Precious Barriers

Precious Barriers

short fiction by

Douglas Christian Larsen

THEY SAT BEFORE THE CEMENT RING holding tent stakes with marshmallows sizzling at the ends. The fire in the ring made their faces glow and all about them was blackness. To their left and right, many paces away, other campfires glowed and other couples talked in library-hushed voices. They could hear voices clearly, but only listened to each other.

"I always used to stick them all the way into the fire and eat them all charred on the outside," the girl said.

"You know, I was a peculiar kind of kid," the young man said, and the girl nodded, grinning. "If mine got any soot on them I'd throw them into the fire."

"Don't look now," the girl said, laughing softly.

He blew on his burning marshmallow and then ate it in one large chomp. "I've learned to adapt," he said.

"Like living with five cats?"

He didn't reply, only glanced briefly at her, but his eyes spoke volumes.

"Oh," she said, and then: "Oh!"

"What is it?"

"Feel."

He put his hand where she directed him and he smiled and glanced up into her face and saw her smiling back at him.

"Mr. Beebs is in the camping spirit," he said.

"I'll say. It feels like he's dancing from my boobs down to my waist!"

"I like this belly," he said, warmly, pushing his hand beneath her blouse, flush against her gentle protrusion.

"Not too hard," she said. "Only three more months, can you believe it?"

"Yes. I can believe it."

"Want some more coffee?"

"Yes," he said, nodding his peculiar left-eyebrow nod, reluctantly releasing her belly.

"Help'a-mee-UP!" she commanded, playfully.

He put his hand up as a banister and she took it in both her hands and with a unifying grunt from both of them she swung herself to her feet.

"Isn't it peaceful here?" she asked, speaking softly as she filled the kettle with spring water, the two big Styrofoam cups with two heaping teaspoons of instant coffee.

"Yes," he nodded, lying back on the blanket and looking beyond the aura of the campfire at the stars which they couldn't see during the week in the city. "Especially after all the overtime this week, the tension, and the idiots on the road."

"I still can't believe those crazy drivers. It's as if each person that passed us wanted to run us over."

"After this weekend we'll stick with the car. Safer for you and Mr. Beebs," he said, adoring her with his eyes as she set the kettle on the grate over the licking orange flames. Perched in a heroic squat, her belly hanging below her knees, she looked like a very skinny sumo wrestler.

"Dear, I know you love the motorcycle and the wind and all, and the doctor said it's all fine since your bike is so smooth — nothing is going to hurt the baby," she crooned, moving close to him and snuggling into his arms. "And besides, I love the way you look in chaps and cycle boots and that smelly leather jacket."

"Say no more. I've been thinking about trading her in — Kathy!" he squealed as she interrupted him by thrusting her hand between his legs. "What if the squirrels and bears see?"

She tousled his hair moved to put her back against him, his arms about her, and then moved his hands upon her belly.

"Did I ever tell you that you looked like a sexy sumo wrestler?"

"Yes," she said, giving him a level look over her shoulder. "And also a sexy whale."

"I love you," he said, "very much. And the baby."

"I love you and he loves you," she returned, nestling her head within the nook of his shoulder and neck.

"Or she," he said.

"You're the one to talk with your Mr. Beebs and all. But I do have a feeling. He's going to be a boy and look just like his papa."

"If he's lucky, Kathy, he'll look like you."

"Hmmm, I suppose you're right!"

And this time it was she who shrieked as his hands deserted her belly for other regions.

The water began to hiss and she poured for them. They sat cuddled, drinking their coffee black, side by side, barely touching, just drinking, lost in their own thoughts.

"Isn't it something," she said after several moments of reflection, "how close we can come to touching this little critter, our baby — but not quite touch him?"

He put his hand next to hers upon her belly.

She said, "There's just a little bit of space between our hands and our baby."

He smiled and put his lips on her cheek and without taking his lips away he mumbled: "A wonderful barrier. A precious barrier."

She closed her eyes and leaned against his lips and then they finished their instant coffee, listening to the fire lick at the iron grate. Moths dived and cracked in the flames. The knock of a woodpecker carried through the still and quiet night as some bird put in overtime and the smoke changed direction and blew toward them.

"I'm going to love our baby," he said, suddenly. "I'm going to spoil him. Spoil him, or her, with love, and I won't care and it won't matter what people say, because no matter what you do everyone thinks you're doing it wrong, and it won't matter what our baby looks like. I love you and the baby so much," he said, softly but swiftly, but breaking off to push his eyes into her hair, nearly overcome with emotion.

"You're so wonderful," she whispered, rubbing his hands and then turning to kiss his mouth and eyes, thinking, oh how lucky I am to have you, such a strong man and yet so gentle.

He didn't say anything, but sat holding her, cherishing the moments, listening to the night quiet.

Someone passing on the other side of the fire stopped and looked at the couple through the glow. A man, hair glowing silver in the night. He peered through the smoke at them for many moments.

The young man peered back, leaning forward, and discerned an old man, a man aged but burly and strong, decked out in old-fashioned motorcycling gear. The young man's hackles rose, his body prickling with gooseflesh, and his eyes grew wide.

"What is it?" the girl said, chills spreading across her body. She shivered and drew closer to the young man. It seemed she suddenly heard the sounds of a busy street, though that was impossible up here in the mountains.

The young man did not reply. His eyes misted with tears and he stared — oh how he stared, as if hypnotized, and his hands tightened down upon her belly, actually causing her some discomfort.

"Dear?"

The young man remained quiet, his heart slamming within his breast. His eyes were far away, so far away, scaring her, but his face shined, bright, glowing with a radiance not of the fire. Then, oddly, he spoke, softly, yet distinctly.

"I know," he said, the strangest of smiles upon his lips. "And I love you, son, very much. I'm so proud of you." And then, after a moment, he concluded, whispering: "I love you."

As she watched her husband, her hands gripped her belly as the baby leaped inside her womb. The young man nodded his peculiar left-eyebrow nod, as if greeting someone, and then his eyes came back to earth, and he looked to his wife, smiling sweetly. That old man on the other side of the fire, whoever he was, was gone.

"Let's go to bed, Little Squeaky," the young man said to his wife.

She almost asked him. But she was afraid. She didn't want to know, what it was, what it was all about, but she knew something had happened, just now, and not something of the ordinary. She looked away from him and through the smoke. Earlier, she was almost certain someone was out there, in the night, beyond the circle of the firelight — but that was silly, wasn't it? There was no one out there, nor had there been. But what, or who, was her husband looking at? To whom did he speak? Or had she imagined the entire episode?

She heard a motorcycle purring into the distance of the night.

Tears came to her eyes, but she smiled and put her hands out for him to help her rise, and they walked over the unpolluted earth, stepping over and around the shadows cast from the glowing coals of the dying campfire, and they didn't speak as they ducked down to enter their tiny tent.

In the morning they enjoyed a slow breakfast and the young man commented on the goodness of the way the girl could cook a hot dog, and she bowed (as best she could) and complimented him on his fine talent of removing every rock before he pitched the tent. And they smiled a lot, she always remembered, as they moved in their comfortable rituals of love, ever looking deeply into the others' eyes.

When they glided away from the forest upon the rushing wings of the motorcycle she pulled herself snuggly against her man's body, and placed her lips upon her man's ear, and she sang to her man.

* * *

She has told him everything, or almost. Many times she has hated herself for waiting this long, for waiting so long, for waiting too long. So many years. But she has done what she has done, and life has been very good, it has had its special moments, its fine times along with its sad and bitter days, it torturous nights.

She looks now into the golden dark eyes of the boy and realizes for the first time in years that the boy is as old as the man. How odd. The boy, as old, as the man — the son the same age as the father, and was that even possible? Strange, she thinks, mind wandering from the boy's rage, realizing for the first time in years the age difference between herself, and her dear Christopher. Christopher was always three years older than me, she thinks sadly, and in a sense he will always be three years older than me, and yet he will always be twenty-three years of age, forever a young man, as I age, as the gray fills my hair and I begin to wither away, he will always be so young, so strong, and so potent. Christopher was locked within space and time.

"I guess I always knew . . . or at least I should have know," the boy says, eyes blazing, exactly like Christopher's eyes. "But why did you wait so long to tell me, Mom?"

What can she tell him? She is not sure what the truth is, exactly, why she never told him of his father. Why she never told him the reasons behind his differences from the rest of the family. Why he looks different, why he thinks different.

But now she has told him of the big car that made a ridiculous left-hand turn in their path, oh so very long ago, and how their motorcycle plowed directly into the front of the mammoth car, slamming into that car at over fifty miles an hour. She has told the boy how her man, her darling young Christopher, in the very last instant prior to impact, reached back with his powerful hand and clamped down upon her leg, how after the accident the firemen had to pry the monstrous fingers loose from her leg with a pry bar, how the ambulance attendant had said that Christopher had been a protective barrier between her and death — his body had saved her from destruction, from the kind of destruction Christopher's body had sustained. Her Christopher, her precious barrier.

"But I don't think your baby has much chance," the ambulance attendant concluded, bluntly, shaking his head, emitting a sharp whistle from his pursed lips.

And now here is the proof that their baby had survived, this twenty-three-year-old boy-man, hot and angry and outraged. He stands glaring at her, a whole head taller than her, her baby boy, Mr. Beebs, the product of her and Christopher's love.

"And now you tell me? After all these years?" he demands, towering over her.

She smiles softly, half lost in memory. Because her son looks so familiar, standing here, the same height as Christopher, the same eyes, the same determined look. This young man, a stranger in her life, the same age as that young man all those years ago. Strange, she thinks.

But she has to try and explain, she owes her baby boy that much. "There was something growing between us, dear, and I had to tell you. I know I should have told you before, but it never seemed the right time. It just never did seem the right time."

He stares at her. If he were someone else she would worry that she is in danger, but she is not worried, she knows her boy, and she loves him so much, as the grief rises within her belly, suffusing her being, encasing her within a bubble of heaviness.

"I had to give you these," she says, motioning to the trunk bulging with envelopes and manila folders and steno notebooks, stacks of paper bound with rubber bands.

He turns away from the trunk, flushed, quivering with emotion.

"I've never opened this trunk since he died, well, days after he died, anyway. I've saved everything for you. Some of it is published, but most not, I'm not sure which is which. I don't remember. I don't want to remember. But they're yours now."

He starts walking. "Give them to your family," he spits, still contained, still in control, but vibrating with intense rage. He slams the door behind him.

She has told him now, she thinks. She has told him everything. Or almost. She has not told him everything of the hand which gripped her leg, of its warmth, of its gentle strength, the way it moved through her hair, or along the length of her body, exploring her, how it felt when that hand massaged her neck, shoulders, back. She has not told the boy that to this day, twenty-three years after Christopher's death, she can yet feel the weight of his hand upon her thigh. She has told the boy of the body that separated her from death, separated the beloved baby from death, but she has not told her son that some nights, even now (but seldom, not as often as in the past) she still wakes and her pillow has become — for only a few heart-breaking moments — a broad, warm chest, a chest alive and breathing beneath her cheek. She has not told the boy how she still weeps, on those nights, how it still hurts, how she still sometimes longs for things that can never be. To hear that heart beating so young and so strong beneath her ear.

There are some things she cannot tell her boy, or her husband, or her three other children. She must keep these painful things secret from them, her family. Because these things are painful, but more, because these things are hers, hers alone. Painful and happy, inside her, these things, for her only, of her only. They are her dying yet always alive passions, or at the very least the mere memory of her very real passions.

* * *

The boy breathes hard. He treads heavily on the sidewalk and his hands fist behind his back, crushingly against his spine. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

He has always known. He has never known. But he has always known that he does not fit, he has always known that things are different for him than for his little brother and two sisters. Fresh in his mind are the times the laughter has drawn him, laughter distant through the walls, and with boyish curiosity he has gone (a fool, a pathetic naïve fool) seeking that laughter, because it is rare in his family, such happy laughter, such merriment, such joy, and the laughter comes from his parents' room! He can hear the voices of his sisters, his baby brother, the sweet laugh of his mother, the rumble of his bearlike father. He opens the door, beaming, so ready to participate in the merriment, so ready to experience the joy, the smiles, the giggles — he goes into that room and everything stops.

There is no happiness there. Instead, the laughter drops away, the father climbs from the bed, the mother says it's time for breakfast, the sisters, shyly, tug down their granny nightgowns, the little brother goes in search of toys, and the boy wanders away, hardly curious, but sad.

Other memories, other painful reminders of being alone. He has them, oh brother, he has them bad. He can call them forward to perform like poodles if anyone needs the entertainment.

The humiliation of growing eight inches taller than his "father." What was he doing, six-foot-five in a family of average-sized men? Beanpole! Goon! How's the weather up there? He sure is tall for an Italian! Friendly milkmen in your neighborhood, what Kathy? Tall, too.

He never knew. He always knew.

That son of a bitch, his father, his real father, for leaving him here in this unloved and unloving world. This cold world, This lonely place.

Small signs his mother slipped, like, "You'll be tall just like your father" or "You have your father's eyes." Those things never made much sense, until today, when they come rushing to his mind.

The indifference of the little man he called father — he remembers presenting handmade Father's Day cards, ashtrays made in pottery class, pictures he'd drawn that never went up on any walls.

"It is nice, Cypress," Father would say, setting the paper aside after a cursory examination. Never good enough. Never the smile that his brother and sisters received.

"Why did you have to reach back and save us?" the boy mutters aloud, stopping at the corner of a busy street. Traffic blares from four confusingly close corners. "Why couldn't I have never been born? Why couldn't she have never lied to me? Why couldn't you have lived?"

And his eyes, shamefully, unbidden, wash with tears. Stupid! Idiot! Wimp! He starts to stumble across the street but catches himself — the light is red and someone honks at him.

The boy looks up, blinking away tears, and spots the old man on the motorcycle. The man is perched nearby, right alongside the boy, paused at a red light. He's a distinguished looking older man, with gray eyes and grayer hair. White hair. And the old man looks oddly undersized on the great hog he's riding, only one foot able to reach the ground.

The old man smiles and winks.

The boy looks away, embarrassed to have the man see his tears, but then in the window of a shop he catches his reflection. The boy blinks, peering into the glass, seeing himself and the old man perched behind him on the great motorcycle. The reflection is so clear! As if he is staring into a mirror, not window glass. And then, due to a heat wave, or the boy's tears, the two reflections seem to merge together, his own reflection and that of the old man. The boy rubs his eyes and stares intently into the glass — what is he seeing? What in the world? Clearly, absolutely, the boy sees a long face like his own, a long face with heavy eyebrows and pronounced jaw.

The boy's skin whorls with gooseflesh. What in the world is going on? He knows that face, almost as well as his own face! The boy swallows hard, his mouth suddenly dry, his throat scratchy, and standing there on the busy street corner, staring into the window of a store, the boy knows exactly who he is seeing, not how or why but only who.

"Papa?" the boy says, deaf to the roar of the traffic, speaking as if the distorted reflection of his father was a real, living, breathing man that could hear and respond. "Papa? I wish I could have known you, Papa. I love you, Papa, I love you so much!"

"I know," the reflection answers, from a great, far and dark distance — glowing, as if with the light of fire, "and I love you, son, very much. I'm very proud of you."

"I love you," the boy whispers.

"I love you," the man in the reflection whispers in return.

Then the young man in the window and the young man on the street nod to each other, each simultaneously nodding a peculiar left-eyebrow up, right-eyebrow down greeting.

* * *

The traffic light turned green but the young man did not cross the street. No, he had too many things to discover; things about himself, and about that other young man, and also, things about a very special, lonely woman back at home — she who could help him with those discoveries.

He turned and, smiling, headed for home.