They Were Laughing, Patrick Sean Lee [highly recommended books .TXT] 📗

green carpet of grass toward the neatly raked pile of leaves. She glanced back at me with a smile as a gust of wind ruffled the ends of her hair.

                     “Come said the wind to the leaves one day,

                    Come o'er the meadows and we will play.

                     Put on your dresses, scarlet and gold,

                  For summer is gone and the days grow cold…” she said out of the blue.

When she arrived she bent over and scooped a handful up, then let them move and roll back and forth in her hands as though she were contemplating fashioning something elaborate out of them, some amazing thing out of hundreds of leaves made of pure gold. And then she tilted her head a little and threw them back up in the direction they’d just come from.

     “Go back! Don’t leave us for the winter! Go back!” She laughed, and I half expected the little umbrella of gold and brown and dark, dark green to obey her. To streak upward into the maze of branches and reattach themselves to the tree. They responded as instructed for an instant, then turned and fluttered downward in greater obedience to God’s physics.

     “Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals…”

Jimmy found his voice. He had laid his hallucinogenic, loveless, bloody rake down on the stunned ashcan horror of grass and hopped helplessly, hopelessly to the naked and mindless fence. Well, that’s what I thought, anyway. What possible connection his last statement had to Carol’s beautiful ode to the fallen leaves totally escaped me, but I had to admit something deep down inside me kind of liked the belligerent ring of Jimmy’s words.

Carol laughed at him, and then threw herself back into the pile of waiting leaves. I felt in that moment as though I’d raked them all up for this very instant in time. A golden bed for a diamond goddess. Jimmy bounded over the fence and joined her on his hands and knees.

     “You understand?” His eyes were those of a flounder.

     She turned her head quickly to look up at him, and answered sotto voce, “Not at all…the words line up so strangely, and I think they’re funny the way you’ve strung them all together.” She sat up; I joined them on my knees. Allen stood ten feet away and began fiddling with the camera, mumbling. “Still, I like your very mournful poetry,” Carol added almost as an afterthought. “Really, though, what are skeleton treasuries! Robot…apartments? Robot! It’s all too funny, Jimmy. Honestly. You are too, too weird, but I like you anyway,” she said more loudly. A few stubborn leaves clung to her hair. I envied their fingers. She shook them free and then grabbed another handful and tossed them over Jimmy’s head. He sat back a few feet from her in the crushed pile and rolled his grayish eyes, as though her questions to him were stranger than the robot apartments in that Ginsberg guy’s poem.

     Click! Clicketty, clicketty, clicketty. Click! Allen moved in a semi-circle around the three of us, then back to his starting point, bent slightly to lower the angle of his shots, snapping, then winding.

     “Skeleton treasuries? Society, Sarah says. I mean most of it has to do with our corrupt, stulti—sulti—umm…spirit-crushin’, post-war way of life,” Jimmy explained.

     “Huh?”

     “Yeah. That’s what Howl is all about. How society’s given up on bein’ individual, sort of. I think that’s what it is.”

     I watched Carol. She fixed her eyes on my best friend, waiting anxiously, I think, for a sermon or a lofty dissertation from him. Her focus was as intent as his musings, although I suspected his musings might only be half-baked at their heart, and oozing out as batter. Still, he was utterly absorbed in the earnestness of it all, even if the cake would crumble later on.

“Doggone! I seem to have run out of film! You fellas stay here…I’ll return shortly with a fresh roll. Don’t go away, okay?” Allen hesitated—waited for someone to assure him we wouldn’t ditch him.

      “Yeah, sure. Go get your film. Take your time,” I said without taking my eyes off Carol. She tipped her head slightly, trying to read Jimmy’s unspoken mind, I thought. I heard Allen stumble out the gate.

       What do you mean, exactly? Tell us. Individuality? Is that what you mean? Carol asked Jimmy with her stare, her delicate smile. I saw the words, the thoughts, I swear it.

       Something possessed me, like the strange words had possessed Jimmy. I moved my hand carefully, unobtrusively, until my fingers found hers beneath the leaves. She lifted them just a little, and I let mine stop them, settle them. I closed my thumb and index and forefinger over her fingers. Her eyes shot a glance at me without her head moving at all, and then she returned her attention to her new, crazy friend. My heart raced.

     Jimmy heard her thoughts, too, I think. I’m certain. We all stopped. Everything stopped as though God had rung a bell ending the first day in the creation of the world. We knew one another intimately for a thousandth of a second. A shorter span of time than imaginable; but there it was. I tightened my fingers around Carol’s. She was smiling.

     “I think Ginsberg is upset that our parents want us to become like robots. No brains. Automatons or automations, or whatever. You know? Watch TV till our gray matter turns to black jelly so that we can just…I don’t know for sure the rest of it. Sarah does. She could tell you.”

     “She wrote that?” Carol asked in surprise.

    “Heck no. This cat named Allen Ginsberg did. Last year. It’s like this eight page poem that’s filled with irony and sadness cuz all his friends are these brilliant drug addicts, and they’re dyin’ and society doesn’t care. None of us cares. Sarah loves it so much that she adopted his name. She ain’t Sarah no more. Just Gins.”

     “She loves that they’re all dying?” I asked.

     “No, dummy. The poem. Howl. It’s her bible.” Jimmy said.

     “Is she a Catholic?” I asked, getting just a little confused by the deep theological direction the conversation was heading into.

     Carol laughed in a hearty, undignified way. I wondered, as she fell back into the leaves, if I’d said something altogether stupid again.

     “What difference does it make what religion she is or ain’t?” Jimmy asked.

       “Well…uh, I guess that us Catholics don’t believe in the Bible. That’s all. Maybe Howl ought to be her Baltimore Catechism. If she’s a Catholic.”

     “Whaddya mean we don’t believe in the Bible? I heard Sister Dolorine say that Jesus’ crucifixion is told about in the Bible. So, if we believe in God and Jesus and Mary and Joseph, and all that stuff, then we must believe in the Bible, right?” he said with a certain air of incredulity.

     I thought about it. I supposed so, even though I’d never dared crack the cover of the book because I’d heard something, somewhere, that it was like trying to understand Shakespeare, with all those thee’s and thou’s and begets and such. I guessed that it was okay to read it, but what for when the Baltimore Catechism had all the important stuff laid out in plain and simple English? Carol tightened her fingers on mine just a bit. I can’t imagine she agreed with my thinking, but I sure appreciated her fingers.

     “Skip Morley, you should really consider reading the Holy Book. It answers all mankind’s questions. Every other religious book is just a commentary on what God wrote inside the Bible. We don’t need anyone else’s opinion on what he wants for us. It’s all there. The fact that Sarah…or Gins…ranks that poem, or that guy Ginsberg, up there with the Holy Bible just means it’s very, very important to her,” Carol said.

     “Oh.” I squeezed her fingers gently, hoping that I hadn’t displayed the true depth of my ignorance to her. Moreover, I didn’t want to push the conversation too far and risk going to hell by thinking or doing something that the nuns and Father Blenkush and the Pope might disapprove of. Like reading the Bible. I wondered if they really didn’t want us to because it was so hard to understand? Or was it…what was it? Why were we so different than Protestants? Which group of us was going to be sent to hell? God, I hoped it wasn’t Carol’s. Well, yes I did, but I really, really prayed that she could sneak by Saint Peter somehow. I really did.

     “Yeah, dummy,” Jimmy added.

     I guessed that I was a dummy.

     “Is she your girlfriend, Jimmy?” Carol asked, changing the subject.

     “Sure is. I’m gonna’ run away, here pretty soon. Maybe by Thanksgiving. I’m gonna’ hitchhike back to Manhattan and then me and her are gonna’ get a pad.”

     “A what?” I asked.

     “An apartment or a house,” Carol said. I was beginning to get the feeling that maybe she knew everything. Everything. I liked that. I loved it.

     “Oh, right! How do you think you’re going to do that?” I asked Jimmy, all of the sudden realizing that his plan, if that’s what it really was, was stupid. “You’ll flunk out of school, and your mom’ll send the cops after you. You can’t run away…dummy!”

     “Watch me. Wanna’ go with me, Carol?”

     She sat up. By so doing she was forced to pull herself free from my hold. Carol looked first at me, and then brought her eyes to bear like two searchlights on Jimmy. For a moment she said nothing. I tried to find her fingers beneath the leaves again.

     “You boys are so, so silly! You, Skip Morley, think God is some kind of decrepit, mean old grandfather, and…” She said that without looking at me. I wanted to object, but she continued before I could open my mouth. “…and you, Jimmy, believe we’re all demons! How silly of both of you!”

     The sound of Allen’s clomping footsteps returning him to our comfortable home in the pile of leaves was the next unwelcome sentence. He rattled the gate open. “Hey! You’re all still here! I got the new roll of film! It’s in. Gosh, you’re all still here!”

     “Where else would we be?” I growled him. I stared at Carol’s hair, dangling, disrupted by the leaves. She continued to look at Jimmy with an intense look in her eyes. He smiled, suddenly, broadly. He laughed. Then he grabbed a handful of leaves and tossed them at Carol. The three of us stirred up the damp, golden feathers of leaves and began pitching them at one another in laughter.

     I heard Allen curse. “Darn it! This thing is stuck! It won’t move! Skip, help me get to the next frame, would you, please? It’s stuck!” He sounded as though our lives depended on my answer. I glanced back at him. He was in an unknown world for a change, unable to reason the mechanical box into working correctly.

     “Shit, Allen. Does your mother wipe your butt?” I rose and walked over to him.

     “Skip Morley!” Carol said giggling.

     I grabbed the camera from him and turned it over in my hands; tried to turn the small knob on top of it that wound the film. It refused to budge. I shot him an annoying glance. He simply looked hopefully back at me. After I tried one more time to turn the stubborn knob, ending up with the same disappointing result, I stepped beside him, and to his horror, banged the piece of junk against the trunk of my elm tree. Then again for good measure.

     “Oh no! Skip!” he cried out.

     I tried the knob. It turned as easily as if an angel had slipped inside the camera and waved a blessed finger or two at its guts. And I hadn’t even asked anyone up there for help. I