The Day the End of the World Was at Hand by J Bradley Minnick [1]

“I’ve signed you up for swimming lessons at the Y.M.C.A. Lessons start Monday. That’s tomorrow,” Mother said as I stood on pretty pink petals that lined the ground of our backyard jungle. A late spring snow had just left the rooftop of our home. The gutters were filled with brown, wet leaves. Father stood high atop a wooden ladder. Looking up, I saw his blue jeans and the dirty soles of his shoes. Mother stood under him, holding the bottom rungs. She wore a small bee-hive hairdo, a plaid shirt, and black slacks. Every so often a clump of leaves exploded in a burst behind me. 

In those days, Father was a dominant shadow, whose late-afternoon appearances signified dinner and whose morning appearances signified weekend. Mother was someone whose presence I always felt and who seemed hell-bent on telling me what to do.  

In those days, I spent my Easter morning break watching The Mickey Mouse Club on television and most of my afternoons playing army in our backyard jungle. There was a war on, and I was Sergeant-Major-Corporal-Minor-Jayson Why, Dog-of-War, Enemy-to-all-Enemies. “Destruction” was my middle name: I knocked the heads off of weeds and wild flowers with plastic golf clubs, dug deep trenches toward the center of the earth with sandbox shovels, and buried myself under leaves, camouflaging exposed limbs with parts of bushes. Happily, I made booby traps out of Mother’s clotheslines, lured neighborhood kids into my backyard jungle, and laughed myself wet when Father’s underwear sprang up at them like one-eyed monsters, and they ran screaming home. I tried to change what I could. I tried to understand what I couldn’t. There was a war on. 

In those days, I hadn’t yet learned to swim, and Kenny Bloom, my next-door neighbor, was yet to go off to Vietnam. I’d convinced myself that if Vietnam hadn’t happened, Kenny wouldn’t have had to leave home at all.

In those days, I stood in my backyard jungle peeking through the brambles and pine needles at the Bloom’s magical house. Somewhere in the middle of the huge expanse of grass between our houses, I gazed across the 17th parallel. 

The Bloom’s house didn’t seem to belong to our neighborhood. It had everything: large, thick, white pillars that kept the roof from falling; a crooked walkway made out of bricks that wound a snake’s path to the front door, and a real-honest-to-God doorbell one pulled with a rope. The Bloom’s house reminded me of The White House, and Old Mr. Bloom a slightly fatter version of the president. He even had a crew cut and a rag-top Cadillac. I thought the Bloom’s must have been very special indeed to have been blessed with such things.

And, somehow I knew we would never have the things that the Bloom’s had: we had a tiny, red house with green shingles; a huge oak tree in our front lawn; and, red and yellow flowers neatly placed in window boxes; we had a light post in the corner of the yard that stretched far up into the sky and looked like it might fall on you at any moment, and a sign on the corner named Stop, but nobody ever did. Father owned a Plymouth Valiant with wide holes in the floorboards, and I owned a red Western Auto bicycle that leaned most days on its kickstand in our gravel drive. We didn’t have big, white pillars holding up our house or a winding brick path that led to our front door; we didn’t have a rag-top Cadillac or a real doorbell that chimed. We just didn’t. We never would.

“Jayson! Did you hear me?” Mother repeated. “I’ve signed you up for swimming lessons at the Y.M.C.A. Lessons start tomorrow.”

Kenny Bloom was going off to war, and I was starting swimming lessons at the Y.M.C.A.

The world just didn’t seem right.    

My eyes met Father’s in a moment of magical understanding.    

“Don’t worry, Bud. You’ll get through it,” he said to me.

“I know, but you know,” I said.

“I know, and you’ll survive,” he said.

 I wasn’t so sure. 

I had only been to the Y.M.C.A. indoor pool once and had gazed up at the endless spaces in the ceiling—the girders crisscrossed in a network of angry thoughts. I had breathed in the green humid air and had felt warm and cold at the same time.

I looked away from my father and back to the Bloom’s mysterious house. Through the branches and pine needles, it looked farther away than ever. The clouds had stopped moving; the world was still.  

The front door opened and Kenny, handsome and tall, walked out of his house and stood high on top of the hill, wearing a T-shirt and holding a frisbee, which reached unheard-of heights as he waved goodbye. I burst out of the jungle chasing the frisbee’s elongated shadow. I wanted to stop running, to wave back, but the frisbee sailed over my head, hovering above the street, spinning, going nowhere, and finally falling, meeting its shadow on the ground.    

 Kenny rushed by like the wind in his father’s rag-top Cadillac, taking a spin around the neighborhood one last time. His mother sat beside him and his dog Topper barked into the spokes. Above the roar of the engine, the taillights lit up as the Caddy leaned into the corner, passed the tree in my front yard, passed the falling lamp post, passed my Western Auto bicycle, passed my father’s Valiant, ran through STOP and disappeared.

The next day, the pool at the YMCA was filled with kids. I refused to get in the water and sat on the wide bench alone, watching them. They swam back and forth, their heads looking strange, bobbing on the surface. They waved for me to get in. Yelled the water’s great. They waited, but I just looked down at my feet and stayed put on the bench.

Mother was very disappointed to hear I hadn’t moved since she had left me on the bench and spent a long time talking to the high school kid who was supposed to teach me. He just shook his head, looked at me, shook his head again, and then looked down at his own bare feet. That night my father tried to smile at me over dinner but didn’t seem to be able to. 

After Kenny Bloom disappeared, I watched for him each night on television, but I never saw him, only a lot of soldiers who looked like him.

In August, my father came for me in his new red Cutlass 1968 hardtop. He was so proud of that car. It was sporty, and he’d never had anything like it before. In fact, I think that red Cutlass was the first thing my father felt he really owned and that included his house, and the land around it.

His old car, a black Plymouth Valiant, had recently become scrap metal, dissolving into tears when the tow truck operator came to take it away; my father paid the man five dollars. I remember wondering if paying to take it away was something he’d done to honor the car or something he’d done to help him forget it. Before it was towed away, I ran out of the house and leapt into the backseat hoping that my father wouldn’t get rid of it if I was still inside. There were tears in his eyes when he pulled open the side door and extended his hand.

Everything about the interior of the red Cutlass was new, except for the steering wheel—the only thing the old car had left us: a silver-capped horn that shone out-of-place as magnificently as a sheriff’s badge on a modern policeman.   

My mother’s thin, disembodied hands disappeared before she could get the bay window open and wave goodbye; the Cutlass paused at the corner stop sign, and we moved clear out of sight.

The newness of the car was a part of the age I was living in where spaceships were no longer science fiction, where cars might soon be able to take-off into the air. 

Its newness contrasted with my father, who’d had such a hard life that he was fond of telling me he had become old while still a boy.

In one photograph of him, he is twenty-five, standing tall amongst the other graduates of his law school class. In the picture he seems like he is breathing for the world: the first member of his family to graduate from high school, college, and now this. 

While in law school, his father had died suddenly and that’s how my father inherited the Valiant. He said when he turned the key to that car and all of the gages suddenly came to life, he realized his father was never coming back.  

By the time I got to ride in the Valiant, though, it was thoroughly rusted. There were holes in the floorboards, and the odometer had stopped around 200,000 miles. To tell the truth, the car embarrassed me, and I felt we must have been very poor indeed to have to drive it. Still, my father kept it running for years after its expiration date, until few of the old parts were left except for the steering wheel he refused to let go of.  

This new Cutlass probably cost more than he’d made his first year as a lawyer, and as I sat beside him, I wished that he could have been as happy driving it as I was riding in it. But somewhere I knew deep down that nothing was worth the youth he had been deprived and that this car was a gift to himself for an imminently practical life that only allowed lines and wrinkles from worry.

Then, suddenly, we were caught in traffic, sitting on an expansion bridge, watching a barge move underneath that held hundreds of old cars, crushed, stacked on top of each other, their sad grills frowning, their windshields non-existent, their broken taillights unblinking above missing bumpers.

While we sat there, my father told me a story about how once his old car had broken down somewhere on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and he said he had finally decided to abandon it. He left it with a rag tied through the door handle and hitched a ride to the next exit. But the car refused to be abandoned and late that night, he returned to it with a sleepy tow truck operator—my father’s eyes frantically scanning the road until the shape of the old car emerged. 

The road opened up wide as we came out of a crooked tunnel and white lines pointed toward a sun so large and orange that we both could do little than stare at it. Our trip to the sun coincided with my thinking about the way things might be someday—the space race, moon landings, flying cars. What was to become of us?  

We pulled to the side of the road beside a field so filled with flowers I could see nothing else. Father reached behind the front seat and pulled out the longest butterfly net I had ever seen, and told me he had secretly been working on it, letting it take shape a piece at a time: the pole, long, thin and newly varnished—one that he had used to clean our gutters and knock clumps of wet leaves to the ground; the wire fashioned together and spray-painted red as smooth and sleek as his new car; and the net he made out of one of my mother’s maternity dresses. 

He presented the butterfly net to me, smiled, and pointed to the field; and, together we ran through flowers as if dodging raindrops, the net a long maternal funnel in full bloom. I caught everything the air offered.  

The field opened up into a wide expanse where an old cabin sat. Beside the cabin, a set of rusted railroad tracks were covered in parts with dirt. Between the rails were the wooden ties, peeking up in spots like broken teeth. Coal chips of various sizes had fallen off old railroad cars and lay dirty-black in the dirt. The rails, rusty, lined up in parallel rows on their way out toward the horizon, and I imagined that if I followed them, my width, like the rails would become narrower and narrower until I became a thin horizontal line—a stick boy walking through the dust.

Father told me the cabin’s history. 

His father had built it.

While my father was in law school, he said, my grandfather accidentally knocked down a bee hive and had raced through these fields, swallowing the bees until one of them eventually stung his heart, and he fell to the ground. During the winter, he said, the snow failed to stick to the patch of earth where his father fell.

“In these fields,” my father pointed, “is a place where snow comes to die.”

We sat together on the steps of the porch.

I think my father realized he had freightened me and told me my favorite story about my grandfather, who had been hired as a railroad cop during the Depression and worked the nightshift, his flashlight bobbing through the darkness as he wandered between the rails. He had been hired to prevent other men from leaving a place that no longer sustained them and had felt forever guilty about it. 

Growing up in the shack beside the railroad tracks, my father said how as a young boy he always had an urge to move. Night after night, he and his father played a game: my father hiding away in some boxcar bound for leaving; my grandfather searching with his flashlight, never failing to find his son’s huddled figure tucked away in one of the cars; together, they would walk home on the rails.

“I don’t want to upset you, Jayson,” my father said. “I want to tell you the truth.”  

It was at this point that the sun began to fade—streaks of purple mixed with orange and grey.  I opened my eyes and half-expected the sun to have set or the sea of flowered heads to be asleep. And as we sat there, my father became even older.

“Son, if you were littler I could make up a story so you’d understand why I brought you here, why I made you the butterfly net. . . I don’t want to talk down to you, but I think right now I need you to listen and to understand. I’m sorry, son, but Kenny Bloom died last week. He was killed in action. 

I burst through the curtain of new flowers, which admitted me and then drew to a close behind me. The important thing was to keep moving, to keep the net afloat high above my head, to catch the wind, to get away, far away from this place, until I tripped over a dry patch, my mouth swallowing dirt, my mother’s maternity dress deflating, falling from the sky.

My father found me and picked me up and carried me and the net to the Cutlass and deposited me inside— I waited for the car’s gauges and dials to light up, for the engine to roar to life.

J Bradley Minnick

 

[1] Phrase from the novel The Man Who Was There  by Wright Morris. 

Image: Paweł Schmidt, CC BY-SA 3.0 PL https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/pl/deed.en, via Wikimedia Commons. Indoor swimming pool with wooden benches around the side and the water empty.