Henry broke down the song bank, falling over the grass and pressing it into the mud, not falling over it so much as he was roughly sliding as if trying to go through it, and failing because the wet spring grass didn’t put up any kind of fight, but just seemed to accept that it was going to have another day that was mostly covered in mud. When he hit the flagstone cap of the stone wall, he rolled over his right wrist and sprained it, but that didn’t really register, because immediately, he rolled over the edge of the top of the wall and dropped eight feet to the ground that separated the wall from the concrete path, where some grass had been seeded many years ago when the city was investing in “green space.” This grass didn’t put up a fight either; it sunk under Henry’s weight into the damp silt that dirtied the whole of the “Greenway,” washed up every year when the creek flooded after spring rains and covering the path, the stones, the little beaches and sandbars that tried to fill and cover everything in this flat little city-engineered bit of “Nature.” Henry landed awkwardly on his left elbow, hearing something big snap, with the other arm swinging backwards as he was rolling through the air; his open jaw was pressed sideways into the the land and a wet clod of silt and wimpy grass pushed into and over his teeth, filling the gaps with wet grit like they were just another open space in the Greenway, destined by gravity to be filled with the silt that filled everything. The rest of his body fell more or less in line, and was still.
He called it the “song bank” because he would stop there on summer afternoons, as a teenager, riding his bike home from Downtown where he had been wasting time with his friends. The path was mostly used by bike commuters and yuppies out for a run; homeless people hung out under the bridges. Plastic and broken glass bottles made it all a little bit dangerous. To delay going home, he would stop, go up the bike ramp to the top of the embankment, and get his notebook from his backpack and try to write songs, ignoring the fact that he didn’t play guitar very well, or carry his guitar with him, or even sing very much. He thought this spot, a westward-facing bank of rough grass sloping down toward the creek, shaded by cheap city trees and hulking apartment buildings that were “modern” in the 1970s, was where a future rock star probably ought to be writing the next “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” But he didn’t really know how to write like that, especially as a teenager, so after a line or two of vague images and wordplay, the pen would collapse off to the side of the notebook, then down past his hip, and get dropped into the grass while his gaze went upward to the trees and the buildings. He imagined the contemptible little lives of the people who had such terrible taste (or fate) to be living in those awful buildings. But he didn’t write any of it down. He just consumed as much daylight as he could, giving it the attention that he didn’t want to pay at home, gradually inuring his mother to the fact that he was his own man now (he was a teenager.) When he realized his hunger he would head home, because his mom still made dinner.
Today he was at the song bank because he had been walking up the Greenway from work. He was celebrating a promotion from Customer Service Representative to Salesman at the camera store, which represented another dollars and fifty-four cents per hour on his paycheck, although he had to switch his hours and his days off were now Tuesday and Friday, which was perfectly useless but, hey, he was a Salesman now! He could talk about film grain and ISO, and roughly describe the features of most of the cameras in the store, as long as he was actually looking at the camera and could see its controls. And this was worth celebrating, certainly with beer later on, but for now he felt so much freedom and abundance that he would take a victory lap of sorts before going home. About a half-mile up the Greenway was a street where he could catch his bus, and he headed up the concrete path, the little walled canyon cooled by shadows of the apartments and the slightly-swollen stream. It was a good day.
When he got to the song bank he felt like it would be impressive to climb up and look at the world, from the very spot where he used to look at the world, but now with new perspective. He went up the ramp, which had cracked pretty badly over the years and needed repair, and stepped off into the soft grassy mud. The sunlight was caught in the trees on the other side of the creek, about to disappear behind the awful apartments. It was yellow; there would probably be a good red sunset later on, at least for the people on the other side of the buildings. His feet rotated a little in the cold, frictionless earth as he stepped. He looked around at the embankment that had changed not at all since he was a teenager, and wondered where that notebook was, where he had stored those songs or fragments of songs. Maybe his mom had it at the old house. He thought he would go look for it, maybe on Friday. Some of those bits were cool. He should try to finish them, go find an open mic.
The sunlight streaked down and scattered over the embankment, and it looked a little bit, for a second, like the stage of a rock concert with moving spotlights, or like the jungle at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. He felt exultant, and imagined how he might look from below. Iconic, hopefully! Salesman pay was going to change things, and soon. He felt lucky, even though he’d worked for it; it was exactly the chance he needed. So many things would be possible, not the least of which would be beer. He closed his eyes, hoping someone saw him from the apartment buildings. He imagined them admiring him, cheering for him. He slowly stretched into a rock-star pose, arms extended up and down, hips twisted, then bent his elbows and lowered his head into an action-hero fighting pose. The smooth soles of his shoes ground down into the damp weak grass as he pictured his silhouette, as he imagined the camera angle, the wild geometry of his clothes and his hair in the fractured light. And he knew it was time for a dramatic exit, so he made a break for it.
He didn’t know how long he had laid there, at the bottom of the wall; the breath had been knocked out of him and for a long time all he could think about was the horrifying vacuum in his chest and impossibly huge pain in his arm, but then he became aware of the silt grinding between his teeth and over his tongue. The mud pushed through the fabric of his plaid shirt and he felt the wetness in his hip, his knee, and the bottom of his ribcage; his hand slowly and instinctively curled around a bottle that had fallen just like he had. He tried to just breathe.
A jogger wearing a fitness-calculator watch and very clean workout clothes tossed a joke about “happy hour” over his shoulder as he ran past.
©2020 by Nick Trotter. All rights reserved.