Skateaway

by Jaffe, Michael Grant

• ISBN13: 9780374265717
• ISBN10: 0374265712
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-10-01
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux

Summary

Jaffe chronicles three stages--preteen, late teen, and early adult--in the lives of Clem, Garrett, and Samantha Boone, who try to lead a conventional childhood in the Ohio River valley, in spite of their unconventional parents.

Excerpts

Chapter One

HERE WAS HOME. PITCHED behind the swish and swagger of life's motion tripping past. The way familiar things appeared at easy angles. Distant visions of landscapes in which smokestacks resembled a crooked row of incisors, sharp and rusted with age. The hillside above squeezed into cheekbones and, abruptly, a shortened forehead which vanished beneath a brush cut of evergreens. Then any stillness swung closed as if on whiny hinges. There was no more mouth or teeth or nose, only an apron of soot and coal dust. A mewing that grew louder and louder until, finally, it escaped into a yelping siren blast. The ache of steel against hotter steel.

    Sometimes a hidden face, fuzzy without perspective. Mostly, though, the town was built of chipped brick and chimneys and iron and chicken wire set between the panes of thickly cut glass. Where one might expect to find calves and ankles and feet, instead stood houses with rubbery lawns and motes of black-tarred roadway. The smell drew the neighborhoods close to the smack of industry, breathing through screened doors and loosely rigged windows. A rancid cocktail that never faded, similar to spoiled coleslaw or turpentine.

    The days braided together in a rope of noise and cooled cinder. Everything swallowed by the same foil of naked gray, like the wintery skin on poplars. Two years after Garrett was born, when Sam was still a baby and Clem was only four, his parents moved the family to a parcel of land in northeastern Ohio, slightly below the place where you'd affix a postage stamp if the state had been some squat-shaped envelope with edges worn furry.

    The house, a large ivory Georgian, was hard by the southern line of their property. Each window had heavy black shutters tacked back at the sides--working shutters of narrow slatted pine which they'd used, twice, to protect the glass from high winds and blowing debris.

    On the left side of the house was a pressed dirt and gravel driveway. Angled off behind the garage sat an enormous, silt-colored warehouse. From the moment the Boones moved onto the lot, the warehouse had been in a terrible state of disrepair. There were times during fierce weather when Kendall, who used the warehouse as his studio, braced its walls with four-by-six boards and weighted steel hinges at the corners. Some nights when rain was expected, he climbed to the roof and hammered reams of tar paper into the spongier sections while Garrett stood below, aiming a spotlight to his directions.

    Besides two apple trees growing on the quarter-acre plot beyond the driveway, there was nothing especially remarkable about the house, though in the early primary grades of their schooling, the Boone children achieved a certain unexpected celebrity because they each had their own bedrooms--something of an oddity among the small, well-stocked homes in Lukin.

    From the window of the second-floor bathroom Garrett shared with his sisters, they could see in the distance large smokestacks from factories huddled on the shores of the Wayonga River. As the children grew, their eye levels coincided with a peeling socket of frosted glass, a clear smudge that expanded with the massage of each thumbnail. Out there, above the horizon, seven chimneys, straight as pencils, loosed inkblots of black and gray against the sky. Sometimes at night, when one of the children had awakened from sleep too logy for lights, the smoke seemed almost white. Phosphorescent.

    But that initial viewfinder etched into the window, dime-sized, appeared mysteriously one morning after the first protesters came--Clem or Sam or Garrett, though none had any recollection, wheedling a tunnel to the outside world. A place where they could see things they weren't allowed--an eyelid folded back. If they kneeled on the toilet seat, from the proper angle, they could peer almost directly down at the street. There were days, when the protesters returned and the kids had been sent to their rooms, that Sam and Garrett imagined crosshairs had been painted along that hole. The two of them pretended: each making clicky shooting sounds with their mouths or the snapping of fingers until they got bored. They could hear their mother's voice inside their heads urging them to stop; this desire made them no better than those people chiding her from beyond the property line.

    Most of what mattered in their young lives seemed set into motion that autumn their mother was tapped with recognition. Everything around them suddenly labeled for change. And they understood, even as children, that they'd been pulled in another direction, one they weren't likely to have chosen themselves, set apart from the normalcy they saw shared by schoolmates. Not much affected them in tangible ways, not in ways they were forced to deal with on a daily basis other than the occasional argument or fistfight. They were bent and buffed into three tiny moons, orbiting each other, constantly, for protection and ease, because they retained a similarly queer source of gravity. They knew this thing , rarely discussed, powdered like prickly steel grinds, impossible to scour away. Each of them, desperate for stations of relief, took turns fumbling into freedom. Always, though, came a familiar, whispery tug that brought them back home.

HARPOONS OF LIGHT WRIGGLED loose from the sky, or at least it appeared that way behind squinted eyes. In truth, Sam was tossing silver batons which caught the sun when they rose above the torn line of treetops. She let them roll off her shoulders, across the nape of her neck, coming to rest, briefly, between the doughy-humped flesh at the base of her palms, before throwing them upwards once more.

    There had been rain, nearly three solid days. Saucers of tobacco-colored liquid pooled on the front grass, greasy and dark. She knocked the instep of her sneakers with one of the batons as if she were a batter flossing spikes of dirt.

    They expected strangers; they had been warned. So when the van pulled to the curb, she only glared, crossing the batons near her waist. Not once did she back herself to the porch, where the rest of the household was standing. She watched, she dragged her sneakered toes in an arc as if drawing a border. Something invisible to keep danger away.

    They had come to march, her family had been told. Gum-soled boots belching in the muddy pathway. Most of the signs were hand-lettered and dripped runny ink like juice pressed from a blood orange. Baby Killer or No Death with a small, plastic infant doll hanging by a noose of wash-line cord. Parked behind their van was a navy-and-white squad car. Two police officers drank coffee; they held the Styrofoam cups between their hands, steam climbing across their cheeks. To Serve and Protect read the emblem stenciled to the car door, below the metal keylock. They simply watched to see that none of the protesters stepped on private property.

    The new lawlessness of civil disobedience was accepted by these picketers. Discovering where their quiet world smeared into something else.

    A cresting wave of hair, auburn losing to white, was tugged clean of Mercer Boone's face by bobby pins and aerosol sprays. She looked bloaty, tired. The engine of her life was clotted by stress. Running down the left side of her neck was a vein that inflated whenever she spoke.

    Recently, she'd caught herself massaging her hands with regularity--turning them over against each other in knots of pink friction. Another new habit born of anxiety: she pet the hinge of her right hip, in quick, tappy strokes, as if assuring herself the bones hadn't exploded beneath the weight of her torso. From a distance, this practice made her seem like a gunfighter in the last moments before he was preparing to draw his weapon.

    What she wanted, most, was a single day when the cogs that moved the traffic of her family trundled along without interruption. Nothing to provide a pause of alarm--for Mercer, for her husband and children. The filmy screen of uneventfulness, belonging to other families, hopefully slipped over the lens of her life.

(Continues...)

Copyright © 1999 Michael Grant Jaffe. All rights reserved.