Fiction   Essays   Poetry  The Ten On Baseball Chapbooks In Memory






Mike Moran




Jacob's Breath

Jacob, the local fat kid, was trying to breathe.

His perception was all fouled up. From where he was laying, the trunk of the maple he had just fallen from looked kind of like a dirt path. But the branches weren't footholds and handholds from this angle; they were all brambles and brush. But if you could imagine it -- and Jacob could -- once you got past all that, there was the sky. All he had to do was put his feet to the path and he'd be on his way.

But he wouldn't, of course. Jacob couldn't quite catch his breath.

The fall had been a good one. He'd been way up there and the air was feeling fine -- was it really cooler up there or had he imagined that? -- and his friends had gathered around the base, drawn from their respective yards by Marvie's shouts. It had been a good feeling looking down at them, seeing them there far beneath his sneakers. They couldn't touch him from here, could they? Not Stevie or Russell or George -- from here they were small and he was beyond their reach.

And then, as he was making his way up another step, he grabbed for a branch that twisted in his grip. Jacob found himself doing a slow, backward twirl. To keep himself facing the trunk, Jacob decided to just let go.

And that was it. Then he was sliding. His arms were chewed by the bark. A knot in the trunk punched him in the cheek. Leaves ripped at him. Then a large branch stopped him with a wicked slam to his gut, some eight feet from the ground. The branch flipped him. He fell on his back.

His friends gathered round: Stevie and Russell and George and Marvin.


Stevie was the first to speak.

"God, yer a shithead!"

The others all thought that was hilarious and doubled over. Even little Marvie, with his freckles and his smudged nose, was laughing.

"He ain't monkey-boy!"

"Hey-hey! Who am I? Wham! 'Whoa... Where am I?'"

"Who are ya?"

"He ain't monkey-boy!"

"You always wanting people to be monkey-boy."

"Mebbe he was going to fly off!"

"That ain't funny now. He coulda falled."

"What're you? His nurse-mommy?"

"Shut up!"

"Give him his spongebath now?"

"I ain't touching no monkey-boy."

"Jacob like Simple-Simon-monkey-boy."

"Oo, lookit! He's making his moose face!"

"Angry moosey!"

"Uh oh, he's getting up!"

"Mooooooose!"


They backed away. To someone passing by in a car, happy, laughing children playing in the yard were all they looked like. Jacob knew better. They were bastard-fuckers and assholes. They were pricks and cockersuckers. They were all those words his ma would beat him for ever saying. But fuck that: he could think them all he wanted.

He got a hold of Marvie first -- little Marvie with his crewcut and his brown freckles and the way he smiled all the time like he was getting ready to laugh at you. Steve and Russell and George were all older than Jacob, but Marvie was a year younger. So fuck him, the little cockersucker, Jacob was going to beat the fucking shit out of him for laughing.

So Jacob grabbed Marvie's collar and he hit the little bastard-fucker in the ear.

"AAAAAH!"

Jacob had forgotten that Marvie had the loudest scream in the neighborhood. And Marvie's grandma had once come out when Marvie started screaming like this and hit Russell with a stick.

"AAAAAAAI!"

Front doors opened up and down the street.

"AAAAAAAAR!"

Steve and George and Russell came rushing in at Jacob. George clipped him from the side, knocking him back to the ground, and then jumped across him.

Jacob thrashed and tried to break free, but one of them was lying on his feet and beating on the big muscle in his thigh.

Steve stood off to one side, talking quietly to Marvie, perhaps trying to calm him back down. Then they all went quiet for a second -- except for Jacob; his harsh breathing was loud. Marvie was there, putting his face in close to Jacob's. His breath smelled like dill pickles.

Jacob stopped thrashing. He and Marvie were nose-to-nose.

Marvie sprinkled grass in his face.

Jacob didn't move. Grass was better than spit.

Marvie drew back for a moment, then came back in close.

This time, Marvie sprinkled some dirt.

Jacob squinched up his eyes but didn't move.

Again, Marvie drew back. Marvie wasn't going to spit on him was he? He wouldn't dare.

Then: "Wait, Marvie. Put this ant on him."

What?

And then: was something crawling on his cheek? No, it was only a strand of his hair in the breeze. Or maybe it was Marvie's hair.

The little cockersucker wouldn't do that, would he?

There was a tickle moving over his ear now. Was it hair? Or was it insect legs? Was it looking for a place to burrow down and lay its eggs somewhere safe? Like in nice, warm ear flesh?

That was all it took: Jacob bucked and slashed in fury.

They let him go and backed away. Russell was grinning a bit. So was George. Marvie was standing there behind Steve a bit, hiding. He was mooing softly.

None of them cared that he'd gotten higher than any of them. None of them realized how far he could see: that from up there he could see their rooftops; that he could see the school from up there, could make out the playground balls, like small red beans, on its roof. None of them knew that from up there he could see all the way to the fields; that he could see all the way to the river. They didn't know that he could even make out the high tension wire towers, that he could see the train tracks, that he could even see the distant haze from the city miles and miles beyond the cornfields and beanfields. They didn't care.

They only knew that he was fat and that he was crying.

"I'm telling my mom," he said and ran with his heavy, plodding steps across the sparse grass of their lawn, trying not to let it matter that he could hear them. "Don't worry about it, Marvie." "Yeah, his ma don't care none." "He's such a crybaby." "He always making a big deal about nothing." "Did you see that look?" "Moooose!"


From the wide-open spaces of sky and yard, everything tightened. The house constricted around him. Jacob went through the yellow kitchen and into the gray living room.

There was newspaper spread out around the fireplace. His mother was on her knees, her bony legs sticking from out of the fireplace. The rest of her was up the chimney. Jacob could see the green wormcrawl of veins around her ankles.

"Stupid bastard," said Jacob's mother.

Jacob stood there, silent.

His mother was telling secrets again, just like in the days before his father left -- when she wandered from task to task muttering back and forth to herself.

"So what're you saying, Marjorie?" she asked herself. "Are you saying that he didn't surprise you?"

She answered back: "Oh no. He did like men do, right?

"Did he?

"No different than Daddy."

Jacob just stood there and tried to figure out what do with his hands. He was thinking that he needed to pose himself, so that when she appeared from out of the fireplace, his stance would somehow inform her that he hadn't heard anything she said. There was no leaving now that he was here. The house was her house -- it would give him away with a sudden squeak of floorboard, a flutter of curtain, a creak of door.

She grunted. Ash crumbles tumbled down around her knees.

"And this is what they do, right?" she said. "They burn their fire up your hole and leave you to clean up the mess. Isn't that what Mama said Daddy did?"

She was withdrawing now, climbing backwards out of the hole -- a weary breech-birth (although Jacob wouldn't think of that parallel for another seven years and when he did, none of his classmates would understand why the tall, lanky boy with the spiky hair had so violently burst into laughter there at his seat on the side of the lecture hall).

"Isn't that what he did?" she muttered as she stood up.

Marjorie Taft was a little woman. Her nose was small and sharp and she sniffed a lot. Her wiry hair was dyed an even brunette and curled tightly with rollers. Right now she wore a faded blue kerchief over her head.

She looked at Jacob with no surprise and said, "He just left a mess for me to clean up."

Jacob knew she wasn't talking to him.

"Isn't that what all men do?" she asked. She touched his cheek, then turned away and began picking up the newspaper. "Men leave their messes behind with no thought, no regard. They piss on the ground like dogs, and mark their territory, and they tear their bitches' ears whenever they open their mouths."

Jacob went down on his knees and began folding up the newspaper, careful not to let the soot stain the threadbare carpet. His mother often told him he was a good son.

"You won't be like that, will you, Jacob?" she asked. She took the folded-up newspapers from him as he stood.

"No, Ma," he said.

"That's a good boy. What a good boy." She drew him to her bosom and hugged him. She stroked his hair. "You're my good boy."

The folded newspapers in her hand rattled against his back.


Jacob followed her into the kitchen, but when she went to put the newspaper in the garbage under the sink, he slipped by and kept on walking. She wouldn't stop him. She wouldn't ask him where he was going. She never did.

Walking from the dim quietness of his drab home to outside was like an explosion of green leaves, blue sky, and cool breezes.

Jacob's friends were gone.

Jacob went back to the tree.


This was the tree that betrayed him before: dropped him down through its branches; bruised his face; knocked his breath from him; flipped him on his back like he was a beetle.

This was the tree that sang him to sleep at night when he left his window open, rustling its song while he lay there between crisp, cool sheets and thought about his father.

This tree was a promise. And were the squirrels and wrens and finches the angels then, moving up and down its branches? Or were the angels the sap moving secret down through its woody veins? Was it the carbon dioxide that was breathed foul from the mouths of his friends when they swore and punched and screamed in his face, photosynthesized with sunlight and rainwater, and then exhaled, turned sweet into oxygen that Jacob tried now to suck full into his lungs?

The first step wasn't a step. It was a leap and a grab. Jacob jumped at the tree and held it tight. He kept the bruised side of his face against the trunk. His legs squeezed and his sneakers dug at the rough surface. He crawled up. Then it was a reach to the first branch, the nasty one that had kicked his air from him. Jacob flailed one hand out and took hold of it. He scrambled and pushed himself up to the firm crook.

Jacob held on there a moment and let his feet swing easy.

He leaned against the trunk. His fingers found their holds. He stood. It was only a step up to the next branch.

When climbing, there was no north, south, east, or west. There was down, where the tree clung to the earth; there was out, where the branches grew slowly towards, moving the leaves to more sunlight; and there was up, where the breeze would surely sing to him and fill him with cooler, sweeter air.

He stopped for a moment. From here he could see where the squirrel-mother had built her nest out in the branches. Late in the spring, Jacob had watched the babies cling to her back as she moved through the realm of the old maple.

Higher he climbed. There was a tickle of leaf against his arm as he held tight and considered his next step.

Higher. A squirrel, just a few feet up from him, leapt away in a blasting rustle of leaves, out of the maple and to the nearby birch. Jacob watched as the squirrel clung to the bouncing branch: up, down, up! Then it skittered to the birch's trunk and down to the ground.

Higher. A steady breeze pushed at the tree. Maples split their trunks as they grow and Jacob was navigating as best he could to take the splits that led to the top. The branches were shrinking though as he climbed -- first as thick as his leg, then as thick as his arm, now as big around as his wrist. Jacob held tight to the branches and felt the maple sway. He looked down as it held him over the street.

Still, up Jacob climbed. Many of the branches around him were twigs now, thin as fingers, reaching ever higher.

Jacob stopped moving and held tight. His own body was bending the trunk -- if trunk you could call it. He looked back to the ground.

It was like his heart gasped in his chest, a sudden yawning suck of blood through atrium and ventricle.

How do I get down? he thought. It seemed like such a stupid question, like the punchline of third-grader's joke. Jacob was some eighty feet in the air.

What do I do? He thought of his father as he looked up at the sky. The twist in his gut echoed out -- a delicate sway of his body on the branch. For a moment, his mind feeling sharp and clear, Jacob imagined that there was another branch just a touch higher that he couldn't see, a branch coming down from the sky, and if he took hold of it the whole world would turn over, and Jacob would find himself climbing down this other tree, disappearing up into the heavens. All he had to do was let go of this branch, the one that connected him down to the earth, and reach hold of the branch that was connected up to the sky. All he had to do was let go.

Who will save me? Jacob looked down at his house. His small-boned mother was still moving down there through narrow rooms of wood and stone. She had made Jacob's home an Egyptian tomb. It had its hidden traps and secret treasures all put fastidiously together with the promise of being born again into something greater. But Jacob had seen the pictures at school of those delicate mummies with their grimacing smiles and their dried papyrus skin and their secret parts -- their liver and lungs and stomach and heart -- still held, waiting in canopic jars, waiting for the promise of being used again, of being returned to belly and chest, of being brought to beautiful, familiar life. It was all a lie. Didn't his mother see?

Should he let go? Didn't his father let go? Where was his father now? The greenish roll of clouds overhead held a threat of storms. His father had let go of the earth, his wife, his home. And me, thought Jacob. He let go of me.

There was a rush of wind, a loud rustle of leaves, and again Jacob felt the tree move him out over hard ground and dark asphalt. He looked down through the branches, thinking for a moment that he would see his mother there at the base, crying and holding her apron to her mouth. Thinking also that his friends would be gathered there, even Marvie, muttering in astonishment and pointing up, up, up to where Jacob held the wind in one fist and and the great maple in the other -- Pecos Bill riding the cyclone.

But there was no one there. Jacob rode the wind alone.

The air in Jacob's nostrils was suddenly cool. There was a whoosh and the entire tree swayed further than it ever had. Jacob made no sound. His legs were secure and his fingers held tight. And now, instead of looking up to the next imaginary branch or down to the dark and distant ground, Jacob looked out.

From over the rooftops, over the snags of chimney and television antennae, past the river and to the rolling fields, Jacob saw a great, dark wall of cloud. Like some beast from a children's fairy tale, some black-magic rhinoceros or wicked hephastean cyclops, he saw this fierce, powerful vortex as it sucked the air from the sky and twisted it into a swirling, hateful wind. Jacob clung to his tree and watched as a single, black, monstrous worm thrust out from the bottom of it.

I'm the only one who can see this, Jacob thought. He looked down at his town. None of them knew. None of them could see it, this new tornado swirling out of the sky, twisting furious and hungry, there beyond the river. I got to do something, he thought. I gotta do something! He unwound his feet and began lowering himself down.

I'll be a hero, Jacob thought.

That's when he fell.

One moment he was thinking that George and Russell and Steve and Marvie would finally stop calling him Moose when he got angry -- they wouldn't dare! -- and the next he was some fifteen feet down the tree, hugging it tight, aware of the spreading pain at his crotch. His face was bleeding and there was a good gash across the back of his hand. He didn't know where he was. He only knew he was up in a tree and his balls hurt -- a lot. He crawled backwards down the trunk, careful to test each branch underfoot while gripping tight to the overhead limb.

Then he was down, his feet on good solid earth. He ran to his neighbor's home and beat on the door. "Tornado!" he shouted. Then he was off, running heavily (he had once seen himself running in the reflection of a schoolhouse window and the absurdity of what he looked like had forced him into a walk. And when George -- who was chasing him -- caught him, Jacob had turned with bear-like fierceness and had put his fist straight into George's gut) to the next house. At each house Jacob beat on the door and cried out, "Tornado! There's a tornado coming!"

Then he came to Marvie's house. Marvie's house was a whitewashed house with a creaky porch. At the first squawk on the step, Jacob jumped off. He considered running on. Then, fearlessly out-of-character, he ran around to the side door.

"Tornado!"

He beat on the door. "Tornado! There's a tornado! It's -- "

"Hey!"

Jacob looked around.

"Down here."

In the narrow basement window beside the side door was a fleshy, snaggle-toothed woman in a flowerprint dress.

Jacob bent down to her. He imagined his chest out, his face bruised, his hand still bleeding. "I saw it," he said. "There's a tornado out southwest of town."

She bared her crooked teeth at him. Her fleshy cheeks folded back from her mouth. "We heard it on the radio already, boy," she said. "You better getcher ass home!"

Jacob saw his reflection in the tilted basement glass. What was he doing trying to stand like some kind of superman? Behind the old woman he saw Marvie -- the little cockersucker! -- smirking at him. Jacob felt his scalp crawling as Marvie distinctly mouthed the word "shithead" at him.

Before Jacob could reply, the old woman withdrew. Mavie disappeared with her.

The rain pelted Jacob with heavy drops. The trees bent and waved. He knew the tornado announced itself with stillness and so he made a point of not hurrying. He also made a point of not looking at any of the houses whose doors he had beat on. He knew each family was down dry in their storm cellars, huddled no doubt around battery-powered radios where a newscaster crackled out the storm's movement.

His hand hurt. He touched his face once with his fingers.

He didn't care, he decided. It didn’t matter. Jacob went into his house through the breezeway. He went down to the basement. It was a storage area really, a maze of cardboard boxes stacked high. His father had promised before disappearing to transform it into a spare bedroom, a clean laundry room, and a family room with a television and an electric fireplace.

Jacob found his way through to the furnace, where his mother sat rocking on a lawn chair. She ran to him. Her teary face and her hands were still dusty with ash. She hugged him. "Where have you been?" she said. "How could you leave? Why didn't you come back right away?"

Jacob pushed her away. "Knock that shit off," he said.

She drew back from him immediately, as if he were now going to slap her face, knock her to the ground, stand over her, shouting, "You see what I am! You see how little I am? You see what I'm reduced to?" She put her gray, dusty hands over her mouth, seeing him.

Jacob turned away, sucking and blowing air. In and out, in and out, but it was still not complete, not satisfying, as if something inside him was keeping his lungs tied down.

He had climbed. Jacob had touched the highest point of that tree. He knew what it was to ride the very highest point of a great, swaying maple tree, someone who could feel the lightness of the branch and smell the sweetness of the air from on high.

No one saw. No one knew. Upon returning to earth, he wasn't aware that anything had changed. He was still just a chubby boy with a temper and friends he didn’t like. But he had ridden that tree like an angry new god born on the wind.

Jacob sat down on a box facing the furnace. He stared at the glow behind the grill. He wrestled with his air, sucking it down, counting as he breathed in and blew out. One two three. One two three. One two three.

Outside, the wind blew fierce through the trees.



©2007 by Mike Moran

Mike Moran is a teacher, playwright, and performer, known locally as the Iowa Goatsinger. He's had work produced in Chicago and Philadelphia, and has performed his solo goatsinger shows throughout eastern Iowa. For more information see his Web site.


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