The Skill of the Killdeer

By Roger Brown

A mother tries to protect her sons. One is just a boy of fourteen and vulnerable, the other is much older and deeply troubled, but in her efforts to control their fragile worlds, she opens wide a door to a scenario that is much worse. The naive boy is caught in a dire crosscurrent, being that he's been conditioned to step lightly around his brother (a pedophile) as not to push him over the edge-this, while a rapist is combing the woods nearby, looking for soft, compliant boys just like him. What can possibly bring clarity and light to a young man ripped to shreds by this unforeseeable predicament? The year is 1981. Years later, near the turn of the century, he is estranged by all. He goes alone into the realm of the mind and nature. He listens. He answers the challenge to observe life carefully, and then to dig down deep for the revelation his dogged perseverance will bring.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781640827219

Roger Brown

Self published author with a passion for poetry

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The Skill of the Killdeer

Roger Brown

Copyright © 2019 Roger Brown

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2019

ISBN 978-1-64082-720-2 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64082-721-9 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

About the Author

Where I am going, there is a darkness of evergreens and a stillness of water, and further in, the white light of a river. There is a sound that seems far away, like wooded hills or the highway or sadness or breath or a distant motor, that long shaft black with oil, a humming cantilever, shifting forces that rise and fall like the river. There is sand and six-foot alder. There is strangeness within sorrow. Desolation and deliverance. A smooth bone made clean by the elements. Where I am going, there is a noisy bird that nests in a suitable divet on the terrain, and upon that wide open field of stones, unfazed by his vulnerability, he is seen standing atop a prominent stone—next to something I have tried so hard to remember.

Preface

At age fifteen, I got raped on the way to school by a stranger. The year was 1981, the second day of February. He led me about two miles down an impassible wooded trail to a campsite of sorts, and as it happened, I noticed a strange familiarity, as though it were routine. I felt as though the danger wasn’t real. At the very onset, there had been a chance to break the stillness and silence that gripped me like deep sleep, and to escape, but I was afraid it would make him angry.

As I grew older, it became apparent that I lacked the inherent pride that other young men possessed. In fact, I felt as though my societal role around dominant alpha males was to be wifelike. Once both parents had passed away, I was left with mysteries and very few answers, only a trifle amount of clues, leaving me to search my mind for memories that had been repressed, like objects dropped into a dark pond. This book is about mystery, of yearning for answers, the path toward clarity, the root of dysfunction—and a bird.

A certain kind of bird. In a wide open field of sparse vegetation, you see him running along the ground or circling in the air, a life and life’s objective, and for its success, this cunning bird has an amazing skill, which you will see if you come here, alone, observant, and curious, being careful where you step.

Incident at Meadowdale

February 2, 1981

Chapter 1

On the way to school, I saw that there wasn’t any ice on the pond, so I just stood there. For five years I had done this (stopping as I walked by). Ordinarily, there wouldn’t be a reason to stop; these were the suburbs. The pond was narrow but long, like the crease in a greeting card, a depression between two clearings whose stagnant contents didn’t allow you to see below the glare. It was white sky amid the bare branches of bog willow and fir. It was timber that men left standing in water that soon turned black. I crouched at the edge and touched it.

Picture the greeting card opened up to the sky, giant and blank, the two halves as massive clearings—this was land they clear cut for tract housing and a multipurpose field, plus monkey bars and a slide and swings, for a baseball diamond. But when they broke ground, water began to pool in between the middle embankments, and the project was axed. Dad brought his chainsaw in here for a couple truckloads of firewood, as I ran around in the woods. There was a strange girl in there, and I followed her around for a while. The back and forth and moaning of the saw seemed to go on forever, leaning against the soft heartwood. Now there were no more logs, no stumps, just bare acreage enclosed in a darkness made of second-growth evergreens.

Then came the element of time, long compressed banks fed by saturated earth, the pond seemed as though it had been there throughout the ages, on a tract of land that no one cared about, quiet but not peaceful, not pristine.

***

I had taken the shortcut through the woods to get to class on time, but I wasn’t going to make it, and I was tired. My body could not transcend above the slow marine air, a state I’d been in all winter—I had fallen behind like an animal that failed to sense the changes that came in autumn, changes that were felt by the other kids, leading them to rise with the skill that is necessary to succeed. One of my teachers noticed the state I was in. Mr. Anderson. He was the only one who did.

I walked back toward home a little ways, to the middle of the clearing, with my head down, scanning the hard earth, thinking that I had dropped my hot-lunch money as I was coming toward the pond. I was glad there wasn’t any ice over that dark water; I would have tried to be brave by walking out to the center of it, relying on instinct, yet my instincts were not accurate, and I would have just stood there, wondering. More often than not, my decision to be brave was the whisper of deception. Deception was a woman, and she lived beside me. She would often wake me in the middle of the night and instruct me to follow her into the black, imperceivable center of her world. From time to time I would feel myself rise out of bed and wander to some other place in the house. My flimsy body seeming to be lacking substance, all caution to the midnight wind, I was caught between two nonconcentric realms. That one and the other, brighter, more painful one.

A little further, at the edge of the field stood the old concrete frame of a U.S. Coast Guard station. It had been gutted by a fire long before I was born: large black squares that had been windows, a black rectangle, it was the door, the upper perimeter of the roof forever crumbling, alder saplings taking root in its fissures, the faded graffiti on faded walls, lurid yellow vulgarities—insignia and sacrament. The sun was beginning to shine a little. I couldn’t find my hot-lunch money. I stopped and moped around for a moment. I felt sad for the crane fly that I saw as I left the house. It searched every square inch of the window, looking for a way outside, then it stood there, upon the clean sill, impeded by a mysterious element. All the humans knowing its fate.

The moment seemed quieter now, as though the drone of a distant airplane had finally ceased, but then I thought how it was more like a constant pressure that had been inside my ear all winter long, and it just popped. I felt it before, after a flash of lightning when I was alone, that small amount of clarity and peals of thunder coming so hard the air pocket broke open, smoke that was mixed with warm rain, the pulverized muddy cloud moving east, beyond the tops of hundred-foot evergreen trees. And I felt it now. I could hear the ground. A painful set of instructions, rigid prompts aimed at my behavior, not suggested but told, and the response was to be automatic or else my stomach would fill with acid. I must turn around, move my body over the ground, past the pond and that other clearing, down the rutted access road that led to the main arterial, and go to school.

More clarity came to me as I turned—the dark gray expanse, the glimmer of standing water, food wrappers that lay still, paling away, large stones and patches of scotch broom, the tall trees. And a figure with dark hair standing next to the pond. It had moved near at a steady rate of velocity.

Environmental indicator, definition: a plant or animal that indicates by its presence in a given area the existence of certain environmental conditions.

I wore the down vest that my dad bought for me. He bought it for when I went fishing at the river, so my arms would be free and light as I cast my line out to a hole that was hard to reach, one that was slow and empty—and to keep me warm. We camped there in summer, but this was winter, miles from there and that wondrous water that sounded like endless giggling, so many voices leaping above the stones in the creek that came down by us, on its way to the bright banks.

There wasn’t a lot of space in this little passage between the clearings due to where the pond lay, and these tall trees, and now a man was standing there. My palms got moist; the warmth underneath my puffy down covering rose into my neck. Then more clarity. My mind rushing ahead into the flash and the rumbling. The thought came to me that there was no reason for a man to linger by water that had no life in it. His body turned to face me.

I moved along the pond’s undefined perimeter in a berth of seven meters from the edge of woods and was nearly past the man when he turned, showing some kind of interest in me. He had bad acne, his face was puffy, his head was round, and he was about twenty-nine. He took his hands out of his pockets and parted his thick brown lips, repeating something that he had just said but louder, his words dropping out of his mouth like useless blocks of wood into the dirt that lay between us. They were simple words, not clear and complex like my brothers when they debated politics at the dining room table.

I don’t know, I said. It was the only thing I could think of. I did not look him in the eye. I thought about his hands that came out of his pockets as he turned. It wasn’t a thought, thoughts take more time. This was instantaneous.

I want you to come over here, said the man. There seemed to be a pause and then a shift that was nearly impossible to detect, but I sensed it seconds after it happened, a change in his stance. His mouth gave no expression.

I had stopped my forward movement at an imaginary line that somehow felt real, like the borderline between two countries, and in that point in space and time, the man with the dark hair specified what it was