A Quality of Light (15 page)

Timmy Parks was my first real friend. Until I met him I lived in books. Long John Silver ranting away could always drown out Ben Gebhardt ranting away and I learned to disappear into fiction very early. I never took the time to try and make friends. When you get used to the idea that nothing’s going to last and that permanent is just a word on a Magic Marker, you get used to the idea that alone is more practical, that the pain of leaving can be avoided by never arriving in the first place. So I lived and read and dreamed alone. I didn’t believe there was a single human being who could match the people I was discovering in books. Until I met Timmy Parks.

He was a daredevil. One of those kids with perpetual scratches and cuts and bruises from all the climbing, tunneling, falling, tumbling and exploring. Timmy was always the first one to try anything. The tree that
couldn’t be climbed, the fencetop that couldn’t be walked, the space between rooftops that couldn’t be jumped, all of these belonged to Timmy Parks. He was a swashbuckler, scamp and rogue and the first person that I met before you who lived their life heart first.

Timmy adopted me. Why, I’ll never know. One day he just walked up to me where I was reading on the front steps and started talking. He talked about adventures, about night-time raids on the winos in the hobo jungle by the railroad tracks, about jumping bikes over the drainage ditch behind the industrial park, about getting the dog at the scrap yard to chase him and a myriad of big-city derring-do I’d never considered either fun or possible. Soon, I was tagging along with him and the rest of his gang. We were out every day and night carousing and playing, creating adventures out of the heaps, piles and confusions of the city. He challenged me constantly. He talked me into leaping, climbing, crawling, hanging, rolling and running. He talked me into life. I still read my books, but I was beginning to see that adventures could be lived, that magic was invention and fun was possible even in the dreariest of circumstances.

Timmy Parks was the first one of us to ever dive from the high diving board at the Parkdale pool. That board must have been a good ten feet off the water but when you’re eight years old, ten feet might as well be a thousand. We went there every day that summer to see if one of us could work up the courage to go off that board. Anyone who ever did would merely sit on the edge and drop off like a stone. But Timmy Parks dove. One day he climbed up, heaved a big breath into his lungs, ran the length of it, hopped up and sprang off that board into a soaring head-first dive to the gasps of those of us perched safely on the edge of the pool. He surfaced, grinning, and swam back to do it all over again. One by one we made the same climb but no one was able to screw up enough courage to make the same dive. Finally, one day, Timmy looked at me with eyes shining and said, “Your turn, John. You can do it!”

The climb up that ladder was the longest and hardest thing I’d ever done. I was shaking when I reached the top and looked out over the pool, the park and a section of city. The eyes of our gang were on me as I stood there with Timmy pumping a fist at me in encouragement. You can never plan the big things in your life. You can never tell yourself that this one thing will be bigger than anything else that’s gone before or that this one
act will open doors in yourself and in the world you’d never anticipated. And it’s a good thing, because you’d probably talk yourself right out of trying the very things that set you up for the rest of your life. I just stood on the board that afternoon for what seemed like forever, afraid but alive. Alive, Josh. There I was, facing danger and risk of my own choosing for the very first time and feeling the swell of courage rising in my chest. I knew I was going to do it before I did it. As I ran the length of the board and sprang off into a big, clumsy swan dive, it felt like I was running to meet myself. Like I was leaping past the two-dimensional adventure I’d found in characters and books and soaring into the three-dimensional adventure of living. It was magic.

I surfaced to the applause of my new friends and the beaming face of Timmy Parks. “Cool,” was all he said as we raced each other to the ladder to climb and do it all over again. For the rest of that summer we dove from that high board. We learned jack-knives, swans, gainers and flips. Every time I felt queasy, Timmy would be there to show me how courage could get you through. He planted that warrior seed in my heart. Timmy Parks was the first warrior I ever met. He was totally alive, totally fearless, and somehow he made it easier for me to live the life I’d been given to live. I was able to shrug off the drab nature of my house and home, the railings of my father, the sickness, the puke, the lack of any Norman Rockwell renderings of family. Timmy Parks made me brave.

Of course, my dad got drunk, lost another job, and we moved across the city again and I had to say good-bye. That was in the early fall. I snuck back across town one day around the beginning of December. I remember that the whole place was festooned with Christmas lights and trappings. I wanted to spend an afternoon running the streets with my old companions, but when I got there I learned that Timmy was dead. He and his family had been killed in a car-crash. The lights and festive paraphernalia were incongruous on that trip back across town. It was the first ache I ever really allowed myself to feel. I never cried though. Not out of bullshit bravery or anything like that. No, I never cried for him because there was nothing to cry for. Something in me understood that Timmy Parks really lived. Lived. He never once backed down from life or its challenge, never once allowed himself to feel smaller in the face of anything, never failed to risk. We’re perched forever on the diving board. That’s
what he taught me. We can either sit there and get diminished by fear, slink down the ladder to the safety of the ground or we can soar off into that big, wide empty and feel the rush that comes with courage. Become more.

We carry something of the people that affect us within us forever, and I carry the heart of Timmy Parks within me. Life’s a high board, Josh, and there’s only two choices — back down or soar into space. Warriors soar.

T
his is Parkdale, chum,” the cabbie was saying. “Any place in particular you wanted to see?”

“Yes. Drop me off by a school,” I answered.

He eyeballed me in the rearview mirror as though memorizing my features. “Yeah. Sure, pal. Schools. You got it.”

He wheeled arrogantly through the streets while I watched the houses flow by, searching for a break in the uniformity. I imagined Johnny walking out of one of these houses and turning up the street towards his school. If school, books and lessons were the security blanket he’d pulled around himself back then, I needed to see one. It didn’t really matter whether it was Johnny’s old school or not, I just wanted to soak up the atmosphere.

It was summer and there were children everywhere on the streets. I found myself searching among them for a face like Johnny’s until I realized that the faces of the lonely, disenfranchised and afraid are everywhere. Their faces passed in clumps of browns, blacks and white. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot of movement between the races. The color lines were drawn indelibly everywhere, even in the playgrounds. Latino youths played soccer together, while a group of black kids hustled through a basketball game at the opposite end of the same park. Beyond the fence two teams of white children played slow-pitch baseball, yelling and laughing.

We pulled up in front of an older high school. The glass and brick facade had a strangely recognizable quality you could find in
a school practically anywhere you traveled. Our high school in Walkerton looked almost like this Parkdale Collegiate Institute. Walkerton Secondary School, 1968, the year Denny McLain won thirty-one games for the Detroit Tigers, my father won first prize for our favorite heifer at the Mildmay Fall Fair, and I became an Indian. The first pair of events was greeted with unbridled exultancy and the latter was fraught with wonder at the hard kernel of meanness that exists in human hearts. I paid the driver and began to walk.

There’s a hushed atmosphere to empty schools. It’s almost as though the walls want to collapse upon themselves in loneliness for the clamor of voices, running feet, slamming doors, laughter and the stentorian trill of exasperated teachers. As I walked around the school that afternoon I remembered my own high-school years — how Johnny and I had grown through all the changes that happened to us.

When we’d walked into the halls of Walkerton Secondary, we entered with the expectation of adventure. Walkerton drew students from Paisley, Pinkerton, Kinloss, Formosa and all farms in between. There were roughly three hundred and fifty students there. We saw high school as a passageway into a world filled with the excitement of books, a place where dreams became tangible, a step closer to our manhood and the adult world. We were able to select courses for the first time, so I stuck pretty close to the academic bone while Johnny filled his options with music, art and drama. When the timetables were mailed out we were happy to see we would share three classes — phys ed, math and biology. That first morning a handful of our old Mildmay classmates was making the bus trip with us, and I felt comfortable and secure in that familiarity as the bus rolled up Highway 9.

Our lockers were just past a short hallway with wide ledges along the windows. When we passed through on the first morning we discovered that the ledges were a favorite gathering place for seniors before and after classes. There were about twenty boys and girls gathered there that morning. Awkward with people I hadn’t met, I lowered my eyes as I passed. Johnny was beside me, along
with Lenny Weber and Connie Shaus. I remember thinking, as the hubbub in the short hallway died down as we entered, how strange it was that silence was something you could hear.

“Holy shit! Is that an Injun?”

“Damn. You know, I believe it is. How’d he get here?”

“Musta escaped the reservation.”

“Or jail.”

“Circle the wagons! Circle the wagons!”

“Hey, Injun. Gottum heap big squaw in wigwam?”

“Look at him. He is a heap big squaw!”

The chorus degenerated into a hand-over-the-mouth war whoop as we passed. I made the mistake of looking up with a half grin in an attempt to deflect the teasing. Johnny stepped in a little closer as the laughter grew louder, more insistent.

“Hey, look. The Injun’s got a handler.”

“That’s not a handler, that’s his
trainer.”

“Can Injuns be trained?”

“Nah. Don’t need to be. They shit outside by instinct!”

Johnny gave me a hard look and picked up the pace. By the time we got to the end of the hallway, the crowd along the ledges was listing all the known euphemisms for Indian, laughing and clapping at their favorites. Johnny’s face was red and his lips were pinched tight together as we stepped into the main hallway near our lockers. Connie and Lenny stared straight ahead.

Johnny was staring at me wide-eyed. “You’re just gonna take that?” he asked quietly.

“Take what?”

“Take
what?
Josh! They slammed you.”

“Oh, that. They were just joking.” Yet there had been a note underneath it all that rang with an unfamiliar urgency, an unsettling pitch I’d never heard before.

“Some joke. You like being called a squaw hopper?”

“I don’t even know what that is. Besides, it doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t
matter?
It doesn’t
matter
that you have to spend five years listening to people put you down? Come on, Josh!”

“Johnny, they’re just giving me a hard time because I’m new. Everyone gets a rough time when they’re a niner.”

“No, Josh.
I’m
a niner. You’re an
Injun.”

“Big deal. It’ll pass.”

“Being Indian will pass?”

“Yeah. To them,” I said.

“You’re crazy.”

“Yeah. I’m a crazy Injun. How’s that?”

“Just watch yourself, okay? I’ll see you at lunch.”

The words and their edge had unsettled me. When I’d raised my eyes to the kids on the window ledge I’d seen something in their faces I couldn’t name, a look vaguely familiar.

One early spring a wild cat had crossed the fields to invade our barn. They did that now and then, appearing shortly after the birth of a litter, killing the helpless kittens before their eyes had even opened, as if removing a challenge to their territory. My dad and I had taken the .22 and staked out a spot in the stable to wait for the cat. It had slunk out of the shadows and sat motionless on a beam, staring. Even as my father had raised the barrel of the gun towards its head, the cat had stared. As the seconds stretched unbearably towards eternity it had looked straight ahead at us, a look in its eyes that moved between defiance, recognition and a colder, darker emotion, one without edges or limits. When the shot rang out, it simply collapsed in a heap on the beam. I always wondered why it hadn’t made an effort to flee. Instead it had sat there, that colder, darker emotion driving it to stay steadfast in the face of its own destruction.