You could say the lie was a story about what didn’t happen.
Not the tale of my falling and snapping the plastic stock
of a friend’s Christmas-gift toy rifle. I told it,
the stretcher, to his mother. And didn’t hesitate,
having schooled Wes, the friend, to nod and say nothing.
She had questions. And her line of interrogation was laced
with threat. The Cuban missile crisis had shaken us that year.
Kids had developed the habit of looking skyward in dread
and anticipation much of the time they played outdoors.
I saw that sky in the look on the face of Bernie Vines,
Wes’ mother. The light of all-things-American, too.
Some are born to lying. I was a natural—angel-faced,
a few whisper-touch brushstrokes of frightened boy—
the sort of kid aware which details work. In what order.
Shared truth does exist, I discovered, but is contingent
upon its utterance not sounding like a scratched LP,
not repeating what the hearer expects to glide through.
It seems a lie can clear the air of a quantity of truth
after which a friend’s trusting mother will accept
the hypothetical presence of rowdy older boys,
lanky representatives of the likely and possible
descended out of nowhere like crows to carrion.
Marauders from elsewhere. Adolescent thugs
coveting a replica-by-Mattel Winchester rifle.
Bernie bought my story until she got Wes alone.
When she stormed across a shared side yard
to enlighten my mother, she wasn’t smiling.
But then she was. Bernie Vines was a nurse.
A veteran of the day-to-day and hour-to-hour
earthly realities of what’s true most of the time,
minus the fine gold pixie dust we toss about for luck.
But I’d somehow shown that her austere morality
and principled moment can extend outward as it
bends. Like a length of plastic before it snaps.
The smile was that part of a clear blue Ohio sky
unfilled by doom, untrafficked yet by missiles.