#no that dirty theater jerk shack needed to go

[sidpah]

Nature’s Classroom

There is no warmth coaxing me out, and I’m away from home for the first time. Far far away, and I’m too young to be strong. Looking up at the springs and underside of a drab military mattress. I hate the creep who’s sleeping on it. I hate the kids snoring all around me. I’m alone among them and can’t wait for the calendar page to fall so I can break the hell out of here.

Earlier when I sat on my bunk rifling through my duffle-bag looking at trinkets and wrinkled pictures, fighting back the tears that come with remembering, they laughed at me, legs dangling from high bunks, talons gnarled together eyeing me like celluloid vultures in a wool and pine desert. There’s no electricity so there’s no television or radio or any other entertainment than watching this fat little jester.

I palmed an old letter so they wouldn’t see and slid it into my pocket so they couldn’t read it. Or steal it. They’re a bunch of thieves. That’s why we’ve been confined together. Not one of us is innocent. I won’t lie about that. The difference between us is that I feel rehabilitated. Or penitent. While they revel in their baseness. It’s their bond. It’s all they talk about: reminiscing hauls, their muggings and petty thefts, rings slipped off oblivious fingers, folded cash from a mother’s hidden billfold… And how they’d spent their ill-gotten funds, and what they’ll do together, when they’re freed, pitting their feeble minds against the petty cash of the unsuspecting public. These were the influences the superiors have seen fit to buffer me with, and the best I can do is try to tell myself that I’m not actually here. That and hide my valuables. (Nothing I own has significant monetary value, purely sentimental, but those pricks don’t delineate between the two; valuable is valuable, and the thought that they have something someone else wants is the only kick that matters.)

I hide them in a small slit that I made on the side of my mattress. It’s a tiny incision right in the middle near the wall where my head would lay when I was pretending to sleep.

In the dark I would snake a hand down into my bag, root around until I’d extracted an item to secret away, and then oh so slowly, pull it up under the covers. With great patience, so their nocturnally-trained burglar eyes wouldn’t catch the movement, I’d bring my hand up and slip it under the pillow where I would deposit the treasure without anyone being the wiser. This whole process could take upwards of twenty minutes. But it was worth it. It was all so I’d have the relief, potent tangible relief, of sliding my hand under the pillow and into the hole just to know that my past was where I’d left it.

But now the mattress above me sags in the middle and I turn over to try to keep from watching the springs pull and compress. It makes me queasy.

“You sleeping?” he asks me. I produce a fake snore but he doesn’t buy it. “Fruitcake, fruitcake, I know you’re awake.” I bury my head beneath the covers and curl up tight. Something soft bounces off my ear. “Wake up, you little bitch.” I snore again too loudly and it hurts my throat. “Wanna suck me off?” I roll over on my back and see his face, all protruding eyes. “Come on, I know you want to. A handjob, then. You’re down there jerking off anyway. Help a brother out.” Fucker. I don’t look at him and turn onto my other side. I hear him roll over and now he’s facing me again. Goddamn it. “Hey, hey, pansy, come on, no one’ll know. I know you want to,” he whispers curling his lips into a snarl.

Without premeditation, I roll onto my back and piston two legs toward the mattress, kicking with all my might the sag above my stomach. I can’t help but laugh as his dark form gracelessly falls past me and smacks loudly on the concrete floor, tailed by the angular blur of his blanket covering his limbs sprawled out and I can smell the surprise on him. Fucker, hope he’s dead, I think with tasty satisfaction.

That week I didn’t shit on a toilet or shower once. The line was never too long but I couldn’t bring myself to be part of it. I’d rather hide behind a nice clean bush. I’m not so civilized that I can’t tell poison ivy from a maple leaf.

I sat alone beneath a towering pine in the middle of a thunderstorm. I kept dry while I prayed for a tornado. That prayer, like all my prayers, was left unanswered. The tree later fell on a hiker and killed him dead a few feet from where I sat. I thought about running away at the height of the downpour, but I didn’t know how I’d gotten here, so I didn’t know how to leave. I thought about just heading deep into the woods. Surely there must be a road carved in there somewhere. But I knew I’d die either at the paws of a bear or at the slow steady hands of starvation.

So I remained in my place and fell desperately in love with a little copper-haired girl who cheered me on as I tried to swing over the mud or lava or imaginary gorge (can’t remember which it was supposed to be) and my feet scraped at it and either got dirty or burned or scooped helplessly at the air. It’s not flattering but most times I simply died a bumbling death. But she didn’t mind, and she always managed to bring me back to life, even when the others were ready to bury me where I lay. When she swung I made sure to catch her, just to feel her body beneath her warm winter coat. To know what a warm body felt like. What a body like hers would feel like. Sometimes I’d pretend that I’d forgotten how to let go. I yelled out sincere words of encouragement as she scaled the wall I was too afraid to approach. I knew the embarrassment already. There was no need to relive the experience. I’d tried to talk her out of climbing but it was something she had to do. Some of us feel motivated to do grand things. Some of us barely feel the motivation to feel motivated. I watched on with vicarious consternation. And when she fell from thirty feet above, my heart lurched. I gasped, hoping no one heard. From so far away I saw the expression of shock her entire body curled itself into, that instinctual “O” her lips made as her fingers clawed at the crumbing rock. I saw the tips of those fingers scrape open revealing their core and I saw her hair stay suspended around her face as the rest of her fragile shell rushed toward me for the last time.

When she hit the ground she was laughing and smiling and joking about how it was much more fun to come down than it was to climb up. The cord saved her. But I hugged her all the tighter when she landed. If I could, I would never let her leave the ground again.

I ate paltry breakfasts consisting of one paper cup of raisins and one small half-brown banana while everyone else had bacon and eggs, hash browns and pancakes. I had orange juice. They had orange juice. We pretended to be equals. I would clean up the dishes afterwards and someone would stay to help. They would be rewarded with a plaque for helping me. I was duty-bound to my chores. They were going beyond their call. I was the imbecile who always needed assistance. My first day there I got lost. I dragged bulging green duffle-bag over dirt and rock and fern. Going from shack to shack asking if this is where I belonged. I didn’t belong here at all, and I knew it before I’d stepped foot into the van hours earlier. Before I posed for that final commemorative photograph. But when someone approached and offered to help me with my bag and indoctrinate me into the ranks, he was given a medal or a plaque or a commendation. I was scolded for being late and chastised for being directionless.

Often, she would stay to help, no matter how little there was for her to do. And no matter how much she’d rather be joining in with whichever group activity she was choosing to miss. I hated group activities. That mandatory ballroom dancing could have been the worst. If she didn’t always offer to be my partner. She was the subtle variation that mutated the revolting into the sublime. I searched for her whenever possible. I probably made her detest me with my clinginess. But if she grew sick of me, she never once showed it. Even when we were torn from our feigned slumber for a fire drill in the dark cold hours when I was busy not sleeping and not shitting, I dropped out of my ranks and ran to find her in her flannel pajamas, arms wrapped tight across her shaking midsection. She was standing in line. I forgot we were segregated and that I shouldn’t be seeing all the other girls in their bedclothes. I didn’t see them anyhow. I saw only her and she seemed delighted that I’d come all the way to find her. I hadn’t remembered my shoes so my feet turned yellow and went numb. Which was okay because I couldn’t feel all the rocks that I stepped on or the piece of broken soda bottle that I wasn’t awake enough to see embedded in the dirt. I spent the rest of the night happily extracting glass and stones from my cold dead feet, not in the least thinking about my task and only remembering how her hair looked, tussled from her pillow, and the rosy hue of her cheeks surrounded by clouds of my hanging breath.

Later I slept flu-bound on a couch behind the stage while the troops were being entertained. The music made my head swim, putting me in mind of a school fieldtrip I’d attended years before. I’d been so scared by a performance of The Wind in the Willows that I’d laid down on the theater floor stretched out beneath the seats of four or five of my classmates. The cool surface and smell of chewed bubblegum calmed me. Not having to see those swinging actors in animal makeup and fake fur calmed me. “He has a stomachache,” my teacher told the kids who asked why I was pinching their legs from behind. I smiled to myself and then rolled over to vomit into a brown pail. She came to me when she could. She brought me cool wet washcloths for my forehead and glasses of water to sip with chocolate graham crackers to nibble on if I felt up to it.

“You can’t call home,” they said. “Against the rules,” they said. “Against the law,” I said. Like always, the elders’ rules prevailed.

I shuffled into the trailer to get my nightly fix while she waited for me outside. The old woman had what I needed in a little paper cup. She was nice – didn’t make me pay. Guess she felt sorry for me. Not sorry enough to let me use her phone, though. I sat at a small cluttered table that probably folded into the wall, or would have, if she’d ever cleaned it off, which to the best of my knowledge, she never did. Over it was one tiny porthole of a window with the curtains perpetually drawn. The door was light and creaked, felt like aluminum and cardboard. There was never a smell of food in that trailer. I wonder if she ever ate. Only the bitter wisps of an inhaler and the stale scent of old tobacco.

On the last day, I watched the little copper-haired girl climb the steps to her bus, leaving for a distant land, and I waved optimistically with a big plastered-on smile full of big sad teeth, asking her to keep in touch. Knowing for the first time what it was to be heartbroken. She didn’t wave back. I headed off to my own bus, bound southward, all the while stealing wistful glances, hoping to see her turn, wave, run to my waiting embrace replete with soundtrack of swelling strings… She never replied to any of my letters.

Some time in, I was taken under the wing of an old gentleman who taught me things I cherished and then forgot. He taught me survival in the woods. He taught me either to find a large tree in a thunderstorm and stay beneath it, or else stay as far away from any large trees as you can, I can’t remember which. He taught me which mushrooms I could eat if I was starving, and which ones I could eat if I was suicidal. He taught me how to make a fire with a tent peg and a dead leaf. He taught me that even elderly couples, those who seem so content and at ease, can still secretly despise one another. He taught me to see people for what they are and accept them for the same reasons. The most important lesson he taught me was kindness. For that I will not regret the experience.