The Kite Messenger

WHEN I HEARD RUTHIE CALLING, I PUT ON MY SHOES and went over the fence to the Mitchums’ house. Mary Maureen was sitting on the back stairs. “We’re going to make a kite. My father said you can help if you want.” I knew she or Ruthie had asked for me.

Mr. Mitchum had talked about kites before. The ones he’d made when he was a boy with his father, and the ones he’d made later. I had never made a kite myself. I bought one once, but I must have not put it together right because the paper tore and the stick broke before I ever tried to get it off the ground. You have to have someone that’s done it before who knows what they’re doing. Even with a store-bought kite, it’s hard. I had watched some kites in the sky before: I knew it was possible. In the end I smashed the kite I bought, crushed it round and tight like a ball, and forced it down a big gopher hole. But I kept the string.

“Avery,” Mr. Mitchum said, “I wondered if you’d show up. It’s kite-flying time. Do you feel that March wind?”

“Yes sir.”

“It’s just the right kind,” he said. “Gusts like that will take a kite up faster than you can let out the line.” He had sat down on the back stairs with us and was scraping the one stick smooth with the blade of his jackknife.

“I did some government work last night,” he said. “They had a saw in the carpenter shop, and I cut some scrap up. Look at this,” he said, and he bent the stick almost into a circle, stopped short at a big C. “Red fir,” he said. “It’s got give. Never saw anything like it back home in Tennessee. Wait until the wind gets behind this kite; it’ll bend it double.”

He took the other stick from Ruthie and made notches in the ends for the string. He marked the middle of the stick and balanced it on the dull edge of his knife blade. It went to one side and he took a couple of curls off that side.

It was a true miracle the way he could make things. Some Sundays at Mass they talked about how they needed a miracle to raise enough money for new vestments for the priest or an altar for the church or something for the bishop. They never mentioned what Jesus did when he was a carpenter, before he started to become God: That’s when all those church miracles started rolling in. But he must have made a lot of cupboards and stools before he ever could turn one loaf into a whole mountain of bread. I’d seen Mr. Mitchum turn a stick into 10 pinch clothespins for Ruthie’s grammy, or take new growth out of an old willow down the street and make a bentwood chair, just go ahead and make a chair as quick as that, that you could sit on a couple of hours later. Then he’d made a table to match.

He put the kite together just like I always thought it should go. The tissue paper must have been saved from Christmas because it had Mary Maureen’s writing, To Mother and Father, in black crayon. The sticks made a cross and he made them stay together with a wire. Then he threaded string through the notches at the ends of the sticks and laid that on top of the paper that we were holding against the cement on the driveway. Then he cut out the shape in the paper, leaving extra to fold over the string.

He did it all like the thought was so strong even his hands and fingers knew how without being told, and he kept telling us--the sound of his voice made you listen--”This is important, to keep the fold directly against the string without any play, or goodby kite. It’ll fall apart on you every time.” He used tape to seal the paper over the string. “Now,” he said, holding up the kite, “we need to make the shape that’ll scoop the air.” He cut off a length of string and tied it on the up-and-down stick and pulled it into a little curve. Then he tied another piece on the crossways one, so tight that it made the stick curve more than the lengthways one. The kite was almost as tall as I was. I realized I had a lot of questions I’d like to ask, but I didn’t want to try. He saw me looking closer at the reel of string, like one you used when you went fishing, but bigger. It was all wood and set in a box. “My father made it for me,” he said, “when I was Ruthie’s age, out of cherrywood.”

He thought of everything, had a tail already cut out of what looked like an old sheet, longer than Abner’s chain. That dog was watching us close, just waiting for one of us to take a step closer so he could start snapping his teeth. Mr. Mitchum let us tie the little pieces of cloth on like bows. “It’ll act like a rudder and at the same time like a kind of ballast to keep it in balance,” he said before I could think of the question.

Last he attached the string from the reel onto the line that made the sticks bend. He had all the ideas a person could have on a kite. As soon as he lifted it off the ground the kite came alive. It leaped a little, waved back and forth, wiggling the tail to see if it was ready.

He just stood there looking around as if the sky was too crowded with airplanes or Zeppelins or Jap fire balloons or something and we couldn’t start quite yet. Even Mary Maureen was hopping around. But he waited, holding the kite like a big shield in front of him. “Dad, Dad,” Ruthie kept saying.

Then, instead of going out in the street where everyone I’d ever seen flew their kites, which was the best place once they got over the telephone wires, Mr. Mitchum went out through the back gate past Aunt May’s garden plots and across the streetcar tracks to the railroad tracks.

Ruthie carried the tail. I carried the box with the spool of string. And Mary Maureen and Mr. Mitchum each had a part of the kite. It shuddered like it was trying to get away. He kept saying, “Hold it now, hold it.” I could feel the wind hard on my face.

I couldn’t help myself and tried to say, “Don’t let it go, Mary Maureen, Mary Maureen.” But I couldn’t get it out. I got the stutters, I was so worked up. But no one seemed to notice.

“This is the most important part,” he said. “This is where things go wrong no matter how good your kite is made. This has to be done perfect.” He told us again what we were to do.

I held the kite up over my head as far as I could put my arms up, just like he said. Ruthie still held the tail, ready to throw it up in the air when I let go. Mary Maureen was at the next telephone pole with plenty of slack around her feet and holding the string between her thumb and forefinger so we could see. Mr. Mitchum yelled “Run,” and Mary Maureen took off. I stretched the kite up on my toes and my fingertips. I could see the string looping less and less and then the tug at my hands. I didn’t want to let go. I wanted to hang on and let the kite take me with it up in the air. Away. Away. The wind pulled the kite from my grip and Ruthie whooped. We both were jumping up and down watching the kite rise, take the slack line all the way back to Mr. Mitchum, who let the reel spin free as the kite went up.

The tail was whipping back and forth like you do on a swing with your legs to gain height, the point wiggling its way slowly, cutting through the soft sky as if it were made of water. I felt my heart and it was trying to leave too. It thudded against my hand like it was going to break through my skin. The kite kept going straight up. Getting smaller but more graceful. For the first time I thought there might be a heaven, like a street you could learn to find. The kite could get there, I thought, if there was enough string.

The kite finally stopped, the big loop of string invisible after the first few feet out of the reel. It stayed fixed in the blue sky like an arrow, the long tail beating back and forth. It was the highest I’d ever seen one.

There was still some string left in the reel but most of it was played out, holding the kite where it was. My neck hurt from looking up, but I couldn’t stop from trying to keep the kite in sight. It was as if it might disappear if you stopped looking. Mary Maureen held the line but it wasn’t necessary. The kite couldn’t move, stuck fast there in the blue sky. “Go get some brown paper bags,” Mr. Mitchum told Ruthie.

She came back out of breath, her stomach pumping in and out. Neat as ever, Mr. Mitchum laid the bags on the ground and cut squares out with his knife, about the size of school paper. “Watch this,” he said. First he took out a pencil and wrote something, then he tore the paper down the middle to the center, then fitted it on the kite string. He placed the paper as high as he could reach, so I couldn’t read what he wrote. Instead of looking at the kite now, we watched the brown paper.

I thought nothing could surprise me, not in church or at school or here on our street. “It’s moving,” Mary Maureen said, “the paper is moving.” She pointed. I went over to where she was standing. I lined the paper up with one of the poles that held the streetcar wires up and watched. It looked like it moved past that. Slow, but it moved, and kept moving right up the line. “What makes it do that, Pop?”

“I don’t know; my father showed me that when I was your age. It might be some kind of vibration from the movement of the kite that draws the paper up.”

I held Ruthie’s head steady so she could see the paper move. Then she took the pencil and wrote her name and I put her paper on the line. It started going up too.

Then Mary Maureen got the pencil. “What shall I write?” she asked.

“It’s a message you’re sending. I used to think it was telling the kite something,” Mr. Mitchum said.

She wrote and I didn’t look and she handed the pencil to me. I wrote and tried to give the pencil back to Mr. Mitchum but he was staring into space.

However it was the messages moved, they moved right along, Mr. Mitchum’s in the lead by half a block. Then our three coming up, spaced a few yards in between. I never tired of watching the kite. Ruthie was already on her hands and knees playing with a blue-bellied lizard. Mary Maureen was picking at her hair, wrapping a strand around the end of her finger and then putting it in her mouth. Mr. Mitchum was still staring over his garage.

I heard Grammy start calling for them. I noticed then that the sun had gone down. But the sky was still as blue as if it were noon; it was just that there was no center left. Only the flowers knew and were rolled up, the California orange poppies along the railroad rocks like fractions of sunlight, the sweet peas shining like marbles against the back fence. No one moved.

I could see Grammy now at their back gate. I looked up at the sky again. Mr. Mitchum’s message had arrived; you couldn’t tell it from part of the kite. The other three were almost there.

Grammy called out when she spotted us, “Dennis, Dennis.” He shuddered like the kite did when it wanted to go up, and looked around him like he wasn’t sure what he was doing here. Waved his arm back and forth over his head to Grammy, who went back through the gate when she saw.

“Let’s go, girls,” he said, opening up his knife with his thumbnail, and as I watched he cut underhanded the string that was going invisible up to the kite. I was so surprised I never even tried to say anything. Mary Maureen kept looking back at the wooden reel, then at the sky. The string was gone. But the kite was still there in the same place; you could see it like before. Nothing changed.

“Come on, Ruthie,” he said, reaching down to take her hand, “we have to go home.” He started walking away, Mary Maureen going ahead of them. I grabbed the reel and tried to hand it to Mr. Mitchum. “No,” he said, “you keep it for us, Avery. Keep it for me while I’m gone.” They all walked away across the street. Mary Maureen shut their gate with a bang.

I ran up the bank to the tracks and stood on top, jumping in the air trying to reach and grab the string if it was still there, low. I kept trying, jumping and jumping. I couldn’t catch it or it wasn’t there. It made me out of breath. But I could still see the kite. I hid the reel in a drainage pipe and moved along the track, trying to keep the kite in sight and not stumble. It got dark. Then darker. I thought I could see the kite still at times, making that wiggling motion, the tail coiled like a corkscrew.

The wind seemed to be blowing toward the mud flats. I had to try. I cut away from the tracks and through the fence past the eucalyptus trees. The full moon came out, moving fast now. I kept going, running against the gray clay on the mud flats through the tunnel under the Bayshore Highway, listening for the sound the wind made slapping against the tissue paper kite. It had to come down somewhere. This was the farthest I’d ever been. I stumbled, got to my feet, wet up to my knees, and lost my sailor cap, but I kept going. Until I reached a big fence that I couldn’t climb over because of the rolls of barbed wire on both sides on the ground. Up high on the fence was a sign with a big skull and crossbones and I started stepping backward.

The moon was as bright as a light bulb in a room. I couldn’t pretend to see the kite anymore. And there were no sounds. I could see the lights where our street was and started going in that direction. I wasn’t watching for it, but I found my sailor cap on the way back.

I KNEW WHEN THE SIXTH-grade messenger came into the classroom and handed the slip of paper to Miss Walker that I was going to the office. Then she called me up to her desk. I could run for it, get out of the classroom and off the school grounds before they could catch me. But I went to her desk.

“I didn’t do anything,” I said before she could ask.

“Leave your hat here,” she said, and pointed at her desk. It was folded and through my belt. I did what she said. But I didn’t wear it at school anymore; I just carried it around. I didn’t want to be in trouble anymore. She whispered, “Be good now; just go up there and be polite. No back talk. I don’t know what this is about. Go on now.”

I had to wait with the secretary, who said, “Sit over there.” I sat on the wooden chair, my feet almost touching the floor. I didn’t mind. I knew how to remember good times. Drinking a strawberry milkshake. Thinking of all the flowers coming up and Aunt May telling me about them. I had the practice.

When Mr. Allen called me in, I wasn’t nervous either. My heart was beating, because I’d found I could feel it in my thumb too and didn’t have to look for it on my chest, and my eyes stayed put because I pretended I was looking at Aunt May’s iris that were just blooming.

“This is just a visit, Avery; don’t think you were sent for.” I made my mouth smile for him. “I want to help you, Avery; that’s my job, helping students in school. You probably haven’t had it in your speller yet, but principal is spelled P-A-L; the principal is your pal.” He laughed. “That’s how you tell that word from the other principle that you use in math.” I tried to smile again. “I’m your friend; I want what’s best for you.

“You’ve been having some difficulties doing work in the fifth grade, and this is your second year there. So I thought I would ask the superintendent, Mr. Enoch, if he knew of a school that you’d like better. And there is one in South City, that would like to have you. And it’s not all sitting at a desk and fooling around with books all the time. They have projects, games where you might take big barrels of screws or nails of different sizes and sort them out. It’s all for the war effort. And they have a baseball team and other sports there.” He stopped and wanted me to say something but I didn’t.

“I want you to have a future, Avery. What do you want to be when you get big?”

“Join the Navy, Mr. Allen, sir.”

“This will help you become a better sailor. I promise you. In fact this school is like the Navy; you live there, in clean dormitories. Everything is taken care of for you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Allen, but I don’t want to leave the street where I’m living now. But I appreciate your offer.”

“You’re not going to get promoted, Avery. How would you like to spend another year in the fifth grade when all your friends go on to the sixth? How would you like that?”

It’s something extra when a flower smells sweet. Daffodils and narcissus do, and you can lean over them and take a deep breath and fill yourself with their sugar.

“How would you like that? Avery? You don’t have to answer. But all I have to do is get permission from your guardian, your Aunt May. I wanted to be your friend, Avery. I wanted to make you a better citizen, so when you went into the Navy we could all be proud of you.”

I picked the biggest narcissus and put it in Aunt May’s dictionary, the thickest book. It pressed fine, and after a month, it still smelled as good as when it was in the garden.

“Go back to your classroom, Avery. I’m tired of looking at you.”

Miss Walker asked me to stay in at recess and I told her. “He knows you’re improving, Avery. I said you could do the sixth-grade work, that I want you in my class next year if I teach sixth. Don’t be so concerned, now; go out and play. I’ll talk to him again. There’s been some mistake.”

I trusted Miss Walker. She had come over twice to talk to Aunt May, to tell her I was doing better and was a big help to her as paper monitor and was doing one of the best reports in the class. Aunt May didn’t say anything about it, and I pretended I hadn’t heard through the door.

I went outside and sat down on the benches where we ate our lunches in good weather. I felt so tired, like I had been running around and around until I couldn’t take another step.

But everything happens so fast that you don’t have time to understand why. It’s all surprise, like the wind gets knocked out of you and you can’t breathe. Mr. Mitchum joined the Army. Mary Maureen had to tell me three times before I would believe her. Then I asked Ruthie. Then I had to ask Mrs. Mitchum.

Anything can happen, I’ve always known that, good or bad. I could be here today and gone tomorrow. But I wanted to be here, if I had to be somewhere.

IT WAS ALWAYS THE GOOD times, like flying the kite, that brought on the others. Especially when I couldn’t sleep. The times before I came to live with Aunt May, who wasn’t really my aunt. I’d try to think of something else, but the dead things would start appearing. The blood, and me thinking it was me that was shot dead instead of my real uncle, Johnny, that time that I screamed and screamed and thought no one would hear me because I was on my way up in the sky. But it was the eye, the sea lion’s eye, looking at me, that gave me the trembles, not old Johnny’s laugh, or the way he’d said to my father, “Don’t take everything so serious, Chet. I’ll pay you back. Sit down and have a drink.” Laughing, slapping his knee when my father pulled out the pistol. “Oh my oh my, Chet, you never knew how to take a joke.”

Uncle Johnny used to get me up in the middle of the night when there was a minus tide, and I’d go to sleep in the back of the car on the way to Moss Beach. Unk liked abalone steak better than anything in this world. He got the ones that were undersized, no more than six inches across the shell, because they were young and you didn’t have to beat the life out of them with a mallet to get them tender enough to chew.

Unk got me up that morning like he always did by lifting the end of my cot and dropping it back on the floor. That knocks the sleep right out of your head, and I got dressed and got into the back of the Plymouth. There was a minus-two tide. I woke up once when he stopped to put some water in the radiator. As good a mechanic as he was, he wouldn’t fix the leaks in the radiator; he’d rather let the car get heated up and have to stop. That’s what Helen, his bookkeeper who stayed with us, told him all the time.

We got to the cliffs, and it was not only dark, but it was drizzling. No stars, no moon, when it was like this. You could hear the boom of the surf as the tide went out, and then the crack, like a rock on a tin roof, of a rifle shot.

We got everything and walked the path down the cliffs to the sand. Picked our place near some rocks that shielded us from the wind, and I started dragging back the driftwood. Unk sat down and put on his thick socks first, then his knee-high rubber boots. We got the fire blazing so he’d be able to see his way back, no matter how far he went out.

With two gunnysacks, ripped so they fit over his shoulders, one on each side, and smoking a cigar, Unk went out on the smooth rocks. Helen and I followed until the seaweed got too slippery and he started feeling around the bottom of the boulders for the abalone. Then we went back to the fire and I dragged more wood up.

We hadn’t seen any other cars where we parked, but the cliffs went on for miles, and by the number of rifle shots we knew there were more people down for the minus tide. I couldn’t hear them barking, but the sea lions were out there too, gobbling the abalone like 700-pound vacuum cleaners. Unk saw one once, eating the meat out of a shell, he said, like it was a bowl of oatmeal. They weren’t shot at because of that though; people just killed them. I’d seen it plenty of times: men using the hoods of their cars up on top of the cliffs to steady their aim, potting the sea lions lying out on the rocks in the sun.

We took a walk, after we got enough wood, to see if we could find anything interesting, like those glass floats or nice-looking seashells. The sun was coming up, and we could see through the morning fog. Helen found a brass lantern on part of a buoy from a fishing boat. I let her find everything, even if I saw it first.

I thought it was just a lump of seaweed, because there was no smell, but it was a sea lion. I’d never got up close to one. But Helen went right up and gave it a kick. “Come on, look,” she said, so I had to go. You couldn’t even tell where the head was, it was so round. Helen started walking around it. Then I saw the sea lion’s eye. It was looking at me, looking straight at me, and it blinked. “Here’s where it’s been shot,” she said. “There’s a big hole.” The sea lion was still alive, but I couldn’t tell her that. “Cut me off one of its whiskers, Avery, and we’ll have a toothpick for Johnny.” I was backing away already. “Avery, take my fingernail file and get me a whisker. He won’t bite you.” The eye was watching me. I wanted to run for it but I couldn’t. And I wanted to saw off the whisker too. But it was the eye that made it hard. I got up close and started using the file, back and forth, not looking. The whisker came off, thick and hard as a wire, and I handed it to Helen. I never looked again.

When Unk came back, both sacks full, he could hardly walk, his boots were so full of ocean, and even his cigar was wet. We got the boots off first and he got warm by the fire. I took one sack at a time up to the trunk of the car.

Then we went to the restaurant and had our buckwheat cakes and eggs. Everyone was happy. Helen had given Johnny the whisker and he had it in the corner of his mouth when my father came in.

WHEN I OPENED THE FRONT door to the knock and saw Mr. Allen, he never gave me a chance to think. He stepped around me. Aunt May was in her chair.

He started talking about the school in South City and he had a paper he wanted her to sign. I was so surprised I never closed the door. Then Miss Walker came in from her apartment across the street. They started arguing. “You were supposed to wait for me to decide.”

“Last month you said you didn’t want him in your class next year.”

“I changed my mind. He’s improved.”

“I’m the principal.”

“And I’m his teacher; it’s supposed to be up to me.”

“Not anymore; the superintendent has decided.” He looked down at Aunt May, who had her eyes fixed on the extra-thick part of his black shoes. “He’s your responsibility, Mrs. Fontana. We all want to help him, but if he causes any more trouble we’re going to have to expel him permanently. Then, because he’s underage, there would be a hearing. And you’d have to pay all the expenses, as his guardian.

“But if he goes to the other school with your permission, you won’t have to worry. We all want what’s best for Avery.” He was holding the paper on his notebook, his fountain pen uncapped in his other hand. She took the fountain pen first.

“May,” Miss Walker said. And I ran.

Out the back door, making it crash as hard as I could against the wall. Then the screen door. Through the open gate. I turned to run along the back fence, but didn’t turn off when I came to the slant rows of sweet peas. I kept going, crashing, kicking, swinging my arms as if I were fighting, feeling the pull of the string, the stretch and snap, the flowers sticking to my legs, arms, and around my neck, but I kept going.

When I got to the sidewalk I stopped, breathing hard. I heard a streetcar coming. Over the streetcar rails and up the loose rock and down the railroad ties. I turned down the bank toward the mud flats and slowed to a walk to get through the fence and started trying to decide, stepping over a new crop of mushrooms. No more thinking; I was done with that.

When your ideas are impossible you have to stop using them. When you can’t think of anything good. When your ideas have no shape or color. You have to stop it. But if you do things without thinking before or after, that sometimes works. Trampling Aunt May’s sweet peas. That made me feel better by the minute. When Mr. Mitchum cut the kite string he was smiling to himself.

I was Avery. I could do anything. It was only a matter of making my hands and my feet do the work. I didn’t need to get any ideas. I didn’t need to think anymore. I hadn’t brought the food I’d been hiding in the shed, but I didn’t need it. There were plenty of mushrooms and I’d eat them for dinner. Hands picked up a rusty lard can and feet went back the way I’d come, to the grass by the eucalyptus trees. No one knew I was here. I had plenty to eat. I could stay here till I was old enough to join the Navy and they’d give me a uniform and new shoes.

There were a lot of mushrooms. I started picking. I watched my hand snap the stems off at the ground and put them in the lard can. When I came to the first toadstool I let my hand do what it wanted. Then another and then another. My legs carried me back to the mud flats.

A thought tried to get through. What had I written on the message to the kite? I couldn’t remember. There was no heaven. Just like there was no more school. No more sea lion’s eye. No more going back. And no more. No more.

My fingers told me so. I watched my hand take the first mushroom, and I chewed. They were better with salt. My hand took another. I closed my eyes. My hand took another.

But my thoughts wouldn’t stop right away. I knew the message to the kite now. Hello, I had written first, and then another Hello. The three other messages were on their way up; I had to hurry; and I wrote, Whoever’s up here, don’t worry. Avery Gorman. I signed my name so they’d know who it was. The kite must be waiting for me now.