nosound of water

jake jenkinsa midwestern lyric

NSOW

Copyright © 2013 by Jake Jenkins

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Natural History PressGreen Bay, Wisconsin

NO SOUND OF WATER

Jake Jenkins

A Midwestern Lyric

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Hot gold flakes pop and shower from the end of a sparkler, each one a tiny meteor crashing toward Earth and I guide them, slicing a cursive ‘J’ into the drought-dry air with two twists of

my hand. I am Prometheus, in miniature, standing and grinning fifty cents of toothlessness on a square of arid lawn with two squares on its right and left, each banked by their own neighboring lawns—all brown, all moisture poor to six inches below topsoil. I am an eager little fire bringer, hemmed in by tinder on all sides, gold flakes showering down to dead blades, to dead Earth waiting to be scorched.

In the Summer of 1988 there was no rain. We watched the water evaporate, away, into the air, Where it stayed.

The last receding wave A stannic breath between Our sun-warmed thighs.

Our eyes, our matching eyes,The dusty blue of cruel skiesWatch the whole word burn down.

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Monte Jenkins is a son of bitch, and, though I am only eight-years old, I have an adult-sized hatred of him. He is my stepfather and my moth-er’s biggest mistake. He was born a cancer, I’m sure, a five-foot-six-inch malignancy in a pocketed white tee; and, that summer, I watch the moisture weep from his pores and wonder: if the heat could kill the corn, could it kill him, too?

Even-numbered addresses may use sprinklers on even-numbered days from midnight to 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Odd-numbered addresses can use sprinklers between the same hours on odd-numbered days.

There was one green lawn that was owned by an old man whose name I never knew. He was always alone. He wore button-down white shirts and brown trou-sers, and his hair was uniformly grey with a straight part down one side. He used an unpowered push mower, planted flowers in tidy beds, and trimmed, by hand, the long grasses that grew around his cra-bapple tree. Crabapples leave purple bruises on un-suspecting necks. He turned on his sprinklers every day and at any time he wished. He must have been fined for it, but he must have been the sort of man who paid his fines.

Monte Jenkins has a hell of an arm. In high school he was a pitcher. Or was it a first-baseman? Or a short-stop? It doesn’t matter much. Either way—a hell of an arm. One day he asks me to play catch. It is the first and only time he ever will. I fetch my glove; it’s made of stiff, cheap leather, and on the back is a replica signature of Ryne Sandberg, a popular second-baseman for the Chicago Cubs. When Sandberg steps into the batter’s box his fans chant: Ryno! Ryno! I think they are saying

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Rhino. That is why I bought the glove. I would rather be a rhino than a baseball player.

The following is excerpted from a conversation that never happened:

- I’m in the backyard now. - Do you remember the backyard?- I do. But not him. Not then.- I don’t understand.- I remember the ball. I remember the glove. The

way it felt. And I remember his T-shirt. It’s real white. But I can’t see his face. I couldn’t tell you the expression he wore.

- But you remember the ball?- Yes.- Tell me about it.- It’s not quite a baseball. It’s like a rag ball, but

dense. It’s white, too, like the shirt, but not so clean. There are red seams.

- This is summertime, correct?- Yes, 1988, the year of the drought.- How long did you play?- How do you mean?- You and Monte. How long did you play catch?- Oh. Just one pitch.

The ball comes so fast I never see it leave his hand. I hear my nose crunch, like the dry grass underfoot, then Monte sighing two words, fucking faggot, before going back inside. I bleed, alone, on my knees in the center of the dead lawn, dripping wet blood on the thirsty ground, hemmed in by tinder on all sides.

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I would rather be a rhino.

Rhinos are classified as megafauna. Like elephants or hippopotamuses, they grow to weights well over a ton on plants alone. It should not be assumed that, because they are vegetarians, rhinos are light eaters. An Indian rhino will eat in excess of one-hundred pounds of food a day. That means one rhino could eat my entire lawn in less than twenty-four hours, and, by the end of the month, it would consume the neighborhood whole. In contrast to their enormous appetites, rhinos require relatively little water, often going several days without taking a single sip. Rhi-nos are drought-proof.

Monte Jenkins has a blue-collar charm. He dresses in white tees, jeans, and steel-toed boots, and wears his hair pushed back in a fifties-style pompadour. He is short but strong; his muscles, like cables, coil down

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his arms and terminate in compact, powerful, hands. Grease and grit make black crescent moons of his fingernails. He works as a mechanic on the floor of a chocolate factory where my mother is an office girl. She would have seen Monte first from the catwalk that ran above the factory floor. He would have reminded her of her father in both style and stature. She would have noticed his dark swagger, his mechanical competency, and, if she had looked close enough that day, his periwin-kle eyes, the eyes of Hermes, crackling with mischief.

On July 14, 1988, Ronald Reagan delivered a speech to a crowd of farmers and agriculture officials in Du Quoin, Illinois. Du Quoin, a town of 7,000, lay deep in corn country, and, like all Midwest farm towns that summer, was hit hard by the parching

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drought. Reagan, known for his comforting demean-or, was there to assure the people of Du Quoin that their government had not abandoned them. This stop was the latest of many he had made in the preceding weeks; town after town, Reagan had seen the brown Earth spreading wide, had seen the “stunted corn, [the] sparse bean fields, [and the] withered plants starved for water, struggling to push their way up.” In typical home-spun fashion, Reagan recalled an anecdote. This one involved Mark Twain, who, like Reagan, grew up in the Midwest. “Mark Twain was leaving church one Sunday morning with a friend,” Reagan said, “and it began to pour. And his friend asked Twain, ‘Do you think it’ll stop?’ And Twain looked up at the sky and [said], ‘Well, it always has in the past.’ I think we can say the same thing about the drought. Will it end? It always has in the past. But the question is: When will it end?” I had the same question as Reagan.

In the beginning, we are buddies.

My mother and I live in a small apartment in Downs, Illinois, just south of Bloomington. Sometimes Monte visits us there. When he does, he slings me onto his shoulders and flies me around the room until I’m screaming with laughter. Physicality is how Monte shows affection, and it is his affection for me that wins my mother over. A year later, they marry, and we leave our apartment to live with him in the yellow house on Low Street. Things change after that.

The following is excerpted from a conversation be-tween my mother and my first grade teacher:

- We’re concerned about Jacob.- What do you mean?- He seems bored. Listless. He struggles to stay focused.

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- He’s a young boy. Of course, he does.- Fair point. However, we still want him to come in

for some testing.- Testing? For what?- To determine, Mrs Jenkins, whether or not your son

has a learning disability.

Earl and Mabel Jenkins, Monte’s parents, do not value education. Earl is a grizzled old factory hound, and Mabel is an embittered house wife who has few aspirations for her son. At seventeen, Monte drops out of high school and, like his father, lands a factory job. Earl and Mabel will never see their son in a cap and gown, but, frankly, they couldn’t care less.

His name is my name, too.Whenever we go out,The people always shout—

The results of the test are in. Rather than the learning disability my teacher suspected, it is discovered that I have an exceptionally high IQ. For my mother, this means vindication. For me, it means that ev-eryday I will have to leave my school to go to another school and spend two hours in a cramped art room taking gifted classes with five other

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certified smart kids. Monte doesn’t understand why I need to go to two schools. I understand—it makes my mother happy—but I don’t like it. I am already having a hard time fitting in with my peers, so myste-riously disappearing for part of the day on a bus typically reserved for the handicapped students isn’t helping things. Suddenly, refrains of John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt sound in all corridors and from every corner of the playground. It is around this time, too, that Monte comes up with my new nickname: dummy.

Da da da da da da da—

The administration enforces a ban on water fountain use one month be-fore summer break. Students are expected to bring their own water from home, so each morning I fill a Gremlins thermos and carry it to school. Our teachers instruct us to take small drinks and make the water last. With two weeks of classes remaining, a sudden rain falls, and the ban is lifted. I put the thermos on the top shelf of my locker, where it sits for fourteen days. As the final bell rings students flood the hallways, tear open their lockers, and spill a year’s worth of accumulated papers onto the floors. The teachers, as relieved as we are to be done with the year, turn a blind eye to the ritual besmirchment of the campus. After empty-ing my own locker of mimeographed quizzes and half-filled notebooks, I grab the thermos and stick it in my backpack. Upon returning home, I shove the backpack into the corner of a closet, where it sits, thermos inside, until the following school year. During the summer it becomes clear that the sudden showers will not return, and the City, like the school board, enacts a series of bans on water use: car washes, public pools, water parks—all are impacted by the bans. In August, I retrieve my backpack from the closet and find my forgotten Gremlins thermos. It makes a sloshing sound. When I open it, a foul smell, like rotting cat-fish roe, gushes into the room. The abandoned water has gone stagnant and now is an incubator for a host of anaerobic bacteria and disease. I pour the spoiled water into the toilet and flush it down. Then I take the thermos out to the garage and bury it in the bottom of a trashcan.

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Monte Jenkins has a log in his eye. Mrs Orrick, the fireman’s wife, jogs the neighborhood each morning. Monte watches her and savors the im-age of her tight butt chewing on the fabric of her athletic shorts. Donna Marshall, the daughter of my babysitter, Jeanie, sunbathes on the dry grass, misting her body with saltwater. The beads collect and combine, pulled by gravity to the Earth, and coat her young skin. She glistens, and Monte charts constellations in her freckles—the Gods fuck pow-erfully in her Heavens. At the chocolate factory he sees a woman with glossy copper curls. She works the line in a pair of stone-washed jeans that snug against the soft ‘V’ of her crotch. She cannot wash the smell of chocolate from her hair. He watches her for months. She watches him back.

First of all, keep him out of the light, he hates bright light, especially sunlight, it’ll kill him.

Second, don’t give him any water, not even to drink.

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Stripe is the villain, but, secretly, I’m sad every time I watch him die. He is giving birth in a fountain—the water washing over him—and firing a pistol at Billy Peltzer to protect his babies. Gizmo pulls a curtain cord, dropping a heavy slab of sunlight on Spike’s laboring body. In water and sun, the flesh falls from him. He howls and oozes yellow-green goop into the fountain. The baby gremlins, bubbling on Spike’s back, die before they are born. Billy Peltzer wraps Gizmo in a scarf to guard him from the light, and he, and his father, and the girl next door, watch Spike disintegrate until there is nothing left but ligament and bone.

It is a slow collapse. At night I hear them fighting, their voices indistin-guishable beneath the chugging of the air conditioner. My mother has begun to notice every time Monte calls me dummy, or stupid, or faggot, and how he grumbles anytime I bring home an ‘A.’ One afternoon, she returns from work to hear Monte hollering. She follows the sound of his voice to the stairwell and finds him holding me suspended over the steps; he looks poised to throw me down. He laughs off her accusation, claiming that he was just frustrated with me—he can be such a smart ass, Virge, you know that. She has also become aware of the way Monte leers at the neighborhood women and the girls at the factory. Murmurs in the office die in the mouth whenever she enters a room. The summer before the drought my mother has a nervous breakdown and is hospital-ized for a week. When she gets back, Monte dotes on her and suggests that he should adopt me. A few months later, my last name is changed from Tibbs to Jenkins. Monte’s former affection rematerializes, but, like the sudden showers that fell in June, it doesn’t last.

1. The sale and use of fireworks within the City increases the risks of fires and the associated danger to public safety, public and private property.

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2. Both illegal (dangerous) and legal (common) fireworks as defined in 49 C.F.R. 172.101 are types of fireworks involved in fires within the City of Bloomington.

3. A ban on the use of all fireworks within the City is rationally related to the Council legislative purpose of reducing and or eliminating the risk of major property damage and risk to public safety which results from the sale, possession, and use of any fireworks.

Apple pulp plops on our shoulders. The smell of flash powder hangs in the air. Tommy Marshall, Jeanie’s grandson, and I find a coffee can full of M-80s in the Marshall’s basement and make busy blowing up anything we can get our hands on. Apples, a melon, several action fig-ures, a dead bird—none are safe. At the end of the day, we divvy up the remaining explosives to take back to our respective homes. Monte un-covers mine while rifling through my sock drawer, and, without saying a word, confiscates them. On the fourth of July, Low Street is packed with families returning from the fireworks display. Initially, there were to be no fireworks, but after an intense public protest, the Parks Department proposed a compromise whereby the mortars were to be launched from a pond-float to prevent falling embers from striking the ground. The city responded with a temporary stay of the ban, so the people got their show and are leaving, satisfied. We watch the cavalcade from Jeanie’s front porch. Monte has been drinking all day and it is apparent in his loose grin. He draws an M-80 from his pocket and smirks at me. Holding the explosive between his thumb and index finger, he lights the wick with a cigarette and lets it burn a little too long. As the spark vanishes into the cardboard tube, he lobs the M-80 into the street, where it detonates on contact below a passing car. My mother and the other adults jump. The car screeches to a stop; its driver looks around, confused and angry, thinking his car has just backfired, before driving off. Monte chuckles. His periwinkle eyes have never left mine.

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The following is a continued excerption from a con-versation that never happened:

-I made him up.-Who? -Monte. He is imaginary.-Why do you say that? -Because I could never see him. Not when we played catch. Not on the Fourth July. Not on the stairs. Not ever.-Yet you describe him so clearly.-The him I’ve created, yes. From fragments. His posture. His smell. His weight next to me as we sat on the couch. But not his face. I can never see his face. He was always in front of me but never there somehow.-And the periwinkle eyes? That detail is very specific. -Those aren’t his eyes.-Then whose are they?-I don’t know, but not his.

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A Rhino’s eyes are deeply set into fatty, folded eye-lids; they are tiny, myopic, and ineffectual. Stand still before a rhino, and it might never see you. Smell, touch, taste; all of these senses are highly at-tuned—all but sight. Though, a rhino can discern your scent on the slightest wind, feel your footfalls thumping afar on a dry plain, or lap the air to pull down a smatch of sweat perspiring on your brow; make no movement and you are nothing to it but a static gray blur in field of gray blurs.

My mother steps out of the car. Wisps of air-conditioned air eddy off her sun-burnt shoulders to be cooked in the August heat. The rain has still not come, so when she crosses the dry lawn it shatters beneath her feet. I am not home. I am with my grandparents eating Scwhann’s ice cream sandwiches and playing Rummikub. She is not supposed to be home, either. She is supposed to be on a weekend getaway with some girls from the office. Why she left them, I am not sure. Perhaps, she was not in the mood to play-act easy joy with a group of near-friends and acquaintances. So she returns road weary and sun worn to the yellow house she shares with Monte and me. Standing in the kitchen, she drops her bags and in the silence hears above her the sound of dry-rot wood groaning under a shifting strain. She climbs the stairs, and the air thickens, fat with moisture and stinking of sweat. Heavy grunts float to her like stannic bubbles in a smelting cauldron. She opens the door to see copper curls, damp and falling, and Monte’s small, strong hands gripping a pale, foreign flesh.

Hot gold flakes pop and shower from the end of a sparkler, each one a tiny meteor crashing toward Earth and I guide them, slicing a cursive ‘J’ into the drought-dry air with two twists of my hand.

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Monte leaps from the bed, his dark pubic hair glazed in semen and sweat. The girl from the factory cowers behind him, her copper mop hangiing like wilted cornsilk on a brown, dead stalk. I wonder if my mother saw him then, or, if in that moment, he was to her as he had al-ways been to me: fragments of posture, weight, and smell—a grey blur. She tells me, when I am still too young to hear such things, that in that moment all she felt was rage, so she kicked him hard in his wandering cock, and left him to weep, a wet lump on the bedroom floor.

Our eyes, our matching eyes.

Hemmed in by tinder on all sides. Three more cursive letters carved into the sky. My name dripping sparks onto the lawn. The embers catching and enlivening the grass. Browns and yellows leaping into graceful, elemental red flames. The Gods howl. Prometheus stole fire from Hermes, its creator, and bequeathed it to Man. Now it burns the whole world down. I run inside to fill a stock pot with water from the kitchen tap. Back at the lawn, I cast water into flame. It quenches it not, just pushing it out in broadening circles. Back to the tap and out again as the fire spreads to the concrete limits of the lawn. But there isn’t enough water. There is never enough water. The fire burns until there is no more fuel, no more oxygen, and leaves grey ash to whirl, a blur in the drought-dry air. ‡

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Natural History PressGreen Bay, Wisconsin