Honea Express

Archive for the ‘Anger’ Category

“I want to show you something,” I said. “It’s not a kid thing.”

The boys were in their pajamas and whatever they were watching was full of smiles and hugs and had been sanitized for their protection. I turned on CNN and started a conversation that I had long avoided. Their eyes were on the screen behind me and they widened as they took in images that they couldn’t comprehend — images that have haunted the rest of us for nearly ten years.

“I’m showing this to you because this is history, and someday you may want to remember where you were when it happened. Assuming you want to remember it at all. I want you to know what is happening.”

And then I started to justify actions to my children that went against all of the words I had ever told them.

I explained to them that a man was dead and that he deserved it. I compared him to the villains from their storybooks. I compared him to Hitler. I told them that he had done evil things for evil reasons and that his death was a means to help end those deeds.

I said that many people would feel a sense of relief. That many people would feel a sense of joy.  I explained the concept of closure.

Hanging in the air was an unspoken thought, a quote from The Iron Giant that had been repeated often in our home, usually by me:

It is bad to kill, but it is not bad to die.

I could say that and I could believe it, because I knew how to make exceptions to the rule. I left that part out. I also left out the part about how many of the people they know and trust would have killed this same man with their own hands had the opportunity presented itself. I left out that I may be one of them.

“Why are the people singing?” asked my oldest son long after his brother had gone to bed.

I didn’t answer him. I saw what the people were doing. On some level I understood it. However, the death of one evil man in a world of evil men did not inflate my patriotic pride with song, rather it emphasized my silence. I thought of the losses our country has suffered over the past ten years, the lives, time and money that have been wasted. It reminded me that things are far from over.

“I know why they sing,” he said. And then he fell against my lap, first quiet, then asleep.  The TV stayed on for hours. Their song carried on the night like a lullaby.

There was the Sound and there was the Fury and they were wrapped one around the other like moss on stone aching to roll.

The Sound was made from crying, not the gentle whisper of a tear down a cheek or the small drip of said tear bouncing softly from the floor, but rather the kind of crying that is lost in one scream after the other and implies that there is blood to be had. The Fury was holding the Sound with one hand twisted firmly behind its back.

Fury came from the little things, a series of straws stacked high upon a spitting beast of burden. The Sound didn’t build the stack, but its straw was the last one and backs had fists break down upon them.

The Sound shot like a cannon and the Fury ran a pace of grasps and ill-timed lunges. The errors would have been the stuff of comedy if not for the ringing in my ears and the trail of destruction left wide in its wake.

The path was improvised. The zigs could have easily been zags. Short sprints became long hauls and hurdles became the kind of obstacles that one might run around. The contact was inevitable.

With tears spent outnumbering the minutes gone the Sound was caught by the Fury and there was much in the way of rolling and the world ending. And then the Sound grew loud with laughter and the other followed suit. The ringing in my ears gave way to the singsong sway of sudden and unexpected joy, and the world spun madly on.

There wasn’t a care in it.

The headache had always been there.  It was sometimes dull and heavy, a brow filled with rock.  It was sometimes quick and sharp, the darting stab of wild claws trying to dig a way out.  It was only noticeable when it was gone.

I haven’t noticed it lately.

Stress winds through the body like a snake.  It coils down the neck, wraps firmly around the spine and stretches downward through the legs before pulling the toes tightly inward. The fangs are everywhere.

The pangs of the stomach are beyond hunger. It burns with acid, boiling from the throat to the taint. It is hot. A drop of whiskey is as effective as a cube of ice.  It is a hard, fast punch to the ass that keeps on going. And not in a good way.

Children don’t notice that the belt is tighter. They only feel that you aren’t as soft.  Decisions based on need leave children always wanting.

There is an edge that our tempers dance upon.  There is spinning and dipping and a fucking angry tango.  The beat is maddening and the roses in our teeth are filled with thorns.

The days ahead loom dark and cloudy.  May they be short-lived with glowing seams of silver lining.

The food court was alive. Tables were double-booked. It was a sea of trays and Gap bags.  There was a TV on without sound and music in the background that lacked any sort of soul.

I was a boy having lunch with his mother.  I was twelve. Give or take.

One man sat one table over.  He was in a suit that wore him cheaply. Even then I could see the frumpiness of it all.  He was wearing the required uniform and they did each other no favors.  He may have worked in the mall or perhaps the car lot across the street.  His lunch was in a brown paper sack as wrinkled as his jacket.  The shadows against it fell from the cloud looming above him.  His tension was cartoonish.

One man had a hampered gait and a fast smile.  He moved as quickly as his body would let him, darting between the busy tide of people to which he was all but invisible.  He took trays and wiped tables and he sang a little something to himself that echoed of happiness on repeat.  His manners were impeccable.

The crumpled man in the crumpled suit crumpled once more his once crumpled bag. He was careworn. He wore the ill-fitting suit like it had once been his father’s and the faded tweed was a weave of ghosts and disappointment pressed firmly across his back.  The cloud above him was dark and full of rain.  He rose from the table, put his hands in his pockets and walked away with far too much focus for a man of his nature.

The bag sat in the center of the table, a monument to his once was.  It sat there and slowly unraveled.  Time marched onward and the bag remained just one less thing that the man had to carry.

The man with the song on his breath circled the shrine.  Then again.  His eyes restless.  His mouth never stopping.  He searched the crowd for shades of tweed and finding none he took the brown bag and placed it in the trash.  He wiped the table until it glowed. And then his attentions were needed elsewhere.

I sat with my mother and ate my lunch.  Perhaps we chatted.  Perhaps my gaze returned to the quiet television.  Perhaps we were already done.

The man in the suit seemed taller when he returned.  His chin was firmer.  His face more red.  He stood at the glowing table and asked above the din as to the whereabouts of the bag he had left.

“The guy tossed it,” someone had said and suddenly the guy was standing there, no longer singing but looking sheepish and lost.  He tried to apologize but his tongue failed him.  He tried to apologize for doing his job.

The man in the suit proceeded to belittle, deprave and defame.  The man in the apron grew smaller and smaller.  The sparkle in his eyes turned soft and gray. His simple song fell muffled beyond silence.

The crowd marched onward. They cast glances and even looks of disgust, but they had trays in their hands and Gap bags on their wrists and there was something on the TV without sound that they could hide from their life in.  Theirs was a sound lacking any sort of soul.

“Stop it,” said a shaking voice from my shaking mouth. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Mind your own business, kid,” replied the man, more or less, and his look was for my mother.

“You left the bag on the table,” I continued. “It was trash.”

And then he said other things that I can’t recall because I was overcome with anger and by that time someone much bigger than myself had decided that shouting at a child for defending a man with needs was even more than they could ignore. As the crowd grew bigger his cloud did too, and then the angry man went away for the second time without his bag and I think he looked at me but I wasn’t watching him.

I was watching a spark of doubt grow where happiness used to be.

And he found them not where they were supposed to be and doing the things they shouldn’t. He had left them alone among the molehills and found them perched upon the mountains.

They were laughing and full of fun and getting away with being young. They were silent and drained of joy and by all means busted.

He was tired. There were long days behind him and long nights ahead. His back, it burned with exhausted muscle and it erupted with spasms of stress and it resorted to a door frame to keep it remotely upward.

Ropes wind and they twirl and they roll nicely off the spool and one minute you’re tying knots and making swings from trees and old tires and the next your hands are empty and your metaphor is at its end.

Then they are sorry and they cry and they’ve said it all before, for instance, last night when he stood propped against the same tired door frame grown weak and weary beneath the burden of his weight. And the waiting still grows heavy.

Words were said louder than they needed to be. Threats were made that were never meant. Little feet scurried to where they should have been and behind them they left a trail of guilt like so many bread crumbs. Sweet, innocent, beautiful guilt, and they cried loudly as he closed the door in hopes that doing so will save them all.

The hallway is long and lonely and it only need be examined a dozen or so times before it is ingrained firmly upon his brain. Every footstep has purpose. Every crack is considered. Life is bends that do not break and behind the door there is only the sound of their heavy slumber.

Their bread crumbs are soft and smooth and shaped like plush piles of imagination. He picks them up one by one, carefully, quietly, and he carries them into the room and places them where they are supposed to be, in the arms of his affections. And his whispers are for forgiveness