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from Contest #6

Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son. Every afternoon, minutes after the school bus dropped the children off at the trailer park, before the cloud of gravel dust had time to settle, the boy would be next to the man in the street in front of his trailer. The man, called “Bird” by everyone in the park, would be bent over his Harley Davidson, his tan back glistening in the sun like the bike’s polished leather seat. He would stop whatever repair or touch-up he was doing to give the boy a high-five and ask how his day had been. After getting the boy a Coke, Bird would return to the bike and continue working as the boy watched.

Bird was part Kiowa, had been raised on the reservation outside of town, and had earned half of a degree in History from Haskell Indian Nations College. His eyes were as blue as the Kansas sky and his ponytail as dark and straight as the highway stretching from Kansas City to Colorado.

The boy’s name was Asa. Everyone assumed he was also Kiowa, but his actual father was Ecuadorian, and nobody in the park had ever met the man. Asa lived with foster parents, but they did little more than receive a check from the government every month and keep a roof over his head and food on the table. For all practical purposes, Bird was Asa’s father. He taught Asa how to work with his hands, how to replace a lightbulb and how to change the oil on a bike or truck—nevermind that Asa wouldn’t drive either for at least five years. He helped Asa with his homework when his foster parents were at work, and he told him how to mind his manners around adults.

As long as Bird was around, Asa stayed away from the trouble some of the other boys without fathers got into. But all that would change in a bad way when Bird left.

 

Their last day together was a bright afternoon toward the end of May. Asa’s mom and the other adults in the park had been talking a lot about Vietnam, but that meant nothing to Asa. The school year was winding down, and the Kansas City Royals were starting out their season with a winning record. Asa couldn’t be happier.

When he got to Bird’s trailer that day, Bird was standing back on his heels inspecting the bike. “She’s ready to go.” A nest of black facial hair opened and closed when he spoke.

“Ready for what?” Asa asked.

“Going out to the Flint Hills for a while.”

“What’s that?” Asa asked.

Bird paused and then spoke carefully, as if he didn’t know how it would sound. “The heartland.”

Asa’s eyes widened as he imagined a giant heart beating underground, making the land rise and fall like a rollercoaster beneath Bird’s Harley. He whispered, “What does that mean, Bird?”

Bird gazed out past the park with a confused look, a distant sadness creeping into his eyes. His dark beard parted:  “Once you get west of Topeka, you’re surrounded by the Flint Hills. Out of nowhere great big rolling hills, chock full of flint rock.” He was still staring off into the horizon but with less confusion.

Asa was trying to see what Bird saw, but all he could see was the smoke rising from the power plant on the edge of town.

“You want me to show you?” Bird asked.

“Hell yeah!” Asa shouted. It would be his first time on the bike.

As they rolled out of the park, the kids playing basketball stopped to watch. Bird and Asa rode past the open field that separated the trailer park from the rest of town, past the roller-skating rink where Asa’s school went on Friday nights, past the main strip of fast food joints, and onto I-70.

Once they got out of town, Asa didn’t see any big hills like Bird had talked about, only flat fields of corn and wheat. The wind was whipping at his face, so he held tightly onto Bird, who sat rigidly, focusing on the road in front of him with soldier-like concentration.

Suddenly, big green hills rose up all around them. There were no longer any farmhouses, trees, or wheat fields: only a rolling carpet of bright green grass speckled with wildflowers.

Bird turned his head back and yelled, “the Flint Hills!”

After a few minutes, he pulled off the highway onto a rest-stop perched atop one of the hills. A few cows rested on the grassy slope before them like pieces of coal dropped in the green felt. Bird asked Asa if he had learned about buffalo and the Native Americans in school, and Asa said he had. Bird told him to imagine, instead of cows, the entire hillside covered in buffalo. Then he told Asa how his people had roamed these hills and hunted the buffalo long before there were any cities or houses or much of anything in Kansas.

“Is that why you’re coming here?” Asa asked.

“Sort of,” he said, and the sad look returned to his eyes. He pointed out past the hills to a series of brick buildings on the horizon.  “That’s Fort Riley. That’s where I’m headed for a while.”

He couldn’t bear to tell the boy that Fort Riley was where people went before getting shipped to war, where he would spend only a few weeks before getting on a plane to Vietnam.

 

While Bird was away, Asa found other ways to occupy his time and older boys in the park to look to as role models. He did poorly in school and had little reason to think that he should try harder. By his twelfth birthday, he had already begun experimenting with drugs, alcohol, and crime. By seventeen, he found himself in Boysville juvenile detention facility for breaking and entering and aggravated assault. Bird, whom he had reconnected with off and on since he had returned from Vietnam, was the only one willing or able to pick him up upon his release.

When Asa passed through the locked door with the wire-enforced window into the lobby of Boysville, the tired looking parents and grandparents looked up to see if it was their child. Bird, with grey streaks in his black ponytail, stood up to greet the boy, who by now had long black hair himself. Everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son. The two silently nodded at each other and walked out together.

They got into Bird’s truck and drove onto I-70 without talking. Asa watched the flat land pass by his window, broken only by the occasional silo, farmhouse, and the rare thicket of trees lining a stream or artificially created pond.

“You still ride the Harley?” Asa asked.

“Not in a while,” Bird said. “She needs some new parts, and I don’t have the money.”

“I might know someone who can help,” Asa said.

Bird looked at him sideways. “You need to figure your own shit out,” he said shortly. “Don’t worry about me.”

Asa, who was clearly tired of lectures, turned his head to keep staring out of the window. Bird pulled a paper from under his seat and handed it to Asa. It was an army recruitment flier.

“I want you to give that a look,” Bird said. When Asa didn’t reply, Bird spoke again, angrily. “Do whatever you want, but I’m not doing this again.”

 

Asa didn’t take Bird’s advice to join the army, and Bird didn’t have to pick him up from juvie again. The next time Asa got arrested, when he was nineteen, it was for murdering two boys in a rival gang. There would be no going home.

Bird’s hair was in a ponytail, as it had always had been, but it was now almost entirely grey. He filed into the room with the handful of other people, including the parents of the two teenagers Asa had killed. As he sat down in the front row of chairs, the others stared at him coldly.

Beyond the glass window, Asa was escorted to a stainless steel table that looked like a cross. Asa’s eyes were glassy from the sedatives and he looked disoriented, but when he saw Bird, he raised his head in inch in acknowledgement. The two escorts, who were dressed like nurses in their light blue outfits, helped Asa lie down onto his back. They strapped his ankles and wrists to the table and tightened a belt around his waist. Then they inserted the needles that were connected to the long skinny tubes that were connected to an apparatus on the wall.

Asa had no last words to say.

As the poison began to enter his veins, he looked at Bird one last time and pictured himself on the back of that Harley as a child, holding onto Bird for dear life as the wind rushed in his face and the Flint Hills rose up suddenly all around him.

Bird sat motionless for the first few seconds, but as Asa’s eyes closed and the seconds began to tick away, the man began to tremble. He clenched his jeans until his hands turned white, but he could not keep himself from shaking.

Everyone in the room noticed his convulsions. The parents of the slain boys, as glad as they were to see the killer brought to justice, couldn’t help but feel pity for the man. They thought the man and the boy were father and son, and they knew, more than anyone else in that room, what it felt like to lose a child.

back to Contest #6