First Blood
I’ve imagined having sex with just about everyone. Even the ones you’re not supposed to imagine. Bloodline and such. Thinking of it brings the smell. No sleep with the smell. Just dirty finger tips and sweat along the crown line. Thought about teacher then Daddy then Mommy too. Pat on the back gone wrong gone deep. They say there are those who see all. Who see you being dirt and bringing the smell. They sing about it in church and they remind you at Christmastime. You’re never really alone.
At school, teacher tells us to write down three things we want out of the year. Teacher has slicked back hair on the top and shaved hair on the sides. One writes 1. Run eight laps without getting too tired 2. An A in mathematics and 3. Clear face. Reads it out loud and gets red in the fat. Another writes 1. Move up a chair in trumpet 2. earn enough for jeans and 3. stay away from alcohol and tobacco. Teacher sneaks cigs out back before band practice starts. Teacher doesn’t mind when I look. Smiles a little. Looks more tired from glance to glance. Our county doesn’t have much funding for the musical arts. Teacher is always sending notes home to parents for money. Penny whistle cash. Gas money for a local opera. A lovely spring field trip. Brand new oboe. Teacher rakes it in alright. Bright and trying eyes. Raw, clean skin
I write down 1. Get my period 2. Find the tallest tree in the County and 3. Teacher.
A walk by Cousin Jo at the lockers. Jo makes a face licking between two fingers and laughs in the eyes at me. Cousin Jo keeps dip spit in soda bottles and snakes the soda bottles between rows of lockers. I see Jo’s spit about as much as I see anything here. After school is track practice, loops of nothing in heavy air and the red dirt kissing my white socks, my red mosquito bites. I watch Coach as Coach watches us and think, how.
Dinner is chucksteak. Citrus and cottage cheese dessert. Daddy is silent, angry. Mommy repentant with wet cheeks. Something has happened since school. An accident. Fresh in the ending afternoon. Prayers for Cousin Jo in an ATV
creamyskeleton, Golden Hour, Long Walk Home
accident. Jo went to help a friend who flipped and it flipped back onto Jo. Thanks for nourishment and for good land. Spring brings an anxious night. Pink, tart clouds on a wet moon. Dishwater runs brown and sweet. Nighttime television is of a woman who poisoned her children. No public evidence of her tears. She is locked up and is now being scheduled to die. In bed I shake to the thought of teacher’s breath on my hip. In bed I pray that the smell of it never comes to the light of day. It would be a shame, getting locked up for shadow wishes. Jail chucksteak and cold, black coffee. Sharing endless days with a killer, a mother.
Visit at the hospital. Auntie’s house has quit having the lights on. But hospital is too bright to see. Cousin Jo looks sweet in camouflage casts. A face like a sleeping hound. Soft, sleeping hound. Cousin Jo has hundreds of cards and dozens of flowers and many types of chocolates though it doesn’t matter one bit to Jo. Jo’s coma is stabilized but the reality of leaving it. That is not known at this time. I think what if I was the sleeping hound. What if I had everyone wet and worried talking to God. Auntie has things to help her out. Bible group and some pills. Bi-weekly margarita dinners. She says Don’t I wish it was me. Don’t I. Hospital visit followed by crumpled buffet. Fried catfish, peach cobbler. Auntie and Mommy exchange orange bottles in the parking lot. They smoke Virginia Slims and cry very quietly.
Daddy is gone. Hunting trip with the men Daddy works with. They put roofs on town. Just finished a senior center. Built to last. Hot, shining metal. One of the men is not allowed to see his daughters. He is on the hunting trip with a new old shotgun, an inherited Beretta. Daddy has mentioned the Beretta calmly but more than once. His vacation. Others’ guns. Shooting tawny fur. Holding his breath in when it drops. Getting warm. Dinner without Daddy means less meat and more dairy. Cereal, grilled cheese, plastic beakers of diet-flavor yogurt.
Big Football weekend. Band practice stays late. Pep rally on Friday. I’m moving from fourth to third chair in flute. When teacher says it is so, I am a light. When me and third switch seats I see a look on third’s face. It is a sour look. Made to be seen. Teacher scratches a mole until it is angry. We go down the line. A new drum leader. New first clarinet. Same trumpets and nothing new in the tuba. When we take up our music to start again I swear I see teacher smile at my feet. I’d like to throw a lit match on something.
What if I had my hands in the hair of first clarinet. Long, brown braids. The smell is more honey than normal this time. But it is still the smell. It is
moving and moving and I can tell the way it is moving and moving that it is going somewhere very bad tonight. What about poor Cousin Jo asleep for who knows how in that harsh bed? All that camouflage plaster and inside it must be wet. It must be a smell, too. Something so close to the other side of living a life. It has to feel better somehow, in its special, precious manner of things. There’s a catch in my chest. Right when it hits its very best moment. A sweet pain I’ve yet to have.
Once, when Mommy and Daddy were fighting, I heard Daddy yelling a lot of things about Auntie and how Auntie has lived her life in the past years and now and how Mommy has lived her life in the past years but not now. He yelled that he was the reason that Mommy was not Auntie. It was him. He said Cousin Jo would be stuck in Valley Home his whole life because Auntie took too many pills and too many bottles before Jo was born. He said if it wasn’t for him well I would be the same. Delayed. Always a baby and never a real potential for much. He said if it wasn’t for him that Mommy would never be able to dream of grand babies one day or even to dream of seeing a high school diploma or of shit, really.
In Fourth period I see the Home Ec kids through the hall window. Firing up a bunch of old stoves and taking notes. The ones who take Home Ec, they don’t get to take regular classes. They especially don’t get to take honors. Late to Health and I’m feeling gutted around in my body, a feeling I’d imagine dogs get. When I walk in late, I blame a migraine. After lunch, the feeling hardens.
Teacher pulls me aside between last hour and band practice. It’s Cousin Jo. Jo went away. They knew because of the sounds. From the machine. Mommy says on the phone that the percentage of Cousin making it went from slim to slimmest after a really bad night. No band practice. Instead, the harsh leather smell of Auntie’s newish Buick. A sick material scent. Metal and fibers, washed chicken, dog shit. Auntie is but a dewy statue at the wheel. Far-off Paula Cole in the tape deck. Where Have all the Cowboys Gone? and I am wondering too, where have they gone? We ride by the park where Cousin Jo and I used to play. We’d spin each other on painted machines until we would fall. Even better was when we would hurl. Apple juice and animal mush. We’d hold our breath then touch each other as long as we saw things spin. We said it didn’t count if it didn’t look real around us.
In a dream I played in that old park and Cousin Jo was there but with teacher’s arms and teacher’s shoes. We went crawling up the big, metal slide. We
went up the hard way. We shocked ourselves on the slide with oversized woolen jumpers. We wore oversized woolen jumpers. In a dream I fell and felt that catch deep in my chest, again. I awoke. A warm sneeze feeling. My first blood. And Cousin Jo’s funeral in the morning. It was hard to dream again and when it finally did happen it was early morning. Just a little ditty about wanting a cold drink, wiggling a loose tooth. Woke up to the tea kettle, the cat’s wretch.
Burnt coffee and syrupy juice at Valley Home Church of Christ. Unwrapped an old pad from Mommy’s bathroom cabinet around an older pair of underwear with stiff elastic. A clinical vomit smell. With tulips. Scratchy black faux-velvet pricks my calves. Hymns are all flat and bent out of light. Flowers donated with care and courtesy of Magnolia Sporting Good Store. Jonas Silas Stone of Valley Home. Just a boy when the Lord called. Open Casket is the only way to go around here. Especially for the young angels. A sleek mahogany with dimpled cushions. Cramps and kneeling Nicene Creed. Some from band are here. Mostly percussion. Mostly more than that it is football here. Most of Jo’s friends dropped band by the 7th grade. I see Coach and then beside Coach I see teacher. Teacher looks scrubbed and fresh, nearly peppermint. The smell, it’s much too much.
Dipping into the pew, I step quiet into the parish hallway. Around the hall and into the Women’s. It’s a hot pain I’m feeling. On the blush pink stall door, I nearly see stars. Doubled over in plain hurt. Deep breathing and the thought of teacher and the thought of Cousin Jo behind it. How does teacher’s side of teacher’s head feel? How does Jo’s cushion box feel? Do they feel the same? The smell is stuck in a small room. Little finger worship in a church stall. It doesn’t take long. Try not to make much noise. It goes deeper than what I’ve felt before. More room to move when there’s blood.
Cramps fade as the last hymns are sung. Prayers for Visitation. We are close to the front. Teacher isn’t so far behind on the right. Cousin Jo has a false shine. An easy, heavy face. Auntie says Say Goodbye to your Cousin Jo. Goodbye Cousin Jo. She says Good now touch his shoulder and say Goodbye to your Cousin Jo with the Lord in your touch. Looking up, she’s got a bad way with a swollen nose. There’s no saying No to a Goodbye touch on her dead son. Suit is stiff, feels sprayed down. Can’t help but push down just a little in my fingertips. Not much give. But it’s there. Right on my Goodbye touch. Bloody under the nails and all around my chewed cuticles. Deep, brown, girl blood that could only come from the new place. All the way up to a couple of my knuckles. Auntie is weepy and still.
Mommy walks past undignified, unable. Not now for the mothering, not now. I solemnly walk back to my seat, my line of vision hot with tears. Of shame and of daytime’s nightmare. Dead Cousin Jonas and my first blood on his funeral suit. In front of God and all of these people who are kept in my bones. You’re never really alone.
Cousin Jo sat on my chest one time. Pushed his thumbs hard on my ribs. It took a long time before it hurt enough for me to yell out. It was a good feeling, mostly. Truly. It brought the smell before I knew what that was. Before it was something that even had a scent, a mood or a reason at all. I bit my lip till it bled.
Ending prayer. Trying to make the exit procession quick but a safe distance from Auntie. I file into a gap in the crowd. Someone whispers my name. Sweet and little, a thought-out call. A tap on my back. I turn around and up into that clean, raw face. Teacher holds out a shining hand. A keychain hand sanitizer. About half full. Teacher pops the cap for me. Its smell is a cleansing burn. First blood washes fast, dries clean quick.