String

My grandmother Gertrude, who lived with us, died when I was twelve. They took her to the hospital in the middle of the night. When my mother came back in the morning she told me her lungs had broken and she drowned because she couldn’t breathe. I went over to my friend Dennis’s house and told him and we looked at each other through our separate awkwardness and then laughed. She had been stern and I felt a hidden shame mixed with the joy of freedom. I wouldn’t have to stand before her inspection anymore in the morning, in my underwear and show her my washed hands and clean ears before finishing dressing.

The year after that a boy in our scout troop who was dark skinned and tall and thin and quiet and had a strange misshapen mouth died. We all had to go to his funeral and walk past his open casket. He had his scout uniform on and was lying still in the same strange face, with the lower jaw protruding out an inch beyond where it should have stopped. He had always been apart from everyone else and unimportant and now he silenced us with his new power.

On a warm summer night in l961 when I was seventeen, I was standing alone behind an old world war one military barracks on George A.F.B. at the edge of the Mojave Desert. I do not recall now what brought me there that evening but I know that at that moment I am talking about I was doing nothing. I remember that it was dark and I was aware of the enormous stars overhead. There was a small square wood building the size of a garage. A light was on inside and the door was partially open letting the light and occasional soft voices filter out. I walked up to the door and looked in at an angle where I was still safe from view. The man lying on the long table was surrounded by three men in white doctor’s coats. He didn’t have a head and his right foot from the ankle down was laying off to the side hanging by a piece of unsevered skin. His small penis was still, slanting slightly to the left. I stopped breathing and some place inside my mind threw up and then I looked at the white tarnished scholars trying not to chew what they had bitten off. His listless, inert body was a pale, bluish purple, the color of the body drained of color. It looked like a big piece of working clay.

Two years later a fuel cargo plane crashed in Wichita, Kansas where I was stationed. It had taken off from McConnell A.F.B. on a quiet May morning and then something went suddenly terribly wrong and it went down in a poor residential black neighborhood incinerating 36 people. When I got there I saw a small Hiroshima, what remained of the people who had been people. Someone had been starting a car- a frozen ash skeleton, leaning slightly foreword, with the right hand still on the key. In one of the half standing houses a smaller ash figure was stopped getting out of the bathtub- one foot still touching the dry floor. They put stakes in the ground and stretched a thin rope string from post to post circling four square blocks as though to keep such a possibility separate from those of us on the other side of it.

When I was seven years old my green kite caught in a burst of wind and rose straight up fast till it passed clear above the stadium apartments where I lived. It went sideways going higher and higher and then it stopped and my breathing stopped. I looked at Uncle George. “Keep going, keep it going” I said. “We can’t, were out of string. If I let go we’ll lose it. I hesitated. “Let go”, I said and it stopped stopping and went up and up as it became part of the sky and then it became a small green marble and then I couldn’t see the color any longer and it became a small black dot and disappeared.