Don't Point That Thing at Me

Throw a Rock at My Head
His memories are painful. They come to him when he sits in the tub, cross-legged like a repentant yogi, the shower’s water coursing down his hairy skull into his face which hangs suspended over his knees. The water gets hotter and hotter, as per his fiddling with the spigots. His memories are like wounds and wounds always want to be washed out.
The first incident in the string of incidents, in the inextricably linked chain of events, took place many years ago a few hundred yards behind his family’s home, back in the woods and up a sunny hill. The sun came through the trees in carefully marked spots. All the children from the street found themselves drawn to the place, and they made their delicate way through the path, making sure not to make contact with the leaves and vines that leaned and tried to touch above a sock or under the hems of short pants. They contorted themselves cheerfully like modern dancers, twisting, existing in the wood, but never really touching it. Gordon was with them; he later became the man in the tub. They came to the water tower, which sat in its own bath of rough gravel. A drive led off to the street where the maintenance trucks could come through. There was a chain across the street entrance with a padlock that the children would sometimes swing on.
The water tank was squat but big. It was the biggest thing the children could imagine. One by one they came through the woods, and took their places, fanning out. Then they picked up chunks of gravel and threw them at the water tower. Smaller children had to stand closer than the older ones in order to reach the tank. It was made of metal, painted green, probably in order to blend in the woods. When the rocks hit, they made a lovely metallic liquid noise. The children, four little boys and two little girls, couldn’t get enough of this noise. They continually hoisted the sharp, powdery rocks and flung them, mostly haphazardly, at the tank and the tank rewarded them with its marvelous noises. The sound went on as long as their fat little arms could throw.
The two oldest boys left together. Then the two little girls left when they heard one of their mothers call shrilly into the woods. That left the two youngest boys, Simon and Gordon. Simon wandered close to the tank and looked in the gravel for gold or, failing that, pennies. Simon and Gordon were quite young. They were nearly four. They were best friends, Simon and Gordon, even if their parents couldn’t stand each other. Rather, Gordon’s parents couldn’t stand Simon’s parents. Gordon’s mother was a chippy and his father was a wage ape with his name on his shirt who thought he was the first to think of night school. Simon’s parents were identical to Gordon’s but without the ambitions and pretensions. Perhaps in twenty years, with raises all along, they would fall across some prosperity, by way of a will or a real estate valuation. But for now it was peanut butter sandwiches and kool-aid and cans of beer and spaghetti in that little house with the four kids. It was the same menu at little Gordon’s house, but his parents chewed without pleasure.
Little Simon rooted around in the piles of stones. Gordon wandered out to the track of green between the stones and the woods and looked out into the woods, away from the tank. He could only look at the water tank so long. It defied thinking. Gordon couldn’t imagine how it came to be and inhabit his woods. It was so big it wasn’t true. Once, they’d tried to run around it and became winded and so never tried it again.
Gordon’s stomach growled as one cloud after another passed overhead in the blue meaningful sky. He had found a break in the trees through which to look up. He wasn’t hungry. It’s just that his mother had given him a sweet cereal with milk over it and then a glass of chocolate milk besides. It was staying down but not without a fight. Simon shouted, just as Gordon spied a jay flitting on the limbs of a tree. The jay flew as soon as Simon called. Gordon turned to look, out of habit. Simon held a penny over his head. A penny was a piece of gum; everybody knew that. Simon was always lucky.
Gordon walked into the woods, but not too far, not without Simon. He found the right bush and took off a leaf and chewed it and tasted the mint.
“Watch out for Indians!” Simon called after him. Reflexively, Gordon looked around his feet for arrowheads. To Gordon, Indians represented nothing but triangular flints. So far he’d never found one. His father had some in a box, but he had none of his own.
The boys felt the earth turn. The light shifted in its journey through the tree tops to the ground, and the boys felt it and knew what it was. They wandered, not arm-in-arm but close by each other, discovering nests, spider webs, natural forts and overhangs. They pulled on exposed roots and chased squirrels. They heard the squeal of tires far off, and then the banging of a screen door pulled back hydraulically. Simon wandered back to the water tower. Gordon followed at his leisure.
“Throw a rock at my head!” Simon yelled when he got there, leaning back against the tower. He felt as though it might fall over on him. It felt cool and like powdery dried paint on his neck. He turned his little head and looked up at the top of it. “Ooh,” he said. Gordon ignored him.
Gordon was looking for his own penny, his own piece of gum.
“See if you can hit me, Gordie!”
“No.”
“Come on!”
“Mum said not to throw rocks.”
“What about the water tower?”
“Not even the tower.”
“But you just did! Come on.”
“No. You’ll get hurt and my mum will spank me.”
“No! Come on! Throw a rock at my head and then I’ll do it to you!”
“No.”
“Just me, then. Gordie, stand where you are and throw one.”
“What if it hits you?”
“You throw like a girl.”
Gordie picked up a stone by his feet and chunked it at Simon. It sailed, foot after foot, end over end, until it fetched up and made a bloody diamond on Simon’s forehead. Simon reached up and covered his head with his hands and tore home through the woods, screaming. The sound was loud at first, then moved on, the way ambulance or fire truck sirens will do. Gordie stood where he was, arms at his side, and wondered how it would come this time.

It is some time later, now. A season or two it seems, and in the intervening time Gordie has been subject to many a lecture about the throwing of objects: in the house, at the baby, at people, at glass, at mirrors. He seems to recall at least as many heated soliloquies about spitting, which is the more rewarding of the two by far, and a pursuit where Gordie may have rightly claimed his place among the savants.
Lately, he has been hanging spit over the baby on the floor or in the playpen and, then, just when it is about to let go and splash his little eager face, sucking it back up again. There is quite a lot of discipline required that his parents don’t seem to appreciate, but also quite a lot of failure, too. When it goes right and there’s no harm done, his parents still go crazy, which is beyond Gordon’s understanding of fairness. Simon’s brother Mike has been doing it to Gordon and Simon for years. Mike calls them Elevators.
The family is now on vacation for a weekend on Cape Cod and has survived a dreadful drive. Someone crossed the center line from the other direction and Dad in his existential agitation yelled ‘Donkey!’ It woke everyone up and they thought how this - all this! - could have been taken away just like that. But they finally found the place without further incidence. Dad has the trunk open in front of the cottage and he’s trundling bags into the house like a determined ant. The beach is more than ten miles away, which is further away than their home by the water tank. The baby sits strapped into his avocado chair and drools. Gordie kicks his restlessness into the gravel street, his Buster Browns having put in a whole school year. A few more months, and he will go back to the store for more feet pinching and another pair of Buster Browns. Buster had a dog, but none of the kids could remember his name. Julie, a little girl who lived three doors down and had a dog of her own insisted comically that Buster’s dog’s name was “Potato”. The man under the shower blubs happily at the memory.
Dad came out and hoisted more on his head and staggered into the cottage, regular as a second hand on a watch. Gordie looked the house over from the outside. The screens looked a lot dirtier than the ones at home. He’d already been inside and felt at the foot of his bed for sand. There wasn’t any. He was disappointed. There was a crushed can in the road, flat from the top down as though driven by a mallet, the style of which is used at carnivals for driving a steel puck up through slanderous descriptions. Gordie went into the road and picked it up. From inside the cottage his mother’s voice shrieked, “Did you look both ways?!” Gordie turned to the house in surprise and saw his mother’s face in the window behind a screen so dark her face looked, he reminisced later in the bathtub, like it had been wrapped in a winding shroud. Then she mysteriously backed away from the screen and became a shadow. Cabinet doors slammed shut inside the cottage, and bureau drawers that stank of mothballs squealed open. It was a deathly quiet residential road paved with gravel.
Gordie returned to watch his father untie more bags from the top of the car. The car had wings and Gordie’s dad could make it fly when he was sure Gordie’s eyes were closed. The car jolted to the ground when his eyes opened. He held the crushed can in both hands. It was still warm from the sun and dusty.
“Put that down!” his father barked, turning away from loosening a knot. “People spit in those.”
Gordie dropped it where he stood. His dad walked over dangerously. Gordie put his hands behind his back shyly. The hands were the first to get slapped. Instead Gordie’s dad kicked the can back into the street.
“We’ll get Chinese food if you behave.”
“Ucch.”
“Ice cream, then.”
Gordie straightened up exaggeratedly. He looked the lawn over. He perused the quiet neighboring houses. Everyone seemed to be at the beach. There were no signs of life: no pets, no children, no cars, no sounds. Across the street a stockade fence hid a house. A little head peeped over it.
“Hi!”
“Hi,” Gordie returned shyly. Gordie’s dad turned to look and didn’t answer. He brought some more things in the house.
“My name’s Tony,” the boy shouted. “What’s yours?”
“Gordie.”
“How old are you?”
Gordie can’t think what his age must have been, exactly, so he doesn’t remember what his answer was or what Tony’s age was. Tony said that he was restricted to his yard for doing something bad. If it was okay with his mother, could Gordie come over and play? Gordie called into the window. It was not okay with his mother. And Gordie’s mother forbad him to leave the little lawn and driveway of their own cottage. The conversation between the two boys, having exhausted their poor beginners’ memories of conventional chit-chat, degenerated thusly:
“Throw a rock at my head and see if you can hit it.” This was Tony.
Little Gordie looked at his hand and couldn’t think where he’d heard that said before. Repetition was nothing new to him though. His mother and father used the same fifteen sentences with him every day. Only when Gordie shifted up into his “Why?” gear were their answers unpredictable, nervous, dumb. But try leaving a demolished plateful of food on the table, try peeing without washing hands, try stepping off the curb without permission, try asking for a toy in a store, try pitching a fit, and his parents reacted with the easy grace of automatons.
“Come on, throw a rock at my head!”
“I’m not supposed to throw anything. Mum said.”
“What?” Little Tony missed what Gordie said when the car went past, followed by a hurricane of solid grey dust. The pebbles ground against the rubber tires and made a delightful growl. Gordie repeated himself louder and finished embarrassed. His father came out from the last load and listened.
“See if you can hit me!”
“No!”
“Come on! Don’t be a baby!”
“I’m not a baby!”
“Just throw a rock at my head.”
Tony’s talons could be heard scrabbling on the other side of the fence for purchase. All Gordie could see was a shock of black hair and three quarters of a face.
“It’s too far!”
But Gordie’s father took pity on him. Since the boys couldn’t play together, and there was only the weekend in the cottage they’d be losing this day. Gordie’s dad, Ernie, suspected Gordie’s mom, Clarisse, of turning Gordie into a sissy. Ernie wanted a future with Gordie wearing a letter jacket with a cheerleader on his arm, his class ring on a chain around her neck. He was not going to get it with the current regime.
“Go ahead, Gordie. One rock. It’s really a long way,” Ernie said.
“I don’t want to. I’m not supposed to throw rocks.”
“Oh, just one. You’ll never hit him.”
Gordie sighed wearily and shrugged his tiny shoulders like a miniature Frenchman. He dipped and came up with a good-sized rock.
“Come on, hurry!” Tony.
“Yeah, just one,” said Ernie.
Gordie pulled his arm back and let loose. The rock took off like a jet across the street and seemed to train itself on Tony’s face. It hit and Tony fell off his perch unseen and landed with a seismic thud that seemed to come under the street.
“Oh, no!” Ernie said, aghast. He looked down in horror at Gordie who, in turn, recoiled, expecting punishment.
On the other side of the street Tony in his yard let out a demonic wail that everyone would rather forget and made a beeline for his house, the door slamming cheaply and ominously behind him. Gordie and Ernie spent one second wondering what was going to happen. Then Ernie picked Gordie up and ran into their own cottage and bolted the door. He peeked out the window and looked down at Gordie who appeared to be slackening with shock.
“Chinese food!” Ernie announced, looking as though he might fall onto his knees. “Pick up the baby, honey. If we go now there’ll be no lines!” He picked up Gordie and raced for the car. There was no sign of life from Tony’s fence. It was as ominous as a fortress. Clarisse came slowly out with the baby. Before she could close her door Ernie had screeched back out into the street. Gordie looked out the back window until the cloud chased them down the street. He didn’t want to ever go back there again. He wanted to fly away in the car. Deliberately, he closed his eyes and they flew away. When they were in the sky, no one could catch them.
Gordon’s head hangs in the shower, now, water coursing over his head and down his shoulders. His eyes are closed. This, of course, was only one small piece of the puzzle.

Uncle Dynamite
uncletnt@gmail.com
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