Children in the Field

CHILDREN IN THE FIELD / Roger Weingarten I was on my back in a blizzard of milkweed down the chUdren were flinging into the wind gusting like geese suddenly changing direction. The silks caught in my beard reminded me of a scarf over my face, leggings, and boots that buckled over my shoes—it was almost a müe through snow to my waist on my way to Mrs. MUler's first-grade extravaganza of AU Baba, air-raid sirens ricocheting off the basement waUs at our heads tucked between our knees, and fingerpainted Ughtning taped to the back of the upright piano, when a blue dot grew into Jake the cop standing over me in the no-man's-land of the five-way intersection, who said I knew you'd show up. He ducked a snowbaU that came out of nowhere and said Tm sorry about your friend. He was a good kid. I cupped my hands to my scarf and to the red ear under the gold-rimmed cap, shouting that Mike wasn't afraid of germs or bugs. He ate candy off the street, and almost destroyed his buUy of an older brother with a fish hook tied to an arrow. Jake took a swipe at my tears with his mitten, then turned me around in the drift, blindfolded by the white blur, Uke it was my turn to pin the taU on the donkey, and wished me luck as he pushed me back into the buzzard of chUdren trying to bury me aUve under armloads of leaves. I wheeled around a corridor of men staring at the ceiling, catheters dangUng off the side of their beds, then returned to eighth-grade Biology, where my girlfriend was dissecting the lungs and heart 92 · The Missouri Review of a frog pulsing between the curtains of its skin, puUed back and pinned to a piece of cardboard. She passed me a formaldehydescented note under the table: Please don't poke fun at Hyman Lipschitz's acne anymore. We're going steady. I looked up at the bold letters of his name engraved on the bracelet swaying from her wrist as she performed a last incision with her eyes closed because she didn't want to see the hash she was making or me whispering maybe we could jitterbug at his bar mitzvah. Leaning closer to steal a last kiss, I gagged at the smeU between us and threw up with several others close by foUowing suit. She crawled toward the door, while Mr. Schwartz puUed me by my hair wrapped around his knuckles to the blackboard, bounced my head against it, screaming FUth and Nincompoop, then he told me I had four minutes to clean it up. This was PainesviUe, where my sister never smiled or stepped outside our father's house, the richest farm between Erie and Sandusky, our closest neighbor a thief everyone caUed Reuben the Stick, because he chewed twigs and spat the bark wherever he pleased, or Reuben the Conqueror because he'd never been caught. Once, my father on a ladder was finishing a pyramid of süver doUars. I interrupted the sun setting on his masterpiece to read him a letter from Reuben, who praised my sister's inner beauty and demanded thirty thousand for a dowry or else he'd take an axe to our vineyards and bleed our prize Nubians with his own teeth. Please inform Mr. Reuben Mintz, said my father, that he may kiss my ruchas, then Ufted his velvet sUpper to the next to the highest rung. Men with guns Roger Weingarten The Missouri Review · 93 answered my knock and brought me to an easy chair across from Reuben the Conqueror, who offered me wine and a word about my future prospects in his firm. Barefoot, I entered my sister's room. She snored into her piUow, a string of drool trailing off under the quUt. I shook her, whispering that she should prepare a feast fit for an emperor and herself with ointments and a crown of miniature roses in her hair. DeUghted with the powdered cinnamon scattered over the pigeon pie, my father pretended not to...