Darren, Age 5
JAN MILES
“Fucking niggers.”
“Randy! Darren’s sittin’ right there! He’s gon’ repeat everything you say—you know that!”
Belly to the floor, Darren looked up at the television. So many people. Signs. Flags. Red, black, green. Bowtie-wearing men affixed like gargoyles at the edge of a stage. What made them niggers? Another man in a suit addressed the crowd strenuously. The newscaster’s voice intoned over the man’s words as—
—suddenly Darren was aloft, the absentmindedly-held crayon dropping from his startled grip, his father’s face replacing the faces on the TV.
“Don’t say the F-word,” the man said, giving him what was intended to be a playful shake that actually, combined with the sudden hoisting, jostled minor constellations at the darkened edges of his vision. He was momentarily dumbstruck.
“You hear me?” his father said. “Do like I say, not like I do. If I catch you saying it, that’s your ass.” The closeness of the man’s breath, a familiar assault of cigarettes and beer, returned Darren to his senses.
Uncertain, he looked over at his mother, but she had already turned her attention back to her People magazine, so he looked back at his father and nodded.
“What are you nodding for? What’re you not gon’ do?”
“Not…umm…,” he floundered, “…say.”
“Not say what?”
Darren racked his brain.
“The F-word,” his father reminded him. But Darren had already forgotten what that word was anyway.
* * *
The bulldozer worked steadily, lifting bricks from the rubbery ground into the rear of the dump truck. Despite the methodical nature of their labor, both vehicle operators, beneath their shiny red hardhats, wore identical smiles on their lemon-yellow plastic faces.
The television blared in the background, and the smell of coffee and bacon lingered. Seated on the floor behind the timeworn la-z-boy chair, Darren still wore pajamas and played contentedly with his LEGOs. Because he hadn’t turned five until a month after the kindergarten start date and because his dad was off the road for the next couple of days, the two were home alone together. With his brothers off at school and his mother gone to work, these days, when they came, were like small private holidays.
He made the sounds of the machines with his mouth, pistons hissing and engines roaring. The blocks clinked together in pleasant cacophony as one pile diminished from beneath the chair while the other grew next to the baseboards. The chill of the floor, vinyl laid directly on concrete, was passing through his thin pajamas and spreading up-up-up his legs, but he chose to ignore it rather than miss out on the imagined camaraderie of behind-the-chair time with his dad, who was liable to get up at any moment for any number of reasons.
The phone rang.
“HEL-lo.” His father’s answer was a cheerful one, a statement rather than a question, but the tone quickly changed. “This is him.” It wasn’t a friend calling.
His father grabbed the remote and turned the television down. Darren was close enough to hear a man’s voice on the other end of the phone now, his dad occasionally punctuating the faraway drone with an even “yes, sir” that Darren came to understand, immediately upon the conclusion of the call, had belied his father’s actual mood. The phone was hung up three, four, five times violently before it was hurled at a wall in its entirety, the cheap plastic cracking in one place and breaking away in a smooth, large chip in another. Deep scars that would never heal.
As the back of the la-z-boy bounced precariously above the construction site, Darren flinched and a chill shot down his spine to meet the one from the floor. Frozen now, he also willed himself invisible.
“GodDAMMIT!” Randy bellowed. He slammed down the footrest of the chair and stood with a hurricane fury whirling from his center until it helplessly reached his extremities. He paced the crowded room momentarily, the fury blowing in fingertips that raked through his hair then clutched the back of his neck. The lost contract would upend the already delicate balance of a budget that supported a wife, three growing boys, a mortgage, and the lease on the semi.
The fury left no room for rational thought or calm processing. His fingers flailed wildly in the junk on the coffee table—mail, crayons, batteries, candy wrappers—until they landed on a pack of cigarettes that they tap-tapped expectantly.
“FUCK!” he cried out on coming up empty.
His elder son’s wood shop project—the word KEYS carved and shellacked with small hooks screwed in—hung on the wall next to the door that led to the carport. He snatched his car keys from their hook with one hand while opening the door with the other.
The slam of the door concluded the tempest, plunging Darren into a tentative silence in which he (a) allowed himself to breathe again, (b) withdrew his invisibility, and (c) gingerly examined the parting gift left behind in the lull: the word he had failed to record that one night—the F-word he had searched his small recollection for many times subsequently—was “fuck.”
From his side of the hollow door and the thin walls dressed in fake wood paneling, the engine of the pickup truck was no less than a lion’s roar. Then, suddenly, it was silenced. Several minutes passed before the door re-opened.
“DARREN!” his dad bellowed into the house, having forgotten where the boy last was and then shaking his head at the ridiculousness of realizing he was so close. “Come on. Put on some shoes.”
“But I just got on pajamas.”
“Don’t matter.”
Immediately brightened by the potential of this new development—ostensibly yet another gift rained down from the crisis of moments prior—Darren raced obediently down the hall and returned just as swiftly, jamming bare feet into sneakers with lights in their heels that flashed on impact.
From his rare front-seat-of-the-truck perch, the outburst of moments ago was forgotten. All of it—the pajamas, the solo adventure with his dad, the sneakers, the ride in the coveted passenger seat—all of it was instantaneously more Christmas than Christmas, a holiday that, despite its obvious perks, also entailed a great deal of sharing and pre-church ministrations from his mother: wear this…look nice…sit right…be still…don’t get wrinkled. Today, Darren—outside in pajamas—sat on his knees riding shotgun in the truck, oblivious to his father’s seething, and leaned out the opened window with precisely the same zeal as a pup.
The wind tousled his as-of-yet still blonde hair, and the late morning sun was warm kisses wherever it touched his face. They rolled past houses that looked like his—brick ranchers slumped down low, lazing across their yards—and occasionally some elder out for a morning constitutional who would smile or wave at the joyful child reveling in his springtime.
The other side of the vehicle may as well have been another planet. No sun warmed the driver; no breeze dared approach. Any eye contact offered was rebuffed, rescinded. The fury still twitched in Randy. A cigarette would have helped, would have occupied his fingers, his mouth, would have dispatched its own soldiers down the lengths of his body to war away the anarchy of his feelings.
At this point, three things happened nearly simultaneously:
A bird larger than Darren had ever seen in his real life bobbed oddly across a yard on the spring side of the vehicle. Its outlandish neck—like some great white snake with a long costume of a beak affixed to its face—curved and arced as the bird walked. Enthralled, Darren was. Enchanted. “Daddy, Daddy!” He was turning to his father, but…
Farther down the road, a truant child had set out, from the darker, colder side of the barely shared universe of the truck, to cross the street. He was obese already, this child—his eleven years on this earth having been spent in the clutches of American poverty, which is to say that his diet was an inexpensive and unhealthy one. This being said, his effort to quickly traverse the street ahead of the truck was already an overreach. He huffed at the unusual exertion of a light jog and—being also compelled by the unique bird and choosing the shortest distance to arrive there—he made the mistake of prolonging the endeavor by crossing at a diagonal. His geometry was correct; the assessment of his own capacity and of the driver’s goodwill, however, were not, because…
Randy, with great force and intention, accelerated the truck.
The world, at this point, was briefly muted for three of the parties involved.
Darren, who was in the middle of turning from his window to summon his father, saw the boy in the street and—perhaps or perhaps not, he was unsure due to the muting of things—involuntarily screamed.
The boy in the street, living his first brush with death, experienced a wave of adrenaline that not only truncated his path but also quickened his step in a way that he would never again duplicate in his lifetime. Upon barely reaching safety, he fell to his knees, instinctively looking back to catch sight of his assailant only to wind up sharing a mutually wild-eyed moment with a five-year-old boy whose head had emerged from the open window on the passenger side.
The egret, startled, tucked its head back toward its neck, launched itself upward, spread its great white wings, and flew away.
The lion of the engine became audible again as they hurtled away from the scene, and Darren, unwittingly, filed records away in the limited annals of five-year-old memory and understanding. If you were to browse the most recent of these records, you would find:
the word “fuck”;
a snowy white bird of epic, magical proportions; and
a subconscious link between the expressionless brown faces of bow-tied men lining the edge of a stage, the impassioned brown face of a man addressing a crowd, and the terrified brown face of an 11-year-old wheezing at the edge of a road.
