Blue Aviary

CHAPTER THREE-1

CHAPTER THREEIt was dark and I was dreaming of sleep. Dreaming of sleep is not the same as sleeping. If you’re sleeping and dreaming of sleep, you have settled into a doubly deep abyss, pleasant and lingering. I stared up at the ceiling, noticing the cracks.

I remember one morning when I was six. It was a moment of discovery, where dreams and reality mingle. I pushed my cheek against the pillow and rolled my head just enough to allow one eye to open a sliver.

A glint of blue light settled on the lower sash of my window. Cowboy crowed in his emerging baritone. It was early sunrise on a late summer morning. It struck me then, I was dreaming in color, because sunrise is often yellow, or orange, or even blue, but that night I had laid awake, awaiting its arrival.

Sunrise on a Friday, Zach’s second favorite day. Friday was special to Zach for only one reason: it was next door to Saturday, a day without school, without church, especially in the summer. It was a day designed for turtle hunting and hiking to the top of Trumpet Hill. There were even apple wars with kids down the hill. We were blessed with a wild apple tree that produced ammunition to support just such a war. Apples grew green and hard, and almost each had a worm. The tree was wild because of its location, not its ancestry. It stood hunched over and twisted in a meadow just beyond the stream. According to Beepah, it might have been planted by Johnny Appleseed himself. That would make it very old indeed, if it were true.

I slid from my bed and went out into the faint light in the hallway. I was hoping to be first to announce Friday’s arrival. Zach’s door was open. I could hear him breathing as I crept across the floor. I put my hand on his shoulder and gave him a gentle shake. He rolled a little, opened an eye just enough to catch the glint of light coming in beneath the shade.

“What? What?” and he jerked awake.

“It’s almost Saturday,” I whispered.

Zach curled his arms around his pillow and pushed his head in deeper. “I’m sleeping, Sydney.”

I put my mouth near his ear. “Are you double sleeping or only sleeping?”

“Scram!”

Grasping the concept of double sleep was no small task when I was six, but especially not for Zach, even though he was older. I silently forgave him and made my way back into the hallway. After all, who chooses to abandon sleep only to dream of it? I was certain Zach was already clawing his way free of the pleasant and lingering effects of double sleep, and would soon, in the wee hours of morning, be his happy, obnoxious self.

I went down the hallway to the big room with its bold beams and a pale green ceiling vaulting upward to a peak above the bed. I often lay there alone when I was younger, staring into the empty space above. Mom and Beep slept there, although there were nights Beep snuck off to sleep in the basement. Who knew why? As much as I knew, it was just Beep’s way. I climbed up on the foot of the bed and bounced my way to the gaping space between them. There was room aplenty. I was convinced the giant bed was built for no less than three people, and big people at that.

Mom rolled over and kissed my cheek. She put her arm over me and pulled me close. A heavy thud shattered the quiet and when I looked, Beepah was gone.

A gasp escaped Mom, and her head jerked from the pillow. “What the f**k, Ben?”

Beepah’s tangled patch of hair poked above the edge of the bed. He saw me and offered little more than a stunned expression. “I fell out of bed,” he admitted with much reluctance.

It was not the first time. I’d heard about it plenty. It drove Mom to distraction. Doctors at the veteran hospital referred to his frequent animations as a sleep disorder, at least that’s what I heard at breakfast one morning. This particular episode left him pulling his way up from the floor, groggy and confused. Mom never did explain the VA’s diagnosis, at least not back when I was even smaller. But even I suspected the occasions precipitated his trips to the old basement couch.

Mom’s head flopped back down. “Jesus, my luck,” she muttered into the pillow.

“I had that f*****g dream again, Angela, if you care,” Beepah said. “You know . . . where I jump off the bridge.” He peered above the edge of the bed, his head clearing enough to recognize me there. “Oh, good morning, Syd,” he greeted me with some surprise.

“You guys both said the “f-word.”

“It doesn’t count, Syd. I didn’t even know you were there. Besides, I got that nasty habit from your mother,” he grumbled. He pushed himself up a little and sat on the bare floor rubbing his knees. He was annoyed that his precarious position at the edge of the bed had caused him to be flung to the floor yet again. “Christ, Angela, I was holding on by my toenails, if you give a damn.”

Beepah falling off the bed happened plenty. In fact, I even witnessed it one other time. I was certain Beep fell out of bed only to make me laugh, and it worked. He poked his head up and showed the world his best bewilderment, and I laughed. But this time the inflection in his voice attributed blame, and Mother was the culprit. In his mind, it was Mother who forced him to the precipice at the edge of the bed, where peaceful sleep was not possible for him, especially when dreams invaded his nights. I realize now that Beep was troubled even then.

Mom’s head popped up from the pillow again. “Nobody put you over there, Ben,” she snapped at him. “You did that to yourself.”

Beepah’s hand inspected the crown of his head for blood. “I don’t know why I have that dream. It wasn’t the worst of it,” he said. “In my dream, there’s four of us, standing on a footbridge—me, Hoby, John, and d**k, maybe . . .” Beep shrugged, suddenly unable to summon the rest of the names. “There was fire all around, both sides of the river, napalm ripping everything. I was watching it, like watching a bad movie. We weren’t even supposed to be there. We should’a cleared out hours before. We got trapped.” His eyes grew wide with the memory of it. “I went ass over teakettle into the river. What a shitstorm.”

“You said shitstorm!”

My outburst seemed to bring him from his trance. Talk about the war was rare. Nam, he called it. And I heard the word shitstorm from time to time, from Beep or one of his friends. I was rarely allowed to say it. Shitstorm and plenty of other bad words were reserved for grown-ups. Sometimes the only way to know for sure was to throw it out there. Zach was good for that. “Shitstorm! Shitstorm!” Zach sometimes tested correctness without warning.

Beepah’s hand continued to search his scalp for blood. He found none and finally gave up the hunt. “When I came up, I was swimming beside a water buffalo, believe it or not,” he said. “There was a little band of fighters just downstream. They were onto me . . . bullets splashing all around. The river was pulling me down. There was a leather strap stringing from the buffalo. His horns were tangled in it, and I grabbed hold and he dragged me into the bushes.” Beep gave his head another scrub with his hand and crawled up from the floor. “I would’ve drowned or got shot, or washed down into the jungle with all the fire. Anyways, I laid there on the riverbank for a couple hours until the boys found me.” Beep shrugged.

“You got saved by a buffalo?”

“True story,” Beep declared with a raised hand, then he bent to rub his bruised knee again. He grumbled and limped to the bathroom across the hallway. He stood in front of the mirror twisting his body to explore for contusions. “You kicked me,” he sang out after peeling his boxers down to expose the red welt on his hip. “This footprint on my butt is all the proof I need.”

Mom laughed. “Justified ass-kicking,” she said.

He leaned back through the doorway. “Did you kick me out of bed, Sydney?”

“What happened to the buffalo?”

“Oh, he ran off into the jungle before he gored me to death,” Beep said, which made me laugh too.

Beepah hobbled back to the bed and snared me by the foot. He twisted it and gave it a thorough inspection. “Nope,” he said finally. “There is no way this little foot made this giant bump on my butt. It had to be this clodhopper here . . .” and he grabbed Mom’s foot and gave it a twist. “We’re sleeping in the teepee tonight,” Beep said. “Dress warm.”

Mother declined immediately. “No thank you. Can’t.” She jerked her foot from his grip. “I have prep work for my trip. I’m not even packed. Anyway, I’m not spending my Friday night scratching the lumps out of that patch of mud in the woods.” She rolled over again, driving her face into the pillow. “You do it. You’ll be safe stretched out in the mud. You can’t do any bridge jumping out there,” she said and laughed again.

“Okay, then,” Beepah conceded, slapping his hands together to seal the deal. He grabbed me by the foot again. “It’s you, me, and Zach, and a pack of dogs,” he said.

He headed for the bathroom again, then turned back one more time. He showed a pensive face to the shadows playing on the window to the west. “We ran upon the buffalo in the jungle,” Beep recalled. “He was sprawled in the dirt, snorting up a cloud of dust. There was a bullet hole behind his ear oozing blood. He was dying for sure.” Beep aimed his finger and made a popping sound with his lips. “I could have ended it just like that. Pop! The boys said no. Too many gooks around. We just wanted to slip out of there without getting skinned alive.” He knocked his knuckles against the doorjamb and shrugged. “We left him there. It still feels like unfinished business.”

Mother rolled to her elbow. “You never told me that story.”

“I save those tall tales for the boys at group,” he said, slumping into the bathroom. “They eat that stuff up.”

I thought about it often during my childhood, Beep’s story about a buffalo that saved his life in the jungles of Vietnam. He didn’t return the favor by ending the suffering with a bullet to the head. Neglecting it inspired an occasional leap from a bridge into rushing water. It made me sad for the buffalo, but near as I could tell, nobody else died that day. I was left to find the message, if there was one. It may have been just another colorful yarn. Beep was good for those.

The first time Emily Lipton showed up at the school bus stop with her son Jason, was a day in early September. Emily was pretty and about thirty-five, the same age as Mother. Over the days and weeks that followed her arrival, I found out from Beep that Emily was a dental hygienist. She was almost always dressed in her pure white hygienist dress or white scrubs. She had brown hair that she pulled back for work. And she had round breasts she pushed way out. That much even I noticed.

It was easy enough to see that Beepah liked Emily Lipton. She stood very close to him while they talked. From the start, Beep’s unease was apparent, but once he became comfortable with the behavior, he allowed her aura to engulf him. Even I could tell it pleased him.

Jason Lipton was older than Zach and me. He was in sixth grade. In fact, he was the oldest kid at the bus stop, a couple grades ahead of Zach, although his size defied his age. He was short in stature, with fair skin and shaggy blond hair faintly tinged with red.

The two of them arrived from Philadelphia during the summer and settled into the old Rubin Smoran house at the bottom of Trumpet Hill Road. In disposition alone, Jason was the exact opposite of his mother. While she was ready with a smile, Jason was sullen and abusive. Beepah said it was his uprooting from Philadelphia that was his reason for attacks on the younger kids. To me, it was cruelty, plain and simple. Jason Lipton was just mean.

Beepah stepped in on occasion with his form of gentle diplomacy. “Jason, leave the kids alone,” Beep would say and shake his head in disbelief. There was nothing physical. Jason never directed his wrath toward me, but from the beginning his very presence put me in fear. I rarely left Beepah’s side at the bus stop when Jason Lipton was nearby.