Bosler

Area

Why he chose to come back or to stay and never leave, I cannot say. That house, what happened in that house, built long before I was born? What happened? A father, that is for sure, but like him? Worse, somehow? I imagine the grass around the foundation cut or at least trampled to the close acceptance of civilization. I imagine the glass unbroken, delicately flexing against the strong winds. The roof whole. Doors and not the gaping absence rushing through from front to back, top to bottom. He is stout, like one of his sons will be, muscled in the hidden way, shown only by the broad shoulders that seem never to sag even on the worst of days. And he reads, books lining walls, wars of worlds that I’ve never seen, severe symbols drenched in red, generals and something called U-boats. He reads at night when the house is quiet and his wife is absent—she is the only one who worked, it seemed—kids whispering upstairs. He has six to himself now, passed along like some inheritance he never planned on owning, so he strives to keep them at a whisper; that is the furthest he has achieved, and he knows when it’s time to dig in and resist advancement. The house is cool, warmed by a limp woodstove, and the night is immense—like the nights still are. Here where the darkness we live under bleeds seamlessly into the heavens, and his foundation and his father’s, sit comfortably next to Jupiter’s raging eye and Mars’ blood reds. He sits in the quiet, accompanied only by the low moan of the wind that continually presses us all down, or to the side, or in a twist, warping and maligning the rigidness of even the strongest spine, but not those shoulders and not that will. He reads and breaths heavy like a dragon might. Does he smoke? He dies of a heart attack in a few years. Yes, he smokes, cans of shag tobacco still nestled under piles of trash, still there. What else is there? I see a matted stack of pornography. Several magazines have become one under the years of rain. Longing and sex and masturbation inside the inhospitable cold, the dirt. I see several broken T.Vs. He sits at night in front of the screen. The black and white aura flickers in the dark room, outlining his frame as he lazes in a recliner; not a comfortable one, the wooden skeleton and padding showing even then. A haphazard cable snakes up the wall and connects to a crucifix of wires on the roof—that is still there, unchanged, still proud, still receiving invisible waves of CBS. He watches reports coming from the Vietnam War, content. The volume is low as he cares not for the commentary, only the severe images of men—not boys he might tell you—men hauling machine guns on their shoulders. The jungle, less sexy than Europe; it was good to see the enemy and know he’s there and charge and flank and outmaneuver; the jungle hides too much; no strategy but intense fire and blind fire. He watches. What else? There are drawings, faded, on the wall; the kid’s room. Did they share? Yes, only two rooms upstairs, one for the boys and one for the girl. Out here, in the emptiness, he still brings mores from somewhere else with him. A community I could not guess sprouts here—it has changed, now. The drawings are of cats, simple, whiskers too large, and a person in a dress. They are laughing, passing a crayon around, each drawing their choice of dreams. The sun has not set, a bedtime too early in the dry summers. Five boys and the girl who snuck into their room. They whisper and laugh. He yells from the living room; a booming voice that seems to rattle the windowpanes. All at once, they freeze and stare at the door, focused on listening. The air is silent except the low murmurs of the T.V., and, for a moment, they wait, confident they don’t hear the springs of his recliner, confident that he still sits. The whispers start again. He is young in this moment, sandy blond hair, the only boy with vitiligo—same as his father’s? Yes, same as his father. They lean in closer. The one brother, the oldest, is drawing a person in a dress, and the others watch. Next to the simplistic cats, this image shows foresight and practice, hints of talent. “That’s gay,” says the child with the wildest hair. The others blink for a moment before the child reaches for the crayon. A tussle. He stays out of it, more worried about the noise than the others, eyes darting to the doorway. In a moment, the crayon lays broken—it is still there, red, brittle paper keeping the pieces together—and the youngest, quite young, finally screams. From below the springs cry and the echoes of boots—boots? Steel toes, heavy, with soles made from tire tread—climb the stairs. There is no shouting in this moment. No movement from the children, sitting on the mattress in a row, eyes watching the door for the inevitable. He appears in a terrifying crescendo, somehow larger than man, as though he may not fit through the doorway. Is he a dragon? They are always dragons. “Get in your room!” He grabs the girl by the hair and tares her through the door, pushing her into her own room. The boys sit, all except the oldest, often given to resistance that the younger four don’t dare. He hits one child across the head, the youngest; his tears and cry are instant. Again: “Go to bed!” There is a moment of tension as the oldest decides whether to resist. They all know it. Against this tension, the screams and cries of the youngest are in a different house, a different universe. He turns and leaves.

Twenty Miles Out

I always liked how books would say at the end, such and such was “born in 1924 and educated in New York.” Like the birth mattered but the place of education did more so. And it surely does. A birth never mattered none. It was a thing hidden from us for eternity like a secret that no one told because it held no value. But a place educates to the bone, and right through the blood of birth, staining the marrow. A place’s education works through and motors the soul more than any holy whispering could ever manage. A place educates. And nurturing, as the feckless intellectuals often contemplate, is a waste of breath. For a place educates, and time dictates the curriculum.

The Dirt Here Reeks

The tattoos on his bare body were pointed out, kindly. The person said they were the four questions of ______. And they were. It was a husband and wife. Disheveled and neurotic, reminiscent of drug addicts I had known, one keeping life together, barely, the other leaning.

The picture books were ones of Spanish Galleons in the stars, sailing through nebulas, glittered with the flakes of beautiful gas giants.

So when I called 9-1-1 the operator said, “What’s your address.” I looked into the distance at a water tower that said Lacona, 1409. I informed the operator who replied, “It was you who chose this.” I looked up, and the woman was staring at me. “Why do you do this to yourself, always?”

One the hot days

The afternoon air was thin and dry. This was not told by the air itself, largely absent because of the dryness, but by the grass that stood tall and stiff and dead. Each step an aroma of straw dust. The railroad tracks next to the path emitted the smell of hot steel and wet creosote tar. Summers died quickly after spring then stretched on inappropriately, killing the smells of life until all that was left was an absent smell to the endless warm breeze. So it was that the river became the main attraction for Arak most late afternoons, fishing pole in hand, one lure attached. Shade underneath a railroad bridge. The fish hung out there, too, swimming with perfect stillness to remain under a black strip of shadow that crossed the water. The lure, sent almost to the other bank, spun dully in the black, crossing the nose of large, uninterested carp. Again, he cast, settled and content to wait out the fish or the temperature, whichever dropped first. Twice his line was caught up in the reel and twice his bone-thin fingers worked tiny knots free from the mechanics. He never minded not catching anything. His uncle warned him of the fish that shaded under the bridge, polluted by the chemical railroad ties that shaded them and the fertilizer that came upstream from the ranches, were never good eating. But they were big fish and catching one for the sport of it seemed like a good alternative to the wide-roaming his brothers fell into on the hottest of days. Though, he had never caught anything in the river, ever.
Then his older brother arrived, older by three months, David. “I figured you’d be here. Catching anything?” He sat on a rock just behind his brother.
Arak finished reeling his line and held the lure in the air, dangling, dripping. “I can’t tell if it’s spinning.”
“Think the line from your knot is stopping it.”
True enough, the fishing line that remained from the knot was twisted around the action, and Arak set the pole down and brought the lure to his mouth, biting at the end.
“I think Mike and Joe are coming.”
Arak finished nipping the line and checked the spin. “How come? Randy freaking out again.”
“I don’t think he stopped from the last time.” They laughed. Arak cast his line, staring more at the lure than the fish. It was still dark, a piece of moss racing for the bank.
Why won’t it shine, Arak thought, pulling the lure up again. It hung in the air with a pendulum-like drift.
“Let me try,” David asked.
“Bring your own pole,” he replied and cast again.
“That was the last good reel, remember?” David said. “The others are rusted up or the drag is busted.”
Arak didn’t reply. He reeled faster, then slower, jerking, but still, the lure wouldn’t shine. He handed the pole over. “You can try. I can’t get it.”
“I think it’s broken, too. Like everything else.” But David grabbed the pole with a smile and took Arak’s place at the rock. He cast. “Think they’ll bite?”
Arak picked up a fist-sized rock that collected there from the railroad above and hurled it at the large fish. The crashing water scattered the fish in all directions, forcing them into the heat.
“Hey!” David turned to Arak with outrage in his eyes. “Why’d you do that?”
Arak was already running, laughing, the bedrock of gravel making it hard for him to make any ground, and David had thrown down the pole in chase. Arak stopped running at the top of the ravine, winded by the heat, still laughing. David reached him and pushed him, and still, the laughing continued.
“Where’s the pole?” Arak finally asked.
“I left it.” They both turned to look down at the river; the pole and fishing line haphazardly lying by the water. David turned to Arak and shrugged. Arak laughed and turned down the path to home.
“What do you wanna do?” David asked.
“I dunno, what do you wanna do?”
“I don’t know either.”
Up ahead, Mike and Joe were walking down the dirt road.

Nature

It seems I was witnessing the past wrong. It is not as I had previously thought: human nature being what it is; the twisting helix portioned in the correct manner, so alike those you have met; no surprises. I was wrong. It was not a replaying of the past. Or some further twisted form of it. I was wrong. He is better understood as an aspect of the land itself. He is the town and vice versa. There is no enactment when it comes to land. It is only the effect of being there, and all the sunsets and sunrises and sage and sadness are what waft from the inside. The land just is. He left Bosler only to grab her. Then when she was there, he sat as any old mountain. Stoic and harsh. Punishing. He brought the storms and kept them there, as any good mountain does. He brought the burning snow and the choking altitude. It’s not personal. And when we left, as people do with land, he remains, as land does. You might say he remains but changed. You’d be wrong. The change you see is only what we left. The change you point to is the smashed grass of where I lay with him. The fire ring where we told ghost stories about his dire recesses. Our trash. That is his change, but the land doesn’t change. It wears what it took from us—what we chose to leave when we left in a hurry.

On the consequences of space

I hadn’t realized the full implications of it. I probably never will. But I discovered a new aspect of it recently. It negates nothing that came before, only adds something. Why did everything that followed that first look at my birth certificate—his name, his company, all his constellations and conspiracies—have no effect on that space? Before it was a space, it was a silence, and it had an aura of hope around it. It was as if, at any moment, it could be filled, and all the pain that was caused by it, would magically vanish with the fact of his existence. He could walk through the door with his arms spread, asking, where is my son; Where is he? I am here, Father. Would you look at that…My god, you’re so big. I’ve missed you; I’ve missed so much. I am sorry. And he would reach low to my toddling hurry and lift me up, our eyes meeting, blue hues matching. There you are. And all that came before would vanish. All the consequences of the silence merely growing pains to a full height, remembered as painful but worth it instead of not. But when I found that document, there was a finality. I knew it, plain as my name and his absence. A finality that stretched to include all future dreams and nightmares, all the daydreams and wish lists. Nothing changed, mind you. The certificate’s acknowledgement was only of what I already knew. Silence. And the space was just silence in writing. Nothing in that translation was new or arrived as further evidence than what was already understood. He was not there—no, something else, because he was not somewhere in opposition to being there. He wasn’t missing either; there were no flyers, no one professed missing him, not even me. By the way people acted and never spoke, he wasn’t dead; they whispered around the subject, as though he were close and consequential. He just…wasn’t. I don’t know. Almost like how the Roman’s never came up with a numeral to represent zero. There is no representation of nothing. He wasn’t gone or missed or missing, he was always zero. So that space on the certificate is not a further echo of silence, as I had thought until recently. It is a zero. The finality I felt holding it was a realization that the space was not momentary but eternal, stretching forward for all time and backward for all time. As I was zero, before conception, then moving to I, my entrance into the world accompanied a fact. Zero. It wasn’t a miscommunication or an unfortunate accounting error. It wasn’t .02 or .99, a rounding error. That zero was purposeful. It was decided by all present and all witnesses, all those involved knew it. Who was my father? As often as a father is named for any child, that name understood as any other fact of a person’s life, stretching forward with all the consequences that that name might inflict on the world, so too, does the zero. The space was not waiting to be filled by an eventual father; it is, to this day, not empty and waiting for a typing stroke of sire definition. The space was applied as per custom, and any father’s name is on a birth document, as per fact. So nothing changed the day I found my birth certificate—I didn’t feel changed—only, I guess, I knew that nothing was going to change. That the silence I obsessed over, impatiently waiting for what would come to fill it, was an everlasting, purposeful silence, represented the best possible way by those required. I could wait all I wanted, in the deafening silence, for nothing was coming. A zero added to anything is only the thing itself, unchanged. No amount of desperate prayer or deluded logic can change that.