Fight Song (31 page)
“Maybe this one does touch down,” Jane says to her. “According to you, there can’t even be a rainbow at night.”
Margot sighs and says, “This is stupid.”
Coffen says to Brent, “If there is a pot of gold at the rainbow’s end, we’ll split any loot with you.”
“Can I stay home? It’s freezing,” says Margot.
Bob talks in a terrible pirate accent: “You don’t get a cut of the treasure unless you come along for the adventure.”
She doesn’t laugh. But she does sigh and come along. So there’s that …
“Maybe you won’t need a new job,” Jane says, “if we strike it rich tonight.”
“Try to talk the kids out of college,” Bob says. “Then we can squeak by. Plus, now that Ace is teaching me to play the bass, I might become a rock star.”
“That sounds really probable,” she says and smiles at him.
And so the four of them push on into the snowy, rainbowed night. Tough trudging through the powder with their wonky, sinking steps. They walk to the end of the cul-de-sac. Coffen takes in the cars—how they’re hidden under a blanket of snow. He remembers calling himself a fluorescent orange monster, covered in so much of the artificial stuff, hidden under all his failures. He rubs his hand across a car’s bumper, knocking the snow off, inspecting what’s underneath. Then he turns his gaze skyward, looking at all the flakes coming down, all of them white, not one orange flake targeting him.
They get to the park eventually. Smack in the middle of the snowy field is the rainbow’s end. It comes down and kisses the snow.
Bob wonders how the HOA will handle this: Who shall be the recipient of a belligerent, bullying email about an unauthorized rainbow?
The Coffens are the only people out; they’ve got the place to themselves.
As they stand gawking at the thing, there’s a lovely barrage of adjectives, one from each member of the family:
“Unbelievable!”
“Stupefying!”
“Cool!”
“Impossible!”
Then Coffen says, “I want to touch it.”
He starts walking toward it.
His family follows.
They all reach the rainbow’s end. It’s about two feet wide, shaped cylindrically, and Bob puts his hand into the
rainbow. For some reason, he’d expected the colors to be hot, like steam releasing from a teakettle, but it’s no different temperature than the cold, snowy air. He moves his hand around in the light, watching it shift from red to orange to yellow, then green, blue, purple.
“Can I do it too?” Brent says.
“We all can,” Coffen says.
And they all do, hands sticking in the colors. They are all deep in the night rainbow. Everyone’s laughing! Margot moves her hand around in a motion like dribbling a basketball.
“Isn’t this better than pretending to be at the Great Barrier Reef?” Coffen asks her, gloating that she’s seeing something in the real world that she’ll never see online.
But she doesn’t answer, watches her colored hand continue to bounce the invisible ball, mesmerized.
“There’s no treasure,” says Brent.
“Yeah, there is,” Coffen says.
“Why is the magic rainbow here?” Brent asks.
“That’s a great question,” Jane says.
“Probably Armageddon,” Margot says.
“What’s that?” Brent asks.
“It’s nothing,” Coffen says.
“I hope it never leaves,” Brent says.
“That would be insane,” Margot throws in, still bouncing her invisible basketball.
She’s not far off. It would indeed be insane if the night rainbow rooted in this spot like some kind of monument. Coffen pauses at this idea: What would it be immortalizing? The plock marks the passing of ten years. What kind of shrine might the night rainbow be, inexplicably
landing in their lives without reason or recourse or context or perspective? What’s the big idea behind such wondrous alchemy?
In the end, who really cares?
Point is it’s here.
Point is it’s here and so are all the Coffens.
They stand together, their hands flexing and stretching colorfully in the night rainbow’s rounded light. Bob’s free hand has crept up over his heart again, like it had that first evening on Schumann’s lawn. What’s that ditty he’s now humming? “Hail Purdue”?
No, actually Coffen happens to be performing his family’s fight song: “Rock and Roll All Nite.”
Jane smiles at his selection and says, “Would you have ever guessed something like this could happen to us?”
Bob Coffen looks at all the vibrant, rainbowed hands of his family. “Just lucky, I guess,” he says, then picks up the tune where he left off.
I wouldn’t have a career if it weren’t for the tireless enthusiasm of independent booksellers. The work you do often goes unnoticed, so I want to thank you all from the bottom of my heart! We should all try and buy a book from an indie shop this week. Come on: you can do it.
Special thanks to Cooper Edens, author of
If You’re Afraid of the Dark, Remember the Night Rainbow
. It’s my favorite children’s book, and I wanted to pay homage to it in
Fight Song
.
I’d also like to thank a couple of Dans: my editor, Dan Smetanka, who has a shrewd eye and a wise spirit: scribbling this book together was a blast. And to my agent, Dan Kirschen of ICM: I know I’m in good hands with you and am stoked to grow a career together.
Eric Obenauf read this book in manuscript form and gave me kickass feedback. Thanks for your continued support, old friend.
On an unrelated note, Bucky Sinister wrote a poem for my wedding, which has nothing to do with what we’re talking about, except I want to say thanks to him one last time.
Thanks to my colleagues in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco, and also at Stanford’s Online Writer’s Studio.
I’m blessed to be surrounded by cerebral, strong, and beautiful women: Diane, Sarah, Margaret, Jessica, Katy, Shana, Rochelle, Chellis, Aubrey, Veronica.
My wife, Leota Antoinette, is my perfect playmate. We have so much fun together it should be illegal, but I’m sure thankful it isn’t.
Photo credit: Kevin Irby
Joshua Mohr is the author of the novels
Termite Parade
(a
New York Times Book Review
Editor’s Choice selection),
Some Things that Meant the World to Me
(one of
O Magazine
’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a
San Francisco Chronicle
bestseller), and
Damascus
, published in the fall of 2011 to much critical acclaim. Mohr teaches in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco.
