Winged Shoes and a Shield. Don Bajema

He looked at me like I was stupid. He said, “I’m looking for love, something bigger than my life.”

      DASHBOARD

      “What the fuck should I be trying to write lines for?” He wiped the running nostril awkwardly with the heel of his hand. His drunken eyes focused on the grimy visor over the filthy dashboard. The 1949 Ford truck bounced over a series of potholes. The drunk’s eyelids took a second and a half to raise and lower over his wet red eyes. He turned to the driver. “I can’t even play guitar.” He thought this remark was very funny. He managed a slack smile to show the driver he got his own joke.

      “Can’t sing, either. Wish I could, but. . . .” He shook his head with sloppy emphasis, “I can’t.”

      His shoulders twisted to his side window. He stuck his head outside the cabin, looking backward down the road. He pulled his head in again, swung himself back around, and faced the dashboard. He stared coldly for a long moment, then examined the floor of the truck cabin, muttering, “I know that fuckin’ bitch.”

      Looking into his rearview mirror, the driver caught a long-legged girl stumbling in her blue jeans and red jacket. Her boots kicked up small stones and dust. The driver down-shifted, let up on the gas, backfiring the truck, pressed his sweaty palm on the steering wheel and spun it counterclockwise from ten to two o’clock. The drunk’s weight pressed on his door. Afraid his passenger would fall out, the driver grabbed a handful of sweaty yellow T-shirt and yanked against the centrifugal force.

      The driver straightened the wheel, ground the gears into third, saying “Fuck,” and began to accelerate. The truck jumped forward, lost some of its traction on the dirt road and slid from the far right shoulder to the far left. A here-comes-a-rowdy-farm-boy cloud of brown dust billowed behind the tailgate. Irrigation ditches sat deep on either side of the road and cattails began waving from side to side in the brown air as the truck continued to gain speed.

      The driver punched into fourth gear. The truck did what it had going into third. The accelerator remained flat on the floor. “Stand on the maafucker, Lyle!” the drunk hooted.

      Lyle asked the drunk who the girl was. “The biggest slut in El Cajon,” muttered the drunk, his high spirits disturbed by something. “Ya fuck her?” inquired Lyle. “Yeah, sure, once — me an’ about twenty other guys.”

      The driver smiled to himself. He straightened his elbows back from the steering wheel, pressed his weight against the back seat and hit the brakes with one serious jolt. The drunk didn’t have a chance. He had been looking at the buttons on his Levi’s. Completely vulnerable, he flew forward. His skull jammed into the corner where the windshield met the dashboard.

      During this micro-second, he was thinking clearly. He heard the voice in his head say “dashboard.” His memory provided a total recollection of his aunt’s farm in Oklahoma. He hadn’t seen the place in fifteen years. He remembered her grating voice whining, “Clifford, you be careful on that swing. . . .” He could feel the warm summer wind blowing across his aunt’s front yard. He could feel the gravity and release of the rope swing he was pulling against. He could see the blue sky and his little-boy knees, bare and skinned. He saw a dirty white tape bandage on his left big toe, which he held just a little bit higher than his other dirt-encrusted foot, both pointing directly into the sky. He heard his aunt cough, clear her throat, and finish her warning, “. . . or you’ll just dash your little brains out.”

      Clifford’s head wobbled on his broken neck. His arms flapped awkwardly; a giant blood blister formed like a bruised peach over the mushy crown of his head. His ear hit the wind-wing support bar and sent blood splattering out the window and over the back of the bench seat. He shit his pants, in a single convulsive explosion; a huge volume of piss firehosed down his pant leg. His legs slid to the left along the floor, knocking Lyle’s feet off the pedals. His paralyzed body flopped lengthwise on the floor.

      Lyle tried frantically to kick the heavy legs off the brake and accelerator pedals. He screamed when he realized the truck was describing a slow arc with the front of the hood falling. He tried to remember the position of the wheel, but it didn’t matter. The truck, in a solid bounce, crammed into the ditch on the left side of the road. Lyle’s forehead sent a shower of broken glass into the air. His head popped through the pre-safety-plate glass windshield and snapped off on the bottom of the jagged hole. His head bounced once on the fender near the left headlight, right next to the spot wiped clean by the jeans of the girl he thought he loved, and had just seen in his rearview mirror for the second time this morning.

      The girl paused as she noticed an abrupt end to the brown cloud of dust leading diagonally across the field to her left.

      She wondered what the boys in the truck were stopping for. She shrugged and kept stumbling down the road.

      BOY IN THE AIR 2

      You would have to have been in that stadium, and heard the echo every time the gun went off. You’d have to have been in the bottom, on the black asphalt with the white lines setting the limits of the lanes and the beginnings and the ends. You’d have to have been sensitive to the irony of the black surface and the ruled white lines — and somehow linked it all with an appreciation and awe of the threat to you, and the promise to all of black athletic talent.

      You’d have to have been there twenty-five years ago when cities ignited, fists were clenched in love and in hate, and at the same goddamn time. You’d have to have red hair, be thin with milk-white skin tinted orange from the hot spring sun of this border town in the southwestern corner between the Mexican border and the blue Pacific.

      You’d have to be thirteen years old and dreaming of a national record in the running broad jump as they called it in those days. You’d have to be consumed with the knowledge that some kid in New Jersey had jumped 19 feet 3 inches. You’d have to accept that you were the unchallenged best jumper out of thousands of kids, except black ones, by jumping just over 17 feet. You’d listen to Keith Richards, or some other Delta blues imitator, and understand as you heard “King Bee,” that the line could be crossed in expression, but the mystery of color would never change. You’d have heard of another white rocker who just had to be named Tripp. Arnold Tripp who had been king of it all just ten years ago. Tripp the fastest boy in San Diego whose career was dumped at the state meet, when the coaches raced him on a torn hamstring — because they wanted someone to beat the niggers. They had their Tarzan. You’d have to hate both of the words, Tarzan as much as nigger. You’d still have to bring your white skin with you to the starting line, and snort in contempt at the attitudes of both colors when the resentment came from the blacks, and racist encouragement was offered from the whites.

      You’d have to be in a stadium that echoed not only with the sound of pistol shots, but also with the sound of girls’ voices high and wild with humor and sexual anticipation as they waited for Louis Rey to take his next jump. You’d have to be sitting on the grass in the blazing sun at ten o’clock on a May morning looking indirectly at and listening intently to the conversation directed at a boy your own age, who came from a world with ten times the life and death of your own. Sitting there on the grass listening to the most beautiful girls in the world, gleaming white teeth, almond eyes, dark tanned deep black skin, tight skirts, white angel blouses that had heavy breasts bursting light and perfect under buttons that split and revealed black skin — and those shoes.

      You’d see Louis Rey (no one ever called him just Rey, or just Louis, because he was Louis Rey). Thin and muscular with large bugging eyes and a snarl for a mouth when he wasn’t smiling and hair that was becoming an Afro, skin oiled to a shine and every bit the urban Masai warrior walking proud and defiant, dominant and beautiful, and better than you at what you wanted to be best at more than anything in the world. You’d watch him intently because you had enough of it yourself to know what a genius looked like, but not what one acted like, as you waited for your next jump. You’d watch the girls in the stands who were at one moment on the coolest nonchalant trip, unconcerned and casual, and the next instant spreading their legs right in the twentieth row laughing and telling Louis Rey they had something for him. Louis Rey was smiling and promising all of them a ride in his brother’s car. Sharing