Four Take away One

Vernon

This morning he spoke up at a meeting. My name is Vernon, and I'm a addict. Hey, Vernon. Hey, Vernon. Hey, Vernon.

The hard part, he thought, would be starting, saying the who and the what. And then it got hard again, sitting there all prickly hot on his neck and shoulders, all nervous and naked. Foolish. And punkish at the thing that wanted giving up. He seemed to have a stone he was trying to get out of his pocket, but it was too heavy and too stuck, and it was beginning to look like he would have to turn that pocket inside-out to get it loose.

He wanted, wanted, wanted to tell his own, his very own story, and the wanting was building until he thought that he would burst. At first he had acted scornful of all that sissyfied meeting-feeling, all that sadness and opening up, wondering why it would change anything, why it mattered what he said or did in any case. But for weeks he had been sitting there closed and aching to open, even just a hairline crack. He knew the others had started thinking he was too scared to talk, and things had gotten mixed up inside, so that he couldn't keep straight whether the punks were the ones who had the words or the ones who didn't.

He spoke up before he could stop himself, and looked for somewhere to put his hands. They felt more empty than ever: no gun, no works, no wad.

"I'm not big on talking," he started out, unsettled by the sound of his own voice filling the room, "and mostly I just want my space. I want to be left alone, and if you don't invade what's mine, I'll let you be. But. Now. Well. I got a thing to say." He turned the pocket out and showed his stone. "My pops, I never really knew him. Then he left."

The others looked down to give him some respect while they waited for more. "Take your time," one said, gently, and the others nodded.

"That's it," Vernon said. "That's all I got."

Now he is lying in his cell after lights out, left with what was underneath the stone. Looking out his narrow window at the January ice. Left with the boy he used to be.

Like I didn't already have enough company with those other ghosts who visit, he whispers, what the fuck.

He has been keeping them away all day, while they stood just by him, quiet, but waiting, next to him in the chow line and at the table, during commissary and count and mail and phone calls and dominoes. A man, a teenager, and a hungry-eyed boy asking him to listen, practically pulling at his shirt.

A boy walking right up with his eight-year-old scarecrow body, looking for the chance to tell him who he is, where he lives, how his heart begins to close around the hole his daddy left. Listen, he says, pulling at him, now that we are in the darkness, now that we're alone, Remember me?

I'm listening, boy, he says, you got me cornered. There's nowhere else to go inside this concrete box. Go on and speak.

My dad is king, he says, looking Vernon in the eye. He sits way over there in his big chair, and nobody tells him "No." People listen if he talks, but he doesn't even have to talk at all. Without any words, he can look down at you with his eyebrows together and his lips in a line, and you know he's the boss.

He's big this way and that way, too, and when he screeches his chair legs back on the kitchen floor and stands up, he's the only thing anyone can see.

Standing there, big as our whole life put together, he fills the room, he and his mad weather, and I try to peek around him without moving and making him bigger. Mama...