Her brother was all about tits and fighting and this made her even more special.
It had been that way since as far back as anyone could recall: She was peace to his bit of stupid war.
My first memory of them: Halley and Jack keeping some kind of balance in the world, in the middle of the baseball diamond behind the grade school with airplanes in the distance overhead, and even as a boy their age I understood this then, this strange notion of two poles balancing out the tides of that strange endless summer. There they stood, Jack vengeful with rocks in hand, hurling them one by one towards the bright circle in the Magic Marker-blue sky wheeling overhead. Because he was going to kick his butt, that big stupid ball of fire, who the heck did he think he was being so big and unstoppable every afternoon, so untouchable up there like a floating brag?
And dancing a ring around him, that was Halley, frail and diminutive beside her younger brother like a giant. Halley slow-dancing to the incongruous soundtrack of hateful words thrown up at the sky, steadily circling Jack with a skip-tap of her bare feet on the thin-cropped lawn. Halley, named after a comet her father had fallen in love with when he’d been as young as her, and wasn’t he right about it, that watching Halley make crop circles in centres of baseball diamonds looked prettily cosmic with her wispy yellow hair trailing on the air.
I knew them both and I saw them as we all grew up. We were never very close, Jack and I, but I was privileged in that I occupied that rare neutral space which excused me from the brunt of his wrath. I never really understood why that was - maybe because the scared look I noticed in his eyes during spelling dictation did something inside me, and so I made certain to leave my quiz papers on the far side of my desk within easy reach of his eyes. Maybe it was that I said hello to him every morning when I sat at my desk like no one else did, and goodbye, too, at the end of the day, during the hustle-bustle of kids dashing for doors, buses. It could have even been the one time I’d dropped a pair of Jelly Babies on his desk while I walked past, not to kiss up to the resident class tough boy, but simply because we all seemed to have snacks snuck indoors after lunch except for Jack, and maybe he needed something sweet to suck on during the long afternoon stretch, too. But the strange sense of pride it filled me with then returns whenever I recall him: Maybe he’s head-locking a classmate and grinding his face into sand-pit sand and gravel while I look on, or maybe he’s only brushing past me after he’s left the broken boy behind, crying with the taste of blood and shame in his mouth. Jack graduated to lobbing dirt missiles at weaker classmates, matured enough by high school to understand that it was futile to aim too high. Best to remain firmly grounded and choose targets close at hand and you’ll feel a little bit of power rampant inside of you at their defeated eyes and slumped shoulders. He became confident at his successes and led his teammates in football and other sports and was always charging at the vanguard when it came to messing with the girls. Tits and beer and-look-at-my- muscles and what-the-hell-are-you-looking-at, I’ll see you at 3:30 behind the tennis courts, faggot.
And Halley continued making circles in the middles of fields, invisible circles that never left any sign of her dancing through the days.
The only words she ever spoke to me, the only words that I ever understood at least, because mostly she only mumbled gibberish, turned something inside me. I’m not exactly sure what that means, something having turned inside me, but it happened, that much I know for certain. It happened in late April, on my birthday, and I like to think of it as her gift to me, even though she probably could never have understood the meaning of birthdays or gift-giving. At least not in the everyday shallow bestowing of boxes in bright-crinkly gift-wrap and cards with generic well-wishings printed across them and waiting to be bought in the drug store and then passed along to you on your particular special day.
I’d happened on her in the football field that time, in the centre, she always chose the exact centres of fields for dancing. Her arms were reaching to her sides, airplaning her faster and faster as she turned. She was smiling. Her smile was deep, it came from a place where she must have understood whatever good feeling she felt right then. I stopped and watched her and it made me happy seeing her that way, beaming and spinning like a feather or leaf or some other fragile thing on the air.
I didn’t say anything to her because it would have been pointless because Halley never spoke, not really. Happening on Halley airplane-dancing was gift enough for me on that particular afternoon of sun and drowsy silence. But I received my second gift from her then, when she noticed me for a quick second, when her pale vacuous eyes lit up briefly as they rested on mine; and my third when she said these words, and their sound became loud and softer and then loud and softer as she spun around me: “Some clouds are airplanes, Jackie, some clouds are airplanes flying away.”
I asked Jack about it later, and he’d said no, Halley never spoke to him, not really, although he guessed she liked airplanes because she was always watching the sky. It’s the only reason, their parents claimed, for them to stay in their small home with its cramped rooms and poor insulation during winter time, because their backyard abutted the airport. And their view of busy sky traffic and lingering vapour trail clouds was uninterrupted, and Halley liked to dance under the blue with her arms spread wide and her face staring upwards.
I never mentioned any of it to Jack again. He was always full of lion-anger at the best of times and seemed to get more ferocious whenever someone mentioned his sister. So I didn’t tell him how happy I was to have been caught in her circle on my birthday, and that I walked away from it only when I had to, because school bells, however unimportant in the big scheme of everythings, those bells we have to answer.
*****
No student, girl or budding young man, ever alluded to the irony in his constant slapping of the title on weaker school children than he. Retard, and a push in the small of the back where it affected your balance most, throwing you helter skelter into an off-kilter recess. In the small of the back because it hurt there the most, and if you’re going to shove and be tough you may as well do it properly, with some piss and vinegar behind it, some spite and excitement and maybe a dash of fury in your shaking arms.
No one ever dared fire the bullet back, and show Jack his mistake, the weakness in his wall of muscle and swear words. You’ve got one of those in your own nest, Jackie, who you calling a retard? How’s comet space girl nowadays, she drawn any messages for the big fleet in the end zone lately? Any blank-eyed invader from upstairs with flecks of drool in the corners of his mouth answered that little darling’s love letter, and when’s the fuckin’ wedding, Jackie, because we all want to be there for that, don’t we, gang?
Boys didn’t like swollen lips and purple hill-scapes surrounding their watery eyes, and chipped or loosed teeth weren’t easy to explain away to mom and dad. So no one spoke a word against that easy victim, that fixture of school history, the slow-girl slow-dancer, sister to big bear Jack with permanent fists ready at the ends of his arms, just waiting for the chance.
*****
I liked Jack myself, despite his simple way of watching the days passing, like a barbarian waiting for something to cross his path to punish. And so things weren’t his fault necessarily, not all the time. It wasn’t entirely his fault, I suppose, that Sally Henderson accused him of forcing himself on her and then hitting her nice and hard and close-fisted on the chin when she wouldn’t slip out of her shimmering emerald strapless on Prom Night. Maybe he had reasons for doing it, good reasons; and sure it may have been a valid way to act when he buried a golf ball wad of Hubba Bubba in little boy nerd Ralphy Ophus’s alfalfa head of hair for no reason at all, and who cares that this happened during his sophomore year at Kesey College, when the impetuous ways of high school boys should have been left far behind. No big whoop. Because Jackie’s a good guy, underneath, and you better remember it, because you don’t need him to remind you.
I liked Jack, because I remember that he used to dance his own kind of steps alongside Halley when they were younger. When I was a boy, too, wondering about the outer space in her far-away eyes and the strange composure in her dances, so amazing to watch on a summery afternoon in the middle of a baseball diamond. And he kept them at bay, too, those school boys and girls who might have had some words to say that would disturb his sister’s spinning orbits. Jack did it every day I knew him, rocks in fingers and fingers curled into little square fists.
If I’d been brave enough, I would have told Jack one thing, one thing that might have saved some unfortunate boy here a glistening deep purple welt under an eye and another there a mouthful of loose bones. I’d have said Hey Jack, you rule for standing guard, but you know what’s awesome, you want to know what’s the best thing in the world?
The comet girl doesn’t hear a thing from their mouths, not a single thing. Because she’s full of smiles, tuned in to something better, and maybe it’s upstairs in all those criss-crossing clouds on the move. Maybe there’s a message streaming down to her and no one else, and I think she’s lucky not only because she’s able to always catch that frequency from that invisible band but because her brother’s throwing rocks into the sky for her, standing up to someone as big and indomitable as the sun on her behalf.
*****
I was like any kid. I never dared because I feared. You didn’t want to wear your weakness for everyone to see, it was enough to hold your words and know it lived inside you, underneath the acne and feigned confidence. I never mentioned her again.
But I wish I had. I wish I had, despite everything, because I liked Jack.
Because whether or not Jack had put the baby into Halley’s belly, whether it was true and all the inevitable scenarios that played themselves out in your shocked mind had indeed been silent chapters in the secret history of all us school children grown older; whether it all happened that way before Jack and his ashamed family disappeared, moved away to we’ll never know where, with poor Halley, too, of course, because where else would she be able to go without hands to guide her; at least we can be certain of a few things.
My memory doesn’t fail me, and I remember for us all.
The strange silent comet girl making circles where games of baseball should have been played. And at the centre of her steadfast orbit, he was the boy with fists ready to punch out the too-bright sunlight, because how could it be so bold, how could it be so bold?
Yes, everyone, it was still Jack in the centre of the comet’s trips through unmoving time and grassy fields. Some clouds are airplanes, Jackie. Some clouds are airplanes flying away.
It wasn’t my name inside that little poem all about smiles coming up out of nowhere, and it wasn’t yours either.
