The Great Daylight

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Day after day, Daniel Avery watched his weary father shuffle out the front door and off to work, until eventually he got it in his head that he should try doing the same. For the occasion, he convinced his mother to pack him a lunch of an Oscar Mayer sandwich, a small red apple, and corn chips. But whereas his father carried a black lunch box with metal latches, a simple brown bag would do for Daniel. And whereas his father wore a pressed blue uniform with two stripes on his sleeve, Daniel would wear his usual dark blue toughskins and a plain white t-shirt, the one with the chocolate ice cream stain in the center, just above his belly button.

Still in her pajamas and a flowery bathrobe, and with a cigarette hanging from her lips, his mother stooped down, squinting in the dim light of the kitchen and breathing smoke into his face as she helped fasten the tool belt, from which hung a hammer, a screwdriver, some nails and screws. He clutched the saw in his hand and pulled a plastic hard hat onto his head. And out the door he went, to get some sense of what this going to work business was all about.

It was early August, the air dry and the sun so brilliant it washed the world in white as he stood waiting for his eyes to adjust. He stepped off the porch, around the small hedge that ran alongside the walkway leading to his front door, and onto the grass, a tiny lawn that might as well have been a meadow, vast as it seemed. A blanket of varying shades of green and yellow, dotted with occasional small brown divots and puffy white dandelions. And a tree with a perfect globe of leaves at the top, like a giant tootsie pop. It made immediate sense that he should start with that tree. Saw through its trunk and watch it fall like a tiny green soldier taking a bullet in the sandbox out back.

He set his lunch bag on the low brick wall that held what his mother called the flowerbed in place against the house. His mother would continue to call that long patch of dirt a flowerbed throughout his childhood, although it never held a single plant, but for the weeds she would occasionally shoot down with chemicals from a plastic bottle. Instead, it would become a repository for matchbox cars and cat shit and would serve, in later years, as a soft landing when he sneaked out of the house through his sister’s window. But today it was not yet what it would become. Today it was merely dirt, not worthy of his attention.

He set to work on that tree, sawing back and forth, letting the plastic teeth rattle against the thin bark, twisting his mouth up as he spat sound effects, gweesh-gwoosh, gweesh-gwoosh. A few droplets of sap glistened along the fresh cut. Within seconds the tree crashed down, whoosh-carumph, and sprawled across the grass in exactly the spot he’d imagined, aiming back toward the house, in that patch of shade the actual tree continued to cast. He wiped the sweat from his forehead.

A canoe. That’s what he would build. The thought entered him with such eternal logic that it seemed a canoe had been the obvious plan all along. Some sawing here. A plastic screw twisted into the ground. Hammering there, and there. The water rising at his ankles now and a sense of urgency that this canoe be built quickly. And soon he was floating on a wide expanse of blue water, sitting cross-legged with his tools and his lunch bag now on the ground in front of him. The salty-sweet scent of that sandwich filled his nostrils before he even got the plastic off of it. That perfectly round slice of meat sticking out between two square pieces of bread. He peeled off the thin, plastic-like film that ran around the outside of the Oscar Mayer and ate that first.

Out across the sparkling blue water, bright orange and green fish leaped into the air and splashed back down, sending up explosions of droplets that glistened like gemstones. He set the sandwich in his lap and pulled an arrow from the quiver now slung over his back. Drawing the string of the bow back, he aimed carefully and speared an unlucky fish, a large one with yellow and green stripes, straight through its gills. Its eyes bulged in disbelief as it fell, flipping and lurching madly through the air, and bright red blood spewed forth, staining the water around him, a rich purplish hue. He took another bite of the Oscar Mayer, and for a moment, it was the raw, quivering flesh of that fish in his mouth, the saltiness of the baloney now the salt of the ocean.

With the saw, now a paddle, he propelled himself along peacefully past high, sheer cliff-faces of gray rock, topped with giant trees with drooping, broad leaves. Small brown monkeys with bright red faces swung from vines and hooted ca-caw ca-coo and beat their chests ratta-boom-tat. They hurled coconuts that splashed like cannonballs in the surrounding water. One hit Daniel on top of his head and bounced off of his hard hat, landing in the bottom of the canoe and rolling around, rattle-tat, dark brown and covered in hair, just like the head of the monkey who threw it.

Then the trees and the cliffs and the monkeys were gone, and a heavy fog rolled in from all directions, white and billowy, marshmallow clouds floating past like misshapen balloons. For several minutes the air was cool and moist. Alone and anonymous in the midst of a beautiful nowhere, Daniel could see nothing, and no one could see him.

He bit and chewed the sandwich, and soon, just as spontaneously as it had arrived, the fog began to clear. Way off in the distance, on top of an enormous mountain, sat a large building called junior high, where his sister would one day go to school, and he would too, he’d been told, but not until he was much older. Instead he would soon go to another school, but while this prospect had lately weighed heavily in his thoughts, he did not trouble himself with it now.

Below junior high lay an empty field, a million times as big as his own yard. And even closer, across the street from the near edge of that field, began the cluster of houses that made up the neighborhood he had not yet begun to explore. Cars were parked at the curb and in driveways along the street, which led directly to his house before bending and continuing further on to his right, onto an unknown destination.

And then a boy, standing on the sidewalk at the edge of the yard. Standing like maybe he’d been there a while, waiting to be noticed.

Daniel stopped chewing the gooey wad of baloney and bread in his mouth. He turned his head and looked back at the screen door of his house. He turned his head and looked back at the boy. He swallowed and felt as if a large, smooth stone were passing down his throat.

He raised his hand and waved. The boy waved back. Then the boy motioned for him to come toward him. Daniel looked back once more at his screen door, but there was no one there. As he stood, the tool belt click-clacked around his waist and pinched his side. It pulled at him, weighing him down. He fumbled with the clasp and let the belt fall. He took off his hard hat and dropped it, and he walked cautiously down the mild slope of his yard, stepping over the narrow border of jagged gray pebbles his father had deposited there only weeks before, shoveling them from the back of a truck and spreading them around until he’d gotten them just the way he wanted.

Daniel and the boy looked each other up and down in silence for several seconds. This new boy was much taller than Daniel. His eyes didn’t open all the way, and his hair was short, straight and black, not at all like Daniel’s pale blond locks that hung over his ears and fell carelessly in front of his eyes. The boy wore short pants and a clean blue t-shirt. His white socks, each with a single stripe, stretched halfway up his long legs, stopping just below his knees. It wasn’t that Daniel had never seen other boys, other children close to his own age, but they had always been the children of his mother’s friends, or cousins in far away towns. His encounters with them had been brief and infrequent and had always been arranged by his mother. He never imagined that out here, in front of the house, another boy could arrive without a mother trailing behind him.

“You live here?” the new boy asked, pointing.

That driveway and garage. Those two windows in the front. That roof. That screen door. Daniel lived there. That was his house. He knew this, but he could not fathom when he had started to know it. Never before had it occurred to him to declare that this house, rather than that house, or that one, was his.

“I live there,” the boy said, pointing off into what might have been eternity.

“Where?”

“There,” the boy said, pointing more insistently.

Daniel still did not understand.

“There, idiot! See that white car? Right there? See that car?”

Daniel saw the car.

“That house there. That’s where I live. I used to live somewhere else. But now I live there.”

He had lived somewhere else. But now he lived there. Daniel had never before considered that such a change in the ordered nature of things could occur. That such circumstances could change, that the place where he lived was not simply a matter of permanence, a natural extension of who he was, of Daniel as an entity, was unsettling, not only because he’d never considered it before, but because it suddenly made so much sense.

Daniel counted the houses from his own to the new boy’s. One. Two. Three. A long way from home. All by himself.

“Where did you live before?” Daniel asked.

“You never heard of it, probly.”

“You mean a different house than that one?”

The new boy let his mouth fall open, like he wanted to say something but didn’t know what it was. He shook his head. “It’s a whole different place,” the boy said. “It’s called Tie-wahn. It’s just this whole different place from here.”

There was something unfamiliar in the new boy’s voice, as if he were plugging his nose while he talked.

The sun burned relentlessly in the barren sky, directly above their heads, and the air was still. The boy looked over Daniel’s shoulder, considering the dull plastic objects Daniel had left lying on the ground.

“I’m going to school,” Daniel said. “Not yet, but I will. After summer’s over.”

“Me too,” the boy said.

“Yeah, well, but I’m going to Cooper School.”

“Me too, dummy. Everybody goes there.”

Everybody.

“My dad’s in the air force,” Daniel said.

“My dad was,” the boy said. “Now he’s not anymore. What is your dad?”

“In the air force.”

“I know, dummy. What is he? What does he do?”

Daniel shrugged. “He’s in the air force.”

“My dad was a pilot,” the new boy said. “Now he’s not. Now he does something different.”

Daniel tugged at his toughskins and glanced briefly at the ground, at the gray sidewalk, and at the rocks. “I’m Daniel,” he said. “That’s my real name. But my mom calls me something different.”

“What’s she call you?”

“I’m not telling.”

“Oh yeah?” The new boy thought about this, staring down his small nose at Daniel. Then he said, “My name’s Chu Wing.”

Daniel smiled and allowed a faint chuckle to escape his lips.

“You making fun of my name?” the boy asked. “You think it’s funny?”

Then Daniel knew it wasn’t a joke. “I just never heard a name like . . . like, Chew . . .” Daniel struggled to pronounce it.

“Chu Wing, dummy. Say it. Chu Wing.”

“Like, Chewing?”

“Not chewing, idiot. Chu Wing. Two words. Say it.”

Daniel tried, very slowly, “Chooo Wing.”

Chu Wing waved his hand, giving up. “Close enough.”

“I just never heard a name like that before.”

“Yeah, I figure you haven’t. It’s a Chinese name.”

“Oh.” Daniel considered this, and then asked, “You mean like a Chinese man?”

Chu Wing’s eyes widened, and he squeezed his lips together, like maybe he’d swallowed something that hurt his belly.

“I’m not a Chinese man,” he said. “I’m not Chinese. My mom’s not Chinese, neither. She’s from Tie-wahn. My dad says I’m a Mare-kin, just like him. And now my mom’s a Mare-kin, too.

“Well, I’m a Mare-kin, too. We got a flag to prove it.”

“We got a flag, too. A big one.”

“Ours is a big one, too.”

Chu Wing opened his mouth like he had something else to say about that, but then he changed his mind. Instead, he motioned across the street with his head and said, “What’ll you give me if I hit that car over there? That brown one.”

Daniel did not understand.

“Look, dummy.” Chu Wing leaned down and picked up one of the gray pebbles. He tossed it in the air and caught it again, blowing on it to cool it off. “I say I can hit that brown car with this rock. If I do, what’ll you give me?”

What’ll Daniel give him. If he hits that car. Daniel’s confusion stemmed not from the idea of throwing a rock at a car. The car was there. The rocks were here. He hadn’t thought of it before, but it made sense enough. And Daniel understood what it was to share his things, his toys for example, even if he hadn’t always been happy to do so. But this new boy was suggesting that if he threw a rock, and if that rock hit that car, then Daniel should give him something, something of his own.

“What’s in that lunch bag?” Chu Wing asked, pointing behind Daniel.

“Maybe an apple. But my mom gave that to me.”

“Got any chips?”

“No.” Daniel felt something near his ear and swiped at it. But there was nothing there.

Chu Wing looked hard at Daniel’s face. “You sure you don’t got any chips?”

Daniel shook his head, and there it was again, that phantom bug, maybe just a strand of hair brushing against his ear.

“Okay,” Chu Wing said. “Get the apple.”

Daniel walked back across the yard and reached carefully into the brown bag, taking care not to let Chu Wing see what was inside. His mother was still not there in the doorway. He might simply have gone inside. Chu Wing had not followed him into the yard, as if those pebbles formed some kind of magical barrier that intruders could not pass. But Daniel wasn’t sure he could work the latch of that screen door quickly enough before Chu Wing figured out he could walk around the pebble border and come up the driveway. He had come this far, all by himself. What was to stop him from coming all the way inside Daniel’s house? So Daniel did not go inside. Instead, he did as he’d been told and returned to the sidewalk, apple in hand.

Chu Wing looked around in all directions. There was no one else outside, no cars driving down the street. Then he reached his arm back and threw the pebble. It landed in the middle of the street, nowhere near the car, bounced a few times, and came to a stop.

“Haha, you missed.” Daniel giggled, clutching the apple firmly.

“Your turn,” Chu Wing said. He stooped and picked up another pebble and held it out to Daniel. “I’ll hold the apple.”

The exchange of apple for pebble was quick and fluid, and while the apple had been smooth and cool against Daniel’s palm, the pebble was hard and dusty, burning hot, scorched by the constant sun. This time Daniel did not look back at the screen door. He cocked his arm and flung the pebble into the middle of the street, just as Chu Wing had done. But Daniel’s pebble landed far short of the other boy’s.

“Fucking girl,” Chu Wing said. “You didn’t even try.”

“Neither did you.”

“Hold this,” Chu Wing said, thrusting the apple back at Daniel. He bent and picked up two pebbles, one in each hand. He let out a grunt as he launched one well over the top of the brown car and onto the lawn behind it. Then he took the apple from Daniel and put the other pebble in his hand. “Your turn.”

This pebble was even hotter than the other one, and Daniel moved it from one hand to the other, back and forth. Chu Wing folded his arms and stared down at Daniel.

But something above Chu Wing’s head caught Daniel’s eye then, something far off in the distance. A tiny speck of pulsating light hurtling across the low end of the cloudless sky, with a long white tail streaking behind it, making a gentle but determined arc, not just above junior high but beyond it, way beyond it. Daniel watched it without blinking, transfixed by its unearthly brilliance, until it disappeared, the whole thing gone, white tail and all, after a few brief but fortuitous seconds, almost as suddenly as it had appeared. He had seen airplanes in the sky before, giant metal birds from the air force where his father worked, thunderously shrieking as they passed overhead. He had once even seen a real helicopter and heard the thudding pap-pap-pap of its propeller. And he had seen fire, had seen tiny yellow sparks leap from a burning log, crackling and popping as they landed on the blackened bricks of the fireplace. But this was a different kind of fire, some mystical beast that occupied a hidden realm somewhere beyond his world, beyond any world, a silent white fire sailing across what his mother sometimes called the heavens, a spark that did not sizzle and fade but rather kept on burning and, if anything, burned brighter, he imagined, even after it had gone away.

When Daniel looked again at Chu Wing’s face, he found it was still staring down at him, silent, waiting.

“You can’t trick me,” Chu Wing said.

Daniel opened his mouth to explain but stopped himself before he’d uttered an intelligible word. How could he explain? Chu Wing would not believe him anyway, and how could he prove it? And even if he did believe him, how could he possibly understand?

Chu Wing still did not move.

And why shouldn’t Daniel hit that car with a pebble? What was that car to him, anyway? Here was this kid who had walked all the way from his house without his mom, and he hadn’t hit it yet, wouldn’t even try. Daniel could hit that car. He could pop that car’s tires if he had a knife. A real knife. Not like one of those cheap plastic toys his parents bought for him. He could blow that car to smithereens if he wanted to. He could hit that car, and Chu Wing would remember that he, Daniel Avery, had done it, that he had been the one. But then,

“Jackie!”

It was a voice like none Daniel had ever heard before. A high, piercing screech that could send every cat in the neighborhood up into the trees. This boy, Chu Wing, who towered over him and had seemed like he wasn’t afraid of anything, ducked at the sound of that voice, as if expecting something to hit him in the back of the head.

“I gotta go,” Chu Wing said.

“Who’s Jackie?” Daniel said.

Chu Wing pushed the apple back into Daniel’s hands and turned and ran, his arms and legs flailing awkwardly, like a gangly young giraffe, toward the tiny woman with crazy black hair sprouting in all directions from her head, who stood next to the white car in the driveway of the house Chu Wing had said was his house. He stopped short several feet in front of her and hunched forward, keeping his head down. Even so, he was still nearly as tall as her.

“Jackie!” she bellowed again. “You come here now.” She raised her arm and pointed forcefully at the ground in front of her.

He approached her slowly, and when he got close enough, she slapped him on top of his head. Whatever part of him she grabbed then, his hair, his ear, his cheek, Daniel could not tell. But she had him doubled over as she led him up the driveway and through the open garage door into the house. And then the street was quiet. And Daniel was once again alone.

In one hand he held the apple, waxy-smooth and almost perfectly round, like a baseball. In the other was the pebble, small and coarse. Forget pebbles. And who wants to eat a stupid apple anyway. He dropped the pebble at his feet and reared back, and with a new strength he’d managed to pull up from somewhere deep within himself, some musty, dark hole deep inside his gut, he flung that apple as if his arm were a catapult. It sailed above the asphalt, a tiny ball of fire flying through the air, like the one he’d witnessed moments ago, only this was his own fire, his alone and no one else’s. And it hit that brown car, smack in the middle of the back door, exploding into a million tiny sparkling pieces and making a glorious bowmp that echoed throughout the entire neighborhood, across that barren field, up past junior high and onward to the distant, undiscovered lands beyond the mountain where it stood, up and up, all the way up to the cruel sun, burning stupidly in the indifferent, empty sky.

If only that new kid had seen it, Chu Wing, Jackie, whatever his name was. He would never believe Daniel now, but man, oh man, he should have seen it. If only someone had seen it. Anyone at all.

But what if someone had seen it?

Daniel dashed back across his lawn and scurried to pick up his tools. Then he thought better of it and let them fall. Ants had found the remains of his sandwich and now swarmed all over it. He shoved it into the small hedge along the walkway leading to his front door, slapping away all the tiny black ants that dared to stray onto his hands. He scooped up the unopened bag of chips and leaped over the hedge, landing firmly and steadily. At the screen door he stood on his tiptoes, reaching with his free hand and fiddling with the latch. But he couldn’t work it. He slapped the metal part of the screen, bang bang bang.

“Mom,” he yelled. “Mom? Let me in. Let me in!”