All This Life (12 page)

There are so many memories back here that Sara can't pick out one, can't zero in on one day where they were all here, all alive. It's not one recollection from their past, but a hive of them, a colony of reconstructions, Hank showing off how long he can hold his breath underwater, Sara doing handstands, legs together, toes pointed perfectly. Their mom works her way through yet another Sudoku book. Their dad flips burgers on the barbecue. There are enough memories now to fill this pool.

“I like the backstroke,” she says and mimics the motion, moving in the same circular direction as her brother, both of them walking around and swinging their arms.

“You're good at it,” he says.

Hank laughs and Sara laughs, and they are both laughing.

They are laughing like children and walking in circles and sort of swimming and they spend the next ten minutes like this. Hank forgets to tell her what he'll do to Nat, and Sara forgets she wants to know.

She switches to freestyle.

Hank says, “How the hell do you do the butterfly again?”

He awkwardly flaps his muscled arms like he's trying to fly and
Sara laughs so hard that she sits down on its sandy bottom, then lies down completely. She doesn't say anything, straightening out and moving her arms and her legs back and forth in the dust, a desert snow angel.

“Is this right?” he asks, shaking his arms in quick small circles.

8.

T
he day Balloon Boy was born, Rodney had been with Sara. They left their junior high and kissed in the park and then saw a man with a big balloon tied to a tree. It wasn't typical; it was flat like a big hunk of gray bread, about four feet across, hovering close to the ground. Rodney and Sara asked the guy what he was doing.

“It's a homemade weather balloon for some experiments,” he said.

“What kind of experiments, sir?” Rodney asked.

“Do you two want to be my assistants?”

“Sure,” they said.

“First thing I need you to do is watch the balloon for me. I have to run to the restroom. Can you do that?”

“We're not babies,” said Sara.

“Don't touch anything until I'm back,” the man said. “Then I'll show you how to measure barometric pressure.” He ran off toward the bathroom.

Sara poked the balloon and said, “I wonder if this could make it to Spain.”

“Why Spain?”

“We can go up, up, and away,” she said.

Back then, Rodney's goal in life was to impress Sara. Making her laugh was his chief mission, and so he said, “Want to watch me fly?”

“Don't be crazy.”

He strutted to the huge balloon and jumped into the middle of the flat gray thing. It took his weight no problem, kept hovering a few feet high.

Sara said, “Quit it.”

He said, “Spain.”

He reached for the rope and untied it.

“Get off there, Rodney.”

He hovered a bit higher.

“This isn't funny,” she said.

“Hey!” said the man, running toward them. “Son, be careful!”

And Sara said, “Please don't.”

They kept screaming at Rodney in alternating sentences, but he wasn't listening. He smiled at her. He loved every second at first because this was all a joke. No big deal. Nothing to worry about. Rodney knew they'd all laugh once he was back on the ground learning about barometric pressure.

The balloon was fifteen feet in the air.

Rodney didn't feel any fear. He was a kid impressing his girl. Swept up in making her laugh. Sara wasn't saying anything anymore, only staring up at him, open-mouthed.

There weren't any clouds in the sky. He was up there by himself. He felt like a test pilot, brave and fearless. Someone reckless with liberty. The sun shone so violently that he couldn't even see its shape; it seemed to run and bleed like lava. It made everything a harsh blinding hue, and Rodney squinted into it, not bothered by the opaqueness but feeling welcomed by it, seduced.

There was also the unmistakable smell of burning hair, a scent that normally meant he was in the kitchen watching Uncle Felix fry fish, singeing the coils from his knuckles and hands. He despised
the stink, but up on the balloon, he didn't mind it. It represented something else: The things that burned this high in the air were boundaries, limits, and a free Rodney flew, floated, soared. The sky was ready to take him wherever he wanted to go.

This must have been what it was like when they realized the earth was round, not flat—to understand that there were no edges to fall from, no end to the world. It would spin and spin forever, and they were all so lucky to be here. Rodney for the first time felt a great appetite to experience life outside of Traurig. He didn't care if it was Spain or not. All he craved was flight.

Lost in fantasy, there was no part of him that pondered the balloon tipping over. It wasn't even possible that he'd fall out of the sky, that his skull would jostle and crash. He'd never heard of aphasia or brain traumas or closed head injuries. Rodney had no idea that mouths could curdle and wobble and warp and never work right again.

How could any of those impossibilities be plausible when he was drifting on a balloon, feeling a warm breeze?

At first, it was a simple shimmy, a slight waver, a blip of turbulence that barely registered.

A few seconds later, though, the balloon buckled, shaking from side to side. Rodney tried to dig his hands into it for some grip. He looked down at Sara and she was the last thing he saw.

The falling was fast. It seemed to Rodney that he was on the balloon and then on the concrete.

He had two separated shoulders and a broken jaw and a broken nose and a broken wrist and a broken eye socket and three cracked ribs and a shattered ankle and a ruptured kidney and a traumatic brain injury. Everyone in town called him
lucky
once he was out of the hospital and limping around. All patched up on the outside, but they couldn't see the tornado unleashed in his head.

•
  
•
  
•

LYING ON THE
front yard's hot dirt, fresh from Hank punching him in the cheek and in the chin and in the solar plexus, Balloon Boy looks around for his dad and uncle. They both lie in close proximity, moaning and attempting to peel themselves off the dirt.

“I'll bring the damaged pole,” Rodney's father says.

“Be gentle with it, Larry. Maybe it can be saved,” says Uncle Felix.

Larry lays the broken fishing pole across his palms, carrying it like an injured animal.

Slowly, the three remaining members of the Curtis clan limp into the house. They lurch through the front door, onto the concrete floor, which Kathleen used to have covered with a knockoff Persian, the rug running the whole square room, concealing the cold cement underneath. Uncle Felix rolled up and torched the rug in the backyard once she'd left.

The only furniture in the room now is a small couch, a record player sitting on the floor in the corner, hooked up to a couple of cheap speakers. All of Felix's old vinyl is in a pile around it, Hank Williams, David Allan Coe, Johnny Cash. He's been known to crank up the volume and howl along to his records, Rodney always staying in his room until these recitals are over. He barricades himself away because he hates that old hillbilly shit, but more importantly, he doesn't like listening to his uncle sing—something he so badly wishes he could do—especially if a melody is being wasted on some redneck twang.

There's also a swamp cooler jutting from the living room wall, an ancient one that looks like a lawnmower has been turned on its side and jammed into the cinderblock. It makes so much noise when it's on that the whole room reverberates, the mewling ricocheting off the concrete walls and floor.

Not all three of them can sit on the couch at once. Rodney and Larry take a seat, while Uncle Felix lays the two halves of the broken fishing pole on the concrete floor and kneels down next to it, a doctor conducting an autopsy.

“He is an evil man,” Felix says. “He wants to fight, fine. I am not opposed to physical violence. But ruining another man's fishing pole?”

“How's your head?” Larry asks his son, running his finger across the boy's cheek.

“I'm,” Rodney says, then five seconds later, “fine.”

“A fishing pole can't even defend itself!” Felix says.

“Do you need some water?” Larry asks his son.

Rodney shakes his head no.

“I'm sorry about this,” Larry says to Rodney.

Uncle Felix takes both pieces of broken pole, waving them about like he's conducting a choir, and Balloon Boy dreads what's coming next. He's seen this look on his uncle's face many times, right before a bad idea: The look is like a whistle on a speeding train, telling you danger is on its way. The same face Uncle Felix had right before fighting Hank, or a couple weeks back when he rifled through the neighbor's trashcans looking for salmon skins, convinced they'd stolen a fish from the fridge, or a few weeks before that when Felix jacked a battery out of someone else's car in broad daylight, not even hurrying, calmly thieving, and then put it in his truck. Rodney knows this face and he fears it.

Uncle Felix brings one of the broken pieces of fishing pole up close to his face. “As much as it pains me to admit, this pole is a goner. Hank can't get away with it.”

“He's already gotten away with it,” says Larry.

“The battle has only begun,” Uncle Felix says.

Larry stands up off the couch, clapping his hands, swelling with toxic camaraderie. If Balloon Boy has seen the crazy look in his uncle's eyes as he conceives and executes a bad idea, he knows this face from his father: a blank-eyed, abject agreement. He's going along with whatever plan his brother spins.

“I say we light her car on fire,” Uncle Felix says. “Let's hold it responsible.”

“Good plan,” Larry says.

“Bad,” Balloon Boy says, then four seconds later, “plan.”

“Hush,” they say in unison.

“But wait,” Larry says, “won't Hank kick our asses again?”

Felix smiles and swings those broken poles about, keeping that deranged choir singing: “We need backup. Call our softball team. Call every Wombat. Get our whole batting order here and we'll light her bucket of bolts on fire and get some revenge on Hank.” As he finishes his thought, he begins using the poles as swords, fencing thin air.

Balloon Boy isn't on the softball team, but he does go to the park to help with their practices, collecting equipment and whatnot. Sometimes a Wombat will look around the park and ask Rodney, “Isn't this the place where it happened?” and he'll say, “Yes,” and sometimes a Wombat will say, “How high'd you get on that balloon anyway?” and he'll shrug with a smile, not wanting to talk about it.

Now Larry gets on the horn, calling Wombats, and Balloon Boy sits and watches, knowing there's nothing he can do to talk them out of this. But he can make sure that Sara stays safe, which is what concerns him the most. She might not love him anymore, yet that doesn't mean he's forgotten his own feelings for her. They're locked in him. That's what makes Balloon Boy feel so alone, all the swirling thoughts that can only clank around his brain like shoes in a dryer.

Alone, with no way to articulate himself.

The two halves of him, much like the busted fishing pole. Rodney and Balloon Boy. The same. Different. Permanent. Terrible.

“Excuse,” Rodney says and gets off the couch, “me.”

“Where you going?” Larry says, cupping the phone with his hand.

“Need. Fresh. Air.” The whole sentence takes sixteen seconds to choke out.

“No such thing in Traurig,” Uncle Felix says.

Rodney goes out the front door, walks over the small dune in the yard, and makes his way toward Sara's. He should have stopped in his room to get his pen and pad. This is going to take a lot of words.
But it was about time to Rodney, maximizing his time. So he decided to blow off the pen and pad in the name of getting to Sara as soon as possible.

The day is equal parts hot and achy, and Balloon Boy wonders if it's even possible for him to get a concussion, after the damage already done. Hank's fists connected hard against his body and Rodney feels a bit woozy.

He hears a ringing, which isn't a good sign. He might be concussed. Then he realizes it's Old Erma's wind chimes a couple houses up. Obviously, there is no midday wind, but she sits on her porch, clanging her cane along all the chimes, like a prisoner running a tin cup across her cell's bars. She smiles as Rodney passes and calls to him, “Hey there, sweetie. You good?”

“I'm,” he says, and six seconds later, “good.”

“I love music,” she says, sending her cane over the wind chimes again.

He sees a lizard darting up a wall and a swarm of ants slowly mutilating a moth and carrying the bits off.