Uncle Felix brings one of the broken pieces of fishing pole up close to his face. “As much as it pains me to admit, this pole is a goner. Hank can’t get away with it.”
“He’s already gotten away with it,” says Larry.
“The battle has only begun,” Uncle Felix says.
Larry stands up off the couch, clapping his hands, swelling with toxic camaraderie. If Balloon Boy has seen the crazy look in his uncle’s eyes as he conceives and executes a bad idea, he knows this face from his father: a blank-eyed, abject agreement. He’s going along with whatever plan his brother spins.
“I say we light her car on fire,” Uncle Felix says. “Let’s hold it responsible.”
“Good plan,” Larry says.
“Bad,” Balloon Boy says, then four seconds later, “plan.”
“Hush,” they say in unison.
“But wait,” Larry says, “won’t Hank kick our asses again?”
Felix smiles and swings those broken poles about, keeping that deranged choir singing: “We need backup. Call our softball team. Call every Wombat. Get our whole batting order here and we’ll light her bucket of bolts on fire and get some revenge on Hank.” As he finishes his thought, he begins using the poles as swords, fencing thin air.
Balloon Boy isn’t on the softball team, but he does go to the park to help with their practices, collecting equipment and whatnot. Sometimes a Wombat will look around the park and ask Rodney, “Isn’t this the place where it happened?” and he’ll say, “Yes,” and sometimes a Wombat will say, “How high’d you get on that balloon anyway?” and he’ll shrug with a smile, not wanting to talk about it.
Now Larry gets on the horn, calling Wombats, and Balloon Boy sits and watches, knowing there’s nothing he can do to talk them out of this. But he can make sure that Sara stays safe, which is what concerns him the most. She might not love him anymore, yet that doesn’t mean he’s forgotten his own feelings for her. They’re locked in him. That’s what makes Balloon Boy feel so alone, all the swirling thoughts that can only clank around his brain like shoes in a dryer.
Alone, with no way to articulate himself.
The two halves of him, much like the busted fishing pole. Rodney and Balloon Boy. The same. Different. Permanent. Terrible.
“Excuse,” Rodney says and gets off the couch, “me.”
“Where you going?” Larry says, cupping the phone with his hand.
“Need. Fresh. Air.” The whole sentence takes sixteen seconds to choke out.
“No such thing in Traurig,” Uncle Felix says.
Rodney goes out the front door, walks over the small dune in the yard, and makes his way toward Sara’s. He should have stopped in his room to get his pen and pad. This is going to take a lot of words. But it was about time to Rodney, maximizing his time. So he decided to blow off the pen and pad in the name of getting to Sara as soon as possible.
The day is equal parts hot and achy, and Balloon Boy wonders if it’s even possible for him to get a concussion, after the damage already done. Hank’s fists connected hard against his body and Rodney feels a bit woozy.
He hears a ringing, which isn’t a good sign. He might be concussed. Then he realizes it’s Old Erma’s wind chimes a couple houses up. Obviously, there is no midday wind, but she sits on her porch, clanging her cane along all the chimes, like a prisoner running a tin cup across her cell’s bars. She smiles as Rodney passes and calls to him, “Hey there, sweetie. You good?”
“I’m,” he says, and six seconds later, “good.”
“I love music,” she says, sending her cane over the wind chimes again.
He sees a lizard darting up a wall and a swarm of ants slowly mutilating a moth and carrying the bits off.
A toddler on a tricycle rides it in slow laps around an aboveground pool in a front yard. Rodney waves at her. The young girl doesn’t break concentration, slowly circling while wearing a ratty red bathing suit.
He’s at the end of the cul-de-sac, standing in front of Sara’s house. There are so many other places he’d like to be — namely any place where Hank is not — and yet here is where he must be. Sara needs him.
Hank has a Rottweiler the size of a Mini Cooper, but even that won’t stop Balloon Boy from warning her. The dog barks and froths on the porch, and despite being terrified Rodney walks right by it to ring the bell.
Hank comes to the door and stands, tapping his foot and smiling. He doesn’t have a shirt on and Rodney hates how small he feels next to Hank.
“You wanna throw some more hands with me?” asks Hank.
“Sa. Ra,” says Balloon Boy.
“Nope.”
The Mini Cooper keeps barking.
“Sa,” he says, “ra.”
“She’s busy not talking to you.”
“Sa! Ra!”
“Don’t poke a grizzly with a stick,” says Hank. “We bite.” He rubs Bernard’s head. “We bite and it’s no bueno for you.”
“Sa! Ra!”
Sara finally comes to the screen door and says, “What do you need, Rodney?”
“They,” he says, then five seconds later, “come.”
“Who?”
“Dad. . un. . cle.”
“They’re coming here?” Sara says.
Balloon Boy nods.
“We no speaky the retard,” says Hank with a brash Chinese accent, walking back inside with his hound in tow.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” Sara says.
These moments in Balloon Boy’s life are the worst, the times when he needs words to make someone understand what’s happening without the aid of his pad and pen. It would have only taken thirty seconds to run to his room and grab them. Now he has to humiliate himself in front of her, one syllable at a time.
And if she could ever see what’s been written down in his pad, he thinks it might rekindle what they had. Balloon Boy has heard stories of people losing one of their senses and then the others gaining strength. For Rodney, this compensation happens in his pad. He cannot communicate orally and yet he is able to write down everything, not only jotting recaps of each day, but he even allows himself to write little one-act plays. He bought a copy of a Sam Shepard collection at a garage sale, the volume containing seven or eight plays, and Rodney has read them a hundred times. He’s studied every line that Shepard put together. His favorite play is “Curse of the Starving Class.” It’s about a son who is doing his damnedest to avoid his parents’ mistakes, the death sentence of turning into them, a story that Rodney can not only relate to, but holds as his biggest fear. He’s already fallen off the balloon, but he so badly wishes that he doesn’t have to go down the same pit that swallowed his parents. He doesn’t want to be a coward that takes off, prioritizing herself above her family. And he doesn’t want to be a coward that stays behind, drinking too much and wasting his life. He wants to shuck these curses, do better.
His one-acts are all set in Traurig, taking people and settings he knows and then spinning the stories from there.
So if Sara took the time to read a few pages, Balloon Boy has no doubt their friendship would wake from hibernation. Chances are he’ll never kiss her again, and he’s accepted that over the years, but there’s no reason they can’t be better friends, especially if she reads and understands that he is still the same person.
She exits the screen door and they’re standing only a few feet apart.