"It Was His"

"It Was His"(Douglas E. Cate) "It Was His"
A Short Story By Douglas Cate
May, 2010 and May 16, 2012



(Author's Prefatory and Explanatory Note and Description: This is a semi-autobiographical, epic, hyperbolic yet dreary account of the internal and external adventures and misadventures and discoveries of a young boy. It is written in a stream-of-consciousness, Faulknerian/McCarthyian style. It was originally intended to parody Cormac McCarthy's style, but it outgrew that intent.)



Beneath the leafy canopy of the insular thicket, stood a boy, his dress somehow shabby, dirty, opaquely indigent. Though a light spring rain began to fall, pattering against those bunches of verdant, outstretched leaves, inundating them, turning them black, and falling downward; steadily, unchecked; he wore no slicker - nor was the textile hood of his thin, light shell of a jacket up. The rusty bulk of a decrepit dumpster lay behind him and the scent of its uncovered human offal; the stench and the malodor of it; commingled somewhat pleasantly with that of the dirt, the rain, the leaves of the copse. It was cloying, overpowering, nauseating - yet somehow tolerable. The copse was like an island - a rising, infundibular one. One whose middle was a raised ridge composed of smelly, brownish, solidified earth. A thick, deep litter of ancient, gray crisp leaves and moribund, sickly grass lay all around the flaxen-haired laid on top for the layers of soil. The sloping, curving, scandent ridge of the trailing asphalt driveway and it's bantam parking lot, loomed, bulked behind him.

Seen through the gray and green interstices of the multitude of ringing trees, it looked broken, castoff, empty, alone, apart - yet riverlike. A jigsaw puzzle of great, lifelike clarity. Of his house, parking lot, neighborhood - his whole childhood world, in short. The wind breathed ominously through the trees. One which looked purple or black in the light of dusk and night, bulked in rising, stately, almighty stature and leafy abundant thickness immediately behind him. He could see the slient, palely tan behemoth of his apartment building, with its several crazy cuts and angles and slopes, facing him on a parallel through spaces in the ingathered trees of the atoll-like thicket. It sheltered him, but not from the rain as he lay in its heart. No beating issued from or originated in this particular heart, other than the sound of wind sighing steadily through the eaves of the grouped trees - or the rustle of the boughs and leaves, scraped, disturbed the passing, valetudinary fury of the wind.

Pale, alabaster hands, with some red spots here and there, which gleamed dully in the eldritch, ominous gray-green overcast half-light beneath the thronged trees, stretched out questingly, probingly, exploratorily from the trim inner recesses of the dun coat. The boy's hands, they were. He stooped down, his hands following suit, mimicking entirely the downward trajectory of the body otherwise entire, and while bent slightly at the waist, pawed ursinely at the thick covering of dead leaves below him. In the darkness, in the starkness of the copse. His mind knew it had a task set before it, a purpose, an excuse for being in this odd, still, temperate, nemoral zone - but nothing of him beyond his heart could ascertain precisely what that object was; and even his heart knew only shadows and ghostly patterns, saltant and scandent and elusive in this otherworldly light. Or lack thereof.

Vacuum of light. What his mission was beyond plain, flat, flattest exploration of a temperate, parently forbidden, rubbishy, odoriferous sector, none could tell. Certainly no part of him anyway. he had felt the irresistible impulse earlier, while inside, quietly crayoning inchoately in infantile coloring books, their sticky, matted pages yellowing with musty age. It hit him swiftly, without any forewarning. The dim, dull, thin, threadbare expanse of the carpet rubbed to patches of solid, inexplicable blackness and oblivion in places, it stretched away, orange, yellow and red, and telescoped, transforming itself and the distance to something vaguely Saharan. yet he did not notice this hallucinatory portion of the impact of the unbidden, distorted, incomplete thought. Rather, he got up stiffly and glimpsed out the crumbling, white-silled windows at the stillness, ominousness and silvery-grayness outside.

The leaves of the trees rustled, rattled intermittently in the breeze, but otherwise, above the slight, cryptic whistle of the wind, all was slient and still. Even all the juggernauts and minutiae of the hill itself. For he lived on a hill, his apartment building was set into the slopes of one. His eyes, fervid yet pale, scanned the exterior swiftly. They saw it all in perhaps ten seconds. The focal point of his impromptu, childish scan was the copse, with its rusty, bulking guardian dumpster, directly in front of him. His eyes kept drawing to it, as helplessly as iron filings to a magnet. It loomed mentally like a terrible, caliginous, tree-studded mountain. But if it was not an island (though, in that it was somewhat secluded and was flanked by two rivers of asphalt, two driveways that formed it into some sort of delta) then it was certainly not a mountain.

Not even the dirty, leaf-bestrewn humped ridge that rose dark and secret at its center. Not once did his eyes, after their initial, hasty scan, drift from that temperate, verdant, forbidding locale. Not even to look once at the bunches, the clusters of ambiguously Middle-Eastern sumac trees that dotted the grassy humps of the hill to the extreme north that comprised the entirety of his outdoor play area and yard. Not even those trees whose implicative tropicalness starkly fascinated him at idle whiles thus leading to frequent histrionic imaginings of Egyptian landscape and Arabic intrigue beneath the outspreading, luxuriant, shiny boughs for the gray-barked, thin sumac trees. No; not even these mainstays and frank obsession of his hours outdoors at play; not even these remembrances and imagined Arabian oases diverted him from his focus on the dreamy yet stark copse.

Now, though, he came out of his imagistic imaginings, his hypnagogic regressions, his flashbacks and torrid, unfocused, scattered memories abruptly, even jerking his head somewhat violently as he shook off the demons and haunting images of the past, to return rudely to the present. His pale, almost limpid hand was brushing absentmindedly at the deep carpet of dusty, dead leaves. Leaves much drier than an arid, sunbleached, stark desert plain and infinitely more lifeless, desiccated and drained. They crumbled to colored dust at the barest touch, so ancient, so dry and parchmentlike were they. He brought some semblance of order to his chaotic leaf-churning, eventually. He brushed aside more leaves as intent fused itself onto his haphazard, mindless actions. The carpet dissipated; the dust grew. And blew - it surrounded him, suffocated him. He coughed while in the snare of its filthy, obscuring, membraneous mist. In its midst. The midst of the miniature cyclone that enwrapped him.

He stood still in its center for an ephemeral duration, coughing dryly yet heartily all the while. After what seemed like a blatant eternity of shambling around in the early, overcast, dusty dusk, churning up dry leaf dust, his hand touching nothing but leaves, earth and dust, all of it as tangible, as substantial as air, it struck something buried in the ancient, autumnal detritus: something metallic. It clanged mutely, but in the stillness and silence of the overcast day, a stillness broken only by rustling, wind-disturbed leaves, passing cars, piddling rainfall - more like drizzle or mist; and the occasional rush of the wind, it sounded much louder than it actually was. In the stillness, the silence, it was booming, deafening: the coughing, abrupt blast of a shotgun, the report of a carbine, the devastating oratory of an explosion.

He seemed blind before; he did not gaze at what he touched and moved and swept away with his bloodless, livid (livid only in the dusklight-the gray, overcast overhead, the ingathered accretions of silvery clouds) now, with the short metallic clang, he looked down and his eyes at last registered what they saw: a tiny toy airplane with squarish, inswept wings, scaphoid fuselage and tapering gray muzzle. The muzzle, needlelike nose of the lilliputian aeronautical plaything that his wide open, wondering eyes gazed raptly upon and that his hands groped greedily, swiftly, clumsily for, was a argent as diecast stell and was as sharp-looking. Yet dull and faded somehow. It reminded him, other than the dullness and the fadedness of it steel coat, of his sister's home remedy for glass shards incidentally lodged deep in pedal tissue: Poka-Coca, she called it. It consisted of her rudely probing, stabbing, poking his naked, reddened, elevated feet with the sharp, tapering nose of one of his toy airplanes; not this one, though, of course; while she laughed at his discomfort and repetitively, talismanically intoned: Poca-Coca, Poca-Coca over and over again.

Needless to say, it had been a long while since he had been foolish enough to step outside barefoot. He thought that maybe that was why she had performed the "Poca Coca" ritual and with such odd, unbridled glee - so as to help him. Maybe, though younger than him, she had thought to teach him a lesson, the lesson: Don't go wandering around outside barefoot. Perhaps, by doing this, she had somehow helped him to avoid contracting tetanus or something. But, perhaps not. He was startled back into the present reality from this second, distracting reverie. he shrugged "Poca-Coca" off quickly, almost rudely. It interfered with his nascent greed - greed, lust for the airplane that may or may not have belonged to him that once lay beneath the cripsed, sere, funerary leaves (with their purple or blue or brown veins and stems; more of them blue than purple or brown) that had thus evaded his grasp. Yet, not so anymore. Finally, tilting his head down too and absorbingly watching, scanning everything, he got a grip on it. He plucked it, like some ancient, buried, precious gem, from its mantle of expired, fallen leaves, and held it tightly in his fisted hand.

Greed and lust had so infused him that he did not notice the steady trickles of descending blood that ran from his hand where he had cut it on the sharp edges of the toy jet. He did not heed it, gripping the replica ever tighter, afraid to let go of this elusive object as if it were some archaic trinket of dubious value. The very loss of which would bankrupt him. He grasped it, grabbed it, squeezed it, pulled it, held it high aloft, covering the thin light of the sun that peeked out of the gray sky at the apex of the outspreading trees which formed a basin around him, but one that wanted for a roof: through the absence of which he could see much of the puffy, silvery, alabastrine sky overhead. Overhead, with no obstructions - no major ones, anyway. Now he knew with grim certainty that, as he presented the airplane like some strange, modest offering to the sky, that it ironically now was his, had been his forever and ever, it was his property and it's manual ascent heavenward merely reasserted that unspoken fact. Come what may, and even if his bratty, surgically-minded sister performed Poca Coca with it, it was his. He solidly, eternally recognized that - it was his - and left. It was his.