INTERSECTIONS: Horton @ Delevan

THE WARRIOR

By Luanne diBernardo

There were five of them running and darting, one boy small, the other boys taller, one fat.  Two screamed Antoine, and nobody’s mother was anywhere in sight.  Almost, it was dusk. 

The boy who turned when a voice screamed Antoine was straddled to a bike stripped pipe to peddle, his bony arms stretched to each bend of pitted chrome.  Behind him a house of shattered glass, where a screen door missing its screen floats open then closed, though nobody comes or goes. Behind him a side street, both narrow and short, with cars more permanent than trees.   

On the other side, and separated by ancient gates asked to separate the dead from the living, and separated again by a busy convenience for cars traveling into or out of the city, stood I.  Chains looped and locked through and around the great tall spires, where inside rested Red Jacket’s tribesmen, burials topped by worn cement slabs scratched with names like “Destroyer of Cities”, and where loomed above them: Red Jacket himself.  Could also be seen were the Ogilvys, the Fassbinders, and the Spoonleys; the marbled mauseleums of the close-knit Brunis, Schoelkopfs, and Knoxes; manicured greens and reflecting ponds. cloud-grazing statues, the grand gifted bronzes and granites, families discontinued, some remembered, most forgotten, and a strong columned structure where maps could be borrowed in order to find who laid where. 

Antoine’s name screamed from one of the boys.  I turned and watched the fat one shorten the distance between them, Antoine poised until barely too late before one foot slams the pedal of his barren bike, his wild-pitched cry claiming the air, even my air, victorious as he forcefully pumps the short turn of pedal, a circumference so slight that it barely caused his legs to move as they sailed the bike across the street, the busy street, horns and screams before slamming the concrete curb, then grass, his eyes wet with thrill, his small chest heaving, his head turned back towards the fat and tall boys who flickered between frenzied cars. 

With a force that erupted the budding wings of his delicate shoulders, Antoine jerked up the front of his good-enough bike, his front wheel now skyward and paused mid-air before slamming the street, his body hunched forward, his focus aimed back through the threat of road.  The fat and tall boys called him forward, then not, until Antoine slammed foot to pedal, a movement that blasted him towards them, through them, then past them to where finally he braked, the tail of his bike whipping sideways and causing the boy full circle, back where he started.  

Flanked by vehicles to his left and right, his breath beat against his taut-skinned belly.  Then with nobody moving or laughing or calling, and beneath a sky growing darker than truth, the boy named Antoine slipped from his bike and fearlessly walked to the broken house.

INTERSECTIONS: Orchard @ Division

THE GOOD SAMARITAN

by Luanne diBernardo

I’d never seen the car before, but the girl I’d seen for years; a girl from a couple blocks over who passed our house on her way to school, sometimes in winter the light from our kitchen the only light streaking the early snow where she passed.  Evenings too, like now before dusk, where the curious car slows to the pace of the girl, not in the lane where vehicles belong, but nearer the shoulder where a week’s worth of leaves rustle about the car’s bloated tires. 

She was heading towards school and away from her house, away from the Erie Street Bridge, a drawbridge that rarely drew anymore. Any longer, it was crossed by locals, people who returned here from work, but never the car just outside my window. Twenty-seven years I registered, transferred, and collected surrendered plates at our local DMV. I knew every prefix to every plate; I knew the auto dealers, the city officials, the corporate issues, and the vanities; and this car was a stranger.

Dull and blistered, it barely crawls to the walk of the girl. One of its taillights is busted and bandaged with bright red cellophane that crinkles around the empty duct. Inside, a man hunkers so low across the front seat that I can watch him watch the girl and, for whatever reason, his foot jabs the brakes while he calls something out, and politely she answers. 

Even from here where I watch, the man reads large and lumpy, his large skull misshapen by the swell of his hair, easier to see once his car has paused for whatever he wants of the neighborhood girl, a sincerity to her movements that touches me, the hunched-over man now smiling. It’s difficult to tell who is asking and who is answering anymore, though clearly the girl and the man are people not yet familiar with the other, evident by how she moves nearer, then stops, moves nearer, then stops, when just in time, he says what he says and she reaches the wide metal stretch of door, it’s old chrome handle dangled by a jimmy of twisted wire.  With one hand slung over his steering wheel, the bulky man’s heft leans further across the seat, his free hand releasing the latch of the busted handle, a movement perfected. The dull length of  door gapes open.  His body scootches back behind the wheel.  Without so much as a glance in her direction, he waits.

Her feet flinch towards the opened door, but her body lags; only seconds long and barely noticed, it quakes up my lawn, through my kitchen window, up my spine and across my scalp.  I’ll do it the moment I get to work, check the computers to learn where his plate was registered, his name, what business he’d have with a girl from our town, certain I was making something from nothing, the heavy car door as high as her shoulders, once seated. In a movement that should have been two, his fleshy hand reached over the girl and wrangled the gizmo that locked her safely inside.

The car jerks forward. My hands feel clammy despite the fact they are still immersed in dishwater. Queasiness crawls from my gut while I fight the urge to run from my house, to stop whatever it is that’s happening, a thing so deliberate and yet I can find no words as I imagine myself explaining what I’d seen to the officers who’d arrive to take my statement, or to the girl’s parents, or even to the man when I’d scream for him to stop, except that only I’d seen him pumping the brakes of his own registered car, and only I’d seen the girl enter freely, a whole lot of trouble because I happened to be at my kitchen window where I’d seen her a thousand times before, where, if I minded my own business, this all would have happened anyway, proof in how the mammoth car devours the street, its immense rusted body too long for the three-point turn that rubs streaks of black rubber against the curb. A battered rim escapes and wobbles, the story of a runaway pancake, I think without smiling. 

I crane my head forward, then sharply against my kitchen window in order to sight the round, red taillights.  Cindered smoke chokes from an oily tail pipe and stains the air between where the girl had been and where she was heading, her face turned back as if she’d left something behind her.

A CAR WENT BY

by Luanne diBernardo

He drove by his house today. Not planning to, not even thinking about it really, just slowly approached the painted symbols on the curb, the white paint applied by the water company before he and Iris moved there, three markings that signaled when to turn the wheels of his too-big car in order to make the sharp turn of his too-narrow driveway, where in a moment he will leave the keys in the ignition, where he will then tease his kids at the screen door, waiting, where he will settle to a noisy dinner followed by a worn excuse that will find him sharing familiar lies with his old friend, Steve.

Maybe because he was thinking of other things, or maybe just to see if he could, but he drove past the painted symbols, past the too-narrow driveway, past where he maybe saw his two kids waiting, maybe not. Typically, he only drove this way on weekends, never before noticed how one direction led him to his office, the dentist, his mothers house; while the East-bound route let him straight to his favorite bar, to Steve and Martha’s, and to Syracuse when his grandparents were alive. He figured he felt inside-out because it was Tuesday and he was heading East, the direction for weekends, or was it because he’d just passed his house, and yes, those were his kids’ faces, his car already beyond the first stop sign where nobody stops anyway, no intention of honoring the next one either. Until a car comes from the other direction and he pauses to let it pass. Steve, his best friend since high school.

He waits for Steve to motion him over, meaning Iris had called wondering why Steve’s high school buddy passed his driveway today, why he was heading East on a Tuesday.

“You sure you guys didn’t have a fight or anything?”
“No; why would you think that”?
“He was headed East”.
“Oh”.

The conversation went something like that, he figures as he approaches a red light, the last signal before crossing the city line. He wondered when his stomach started squeezing into queazy waves, today’s fried Pike and slaw not sitting well. Iris will have some ideas about what he should take, he thinks without one thought to turning back. Like his grandmother used to, Sadie.

Sadie was large-boned, saucy, a man-hater, his mother would rant, though it was Sadie who looked after him when his parents dropped him by for a weekend visit, two years old, and it was with Sadie and Gilbert he stayed until his parents retrieved him three years later, better for everyone, she would tell him. And so she retrieved him from wherever he ran, from grade school, from high school, the Navy, from job after job.

No child of mine, he thinks as he loosens his tie while vowing to never retrieve what should never be lost in the first place: children -- a promise he’d share with Iris the minute he got back home. Crazy for her kids, their kids, she would love him for such a promise, this one he’d keep.

His mother had been jealous of Iris’s warmth, of her ability to woo him in ways his mother never could, never tried. Love expressed in bigger ways, his mother instilled, his father feigning to agree when not sneaking love at Thursday night bowling, on sales trips, while his wife fussed with brown-bagged lunches of meat, grains, and fruit, every meal balanced and well within budget. Her son she coddled with bristled scrubbings that reddened his skin, whitened his nails, shined his ears, her hygene insisting on closely-clipped toenails, and pjs worn over bleached white undies. She loved him with bleached terry towels that left no moisture, with consistency, routine, and with bible tales told while tucked between crisp, cool sheets. A horn beeps.

It beeps again before he starts through the now-green light, whatever he was thinking irretrievable, a memory good for some things, not others, as he tilts the rear mirror to see if his friend had turned to follow, when he realizes how seldom he looks behind, always forward like his mother had taught, a lesson well learned.

That doggone fish, he thinks as he attempts to quiet his stomach with his one free hand. Or the too-many stops, the barrage of interruptions, whatever he was thinking completely gone, instead those two small shadows behind his screen door, their hands and noses pushed to the screen, his daughter only three, his son barely four, too young to know it was their father’s car that drove past their house today, the same age as him when he’d wait for his gramps to return from work, remembers it like it was yesterday. Only when he’s tired, too tired to forget, do thoughts like those find him. If only he’d been like one of his own kids, just kids. They only know that a car went by, not his car, and then that feeling in his stomach again. Already it’s growing dark, Iris getting anxious and phoning his mother, his kids growing whiney for no good reason, and dammit, why did he order the Pike.

Up ahead is a turn-around, a road right before the toll road, a soft dirt road that curves around before rising into a smallish bridge before passing the park, then the river, certainly outlined with flowers by now. Before the turnaround, he checks his side mirror to see what’s behind him. Nothing, his car already clocking distance between him and a world that rattles from the force of his acceleration, a motion that makes him so sick that he vows not to look back until he’s stopped for good.

Something witty to brighten the toll taker’s day, then dawning before him, the sky spans over the birm of the highway. Faster and forward, his car works hard while he settles back against his seat, each movement jerking him further forward, further away, his pulse rehearsing for what he would come to know. His hands sweat against the steering wheel as the car inches forward, no way to turn back or to ease the erratic tugs in his gut like a thing remembered, when for one brilliant moment he reaches the crest, suspended, his mirror washed clean with sky, nothing behind, just the park and river below, all that was rooted now jarred and weightless, when suddenly, as if somehow he hadn’t known it would happen, he buckles his belt at the top of the thruway and rockets beyond the crest, no hands.

INTERSECTIONS: Hudson @ Wadsworth

A BOY, LOVED

by Luanne diBernardo


I hadn’t seen him since he was seven years old, finely boned with skin of gold. He had the knobbed-kneed legs of a newborn colt and the curious keen of an immigrant, the first of his blood to be born here, more often than not, the only one in his house to speak English, a blessing for his grandparents who, (with the tired that followed them this side of the sea) looked after the boy while his father fostered heroin.

At seven years old, Little Anthony was the mouthpiece to whomever appeared on his grandparents’ doorstep: news boys, meter readers, Jehovahs, girl scouts, and each one scrammed by the bird-sized boy spitting first-hand Sicilian into second-hand English while his grandparents hovered behind him, their fear sifted into and out of the boy’s quick mouth with a sound deciphered as anger.

On the day I first met him, Little Anthony greeted me with an expression too old for his years, a look that knew to expect a problem. I was the new bride of his favorite uncle, and so he followed us through the room-after-room of his grandparent’s flat, his face onto mine like a hawk’s to a mouse before finally, (or as close to finally as I knew), his face morphed into a sweetness that just in time remembered him.

It struck me odd that Little Anthony and I were separated by the same math that subtracted me from his uncle. Odd that my own father went missing when I was the age Little Anthony became the bastard child of a seventh son. Of his mother, there was a framed photograph on the dining room buffet, her arms wrapped about her delicate boy, his smile the one that was watching me watch him.

Had she been in the room, I might never have noticed the tinted photograph, less distinct than the porcelain lamps with their wedding cake flowers, the sofa and chairs sealed in shiny clear plastic, the Virgin Mother propped center cushion. I might not have wondered how it came to be that a young mother rifled through drawers and closets for a sweater as pale as her toddler’s blue romper. I would not have wondered how many times she posed with her child in her arms, on her lap, mother and son face to face, and then this pose. No thought to her leaving the photographer’s studio that day, already impatient to return for the proofs, one pile to her left and one to her right, until finally she’d whittle her favorites to two: eenie, meenie, minie, moe.

Had she been in the room I would have had no reason to imagine her choosing an 8 by 10, maybe wallet-size too. To imagine the glossy sheets in their cardboard sleeve, then to K-Mart, then Sears, where Little Anthony’s mother more than likely spent most his naptime comparing gold frames to silver, painted to varnished, a decision she most likely doubted while pacing outside the bus stop portico. Had she been in the room, though she hadn’t for a very long time.

Sam and I parted seven years later, our son the age of Little Anthony the first time I saw him. In that time, my in-laws learned just enough English from daytime soaps to keep them confused, just enough misused words and phrases that their little linguist was no longer needed. In that time, Little Anthony saw his father until less became never, time enough to learn that a bike could be pawned for twenty, a grandmother’s watch, fifteen. Even a banged-up vacuum was worth something to somebody under just the right circumstances.

My in-laws learned it took more than a braid of garlic to keep bad spirits away, learned that three locks and two Doberman’s were useless to someone with gold in his veins. Little Anthony learned that even at fourteen years old, he felt oddly excited at the sound of his father’s name. That though he quit looking for him, he didn’t mind when he happened past the vagrant at Allen and Wadsworth, who (were he heavier and cleaner), reminded him of his father.

My in-laws grew saavy, learned words like bail and brutality, and though he rarely slept home anymore, Little Anthony learned words like accomplice and premeditated.

It was somebody else stealing somebody’s bike, he’d only been watching should somebody come. Somebody did. While the thief was handcuffed and taken away, a second cop carefully leaned Little Anthony, an obvious novice (and while smaller than most, no longer little), into the back of a squad car. He couldn’t understand why he felt safe and angry at the same time; couldn’t understand why the officer accused him of mouthing off, when all he was doing was explaining. By the time he was 17, Little Anthony learned that the sound of his name would change the manner in which a cop would lean him into a squad car. And so how he came to spending more time in holding centers than he’d ever spent in his father’s house.

When finally he entered Attica, Little Anthony passed his days lifting weights. Sometimes months, sometimes years, he never grew tired of lowering the pins, always surprised when his body did what it was told to do, no thought to the constant ripping and tearing of what was once good, no longer the slight of his father and grandfather, men not much bigger than Little Anthony when he first wore shackles. Several years after his Attica entry, Little Anthony would be paroled at two-seventy. And after only seven weeks of walking the streets in a form that even his father wouldn’t recognize, Little Anthony would pursue an accuser by car, then foot, until finally (or just a few seconds after) he would realize someone had pulled a trigger.

He had always had a short fuse, a screw loose, a fiery temper, or so someone said on the news. It was said by neighbors that he’d always been in trouble, that he respected nothing, a piece of shit like his father, found more times than not at the corner of Wadsworth and Allen. It was said that he’d never leave Attica, that it’s where he belonged. Sam agreed, said thanks be to God that his parents were no longer there to see it, may their souls rest in peace. It was said that Little Anthony would spend his life in prison, a place to think about what he had done and how he had single-handedly ruined his life.

It’s been thirty years since I’ve seen him, my own life a series of do and do-overs, of odd, sometimes useful distractions. A life so busy turning this way and that, that to not think about Little Anthony ever again would seem natural, even expected. But once there was a photograph on a dining room buffet. Since boxed and moved into somebody’s house, or set at a curb, plucked by scavengers, crushed by compactors. Or maybe its glass grew spidered from the stress of records and books in some neighborhood Amvets, or salvaged for its gilded frame by a junk man who placed the portrait on a chest or a bureau because he liked the story it told: how a little boy was somewhere loved, because once a young mother had taken the time to board a bus for no other reason than to frame the very truth of it. I know this because I almost saw it happen.

INTERSECTIONS: Hoyt Lake @ Jogger Path

SHE WAS

by Luanne diBernardo


The hook jabbed into her back.

She had only just passed him, tall and fat and fishing at the edge of a pond stilled with sewage, the stench of death. Disinterested, he bothered not to turn the way people do when they’re lost in a task, she would have noticed had he glanced her way. Still she knew what it was when it struck her.

She’d been running the same path for years, knew the sting of a pebble snapped back from a passing biker, knew the scratch of a low-hanging limb, and though unexpected, knew that what pierced her back was in some way attached to the man who chose to not glance her way. She felt the slack in his line pull taut, his poorly-aimed cast intending to sink the barb that stubbornly tempted to slow her, his nylon cord unspooling to the speed of her sprint, the speed that he followed. A marathon runner, she managed to keep just ahead of his tug without turning to see who or why. Her heart beat the pace of a toy wound too tightly, her shoulders cranking her right-angled arms into movement, her fists blurred forward, then back.

Her legs moved on their own, her feet barely touching the ground, the earth spitting divots because of the force that thrust her knees her calves her feet, her speed what moved the world into motion. She ran with everything she’d ever known packaged safely inside her, now pulsed into fight, the newfound thrill of a life worth saving. She ran with no thought but this thought: it had come.

Though not penciled on a calendar, nor some scrap of note left deep in last winter’s pocket, this was a day penned in time, inevitable. For years she’d seen it in dreams, his knife popped into the fat of her calf then ripped up the length of her thigh, to her buttocks. She saw it a hundred times in her sleep, her flesh splayed wide like an overboiled hot dog, her muscle the white of citrus peel, while blood streaked both sides of her calf with ribbons of thick, sticky red. She saw how his knife next spliced her other leg and she wondered where each dream would stop, what she thinks of now while the fisherman quickens his pace.

She, (with an exertion that was its own reward, exhilarating if not for the burning across her shoulders and down her spine, if not for the fisherman gaining behind her), could already see him reaching her throat, not to choke, but to fell her balance, her legs collapsing beneath her, her knees overextended and ruined, the promise of a pain she would host the rest of her life. She would slam to the ground like a fallen deer, a thud that would surprisingly have no feeling, not even his fists pounding bone against bone, her offering of jaw, the feature most like her father’s, graceful the way it defined her chin, then upwards to meet her delicate ears, none of which she took for granted.

She knew her life could have been more, but she knew it could also have been less. Still, it disappointed her when men neglected to notice, or when they did, how they still found reason to walk away, though it’s true she was never so obviously pretty. She knew which features played well because of how they fell on a face of mismatched parts, her cockeyed smile and thick puttied nose, clear dark eyes that betrayed her time and time again. No feature so perfect as that which resembled his, that it meant so much made her angry. Even now while running with a hook to her back, her insides busting because of who chased her, he who happened to be where she happened upon, wrong that his weight would crush her ribs and lungs, her hands at her sides and clenched into fistfuls of fabric, she pulling upwards while he pulled down from where he crowded between her legs, both fisherman and runner unwilling to lose. Pinned and pleading in somebody’s voice, confused by the fisherman’s indifference, by how he forced her pants from the part of her body that nobody (not even the boy who wore his dead father’s dog tags) had the right to see. The part of her body she rarely considered except when time to pee, to bleed, to clean. A part of her body unlike her father’s and so never studied, somehow more foreign with her back pressed against the earth.

He weighted her with a force that planted the hook like a carpenter’s staple, prongs spawning fire that paled at the force of his thickness, a violent push that punctured the mysterious and tender pulp just inside the spread of her legs, no matter that it didn’t fit, no matter the way it ripped her into a bloody nest by cramming and pushing and grunting its way to a place it did not belong, a body he had no right to claim.

Years later she will forget how her flesh looked when as young as that day. Her thighs then firm and strong will remain that way, like her buttocks, though lessening, once dominant. She will remember nothing of his hands or face or if she ever touched him; nothing of his scent or what he wore. Those years later she will understand nothing about his forceful intrusion, profanely impersonal, will think nothing of her broken jaw, reshaped, her knees unhinged, arthritic. Those years later she will remember nothing so well as the violence of his walking away -- not so much the direction he took or if he ran or walked or stumbled –- but the possibility that nothing of her remained with him. That she had not imposed on him something imperceptible and nameless, something he had not wanted but that would linger the length of an average life; a graceful line traced in dirt, what never was, and then gone.

INTERSECTIONS: Robinson @ Bird Alley

HIS UNOBSTRUCTED VIEW

By Luanne diBernardo

                                                                                                                                    

            From the tilt of his head he could easily see the top of every tree that crowded the back and beyond of his property, were they not, that is, for the most part obscured by a dense grid work of steel, roped cables, and hives of buzzing transformers that out-cried the nearby cicadae. And while his head remained cocked only slightly, it was clear that the man (his arms to his sides and slightly forward), was intending to be looking upward, though barely his head.

            He stood almost center of his backyard lawn, some lucky few blades poking upside his shoe tops. Facing him was an old white garage with two sliding doors, hinged and crisscrossed with black-painted trim. The sky was summery blue. To the left of the man, a narrow garden ribboned alongside a chain link fence that begged you not notice the graveled alley just beyond.

            The man is bald, and his body thick from content and from meals like the one I breathe in as I near his house.  His head is axled back in a way that suggests it has reached its limit, against the odds he might see whatever was worth his pained deliberance.   A young girl at the edge of the skinny garden scoops fistfuls of homemade mud from a silver bucket, drizzles the slop into dung-shaped pies.

            A woman’s voice hums from behind a screened window, impossible to see through the silvered screen, though I try.  It doesn’t occur to me that while impossible for me to see through the screen, it was likely the humming woman could see me. Possible that she had been watching me watch the man and the girl from the start, and that the reason the man couldn’t move his head was something she knew like a secret, something to do with why she hummed.  Possible that the man not being able to glance towards a colorform sky had a thing or two to do with who he became on a day intended like this one.  It’s who he is the instant he wakes, when he dresses, when he walks, when he dreams. It’s who he became and would ever be, and why it mattered enough to crane (or attempt to crane) towards what he had not seen for a very long time.

            Whether I was moving or not, I can’t be sure, when I heard the man groan. The sound from his throat was low and winding, not quite enough to become a word, but enough to know it was good.  My eyes have, by this time, grown accustomed to his shape against a vast backyard Maple, and so how I’m able to witness when the tip of his nose edges upwards from a cluster of leaves, a movement not worth noticing, but the small girl does.  Her hands, though filled with earth’s batter, are stilled for that moment, and her face, it widens, and the woman’s humming slows to a hush, and all because of what he saw.