I Saw This (for Phil)

He’s 5, Chuck Taylor’s on his feet, before they were hip, when they were still just white shoes on a white boy, walk­ing through the hood. He is kick­ing the can when that was still the name for ‘tag’. He is run­ning his hand along the slats in a white fence, feels the thud thud thud as his fin­ger­tips knock the next slat. Time is slow­ing, the light is becom­ing slanted, funny, clearer, not in a good way. He can tell before the fence ends, two feet before or three that the gap to the next fence, the alley, holds a dis­as­ter. He doesn’t really know it, but now, look­ing back, he knows he knew. Things wasn’t right around that cor­ner. Right hand on the slats in the fence, Chuck Taylor’s under jeans, his head slowly, on a pivot, turns right, into the alley’s maw, to see the body of a dead man.

It is lying there unnat­ural, vio­lent. His fin­gers, the boy’s, slow­ing now, are just brush­ing the last white slats silently. He makes a half turn in to the alley and stops. He’s 5. His arms are at his side now and, now today 50 years later, he remem­bers that his foot, like on auto­matic, slips for­ward and kicks a stone that stops between the sec­ond and third fin­gers of the man, and as he remem­bers it now, that stone is still, in this moment, skid­ding along the blanched side­walk – it is alway this moment between the kick and the silent knock of stone on knuckle… Then noth­ing. Nei­ther of them move and then the boy is turn­ing away, walk­ing, and not feel­ing and cre­at­ing an elab­o­rate sys­tem to hide that moment and still meet the next line of white slats and his fin­gers run­ning through them, thudding…all that has to make sense again before the width of the alley is over and he is still walking…home

…and every time he dreams of this moment he is stand­ing in cen­ter field (remem­ber­ing the alley and the man and the white and the fence and the stone), glove under his left arm and he is adjust­ing his hat to shield his eyes from the sun and he is look­ing up to the stands, sun break­ing through the bleach­ers like through white slats and in the dream he drops his glove, turns his back to the game and holds his arms out and waits for his father to meet his gaze from the stands and his father was not there.