Tim Tomlinson (USA)
All week, every week, it was games games games. Flipping baseball cards—topsies, leaners, knock-downs, nearsies. Stoopball, wiffle ball, catch-a-fly-you’re-up. Touch football, tackle football, rough tackle, kids limping home bruised and bleeding from the nose and lips and knees, their mothers shouting threats at the older kids who’d done the bloodying. War—in backyards, the woods, the new developments along North Country Road. World War, Civil War, Cowboys and Indians, bombings, shootings, stabbings, scalpings. Or it was card games. Black jack, five-card stud, follow the bitch. Crazy eights, pinochle, knock rummy. Or Knuckles—winners gouging the knuckles of the losers’ hands with the deck’s hard edge, scraping skin, drawing blood, exposing meat and tendon. The beach. Diving between Big and Little Barnacles, splashing, dunking, holding heads under. Sand in the bathing suits, rock fights on the bluffs. Halloween. Toilet paper, shaving cream, eggs, spray paint—satin black and gloss white, the filthiest curses across clean garage doors, picture windows, the side panels of vans, and the hoods of new cars. Dirt bombs, crab apples, pine cones, peach pits. If you could pick it up, it could be thrown, and you threw it. Knocking mailboxes off their stands, ripping flowers from their stems. Piss rings in the middle of the road, on fresh asphalt driveways. Checkers, chess, Stratego, Risk! Marathons of Monopoly, the racing car, the battleship, the magic hat, never the wheelbarrow or the ridiculous faggot thimble. Hide-and-seek, tag, Twister. The boredom, the endless hours of it, and the pent-up energy ready to explode.
Sunday afternoons: the NFL on black and white TVs. Colts against the Giants, Cleveland at Green Bay. Huff, Gifford, Bart Starr, Johnny Unitas, and Jim Brown. Jim Brown. Jim Brown. Taking the hand-off, slamming through lines, rushing through the middle, sweeping around ends, knocking over tackles, shaking off guards, straight arms, broken field, driving forward, thudding forward, plowing into and through one opponent, another, never going down, legs furiously pumping, six seven eight hundred pounds of defense hanging from his shoulders and hips, their asses dragged into the end zone.
Followed by: pro wrestling. Dick the Bruiser, Haystack Calhoun, Bobo Brazil, Killer Kowalski. The Valiant Brothers. The Wild Samoans. The choke, the sleeper, the crossface, the bear hug. And me and Wally at the commercials, jumping up and down on the loveseats, Mom shouting Quiet! from the phone she was always on. Keep it goddamn down, she screamed, stamping her foot, clenching her fist, which we gleefully ignore, slamming our imaginary opponents, the cushions, onto the floor, flying knee-drops into their thick centers, stomping, pummeling, punishing them until stuffing bursts through the seams. Then we take on each other. The hammerlock, the half-nelson, the claw, the gouge, the forearm smash. Flinging pillows like ninja stars, aiming the hard piped corners at each other’s eyes, and when those land and blind or scrape or cut: wild fury for real! Pinching scratching punching biting. Body slams. Ornaments rattling off the windowsills, shattering on the hardwood floor. We bounce off the TV console, upend the coffee table, potato chips and black cherry soda flying onto the brand new braided rug.
And that’s when Mom blows in, arms flailing, shrieking you son-of-a-bitch-bastards. What did I tell you, what did I tell you, what did I tell you when I’m on the phone? Chasing us around the debris, down the hall, into our room, her fists tomahawking the arms we hold up to protect our faces. She turns to the closets, wrenches back the doors, rakes every single thing off every single shelf, the board games the baseball gloves the library books the army men the toy guns and rifles and arrows and bows. She tears the drawers from dressers and flings the underwear and tee shirts and dungarees. From the walls she rips posters—Roger Maris, Jim Brown, Bruno Samartino. And in the midst of the wreckage, she croaks, “Now you clean this shit up,” her breath short, her throat shred raw. “And I better not hear a sound, not one sound. Do you hear me?” she shrieks. “And don’t you dare say a word about this to your father. Don’t. You. Dare.”
And we won’t.
In silence we study the wreckage, the wild chaos of it. Where to begin? The army men, the chess pieces, the marbles. The Monopoly board torn in half. The shattered piggy bank, coins still spinning. We nudge the junk into a pile. Lumped together it looks comical, absurd, nothing retains its purpose. It’s just wreckage. An Ernie Banks baseball card. The fuselage from a model aeroplane. A black rook from the chess set.
In the kitchen, Mom is back on the phone. It’s like she never got off. We mimic her. This is Mom on the phone, I whisper. I twirl a finger in my hair and stare blankly. You don’t say! She said that? So what did you say? Wally goes into his act. He makes Mom angry. The slapping and smacking and tomahawking. The shrieking, the gagging, clutching his throat. At her back he aims the hand signs he’s learned in fourth grade: the finger, two fingers, the palm slapped against the forearm, the fist curled at the mouth. These, he explains, mean fuck you, take two and chew, up your ass, and blow me.
Your turn, he says.
I say, My turn what?
He says, You do Mom.
I say, Do Mom how?
He says, Do Mom happy.
And at that moment it occurs to us: we don’t know what a happy Mom looks like. We look at each other for what feels like a minute, maybe two. Then we don’t look at each other. We don’t dare. Quietly, carefully, we finger through the mess Mom’s made. We look for anything that’s not broken.