Six Words A Day

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Six Words A Day - Jesus Boy

Never underestimate your reader's gracious imagination.
(2,476 words below)

So here's my story on this story.

It's the final round entry for the NYC Midnight Short Story contest. The 60 writers competing in this final round were assigned a genre (science fiction) and a story element (neighbor), and given 24 hours to write 2,500 words.

For starters...it wasn't the best week for creativity. (Is there ever a BEST week?)

My mother had a heart attack. I'd been up and down Interstate 35 six times in the ten days preceding "writing day."

My son's talented band had a much anticipated and fabulous CD release event on the Friday night the assignment was made. I barely made it home from mom's before the show - and wasn't home from the show 'til after 3 AM.

I figured I'd be fine, though...as long as the genre wasn't sci-fi.

Oh well.

I promised myself a reasonable attempt - but still slept in on Saturday, thought about characters and story lines over coffee, researched a setting for a couple of hours, and finally began to write at about 2 PM.

So here's what 10 hours and the encouragement/inspiration of a sci-fi enthused husband produced. I'm not proud of it...but, the judges allowed the entry a place in the top 10 (#6).

Go figure.

JESUS BOY

In the summer after seventh grade, people began calling me Jesus Boy instead of Vic, which was the abbreviated version of my real name, Victorio Mangas. By tenth grade, I was just JB to all my friends who, fortunately, had mostly forgotten where the nickname came from.

My mother hated the name JB, although she did like it better than Jesus Boy. She insisted on calling me Victorio, no matter who was around to hear it, or how many times I told her I preferred to be called JB.

“VicTORRRRio” was the way she said it, as if her faux Spanish drawl and over-modulated lilt would somehow convince me to return to the honor of my Mimbres tribe roots and my given name.

She’d asked me about the nickname at least three-thousand times in three years.

“Jesus does not like to be made fun of,” she would say. “I don’t think this is a good name for you.” She was steeped in a traditional Catholic-bred fear of a humorless God.

I dared not tell her I was crowned Jesus Boy at a birthday party for Jenny Jackson after I’d walked on top of the water at the Deming, New Mexico city pool. I’m not sure what came over me that July day of my 14th summer – a young boy’s need to be unforgettable to the girls, I suppose – but I have thought back to that afternoon many times, grateful for the human incapacity to believe in the unexplained.

I have always been a curiosity. Born of an Indian father and an Irish mother in a small railroad town just 30 miles north of the Mexico-New Mexico border, I had the societal profile of the high accountability Irish-Catholic and the low expectation Native American.

My maternal grandfather was a fierce, opinionated scientist who could square root 5,286 in his head, and play a violin on Sunday afternoon with the kind of long bowing that would make even a songbird weep. My grandfather on my father’s side was a junk collector who lived on the wrong side of the tracks and smoked peyote in a circle of drummers for three full days every week.

I looked like my paternal grandfather. Thick black hair, dark-eyes, full lips, square-jaw. I thought like my Irish grandfather. In equations, lines, symbols, and vibrations.

****

Grandpa O’Shea had an old set of tuning forks that were my first and favorite toys as a child. Wrapped in a flat piece of leather with sixteen long narrow pockets to hold eight forks, the cold, steel, u-shaped tines became something of a puzzle for my young hands to manipulate. I would pull the tuning sprongs out of their beds, and work tirelessly for hours at a time until each fork was in exactly the right pocket. At some point, Grandpa showed me how to tap the fork’s tines on the side of a chair to create the magic vibration that sent rich, perfectly pitched tones into the air. When I was no older than four, I found if I held the vibrating fork close to my ear I could actually feel the tones buzzing inside my head.

If it was the B fork, I heard a voice.

“Hi, neighbor,” was all the voice said.

I told my parents about the tuning fork voice. They smiled and said I had an imaginary friend.

And then they talked to each other about how much I needed to be around other children.

“What’s your imaginary friend’s name?” my mother asked at bedtime that night.

“I guess it’s Neighbor,” I told her. “That’s what he calls me, so that’s what I call him.”

By the time I was six, I had learned to replicate the pitch of the B tuning fork, and could conjure up Neighbor whenever I wanted to with a long hum of the B tone.

“Hi, Neighbor,” he’d always say.

“Hi, Neighbor,” I’d reply.

For a little Indian boy, known as the grandson of the crazy wannabe chief in shanty town, it was sometimes the friendliest voice of the day.


****

Two things happened when I was seven.

The first was a cub scout weekend at City of Rocks State Park. The pack was working on a geologist’s badge, and had come to the park with tents, lanterns, and backpacks to study rock formations and look for arrowheads left behind by my ancestors, the war-loving Mimbres. We had fanned out to scour a particular piece of the preserve, kicking rocks and studying dirt. I found the whole exercise excruciatingly boring, so I hummed the B note and said hi to Neighbor. I heard him ask me why I didn’t pick up the old bowl on the ground.

“What old bowl?” I asked, as eager to have a conversation with Neighbor as I was to find anything in the dirt.

“It’s right there by your foot,” he said. “Pick it up.”

“There’s nothing by my foot except a mesquite sprout and dirt,” I told him.

“I don’t see dirt over here,” he said. “Dig.”

“I don’t have a shovel,” I told him. “Where’s over here?”

“Get a stick and dig,” Neighbor insisted. “The bowl looks good.”

“Someone will see me and think I’m crazy,” I told him. But I was looking for a stick because Neighbor said the bowl was good.

“They don’t know what we know,” Neighbor said.

So I dug with a stick into the hard-packed, powdery-brown silt. A mouthy, know-it-all scout stopped to ask me if I’d found something and I just said, “Maybe.”

He sat down and watched me with about as much interest as a honeybee has in vinegar. When I hit something with the stick he said, “It’s prob’ly a coyote bone.”

But it was a bowl. An almost-mint condition white pottery bowl with a horned toad painted on it. It turned out to be a circa 1050 piece of pottery made, indeed, by the Mimbres people. It became a museum piece that is still on display at the Deming Luna Mimbres Museum. And, I became an instant archeological genius-child in Deming.

The second thing that happened that year was a trip to White Sands Missile Range. Grandpa had been a physicist at Los Alamos Labs for many years, working on what my mother called “secret government projects.” Grandpa called them “just science experiments.” He wanted me to see the place where the first nuclear weapons were tested. Mother wanted me to see the closest thing to snow I’d ever see in our part of New Mexico. And so we went.

They let me wander the vast, wide-open monument-to-nothing-but-white-sand-dunes by myself. I was dressed in a red jacket and had instructions to walk up the highest sand mountain I could find when I was tired of exploring, so they could find me. I ran up and down a few sandy hills and then threw myself face down into the soft sugary valley between two gently sloping dunes. I rolled onto my back and summoned Neighbor with the B.

Suddenly he was there. I mean there – actually there. Lying next to me on his back, humming. He turned his head my way and said, “Hi neighbor. It’s me.”

“You’re me,” I said back to him with a bit of surprise, although I remember I was not surprised at all. He was old, it seemed. Maybe older than Grandpa. But Neighbor was somehow me. I knew this, but I certainly didn’t know how to explain it. I decided not to tell Grandpa and mother.

****

I began to beg to be driven the 90-minutes from Deming to White Sands every weekend. About once a month Grandpa would give in and drive me there, then let me roam the dunes on my own. I always met Neighbor in the space between two big hills. Gradually I learned, in very small and simple lessons, that we were living on different sides of what he called a “curtain” of particle energy. Somehow, he said, the vibration of the B note I could hum and the nuclear disruption of the atoms at White Sands combined to create a hole in the curtain.

“It seems that’s why we can see each other, Neighbor.”

“Are you a ghost?” I asked him.

“No,” he laughed. “I’m a collection of energy charged particles, just like you are. I just live in, well, kind of a different neighborhood.”

On the way home I asked Grandpa if he believed in ghosts. He was quiet a long time, and finally said, “Well, once, out there on the sands, we cleared everybody out of a big area so we could test that new bomb.”

Then he stopped talking, and I thought maybe he was going to cry. I waited a few minutes before I asked him, “Did you see ghosts at White Sands, Grandpa?”

“No, JB,” he said with resolve and some relief. “I saw people. In the bright light of the bomb explosion. I saw people. Hundreds of ‘em. And then they were gone.”

We sat in complete silence for the next twenty miles, then Grandpa said, “No need to mention that to anyone, right JB?”
****

Once I could drive, I went to White Sands several times a week. I stayed in almost constant contact with Neighbor who told me more and more about life on his side of the curtain. There was no solid matter in Neighbor’s world. Everything moved with the same energetic force and flowed with much more vision and ease than things on my side of the curtain. Still, Neighbor said, there was much curiosity on his side about the oppositional physics on my side of the curtain.

And so we became students of one another. Soon, I could heat a mug of cold water to boiling in my hands, snap a mental image of a textbook page and store it in my memory until needed, and I continued to find ancient artifacts in the hills without much digging. Oh, and that walking on top of water thing…just matter over matter. When people marveled, I shrugged my shoulders and gave a stoic Indian mystic look toward the hills that I had seen my Indian chief Grandfather use when my mother “marveled” at his piles of treasured trash. People considered me something of a Native Magician.

My mother worried that I was sitting in the peyote circle with Chief Grandfather too often.

On the day of my high school graduation, the entire family gathered to celebrate the great occasion. I was headed to college, following in my scientist grandfather’s footsteps. Grandpa O’Shea raised his violin and bow to play a Bach piece in that way of his that I had come to love. Three measures into the piece he collapsed. My mother could not find a pulse. Without realizing I was humming, I began to hear the calming voice of Neighbor.

“Open the valves inside you. Let energy flow. Feel the heat in your hands as you do with the water in the mug. Place your hands on Grandpa. Can you see his heart muscle? That’s it. Hold your hands there and do not stop the rush of your own energy. He will be fine.”

And, of course, he was.

My mother then began to call me JB.

****

Seeing Neighbor in the white sand dunes of Alamogordo became as natural for me over the years as meeting a woman for a drink after work. I went often, both as a student of quantum physics, pondering the phenomenon of altered nuclear charged particles poking holes in the curtain between parallel universes, and as a student of the parallel universe in which I seemed to occasionally move.

Neighbor asked me one day why I did not fly to our meetings in the desert.

“It’s as convenient to drive here from home as it is to drive here from an airport,” I told him.

“No,” he said. “I mean fly. Why don’t YOU fly?”

“You mean flap my wings and fly like a bird?”

“More like floating on particles,” he said. “Something like walking on water, only it’s combining your particulate matter with the energized matter around you. You basically float.”

“Should I try it here?” I asked, even as I was standing and climbing to the top of the nearest dune.

“You might as well,” he said, with a tone that seemed as encouraging as it did exasperated.

I threw my shoes and coat into the sand and stood waiting for instruction.

“Look for the particles of time and light,” Neighbor told me. “Where they bend you will find the pull of gravity. Aim your matter above those bends.”

I wanted this more than I’d ever wanted anything before. I drudged to a higher dune and stood for what seemed like hours, trying to discern light from time and myself from anything solid. I was talking, continually, to Neighbor. I took off my clothes, at his suggestion, to eliminate the task of transforming any matter beyond my own body into pure and flying energy.

Of course the police came. I was standing naked on top of a sand dune in a National Park talking to myself in broad daylight. My Indian mystic faraway look into the hills did not work on law enforcement. And I mistakenly told them I was trying to fly.

****

So here I sit, talking with Neighbor, unable to see him but still able to hum him to my side. We are discussing the altered universes of Haldol and Thorazine and Prolixin. He tells me exactly what he sees inside my brain as I am forced to take these anti-psychotic drugs. He has scolded me every day for saying I was trying to fly.

He describes every receptor in my central nervous system as it bends and collapses with the flood of the chemical chlorpromazine. He says, “Soon, you won’t be able to hum the B anymore. Perhaps it’s time to step permanently through the curtain.”

****

Dawn’s early light seeps around the edges of drawn window shades on a stark hospital floor. A white-coated doctor picks up a stack of metal charts.

“How’s our naked bird doing?” she asks the night nurse as he fills paper cups with pills.

“Fine,” he says. “Probably ready to see you. He an early bird.” They laugh.

The doctor slips through the patient’s door - quickly in and quickly out.

“Where is he?”

“He should be there. No one has left this floor.”

“The bed hasn’t been slept in. All I found in the room was this.”

The doctor taps a tuning fork on the nurse’s desk.

A clear and resounding B tone fills the air.

“Who was that?” the doctor says, turning her head toward the window.

“What?” the nurse responds.

“I swear someone just said, “This way Jesus Boy.””

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