Rise (2 page)

“How do you know it won't be a girl?”

“No way,” he said. “I asked my mom for a brother. And she can tell anyhow. She gets sick in the mornings and not at night and she says only boys do that. Sometimes she's in there for hours.”

Freda set her bucket down and wiped her wet hands down the front of her pants. It was May, but the air still had some bite and this boy was wearing only a pair of thin cotton shorts. She pointed to the back of his bike. “What do you have in that box?”

“I'm looking for crickets,” he said. “My lizard Freddy he's got a condition.”

“I've got plenty of those,” she said. “They're eating up my flowers.” The waterlily tulips were done for the year, but her lady tulips were just getting started. They were red on the outside but their insides were yellow and orange and it was like having two different gardens when they finally opened.

“You got some nice ones,” he said. “You got more than Mrs. Dillman and she's out there every day.” He rubbed his thumb against his jaw like somebody much older. He was wearing a T-shirt from the Freedom Train. She could see it now that she was closer. She could see his collar bones and the hollow beneath his ribs and how his legs were knobby as drumsticks and brown already from the sun.

“You want to see those birds? You want to see the babies sitting in the nest?” She held out her arms, and he came to her. He should have been afraid, but he leaned his bike against her maple and walked across her lawn. She hoisted him upward and toward the eaves and he was all bones, this little boy. Her hands fit perfectly around his waist.

The nephilim were the children of fallen angels and ordinary women. Her mother had told her this years ago. Her mother who was so tiny when they laid her out because she shrank as she got older.
I'm five foot two and one half
, she always said, and she was angry if the doctors tried to round the number down, but she knew about the nephilim. She'd read about them in books. How they were giants on the earth before the coming of the floods and how they left their bones behind. That part wasn't in the Bible, but her mother said it was true. Enormous piles of bones and the sun bleached them and they turned to rock and that's why we have the mountains.
Look
, she'd say,
we can see them from our window
, and she'd point to Pikes Peak and it looked like skin, that mountain. Pink as skin when the sun hit it and not just piled-up bones.

•

His name was Teddy Fitz. His baby sister was born that September, and every morning he walked past Freda's house on his way to school. He didn't close his jacket, not even when the wind started to blow. He wore tennis shoes in the snow. She paid him five dollars to shovel her walk. She bought him knit caps at Walgreens and thick fleece gloves, and he looked so serious while he worked. She could see in his face the man he'd become, in the set of his jaw and how his eyes slanted downward.

Five dollars to shovel the walk and seven fifty when summer came because she couldn't push the mower. Another five to help with the bulbs the following September. She told him where to plant them so she wouldn't have to bend. Her knees were starting to go. Pretty soon she'd need a walker.

“This looks like an onion,” he said, holding up one of the bulbs. “How's it gonna grow a flower?” He made holes with the dibber and set the bulbs inside and he was careful when he patted down the dirt so they wouldn't turn.

“Just wait,” she said. “You'll see in April how it works.” The plant was inside. It was only sleeping. It was waiting for springtime when the dirt would get warm.

He shook his head at the wheelbarrow she'd filled with bulbs. “You sure bought a lot. It'll take days to get these planted.”

“I'll give you five dollars extra if you do them all today.”

She sat in a mesh lawn chair and let him work. Her bones were burning again. She'd be on crutches in a few years, and the wheelchair would come next. Her internist Dr. Spielman was bringing up options at every visit. There was an operation they could try. He knew a pituitary specialist who'd had good luck with a patient in Tulsa, a man who was almost eight feet tall and the operation took out his tumor and stopped his bones from growing. Her tumor might be too big by now. Surgery might not be an option, but only the experts would know for sure. Her spine would begin to curve if they didn't do something. She'd get diabetes or high blood pressure, and eventually her heart would stop. The radiation therapy was better than it used to be. Surgeons were more precise now than they'd ever been before, and she needed to be brave.

She leaned back in her chair and watched this perfect boy. He held the bulbs like they were porcelain cups, and he gently laid them down. The wind was still warm when it blew and it ruffled up his blond hair. He wiped his forehead against the inside of his elbow, but he kept working because those five dollars were waiting and they'd bring him that much closer to the skateboard he wanted. She'd give him ten when he finished and not just five. She'd buy him the skateboard herself, but his mother wouldn't like it.

Anna Haining Bates was seven foot five and one half inches at her tallest. She died the day before she would have turned forty-two. Her heart stopped while she was sleeping. Jane Bunford was another giantess. She was perfectly normal until she was eleven and took a fall from her bike. She cracked her skull against the pavement and then she started growing. Things turn in an instant, this was the lesson. Hit your head and everything changes. The tallest man in modern days was Robert Pershing Wadlow. He was eight foot eleven inches just before he died, and when he was nine he carried his father up the stairs just to show he could. She knew this from the
Guinness Book of World Records
. She bought a new copy every year. How strange it would be to stand next to a man and to look him in the eye. To feel the smallness of her hands when he took them in his.

“My dad says I'm gonna be short like my mom.” He sat on the bag of leaves like it was a beanbag chair. He sat right beside her and took a rest, and his nose was smudged from the dust. He'd filled five bags already just from the maple tree. “He says my sister will be taller than me when she's done growing.”

Freda leaned across her mesh chair and wiped the smudge away with her thumb. “My momma was a tiny lady. Her waist was smaller than my neck.” There's no knowing how things would go, she wanted to tell him. He could be a giant when he grew up. One day he might walk on the moon. She stroked his cheek with her thumb, too, but he shook himself free.

“What about your dad? He must have been pretty big.”

“My dad was about as tall as yours. That just goes to show you. And how can your daddy know how big your sister'll be? She isn't even three.”

“He says she's got those monkey arms.”

“We're all monkeys,” she said. “We all come from the same place.”

“I'm no monkey.” He shook his head. “Those are very dirty animals. I went to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo last year and they were throwing poop.” He got back up and finished her front yard and then started on the back. He fished the elm leaves out from her beds and all the ponderosa needles, and she followed him on her canes and stood there for a while. The canes were only temporary. Some days she didn't even need them. The canes were for when the pressure changed or when the winds started blowing. As soon as summer came, she'd walk without any problems. She just needed that dry air.

According to the Book of Enoch, the nephilim were three hundred cubits tall. Four hundred fifty feet, give or take. That's three times higher than the Holly Sugar Building on Cascade, which was only fourteen stories. They were bigger than Barkayal and Samyaza and Akibeel and all their angel fathers, and they were always hungry. Nothing could fill them up. Not the birds or the fish or the grains in the fields, not the sand snakes or the lizards. They stripped the forests and ate the bark from the trees. They turned against ordinary men when the last food was gone. They went after the newborn babies.

Teddy bought himself a skateboard with some of the money he'd earned. A cheap one from Target and then a nicer one from the Acme Pawnshop down on Fountain. He bought himself a bike, too. One of those Speedsters and the paint was gray and dull from the sun, but he waxed it anyway.
Just wait till I'm old enough to get my learner's permit
, he'd say.
I've already got six hundred and thirty-four dollars
, and his car fund was growing every day. His parents shouted almost every evening. Freda could hear them four doors down. Sometimes his mother went away for a few days at a time, and Teddy never said anything about it, not even when Freda asked.

He delivered the
Gazette
in the morning and for a while he delivered the
Sun
, too. That was back in the late 1970s when the Springs still had two daily papers. He threw the papers from his bike without even slowing down. He knew just how to toss them so they landed on people's front steps and not in their flower beds. She waited sometimes to see him go by. She stood behind her screen door, and he cycled past with an athlete's grace. What was it like to move like that, to never be still and never be tired? He stood on his pedals and pumped them hard, and the other boys were so ordinary compared to him.

The Lord ordered Michael and Raphael to kill the nephilim one by one. To bind their fathers under the hills for seventy generations. The crops could grow once they were gone. The trees could push out shoots. Hunger is a terrible thing, her mother had told her more than once. It's like a hot rock in your belly and you can feel it burning. She knew this from her childhood in Nebraska. The days so black you couldn't find your way from the steps to your front door. The wind blew the seeds right off the field, and days later the alfalfa sprouted in barnyards and distant cemeteries where the seeds had scattered. Hunger has no mercy when it comes, she'd say. But hunger was their burden, and they should have carried it.

He bought Mrs. Dillman's old '72 Gremlin the week he turned sixteen. It was butterscotch gold with racing stripes, and he waved at Freda when he drove by. His arm hung out the window, and he was proud as Hannibal coming over the Alps the way he raised his hand. He used cloth diapers and three coats of Mothers Wax to bring out the luster. He installed a fancy K&N air filter, and every day after school he was out there in the driveway. He rolled back and forth under the car, and his sister stood beside him and handed him the wrenches.

That's where he was the day his mother left. Freda saw the truck when it pulled up. Teddy brought the suitcases out to the curb and hoisted them into the bed, and he held the door for his mother. He didn't cry and he didn't wave when the truck rounded the corner. He
kept on waxing his car. So many coats Freda lost count, and he was still there working the diaper when the sky was dark and the driveway floodlights came on. His mother had a boyfriend and his mother was gone, and Teddy was still there working when Freda went to bed.

He painted her trim the summer before his senior year. He sanded her gutters, too, and painted them chocolate brown. He cut down a broken branch from her maple tree and brushed sealant on the open bark to keep the fungus out. She looked for jobs to give him because next summer he'd be gone. He was a cadet in the Junior ROTC, and he'd be going away to college. Up to Boulder or Greeley or maybe to Fort Collins. He did pushups and jumping jacks on his front lawn, and once his sister sat sidesaddle along his back to make the pushups harder.

He sealed the cracks in her driveway and painted her cement steps. All she could do was watch. She leaned on her walker like it was a banister and told him what to do. The juniper bushes needed trimming and some of her window well covers were cracked, and after he was done the house looked as nice as it did when her parents were alive and still working in the garden.

She kept her household money in a Folgers Coffee can. He came inside with her and poured himself a lemonade from her pitcher while she counted out the bills. Somewhere up the street there were children shouting and the sounds of splashing water. Mrs. Dillman had an above-ground pool she filled every summer for her grandkids. Freda took ten five-dollar bills and set them on the table. Her walker scraped across the linoleum as she pulled it around. The kitchen felt so big when he was there beside her.

“I think the rubber's loose.” He pointed to the bottom of her walker. “I can glue it back on for you and then it'll be real smooth.” He leaned in to get a better look, and Freda caught his chin and cupped it in her hand. That face she'd known since he was little. That sad face and those eyes that slanted downward. She wanted to remember him. He wasn't even gone yet. He was right here in her kitchen, but she was seeing him from some distant point ten or twenty years in the future. She was seeing him in her memory standing by her table. He was seventeen and in a dirty white T-shirt and his skin was pink from the sun.

In her memory she kissed him. His lips tasted like lemons. In her memory he didn't pull away. She felt so small there beside him, small as a girl when he touched her cheek. His hands were callused from the shears, and all her life she'd never know anything more perfect than his breath against her skin.

Her mother said a heart at peace gives life to the body. Also, we are all small in the eyes of the Lord. Don't listen when they call you names. How could they know what it's like? She heard her mother's voice those nights when the air was still. Those summer nights when she could feel her jawbone growing. She was almost fifty and the radiation wasn't working anymore. Her teeth were starting to spread, and her features were getting coarser. She didn't look in the mirror when she washed her face. She closed her eyes, but she could feel the ridge across her forehead where the skin had started to thicken. Her mother's voice came back to her after all these years.
Don't be afraid
, she said.
He raises us upward. He carries us inside His palm
, and sometimes Freda could feel her mother's fingers press against her cheek.