VADAVIAN

BLUEBOY

I looked at Blueboy’s hands and thought about his older brother, Todd. The star quarterback in high school. Tall. Popular with the girls. Smart. Charming. Deep voice and thick, wavy hair. Balance and precision in his movement. And what was he, ten years older than us? Blueboy’s hands were smaller than Todd’s. Blueboy himself was smaller than Todd. We sat on his bed up under the slanted roof of the top floor of his parents’ house. The room he had shared with Todd when Todd still lived at home. On the wall above the head of Blueboy’s bed hung a black and white photo of Todd. He looked majestic. Poised with his arm cocked back, about to throw a pass. An action shot from one of Todd’s great football games. Of which there had been many. Blueboy seemed unaware of the photo, the way it hung over him just like Todd’s glorified life hung over him. Blueboy cleared his throat.

“So Minneapolis it is,” he said. I looked at Blueboy’s hands and thought about his older brother, Todd, and wondered how Blueboy felt about himself in his endless comparisons to Todd. I looked at Blueboy’s hands as they strayed, almost unconsciously, to the worn and scuffed football that lay on the bed next to him, as they cradled and caressed and moved delicately over the leather surface of that football. Trying, it seemed, to find just the right grip, the grip that had come so effortlessly to Todd. 

Blueboy’s senior year of high school was coming to an end. We were the same age, but Blueboy was in the grade below mine. My parents had entered me in school too early, his had entered him at precisely the right age. After just the right amount of nurturing at home. From a mom who had stayed at home to raise and comfort Blueboy until it was time for him to enter school. His mom had a nickname for Blueboy, and once I had used it on him, a mistake that Blueboy was quick to correct: “Don’t call me that. Only my mom calls me that.” 

I was just finishing my first year of college at the nearby branch campus. Blueboy had applied to the University of Minnesota, “The U”, and had, of course, gotten in. Not that their admissions standards were especially high, but Blueboy had excelled in high school. He had to. After all, Todd had cast a long shadow. Which had necessitated that Blueboy also played football. Had also played quarterback. Had also excelled at that. But not, of course, to the degree Todd had. He, Blueboy that is, was only 5’10” after all. And at that height it’s hard to see well over the offensive line, hard to see the receivers downfield. But Blueboy had been good, or good enough, at least according to Todd. The next Doug Flutie, he teased. Todd had come to every game, offered Blueboy advice before and after every game. Advice that Blueboy claimed he didn’t need but obviously did. His game stats every season bore that out. Lower completion percentages, fewer touchdowns, than Todd. But Todd had been a miracle on the field. And in the classroom. A local legend.

“I can’t wait,” I said, looking up from Blueboy’s hands to the photo of Todd on the wall behind and above him. I was planning to transfer to the The U. After a year at this small campus with good enough grades, it was easy to transfer. And the tuition agreement meant that Wisconsin residents could pay in-state fees. I had asked my dad if we could sell one or two of the big rams from our sheep farm to help pay for my first year. He had responded with anger and resentment. I would get a job. Or two. Take out a loan. There was no other option. Blueboy’s parents were paying his expenses. Everything except rent. The plan was for the two of us to find an apartment somewhere in that sprawling metropolis, move in together, seal our bond. Share the rent. 

Neither of us had been there, Minneapolis. We had no idea what awaited us. But it had to be better, more exciting, than the rural agrarian setting we had grown up in. Exotic. Dazzling. Cultural. We felt better than this place and needed proof of it. Minneapolis would provide that. And Blueboy, most of all, felt better than the people we had grown up with. Smarter, more experienced, more talented, more deserving. His parents had sent him to France for a year in high school. He had everything. Always had. His dad drove a new LTD, a luxury car. He worked as a caddy at an up-scale golf course designed by the world-famous Cal Fliesenbalm III. He had carried bags for the CEOs of prestigious corporations such as Oscar Meyer and Green Giant. He knew how to schmooze and cajole and ingratiate himself with the upper echelons. He was one of them, it was just a matter of time. Todd was not. That was the only difference that mattered to Blueboy. Minneapolis was the first step on the path toward Blueboy catching up with, and eventually surpassing, Todd. Their mom had fallen ill. Blueboy’s fate was set. He would excel in college and then go on to medical school. He would become a doctor and save his mom’s life. Todd, meanwhile, would continue working as a bartender. A has-been.

I reached across to the dresser and picked up a pamphlet. A folded, stapled, faded pamphlet. It was a roster from an old high school football game with profiles of all of the star players on both sides. On the front was a photo of Todd. Standing in his uniform with his helmet in one hand and a football in the other. Smiling. Perfect. 1977. I tossed it back onto the dresser wondering why it had been lying there.

I doubted my dad’s old pickup truck could make the drive. Orange, rusty, dented, front end shimmying. My few boxes of clothing and books and an old mattress loose in the back. My former life. My entire being. Loose in the rusted bed of that truck. A four-hour drive to the big city. Half of it on desolate Highway 10 through the Amish country and endless farmlands. I looked out the window at the fields and thought about the hot summer days Sundevil and I had spent working in fields like those while Blueboy caddied at the designer golf course. “Blue chip boy,” Sundevil had called him, grinning from a tanned face while the two of us rested under the eave of a barn during a long day of baling hay. “No. Blueboy,” he said, “that’s better. Blueboy.” He shook his head, grinning.

 The drive was mostly silent. I sensed my dad’s lingering resentment about the rams. “Six hundred dollars,” I had suggested, too casually in hindsight, “for one of those rams. That’s a quarter’s tuition.” I regretted it. Shouldn’t have suggested it.

Once behind the wheel of his pickup my dad was reluctant to stop. Gas stops only. He had his own thermos of coffee. Window cracked, a cigarette between the fingers of his left hand resting casually atop the steering wheel. Greasy trucker’s cap on his head. Old Ray-Ban sunglasses with a little safety pin in the hinge of one of the bows where the screw had fallen out. We passed an old farmhouse and a memory flashed through my mind. My dad, in a broken lawn chair outside the old farmhouse we had lived in. A shotgun across his legs. Me in a little wooden chair next to him. “Just watch now, Eddie, they’ll be here any minute,” he was telling me. Early evening, summer. Insects in the air and warm sunlight slanting through the elm trees and oaks that bordered the little clearing around the house. Then, one by one, black birds, starlings they were called, descending from the sky to come to rest on the roof of the house. And then the shotgun raised to my dad’s shoulder, an ominous pause, and the explosion of a shell fired. The birds erupted, most of them. A few fell flapping and struggling, skidding down the slope of the roof to fall into the yard where our dog, an old mixed breed, leapt from one to the other, crushing them in his jaws, shaking them. My dad had given me a cork gun, encouraged me to aim and shoot too. Even though the cork would only fly a few feet and was harmless to the birds I knew instinctively it was wrong. The cork gun lay inanimate across my lap. My dad looked down at it and shook his head.

“Minneapolis,” he said, taking a drag on his cigarette and flicking the ash out the window. “Minneapolis. It’s a long drive. And a big city. You’ll be on your own, you know.” He looked sideways at me across the bench seat of the pickup. 

Yeah, I thought, trying to conceal my excitement. It felt like a betrayal, this excitement. 

We passed another sagging farmhouse with chickens in the front yard. And then a second childhood memory came to mind. My sister and me outside our own chicken coop. It had a little hatchway, which allowed the hens to roam freely during the day and return at will for the night to their safe perches and shelter inside. On this day all of them were out in the yard, along with the rooster. The rooster was large, twice the size of the hens. He regarded us with a watchful eye. And then, in a flash, he raced toward my sister, wings flapping and bristling, and launched at her. His talons sunk into her kneecaps and he hung there, flapping and twisting and pecking furiously at her legs. She stood screaming. I stood frozen. And then the front door of the old farmhouse crashed open, our dad racing through the doorway and down the steps of the porch. In his hand a length of wood, like a table leg. And then he was in front of my sister, swinging the stick at the rooster. Blood erupted from its head, it hung for a moment motionless, talons still embedded in my screaming sister’s knees. Then the stick was thrown to the side, the rooster’s head in my dad’s hand, the rooster jerked loose and flung to the ground, stomped to death in front of us, my sister wailing, my heart pounding. I looked back across the bench seat of the pickup at my dad’s face in profile. His rough, untrimmed beard, his sunburned neck. I felt an old fear, an apprehension of his unpredictability, his explosive anger.

The boxes and old mattress had been removed from the bed of the pickup and stacked in the front yard of the apartment complex. A single-story building, eight units, four at street level and four below. Ours was one of the front units below street level. I would have to wait for Blueboy and his parents to arrive in their luxury car and U-Haul trailer. Blueboy had the keys to the apartment. My dad stood near the front of the pickup, its driver-side door open, looking at me among the cardboard boxes. He wouldn’t stay in the city over night. It was another four-hour drive home. He had to get going. We each took a step toward the other, just close enough to reach across and shake hands at arms-length. He smiled at me, shook his head. “See ya later, alligator,” he said, and then climbed into the pickup. Raised a single hand goodbye as he drove away. I stepped back to stand among the boxes and suddenly felt quite alone.

Blueboy had a lot of stuff. He and his mom and dad carried box after box from the trailer into the little, two-room apartment. Boxes of clothing, books, a word processor, a table, a stereo, a television, chairs, an actual bed. Everything put into place, a home in the making. They would rent a hotel room in the city, spend a couple of days, take Blueboy shopping for clothing (Benetton, Pendleton, Calvin Klein – he had the look), groceries, warning me gently, with smiles, that no, they couldn’t provide any groceries for me too but they wished me a good start with the new life. I lay on my mattress on the cold, linoleum floor of the bedroom Blueboy and I would share, his wooden-frame bed looming above me, lay there perfectly still and listening to their contented chatter and Blueboy’s whistling as they unpacked his things, their things, and prepared his new home, a home that I already felt like a guest in. 

Darkness began to descend outside, visible through the tiny window above the floor where I lay, a narrow slit just at street level through which I could see the top of a tree, its branches straining into the sky above, toward faint glimmers that I imagined were stars like the ones I had looked up at on so many nights from outside my childhood home in the woods. As the darkness grew and evening settled over us, I heard the three of them leave the apartment, the car start outside and pull away, off to a nice dinner together somewhere in the great vibrating city that took its name from an old Ojibwe expression for falling water.

In the silence that filled the apartment I rose from the mattress, walked across the room to the single box of my own that sat discretely next to the doorway, and reached in, pulled out an album. I carried it gently into the other room, switched on Blueboy’s stereo, laid the album on the turntable, placed the arm carefully on a certain track, and walked back to the mattress and lay down. I closed my eyes as Wagner’s “Song to the evening star” began to play. I thought about Sundevil, wondered where he was, felt the weight of my body, the weight of the rocks we had picked from potato fields, and the weight of the hay bales we had stacked in barns hundreds of miles away and several lifetimes ago, slowly dissolve, slip free, and release me as the notes of Wagner’s aria transformed into moving colors behind my eyelids, gradually filling my troubled, wandering mind.