Pull Backwards Means Push

I first saw Billy in the liberal arts building. My attention latched on to his swirly gait, though I got word from more than one source he played football. Next time I saw him, he had a toothpick in his mouth. For God’s sake. He sat next to me during office hours. There were exactly two chairs beside the closed door. I don’t remember who opened up first.
I decided I’d have him over because he sucked his teeth when Professor Hollins said that Jane Jacobs was frivolous. The way he sprang up and walked out like somebody’s hero. No looking back but I was still turned to stone, if you know what I mean. Later on, in our film lecture, he stopped the TA at the podium when a passage she was reading from used the phrase, “an historic.” Don’t an A come before a word with a consonant? he bleated. The TA choked on spit, kept on without an answer.
Neither of us was settled on a major yet. My father labeled higher education a big, expensive orgy. I decided not to tell him they had take-one bowls of condoms now. Billy understood. His family went from the Scottish Lowlands to moonshine six generations ago. They nailed Trespassers Beware signs a mile and a half down the switchback that led to their drive. The “estate,” he called it, reminding me of the house from which my father fled in Baghdad. Before the Gulf War when they were Iraq’s one percent. My father kept no pictures, having left so young, and what are you expected to grab at the last minute when you’re five years old, gliding past the blood-pools of everyone that’s loved you and into the clutch of an auburn-haired stranger, a cross on her partially exposed breast?
I invited Billy over because he was different. I couldn’t take my father’s cracking at my lack of a woman. Billy got bitches so, you know. He asked if we had any beer, and my father’s cheeks went pink before laughter squished out of them. He wasn’t going to say outright that Muslims don’t drink. He quickly changed the subject to the smell that had come and gone over the past month. Even though it’d been a back-burner topic of discussion among our neighbors, Billy shrugged it off, said no air compares to what we breathe in the Alleghenies. My father tossed a hand, said it was likely the nearby horse ranch, then got up to use the toilet. I knew in his condition this would take the better part of an hour, so Billy and I got into the meat of things.
I was envious because he’d been to New York. He kept circling back to some place called The Village as he gazed past our sliding glass door, recounting leather-pants memories, party favors purchased at movie rental places. I wished he could screen-share his mind’s eye. I didn’t know how to look off in the distance.
Maybe it was manners, or whatever my father says we have that Americans don’t. I tried to break eye contact every so often. I convinced myself shakily that I still had manners. I’m gonna go back, he said. First thing once this shitty piece of paper’s in my hands. I told him he better take me with, and he agreed instantly, without looking me in the eye. I knew it would never happen. Everyone’s so different there, he said. Nothing matters that doesn’t really matter in the city.
(My father would curse us behind the bathroom door, if he was able to hear. After the towers came down, he gave up teaching me Kurdish phrases, cast the Noble Qur’an from its pedestal to the keyed shelf of the built-in, and for some reason attempted sloppy Joes, from a recipe he found in 30 Minute Meals. I trust this Rachael Ray, he’d say, because she measures the spices in the palm of her hand and not those stupid little spoons. And that was that.)
Billy wore flannels, the kind you find at stores that also sell cat litter, car batteries, and cheese. This day’s flannel was the kind of blue some will argue is green, with thin stripes waffled in either direction. There was a hole in the armpit where the stitching gave up, and I remember wanting to shrink to mouse-size so that I could crawl through it for warmth. Then I’d round up my new kin and find a fit home in New York City, deep underground.
Billy phantom’d from his chair. I felt this opaque duty in following his lead. He waded through the door to our backyard as if pulled by a long string. What was he talking about while he did this? I wished he’d face me. Outside, he made this noise that shattered the branches. Sounded like a cross between a car alarm and a yodel. I responded with a limp “woo.”
The winter sun was shy against unnamed mountains. Billy pointed to the first naked star. That’s my grandfather, he said. I held back chuckles, because what he really said was, that’s my pepaw up there, or something like that. He died with the Kamchatka handle loyal at his side. I remembered my father saying how this country was so few with early deaths that Americans had to invent their own reasons for letting go. Then Billy told me how his grandfather’s last wish, a secret only he knew about, was for his body to be put in the outhouse that served as their distillery during prohibition and be blasted to smithereens (his words), so that the West Virginia (State) wooks could forget about the stars and think of him instead. Dynamite? I said. Like in the Road Runner cartoons? He didn’t laugh, but tongued his lips in a far-off way. I thought he was getting ready to shoot an arrow into something.
I asked how long since, thinking he’d gotten over it by now, but his thoughts flew right past me and into the Kanawha. He surveyed the land like there was something to rescue; a creature too shy to call out for help. Cocked at the sky, he pointed to a second star. There’s Memaw, he said. Always late to an evening meal. Maybe she wants to skip the prayers, I said, jealous of his constant lucidity. He turned to me like murder and laughed. Birds shifted in their branches. I laughed too, but I made sure my laughter didn’t outdo Billy’s. I shared stupidly that in Islam a body must be buried immediately once its soul has left it, and he squinted at me, licking his dry lips. I trailed off with the emptiness a Muslim might feel, not allowed to smile upon their beloved, one last time, clutching orchids in an open casket.
You ever been to Point Pleasant? he asked me. These backwoods consonants were damn near needles. His lack of an R sound had me forgetting about Islam, about emptiness. I moved my lips in more directions than it took to say No. I couldn’t get my throat to move. I shook my head. It’s only bout an hour up the river, he said. Ten thousand sticks of dynamite left to seep back to the Earth. Left after one of them wars. Billy tried to break in countless times, for kicks, but the tools he carried were no match for the Roosevelt administration. He’d try again come spring, he said, though he hoped he wouldn’t have to. I didn’t know what that meant, but Billy wasn’t a kind to interrupt. He was caught in the flow of things, so I let myself get caught too, like a fish.
He had me all right. I was two steps behind him as we started on the trail. I swore my legs were moving faster than his (we were around the same height), but somehow I could hardly keep up. It’s getting kind of chilly, I said. We don’t want to go farther than we’re prepared to walk back. His response was a click of the tongue and a jaw-jut. I lied and said we’d soon wander past the property line into our equestrian neighbor’s, who loved guns and life as if the two things go together. I wondered what Billy might love more than life.
There was a clearing that took me a few blinks to recognize. He paused there and put his hands on his hips. He then clasped them behind his back and extended them together towards the ground. What’s wrong? I said, no longer the breathless one. He shared the details of his injury. BMX phase, few years back. I tried to recall some rugged downfall of my own, and while my mind was occupied in vain, my fingertips followed an unmarked trail in the air until they reached the ancient runes of Billy’s vertebrae. They poked loudly from the other side of the flannel. My fingers became these sort of archaeologists, refusing rest until they found what alien civilization Hansel-and-Gretel’d the bones this way, so obedient they formed an infantry of their own.
That feels good, he said. His breath made louder exits than these words did. His lungs had rhythms I could only hold on to. His shoulder blades––quicksand to my fists.
Where’d you learn to do this? he said. The only training I could think of was being born to a man that has never had health insurance and the duct tape massage therapy that came with it. I thought about my father, the only man I had yet loved. I wanted to share the deep stuff with Billy. To phrase everything carefully so he’d look past our differences, to the place we‘d both come from. I thought about my grandfather, also an alcoholic, who kept it a secret from nearly everybody he knew. I rehearsed in my head, summoning the look my father wore that day in his life he thought it fit to be so open with me. I was rubbing his shoulders then too. He made me use this mentholated oil that never seemed to wash from my skin. Billy sniffled.
My thumbs made circuits down and up his neck, reversing at the two points where the orange hair swirled inward. I thought I’d slip into these creamsicles, experience Billy in fractal dimensions. Then I’d return to what was not Billy and report to a jaw-sunk world what I had found there (and maybe keep a few details for myself). I escaped from these thoughts as Billy winced. I’d brushed like hell over a tendon. I corrected myself without words and continued rehearsing in my head. My father at the door, five years old, his father passed out in a wife beater. He trusted then (I know now where I get it from), and when this grinning man whose teeth were unnecessarily white put pen to clipboard and asked if his daddy was home, he smiled back and said vigorously that he was the man of the house now, and that any business was to be conducted through him.
Excellent, the strange man said, though he noticed my grandfather slouched in his chair. He pointed the clicked pen, pried for his thoughts on the president. The president, my young father echoed, thinking himself a hero as he shouted the sympathies of all Baghdad to this man, whose grin grew and grew, till it turned into a gun. He was especially proud after sharing that his father, my grandfather, threw the remote at the TV and cursed Allah every time Hussein’s face came on the screen. He could hardly fall asleep that night, in raptures for having put it all so well into words.
I stopped rehearsing for a second to take breaths of my own. Billy moaned as I pressed three generations of strength into his spine, a good excuse to grab his side for support.
He woke the next morning, my father, stepped in every room to find a body without a meaning––his father’s, his mother’s, all three of his sisters’ throats cut. So silent it never woke him up. The sheets looked like love then, and he wondered, or must have, what he’d been dreaming about while it all happened. Downstairs was an envelope, his name written beautifully in Arabic and a box of chocolates housing whole hazelnuts. My father always despised hazelnuts, does to this day. Inside the card was an expression of gratitude from Hussein himself, though it might only have been a printed copy of his signature. At the end of the note came a promise; that a dutiful young man would have a future cut out for him, that a full scholarship would be waiting. Somewhere in there, the claim that such a bold “master of the house” would have no problem cleaning up the blood and continuing to run things the way he saw fit.
My eyes spent fog on a last thrust for Billy. He thanked me on an exhale––that life-force married with my mist. I was almost ready now. The temperature was telling us to create warmth of our own. I chose a mild starting point. Funny, I said, how sometimes an H is silent, and sometimes it’s not, even in the same word, and th, th, that the writer’s intention doesn’t always tell which. Huh? he said with a Glock-glance. The H, I said. When you called it out in film class. That’s when I knew you were different. When I knew you were going to change my life. Even if it wasn’t in a big, life-changing way, I mean. I mean. And Billy smiled at me. I’d got my wish.
We must’ve been nearly a mile in the woods. The journey back felt twice as long as going. We had no clear destination, so I thought of this journey as a bent oval and not the double-crossing of a line. I thought of us as two thumbs, braving the neck of a god we’d yet to meet, constantly near but whose back is ever turned to us. The hill our house was built on––a knot in this god’s back.
Hey, I said to Billy, who was behind me now. I just thought of something. What’s that? he said. We both come from cities with silent Hs. You still talking about that? he said. What you mean? Our ancestors, at least, I said. Edinburgh and Baghdad both have Hs, yet they both have no real business being there. Huh, Billy said, but it was a resignation and not a question. It’s funny you say that, he said. Why? Well, he said, you have no real business being here either. What I thought was homemade warmth still coursed falsely through my waterways. I thought he was talking about New York. I know, I said, realizing we had missed a fork in the path as we happened upon the old whiskey shack. I sure don’t belong here, I said. At least not forever. That’s it, isn’t it? he said, nodding at the shack. What? That old distillery? I haven’t so much as peeked through the cracks in the wood beams since we moved out here. Don’t give me that, he said. I know what I want is in there. Going on six weeks he been gone, everyone knows it’s something funny in the air. I mouthed first syllables, genuinely lost as to what he might mean. That stench my dad was talking about? I said. You know where it’s coming from? He was through inching now, so close to me that if our noses were magnets, they’d have split air’s atoms with a passionate click. It was his dying wish, he said through teeth, yellow even in the moonlight. Months I’ve tried to get my hands on it. You expect me to wait until the got-damn Fourth of July? I felt something prick me gently between my legs. I couldn’t look down. Instead, I lifted my hand to hold it, to say Yes to him so that we could begin with our own warmth. But when my hand got there, it was cold. It was hard and metal and a hell of a lot bigger than my own. I figured I’d be different once I left these woods, if that were to happen. Billy swallowed. I heard a sharp click from between our pants. He leaned in even closer, darted eyes at the shack again. I imagined a heart-shaped bed inside, covered in pink and red silk, chocolate box and cursive card resting on a table. His mouth turned to my ear. Our cheeks scarcely brushed. The small hairs high-fived as they passed each other. I heard spit smack between gums and cheek as his lips parted, and I took it for a fact he was going to kiss me. Another click came from where our hips met, and he said, with a gentility I’d only heard in porn you have to pay for: so this is where you people keep the bombs.