all my life, I've relied on humor and remembering good stuff to get me through each day. To me laughter and memory have always been the best things to fight off worry. And after all, when you're talking memories, I
am
the king.

Right now I can't shut my memories down. My life races through my brain, and I remember everything. I can't even slow my brain down. I remember Christmas morning when I was six years old. I woke up to the sounds of Paul and Cindy in the living room. It might have been the last Christmas all three of us were still pretty much little kids. Lying in my crib, I could hear Cindy and Paul laughing. I'd hear the slightest
ripppp
and the rustling of wrapping paper, then
ooh
and
ahhh
in loud, excited whispers. Then I'd hear them tear a piece of Scotch tape from the little plastic dispenser. They were sneaking peeks at all their gifts, then taping the presents shut again. December that year was fairly warm. I remember lying there in my crib and a robin, very fat, came and landed on the sill outside my window. I saw him through a small crack between the curtains. He was parked right in the middle of the opening, staring in at me. He seemed to know what was going on, like he was a member of the Christmas morning bird police. He seemed to be asking me whether or not we should bust Cindy and Paul. I knew it couldn't be true, but it felt true. I thought to the robin, Let's just let 'em go this time, and the robin winked at me, then flew away. I remember!

I remember when I was eight, Dad and Mom took the three of us kids to the Seattle Center, to the Pacific Science Center. Cindy and Paul had been begging to go to the virtual reality attraction. If you waited in line for forty minutes, you could put on headgear, step into this twirly machine, and fly through the cosmos. After Cindy and Paul had each had their turns, I figured we'd leave, but Dad said, “Shawn's turn.”

The guy running the ride looked at me in my wheelchair and said, “I'm sorry, sir, I don't know how we'd put a wheelchair in this.”

Dad gave the guy one of his best Sydney E. McDaniel, Madman Poet, stares; this was in the pre-Pulitzer era, and Dad looked a lot more “mad” back then. Dad said, “I wasn't interested in taking the wheelchair for a ride.” He lifted me out like I weighed one ounce, and demanded, “Strap me in. I'll hold him.”

The guy running the show was tall and thin, wearing a green Science Center polo shirt. “I don't know.”

“Come on, buddy,” my dad said, like the guy'd been his best friend for twenty years. “You know the drill: no guts, no glory. This kid and I are one turn, look.” Dad walked over to the machine, and before the guy could say another word, Dad, talking nonstop, stepped into the harness, holding me all the while, never giving the attendant a chance to say “no” again.

“This'll be great,” Dad said. “Nobody wants a lawsuit over failure to serve the handicapped; everybody is happy; everybody wants to have fun. This is great. We're havin' some fun now. Great, great. Now I'll just strap in, and we'll put that headgear jobby right on old Shawn's noggin here, and we're all set.”

By the time the guy could get a word out, Dad and I were already strapped into the contraption. Dad reached out, grabbed the headgear from the guy, and put it on me.

In the next moment I whirled through time and space, stars shot past me, and the galaxy unfolded: light, darkness, speed. Fantastic! The best part of all, though: I loved the feeling of my dad's arms around me, holding me tightly as we spun and twisted our way through the universe. I remember.

I remember all my reactions to all the music I've ever heard: songs, melodies, and symphonies. I remember images too: van Gogh's
Crows in a Corn Field,
Hopper's
Nighthawks,
Picasso's
Guernica,
and Mary Randlett's photographs of water caressing stones. I remember the faces, voices, hands, and hearts of artists and poets, actors and ditch diggers, cops and grocers, the guy who reads our electric meter.

I remember Ken Burns's
Baseball,
Mom's Charlie perfume, Cindy's laughter and her smile, the blood that time on Paul's hands, and all the times I heard his laugh and the thump of his feet as he ran up the stairs, the ring of the telephone, the snap of a drum, the morning paper hitting the porch. I remember: Ally's pretty face, William's strong arms, Becky's soft smile, “winky, winky, winky.” My life moves across the back of my eyes, across the middle of my ears, and everything I've ever dreamed, seen, smelled, heard, desired, loved, hated, been scared of, wished I could touch—I remember all of it.

Memory is all we have, for ourselves and for the people we love. The memories of us, once we die, are all that's left of us. When I'm gone, maybe someone will pick up my dad's poem “Shawn”; maybe it will be a year after I'm dead, maybe two years, maybe two hundred years. Maybe that person will read the poem and be moved and think they know me. Whom will they know? What will they know? Will that edition carry a special note explaining that Sydney E. McDaniel, the author of the poem, killed his son? Will the reader know Dad or me any better? If I'm anything at all, you'd have to agree that I am memory. Will anyone ever know that my life, once lived and then over, was one of perfect remembering? No one will know. No one will know me. I'm just not ready to give up the hope that someday I might be known. I'm not ready.

In sleep, voice quiet, he breathes,

hands still, in silence, slumbering
.

His spirit is a feather on a quiet river....

I
t's about ten o'clock at night. I'm tired.
Remembering all your lifetime of memories and thinking about being dead all day long is hard work. I fall asleep right away. I begin to dream.

In my dream I'm at my dad's place, his little green house surrounded and overgrown by trees that hide it from the street. It's just a simple little two-story home, two bedrooms, one bathroom. It has a deck in front, built around a huge old cherry tree.

Suddenly I'm in Dad's bedroom, next to him as he sleeps. I've visited this room many times during my seizure travels: I can see, on the wall, through the darkness, framed photographs of me, Cindy, Paul, the three of us together and apart; there's one picture taken when all three of us were just little kids and Dad had hair and Mom looked like a kid herself.

In one corner of the room, just below a tall window that looks out toward the street, is a writing table; Dad's computer sits on it. His screensaver pattern is dots of light rushing toward us—they look like stars falling off the sides and top and bottom before they fly off the screen. I slip back into the darkest corner of the room, next to the closet door, and wedge myself into the blackness.

Finally I gather my courage, approach Dad's bed, and whisper gently, “Dad.” He doesn't respond.

“Hey, come here,” I command, so sharply that I even scare myself. In that instant Dad looks up at me.

He stares into my eyes, confusion playing across his face—he seems to be trying to place me.

“I don't know you,” he says. “Are you an angel?”