Spring 2010

The World Has No Sides

por David Norman

When William thinks about jumping from the tree, he wonders what his body will look like pressed into Jeffrey’s lawn. Wonders if he will land on his stomach with his arms spread or on his back like the time he and Jeffrey carved snow angels up in the snowy woods in New Mexico last winter, the shoulders of Jeffrey’s angel perfectly ribbed from his blue parka. William wonders how many angels will catch him now. How many branches will snap on his way down and if they will slow his fall. What rib will crack first and what dull sound the earth will make under his body fifty feet below. He smells the musty heat of his own skin, feels beads of sweat crawling through the hairs on the back of his hands, sweat and tears falling into his eyes.     

“Hey, boy!” Mr. Wurther shouts. “Come down from there!”

“My name is William. And I want to talk to Jeffrey.”

William scoots out along the magnolia branch, keeping his stomach pressed to the bark. Mr. Wurther tilts his head back and places one hand at his forehead to shield his eyes against the sun. It’s almost seven o’clock in the evening, the deadest part of August, long past the hour William and Jeffrey would slump onto the stools across from the twin microwaves in William’s kitchen to watch their chicken quesadillas melt. From William’s view right now, the button on Mr. Wurther’s navy baseball cap resembles a spider with curved seams for legs; it’s not a stretch to imagine its large fangs piercing the man’s skull. Jeffrey ought to have been at William’s house trading baseball cards, eating a quesadilla, or swimming in the pool, but he isn’t. Somehow, this man—Jeffrey’s new father—has gotten between them and broken their routine. A gust shudders in the magnolia, and William can feel himself sway and dip on the branch. The velvet leaves prickle his ear. Every time the wind picks up, they whisper, Jeffrey’s gone. Might as well jump.

                 

                              

“He’s not new,” Jeffrey said. “He just hasn’t been around in a long time.”

“Like since before you were born,” William said. This was a week before William tried to jump from the magnolia at Jeffrey’s house. They had ridden their bikes up to the old rock quarry in River Heights. Beside the NO TRESPASSING sign was a big white slab of cardboard with black letters that announced the company name, with a little picture of a suburban house with a green lawn and two fat oak trees on either side. A crew had come in the week before and cleared laburnum for a road. Pretty soon the woods above the quarry would be gone, replaced by the Alta Vista housing complex. William and Jeffrey left their BMX bikes by the curb and hopped the chain-link fence. The quarry looked the same, its lower half filled with water and a few buzzards circling overhead, but already they could sense a change happening down by the quiet blue lake. Sometimes William imagined a chainsaw crew, like in the horror films, cranes and bulldozers rising out of the water, chopping and killing everything in their path. By the end of the summer, their favorite meeting place would be destroyed, gone.

“What’s your mom think about him coming back?” William said.

Jeffrey shrugged. “My mom told me just wait and see.”

Wait and see.

As if having a new father is something you can try out, dispose of later if you’re not satisfied. William frowned. At twelve, Jeffrey should know what was permanent and what wasn’t, what was bullshit and what wasn’t. Jeffrey’s mom was assistant sales manager at Handy Andy, and William thought she was only taking her husband back because she needed the extra money. So far, Jeffrey’s father had no job, but William figured the man would get work at the junk yard selling scrap metal, which was what he did before Jeffrey was born. Neither William nor Jeffrey wanted to talk about September, when William would go to Chesterfield Academy and Jeffrey would stay at Eastside Middle, the public school. They didn’t talk about September because they didn’t know if they’d still be together, and William felt that Jeffrey had already given up on their friendship.

They sat a few feet apart, staring down at the quarry with their legs dangling over the edge of the cliff. William picked up a rock—a chunk of flint that felt hot and smooth in his palm, the perfect artillery shell—and hurled it into the quarry. The rock fell a good distance from the buzzards. The boys waited and listened for a splash, but it was too far to hear. A faint ripple rose to the surface, expanded, then disappeared as the water silked over.

“Since when do you care what my mom thinks?” Jeffrey said.

William spat. “Forget it. Want to swim at my house?”

“Okay.”

William lived at North Side in a two-story house with a pool, a Spanish-tile roof, and a wooden balcony in front from which William could jump if he wanted to sneak out at night. He hadn’t yet, because he had no place to go, but he would later on when he got to high school and started dating Sammy Templeton, who was a year older and would probably get her older sister’s BMW. William didn’t like girls, but Jeffrey thought they both ought to plan on having at least one or two girlfriends each. “Otherwise, you’re gay,” Jeffrey once said. William had settled on red-head Sammy Templeton because she had lots of hobbies—playing tennis, raising box turtles in her back yard, collecting Canadian stamps—and probably would not bother him too much.

 

 

At William’s house, Jeffrey borrowed one of William’s bathing suits, orange surfer shorts with a green drawstring and large pockets on the hips. Jeffrey had worn the same pair when they went to South Padre last summer, where they would stuff their back pockets with sand like padded football pants and race across the beach. They would hold their waistbands to keep their shorts from falling while their legs flung out loose sand and their feet pounded and splashed through surf. That was the first time he and Jeffrey decided they were going to be best friends, at the condo William’s parents rented out in South Padre, and Jeffrey had borrowed those same orange shorts for the weekend. One afternoon, he and Jeffrey had taken their boogie boards past the second sandbar, and William felt sharp needles up and down his leg. He’d been stung by a man-o-war. Jeffrey helped William limp back along the boardwalk, and when they returned to the condo’s A/C, Jeffrey rubbed tenderizer on William’s leg. A red whelp in the shape of a J bloomed on his thigh. William bit his lip. He didn’t want Jeffrey to see him cry. Jeffrey leaned forward and blew on William’s skin. “Does it hurt?” Jeffrey said.

“Not when you do that.” William smiled, embarrassed by the sudden erection pushing up beneath his shorts. He didn’t want Jeffrey to see, but Jeffrey had already turned and gone to the kitchen to put the tenderizer back in the cabinet. When Jeffrey opened the fridge, bands of cool mist curled around his neck and shoulders, dissolving in the air like smoke. Later that night, William would rub himself in bed with Aloe Vera, laboring over the image of Jeffrey’s lips hovering a few inches above his thigh—thinking of Jeffrey’s wet hair tossed into his eyes, freckles that spread like ants down his sunburned shoulders, skin that smelled of ocean and sand. He grabbed a pillow off the couch and smothered it against his crotch.

Jeffrey slammed the fridge door shut. “Your folks have any beer?”

 William said he didn’t think so. His father would drink the tequila he’d buy in Matamoros the next day. At least once during their vacation, he drove the family across the border into Mexico, where he liked to hunker down at a bar and drink margaritas while William’s mom bargained for jewelry or turquoise, and William and Jeffrey bought wooden cap guns or Chinese finger cuffs. There’d be two or three bottles of El Jimador wrapped in brown paper sacks in the trunk for the evening ride back to South Padre.

Jeffrey returned to the living room with half a powdered donut in his mouth, and William said, “You could stay with me, you know.” What he meant was, You could live with me. You could live at my house. A bold and foolish thing to say, but given how perfectly the summer had gone, William decided to take a chance.

“What about my mom?” Jeffrey said.         

“You don’t need her.” William didn’t like how this came out. He didn’t mean to imply Jeffrey’s mother was unimportant, only that Jeffrey might be more comfortable living at William’s house: they could ride to school together, Jeffrey wouldn’t have to ride the cheese wagon. Maybe his mother could live at William’s, too. In the guesthouse.      

“Yeah, but she needs me.” Jeffrey added, “You’re a fucking idiot.”

Jeffrey snatched the pillow off William’s lap and swung it at his face. The tassels stung his cheeks and William leaped for Jeffrey, wrestling him to the floor, where Jeffrey eventually overpowered him, sat on his chest, and pinned his arms to the floor. Jeffrey gave him The Typewriter, stabbing his index finger into William’s breastplate, knocking the breath out of William until William thought his lungs would burst. “Uncle!” William screamed, and when Jeffrey rolled off him, they lay on the floor and watched soaps until William’s mom came inside and yelled at them to go shower off downstairs. “Ya’ll are getting sand all over the floor!” For William, that weekend seemed to prove how indispensable they were to each other. The carpet burns on his knees would scab over and take weeks to heal, but the J-shaped wound from the blue man-o-war—that spot that Jeffrey had soothed—disappeared the very next day.

 

 

The pool at William’s house was shaped like an almond, pinched at the shallow end and rounded at the deep end, with two matching fountain statues of Cupid splattering water back to the pool through a pear-shaped pot. William’s mother had seen a similar design on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”: “We’re not famous, but we’re rich enough,” she told William’s father. “And I have to have it.” Once her mind was made up about a purchase, it was impossible for William’s father to dissuade her. The day the boys went for a swim, a Polaris roamed and swept its tail-like hose under the diving board. Withered pecan leaves were sucked into a mesh bag and left copper stains along the bottom of the pool. Before he jumped in, Jeffrey slid off his T-shirt and dropped it behind him on the flagstone border. He stood in William’s orange bathing suit and curled his pink toes around the edge of the pool. The sun played hopscotch on his forehead and a little silver necklace shimmered at the base of his neck.

“Where’d you get that?” William said.

Jeffrey lifted the medallion off his chest and stared at it as if a bird had dropped it on him by mistake. “My dad got it for me in the Philippines.” The medallion was a ying-yang that hung by a piece of fishing line threaded with a pattern of red, orange, and black beads. “It’s this place on the other side of the world.”

“The world doesn’t have sides,” William said. “It’s a sphere.” He stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Jeffrey, staring at ropes of light dancing across the bottom of the pool, and a pang of grief throbbed in the pit of his stomach. “I know about the Philippines. I’m not stupid.”

Jeffrey shrugged. “Whatever. I’m going in.” 

No point in denying it, William thought as he watched Jeffrey cannon-ball into the pool with his knees tucked to his chest, generating a raucous, lopsided splash, and then swim to the other side. The closer he tried to get to Jeffrey, the farther Jeffrey pushed him away. He remembered South Padre and racked his brain trying to think of how to get back to where they’d been, to that perfect afternoon on the couch, wounded with Jeffrey’s lips poised above his sunburned skin. After a moment’s hesitation, there only seemed to be one way: I’ll drown myself. He’ll have to save me or I’ll die. Either way, I’ll feel better than this. And by this he meant the uncertainty, a terrible thrust of uncertainty that stabbed his heart. When Jeffrey emerged at the shallow end of the pool, one arm draped languidly over the cement edge, water dripping in his eyes, William made his move.

“Take off that necklace!” he shouted.

Jeffrey pretended not to hear, then laughed. “No.”

William leaned closer in to the pool and cut his eyes at Jeffrey until he stopped laughing. “Take off the necklace or I’ll kill myself,” William said. “And it’ll be your fault.”

“You’re an idiot.” Jeffrey turned his back to William. “A fucking idiot.”

“Stop calling me that,” William said. “Please don’t call me that.”

William let one foot hover over the pool’s surface, as if he were about to step on air, and then dropped in. He went straight to the bottom and held himself in a tight ball. The shadow of his head merged with the ropes of light dancing on the cement floor, and then they became blurry clouds in a sky he thought he might break through with his fist. He put his hand out, letting small air bubbles leak from his nostrils and from the corners of his mouth, and when his fingers brushed the rough cement, the light bands latched together like the rings on the carapace of a tortoise. Imagining Sammy Templeton’s box turtles crawling beneath him, he punched the shells a few times, but they merged further together and his knuckles struck one thick impenetrable plate. He closed his eyes and put his fist in his mouth and screamed. Hardly a murmur escaped. When the oxygen left his lungs he shook violently. Then he felt a pair of hands clamp under his armpits. Someone—not Jeffrey—was hauling him to the surface.

“Looks like I came at the right time,” a man said in a voice that rained down on William like buckshot. William felt hot tingles over his skin, and he opened his eyes and coughed. He lay on his back on the flagstone, and the man’s head merged in front of the sun, casting a shadow over William’s face. Mr. Wurther had a scrappy, grayish blond beard, chewed like white kernels of corn on the cob. William turned his head toward the pool and heard his mother run outside.

“Oh, God! What happened, William?”

“Your boy tried to drown himself,” Mr. Wurther said. “I seen the whole thing.”

William’s mother ignored Mr. Wurther and ran straight to Jeffrey. The white lilies on her summer dress swirled at the hem, the fabric below her waistband a tempest whose clouds settled back against her shins. Several rollers were fixed in her hair and from the top of her head a piece of purple string bounced free like a peacock feather slipping off a woman’s hat. “What’d you do to him?” she yelled. Her words spat from her mouth like barbs. “I said no wrestling in the pool. Now, I’m tired of you roughing him up.”

Mr. Wurther stepped between Jeffrey and William’s mother and put his hand out, forcing her back. “He didn’t do nothing, Ma’am. I tole you I seen your boy try to drown himself.”

“Just a minute, sir. I don’t know—”

“I don’t know what kinda family you’re raising,” Jeffrey’s father raised his voice to match hers. “It’s damn obvious that boy needs help.”

“His mother and I have known each other for years. She never once mentioned you.”

“Don’t matter. I’ll think twice ‘fore I let your boy near my son again.”

“Is that a threat?”

Who was this “boy” they were talking about? William wondered. The strange smooth texture of its letters seemed to allow him to slip in and out of the air unexpectedly. Like on that television show, where the magician disappears behind the curtain and pulls eggs out of his mouth that nobody ever sees him swallow. Nobody, not even his daddy, ever called William “boy.” The word made him feel guilty and evil, but also hopeful: if trying to kill himself got this much attention, imagine what actually killing himself would do. They’d talk about him for years, and maybe then he’d finally reclaim Jeffrey’s love. William pushed himself up off the hot flagstone. Mr. Wurther and Jeffrey were gathering Jeffrey’s clothes. Without once raising his eyes, Jeffrey stuffed his socks into his tennis shoes, and he and his father headed for the back gate. “No,” Jeffrey said as he followed his father past the laburnum, the light-green leaves shivering in the breeze. His voice was sullen and hardly audible above the gurgle of the Cupids dumping water out of their pots. “No, we’re not friends anymore.”

                                                                       

           

A week later, after Jeffrey’s sister came to the house to return the orange surfer shorts, William finally cracked. His bathing suit had been laundered, folded and placed in a Ziploc bag simply labeled William with a red felt pen. It was not Jeffrey’s handwriting. Probably Jeffrey’s mother, not wanting some foreign item to get mixed in with Jeffrey’s clothes, had come up with the idea. William slid his index finger between the yellow and blue tracks on the Ziploc, split the plastic seam, and inhaled deeply. All he could detect was the scent of detergent and the chemical smell of marker pen. No ocean, no chlorine, no trace of Jeffrey. The world had dealt him a wicked blow in the form of this sanitized, lifeless piece of fabric.

Later that afternoon he ran to Jeffrey’s house with the bag under his arm. It took him nearly four hours. By the time he arrived, his shirt and shorts were covered in sweat and he’d broken the heel strap on one of his leather sandals. We’ll just have a conversation, he thought as he ran through the shoulder of Austin Highway, dodging traffic, cutting through motel parking lots, gas stations, a cemetery, and a golf course. We’ll have a conversation. I’ll tell him the bathing suit had been a gift. Make him see my point of view. When he got too tired to run, he walked, pumping his arms at his sides and singing aloud any song that popped into his head. So you think you can tell, heaven from hell. Blue skies from pain. At times his voice was lost under an ocean of car horns and police sirens, jack hammers and bulldozers from crews ripping up the street at different construction sites. But he kept singing, kept going. No one noticed the boy with the broken sandal, plastic bag under his arm, running like mad on a Monday afternoon in five o’clock traffic. And that was fine with William.

So long as Jeffrey noticed, everybody else could go to hell.

 

 

He’s so tired he doesn’t care if he falls from the magnolia. The plan he came up with as he ran to Jeffrey’s house, the plan that felt as calculated and sure as the stone weighing on his heart, seems now like the dumbest idea he’s ever had: leave the orange shorts on the doorstep so that when Jeffrey comes home he’ll lean over and pick them up. And when Jeffrey hesitates, make your move. Jump down from the tree and land in the grass behind him. How high will he need to climb to land dead? Fifty, seventy feet? Jeffrey will turn and with the shorts in hand, the proof laid out on the lawn, he’ll understand what he meant to William. In that one perfect instant he’ll understand and everything will be reconciled. Now William thinks: That’s all you can come up with? That’s the plan? Jeffrey’s right. You are an idiot. A crazy fucking idiot.

When Mr. Wurther comes out yelling, “Hey, boy! Come down from there!” William shakes his head, scoots out farther along the branch. Once, his foot slips and he slams his chest against a knob in the bark, knocking the wind out of him. He smiles, remembering the punch Jeffrey gave him in South Padre when they wrestled on the olive carpet, Jeffrey jabbing his knuckles into William’s ribs and forcing from his lungs one delicious howl. “Don’t make me come up there!” Here he comes, William thinks, here he comes, and Mr. Wurther rolls his sleeves past his elbows and shimmies up the trunk locking his legs and arms around the dusty bark. The swiftness of the old man surprises William. Mr. Wurther stops a few times to catch his breath but continues scrambling up the magnolia tree, driven by some hidden and unexpected source of rage, knocking big leaves out of his face until he gets to within a few feet of William, reaches up and grabs his leg. William kicks his foot sideways like a jackrabbit, and Mr. Wurther comes back with William’s sandal strap. William kicks again and the strap breaks. William feels a sudden release of pressure as Mr. Wurther slips backward. What happens next goes in slow motion: the stunned look on Mr. Wurther’s face spreads as he falls with that strip of leather clenched in his fist. Onto a thin branch that bends and snaps. Onto another one that snaps. Then headlong in a back dive with his arms twirling out like a fledgling’s broken flight. Leaves shudder on his way down. He flips twice and lands on his side in the dirt beneath the magnolia with one arm tucked behind his back. His arm looks strange like that, William thinks, strange twisted behind his back like that. And suddenly the world has gone quiet.    

                                                                        

Sammy Templeton has a plastic kaleidoscope filled with shreds of colored paper. You aim the instrument at the light, turn the lens, and the confetti sifts and tumbles through mirrored glass. She has a horseshoe magnet that makes paperclips dance in the air and a tiny square bed with needles that captures the exact contours of your face.

By September, the cliffs overlooking the River Heights quarry have been paved over, the laburnum and cedars cut, so Sammy and William go to the bamboo forest behind Tucker Park to try out her inventions. He and Sammy are too old to call them “toys;” William has to be careful not to say that word or else Sammy won’t let him ride in her sister’s BMW. Sammy insists on maturity, wisdom, and tolerance—a certain lifestyle she defends by placing her hands on her red elastic waistband and thrusting out her hip as though it were a weapon. She doesn’t collect stamps or raise box turtles anymore. “I did that already,” she insists, “when I was little,” implying that she was little before she met William, before she became his girlfriend.

After school, Sammy’s sister takes them to Tucker Park and sometimes leaves them in the back seat so they can try to get to second base. At first, William only stares at the back of the headrest, or out the window where the bamboo sways. Grapevine sprawls along the chain-link fence and beyond that honeybees dive-bomb clumps of goldenrod. Sammy rubs her lips against his neck. He doesn’t mind so much, and sometimes he leans in and drapes his arm over her shoulder. They kiss until their mouths cotton, and then she gives up and they go to Baskin’ Robbins for root-beer floats and Rocky Road ice cream.

Mr. Wurther didn’t press charges, but he reconciled with his wife and moved the family to Galveston, where he got a job managing a Splash Town USA water park. The Kormicks live in the Wurthers' house now. They don’t have any children. Mrs. Kormick is head librarian at Chesterfield. She painted the front door purple and set out pots of spider ivy on the front porch. Before his family moved, Mr. Wurther cut down the magnolia tree. He hired a crew to have the stump pulled and the hole filled with blood-red mulch. William has ridden his bike there and seen the red circle. He often imagines what the excavation process looked like: a giant molar yanked from the ground, soil showering loose off those thin, dangling roots. Although William understands he and Sammy won’t last, William finds himself wanting more and more to be with Sammy, wanting to feel her lips travel under his chin, wanting her rough curls to brush his shoulders. Being with her is the only time it doesn’t hurt to remember Jeffrey. He never talks about Jeffrey, though Sammy asks him what happened to the boy he used to hang out with. She worries, he thinks, that Jeffrey will return, and she’ll be left alone with her inventions.

“He’s gone,” William says. He holds the kaleidoscope in his hand, the notched lens slippery and cool against the pad of his thumb. It’s still several hours before dark, though William senses a chill riding through Tucker Park, a cooling breeze that announces not only dusk but fall, an end to summer. Incredible, he thinks, how he can’t say Jeffrey’s name out loud. Can’t get the right words around that lump in his throat. “He’s gone. What’s the difference?”