Lawrence

Lawrence

  By Jon Sindell

  Copyright 2009-2012 Jon Sindell

  In this story by the author of The Mighty Roman, a simple youth takes a stand for animals and gays. Thank you, reader, for coming.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Please do not participate in or encourage the piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  Lawrence

  In Lawrence’s soft smile were sculpted the loving acceptance of parents resigned to a slow-thinking son, and the loving support of a brilliant big sister who’d passed up the chance to live with college friends to guide her one-year-younger brother through one last perilous year of high school.

  It had always been thus. Walking to school on Lawrence’s first day of first grade, Mercy had cheered her brother with the promise of a flying saucer at recess. Smiling sweetly to the classmates nearest him as the kids tromped giddy and nervous out to the playground, Lawrence tumbled out the news that his sister was bringing a spaceship to him–and they could ride on it! Jasmine–tall, pretty, and bursting with confidence–tittered at Lawrence when Mercy arrived with a saucer-shaped cookie; a pair of tentative girls behind Jasmine stood like wee ladies-in-waiting, observing the scene with slowly dawning grins. Mercy comprehended her brother’s plight and marched back to the cafeteria to spend her allowance plus two borrowed bucks on flying saucers for all three girls. When she returned, the girls were perched atop the monkey bars while Lawrence munched below them and gazed up as if they were high wire angels. When the tribute cookies were eaten and the sated angels floated down to ground, Mercy extended her arms into Buzz Lightyear wings and led the three girls, with Lawrence in the rear, on a soaring, banking, careening space caravan to the outer reaches of the little kids’ yard, the other kids gaping with envy and awe. The three girls adopted Lawrence that day, and kept him all year.

  Lawrence was Mercy’s living doll, and she cherished him suchly. In their yard, at the park, at the playground he was her wind-up doll. She’d crank the oversized key in his back and send him on a tottering, high-stepping march towards thorny bushes, hard benches, the model boat pond, a wheeling, snarling frenzy of dogs, or the basketball court where the rough kids played, she chasing after to alter his course with a turn of his shoulders to avoid disaster. Slowly the game evolved: How close to the hazard before she would turn him? Close, very close, and he never slowed and never shed character, and she never failed to turn him at the last. Indoors he was her dress-up doll: a pirate, Cowboy Woody, Gandalf, Mulan. In her precocious fourth grade psychology phase, she dressed him in their mother’s white nightgown and studied his reaction with notepad in hand: “It’s so comfortable, Mercy. I feel like a queen!” The sweetness of his smile overwhelmed her clinical curiosity and the mischievous impulse which it disguised. She flung the notepad onto the floor and pulled the nightgown up over his head. “I’ll get you some king clothes, Laurie, complete with a crown.” She kissed the squeaky-clean hair atop his head. Never again did she mess with his mind.

  Instead she was straight with him, straight with him always. “Is Santa Claus real?” he asked her at eight. She shook her head no, and he smiled like a scientist who’s just had a rebel theory confirmed. Because she was straight, his trust in her grew. “Where do babies come from, Merse?” he asked at age nine. She pulled the anatomy book from the reference shelf and showed him a womb in all its wondrous intricacy. He furrowed his brow and spent hours sketching a longitudinal section of the uterus and ovaries with such faithful detail that his impressed teacher posted his “smiling cobra” on the classroom wall. Two days later Lawrence asked, “How do the babies get in there, Mercy?” She showed him the page of male anatomy. “I’ve got those!” “Do you?” she deadpanned, forgetting his lack of irony until she saw him innocently reaching for his zipper. “Laurie, I’m joking! Of course you’ve got those.” “So you don’t want to see them?” he rejoined, confused by her uncharacteristic rejection of his offer to share. Ennobled by a sudden appreciation for the enormity of her role, Mercy intoned in her best grown-up voice, “No, Laurie, you don’t show `em to anyone. They’re your own private jewels.”

  “Mmm, jewels,” he drawled like Homer Simpson. Then he stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth and set to drawing a cross-section of male gonads, which he decorated with ruby-red and emerald-green glitter gel.

  In fifth grade he came home full of doubt. “Am I slow, Mercy?”

  “Sure you’re slow, Laurie. You’re like the Internet when we had dial-up.”

  Lawrence savored this image as he poured orange soda down his gullet. “I’m slow, like a snail. I’m slow, like a sponge. I’m slow, like SpongeBob!”

  “You’re slow, like Heinz ketchup. You’re slow, like home cooking ... like Dad’s stew, and how good is that! There’s a whole slow food movement thing, Laurie, and do you know why? Because fast food sucks.”

  “I’m slow like slow food. My mind’s like beef stew.”

  “Yep. Yummy and warm, with great stuff bubbling.”

  She was always pouring new things into the pot. Tidbits, arcana, the trivial facts that made school more fun: headless chickens and roaches that lived, the details of strange celebrity deaths, the peccadillos of puerile kings. She served up weighty matter, too, savvy observations about how the world worked: “The principal’s only mean because she’s got a boss, called The Superintendent. And she’s only mean because her boss is the governor, and he used to harass women. Groped `em, in fact.” Or: “They only sell soda to make money for the school, Laurie. They don’t care if it makes kids fat.” Or: “Sure it’s a great country, but some of the guys who started it had slaves–and women couldn’t vote until nineteen-something.” He received these facts always with his head bowed over some manual task–building Legos, practicing knots for Boy Scouts, stringing beads, folding origami–with skill derived from entire days devoted to craft. He employed the head down strategy in school as well to avoid the sting of the teacher’s disappointed gaze when he lacked comprehension. Mercy knew not to ask him questions and besides didn’t need to, for she could intuit the gaps in his knowledge. “You’re not supposed to talk about this stuff for some reason, but the Bible is totally against Harry Potter–it says you’re supposed to kill wizards with stones! And gay people, too, that’s Dumbledore two ways. I can show you the chapter, bro–chapter and verse.”

  He widened his mouth as if punched in the gut.

  “Lawrence my man, half of what they tell you is great in life ... isn’t.”

  He rotated his head like a dog trying to understand the master’s odd behavior.

  “But hey, half of what they tell you is bad ... is good!”

  “So you tell me.”

  She did. How ads couldn’t be trusted, how “Happy Meals” were unhappy for people who got fat and sick, how teachers got fired if kids didn’t do well on the standardized tests they both hated so much–this was the reason teachers made him cry, why they’d given her the medal she’d flung into the tree. She told him how Dad made his cuticles bleed because he was scared about losing his job, how Mom needed their sweet hugs when her blood sugar was low, how 9/11 was not our fault, sure, but we too had done bad things, had attacked Iraq for no good reason, put leashes on their men, killed thousands of regular people with bombs, not soldiers only Lawrence, but old woman and kids–

  “Wha?” He had just put his remote controlled battleship in the pond, but turned to her with narrowed eyes that wished not to see.

  “They act like only American dead people matter, L, but the bombs we drop kill innocent people along with the bad guys. And everyone acts like it
doesn’t matter! And do you know why? Because they’re not us!”

  He scrunched his face to dam up the tears, bent for a huge rock which he raised overhead and brought crashing down upon his ship.

  “All those so-called great civilizations they tell you about, Lawrence, they hardly even mention they all had slaves. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans all had `em. And we had `em, too. They were cool in ways, sure–but slaves, little brother!”

  “Show me,” he said, so she took him to the museum to see a painting of a pyramid beneath which straining slaves pulled massive blocks of granite beneath the eyes of muscled overseers with whips; then she rode him on her bike to the library where she showed him a photograph she had found of a fugitive American slave with lash marks on his back as thick as rope-cords. She could see the distress in his rounded eyes and mouth, so she checked out Spartacus to lighten his mood. He gazed in awe when dozens of slaves doomed themselves by stepping forward to proclaim: “I’m Spartacus. No, I’m Spartacus!”

  “I’m Spartacus,” Lawrence mouthed in wide wonder.

  Years later in high school a tenth grader named Wieder was cornered against his locker in the hall. “Say, Wieder Man, is it