Slide - Kyle Beachy [85]
We were two and a half games behind the first-place Cubs in the National League Central.
My mother cultivated her therapy of voluntary service. Without fanfare or even announcement, she joined a civilian group that drove Econoline vans through low-income neighborhoods with small bottles of water and battery-operated fans. This was a massive step forward from wrapping Christmas gifts at the Galleria for children's charities. The more selfless her volunteering, the harder it was to continue seeing her as the villain of this domestic drama.
The meeting was to begin at midnight. Once the sun went down, I covered myself in mosquito repellent and set off walking vaguely in the direction of Stuart's. Since I blamed at least some of my behavior on the place that had raised me, perhaps moving through it at the ground level could provide the logic for my defense. I began along familiar roads, blacktop, beneath overhanging trees, elm, and cars, mostly silver. I left the neighborhood by the less decorative back way, taking the pedestrian bridge halfway across Forest Park Parkway. I gripped the chain-link fence that rose ten or so feet from the waist-high concrete barrier. Occasional white lights sped toward me, red lights sped away. Four lanes total. I had never even considered the consideration of suicide, but this struck me as exactly the sort of spot where it could happen, provided one made it over the fence. A fair, reasonable challenge for a final small triumph at life's end. Down the road, I spotted a police cruiser hidden in the shadows waiting for speeders. I walked quickly away.
The photographs were in my back pocket, and with each step I felt them rub against my thigh. Otherwise, my attention was focused fiercely outward on whatever answers might emerge from this exterior world. Flooded by yellowish gaze of streetlight, the colors appeared suddenly retouched, somehow more essential. The forms of buildings struck me as more relevant than ever, each different manner by which lines met and diverged, framing other shapes within. It was as if some hand had reached out and spun the city's master dials clockwise: resolution, volume, contrast, brightness. The menacing dark, empty enclosures inside common garden ivy, a sidewalk seam tall enough to trip over. Everything was here, the facts of the world, the truth of details.
I crossed a street and entered Shaw Park under the watch of a gazillion cicada eyes and the tidal pattern of their call. Skee-her. The park was empty of course, municipal sporting fields and water houses abandoned at dusk. Skee-her. I sat against a tree and felt the bark press some fractal design into my back. I wasn't sure what I was expecting to find here. Some dark rendezvous, perhaps, any variety of nefarious nighttime business, something to make my own moral decay seem tame in comparison. But I was in the wrong part of the county.
After an hour, I stood and brushed myself off, then continued across the park and eventually along a series of dark, quiet streets while details continued to scream my name. Soon I came upon what appeared to be teenage boys and girls in a circle of chairs in the yard of a modest brick home. There was one man sitting among them, light-haired and boy-faced, with the enthusiastic demeanor of faith. It was a youth group meeting. He wore a collared shirt and khaki shorts and leather sandals.
“Good evening,” he called as I passed. I paused and nodded back. Then one of the young men stood from the chairs and walked crisply to meet me. I saw others in the group smile to one another at his enthusiasm. I reached back to make sure the pictures were secure in my pocket.
“Are you lost?” he asked, and I suspected he wasn't speaking of geographical bearings.
“Not really.”
I waited for what he would say next, but instead he stood there, weirdly silent, smiling, and big-eyed. Was this how people found religion? Were they awkwarded in?
“What are you doing out here? It's so hot.”
“Our group prefers to meet under His watchful eye. It allows us to look back up