Have you ever noticed that your sock can drive you crazy? If the seam makes a little ball or wads up under your toes, it can drive you crazy?
Cetaf nudges my arm.
“What?”
“It hurts.”
I watch a corporal being ragged out by a lieutenant. The reason for this ragging is the corporal ordered some men to move back as we moved forward. The corporal did this just as every other corporal I’ve known to do it, the way he learned to do it by watching the DIs at Basic, by yelling at the top of his lungs and degrading his men in front of others.
The problem, it seemed, is Frog Lips, Elephant Toes, The Wisp, and I are the others and the lieutenant is concerned the corporal’s behavior may cause these three to shit sparks and otherwise cause more damage to our ozone layer.
He does this by spinning the corporal around and spittily saying he is dismissed, go away, be here no more.
As I watched the corporal being punished for doing his job how he thought he was suppose to do his job, I remembered Mrs. Woodbury, grammar school fourth grade. My strongest memory of Mrs. Woodbury stems from third grade, not even in her class yet. I had to get the boys in my class in line at the end of recess. We’d all go back into the school, nice and orderly, side by side, all in a line. It was my first day with this monumental responsibility. Everybody was making noise. I did to them exactly what my father did to me when I was making noise and he wanted it quiet. I yelled at the top of my lungs, “QUIET!” Mrs. Woodbury grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around, slapped me hard across the face and shoved me into the school. All by myself. All the kids, boys and girls, laughed. I didn’t know what I did wrong. Never even let myself cry.
“What hurts?” I ask. “Where?”
There are tears in his eyes. This walking wall sheds tears like a mourner on overtime and does nothing to stop or hide it. From me.
From anybody, really, but it is my arm he nudged.
He held his face in his hands and shook it from side to side as if caught in some kind of rage. “These are the strongest tears of all.”
I looked at Cetaf, Jenreel, and Beriah. I looked up and down the street, at military types coming closer and police types moving away. “I don’t know what to do.”
Jenreel and Beriah move to either side of Cetaf and touch him. Jenreel stands in front and wraps his arms as much around Cetaf as he can. “The first communication must be instructions on how to build a receiver.”
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Previous entries in The Book of the Wounded Healers (A Study in Perception) series
