Third Street. Stambaugh, Michigan: Late Spring, 1972 by Chad Faries

Third Street was completely tunneled out of elm branches, and we lived at an opening, our apartment half in and half out, depending on the direction of wind and which of the four rooms we felt like settling in. My room was almost always in the shade because of the thick trunk that ran past the window. On some evenings night bears crawled up and scratched at the window with their claws, and I let them in to part my hair.

Mother was not only a mother now; she was a sexual being again. She was loving off and on like a lighthouse spotlight briefly shining on an island of screaming gulls. She'd thought she'd lost the magic of a full hip sway and pouting lips, her heavy blue eyes full of love letters. She soothed her stretch marks with my baby oil. She'd rub us both down every evening, preparing me for bed and herself for lovemaking. Since I couldn't see the sun, I counted the days by the comings and goings of men. Lying in my oil-slicked sheets, I was lulled to sleep by the chiming of the door bell and the beats of boots clomping up the stairs to the living room where a man would be greeted by a scratchy Joni Mitchell album and a high-pitched pucker from Mother's sea-ship lips that often floated down my arms to the tips of my ecstatic, waving fingers. And that is what I imagined as I lay there, knowing it was night because another man had come. I held my arms up in the dark, wondering what my hands were holding, then floated off to sleep.

“I want you,” is what woke me up most of the time. I understood that. It drifted in from the next room. I thought she was calling for me, but tonight it was John Lowden. I saw him once in the daytime as I was looking out the window when I was supposed to be napping. Through the branches I saw a beam of sun striking his big red truck and his silver belt buckle. The light from the buckle struck Mother's cheek and illuminated her dimple that was nestled in a drop of shade. I was happy she was smiling. I was happy I was smiling. That simple stretching of the lips seemed to soothe my crooked teeth that just couldn't manage to come out right. She was saying “I want you” then, too, but without words, and I saw a brief semblance of what might be called love. Then a bird flew into the tree and I thought about that, and a red tricycle. I fell asleep with my chin resting on the window sash.

I don't know if John Lowden was a good man, or if any men were good. And I didn't know what she wanted him for. Did she want to feed him or give him a bath? What usually followed “I want you” was confusing sounds of what I came to know as some sort of ecstasy, which, at one-and-a-half-years-old, I could only equate with jumping up and down in my Johnny Jumper until the elastic was about to snap and I was out of breath.

With John Lowden the sounds came again, but much heavier, like the wind that had pushed open the vertical window a little bit and frazzled my hair. In this ecstasy it sounded like she was hurting. Her breath was so heavy I confused it with the wind. It whirled in under the door and warmed me a little but wasn't enough to pacify my concern that she was really hurting and needed me. She whimpered like the wounded puppy I watched get struck by a car out the same window that was opening wider now, like a huge mouth. Things got really loud and I began to think that all the men had been secretively beating her and she kept taking it, while I just lay there wondering. I started to get really hot and itchy. My ears swelled so big that I could hear Gramma and all my aunts being beaten from across town. I was waiting for the night bear to come and itch me a little, part the hair from my eyes. I thought that if she would just come and cuddle me that the bear would part her hair, too.

One itch for each sound manifested somewhere on my baby-oiled body until I couldn't take it any more and let out the biggest fucking bear roar I could possibly muster up; and I understood what a fucking roar was. So here we all were in the house with four rooms situated in a schizophrenic shade, in a city with four thousand women screaming, and roofs lifting off at the moon like rockets. Everything was clear in the moonlight, and I twisted out of bed, full of itch and oil, and slid into the living room to make some sense of ecstasy.

And there she stood, naked, radiating moonlight. It was the way her shoulders shook and what they were shaking for.

“Go back to bed, honey, everything is alright,” she said without a trace of sorrow.

“What the hell does he want,” John Lowden boomed.

“Fuck You!”

“Sorry!” he exclaimed.

But I was still roaring, and hot, looking at John Lowden without his belt buckle. I itched my sea-dream arms until they bled salt water and oil slicks.

“Oh my God!” Mother panicked as she stared at my arms.

“What the fuck's a matter with him? Are you alright kid?”

“Fuck you!” I said, falling in love with language.

She rushed over to me and examined my arms.

“Some kind of bites?” John Lowden said.

“I don't fucking know. Put your clothes on,” she told him. A gust blew in from my room. “Oh honey, you're so hot.”

“But it's freezing in his room–is the window open?"

She picked me up, and we entered my room where the window's big mouth was panting wide open and the wind rustled in the trees where birds pretended to sleep, silently watching. John Lowden trailed behind, stumbling as he tried to put his pants back on, his buckle chinking against his zipper.

“Bugs!” John Lowden said, “That tree's full of them I bet! He got eaten alive!”

I still roared, and would continue to roar until John Lowden fastened that magic buckle and descended the staircase, taking back the footsteps that had lulled me to sleep hours earlier.

“Oh shit,” Mother said to herself as she bobbed up and down with me hot in her arms. “Don't worry, honey we'll call Gramma . . . I said put your fucking clothes on and get out of here!”

She held me in one arm and picked up the phone with the other. John Lowden left. The plastic phone dial wouldn't turn fast enough. I quieted down a bit when I heard the red truck fire up. I got lost in the sound of the engine idle while Gramma finally answered, rescued from her own screaming.

“Chad's all hot and full of bumps! I don't know what happened–I think the window blew open and there were some bugs in the tree that ate him up or something. I don't know. I don't know what to do. Can you come?”

I don't know what Gramma was saying on the other end. The roofs had come back from the moon and settled in their proper places, and my hearing was normal again as I rested limp in Mother's arms. She brought me into the bathroom. Those spots were all over me now. She put me in the tub and hosed me down with cold water to break my temperature.

I was in love again, a good love, like when lemons and matches are in your stomach. I just sat there awhile, not talking because it felt right. The itch subsided under the stream of cool liquid, and I imagined a water slide that led out my window and down into the street. I slid down it. I imagined running back up the stairs, and sliding down again. I imagined it faster and faster until I was just a circular blur of entering and exiting.

“Chad!” I opened my eyes to the women. “Look at him! I told you! What the hell is it?” I didn't pay much attention to anything.

“Well it sure the hell isn't bug bites,” Gramma said. “It's chicken pox.”

My first disease wasn't so bad, really. I was slightly dazed and ate a lot of soup. And the men stopped coming around for what seemed a couple of weeks, but it was hard to tell since their presence had been the factor that determined time. We stayed awhile, I guess. My body scabbed up, and I kept opening the wounds to draw out the salt water. I wanted some lasting memory of the night Mother fell in love with me again. I finally got the pockmark scar that I wanted above my left eye and then let myself heal. The whole scenario of the house on Third Street was all a bit complicated for Mother. She had found brief ecstasy, but failed to find romantic love, so she turned once again to loving me and anointing us with oil each night. Now she slept with me and played the Doobie Brothers, which was my favorite. Some song called “Black Water.” Well I built me a raft and it's ready to float. . . She dreamt of the bugs crawling in between the cracks in the window frame. With a big black platform shoe she beat them until they blended in with the carpet. After she killed five, ten more appeared, and finally she made a decision to leave Upper Michigan; but she had already been bitten and didn't even know it. And we slept a long time while the arm of the record player kept lifting and settling the needle into a groove again and again.

And then we moved •

Chad Faries grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is contributing editor for The Cream City Review. He has published interviews, essays, poems, and photographs in Exquisite Corpse, New American Writing, Afterimage, Phoebe, Prosodia, Mudfish, Barrow Street, Oxford Magazine, Left Curve, Yefief, and others. His manuscript Measuring Clouds with a Stick was a finalist for the 2000 Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award. Currently, he is a Fulbright Fellow in Budapest, Hungary, where he teaches at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE).

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