It has become one of the most consistent moments in my life. It defines my every move, action, thought, or result. It has become my eternal karma.
Will, Davis, and I rode our skateboards to the huge park several miles away from our homes on Georgia Street in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Will was always the shortest and smallest of our group. He had this beat up Notre Dame skateboard. The fighting Irishman on the bottom has always reminded me of the now Sergeant Chiron. He would bite you in the eye before he would quit on anything. I remember how decrepit the ends of his board were and how tattered his long baggy pants hung over the holes in his Vans. Davis went through puberty when we were nine. At least it seemed that way. He was never the smartest, nor the dumbest. He was always the most honest and integral, a step ahead of both of us on the experimental scale of things. Maybe it was because he had grown pubic hair, but he had always seemed so wise.
SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! We crashed down Melrose, past the wealthy mansions of senators and congressman, down the steepest hill in our neighborhood. There was no turning back once you committed, and it was so too easy to put your foot down to slow yourself. You could not see the end of the road below.
Will sat down on his board and laughed. "Y'all some bamas! I'm doing the super man!" Will spread his body on his stomach, it was not that much longer than the board itself. With his hands forward and his eyes closed, Will barreled down at what looked like a hundred miles per hour.
FRRRRRUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!! Davis and I's right feet skidded, hanging off the sides of our boards. Will encroached on the gauntlet, the moment when you realized if there was a car coming down the hill towards you. Beeeeppp!! Thtuckkkk!! I took up my foot, gaining speed as my adrenaline boiled in my heart. As the branches disappeared above, I could see Will lying on the side of the road, rolling back and forth. Davis was ahead of me, kneeling beside him. Will had lost control. Large sections of flesh on his stomach and face had scraped off his body. His pain. You could not help but smile; there was nothing to say. Whenever I would stub my toe on a chair, my grandmother would slap the chair back for me. I thought about kicking the concrete.
After a ten-minute recovery, Will went and found his board sticking out of a storm drain where the hill began to rise again. "Well, are we going?" He said. His white shirt was covered in blood. He took off his shirt, revealing his long red birthmark that already covered his torso. The cuts three dimensionalized the marks. If hell had ever broke from the clouds on someone's flesh, it was his stomach.
It smelled of summer camps, lonely housewives, sprinklers, and nothing to do but play video games. We were on a mission. Fishin.
Will splashed the stream water against his cuts. His shirt had become blood soaked, but he just sat there and laughed, pulling the now smushed bread from his pocket. "I'm telling you guys, all you need is some bread" Will stated happily. He was a crafty bastard after all. His parents never gave him much. They turned a computer monitor into a television set. They only got one channel.
"Will, are you sure you don't want to go home and clean yourself up?" Davis asked him.
"Shut up man. We're going fishing! It's just a couple of scrapes." Will responded to him angrily. If he was mad, you knew it because he clenched down on his jaw, showing you his green braces. He wore those things for a full decade. Maybe he just never wanted to grow up. Maybe his orthodontist ripped him off. Either way, I still picture him shooting his 50 caliber in Iraq, sparks flying off those green braces.
We sat on the edge of the stream at Candy Cane, our toes curled up in the mud to prevent us from sliding in. Like Huck Finn or some turn of the century hobos we tied string to the end of long sticks, bread tied on the end as bait. We tossed them in and Davis and I looked at each other, confused with our purpose that day.
Within seconds, Davis had a bite. There was no hook on the end, so when he saw the fish eating the bread he yanked the stick back. The fish jumped a little out of the water and then swam off. "Damn Will, you were right!" "Of course I was right! The thing you've got to do is that as soon as you get that fish on the end, you've got to fling it onto the shore," Will responded.
Within minutes we had each replaced our bread a half a dozen or so times. The fish literally sucked the bread like spaghetti, submerging it as soon as it hit the water. "There must be thousands of them down there," I yelled! With that, I climbed back up the bank and walked on top of the small bridge, looking down at Davis and Will. "I'll tell you when to pull up," I yelled! "Now!" Davis pulled back and the fish flew onto the bank. It could see the water from the side of its eye. The fish slapped the dirt, flung its tail, and then did it all over again. Davis and Will looked at the small fish with accomplishment, bent over its spasms.
I climbed back down to the bank, and we watched the fish gasp for breath. "It takes a couple of minutes," Will said. Our feet were planted into the mud. Our eyes were planted into the scales of the dying fish. Fish eyes are always stationary. To me it was dead already.
"It sure is taking a long time to die," Davis said. SMUUUUUUUUUMPTH! Will cracked the fish with a rock twice its size. The fish was cut, but still breathing. SMUUUUUUUUUUUUUMPTH! Will cracked the fish with the rock again. "Still breathing," I asked? SMUMPSMUMPSMUMPSMUMP!! Will rapidly mutilated the fish. We broke out laughing. We were possessed by some juvenile devil, that maniac who lives to ruine the lives of others who will never fully recover. On the other hand, those nerds and subjects may never know that evil in their veins.
An hour or so later we had murdered three-dozen or so fish. We were getting so good at it that it seemed the fish could be thrown off the string and into the swing of a stick, dead before even hitting the ground. We did not have a single bit of remorse for those fish, not to mention the fact that there were so many of them. "You'd think they'd tell their friends not to eat bread today," I joked as we all laughed, surrounded by our useless spoils. "We sure can't eat them," Davis said.
Around the bend, in the distance of the stream, a large bright light caught my eye. I had barely caught my breath from the last mutilation. Ahead, an enormous swan approached. "Look down there guys!" Will and Davis' heads and eyes shivered with that feeling you get as a child when your mother tucks you into your covers on a cold winter night. "This is a real target! I will be the best today," I thought to myself! I ran up the side of the bank again, grabbing a large boulder.
From on top of the bridge I waited. Davis and Will looked at me from below as I held the boulder off the edge of the railing. Vivaldi played in the distance. It burrowed its orange beak into its side, digging. The wake spread to either side of the banks, disappearing. Will giggled with laughter and I was encouraged as my hair stuck up on my neck and my top teeth dug into my bottom lip. The rock was so heavy. It felt like the bridge were to collapse if I were to start giggling any harder.
"I don't know if you should do that man," Davis said from the side. "Why not" Will asked? "It's just a fucking duck! Ducks are stupid," I yelled back at him! "Yeah, but look at it man. It's a swan," Davis responded. The swan must have grown twenty times its size in less than half that second. All of a sudden, it looked like a giant parade float coming straight at me to come crashing right through me and the bridge. "You're just fucking scared," I yelled at him. "It's the same thing as a fish is a tree is a caterpillar." The Vivaldi music began playing harder, faster, and softer as the swan looked side to side. The ripples, its perfectly round chest created tides that hit symbols and metal triangles. It seemed to be running on an engine of some sorts, propelling a full underwater symphony.
In that moment, my whole life ahead flashed before my eyes. It was like standing off the edge of a building, supported only by a cloud of quicksand. With a single breath, the cloud let me go. My lungs, heart, and inner cavities flew northward, thwarted only by the small shaft of my throat. The dirt fell from the sides of my hands. The swan made eye contact with me. It raised its beak in the air, thanking the heavens for rain on a 200 degree August afternoon. The rock plunged with our jaws, connecting with the head of the swan. Then everything sped up, reversed, and happened over and over and over.
Turning around, we saw that the boulder had connected solely with the swan's head. The body remained the same, and so did the swans course. Its neck had been broken, the head permanently submerged.
"That was wrong" Will said. I wanted to kill him for saying it, and I felt betrayed. Instead, we watched the headless ballerina float off into the sunset.
Ten minutes later, we walked home together. There was not much to say.
Sixteen years later, I sat in a bar with the now Sergeant 1st class Will Chiron. We had a bunch of beers and caught up on old times. "What's it like to kill a man," I asked him? Will had just returned from his third tour of duty in Iraq, and while I know people do not like to talk about war, I could not help myself. Will took a second to think about it. He was that same little kid with the Notre Dame skateboard, except we had grown older and he had shed all insecurities of adolescence. Originally, I attributed this to the hardships of war. He looked like he could walk across Times Square naked, the way he held that beer. He had seen it all over there, or so he told me.
"It's probably not as bad as that swan you killed in Candy Cane," Will responded. I was shocked that he would make the comparison, let alone remembered that moment. "You see, once you've taken something so beautiful, everything else becomes so much more forgivable. It must have drowned to death, you know? Every time I look at death, I think of that swan. You see....fish can only swim. Humans walk, run, and kill. Swans are so beautiful that they spend most of their time swimming, some of the time running, some of the time walking. But the thing it does the best, is to fly. There's nothing I ain't never seen worse than that bird drown to death. Can you imagine, you remember.......... There were those three ducklings a few yards behind it. How long you think they followed her down that stream before they gave up?"
