Falconer

Soon the first cars will arrive for Mass. I can picture them floating down the streets of our city, this suburb of Los Angeles populated by gladsome old people and families with small children and a murky middle swath to which my husband and I belong. I’m idling at the curb of Our Lady of the Assumption while my son and his friends butt a white plastic parking barrier into the car, turning it this way and that, trying to make it fit. I wish they’d taken it from the extras stacked near the parking lot’s chain-link fence. To take from the extras is more like thrift, less like theft. To put an unused thing to use is nearly to be a liberator of the unloved. But they did not, they took it from the very middle of a line bisecting the lot into pick-up and drop-off zones. On its side, it resembles a toddler’s stubby slide. Finally, Adrian reaches through the open back door and slaps around near the headrest, and the seat flops flat.

“Bro finally,” Victor says. They get the barrier in and then Emilio sits on Victor’s lap and Adrian rides shotgun. I pull away and make a quick U-turn, and when we reach Mountain Avenue there’s a burst of relieved laughter.

“You know that kid Falconer?” Emilio says. “Me and Robby were in the four-hundred quad before third period and we saw the police take him out of class.”

I want to say Robby and I. Instead I ask, “Neil?”

“Yeah,” Adrian says, and I can tell he doesn’t want me to say more.

We arrive at the skate park and they unload the barrier and carry it to where the lip of the shallow bowl meets the flat ground. Adrian empties the water from his bottle into the base of the barrier, then uses the bottle to ferry water from the drinking fountain to the barrier again and again. He looks so much more industrious here than he does at home. At home he carries himself like someone arriving late to a movie unperturbed by what he’s missed, nonchalant about the storyline, he’s heard it all before, the words my husband and I are going to say, the arguments we’re going to make for literature, the impassioned pleas—in three, two, one—we’re going to lodge on its behalf. Sometimes the spectacle of belief is enough to turn you off to it. But he humors us and reads what we put in front of him (and we have to, for his English teacher, nostalgia-crazed, teaches only Dylan lyrics). He reads The Great Gatsby and Jesus’ Son and This Boy’s Life and Cortázar’s “Axolotl,” man-meets-salamander story—“And then I discovered its eyes…lacking any life but looking, letting themselves be penetrated by my look, which seemed to travel past the golden level and lose itself in a diaphanous interior mystery”—and speaks insightfully about what he’s read immediately afterward and never again. And so the question for those of us who put stock in such things, who lamely make too much of them, becomes, Where did it go? That mystery? That mystery that weighs inside you as if it’s your own thumb on the scale?

Emilio produces a roll of duct tape from his backpack and they crouch around the barrier—I can’t see what they’re doing—then stand and get on their boards and roll up to it tentatively at first, up and away, pivoting at the hips in their dark clothing, sharp sound of wheels coming down. Crow-like, their pecking. And in a gust they’re rolling up to the barrier with more speed, they’re clearing it.

Neil and Adrian were inseparable for a year, from the summer before seventh grade to the summer before eighth. They lived on opposite sides of a park, our house on a dead-end street to its north, Neil’s street of low-slung apartment buildings to its south. Sidewalks streaked with runoff from profligate watering. Smog-blurred mountains, their craggy snouts glazed with sugar icing. That first summer, Neil would knock on our kitchen door at eight o’clock in the morning carrying a crackling bag of Takis he’d skated to Walmart to buy. Adrian would be eating breakfast, and Neil would ask him if he could have a yogurt or a banana. I’d learned not to offer him anything. There wasn’t a mother in the picture. There was a father, a sister. Once I drove him to the post office so he could get a check for his father from a PO box. His father did home inspections, Neil said. Their car was in the shop, Neil said. His lies made me love him.

He had bulbous eyes and milky legs and the freedom that anonymity bestows upon the anonymous. I wondered how our house struck him, with the platter of fruit on the kitchen counter and the glass jars of granola and almonds and walnuts. The Bialetti on the burner, the framed illustration of birds’ eggs—dangling planets mottled blue and caramel and gold and surrounded by coiling umbilical-like ribbons—over the stove. In the refrigerator, the Greek yogurts he liked. Our house was modest, a stucco cube with three small bedrooms, a galley kitchen, and a sprawl of electric-pink bougainvillea staked to the whitewashed wall of the garage. My husband and I didn’t teach over the summer, and my husband was often on the couch with his laptop or a book while I wandered from room to room. Gathering up glasses. Rinsing them in the sink. I could repeat a small gesture infinitely.

One morning that summer, I watched Neil and Adrian through the kitchen window skating the larger of the two ramps that my husband and Adrian had built in the driveway. They balanced on the lip, back wheels down, front raised. Their shoes were ripped, their laces knotted like lengths of popcorn string. The ka-thunk ka-thunk as they rolled from Masonite to metal to concrete. They wove around the car on their way to the street, which slowed them down, a good thing, as softball parents in their trucks (beds glossily lidded like coffins) might miss a kid shooting out of a driveway. (There had been trouble, recently, with softball parents. Drunken softball moms arguing in front of the house after softball prom. A limousine idling, and our Hillary sign tossed into the succulents.)

After a while they came inside and rummaged in the bureau for tea candles. “I dreamed last night where I did a backside tailslide down the rail of the five-stair,” Adrian said.

“You should’ve tried it on the eleven-stair. And then”—Neil raised his voice over Adrian’s objections—“backside big-flip out.” They popped the candles out of their tin pans and went back outside, and I moved to the front bedroom and watched them run the candles along the curb until it was dark with wax. Adrian attempted a boardslide before Neil was done waxing. The park lay on the other side of the street, grass strewn with rolling papers and condoms and fast-food wrappers stained with blots of grease. They tucked their boards under their arms and cut across the grass to the shuffleboard court, where they used a palm frond to sweep away the grass-skirt litter of other fronds and brought forth from the bushes an orange construction cone, a filing cabinet, and a long piece of wood that they wedged like a ramp between the pyramids of numbered tiles. (I took the dog out and crept close; they failed to notice.) They arranged the scavenged items carefully, the filing-cabinet drawers in a kind of ziggurat, and rolled from one to another, nudging against, leaping over them. Their objective seemed simply to surmount things. Neil bent deeply at the knees, crossing and uncrossing his arms as he ollied into the air like a flung doll. Adrian rode upright, slower and less flamboyant and so quick in the air you might miss him if you weren’t watching closely. In Neil there was something unbidden, like a thought that came rushing to one’s mind despite its inappropriateness, while Adrian was more cautious, withholding. When they were done skating, they hid the obstacles in the bushes again. This went on for the next few weeks, one item exchanged for another—construction cone for milk crate, filing cabinet for desk chair whose casters wobbled like tops—until the landscapers who roared across the park on riding lawnmowers and rounded the bushes with whining Weed eaters found their stash and hauled it away.

I wondered about that, if they did so reluctantly or with satisfaction. Burning villages to the ground.

Seventh grade began. Adrian and Neil weren’t in the same classes, but they skated together after school and on weekends. They rolled the small ramp into the street using their skateboards as dollies. Sometimes other boys came by, their T-shirts a lacework of holes on the lower right where the grip tape rubbed when they carried their boards against their bodies. One boy offered himself up for sacrifice, lying on his back in the street, and the others on their skateboards began at the dead end, the curve that nudged up against the edge of the park, skated with long pushes toward the prone body, leapt over it, landed, and rolled away hips canted so far forward it was as if they were being pulled from the navel by strings. An invisible hand might tug them, lift them into the air where they would backstroke haplessly.

They laughed and ragged each other. “Neil Antonius Falconer? Who named you, Caesar?”

Scrapes and blood were commonplace, but what would happen if one of them broke something? I guessed that their concern would be proportionate to their derision, but the hurt one would not permit it.

The weekend after the presidential election, Neil appeared as usual at our door. They were thirteen; I thought it my duty to give a speech. Adrian had heard me already—it was for Neil, my grief. He listened to me with a shy smile and when I had finished he said, “My dad says we have to accept it and make the best of it.”

I walked the dog down his street, listening for tumult. The grass was thick and the windows shut and the garbage cans lined up in a neat row. I felt comfortable there. That spring, I saw Neil and his father at the park batting balls. Neil’s father wore a knee brace and a mesh ball cap. He had square low shoulders and a red face and he stood on the pitcher’s mound and red silt lifted and clouded about him. “Are you hesitant?” he called to Neil. “Watch me coming at you, plebe.” I tugged the dog’s leash. I knew he was an alcoholic, that he and Neil were extraordinarily close and yet he made the boy’s life hell. I suspected he didn’t approve of Neil skateboarding because he wanted him to play baseball, but maybe he sensed an overkind sentiment coming from me, tinged with self-regard. Those often privy to others’ judgments develop a feeling for such things, and I’d prided myself on being accepting of Neil, knowing that some other mothers would not be. They would not shun him, but they would subtly make the friendship impossible. Their sons would become busy with piano lessons and soccer camps and trips to the Getty. Years ago, after my husband chaperoned Adrian’s third-grade class on a field trip to the L.A. County fair, he’d told me how Neil’s father had ridden along on the school bus and it was unclear whether he was there as another chaperone or because he lacked transportation. On the way back he’d sat reading the newspaper unperturbed by the high-decibel ruckus taking place all around him, when suddenly he raised his head and hollered at a child who had reached across his seat to retrieve a wheel of Bubble Tape from another child, hollered with the great unfeeling vehemence of an auctioneer, then returned placidly to his paper.

I got the dog pointed in the opposite direction. I never looked Neil’s way.

Not long after that I read in the Courier that Neil’s sister had been sexually assaulted by a man who sold dates at the farmers market, a gaunt, cave-chested man with the scrabbling gaze of an insomniac. He was a “friend of the family,” the article stated, and had gone to their apartment when Neil and his father weren’t at home. I didn’t think about the girl’s fate, nor the dubious moniker “friend of the family,” I thought only of whether to tell Adrian about what had happened, and decided not to.

Summer again. My husband made pickled shrimp served on a platter with paper-thin slices of lemon. We unfolded the Ping-Pong table. Neil didn’t come around at first, and when he did he was on foot. He’d focused his board, he said. “I broke it on purpose,” he said to me, and it struck me how neatly that word, focused, connected the quality of paying attention to an act of destruction. Adrian dug an old deck out from a stack in the garage and they took it to the skate shop and set it up with used wheels and hardware, and for a brief window of time it was the two of them again, skating down the street to the burred purr of wheels, and I felt something in my chest soften, turn to the pliant material of contentment. And then Neil disappeared again, and again emerged boardless. He’d left it at Uncle Sam’s, he said, and Adrian went with him to an apartment where no adult ever seemed to be at home, and they microwaved chicken wings and watched anime. Did he get it? I asked later, but he hadn’t, and anyway what it was wasn’t fixed, wasn’t what I thought it was, was beyond my comprehension. One day Adrian came out and said it. “You repeat yourself,” he said, and I did, I did. I stuttered over their closeness slipping away.

Eventually Neil stopped coming around entirely. By the time Adrian entered high school, he saw Neil not at all. Every now and then, in a gust of sudden passion, he’d say he missed him.

At home he carries himself like someone arriving late to a movie unperturbed by what he’s missed, nonchalant about the storyline, he’s heard it all before, the words my husband and I are going to say, the arguments we’re going to make for literature, the impassioned pleas—in three, two, one—we’re going to lodge on its behalf. Sometimes the spectacle of belief is enough to turn you off to it.

When he gets home from skating the Catholic parking barrier (that’s how I think of it, stolid as a believer), I follow him to his bedroom. The inside of his door is papered with stickers, Chocolate and Palace and Girl and Hockey and a black bumper sticker whose white bubble letters read My Kid Skates Better Than Your Honor Student. I ask him why Neil was taken out of class by the police. There’s no answer. “Adrian!” He removes an earbud, regards me dolefully.

“What?” he says.

“I was asking you about Neil. What happened?”

In a rush he says that a week ago Neil was at the skate park and someone gave him something, he couldn’t tell what, and then last weekend Neil and Uncle Sam chloroformed a guy sitting in his car. Yeah, chloroformed. Yeah, no, it sounds crazy, saying it. Like a science experiment, like fleshy things floating in jars.

“Neil did?” I say. He nods. “I can’t believe it. And then what?” 

Then they took the guy’s wallet and phone, and someone called the police, and yesterday the police came to their school and took Neil out of class. He didn’t see it. He’s glad he didn’t, he says.

The next morning, I use my phone to go to the church’s website. There are Masses all day long, from seven to six—Vietnamese Mass, Spanish Mass, English Mass. We need to return the barrier, I tell Adrian.

“But people are skating it,” he says. “We’re filming clips on it.” I’ve watched more than a few clips over Adrian’s shoulder, hyper-intelligible slushy wheel sounds and pigeons rising from tide pools of fountain water and the light of foreign cities and the angles the skateboard makes apparent, angles of benches and railings and the sunken squares of municipal buildings, plazas whose black-tiled mosaics have gone soft and gray with dust. But clips aren’t the point. The point is right and wrong. I have the feeling that Neil’s paying for what we’ve done.

At six, Adrian and I walk to the church parking lot. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” I say. “I kept having this image of myself getting up from the dinner table with greasy hands, fumbling a knife I was holding and stabbing myself in the stomach.” 

“Mom, you have a heartbreaking imagination,” he says. We come to the middle school that shares the lot with the church. Clumps of long-stemmed lavender bushes. Parish office. The lot is half-filled, the barriers indolently stacked. The back door of the church opens and a woman in a silk jumpsuit emerges. She’s holding a crying baby, jiggling the baby and whistling to it.

Adrian points to the bell tower. “We used to go up there. We threw the rope up so you can’t ring the bell.”

At the sound of Adrian’s voice, the baby stops crying. The woman pivots so the baby can see him.

“He likes you,” I say.

“He does!” the woman says. “He loves older kids and cement mixers and stuff.”

“He did too,” I say. “Remember those days?”

Adrian smiles and waves at the baby. “Kind of.”

The barrier disappears from the skate park. What was stolen is stolen again. It has another life, maybe. Three years pass, and Adrian is leaving for college soon. I find him in his room scraping stickers off his door with a paint scraper. There’s a puddle-shaped scar below his elbow from a fall that should’ve gotten stitches. A suitcase filled with socks lies open in the middle of the floor. “You planning on packing anything else?” I say.

“Eventually,” he says.

“I’ve been meaning to ask—whatever became of Neil?”

“He got expelled. And then San Antonio and then juvenile detention.”

“I mean what he’s doing now.”

“I have no idea.”

“It’s just strange. You were so close.” My voice is sheepish. I sit on his bed. “Do you think you’ll ever see him again?”

“Please don’t sit,” he says.

I leave his room and walk through the kitchen and out to the driveway. The ramp’s Masonite has softened in the rain and dried in the sun, hollowed out to a light, inconsequential material. I lift it right off the nails, intact, exposing the slurred grain of the wood beneath it, and break it into pieces and stuff them into the garbage can.

A few months later I’m walking the dog through the park when I see a car docked haphazardly at the Dumpster, someone removing boxes from the trunk. Neil. I call his name and he looks up and his expression of self-possession disappears and his face goes mute and tolerant. His shirt is tucked into his pants and his hair is cut short and gelled into ridges and there are tiny white buttons at the tips of his collar. I think his new respectability is touching. He was close to becoming someone else and chose against it. People generally accede to whatever will have them.

He tells me his father moved to the townhouses near the club. He’s living with his sister and working two jobs, and he names the places, warehouses.

“You should see all the product that’s returned!” he says. Sometimes he’s there all night, but he doesn’t mind. “The sky in early, early morning…it’s like a mirror.”