Jane Two (2 page)

I had simply arrived too late. My little Texas town was one of the most humid places on earth, and by one o'clock in the morning, everything was coated in a veil of dew. That pole was no exception. I must arrive no later than twelve thirty a.m. to have the needed friction to reach the top. I also realized I possessed another secret weapon for my next attempt. It occurred to me as Steve McQueen and I walked home. We took the back way to avoid traffic, crossing playing fields and the stand of trees with The Hole, and the football field under lights where we got to play one game per year, where I had scored my very first FUN Stadium touchdown. That's where I remembered it.

A few years earlier, when I was about eight years old, I scored on an end-around pitchout that left me all alone in the end zone. I had eyeballed the stands for my family until I found them clustered together way up on the top bleacher bench, and I slowly raised both my hands to wave at my mom and dad and my whole clan; Grandaddy, Mamau, James, even Lilyth and Magda came to see me play. I had been elated to stand under the uprights, but shocked to see the ball still stuck to my chest as both my arms waved at my parents. Stickum, although outlawed by the NFL in 1981, was an aerosol spray that turned you into walking flypaper. Stickum prevented fumbles. Stickum increased receptions. Stickum would grant my ascent to her 95s.

The next night I went to sleep early with a “headache,” so Steve McQueen and I were at the school by midnight with two full cans of Stickum. As we took the shortcut across the field of diamonds, the raw gash in the earth that so terrified me there drew a sharp snarl from Steve, but I raced on past The Hole, and urged him not to stop. When we finally reached The Pole, I caught my breath and unloaded my cargo. If I sprayed my T-shirt, it would just get pulled out of my jeans when I climbed, so I took off my red scarf, shirt, shoes, and pants and sprayed my entire bare chest, arms, hands, inner thighs, calves, and feet. I intended to attempt the ascent in my underwear. I had to let each coat of Stickum dry before reapplying, so it was twelve thirty before I was ready to climb. I had already collected about ten mosquitos on my body, guests who had checked in for a quick drink and realized too late that they could never leave.

I gave Mr. McQueen a good-luck pat on the head and came away with a palm full of short hairs, so I had to respray my right hand a final time, losing precious moments. I stuffed what I needed to stuff in the back of my underwear, and I was ready. I could feel the dew in the air, so I knew I had to hurry. I had to hurry to do what is arguably one of the stupidest things I have ever attempted in my life.

When I first stepped up to that flagpole, I gave it a big hug, rested my chin on it, and looked straight up the long chrome tube that penetrated the sky. Her shoes seemed a mile up. The clear view made me absolutely paralytic with fear, so I decided to focus solely into the distance and use my peripheral vision to guide me. My periphery was always just a little bit blurry, and tended to help me hide life's horrible realities. I wouldn't look down. I wouldn't look up. I looked for my Grandaddy's horizon, straight out into that nothing, lit up by a Texas butter moon, until I felt the crossbar.

I must have been about halfway up when I realized that as much as the Stickum was keeping me on The Pole, it was making it extremely difficult to pull my limbs off and up once they were stuck. Just as I was starting to realize my exhaustion, my head hit a metal arm. It was at the peak of an up-pull, so my head hit hard. I had made the climb so much more difficult in my mind that I was only mentally halfway up when my skull cracked the crossbar. Blood dripped into my eye from what I knew must be a pretty big gash right at my hairline. You couldn't see it from the ground, but there were little steel supports under each arm right at the point where they connected with The Pole, and my head had collided with a little steel burr on that support bar, causing it to sink straight into my scalp and rip it open. Steve McQueen sensed that something was very wrong and barked up at me. I looked down to shush him.

It wasn't until I looked down that I realized that I hadn't made the climb more difficult in my mind at all. It was difficult. It was high. It was far higher up than I had estimated from the ground. If I fell, I would die. I knew it. Steve McQueen smelled it. And the blood obscuring my vision was magnifying the probability of me falling. I wouldn't allow myself access to any mature logic at all, and went instead with my abundance of youthful idiocy to calculate the risk-to-reward ratio of retrieving her 95s. I must've spent about four one-thousandths of a second on this estimation.

Yeah, she's worth it.

Now, everything up to this point was nothing but an athletic endeavor. But what happened next was one of the most surreal, hyper-focused adrenal experiences of my life. Time, and every one of my senses, seemed to slow way down. The pain at my hairline was gone, my lungs no longer burned, and my blood droplets seemed to float to the ground, peppering the concrete all around Steve, who was still smiling up at me, his barking muted, flickering in time lapse.

I would get her shoes.

I'd climbed this mast a thousand times in my head, and knew exactly how I would navigate every millimeter. So, I set out across the steel arm for her shoes, fifty feet up, going backwards, hand over hand, hanging with only my arms, my legs dangling into nothing, until I was about four feet out. I swung back and forth until I could snake my legs around the horizontal bar right where it joined the vertical. I hung upside down, and felt the vertical with my foot. I managed to hook their intersection with my right foot, just as I had in my mind's rehearsals, and slowly I inched myself to right-side up. Creeping all the way out across that steel arm, I touched my very first pair of 95s. I touched
her
95s. They were double-looped around the end of the spar, so I had to fling them around twice until they were freely draped over the arm, one shoe on each side. Both sneakers were suspended in a perfect balance for a moment, defying gravity, until one shoe dragged the other higher and higher and it leapt over the arm, set free. They landed about five feet from Steve McQueen with a clunk, but Steve never took his hunting-dog eyes off me.

Once her shoes were free and I was out at the end near that big chrome ball, I realized that the top of the horizontal metal bar was coated in fine Texas clay dust. And, as a result, my adhesion was gone. The Stickum had picked up every molecule of debris. I could feel the boom swaying. I could feel myself rotate just a bit with every sway. I could feel my heart throbbing. I could hear the blood leaving through the hole in my scalp. I could see the Dairy Queen in the distance. I could see the Shakey's Pizza. I could see FUN Stadium by The Hole. I saw my entire life as a child concentrated into one singularity. I reached in my underwear and I pulled out the hat—the hat that had fallen off that fat tub of shit's head in the bathroom as he jammed his finger in my chest, the hat that I saw on the floor in a puddle of pee as I stared at the ground—the hat that I had tied a length of my mom's thread to with a noose on the other end.

Carefully, I slid that noose over the chrome-plated ball that glittered in the moonlight. I cinched it tight. I watched it dangle. It was the first time I actually read what that hat said.
Nothing Runs Like a Deere
twirled in the breeze. I was about forty-five feet off the ground, and I remember thinking,
Well some things probably do, but certainly not a fat fuck like Jonathan.

I was hugging that chrome beam with my arms and legs like a little tree monkey, but the chrome spar's sway grew more and more severe, like a snap reverberation of my passion to survive. I could see my moonlit Weimaraner moving to and fro underneath me as I clung to that arm, but Steve McQueen sat perfectly still, staring up at his errant protégé. The motion was mine. The top of The Pole probably wasn't moving any more than a foot in either direction, but when it would stop and snap back in the other direction, the acceleration was enough to make me slip and rotate on the steel arm. I clasped my hands together around the horizontal arm of The Pole and tried to cross my feet, but as gravity pulled me down and I rotated completely upside down, my feet came apart and I hung by my prayer-clasped hands, swinging by the sheer force of inertia from side to side.

Not a single fiber of my being doubted that I was going to die in the next thrust of that pole's torque. I would die because I knew I would have to separate my hands on the horizontal in order to hand-walk back to the vertical pole. And I knew that if I did, my hands would no longer hold. In that moment, I wondered if Steve would stay by my body all night like those World War II army dogs. I wondered if she would think that I had stolen her shoes, and had just died trying to get them so I could brag about my thievery. I wanted her to know that I was trying to
save
her 95s. I wanted her to know that I saw her every day by the pool. I wanted her to know that every single time we crossed paths, she had embossed an indelible image on the back side of my eyelids. I wanted her to know that I thought about her more than I thought about race cars or fighter planes or sports. And that I thought about her through every piece of music I cherished. But really, in that moment there on The Pole, swaying out of control, I just wanted my mom and dad. I wanted them more than I had ever wanted anything in my life. I was embarrassed to end my life this way. I did not want to die an idiot's death.

I threw my legs up to try and regrab the horizontal, but the debris that had collected on my body made my feet too slippery to hold. Slick from Stickum coated with dust, my hands were too slippery to unclasp in order to walk them hand over hand, and I knew in that instant that the Stickum that had assisted me in my ascent would now most certainly cause my death. I had to try to keep my knuckles squeezed together in prayer-lock in order to maintain my slowly faltering grip. But, in my failed attempt to swing my legs up, the sheer momentum of my kick had slid my clasped hands about an inch closer to that pole. What I thought was going to kill me might actually save my life.

It must have taken me fifty kicks to come within reaching distance of that pole of life, but when I got close enough, I flung my lower body around the vertical like a newborn to his mother. I got my legs wrapped around The Pole while my hands still kept me up, prayer-gripping that metal arm. I knew how slippery I was, and that as soon as I let go of the horizontal bar I would slide much too quickly straight to the ground no matter how hard I hugged. I knew it would hurt, but I also knew that I would not die. I looked out at the city in front of me, and this was the most reassuring sight that my memory provides to this day. It was the view that no one else has ever seen of my Dairy Queen, my Shakey's, my stadium, my church, her house, and my life.

As soon as I let go of the horizontal arms, I slid down at what seemed like fifty miles per hour. I hit hard. A sprained ankle was of little notice to a boy who had just transcended fear and lived to know he would see his parents again. Steve licked my face, and all my senses came back into a much more recognizable acuity. Time accelerated. The crickets seemed to be chanting. The Pole's shadow seemed to be dancing, and the 95s were the most brilliant shade of faded blue and red I'd ever seen. I looked up at The Pole and saw streaks of my blood from top to bottom, and all the way out smeared in blotches and drips across the right arm. I looked at the ground around Steve and me, and it looked like it had been sprinkling blood just like fat raindrops before a Texas storm. I had no idea how I would explain my forehead to my mom and dad. But I was alive. I was alive, and I had her 95s.

I wore my Speed Racer baseball cap the very next day to hide that huge gash, and I put those 95s in her forest green mailbox on Sunday after sleeping with them clutched in my arms. Grabbing my bike from under the giant bean tree in my front yard, I rode right up to her curbside mailbox and stuck her 95s inside. I took my time, hoping she would see me as I retied her laces perfectly. And I rode away without looking back.

I wanted her to know it was me. I prayed for her to know it was me. All through school I never found out. But I did see her walk down that creek, barefoot again, with the 95s dangling around her neck. This time, she smiled
at me
, every time she smiled.

When my mother dropped me off for school on Monday, the whole lawn was filled with kids and teachers alike. Standing outside Mom's smoke-filled car, I looked up at what everyone knew was Jonathan's most prized possession. It had never before left his head in public till that day in the bathroom, and it was now flapping in the wind sixty-five feet up, out of his reach, with a big red
LIAR
written across the white bill. Everyone stared at his hat, knowing he had no way of getting it back. Jonathan never said another word to me about those 95s.

“Who put the baseball cap up on the flagpole? WHO PAINTED MY FLAGPOLE RED? Lest you forget, this is my school, and heads shall roll, you buncha ingrates, unless someone steps forth!” Mr. Totter's voice rasped over the intercom. All Jonathan's buddies at his lunch table that day knew it was me, but even as rumors spread, I never said a word. Not even to Firefly. When the rumormongering finally rippled the truth to the principal's office, Mr. Totter called my parents to school for a conference. When Mr. Totter asked if I was involved, I lied. I looked my mom and dad right in the eye and I lied. This is the first they will read of that lie.

I'm sorry.

My Mamau and Grandaddy arrived a little late at our house that same night after the Totter conference. Smelling like a real man in his Pinaud gentleman's powder, my Grandaddy was groomed to the nines, his brown shirt pressed and tucked in his brown polyester trousers. His whole life, he'd never wear a T-shirt except under a proper shirt, because he said it was like wearing your underwear on the outside. Mamau was all gussied up in gold as usual with good gold jewelry and a gold hair thingy securing her mass of freshly dyed brownish golden maroonish hair, humming “My Sweet Lord.” I never saw my Mamau without makeup. She always looked perfect for my Grandaddy. He called her his unicorn. They were with us most weekends and often after school if I had practice. My Mamau set to making her fried chicken everybody loved while Mom, Dad, and my sister were arguing. My Grandaddy called me out onto the porch, same as always.