From the Depths – Novella Three - 6. Chapter 8: Seesaws – De Profundis & Chapter 9: Kaskaskia

Chapter 8: Seesaws – De Profundis

It was about a week after Mrs. Day returned, and winter would not let loose it's hateful grip on April. Instead of flowers, only gray skies bloomed overhead.

The school day was finished and I stood by the flag next to our classroom windows.

Dustin was bundled in his sheepskin coat and sat with some visible shivers on the wooden balance point of the seesaw at the end of the line. His hands were thrust deep into those pockets and I knew what he was doing: he was waiting for Nino so they could go home.

In the window's reflection, I could see Stevie with his coat and book bag coming up to me.

"Good night…" he started, then saw Dustin. "What's he doing, the dummy?"

"He's waiting for his brother."

Dylan and Klay joined.

Klay sneered. "Look at that clod-hopper. He's a disgrace. Someone should be brave enough to tell him so." He slapped my shoulder, hard.

"Yeah," Dylan cronied. "Some-one brave enough to do it."

I told Klay, "You just want to pick a fight with him 'cause he's a big kid. You want to boast to your older bro and his idiot friends that you 'took him on.' Right?"

Klay shifted on his feet confirming it. His tone slithered: "That songbird doesn't sing anymore, does he?"

Klay, the bastard, knew how to hurt me. His words against me I was almost totally impervious to, but taunting me that Dustin had changed because I had sided with Klay and the other boys, was like a white-poker in my eye.

"Dunno," is all could manage to say.

"Well, I do know," chirped Dylan. "Let's go have some fun."

Now about five boys were around me, and they all chimed in with various "Yeah!" and "Let's go!"

They began jogging to the door. Klay paused and propped a hand on the doorframe. "Simon," he said. "You're with us, right?"

I slowly nodded and began my trek out to the seesaws.

When I got there, the grayness of the atmosphere seemed closer than it had before.

Dustin had risen, and taken his hands out his coat pockets. He stood tall, but defensively, by the tube support of the seesaws. He tried to look anywhere but in my direction.

The boys were surrounding him, and as I stepped up to the scene, I heard indistinct words, like "hick" and "hayseed," turn into violent and coherent sentences.

"Take a bath, for God's sake!" spat Dylan. "Wash the cow shit from behind your ears."

"Go to hell," mumbled Dustin.

"Don’t tell him to go to hell!" Klay walked up into Dustin's personal space. Dustin took a step back from the bully's puffed-out chest. With open palms raised, he told us plainly, "I don't want no trouble."

Suddenly Stevie struck out of the crowd. His words and flashing hands flew around the bully to get at the thirteen-year-old boy in retreat. Stevie shouted: "Go to public school! There they don’t care about unkempt, uncombed, clodhoppers with shit under their nails! And that's all that you are."

Klay, the instigator with the thrown-out chest, picked up Stevie's theme like a dibbled ball slyly passed to him. "Yeah. Or, you could just crawl back into the muck pile from which you came." His advance with arms and hips back continues on the peaceful farm boy. "How 'bout that? Hmm?! Can you even manage to do that for us, dummy!"

The boy under assault stopped his retreat. His knuckles flexed white-hot, and all of his upper body shudders rigid in anger.

"You," he told the bully in slow, hair-raising intensity. "Are an asshole, Klay. And if you think I won't beat your ass to a pulp, you are wrong."

For a moment, Klay just grinned. Then he took a half step back, and made the elaborate motions of pulling his coat sleeves up to his elbows. He slapped his thighs. He kicked a foot back, and bent his knees. His whole cocky body and demeanor looked like a rooster, or a bighorn ram, pawing the earth for an all-out brawl.

The bigger and older boy was not intimidated. "Shove off!" his low timbre booms and reverbed on the metal post of the seesaws. "I don’t want to hurt you, but there's nothing stoppin' me."

Just at the wrong time, to the wrong place, Nino strode up to his older brother's side. The farm boy guided him to stand behind him, and 'wait.'

This bit of protection turned out to be the trigger to Klay's ultimate meanness, for instead of charging the boy with 10 to 15 pounds on him, he casually walked over to me. He draped his arm around my back and griped my shoulder from behind. As he guided my steps to where he had just stood, he told me low; confidentially; threateningly: "Now's your chance to prove to the rest of us, that you're no fairy – like him."

My motions came to a stop. Klay's arm lifted off of me like a weight, and in that momentary freedom, an unstoppable rage built itself from the scraps of my broken psyche. Now it was going to come out one way or the other, for all this crap had taken its toll, and someone needed to bear the brunt of it instead of me for a change.

I turned on the big farm boy, and there was no way to halt it; my self-loathing must make him finally hate me too, for his own sake as well as mine.

The words came spitting out of my mouth in slow motion: "You dumb, stupid, son of a bitch. Why don’t you just disappear – that'd be best for all of us! Can't you see that, you idiot..?"

He was stunned. He grabbed his little brother by the ears; covered them in shock. And those farm-boy hands of his – honest, injured, scabbed and healing – those hands of my former friend, they trembled.

He pulled Nino into his side as the boys behind me howled with laughter and stupid praise for me, like "You tell him, Simon!" and "Way to go, Simon!" Their pitiless triumph made my victim's sheltering hug of the one person he most loves in this world all the more formidable – but his eyes, they never left mine.

Into them, he pleaded with earth-shattering softness: "Why..?"

I'm not prepared to so easily read in their blue quality, which all the sky above us is denied, the force of how much my betrayal hurt him.

And now I don’t know how this all happened; how our friendship went so wrong – for that first day of school seems a million painful years ago – but then, I realized I do know exactly when it started. It was what I did to him on the day of the school Carnival– but it was me that did it to him, so why is he the one being punished for my actions?

Why is he the one meant to suffer at all?

˚˚˚˚˚

So I stand here now, and nothing but the smell of wet and unforgiving earth mires the inside of my nose. My thoughts seem just as uncertain, and just as muddy.

Dustin draws his brother away, but after about three paces, he leaves Nino and comes back to stand before me with animated and sloping shoulders.

He pleads: "Why, Simon. Why!"

I feel like the world's biggest heel. What 'why' is there..? I don’t think I know. There must be something in my face, for Dustin begins to let tears fall freely. He wipes them in long draw of his coat sleeve from elbow to wrist. I see some snot gather too and it gets drawn up with an emotional-sounding snort.

He reaches out, almost grabs both of my arms, but his holds himself back just inches from me.

He tells me in his crying voice: "Whatever I have done to you – I'm sorry."

"You haven’t…"

"Forgive me," he bites his lower lip, and begs. "And I will do better, I swear!"

His hands finally touch me. Now I'm about to cry too, and he sees that.

His tone becomes slightly hopeful: "I don’t know what I did to you, but I am sorry, Simon. Please. Please – you're the only friend I've got. Don’t be like them, please."

And from the depths, if he could forgive me, maybe I could forgive me too. I have learned what real sin is, and I repent it from the very dark bottom of a heart I know is not mine.

I tell him, blinking so my tears fall, "Ok. I'm sorry. You didn't do anything – it's me who acted like a total jerk."

Klay snorts from behind me, "Fairies! Both of them."

I get angry. I whip around and start sputtering in his hateful face, "Fuck you! You, Klay, are a slimy punk asshole. Why I'd ever listened to you, I'll never know!" My tears fall freely.

Klay's fists slam me hard in the chest. A tight-lipped grimace tells me he wants a fight. But, due to his blow, I stumble backwards just barely able to keep to my feet. My coat sleeve brushes Dustin's leg as he pushes past me.

He puts himself between me and the bully. He stares Klay down. "You wanna try that again, on me?"

Klay blinks.

As my restored best friend pound the knuckles of one hand into the palm of the other, he instructs in no uncertain terms, "And you will not call me or Simon 'fairy'…" His feet take him closer to Klay, who backs up. "Or 'faggot,' or 'queer,' or anything like it again – not to our faces – " He practically leans over the bent-back form of the bully. "And not behind our backs either. Get it?!"

Klay's grin was gone. He straightens up by taking a large step back. He barely nods, then turns and runs away with his cronie posse hot on his cowardly heels.

I feel Nino come up to my side, and my arm naturally drapes itself over his shoulder in a brotherly way.

Dustin asks the both of us with equal concern, "You all right?"

A quick check of Nino, and he of me, and we nod in unison to our big Nordic-type, blond-haired and blue-eyed protector and brother.

As the sun peeks through the dullness of the long April afternoon, I fancy I can smell some far-off hint of opening daffodils and crocus, and I can definitely smell the savor of sunlight on somebody's skin. Yes, I know that somehow, everything will be all right.

Chapter 9: Kaskaskia

By mid May, warm days had returned to bless the end of our school year. Dustin graduated with about the highest scores of anyone in the 6^th grade, and even my lousy math results had improved too.

I got my dad to take Dustin and me down to the river for a swim, and although not as carefree as it had been at the end of summer, the bath of sunshine and living water was as welcomed as the first sight of a summer firefly.

Dustin lies on the pier. We are both down to our briefs, and our skin is dotted with the tiny ball mirrors we pulled with us from the Kaskaskia.

My Nordic farm boy is aglow in happiness and good health. He smiles at me from in front of his fingers knitted behind his head. And the fine blond hair on his body looks alive and all-forgiving in the warm glow of the afternoon sun.

I sit up and cross my legs under me.

"I miss Pax," I tell him.

He sits up and matches my seating style. Our knees just barely make contact. There is kindness in the blue of his eyes. "Me too," he says. "But at least he and Krissy are together now."

"Yeah. That's true."

After a moment of silence, he pokes my knee playfully. "What are you thinking about..?" His tone is searching, and gentle.

"I'm wondering what happened to all those caterpillars we saw down by the creek. Do you think their chrysalises froze?"

"I think," he says in warm confidence, "that last fall's caterpillars are this spring's butterflies – free, Simon. I know they are free."

There is something so open about Dustin. He is a friend I could say or be anything I wanted to with. He would let me and not judge, and that very kindness, which exists near the crystal core of him, reminds me what a schmuck I acted to him. Did he forget it all; should I ever do that too? Maybe the point is, I was never supposed to forget, so that I never mistreat kindness again.

Dustin laughs and kicks himself backwards on his open palms. "Did you ever figure out my favorite band?"

I just grin and start singing.

"I've done my penance

Though committed no crime –

and tough mistakes

I've made many too –

I've had a lot of dirt tossed in my face –

But I've come through."

He joins me on the chorus.

"We are the champions – my friends

And we'll keep on winning – till the end

We are the champions –

No time for whiners

We are the champions –

We are the champions of the world!"

His chin tips skywards and his howl of satisfaction seems to echo off the million baby leaves hanging from the trees crowding the riverbank.

"See," I tell him. "I know. Friends are supposed to know what their best buddy in the whole wide world likes. And I do. For you, I know what you like."

This seems to dampen his mood for a moment.

"Do you?" he asked.

I know this is no time for joking. "Yes. I think I do."

"Remember Simon, I'm a year older – and besides, I don’t see any hair in your armpits yet."

Despite my best efforts at comforting dourism, I laugh and throw my hands high. "Nope! Still smooth as a baby's ass!"

After my laugh, I feel guilty. I want Dustin to know that 'it,' whatever it may be, is no big deal, because I am his friend. I lower my arms self-consciously. I tell him, "I can understand, if you trust me. What you tell me stays right here..." I cross my heart. "With me."

He sighs and exhales slowly: "Well, I feel stuff now that I didn’t feel last year – when I was your age."

I decide some gentle teasing might break the loggerhead. "Are we talkin' about puberty again?" I want him to smile for me.

Dustin does smile, and rolls his eyes too.

I get serious. "When you say 'feel stuff,' what exactly do you mean?"

I try hard not to look at the line of fair hair running from his belly button south.

"You're not gonna understand."

"Stop it already. I'm pretty smart. I can get it, so tell me."

"I know you're smart. But. It's hard to tell you Simon. I don’t want to mess up our friendship, and because I'm 100% sure you can't relate to what I'm feeling. I don’t want to confuse you."

My hand stokes his knee. "You my friend, Dustin, make it sound so mysterious."

He draws in a long breath in slow motion as my fingers move away from his leg and onto his forearm. I rub it, and the blond hair there bristles like silk velour.

"It is mysterious, Simon. I don’t know how it happened, it just did."

"Enough Dustin, now you have to tell me. You have no choice, because if you and I are friends, then you trust me enough to say what is on your mind."

I withdraw my hand, and after a moment, Dustin seems to change the subject, but I know he isn't.

"You watch Three's Company on TV?"

"Sure. Everybody does."

"Does your dad ask you who you like better, Janet or Cindy?"

I give a big laugh, and fall back so my hands support me on the rough wood of the pier. "What, were you there?! He asks me that all the time."

"My dad too."

There is a pause.

"You Simon, you ask me that question."

"Dustin, pal, friend, buddy – who do you like more? Cindy or Jan…"

He cuts me off. "…OR…"

"Or…" I drag it out with a grin, "Mrs. Roper?"

"Or..?"

I assure him it's all right. "I know Dustin. Or, is it Jack?"

My farm boy's big blue eyes confirm it with a slight nod. The last choice is his, and I guess he thinks I would care.

I pop to my feet laughing.

Dustin apparently misunderstands my actions, because he acts like he has to do damage control. He says quickly, "It's ok, you don’t have to say anything. It's fine."

"Buddy!" I tell him bluntly, "Don’t be sad. I don’t care…"

"It's just..." He stands. "Just, that you can't relate. I know."

Watching his big hands get all nervous and rub each other, I think of something. Then I ask, "So, when I kissed you at Carnival, you weren't upset?"

His hands stops moving. I can see the new pink flesh under some absent scabs.

"No," he says like a sigh. "Well, yes actually. I was upset, not because you did it, but because I thought there was a chance you'd react the way you did. That's why. The kiss itself…"

"I'm sorry. I'm an asshole. I don’t know friendship when I see it."

"Well..." Dustin looks all funny suddenly. "I do. You are the best friend I've ever had; ever. Stay that way, ok, Simon?"

Dustin Day is good. Dustin Day is so good. I try to make a vow that is sincere both to his friendship to me, and to my soul as a thing seeking grace. "Ok, Dustin. I will."

And as sunlight burnishes his honest, and working hands, I consider that under the ugly scabs was new and stronger flesh. It grew tougher underneath, until like a butterfly from its cocoon, it was ready to withstand the perils of the hard outside world.

I know I had caused a scab to form over the enormous heart of my friend, and I also know, it had come off. I finally feel fully forgiven.

The sensation makes me so giddy and free, all my joy escapes my lung as I begin a running leap, and bursts forth in a joyous sound that takes the form of a single word.

"Cannonball!" I shout.

Leaping in the air over the water, I pull my knees high up to my chest so I can grab on to them for dear life. I rotate in the air and hit the water like a hundred pound brick. As I begin to submerge, my mind's eye can see the raised hands and shock of Dustin getting pummeled by a torrent of water crashing down on him.

As I come up for air shaking my hair, a splash of water smacks me right in the kisser. Dustin had followed me in. Then our giggles and hands splashing water at each other slowly drains us of our breath, and the last of our nervous energy.

Underwater my fingers reach for his, and we tread water in a slowly moving circle. Above us the compass arc of the sun shining on both sky and water turns my farm boy golden. I need for him to be better; better in the way he has allowed me to be better within myself.

I tell him, "I don’t know about all that stuff saying that thoughts are 'sinful.' I think God must know when our thoughts are wrong – like mine were – and He knows when we act because He's put the idea in our head."

This comforts Dustin. "Right," he continues with the same logic. "Doing something bad, something harmful to hurt others is bad. But thinking something good – even if others hate it because they are dumb – doesn't mean it's wrong. If it's a good thought, a loving one, how can it be 'sinful' at all? The devil doesn't put love into our hearts – only God can do that."

"Amen!" I say, pulling him closer. Our bellies touch; our arms slip around our waists. "Do you feel better about that stuff now?"

"I do," he laughs. "I knew there was a reason I drew a halo on you…"

He draws out that last syllable, and pulls it through his radiant Nordic-type smile like a sly blade of grass.

In one element he was right. I do not understand the springs and levers of 'romantic feelings,' but I now understand friendship, and I understand love.

Oh. Duh! Along with Dustin's smiley faces that day was also his daisy picture – the one with the single plucked petal.

Treading water, and looking into his eyes, I think I get that one too. But I decide I better not ask him – not now at least – 'cause I believe him when he tells me a year can make all the difference.

"What?" he says all flat. I must be grinning or something. I don’t say anything. I just pull him into a hug.

And in a moment, I feel him holding me tight; our heads rest on the other's shoulder.

Like the chrysalis and the name of the car, once I know the correct word for it, I cannot go back and pretend I don't know what I'm looking at.

Yes, in my head that little old nursery rhyme plays itself out, but not in my voice. It comes at me like a memory; like a deep-toned boy speeding past farmland blurred on the road's margin; comes at me through the air pounding in at the open windows of a Nissan 'Zed;' comes at me as a blond boy turns from the front seat with a questioning smile, with tenderness, and with so much hope it makes him blush. He sings to me that old rhyme often chanted on the open grass with a daisy pinched between questioning fingers. To me he sings soft and low:

"He loves me; he loves me not; he loves me..."

Yes, Dustin Day – he loves me.

~