Sherman likes mayflies, admires them for their courage, their quick impulse to propagate, in the face of their brief life span; they are sudden and fleeting things. Sherman dislikes firearms. He cannot understand how something clearly intended for wounding or killing can have its own national association and how the president of the United States can belong to such an organization.
Sherman’s parents used to worry about Sherman’s likes and dislikes, though they worried from a distance. They believed it unwise to get too close too fast. This is what they told Sherman. When he tried to hug them or squeeze their hands, they pushed him back by the shoulders, and Sherman’s father would say, “Whoa, little man! What have I told you? You know what will happen if we spoil you rotten? People will say, ‘Phew! What smells?’ and they won’t want to be near you.” Sherman is fearful of smelling bad and driving people away, so he complies and tries not to touch. He imagines people he would like to be close to coughing from the fetid air around him, pushing him back, their arms growing and growing, stretching to such a distance they become stick figures and push him into a hush of icy water.
Sherman’s mother had reservations about this method of child rearing. Sherman overheard her ask his father, “Are you sure we will be close-knit? Do you promise this will work? He’s only a little boy.” Sometimes at night Sherman could hear his mother weeping; the sound was soft, muffled, and made Sherman think of flannel, something he could rub up against, wrap himself in.
Sherman has lived with both of his parents for the twelve years he’s been alive. They recently separated and both have begun to modify their parenting techniques. Sherman’s mother touches his face now whenever she sees him. His father takes him places, hockey games, observatories, putting greens, hardware stores. They are often in a car together, buckled in, looking through glass, moving forward. Despite peer pressure, Sherman loves his parents.
Five years before Sherman was born, his sister, Melanie, was born. Melanie was tiny, always the smallest person in her class, and she was very pale beneath her occasional sallow tint. In the final picture of Melanie, a tiny arm barely larger than a feeding tube rests on the raised metal guard of her hospital bed. This arm is feathered with fine, white hairs and upstages the blurred face that fades into the pillow. When Sherman looks at this picture, he focuses on the arm. It looks to him like something in an early developmental stage, something that will eventually grow and bend and sprout and flourish into a beautiful, velvet white wing. Something that could lift a person up and out of any situation and deliver her to a body of water. Something that could save her from the threat of a predator or extinction. Sherman knows it is only a tiny, sick arm in the picture, but it seems obvious to him that we are all descended from a race of strong and elegant birds.
Sherman knows the story of his existence and wonders if other children know why they are here on earth, know if they’ve been brought for some true and special purpose or if they are only an accidental collision of elements, an extension of lineage, a repository for genes. Sherman was conceived as a means to a beginning, an instrument for prolonging life, and his parents have been quite forthcoming with the story behind his birth. There are even newspaper articles that document their intent. Melanie had leukemia and fell out of remission a year before Sherman was conceived. As the days passed and red spots bloomed on her legs and arms and her white hair thinned, family members were screened as possible candidates for the donation of bone marrow. But it is a specialized substance, and Melanie’s parents soon realized that they would have to take the situation into their own hands, would have to create their own donor. Of course, there were no guarantees.
* * *
Sherman is in love with a fat girl named Cassie. There are two fat girls named Cassie at Horace Mann Elementary and one girl who claims to be big-boned named Cassandra, but it is Cassie Shockley with whom he is in love. Cassie’s full name is Cassiopeia Prudence Shockley, and Sherman wishes to marry her one day and take her name because he loves the sound of Sherman Shockley. It is not quite as good as if her last name were Tank, but he has looked in the phone book to find that people with this name do not exist.
Sherman and Cassie sit at opposite ends of a seesaw. Sherman is slight and his end of the seesaw is elevated several feet off the ground. This is one of the reasons he likes Cassie. He likes to dangle his feet and imagine he is on a giant tongue depressor, a Lilliputian; or he pretends he is seated in an ancient and impossibly slow catapult. Sherman loves being up in the air. He feels indefinite and brave.
A clump of children near the merry-go-round disperses, radiating in different directions like a slow burst of fireworks. As Jason Piper passes the seesaw, he says, “Later, ’gators.”
“Alligators can adjust their body temperatures in order to determine the sex of their offspring,” says Cassie.
This is another reason Sherman loves Cassie. She knows many strange and wondrous things, though Sherman recognizes her knowledge is occasionally dubious. She once told him she knew for a fact that kissing could not, in and of itself, cause pregnancy, but kissing before the age of thirteen could cause a girl’s breasts to overdevelop. She could not decide whether this was an altogether undesirable effect.
“How do they know which sex to want?” asks Sherman.
“I think it all depends on their disposition. If they are prone to fatigue, naturally they want girl alligators because girl alligators are smart and quiet and contentedly sit in the cool mud. But if the mothers thirst for adventure and don’t mind constant rough-housing, then they want boys. Boy alligators stick their scaly noses into everything and eat smelly things that aren’t good for them.” Cassie rests her elbows on puffy, pink knees.
“Well, what if one day all the alligator mothers had a tired disposition and had only girls, then alligators would be out of business. Anyway, it sounds prejudiced, Cas.” Sherman kicks his feet as he speaks.
“I can’t help my female perspective.” Cassie starts to untie her tennis shoes. “I’ve got blisters all over my feet from skating Saturday. Let’s pop them.”
Sherman swings one leg over and dismounts the seesaw. He is afraid to touch Cassie’s feet. He is afraid he won’t be able to control himself. He wants more than anything to wrap his arms around her waist as far as they’ll go and to quickly kiss the soft putty of her cheek. He wants to bury his face in her bulging stomach. He loves that there is excess Cassie. He wants to be romantic and witty and tell her the rings of flesh around her heavenly body are lovely; she is his little Saturn. But he knows she is self-conscious and dreams of a different body, and he fears if they get too close, she will discover his soul has a terrible odor and she will be repelled.
“I’ve got to feed Aretha.”
Cassie stares at her feet. “They look like they’ve been bubble-wrapped. Who’d have thought skating could do so much damage? I might have to go to a foot guy.” Cassie pushes tentatively against a blister as if it were a dead bug.
“Podiatrist.”
“What I said.”
“You just need to skate more often. Build up calluses.”
“And have alligator feet? No way, José.”
“Way,” Sherman says and smiles.
Cassie puts her socks back on. “Can I come see Aretha? My mom’s at the beauty shop until 4:30.”
“I don’t know. This is our quiet time together. I think it’d hurt her feelings if I brought my girlfriend home at this time of day, though she probably wouldn’t let it show.” Sherman runs his hands through the brown tufts of his hair. Sherman’s hair is coarse and prefers standing up to lying down, which it will not do without a struggle. Yesterday Cassie cut and styled it in such a way that it looks as if it grows in clusters like sage or endive. Sherman is happy it now obeys without the use of styling gel.
“Looks good,” Cassie says, smiling and nodding.
“Aretha’s probably screaming for her duckweed. I’ll see you tomorrow, Cas.” Sherman smiles and walks backward for as long as the terrain feels safe and familiar.
* * *
Aretha is a trumpeter swan. It was a little over a year ago when Sherman decided to play outside so that his parents would not have to whisper their grievances to one another, and he walked to the lake, where he spotted a huge nest on the margin. Swans had nested there before, and he knew not to disturb them, but this mother swan was slumped over and quiet. As Sherman neared the nest, he realized the swan was too silent and supine to be alive. He petted the long, white neck and felt under her wings. Her body was still warm. He covered her with his jeans jacket and built a small fire, then he ran all the way to Lodema’s, the bird lady’s, house.
Lodema’s trees were feathery, flaming with chickens and magpies. Sherman could see the owls and pigeons and ducks and hawks recuperating in their respective pens. Sherman loved to visit Lodema. The inside of her house was filled with beautiful domesticated birds that played on rubber rings dangling from the branches of a huge oak tree. The tree reached through the center of her living room toward the skylight of her roof. Some of the birds would swoop to Sherman’s shoulder when he went near the tree. Others would say “hello” when the phone rang or “come in” when there was a knock on the door. Colonel Klink, an African Grey, cracked nuts and fed them to Lodema. Sherman loved how the birds took care of her. He knew people thought Lodema was eccentric, but he decided this was a good thing. His parents were wary of this association initially but eventually deemed it beneficial. Lodema told Sherman she had been born under the zodiacal sign of Aquarius and Aquarians were always eccentric. And since he was a Gemini with, she discovered, a rising sign of Aquarius, she assured him they would always get along famously.
When Lodema got to the nest, the swan was beginning to cool. Lodema kissed its black bill and bowed before it. She cried. She wrapped the clutch of four eggs in a plush towel and placed this on a hot water bottle in a cardboard box. Together she and Sherman quickly buried the mother swan in the moist earth near the lake.
“What happened to her?” Sherman asked.
“Probably ate some old lead. The hunters get them one way or another, sometimes years after they aim for them. Used to use them for pillows and powder puffs.”
After several weeks, Lodema gave Sherman the last egg as it appeared to be infertile. Sherman asked to borrow an incubator just in case and within two days Aretha was born. Sherman watched all day as she poked bits of shell out of her way and unfolded her crumpled body into the open air.
With an eyedropper he fed her a mixture of instant baby food and a powdered concoction Lodema fed to her larger birds. He swirled the white fuzz on Aretha’s head as he fed her.
When she opened her eyes, Sherman stared into the small black bubbles. He thought he saw himself, saw how his lips curved and jutted as if for some specialized purpose. He saw how his tiny ears were invisible beneath his unruly hair. He felt aerodynamic. He breathed deeply. He wanted to know what it felt like to glide through the air that passed through him and fueled his own movement. Aretha gurgled and yapped in scratchy tones. She inched toward him, and he kissed her black bill. She nuzzled his moist palm. She tried to pass through it, to disappear in the callused flesh. Sherman felt newly born, engendered by a baby swan, a sweet and needy cygnet.
When Sherman’s parents found out he had hatched a swan and was hiding it, caring for it in his room, they were not angry. They thought it would be good and educational for him to have such an exotic pet; they thought it would teach Sherman responsibility, so they fixed a place for it in Sherman’s father’s work shed. They did not know it was an endangered species. They did not know the swan’s lineage was in jeopardy, that the mother swan had been struggling unconsciously against the extinction of her race, that the baby swan’s birth was purposeful.
Sherman knew and Lodema knew. Lodema said there wasn’t anything to do now that Aretha had been imprinted. Sherman knew what this meant. He knew his image had been branded on the black beads of her eyes, and he knew her need for him had been etched in a deeper place, a place beneath the gray and white down, a place where sentience and instinct and emptiness collide. And he, too, felt this in the pit of himself.
Lodema told Sherman to tell people that Aretha was a basic garden variety swan and hope she wouldn’t start her migrant bugling in front of anyone who might care. “They’re not as endangered as they used to be. There are several thousand of them now. They got down to a couple hundred at the time old Audubon was painting pictures of them with their own quills,” Lodema said.
* * *
When Sherman gets home, Aretha is chasing squirrels in the front yard. Sherman’s house sits far back from the street. His parents own the several acres of wooded land surrounding it. The house itself is sequestered by a huddle of pin oaks filled with squirrels and birds. Aretha never ventures farther than a few hundred feet away from the house without Sherman.
Sherman wonders what Aretha thinks she is. A dog or a small boy perhaps. He knows she has no concept of swan. She seems unimpressed by all types of birds. She frequently quarrels with the persnickety blue jays and charges robins as they tug something from the earth.
When Aretha spots Sherman coming down the path, she lurches toward him on the black spatulas of her feet; the seven foot-wings spread dramatically, as if beckoning his embrace. Sherman cannot help but see the soap-opera quality of this ritual: they are long-parted lovers with names like Lance and Ashley and tragic pasts coming together out of nowhere in a field undulating with wildflowers or wheat. It reminds him of a commercial for a feminine hygiene spray, a commercial he once saw while watching television with Cassie and which made him turn a near Day-Glo pink. And yet he felt comforted to know women must also worry about love and odor.
Sherman falls on the ground and Aretha leaps on top of him, squawking and nibbling his cheeks and throat. He sits up and buries his face in her breast and kisses the squirming white pillow. “I have a surprise for you,” he says. He leads her to the shed. She waddles alongside, nipping at the fingers that will feed her.
In the shed, she sits quietly on her blanket, the hooked neck poised and still. Sherman digs in his backpack. “I stopped at the lake and got you some water buttercups and elodea,” he says.
As Sherman feeds her, he strokes the conveyer belt of bumps along her throat. He feels the invisible hump in her sternum housing the large windpipe that allows her to trumpet. “Cassie told me something about you today. She said that ancient Germanic peoples believed swans embodied the souls of dead people. They thought swans were sacred and holy.” Sherman remembers Aretha’s mother, her long neck lolling over the side of the nest. “I wonder where the souls of swans go,” he says.
* * *
Sherman turns over to see the red numbers on his clock read 4:17. He expels a “hey” when he notices a figure seated at the end of his bed. He sits up and turns on the table lamp. It is his grandfather, his father’s father, Elmer, a dead person. They stare at one another for several minutes. Sherman was six years old when they last saw each other.
Sherman says, “Grandpa Elmer?”
Elmer smiles.
Sherman bites into his lower lip to see if he can feel pain. He can. He reaches out and touches Elmer’s hand. He can feel the knotted, leathery skin. “You’re solid,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Are you still dead?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing here?” Sherman wonders if he is psychic, if his mind and body somehow conduct the currents of spirits. He feels light as a Kleenex.
Elmer maneuvers his false teeth and holds them between his lips. Sherman laughs at this old trick. Elmer returns the teeth to his mouth. Sherman becomes serious and silent, then asks, “Have you seen Melanie?”
Elmer nods.
“Is she okay? Are her arms bigger? Is she strong?” The fact that his grandpa still wears false teeth worries Sherman. He would have thought everything would be repaired in the afterlife.
Elmer says, “She is good. She is happy.”
“Is she still sick?”
Elmer shakes his head. “She has big pink wings and webbed feet so she can land on the water.”
“Do you know God?” Sherman asks.
Elmer shrugs his shoulders. “As well as anyone, I suppose.”
“Have you seen Elvis?”
“Too many impersonators to be sure.” Elmer smiles and squeezes Sherman’s feet through the blanket.
“Is the Virgin Mary really a virgin?” Sherman smiles.
“She’s given me no reason to doubt her,” Elmer says. He pulls a cellophane-wrapped cigar out of his shirt pocket. He holds it out to Sherman. “They don’t make these anymore,” he says. He puts the cigar back in his pocket.
Sherman asks, “Why do things become extinct?”
Elmer stands. “I don’t know,” he says. “Just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I have all the answers.”
* * *
Cassie and Sherman are sitting in his front room, watching television. With remote control in hand, Sherman flips from channel to channel to channel.
“You have an abnormally short attention span,” Cassie says.
“There’s nothing good on anyway.”
“Why can’t we play with Aretha?”
“I told you, she’s jealous. She’d just charge you like she did yesterday.”
“She needs to get used to me.” Cassie reaches into the pocket of her jeans jacket.
Sherman does not want Aretha to get used to Cassie. He does not want them to bond. He knows they could give one another something he doesn’t have, some secret strength. He knows they would crouch together under trees, laughing and honking, and they’d hush when they saw him approaching. Then his love for them would sour. It would begin to reek of the thing he could not give them, the thing that could lift them up and save them.
Cassie pulls crayons out of her pocket: maize, raw umber, periwinkle blue. She says, “They’ve replaced these colors. I think we should start a time capsule and keep track of all the things that have been discontinued, things indicative of the sorry time we live in.”
Sherman flips past more programs, a fleeting collage of moving pictures. He doesn’t want to think about things that have been discontinued. He settles on a program about killer bees.
Cassie says, “The leaf-cutting ants of Central America are farmers, and they grow their own food. They gather leaves and grow a special kind of fungus that they live off of. And they know how to weed the undesirable fungi out. They’re quite resourceful and self-reliant. They don’t need crumbs or honey or human flesh to survive.” Cassie leans over and kisses Sherman on the cheek. “My mom put me on another diet,” she says. “It’s all rice cakes and broccoli. And carrots, carrots, carrots. It’s barely enough to sustain a small breed of rabbit.” Cassie stares at the layers of her stomach. “We have to be careful of my ketones this time.”
Something wells up inside Sherman and he lurches toward Cassie and knocks her back to the floor. He kisses her nose then buries his lips in the soft center of each new breast. He jumps up and runs out the door.
He runs and runs through the woods, past the lake, across the barren highway, until he comes to the Fairgrove Shopping Center. He runs toward Safeway and collapses in the first parking space on the blue wheelchair symbol. He lies on his back and looks up at the letters that spell out SAFEWAY. There is a nest of finches cupped in the bottom curve of the S. The tiny birds flit about, squeeze through letters, and perch on the F and the E. Sunlight slants across WAY. The birds on top of the sign face the light, as if they were phototropic, as if they were drawn toward the wavy heat by something deep inside their thin, translucent bones. Sherman watches the nervous and luminous activity of the birds until an old man yells out of his car, “Hey, kid! You better get up unless you want to be squashed like a bug.” Some boys walk by and laugh and say, “Road pizza.”
Sherman whispers, “Dead meat.”
Today is Saturday, the day and night Sherman spends with his father. Before Sherman left, his mother hugged him hard, pressing the breath right out of him, and he felt as if he’d been knocked on his back. She kissed him on the mouth and her lips were wet and sweet. She clutched his face in her hands and said, “I love you, Sherman. I always have, and you’re all that matters to me now.” She let go of his cheeks, and her eyes, clear and empty as water, stared past him at his father’s car in the driveway. She laughed, and her lips quivered. “You’re the only reason it’s not obscene for me to still be alive.”
As Sherman got into his father’s car, he watched his mother standing in the doorway. She held one hand over her mouth and clutched her skirt with the other. Her face was tense and furrowed, as if she were crying, although she wasn’t, as though she were watching her only child go off to war and imagined him coming back with fewer limbs or relentless dreams of dying. Sherman has seen this look before, in old photographs.
* * *
Sherman and his father sit in the green-shag-carpeted living room of his father’s apartment. Sherman’s father drinks a beer he has heavily salted, and with the TV remote he flips from golf to tennis. “So, what should we do, Sport?” Sherman’s father smiles and raises his eyebrows. He drops the remote and rubs his stomach.
Sherman blinks consciously and listens for the rumble he feels in his intestines. He thinks it is interesting how a person can feel his stomach growl before he can hear it, sort of like thunder and lightning. He doesn’t like to be called Sport, though he prefers it to Little Man or Sherm.
“So? What do you say? We could go hunting. Mum’s the word to your mother, of course. I just got some new boots, and we could borrow my neighbor’s rifle. I don’t know dick about hunting, but we could teach each other. Don’t want you turning into no mama’s boy, do we?” Sherman’s father laughs and attempts to ruffle Sherman’s stiff hair.
“No,” says Sherman. “That would be tragic.”
His father tightens his lips. “Well, let’s hear your bright ideas, Einstein. I don’t know how to entertain a twelve-year-old kid. I feel like we’re on some goddamned blind date or something.”
Sherman wishes he were cryogenically frozen inside a time capsule, lying next to a twisting hologram of Elvis and a stack of electric toothbrushes, waiting to be thawed by a distant culture. “I heard they were doing military maneuvers in the forest on the opening day of hunting season,” Sherman says. He stares at his clasped hands.
“No shit? Anybody get hurt?”
“A lot of animals.”
* * *
Sherman’s father sleeps on the couch as people on television jump from bridges and dangle by bungee cords like rubber spiders. The afternoon sun angles through the sliding glass doors and spotlights his white belly. Sherman stares at the dust motes that tumble through the light and quietly sings, “We are here, we are here, we are here. Boil that dust speck, boil that dust speck, boil that dust speck.” He turns the television off and walks to his father’s bedroom. He runs his hand over the items on his father’s dresser: a curved wallet molded by his father’s hip, a pair of cuff links, a golf tee, a Tiparillo cigar box, and cologne in green and brown bottles shaped like an old car and a horseshoe. Sherman opens the cigar box. It is full of old photographs. He looks at a picture of his father in the army. His father is thin and stiff and his hair is cut short and neat as a newly mown lawn. The scowl on his face seems rehearsed. There is a vertical series of black-and-white pictures of his parents. They laugh, they kiss, they hug, they smile. Sherman thinks they look like actors demonstrating the different nuances of “happy” for a screen test. The rest of the pictures are all of Melanie. They are in chronological order from her birth picture, in which she is wrinkled and brown like an old vegetable, to a picture of her in a swimming pool. Melanie stands thin and white in the middle of the shallow end of the pool. Her face bears no expression; her eyes are closed. She holds out a hand, and it is unclear whether she is waving or asking someone to stop.
* * *
Sherman takes Aretha to the lake for a swim. He fed her beforehand so she would not be tempted to dig in the dangerous depths where the poisonous substances lurk. He knows it is risky to swim after eating, but he feels bringing a hungry swan to the site of her mother’s last supper would be a bigger gamble. Besides, he is not sure it is possible for a swan to have a cramp. Sherman suspects the idea of deadly cramps resulting from swimming too soon after eating, which he has never experienced or witnessed himself, is a myth manufactured by adults who secretly hope that the lulling effects of turkey sandwiches and milk or the heaviness of meatloaf will sink their children to sleep, and make them forget entirely about swimming.
Aretha immediately paddles out into the center of the lake. She snaps at water striders and dips her head underwater. Sherman loves the shape of her head and neck: a question mark, a pitcher handle, half a heart. Sherman’s own neck feels hot, inflamed. His face stings. He is thinking of a million things at once. Wishes and desires and regrets bleed together behind his eyes. There is Cassie, healthy and pink-skinned. Her mother says she is full-figured. She is ringed with flesh, and Sherman felt the feathery give of her breasts as he pressed his lips to them. There’s his mother, who drinks can after can of Coke in the dark and hugs him now when she thinks he’s asleep and talks to him in an altered voice, as if he were a cat or a doll. Then there’s Aretha and her fragile species. He remembers the moment she first opened her eyes and he saw himself etched in the black circles; she pushed herself into the nest of his hands. Now his hands can barely cradle her head, and he fears they will only grow smaller as she ages, but he will feed her and he will love her and she will live many swan years.
Aretha flaps and honks and swims in circles. Sherman wishes he, too, had huge wings and thinks he can almost feel pinfeathers poke through the skin on his back. He wishes he were younger so he could pretend, pretend he was a swan and Aretha his mate.
Sherman begins to undress. He removes his sneakers and socks, his jacket and T-shirt and jeans and underwear. He walks into the water. The water is so cold it feels to him as if his flesh and bones were leaving him, melting, decomposing with each step, as if he were becoming part of the water.
They would live in an enormous nest atop the woven sticks of a beaver house. They would eat insects and tubers, snails and small fish. They would have beautiful children, small, fuzzy cygnets, remarkable for their blue eyes.
Aretha sees him enter the water and begins to swim toward him. His knees and elbows and ankles ache, and he wonders if Aretha can feel him course through her thin, hollow bones. Sherman extends his arms and closes his eyes. He is not sure if he is beckoning or warning.