Frozen

Short story. Based to a certain degree on real events. Related to Hourglass, but read Hourglass first.

Frozen

 

The first thing that came to mind, for some reason, is I didn’t know where to sit. I didn’t belong here, not really. Not like the rest of them. But then I noticed somebody waving me over--no, not really waving, but motioning: two fingers turned toward himself, half a nod. His other arm in a sling. He wasn’t even really looking at me, but I don’t know who else he could’ve meant so I walked over, and without even a word between us I sat next to him. And waited.

    

‘He never talks much,’ Mort told me, ‘my old man. He doesn’t say much, not to me, anyways. Not to mom, either. But she don’t live with us anymore so I guess that makes sense, don’t it?’

     Mort was a young boy, maybe ten or eleven--I’m not sure which, it wasn’t important I guess because all that really mattered was the talking. He didn’t have anyone to talk to, considering his quiet-natured father, and I didn’t really have anyone to talk to me. We didn’t even have that much in common. But there was something in the boy that reminded me of myself; and, thankfully, there was nothing in myself I could see in the boy. Bright, full of life and wonder, the sparkle still in his eyes--not taken away or dulled down by the worries of adulthood, the things you never even know are out there waiting until you got nowhere else to go but straight to ‘em. Because it’s true what they say: you can’t ever go back, ever.

     We met in a pretty usual way, I suppose. I lived in a little red cabin at the time, overlooking a small lake that backed up against a hydro facility that also housed a hatchery. I wasn’t much of a fisherman, but people fished that lake all the time--from the banks, from boats, sometimes wading in there. I would sit out on the deck sometimes in good weather, drinking beer, maybe working on something or maybe just watching from the safety of my deck. And when I say safety, what I’m really talking about is privacy--I’m not much of a social butterfly, you could say. I’ve always liked to be left alone. Perhaps too much.

     It was a sunny day--I don’t remember the date, the month even. Could have been Spring or Summer--doubt it was Autumn. (Like how I used ‘Autumn’ instead of ‘Fall’? When you’re a writer, you gotta let people know it, somehow.) I had a book with me, but I wasn’t really reading it. In fact, I wasn’t doing much of anything--I was dozing, that’s how peaceful it was. And that, by itself, is a pretty rare thing for me--that kind of peace. I don’t sleep much.

     Which is why my first reaction to the boy was something less than friendly.

     ‘Hey, there, mister,’ he said, voice on the verge--not all that deep yet but on the way down, I could tell. Not very tall, but lanky--his hair cut close on the sides, a bit taller on top. Freckled cheeks, grin wide and filled with embarrassingly white teeth, all of them. (I was missing a few of my own, you see.) The boy just stood there, one hand up over his eyes to shield the sunlight that somehow made it through the trees, the other in his pocket. I can’t remember what he was wearing, but the sleeves were rolled up.

     ‘Hey, yourself,’ I grumbled back. Everything I just said about him in description, I now actually observed. I looked past the boy, into the dead yard of the house next door--no grass anymore, just clumps of dirt and debris left over from the previous owner, an old lady who had to move because of the ringing powerlines that were driving her ‘batty’, she said, though I always guessed the condition was pre-existing. She was nice enough, though. I think she lives in North Carolina, now. I never heard the powerlines, myself. Heard other things, though.

     A man appeared--maybe he was there all along--standing on the deck, silent, sentinel. A mustache black as ink straight of a bottle, and for the lines on his face there’s a good chance that’s exactly where it came from. But I wasn’t going say so. The man didn’t say anything, just looked from the boy to me--didn’t move his head, just his eyes.

     ‘We was wondering if you wanted some pizza,’ said the boy.

     ‘Pizza?’ said I.

     ‘Yeah, just down there.’ He pointed past me, over the hill on which our two houses sat, and one beside--down to the little roadside parlor that I had never once visited, myself. ‘We’re hungry from driving, I thought you might want some, too. It’s okay, ain’t it, dad?’ The man on the deck shrugged his shoulders, I think his mustache wiggled, but I’m not sure. But he didn’t say anything. I noticed the boy start rolling down his sleeves.

     ‘See, it’s alright,’ the boy went on. Really went on--walking himself right up to my deck and past where I was still sitting, to the end of the deck and climbing up and over the fair railing, falling down into the salal jungle that grew there.

     He turned and looked at me. ‘What kind you like, mister?’

     I was at a loss. The whole parade of it had me at a loss for words, and so I did the only thing I could do and answered the boy. About twenty minutes later he was back on my deck, and we were eating pepperoni pizza together. Just me and the boy; the boy’s father never came out. I guess he was busy unloading.

     That’s how I met Mort.

     Mort loved baseball. He loved anything that meant he was part of a team, but for the time being all I knew was that he loved baseball. Once, he came over wearing a Braves hat, so I asked him if he and his dad had moved here from Georgia. He grinned, a kind of wry grin that I would come to appreciate over time for what it really was, and shook his head.

     ‘That’s dad’s team,’ he said. ‘Used to watch ‘em on tv a lot, says they used to be on every day and he watched ‘em.’

     ‘It’s not your team, though?’ I asked, being the observant writer that I was.

     His grin widened--became an actual smile, something else that I would come to appreciate over time--and he just shook his head. He never did tell me what his favorite team was, but I think that wasn’t really what tickled him. But they’d moved from California, somewhere around Stockton. His mom still lived there, he told me. He started to tell me something else, but stopped. I didn’t know the boy well enough to press, and besides, he didn’t seem like the type to shut up without reason.

     I probably should have, though. Pressed.

     One morning as I was getting ready to leave for work, there was a knock on the door. It was Mort. I answered, thinking there was some kind of emergency, and maybe the concern showed on my face because he laughed at me a little--he had this kind of airy laugh--and said he was just wondering if I could do him a favor.

     ‘What favor?’ I said, favors always putting me on guard.

     ‘Dad won’t be able to pick me up after practice today, so he wanted me to ask if you could?’

     ‘Practice?’ I didn’t know about the baseball yet.

     ‘Yeah, I play ball, you know. Baseball.’

     ‘Baseball?’

     He laughed, probably thinking I was acting like a doofus or whatever kids thought older people acted like. ‘You know, like…’ He pantomimed swinging a bat, the helpful kid.

     In the end, I told him I’d pick him up if his dad really couldn’t make it. My job was pretty flexible, since I worked on my own. I watched him skip back across my narrow, mud-trap of a driveway and through the section of missing fence that separated our two houses, his dad nowhere to be seen. I didn’t think about it much at the time, but he was wearing a jacket.

     Later that afternoon, sometime around 4 o’clock, I pulled up at the school. A young woman stopped me just outside the elementary office and asked me my business--probably just doing her duty. I told her I was looking for the baseball team; and after I guess determining I wasn’t some kind of disgusting old creep (with just her eyes, thankfully), she directed me though the double doors behind her--through another set just past the counselor’s office and right on through the covered area. Of course, by the time she got done with all that, I could see them well enough, myself.

     I stood in the shade of the covered area, watching, for probably five minutes or so, unobserved. At least nobody seemed very interested in my being there--which was fine by me. I could hear voices through some open classroom windows to my left, low and quiet but not the voices of children. Kids were playing on the jungle gym in the gravel to the northwest of the baseball field, but I couldn’t hear them at all.

     I didn’t see Mort, though. I mean, I couldn’t recognize him--I was sure he was out there, but I didn’t know where. Following a little trail of hopscotch-stenciled asphalt that ran alongside the north wing of the school, I casually approached the practicers, my gaze moving from each young face to the next, looking for Mort. But I still couldn’t find him. I started wondering if maybe there wasn’t a second team; and was on the point of asking when his voice startled me.

     ‘Oh, hey there, Mr. Carmichael!’

     I turned, and there the boy was--peeking out from around the backside of that northern wing, grinning, Braves hat on and everything. He ducked his head back around, and then a moment later appeared complete, carrying two totes full of freshly filled water bottles.

     I took one of them without thinking, and walked with him over to the benches. We both sat. I noticed the coach watching me, but seeing Mort’s grin I guess I figured I was alright.

     ‘How’s practice going?’ I asked him, after a moment or two of silence. Well, silence from him--there was plenty of other sound going on. Coach shouting out instruction, players either responding to him or laughing with somebody else, the ping of the aluminum bat. The coach again, saying Weren’t you paying attention?

     ‘Oh, it’s going alright,’ Mort said. That was it, just ‘alright’. But that wasn’t really it, though--the way he said it didn’t match the grin on his face at all.

     ‘What position they got you playing at?’ I played some shortstop myself back in the day, until I quit playing in the fifth grade and then again in the ninth, all because I’d rather hide from my demons than face them.

     But Mort didn’t say anything, just kept tracking the ball as the coach would hit it all around the infield, then from one side of the outfield to the next--keeping track on a little notepad the whole time, I’m not sure what of.

     It wasn’t very much longer that the coach called everyone in--Mort, too--and then pretty soon after that Mort was sitting beside me in the truck, turned away and looking out the window, quiet, probably unaware that I could see his reflection perfectly. That I could see he wasn’t even trying to smile now.  I’m not sure how many times during that seventeen minute drive home I’d been on the verge of saying something to the boy--all kinds of things, encouraging things, funny things, whatever--but I’ll be damned if even one single word passed between us until he opened the door in my driveway, turned around, and thanked me for the ride. He was grinning again, when he did it.

     Again, there was no sign of his father. I was really starting to get curious about what that man was up to, most days.

     That night, or maybe some night not very long after, I was having trouble sleeping so I got up, put on a jacket and a stocking cap and went outside to breathe the cool fresh air. It helps me relax, sometimes. I was probably out there a few minutes before something caught my attention, and I looked over through the hole in the fence and saw Mort sitting there on his deck, looking out of the lake. You could see the stars there, much better than you could see them in the sky because of the trees. I’m not sure if he knew I saw him--I wasn’t altogether sure I’d seen him, myself, or if I was dreaming--but he never looked my way. He just looked lonely.

     Somehow, picking him up from baseball practice turned into a usual thing for me. There was never any formal request or agreement, just the boy would show up at my door in the morning and I would tell him okay, and then pretty soon he didn’t have to ask even, I just told him when I’d drop him off that I’d see him again the next afternoon. I usually only got there for the end of practice because I’d try and stay at work as long as I could, and even though I never did see him take the field, after that first time Mort was all smiles--real smiles, genuine ones, not the mask he’d plastered on himself before. I assumed he was always just getting water or taking notes because it was his turn or because there was an odd number of players and someone had to--something like that. Something that really didn’t make a whole lot of sense if I would have actually thought about it in a rational way instead of ignoring what might otherwise be strange because acknowledging that strange would have changed Mort’s smile, or might have. I’m no different than most people, I guess. Pretty good at lying to myself.

     Eventually, Summer rolled around--so I guess it must have been Spring that they showed up, after all. Mort spent a lot of time playing catch with himself on the back deck across from mine, or else sitting down by the lake in a long-sleeved shirt with a sketch pad, sketching the people he saw or the lake or the birds or fish, just whatever interested him. Summer didn’t change anything for me, though. Well, it changed a little--depending on the fire precaution level. So the higher that level went, the more reading I’d get in at the end of the day (although it’s probably better I leave that part out.)

     I’m not sure if I even mentioned what I do for a living, yet. It’s not writing--I doubt that’s a surprise. I actually work for a local timber company, cutting brush. Some years ago, they purchased this old excavator and took the bucket off and fixed a cutting head on there and said there you go, Ken. It’s not bad, as far as jobs go. It’s slow, plodding work, but at least I get to be outside. I get to spend most days by myself, and as long as I keep an eye on what I’m doing, I’m pretty free to think about whatever I like. I guess that’s where a lot of my stories come from. I take pictures, too--pretty good ones, I think. But most people think I just steal them from websites or wherever. I suppose it’s a kind of compliment, just not the kind I really hope for.

     I’m getting off the point, though.

     It was sometime in June. I’d just come home from work, and was sitting on my couch in the sunlight that came in through my front window, my eyes were closed, but I didn’t quite feel alone. I guessed it was Mort, but it wasn’t--it wasn’t anyone. Not anyone I could see, anyway. Instead of settling back down, though, I turned my gaze up in the canopy of green that cast a blanketing shadow over most of the property. Sometimes, on the weekends usually, in the morning while I’m sitting there drinking coffee, I can hear a woodpecker pecking away at one of the trees right off the deck. I’ve never caught him in the act, but I can hear him. I’m afraid one of these days, that tree is going to topple over and end my poor little cabin, and maybe me with it.

     It was too late in the day for the woodpecker though, so I just sat there, listening to the silence, wondering about that feeling and why I felt watched. And I guess that’s the first time it started happening--seeing things without really seeing them. Strange images, things that really had no place in mind--flashes of them, but lingering flashes, like the kind that might stick around when you open your eyes after pressing your fingers against your closed eyelids. Imprints, memories…I don’t know. This time--this first time--it was a revolver, like one of those old six-shooters from a Western. Why in the world I would think of that, I’m not sure--I’ve never even owned a gun, never wanted one. It wasn’t just the image of that revolver, though--it was what it was doing that really had me wondering. At the time, though, it just seemed strange.

     Mort showed up one Friday morning as I was shuffling about the house, getting ready for work. Wearing that jacket, head covered in a stocking cap. The sun was just getting ready to come up; I was just getting ready to head out. His old man was taking him fishing, he said, wondering if I knew any good spots along the river. As a kid, my own dad used to take me a lot, so I told him where I remembered going, and how to get to the swimming hole that was back that in case he ever wanted to go with his friends.

     ‘I might go,’ he said, though I could see he was a little scared. I figured he must not know how to swim very well, and having nearly drowned once myself, I didn’t want to make him feel uncomfortable so I told him it wasn’t all that great, not really. And to be honest, it wasn’t.

     ‘I wanted to go the park, after,’ Mort went on, ‘but he said he had to go somewhere and we’d only have to turn around and come home as soon as we got there.’ There was a park east of the school building, on the other side of this little forest. Kids passed through there on their way home on nice days, but it wasn’t very popular as there wasn’t much of interest there, just a pond with some fish in it.

     ‘If your dad doesn’t mind, I can come and pick you up from the park on my way home.’

     His face lit up. ‘Really?’

     ‘Sure, as long as it’s okay with you and him, you being there alone for a while.’

     ‘Oh, he won’t mind it,’ Mort said, without a second thought. It worried me that he would be so quick, and I so sure he was right. ‘Thanks a million, Mr. Carmichael,’ he said.

     ‘It’s Ken,’ I said, ‘just call me Ken.’ It wasn’t the first time I’d told him this.

     ‘You’ll really come and get me?’

     ‘Definitely,’ I said, asking if 3 o’clock sounded okay, Mort saying that it sounded perfect.

     Only, 3 o’clock came and went, and I did not show up.

     In my own defense, it’s not like I just flaked on the boy. Even if it felt that way--even though he probably did. My machine broke down, and I had to babysit a mechanic who, in the end, did not have the tools or the parts or probably anything else required for the job--which, in the end, was an expensive one. On the bright side, it meant I was going to be getting a few days off.

     Mort wasn’t there, at the park. I drove out there as soon as I could, but the only person out there was a young lady with kind of hooked nose who told me that he’d gone off with somebody--a man, who by her description I could think of a few people, but honestly way too many of them so I started to worry. I thanked her (I think) and drove off, back home, hoping to see him out there on his deck, or mine--just see that nothing happened. And, of course, there he was.

     ‘Don’t worry about it, Mr. Carmichael,’ he said, grinning like he always did, not meaning it though. Nobody likes being forgotten--and even though I didn’t actually forget about him, I’m sure that’s what he thought. Anyway, that’s what it felt like, I bet. Turns out it was his baseball coach who brought him home. Didn’t even think about him.

     I stayed up that night, thinking about life. Mine, Mort’s, Mort’s father’s. Trying to piece them together like they were all pieces of a puzzle that I didn’t know what it was supposed to even look like, how it all fit together. But I was sure that they did--fit, I mean--and it was a strange, almost epiphanic moment for me because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt connected to anyone at all.

     I slept pretty well that night.

     But I forgot to turn off my alarm, so I was up at my normal hour, only not with the normal array of tasks to complete. I made the coffee--and that was it. I don’t eat breakfast. I was standing there in my slippers, staring out toward the lake when I started having that feeling again, like something was watching me--not a person, so much as a presence. There was no image this time, no revolvers--just that feeling. All of a sudden, I started feeling warm.

     About 9 or so, I got a phone call from the mechanic. Parts would be in in a few days, but that wasn’t the real reason he was calling. They were going to have to replace the bearing again, and with parts and labor it was going to cost the company around eight grand. I told him I’d call back when--if--I got the okay. There was always an ‘if’. So far, that machine had gone through four hydraulic pumps (ten thousand apiece) and this was the third bearing. At some point, something’s got to give, right? And I’m just waiting for the man in charge to say hell with that old piece of garbage--same thing I’d thought numerous times, myself--and then I’d be out of a job. What then? Would I actually have to make this writing thing work?

     It took him a while, but Mort finally noticed that my truck was still in the driveway and invited himself over. I was expecting him, I suppose, but the knock still startled me.

     ‘How come you’re home, Mr. Carmichael?’ he asked me, hands stuffed in the pockets of his sweatshirt. ‘This place sure is…’

     ‘Empty,’ I supplied. ‘It’s empty. I’ve never known how to decorate, I guess. I bet your place is a lot nicer than this.’

     Mort didn’t say anything though. He just wandered idly through the little cabin, taking all of that emptiness in like he was walking through some kind of museum or something. He actually seemed interested in my old television, a 24” former hotel set I’d been given by one of my sisters who used to be in the business.

     I asked him if he wanted anything to drink--he didn’t--and somehow we ended up back in my bedroom, which also doubled as my office. I had a desk in there, anyway, lots of printed pages of abandoned stories, notebooks piled high, a thesaurus--all the things you might imagine in a writer’s room.

     I had to keep up appearances.

     But Mort was enthralled, even more so than he’d been with the tv. Apparently I’d never mentioned to him that I wrote stories--I usually don’t, if I can help it. He walked straight over to the printer and peeled of the first page of my most recent attempt at a narrative. It was a short story, work-related, set in a little imaginary town called Kelley Street, all about a fish pipe and blurred line between what’s real and what isn’t. I’m sure that sounds really exciting, but it wasn’t. Sometimes I just write things to keep myself writing. I must be a closet masochist or something.

     For about forty-five minutes we sat there in relative silence--Mort reading my story, me watching his youthful face for any sign of reaction to my various (and pathetic) attempts at humor or suspense. The only real reaction I got, though, was when he read the part about those old stream reports that I copied almost verbatim out of an old elementary school notebook I still had for some reason. And when he finally put the story down, he didn’t even ask the one question that I was sure everyone would. Instead, he said:

     ‘That wasn’t very nice, about that kid from another country. Kicking him out the window and stuff.’

     ‘No,’ I told him. ‘It wasn’t. We were just dumb kids though.’

     ‘That don’t make it alright.’

     ‘No,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t.’

     He stood there quietly for a moment, looking through the window behind my bed up in the direction of the neighbor’s yard--looking through that, too, it seemed, seeing something far away. Then, as if remembering himself, he flashed that typical grin of his--a real one, this time (I was getting pretty good at telling them apart)--and started nosing through some of the other printed pages, glancing at a few words here or there, I’m not sure why. Maybe just to get a sense of the scope of my work. Or maybe it amused him, all this wasted effort. It amused a lot of other people, so why not?

     ‘You really wrote all this?’ he asked. I’ll allow myself a small measure of pride in recording that he did seem impressed at the possibility.

     ‘All of it,’ I said, ‘except what’s actually bound. All the free pages are mine.’ And worth that much, I thought.

     ‘Haven’t you…you know…?’ He looked to me for help.

     ‘Published?’

     ‘Yeah, that. Haven’t you?’

     ‘No,’ I lied. The truth was, I had actually published two poems in my younger days, but they were both terrible and I’d never received a single dime in royalties--not that they were worth that much to start with.

     We stayed in my room for an hour more, at least--Mort enthralled with the b*****d children of my mind’s making, most of them orphaned to boot. But seeing his wonder did manage to bring back a little bit of the joy I’d thought I’d forgotten; and later that night, after Mort had gone home and the sun down, and while I still waited to hear back from the company about going forward with the machine’s repair, I found myself sitting in front of my keyboard, hopeful again.

     It was early the next morning that my phone rang. The repair had been approved, and they would be adding a switch to the console so that the cutting head would run as long as that switch was in the on position. The thought was it would save wear on the bearing. Time would tell, I guess.

     The summer was mostly uneventful, after that. I saw Mort most evenings, but not always. I even saw his father a time or two, but the man never said a word to me or to anyone, not that I heard. He did nod in my direction on one occasion, though. So he was at least aware that I existed. I kept on having that feeling that I was being watched by something, and for some reason those feelings always made my face heat up. The revolver made a few more appearances, too. I didn’t sleep much, that summer, but I did complete a handful of short stories and was in the process of trying to get somebody to look at them. Well, somebody besides Mort.

     Sometime before the school year started, Mort and I went to the park to celebrate his birthday. I believe it was the last day of August, but I don’t remember exactly.

 

Oh, wait--here it is. August 31, 1997.

 

So the boy was turning eleven years old, and instead of having a party he decided to spend the day eating ice cream and walking around with the no-name, unpublished author next door. And I was very glad he did.

     ‘Dad doesn’t let me have much ice cream,’ he told me, as we waited in line at the little store next to old Rodgers’ bakery. On the other side was a little diner that where I’d sometimes meet up with an old friend named Gerald who was known for telling whoppers, especially to me I think because he figured I liked that sort of thing. Which I do.

     ‘He doesn’t?’ I echoed, a little absently, thinking of Gerald. ‘How come?’

     ‘Says it ain’t good for me.’ He then blew my socks off by ordering black licorice flavor.

     ‘If ice cream’s not good for eleven year old boys, then who’s it good for?’ I replied, getting a small cone of black licorice myself. They don’t really sell it anywhere anymore, but you can’t beat it. Really, you can’t.

     After getting a loaf of bread from Rodgers, we crossed the street and sat of the two little benches there, picking off small chunks of bread and throwing them into the pond for the fish. Mort seemed a little quiet, but I assumed it was because of the ice cream.

     As we sat, another small group of people walked past the pond and set out a blanket on the grass some twenty feet away: a young couple, by the look of them, and a little girl in a pretty white dress. The mother was pregnant, moving gently as she sat. I noticed Mort watching the little girl intently, his face a blank slate but for his eyes--and they were narrowed, watching her almost like some kind of hawk. Black licorice ice cream running down the corner of his mouth, blond hair tousled by the breeze.

     ‘You know her?’ I asked, impatient and clueless adult that I was. He immediately blinked his eyes, looking away. Wiped the corner of his mouth with the long, thick sleeve of his sweatshirt. It’s strange--it may seem strange--but I noticed then how much older he looked than what I remembered, even from the day before. It may have just been the eyes, though--something about them, I don’t know what.

     ‘She’s a girl at my school,’ he said, as if he couldn’t have cared any less. ‘She’s in the first grade, or was. She’ll be in second this year.’

     The girl was running around, chasing grasshoppers or some other kind of insect, the hem of her white dress trailing behind her--laughing, careless, her long dark hair flowing all around, barefoot and full of youthful joy. Perhaps we had different reasons for it, but I could understand why Mort might lose himself watching her. I was in danger of doing the same thing, myself.

     ‘Do you know her?’ I asked. ‘Is she your friend?’

     ‘She’s, like, six years old,’ said Mort.

     ‘That’s no reason not to be someone’s friend,’ I said, though I doubt I could have come up with a single first grader I’d befriended as an eleven year old. But there’s probably a lot I can’t remember about being eleven. I remember writing a story about self-aware basketball shoes, but that’s about where it ends.

     ‘Her name’s Sara,’ he said. ‘Sara Edison.’

     ‘Oh, Sara. Like the song, then.’ I was thinking of the one by Ben Folds.

     Of course, he hadn’t heard it. I waved, embarrassing adult that I am; little Sara froze in her tracks, as if I looked like some kind of dinosaur and she was afraid I was going to eat her if she moved. After a few moments, she glanced nervously over her shoulder; her parents, though, weren’t paying attention. But then her demeanor changed--as only a six year old’s can, at the drop of a hat and seemingly for no reason--and she began staring at something, not me and not Mort, but something else in our general vicinity. And then she started walking over--slowly, but certainly walking straight toward us.

     ‘Sara, darling?’ called her mother. ‘Where are you going?’

     The determined little girl made no response.

     ‘What have we told you about bothering strangers?’

     ‘They’re not strangers,’ said the little girl, now very close and with a voice that could not possibly carry; then looking straight at me, ‘well, one of them is.’

     Mort peered cautiously at her, holding what remained of his cone. Mine was long gone.

     ‘What is that?’ she demanded, hair blowing in the wind, some of it getting in her eyes, her mouth. She brushing it away like it was some kind of annoying fly. She didn’t point at anything, just expected us to know what she meant. Or, rather, me--she expected me to know, it seemed, her eyes boring directly into my own.

     ‘It’s bread,’ said Mort.

     ‘I know it’s bread,’ she went on, ‘but why do you have it? Why is it all tore up? You’re not feeding the fish, are you?’

     ‘No,’ I said.

     ‘Yes,’ Mort said, at the same time.

     ‘It’s against the rules,’ said the girl. She held out her hand; was she going to confiscate the bread? This little girl? Yet, strangely, I felt compelled to give it. But she didn’t take the whole thing, just a handful.

     And she proceeded to tear that handful into little pieces, and throw them to the fish.

     ‘They’re so funny,’ she said, smiling, not worried now about the hair whipping against her face, her eyes sparkling, her feet colored with dirt and grass. ‘Their little mouths…’ and she started making little ‘o’ shapes with her own.

     I was content to watch, but to my surprise Mort was not. He tore a chunk of bread for himself and knelt beside the girl, talking about childish things that I had forgotten how to understand, but enjoyed the sound of their voices all the same. It seemed the girl’s mother was due in November, and that she was afraid of being a big sister; and, gallantly, Mort told her that there’s no one a little brother looks up to more than a big sister, and that he knew she’d do her best. I couldn’t see the face he was making as he told her--only the reflection of it in the pond, disturbed by the bread and the fish and the ripples--but I could imagine him grinning.

     And I knew.

     After the girl left, Mort and I got in my truck and drove back home--mostly in silence but now and then he’d talk about baseball season (the Braves weren’t looking very good) and about how much he was looking forward to playing again the next year. I asked him if he was interested in any other sports, and he said basketball was okay so of course I told him my story about the shoes.

     He didn’t go home right away. We sat there on my couch for a little while, watching some old movie that neither one of us really cared too much about. I started thinking about the day and the park and that little girl and I asked him how it was he knew so much about big sisters.

     ‘I got one,’ he said, ‘that’s how.’

     ‘She must live with your mom, then?’ I observed, showing that writerly instinct of mine to get to the facts. Missing what was important, altogether.

     He shrugged.

     To change the subject, I made a show of looking out the window.

     ‘So, where’s your dad at, all the time? I almost never see him.’ And it was true, I rarely ever did see the man. His truck was gone a lot, too.

     Mort shrugged again. ‘I guess he’s probably at work,’ was all he said.

     ‘You guess?’

     ‘Where else would he go?’

     Being a man of the world (my own, mostly, but I’ve picked up on a few things), I could think of several answers, but I decided against offering any of them. In truth, I’m not so sure the boy cared. Or maybe the answer was something he didn’t want to learn--knowing just enough to know that he’d rather not.

     ‘I’m sure glad you’re my neighbor, Mr. Carmichael,’ he said, smiling, meaning the smile. ‘It’d be pretty lonely around here without you.’

     The truth was, I felt the same way. It surprised me, but I did.

     Before I could say anything, Mort was on his feet and at the door.

     ‘I better get going,’ he said. ‘I gotta get dinner started, in case.’ He stood at the door looking in, maybe waiting for me to say something in return; but nothing came. Then he walked out the door, and I didn’t see him again for the next three weeks.

     In a strange way, the lack of him developed its own presence in my life. I’m not sure how else to describe it, but not seeing him--not even a glimpse through that hole in the fence--made me realize what a place he’d made for himself in my soul. Something was missing--and I hadn’t missed anything in a long time. Maybe I’d forgotten how. But I would sit there as my desk, trying to direct my thoughts into keystrokes, but every metaphor took the boy’s shape, every line of dialogue sounded like him. I tried writing about him, I thought maybe that would help me feel less alone, but it only made things worse.

     I got a call during the first week of September from the person I’d send my work to. I’d learned not to be hopeful, but somehow I dreaded the response I was sure I’d be getting. And I got it--they were very sorry, of course--but in the silence that followed that phone call I could sort of feel the emptiness inside me grow.

     You’ve never published anything before? I could almost hear it asking--asking with Mort’s voice, for some reason. Gee, Mr. Carmichael, what a waste of all that time. Well, it didn’t need to tell me that. I walked over and stood in the doorway, still holding my phone in one hand, looking in at disgusting amount of evidence piled there of a life wasted. And I knew it was wasted--in that moment, suddenly I knew it.

     ‘What the hell was I even trying to do?’ I remember muttering to myself. ‘I can’t do this…’ The cold clarity of it. No sooner had I said the words than I felt them, they were inside me like so many hands of ice, gripping at my insides. Again, I felt my head grow warm--and the contrast was disorienting enough that I nearly fell straight onto my bed. I didn’t sleep. Sleep was an impossibility. I was filled with--something, I wasn’t sure what. I was trembling. Perhaps it was rage--rage at myself for having traded so much for so little.

     I sat up, looking across the room now at all those pages. It took everything I had to not burn them, shred them--destroy them however I could, as quickly and completely as I could. But I was also afraid to do so, because I knew how much of myself lived in those pages.

     Does it really? I then wondered--could anyone truly call that life, that will shine on no one, touch no one, move no one, be loved or appreciated by no one? If so, then life was a joke--and like Jack Handy once said, ‘I don’t get it.’

     In the end, I left them alone. But I never looked at them the same--as a part of me, some chimera version of myself that had once felt so interesting and intimate. They were nothing to me, now. They just got in the way.

     And I felt I was no different.

     It might seem dramatic, all this over a phone call and because of Mort being gone. I’ll give you that. But everyone has a breaking point, and not many of us know exactly where that is. Maybe if I’d never met the boy, that phone call wouldn’t have affected me as much. The consideration of myself as a failure wasn’t anything new, but now it was almost as if I was actually letting someone down. Mort believed in me, my stories--at least, he made me feel like he did. Having that is a powerful thing. Having that and then losing it, perhaps that’s even more powerful.

     At least work was going well. The machine hadn’t given me any more expensive trouble, and the fire season was winding down. I’d just finished cleaning up a road system about an hour away and was getting ready to start on a new one. Brushing roads might be a slow and monotonous job, but at least its one where I can look behind me at the end of the day and see what I’d accomplished, and know it’s good. Nobody’s going to call me up some evening and say ‘You really should focus on other things, I don’t think this is going anywhere for you.’

     Other than that, I did what I could to pass the time. I read until reading lost my interest; I played around on an old acoustic a college buddy gave me when he got married and had to ‘reevaluate his hobbies’, but that didn’t give me any joy, either. I remember spending a few days in town, going to the park or the bakery; and once I met up with old Gerald, who’d actually written a story of his own and wanted me to see it. And it was a whopper. But more than that, it was a distraction. Time moved so slowly, during those three weeks. Sometimes I had to wonder whether or not it had actually stopped.

     Funny the way the world turns under the feet of someone you care about.

     When Mort finally showed back up again, he was different. He didn’t act different, but there was a change to him, I think it was in his eyes. They weren’t as sharp now, always seemed to be looking at things that weren’t really there. I wanted to ask him about it, but didn’t feel the confidence anymore and besides, he could just as easily ask me the same questions. I didn’t want to give him those answers, and I didn’t want to lie to him, either.

     ‘How’s the writing going, Mr. Carmichael?’ he asked one afternoon, his voice a little thinner than what I was used to, quieter. He didn’t seem disinterested, just lacked the spirit to properly enthuse. I wanted to give him some of that old spirit back, so I told him a lie.

     ‘It’s going really well,’ I said. ‘I even wrote a little something about you while you were gone.’

     His eyes grew wide, his grin--for a moment he seemed the old, lively Mort.

     ‘Can I read it?’

     ‘Of course.’ I handed him the five pages I’d finished in a flurry one night--a plotless meandering type of story that I began with no concept of where I meant to take it. Its only purpose was to fill that void in me his absence had revealed. To my mind, it was a miserable failure, not worth even two seconds of anyone’s attention, but Mort drank the thing up. He even laughed a time or two--which had me wondering, since I didn’t remember putting any jokes in there.

     ‘You can have it, if you like,’ I said.

     ‘Can I?’

     I later found out that he hung the thing on his wall, page after page. I don’t know why. But I do know that they were the only things he had hanging up there.

     October came. It probably won’t surprise you that Mort ended up asking me to take him out trick-or-treating, or that his dad couldn’t do it because of whatever it was that was always calling him away. I agreed, which meant I had to find a costume for myself--a tricky feat for someone as old as my body thinks I am. I ended up dressing as some character from a popular animated show that involved fighting giant monsters (Mort’s idea), and I only got stopped once by the police on account of the fake swords.  While out walking, I noticed the same little girl we’d met in the park before--she was dressed as Princess Leia from Star Wars, but I could tell right away it was her.

     ‘There’s your friend,’ I said to Mort, and he turned his Swamp Man mask in my direction.

     ‘She’s not my friend,’ he said, a little too defensively, I thought. ‘Besides, she…’

     He trailed, and I pursued.

     ‘I just mean, she’s six years old and I’m eleven. Wouldn’t that be weird?’

     It seemed like a genuine question.

     ‘It might seem that way now,’ I said, ‘but in a few years you’ll find stuff like that doesn’t matter. If you like her, be friends with her. She seems like a nice girl.’

     ‘Yeah,’ said Mort--and it seemed as if he wanted to say something else, but never did. We stood there resting for a few more minutes. Princess Leia disappeared into the night.

     ‘I wonder if she’s a big sister, yet,’ I said, partially to myself. I noticed neither of her parents were with her.

     Mort nodded, but that’s all he did.

     We went home not long after that. Mort’s dad was waiting.

     Another week passed without Mort, and like the time before I found myself grasping at air in his absence. I was sleeping between one and three hours a night--all of it medicated--and began to feel something akin to a phantom, one of those disembodied spirits who doesn’t realize it is one, but walks around and lives life as if there wasn’t anything strange going on at all. The only difference, I guess, was that I did know something strange was happening--I just didn’t know what. I felt like my anchor to the world had been severed. I felt like I was sinking. And that Mort was my buoy.

     I can’t remember the last time I’d ever admitted something like this, but I needed him. I wasn’t enough. I’d spent so many years of my life on this island of my own creation--populated with hopes and dreams also of my hand--but now the sea was rising around me.

     I saw the revolver again, during that week that Mort was gone. I was sitting on my couch one afternoon, trying to absorb what warmth I could from that November sun; and, looking out into the green of the trees, I could see it. I said before that I found it strange--the gun itself, but also what it was doing in these visions of mine. But I didn’t think so anymore. What that revolver was doing seemed like a very beautiful, very peaceful thing to my tired soul. It was pointing itself at my head, and I was the one holding it.

     The road I was working on was called Reid Road, at that time. You go in through this gate that’s set just inside a bridge and at this time of the year that water’s really rushing, it’s almost deafening. In the Summer its more serene--but in the Summer is also when we find all kinds of garbage, humans waste, discard syringes laying around. There’s not a whole lot of beauty out there, and when there is something tends to ruin it. The road itself is kind of ugly--it stretches along one side of the creek for about a mile and a half before turning to dirt and switching back into some taller timber. I’ve never seen one, but the company’s had to hire bear trappers for that road a couple times in the past.

     I left for work that morning--November 6^th, I believe--a Tuesday--as if it was any other day. The drive was about fifty minutes, and about half of that on narrow, winding backroads with no shoulders and a propensity for having limbs and sometimes whole trees blown down across the pavement. It was cold that morning, close enough to freezing that my truck was telling me to be careful. The thing is, I didn’t care.

     There’s one section of Reid Road where the road’s given away a bit on the creek side, making it a pretty narrow passage that I don’t even like taking with my truck. The machine I operate is a lot wider, so I was half-afraid that the whole side of the road would collapse with all that weight on it--half-afraid, but at the same time a part of me hoped.

     But the road held, and later that day as I was stopped for my lunch break, something happened. When I was finished eating, I put my things away and switched the cutting head back on, let it build up. And as I watched that spinning drum, the teeth moving first like a blur, and then invisibly as they reached full speed, I began to picture myself stepping out of that machine, walking up to the cutting head and sticking my own head inside it. I could see the whole thing happening. It would be instantaneous. It would likely be considered an accident. And I would finally be able to rest.

     I realized I was smiling.

     I finished Reid Road a few days later, and moved somewhere else. Mort was back by then, but even he couldn’t lift he back up anymore. A buoy can only hold so much weight before the sea swallows it, too. But I was sure of one thing: I couldn’t ever do it. Because if I did, then someone would have to explain it to Mort. And that was the worst thing of it all.

     I was laying on my couch that Friday afternoon when Mort knocked on my door. I could tell something was on his mind from the way he was bouncing back and forth, but I couldn’t tell whether or not it was a good thing or more bad news.

     ‘Your face is awful red, Mr. Carmichael,’ he said, when I opened the door. As a matter of fact, my head was feeling pretty hot at the time. These head heats of mine weren’t fevers, by the way. I’ve learned to live with them.

     I moved to one side so that he could come in, and asked him what was the matter. He plopped himself right down on the white whicker chair I had sitting under the small window on the living room’s west wall, and starting tracing patterns in the dust that I’d let accumulate on the table there.

     ‘She had her baby,’ he said, finally, still playing with the dust. Wearing a thick jacket, head in a stocking cap with red A on it (for Atlanta--for the Braves), but his face was pale and seeing that, I wondered how red my own must probably seem by comparison. On the one hand, I wanted to share that warmth with the boy--but on the other, I envied his cold.

     ‘Who did?’

     ‘Mrs. Edison. You know--that girl from the park, her mom.’

     ‘Oh,’ I said, remembering, ‘your friend’s mom.’

     He momentarily stopped playing in the dust, his eyes flashing wide. But he didn’t argue it.

     ‘She had it a couple days ago, I guess,’ he went on. ‘I just found out.’

     ‘Boy or girl?’

     ‘A boy, I think,’ he said. ‘Just like me.’

     I wasn’t sure what he meant by the comment--clearly there was no question that Mort was male--but I think I understand it now.

     ‘Tell me about your big sister,’ I said.

     I could tell he was really trying to think of a good answer, sitting there motionless, eyes searching the veil of his own young memory perhaps for the perfect illustration of who that person was, and how to convey it to an old man like me, one who didn’t know anything about sister big or little, who’d never had one of his own.

     ‘She’s always with me,’ he said, after a while. ‘She helps me every day, she’s always trying to make sure I’m doing my best. She gives me strength.’ He seemed to still be searching for more to say, then looked at me as if to wonder if I knew.

     ‘I bet you miss her, then,’ I said, trying out my best façade of a smile, not really knowing or seeing the truth of what he was trying to tell me. ‘What’s her name?’

     ‘Renée,’ he said. I could see the admiration in his eyes.

     ‘Renée,’ I echoed, nodding. ‘Like the song.’

     ‘Everything’s like a song with you, Mr. Carmichael,’ he said, grinning.

     ‘She sounds like a pretty good big sister, though.’

     ‘She is,’ he said. There was a pause, a quiet moment then while he seemed to be thinking about whether or not say more, and I could see his mind working but didn’t know what to say and was afraid to say the wrong thing--something that I’ve always had a knack for.

     Then, without looking my way--still focused on those images of his sister, I thought--he said:

     ‘I want to be like you when I grow up, Mr. Carmichael.’

     The conflict of emotion that I somehow managed to keep inside me then is hard to explain. I’d never been told anything even half that beautiful before, by anyway, and I wanted to tell the boy how much it meant to hear him say it. But on the other hand, I knew what a wreck I’d made of my life; that part of me wanted to scream no, anybody but me…anyone.

     The weekend passed uneventfully. But on Monday afternoon, Mort was back at my door. He wasn’t bouncing back and forth and more, he didn’t seem excited. He didn’t even seem alive. He just stood in the doorway when I opened it for him, looking down. Then he made a sound--it was so low, so warped and inhuman, so unlike his own voice that I didn’t realize at once that he was telling me something.

     ‘What is it,’ I said, sensing something terrible--always so quick on the uptake. ‘What’s the matter?’

     He looked up at me, his eyes filled with tears. The only time I’d ever seen color in those cheeks of his.

     ‘It’s Sara,’ he said, the tears falling. ‘She’s dead.’

     Nobody knew what had happened, or why, only that the poor little girl had drowned in the pond at the park, the very same that she’d joined in our renegade feeding of the fish just a few short months earlier. She was still only six years old; and now she would always be. Frozen.

     I didn’t go to the funeral, but Mort did--he and his dad. I spent the day in the park, by myself, feeding the fish. The memory of that Summer day played out before me on a constant loop. Only, sometimes she looked like Princess Leia.

     The winter was long a hard. Mort was home for much of it, but he rarely came by the house to visit. I could see him, sometimes, through our combined windows, always bundled up and looking tired, looking bored and distant. His father was home more, it seemed--I saw him more, anyway. And though I’d still never heard the man speak, I did see through the glass his lips move in the manner of speech, so I have to assume he was capable of the act.

     Personally, I was not in a good place. The promise I’d made myself to never be the cause of my own destruction--not for my own self, but for the poor boy who’d become the only warmth, the only light I had left--was one that I intended to keep. And I did. But there were several times driving too and from the job when I allowed myself to pray--not for relief, but that one of the oncoming vehicles would cross over and either drive me into the rockface on one side or the river on the other. If it happened that way, well…

     When Spring rolled around and I still wasn’t doing any better, still wasn’t sleeping, I finally admitted to myself that I needed help and went to see a doctor. I was prescribed something that I always tell anyone who asks is a kind of sleeping medication, but that’s not all it’s for.

     I started sleeping a little better, finally. Some nights I even got four hours straight. It was still all medicated, but I didn’t care. I was tired of the demons that watched me while I lay there in the darkness, half awake, unable to move or speak--or that’s what it’d begun to feel like, night after night. I was just so tired. Four hours was a start.

     I mentioned before that Mort liked basketball; in case you were wondering, he didn’t play that year. But sometime around the middle of February I noticed him go outside when the sun was out and, still wearing that thick jacket of his, and a baseball mitt, throw a ball up in the air and catch it himself--doing it for an hour at time, if his dad wasn’t home to stop him. So one day on the way home from work, I stopped by the local sporting goods store and bought my own mitt. We played catch several times after that, just me and Mort. He had pretty good coordination and handle all of my awkward throws with ease; and his aim was good enough that I only ended up with one black eye and one bloody nose. Baseball season was only a month and a half away.

     All through March, things continued to improve. I still didn’t get a whole lot of sleep, but I was falling asleep more consistently and feeling better in the mornings. I remember coming home from work one afternoon, and as Mort seemed to be away, I sat down at my computer and surprised myself to discover some of the old fire still burned inside me--a very small flame, perhaps nothing more than an ember, but it was not dead, not yet. I was not entirely frozen. The work itself was nothing that anyone would notice, but I had a feeling Mort would be just fine with it. He might even hang it on the wall.

     Toward the end of that month, I told Mort to make sure and let me know when practice started up so I could be there to pick him up and bring him home. He seemed pretty tickled that nobody had to ask, but I’d just offered to do it. The smile he gave me in return was one of the genuine ones. I hadn’t seen one in a while, come to think of it.

     I thought maybe it would go different for him, this year--that maybe last year, being the new kid, coming in late and not fitting in with the rest of the team--I thought I’d arrive at the field after work and see him out there fielding grounders, firing those accurate throws of his across the diamond like a little Chipper Jones (his dad’s favorite Brave, so also Mort’s), maybe even wearing the number 10 like Chipper.

     But that wasn’t the case.

     ‘Someone’s gotta keep track of these things,’ he told me, as I sat beside him on the bench. The coach hitting balls all over the field, occasionally hitting them too far--probably reliving his own youth, or at least how he remembered it.

     ‘Someone’s gotta be able to get the ball to first without throwing it the bushes, too,’ I said, and he stifled a small laugh. Call me clueless, but that was the very first time I noticed it. Not the laugh, but that something was different--something about Mort. Something was wrong with him. He’d never said a word about it, but it all added up now--the long sleeves, the hats, the isolation, the never getting to actually play the sport that he loved so much--and the never complaining about any of it.

     I felt something inside me start to break, and I think it was my heart. I looked away, pretended to be watching the sky for birds or airplanes or shapes in the clouds, but trying to think about what I could have missed--what had this boy been keeping secret? Or had he actually been trying to tell me all along--all those times he’d come over to visit, the talking, the not talking. Had I been so absorbed in my own personal misery that I’d been ignoring what truly mattered--the only thing that really truly mattered to me now: this boy?

     What an old fool I’ve become.

     On the way home from practice one day, I remember Mort asking me what I thought about dreams--if they mattered, or if they were just stupid things that you saw when you were sleeping. I’ve always been fascinated by dreams--or had been, until mine because a steady stream of waking nightmares--but I told him what I really thought at the time, which was that I didn’t know.

     ‘Some people say they come from the things you don’t like thinking about, so you try and hide them somewhere in your mind but then when you sleep your mind brings them out and makes you face them. Some people say it’s just the opposite, that you see the things you think about and like the most. A lot of people, though, think they’re just a lot of bunk.’

     ‘Bunk?’

     ‘Nonsense--‘bunk’s the old person word for it, I guess.’

     He let out a kind of airy laugh, the kind I was used to from him. That laugh on the bench at the baseball field might be the only real laugh I ever heard him give.

     ‘You’re not that old,’ he said. ‘My dad’s old.’

     For that, I gave him a dollar.

     ‘Why’d you ask about dreams, though?’

     He looked out the window, still probably not aware that I could watch his every expression there in reflection. I never wished for any oncoming cars to cross over when Mort was with me, obviously. In fact, I never wished for them at all, now.

     ‘I keep having the same one,’ he said, the car nearing our partially shared driveway. ‘I’m a fish in it, like the fish in that pond, I guess. Somebody’s out there throwing bread crumbs and all the other fish keep going up to eat the crumbs, but whenever they do a net comes down and steals them all away.’

     I waited for him to go on.

     ‘My mom’s in the dream, she’s a fish like me. She keeps telling me that I need to start swimming with the other fish like me, that I shouldn’t be alone, that fish like me are supposed to be in schools. But I’m always too afraid because I know that the net’s gonna come down and take everyone away.’

     His reflection turned its eyes directly toward mine--meaning I was not so coy as I thought.

     ‘It sounds pretty strange,’ I said, full of wisdom.

     He nodded slightly. The truck came to a stop in my driveway, and he started to open his door but then stopped.

     ‘It’s just,’ he began. ‘It’s just, my mom doesn’t ever talk to me anymore. Not really.’

     And then he closed the door and went through the hole in the fence, not looking back. I noticed his father’s truck was parked behind the house. I sat there in my truck for a few minutes, thinking about the boy’s dream and what he’d said about his mother--what I felt I’d discovered some days before at the practice field, about something being wrong with Mort. He lives with his dad; he has a sister who does not live with him and his dad; his mother never talks to him. But I couldn’t make any of that fit with the long sleeves and not playing baseball, so I gave it up and stepped outside.

     Just as I was about to open my front door, I saw a dark shape flash from the corner of my vision--something up in the trees, a bird coming in to land on one of the high branches. A large bird. At first, I thought it was the old woodpecker making an evening visit, but it wasn’t. It was only a crow.

     On the morning of May 1^st, a Thursday morning, I awoke to find a few red-petaled wildflowers laying on my doorstep. There was no note with them, but I assumed that Mort had left them there simply because nobody else ever came to my door, except neighborhood cats. It surprised me--I remembered leaving May Day flowers as a kid, but thought the tradition had died out. I suppose that as long as something is remembered by even one person somewhere, it never will. I put the flowers in a vase, then walked outside to my truck. It dawned on me a few hours later that I hadn’t actually put any water in the vase, and I felt a little sorry for Mort. And I wondered, as that day went on, how it was I’d go about finding out from him without asking where those flowers actually came from.

     (The truth is, they’d come from my own backyard. Shows you how observant this writer really is.)

     I arrived at the field like any other day, expecting to see Mort sitting there on the bench or else doing some other manager’s duty--because, in all honesty, that’s what he’d become. I didn’t see him right away, so I went and sat on the bench on the third base line, just off that hopscotch-stenciled asphalt path that ran alongside the northern wing of the elementary school. For a May afternoon, it was a little chilly; I even had a jacket of my own on, and while I waited for Mort to show up, I stuffed my hands in my pockets and pretended I cared about baseball.

     In the gravel playground on the other side of the field, I could see younger kids climbing the log wall, playing on the jungle gym and the slide--could see their smiles, imagine their laughter. It may have just been a trick of the shadows, but one of the little girls reminded me an awful lot of Sara Edison. And I wondered, waiting there on the bench, what the odds were that I’d seen her over there in that very spot the year before, not knowing who she was but watched her play, laugh and enjoy the freedom of her still blossoming youth.

     What a tragedy, I thought. Old people like me, they wake up a day closer to death and that’s just how it is. But kids like her--like Mort--they should be allowed to enjoy all that life has to offer.

     But isn’t death just a part of life, a sneering voice whispered in response, my own voice. Isn’t the end just as much a part of anything as the beginning? Why should children be any different?

     I didn’t have an answer, just that they should.

     I looked around some more, trying to find Mort. Then I heard his voice call out from behind that wall at the end of the building, the same place I’d found him the very first time I’d come to pick him up.

     ‘Hey there, Mr. Carmichael!’ he shouted. I could see from the little bit of him that peeked out around the side of the wall that he was wearing a thick jacket--not his, but one with the school’s colors on it: green and gold. It was the coach’s jacket, I later found out. Not that it matters.

     ‘Getting water again?’ I asked him back.

     ‘Yeah,’ he said, ducking back behind the wall. ‘Had to run inside real quick, sorry I didn’t see you. Had to use the bathroom.’

     ‘Well, that’s still allowed, I think,’ said I, ever the jester.

     The coach shouted something to two players in the outfield who were standing a little too close, probably jesters, themselves, and then tossed the ball up in the air and took a hard swing.

     And missed.

     Not completely, but the bat cut under the ball just enough to send it high into the air, backwards, over the backstop. Toward the north wing of the elementary. Back toward the wall with the water spigots. At first, the players were laughing, but pretty soon they stopped.

     Silence.

     I heard someone shouting, and then realized it was me. I jumped up over the bench and tripped, fell on the asphalt and cut my arms and got up and ran toward the area where I and everyone had seen the ball come crashing down. To the place where we’d all heard it.

     That Crack!

     And I found him there, laying on the cold cement, the ball rolling innocently away, the water still rushing out of the spigot. His eyes wide open, moving but not seeing. Blood running from his nose, from his head, his mouth. Like the water, it just kept running.

     I leaned down beside him, and somehow I knew. I said the boy’s name, I said it over and over… I think he heard me. His lips moved, but no sound came out. He was looking right through me, to someplace very far away. I think he was looking for his sister.

     By the time the ambulance arrived, he’d lost consciousness. Later that night, the doctor told us his skull was fractured in two places, that he’d slipped into a coma and that they were trying to stop the bleeding but nothing seemed to be working. He didn’t say anything else, but his face did.

     I held the hands of a woman I’d never met before, had only heard spoken of once or twice. Her face was thin, drawn round the cheekbones that seemed to bulge out, her eyes sunken, hair clinging together in dark strands. Her hands were so frail in mine that it was almost like I was holding bones, nothing else. And they were cold, so very cold.

     She was praying, talking to a God she’d never once acknowledged, promising things that she couldn’t possibly hope to deliver, all for the sake of the only child she had left.

     Mort had had an older sister, just like he told me. But what he hadn’t told me was that she had died, a short while before he and his father moved into the house across from my own. Mort’s mother was weak, sickly--had always been. And Mort had inherited it, including her bleeding condition--the very thing that was killing him, even now. Then, as a young child, his kidneys began to fail him--he was dying, almost as soon as he’d begun to live he was dying. His sister was strong, much stronger than he or their mother--strong like their father, after whom she took in every way except for his reticence to speak. She breathed--shouted--life, had come into the world shouting it and had never stopped, not even on that very last day.

     When Mort’s kidney’s needed replacing, it was his sister who’d volunteered--demanded--to give him one of her own. She was a match, and not very long after that tiny organ of hers was alive and functioning inside Mort’s fragile little body, function by itself much better than his own two had or could have ever done. The doctors called it a miracle--doctors did!--and the brother and sister went home, and she was always with Mort, everywhere he went. Giving him strength, just like he told me.

     They were sent home with a great prognosis for full and happy lives, the both of them. Each having one kidney, they would have to be careful, but there was no reason to suspect that the usual pleasures of youth shouldn’t come to them in time. Of course, extra care would need to be taken because of Mort’s bleeding condition--they couldn’t say if having one kidney only would affect it, because of the strength of that one kidney perhaps it would improve. Then again.

     I asked her what the condition was, and she told me. Essentially, not only did his blood run thin, but it refused to clot. Hearing these things, I finally understood the warm clothes, and his role on the baseball team.

     For a time, they were happy--the family, all of them. But then, one otherwise ordinary day, Mort’s sister came home from school not feeling well. The school nurse guessed it was the flu, but the girl herself denied it and the symptoms didn’t match. She was weak--that was her main complaint, her body felt weak, so weak that she was having to hold onto objects, to lean against the wall just to walk. She was dizzy, lost consciousness often, and eventually stopped eating. In what seemed like a very short time, she’d wasted away, become a shell of her former youthful self. ‘But she kept on smiling, especially for Mort. Always for Mort,’ she said, still seeing it probably. ‘’You’re my strength, now,’ she told him.’

     All the testing could show was that her organs were failing. There was no clear indication of where or why it began; but Mort knew it was that kidney, the one she’d given him. ‘The one he’d stolen from her,’ his mother now told me, recounting the tale. The words were not spoken bitterly, but I assumed that once or many times they had been. I began to understand that dream about the fish, and what he said after.

     In the Winter of 2006, Mort’s sister was laid to rest. Mort’s father said nothing the entire time; his mother sobbed. ‘He hated us both, I think,’ she went on--not saying if she meant Mort or her husband.

     A couple months later, the medical bills weighing heavily, the tragedy, the great unbridgeable chasm that had opened up between them, Mort’s father decided to move them all someplace out into the country, someplace far away. ‘He just wanted to run away from it all,’ she told me, her hands still in mine, not minding the tears the silently streamed down her sunken cheeks. She decided to stay, and she soon found herself blaming Mort for taking that kidney--as if, had she had them both, the girl might have had the strength to withstand whatever demon it was that devoured her organs. As if it was some kind of talisman. ‘It was stupid, I know…I always did.’ She sighed--sobbed and then breathed in, filling her raspy lungs. ‘I never really believed it. I think… Maybe I’m the one who ran the most…just by staying here. My son, he… She’s there, in his side, that little bit of her is there, all that she left behind…and I was afraid to be near her like that. To look at my son and see only my wasted daughter, to hate that specter of her but have him see the hatred only and think I hated him, instead. I couldn’t…’

     I let her hands go, and she covered her eyes, sobbing freely now. We were alone in the waiting area. The television was on, but it was muted and it wasn’t anything either one of us cared about anyway. I got up and walked over to the window, looking out. Where was he, the old man? Why wasn’t he here?

     ‘It’s his job,’ I heard her say, her face still buried in her hands, her voice muffled. ‘He works in the woods. There’s--”

     ‘No service, most of the time,’ I supplied, getting it. Getting that part of it, at least. But no timber job works the kind of hours the old man did. He must have more jobs than just that one, I remember thinking--and then recalled what she’d said about the medical bills. The old man was trying to pay them off, wasn’t he? I asked myself that question, not sure if I was satisfied with the idea or not. Not while his son was rapidly slipping away on a slab, the very life that man helped create now bleeding out of him.

     But I suppose you wouldn’t have anything say, then, either, I thought, bitterly.

     Mort’s father never showed up. I found out later that he’d been involved in an accident of his own, rushing to the hospital, but I still never really forgave him.

     At around four in the morning, the coach came back--he’d come earlier but gone home to be with his family. He sat beside her now, his arm around her and hers around him, comforting each other, both of them blaming themselves. Not long after that, the doctor returned. She looked up from where she sat, and then looked away almost at once. There was nothing that needed to be said. We all knew.

     ‘He was briefly conscious,’ the doctor said. ‘Very briefly. His eyes opened, but I don’t think he saw any of us… They seemed to be looking somewhere else, seeing something else.’

     ‘Or someone,’ I said, absently.

     The doctor nodded, slowly. I could tell he was beat. I could tell he’d done everything possible for my poor Mort. I could tell he was struggling even now.

     ‘He said one word…just one. That was all.’

     ‘What did he say?’ she asked, her voice a whisper now.

     The doctor looked from her to the coach, and then me, his tired eyes full of compassion. And he told us what Mort had said.

     Of course, it was her name.

     Renée.

     Like the song.

     The funeral was held the weekend after, on May 10^th. I was invited, personally--apparently his mother had heard about our friendship and knew Mort would have wanted me there. Thinking about it terrified me, but of course I went.

     I parked my truck outside the little country church about a quarter mile down the road from where we’d both lived. I saw the old man’s truck there, too--noticed it right away, the side all dented. For a moment, I just sat there in the parking lot, I think searching for the strength to open that door and go inside. I knew I’d see him, in there--for the first time since that day, the blood and him staring through me with those sightless eyes--but at the same time I was afraid to see him. To see him frozen. They say to speak something is to make it true; but in this case, seeing him would be the same. I knew he was gone. But I wanted that grin--I didn’t even care if it was real or not.

     I want to be just like you when I grow up.

     And suddenly they came, the tears. I felt them spilling down my face, hot and hurried, full. I hadn’t cried in years. I hadn’t felt in years, not before Mort. And I remember asking myself, what am I going to do now?

     Did I still owe it to anyone? Wasn’t it okay, now?

     I want to be just like you when I grow up.

     ‘D****t!’ I pounded the steering wheel. I wiped my eyes, breathed; and suddenly it was gone, the revolver was gone. The demons. I was filled with calm, with something like hope.

     No, not something like it--with hope, itself. Mort believed in me. Just like his sister put that kidney in him and helped him grow strong and keep living, that boy put his belief in me. And, d****t, that’s not something you just throw away.

     And like Mort’s mother at the hospital, I suddenly found myself praying--I’m not sure who to, but probably Mort. Thanking him for believing in a foolish old writer like me. Thanking him for saving my life. Promising him to live it.

     I waited in the truck for a few more seconds, then opened the door and walked into the church, looking for my place.

    

The first thing that came to mind, for some reason, is I didn’t know where to sit. I didn’t belong here, not really. Not like the rest of them. But then I noticed somebody waving me over--no, not really waving, but motioning: two fingers turned toward himself, half a nod. He wasn’t even really looking at me, but I don’t know who else he could’ve meant so I walked over, and without even a word between us I sat next to him. And waited.

     Pretty soon, after everyone was seated, the lights dimmed a little and a picture of Mort flashed on the projector screen behind the pulpit. He was wearing a baseball shirt, a giant red A on the front and the name ‘Jones’ on the back. You could see the ball suspended in midair, his gloved hand outstretched to catch it. And you could see the joy on his face. That boy really loved baseball--and whether he knew it or not, I bet he really did love the Braves, too. A series of pictures followed, a lot of baby pictures, some with his sister, all of them of his youth, because that’s as far as his beautiful life stretched. One of the pictures showed him in his bedroom in the house across from mine. I could see those pages of my story hanging on his wall. Just the one, though. I guess that second story wasn’t wall-worthy, after all.

     When the slideshow came to an end, the music stopped, and the lights turned back up, I looked around and saw quite a few people crying. It was hard to count them all, because I was crying, too.

     Then the man sitting next to me, the old man--Mort’s father--stood and walked up to the pulpit. His eyes held low while he seemed to gather himself, and then he looked up and out at us all. At me. His eyes were red. His raven-black mustache trembled. He smiled, he tried his very best to smile; and I thought I saw a flash of that old grin there, Mort’s. It didn’t matter whether it was real or not.

     The old man picked up the microphone.

     And then he started talking.

Author's Note

Completely unedited. Sorry.