RING ON BONE

 They say things come in threes. Some kind of explanation for a string of bad luck, or good fortune, whichever.

I don’t know about all that stuff.

 But I do know that the summer before junior high, three things happened one night that, for me at least, are all glued up together. Even though I wanted to think that the men walking on the Moon was a good thing and the things with Whitey Bell and my dad were the bad, it turned out that they were all rolled up with each other, like kernels in a cornball on a hot day. You’ve had one, maybe strolling around the fairgrounds or dumped in your trick or treat bag wrapped up in cellophane. No matter how many times you lick your fingers, some is still stuck. Gummed up and leaving a mark on everything and everyone you touch. At least that’s how it’s been for me every day since that night—especially the everyone part. My whorled fingerprints showing I was there. That, and a bit of my dirt left behind.

I don’t like making a mess, so I tried to shove it all away. But the harder I worked at it, the bigger it grew, picking up all kinds of stuff along the way, and the uglier it got, black with all the layers of shit that comes with living. Inedible, and still stuck to my hands no matter how hard I shook.

***

 First off, like I said, men walked on the Moon.

 Let that sit for a minute. Right there.

Step back and eyeball that fact.

 Don’t move on just yet. Read it again if you need to.

Now, do you see?

If you still can’t comprehend, get up, open the door, step outside into the night, and look up. Study it. Now, can you see her dancing across the sky, draped in her elegant phases and dripping with silver dust? That’s her, a fashion diva, sometimes a disc bright and bold and then, weeks later, thin as a whisper. But, all the while, bull strong. Tirelessly driving all the tides, pushing and pulling entire oceans at will.

And, somehow, after a couple million years scrabbling around in the dirt, and most of that time running around in skins and carrying a club or a rock, men lifted into the sky riding a cylinder of steel, left Earth and its gravity behind, traveled through empty space, and walked on the surface of the Moon. Embedding their footprints in the dust.

Some say it never happened. They say it’s a hoax made up to fulfill Kennedy’s promise played out on a secret Hollywood stage set, or in the desert at Area 51, with the actors sworn to silence or dead. I don’t believe that. I watched it happen from my backyard and, anyway, the proof is right there. On the Moon. The only way to make it not true would be to erase what they did. Not from our minds—but, instead, actually return to Tranquility Base and rub the prints back into the grey dirt. And I don’t think the naysayers have the guts to do that, so the proof will be there for as long as the Moon orbits the Earth. Basically, forever.

Then, and this is the coolest thing. The men came home.

***

I’m glad they went, and really glad they came home, but the whole thing had me torn up for a long while because of what else happened that night. The what else came to make me believe that our intrusion on the Moon on July 20, 1969 irrevocably disturbed the billions of years of peace that had existed on that solitary sphere. That stepping on the Moon’s surface was something so momentous, that the stepping was itself responsible for what happened next. That it shifted everything. Rent a tear in the fabric of what we believed possible, letting us peek inside places that had been off limits and forbidden. In fact, I’m certain that it triggered something the exact opposite of good. As opposite as the bright side of the Moon is to the dark.

I found out the morning after. When I came into the kitchen, Mom was up too, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, and reading the paper. It was early and I wondered whether she had had trouble sleeping, but I knew better than to ask. She was my mom, not my friend.

I made myself a bowl of cereal and milk and was halfway through it when she stubbed the cigarette. Rubbed it out on the coffee saucer, leaving it there, the filter bent and smeared red with lipstick. Then, she looked at me over the top of the paper, and asked whether I knew the albino boy.

That’s what she called him. The Albino Boy.

Turned out that while the entire world was busy peering up at the sky, trying to fathom that men were walking on that shining sphere, Sarge Bell’s grandson did something I can’t ever let go thinking about. Well, I don’t really aim to think about it. It just creeps in from the side, peering at me from around a shadowy corner, maybe looking with one eye through that rip made by the Moon Walkers, and then there it is, big and looming. Throwing its darkness over everything. And it’s just about all I can do to shrink it down and shove it away, back into the black night where it belongs. Except it’s so ugly I don’t even want to touch it so I can shove it back. Consequently, it stays right there for a good long while. Vibrating.

The truth is, I’m kidding myself. I never am able to shrink it down. I just pretend I can.

 Right now, when I’m supposed to be telling you about it, I want to but can’t barely cough up all the right words. Maybe I swallowed all the right words long ago. Maybe I puked them up when she read what it said in the paper and I flushed hot and ran out the back door, barefoot and all. Barely made it to the weeds.

The most I can say is that it happened out back of Sarge Bell’s Fire Ball Garage. In the old grey barn, the one with the shadow of the tobacco advertisement on the side facing the road, calling out in faded whitewashed letters, “TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST.”

The county fair had shut down and the tent stakes had been yanked and the carneys and their red trucks that were painted up with clown faces and stars, all blue, white, and yellow, had just pulled out of town. Like they needed to sneak away after promising something to everyone and failing to come through. Leaving the field grass flattened and yellow, and a grid of dusty paths where the fairways had been between the tents and rides. The scattered litter of pointed corn dog sticks, wrappers, and smashed cups. There in the empty field that night, someone said they saw the Sarge’s grandson, Whitey Bell, walking alone and cutting towards the Fire Ball. At least, they were pretty sure it was him, seein’ how his face was lit up with the Moon and he was alone.

Here’s the long and the short of it. Whitey and his mom and dad moved to town a couple of months before. Just before school ended. The kids made fun of him just because of the color of his skin, his white crinkly hair, and his pink eyes. Well, fun isn’t the right word. It’s too nice for what they did. It might have been better if they had just hit him. Instead, they pretended to ignore him but then laughed and stared over their shoulders after he walked by. He was just a little skinny kid. That’s all. And, he always sat alone. With a big show, kids would move their desks away, letting them screech across the floor and then look around, grinning for approval. He didn’t have a single friend. He never said anything in class and the teachers never called on him. Maybe they didn’t want to put him more in a spotlight than he already was. Or maybe they were afraid of him. They would never admit it, but I think they were afraid, because people, even adults—mostly adults—are afraid of things they don’t understand.

Anyway, I’ll just say it.

 The night the fair closed down and men walked on the Moon, eleven-year-old Whitey Bell hung himself with a rope from the rafters in his grandpa’s barn behind the Fire Ball Garage.

I don’t like to do it, but if I try, I can force myself to be there with him in that dark barn watching him hold the rough sisal in his hands, knot it and toss it up over the oak beam, his decision long ago made, but him probably still hesitating—maybe even standing there for a long while with it around his neck—until there came a point when it was easier to step off instead of thinking about it anymore. Imagining it that way makes me feel dirty. Like I said, it creeps in from the side, peering at me from around a shadowy corner. My own eye looking back at me through that rip made by the Moon Walkers in the curtain between what we know and the rest of everything. But then, somehow, it comes to me that worrying about how it makes me feel is disrespectful to Whitey and his decision, and I am ashamed to be looking at what happened so close. It’s part of that filthy cornball I was talking about. He never invited me or anyone else to be there. In fact, I doubt he ever even knew I existed because I never gave him a chance to know me.

Puts me right back in the kitchen with Mom looking at me over the top of her paper, the spilled coffee in the saucer staining brown what was left of her cigarette, and her reading what it said, her voice flat like some kind of news reporter, and the hot flush sweeping over.

See, I had made a plan. I was going to knock on his door and ask him to come over and play slot cars or watch TV. But I kept putting it off. So, instead of him coming over and me offering him some chips and a Coke, he died all alone in that barn. It felt like I had strung the rope around his neck and pushed him off the hay loft myself. When I think of how lonely that boy was, and him having to leave his house every morning to face the kids at school, it still turns my stomach. Still can’t abide the taste of Cheerios.

All I needed to do was just reach out. Be his friend that summer.

 I try to tell myself that I don’t know why I didn’t. But I can’t because that’s not the truth. The truth is that I was worried the other kids would laugh at me too. Or move their desks away. I’m near seventy now and still ashamed of myself for that. So ashamed that a few times right after it happened, I thought about how it should have been me swinging from the rafters and I even told someone that. A school counselor. She sat there in her office, with the plants along the sunny windowsill and me sunk down low in the big soft chair and said I should forgive myself since I was only eleven and that I didn’t know the whole story and what was going through Whitey’s mind that night, and what his life was really like. I shook my head like I understood, but I knew she was just trying to help me feel better. I knew I was the one to blame because I could have prevented it and didn’t because I lacked courage. Turns out that lack of courage is a theme in my life.

Anyway, that’s it. Whitey is still dead and I blew my chance to be his friend. I don’t really want to talk about it anymore.

It’s the third thing from that night that I want to talk about. Though, like I say, all this stuff about things coming in threes is bullshit. The third thing came and then, dammit, the fourth followed right along after. And then the fifth, and then all the others the rest of my fucking life.

***

 I was standing in our backyard around dusk before the MoonWalk, before the carnies pulled up stakes and left town, and before Whitey walked across the empty fairgrounds to his grandpa’s barn. Hours before the possibility of me saving him evaporated and everything got stuck together and dirty. It was the quiet time with day fading into early evening. My favorite. Head back, arms at my sides. The deep blue-black sky domed above. The summer crickets sounding off and the lightening bugs just coming out, blinking in the high weeds past our lawn and before the woods. I remember being there in the center of the green grass of the backyard, beyond the picnic table and Dad’s smoking Weber grill.

The Moon was a three-quarter crescent, floating. I could feel its light blearing on my face. Then, without me looking, I knew Dad was there. Behind me. In uniform. White tee shirt, pressed khaki slacks, polished old black combat boots. Except for a beer in hand, him a taller and older mirror image of me. Our crew cut heads tilted back and looking at the Moon.

After a bit, I asked what I had been wondering. “Think they're looking back at us? Don’t you think they want to be back here? Home?”

He sipped his beer before he spoke.

 “Don’t be a dumbass. All they’re thinking about is how much air is left in their tanks, and watching out they don’t trip on a rock or poke a hole in their pressure suit. Guys like that don’t get homesick. They don’t have time.”

A car pulled in the drive, gravel crunching. My aunt, uncle, and cousins.

 ***

 Dad grilled steaks and burgers and hot dogs for the kids. He and his brother stood by the coals glowing red and drank beers while Mom and my aunt set out coleslaw and chips. The Moon glowing silver. A few scattered stars, most drowned out by the light. Tiki torches throwing flickering light on us squeezed together at the long picnic table.

After we ate, we went inside. Dad switched on our big pecan wood console black and white TV. Like always, it was tuned to CBS and from a pinpoint in the center of the grey green screen, Walter Cronkite emerged. He took his glasses off. For a minute, I held my breath because I thought he was gonna cry. Glanced at Dad to see what I should do because I had never seen a man cry before. But then Cronkite spoke and I turned back to the TV. I can still remember what he said. Can quote it word for word.

“Now man has prevailed. He's landed on the moon, he's stabbed into its crust; he's stolen some of its soil to bring back in a tiny treasure ship. To perhaps unlock some of its secrets. The date's now indelible. It's going to be remembered as long as man survives—July 20, 1969—the day a man reached and walked on the moon.”

Those words and the rest of that night are burned in my memory. I’ve relived it again and again trying to unlock its secrets—to split that cornball in half and see what it’s really made of, what makes it stick to me so hard. How a good thing got so dirty.

***

Dad and his brother leaning forward with the TV glow on them. Elbows on knees, lean, buzz cut, cans of Schlitz. Mom and Aunt Betty in summer shift dresses and white short-heeled pumps. My cousin Mary. Sixteen, her parted long straight brown hair framing her face. Folded up on the couch, feet tucked underneath her bell bottoms. A sunrise embroidered on each pocket. My sister, a smaller clone, on the other end of the couch, glancing at Mary and adjusting her posture to match.

And the two twin boys, wrestling on the floor and then the aluminum screen door slamming when they ran out. I followed them and jumped off the porch. They were chasing fireflies.

That’s when I fucked up.

 Yeah, I fucked up. I dragged the rusty swing set seat by its chain across the grass, laughing and whooping, with the cousins chasing and, like a stupid 11-year-old Pied Piper, I led all of us right through the loamy garden Dad had spent the afternoon weeding, raking, and planting. The soil so soft. Our feet sunk deep, leaving behind our footprints and a tangle of twine and scattered seed packs that used to mark the rows. Yeah, I fucked up.

Suddenly he was there. I couldn’t see his face. Just his hands on his hips, surveying the wrecked garden. I dropped the chain. The cousins scattered. I don’t think he knew what to do, so I think he just said the first thing that came to mind. To give him time.

“Go to your room.”

He followed behind me into the garage. I remember the smell of mildewy concrete and the moths flapping wild around the hot white bulb.

And even today, I still feel the knot on the back of my head and the crack of his thick gold ring on my skull.

Ring on bone.

 I guess he had figured out what to do. Or it just came naturally to him. For me, it came out of nowhere. He never broke stride. I stumbled, pitching forward on the smooth concrete. But I didn’t fall. And I didn’t cry. I didn’t say anything.

Neither did he. Not then.

Not ever. 

***

The trouble is that when I became a man, I noticed that whenever other men stood too close, especially behind me, my heart would thud and my breath would go shallow. Perfectly nice, well-educated men who meant me no harm. I would be in a conference room and some guy in a suit would walk behind my chair and I would flinch.

Long after my own son had grown up, I finally put two and two together. It didn’t make it any better.

Even then, I still couldn’t help myself. I would touch the back of my skull and remember it all. It was like I needed to remind myself of it. Stupidly worrying a wound through my thinning hair. Again and again. That didn’t help either. It hurt the same each time. Maybe more.

But then he died and the last time I came back to the old house to check on everything before we put it up for sale, something happened. Maybe it was him finally gone. Or, I had given up trying and the giving up is what it took. Maybe I was just tired of it all. See, Dad had refused to leave that house and with Mom gone, the place was falling down around his ears. Needed a new roof, three burners on the stove shot, and the bathroom smelling like urine from him missing the bowl. See? No matter how hard I scrubbed, it wouldn’t come clean.

By the time I finished loading the last boxes and broom-sweeping the floors, it was after dark and I walked out in the backyard to stand there again, like I used to, and watch the fireflies blinking in the high weeds. Hoping to find something good. After a bit, I gave up and walked back through the garage for the final time to lock up, the single blub still blaring its lonely light across everything. That’s the moment I wondered what might have been if, after stumbling forward from the blow, I had turned to face him and asked, “Why do you think you have a right to hit me?”

***

His face flattens and lips scramble for words. “You deserved it.”

I step closer. I smell the beer. “You didn’t answer my question. My question was about you, not me.” I take a deep breath. “Why do you think you have a right to hit me?”

He draws back but I reach forward quick and grab his wrist. It feels softer than I expect. I’ve never before held my father’s wrist. I stroke the back of his hand with a finger. His balled- up fist relaxes and his hand opens like a flower, the petalled fingers spread and his ring catches the light from the bulb. He steps back.

Away from me.