He seemed made of wood, what a puppet really looked like
after becoming a real boy, but after the ass’s ears slough off,
when he can bear to look at himself in the mirror. This real
Pinocchio troubled me more than he was an item of ridicule.
Certainly, he had the spindly limbs, the spastic gait, and
these sudden, jerking gestures that still betrayed a life that
depended on strings for animation. His maker, this puppet
master still hovered in the air. I have come to believe that
was God. The way the puppet’s slack jaw dropped in
surprise, the peg nose, the eyes darting side to side or rolling
up into his head when he, meaning the boy, had a seizure . . . Every
one of these features assumed reality in and reached a kind
of maturity in the “slow,” slow being a polite expression then,
as though he might still catch up like the turtle who raced
the hare. He still dressed the way you would expect someone
unfamiliar with being a real boy to dress. Had his mother
found clothes for him in solid colors he might have blended
in like plastic dinosaurs, in the blues and grays of Civil War
soldiers. But he stood out and never missed a day wearing
a checkered Western shirt with checks as hard on the eyes as
a test pattern, blue bib longies with matching knee patches,
which no longer needed to be cuffed but they were always
cuffed enough to serve as pockets. The suspenders were yoked
high. The double stripes of his crew socks were also red as
candy canes, conferring a kind of rank, as far as he would get,
I guess. He buttoned his shirt high as well, such that his
Adam’s apple kept popping out when he craned his neck before
taking one of his high steps, as though the cracks in the
sidewalks were made of wire. His voice had cracked early. He
wore choppy sideburns, for he must have not wanted to be
touched on his face by his “poor mother” as mine called her.
They lived at the bottom of Elbrook, which is from the German
Hellbruch, meaning where light breaks through the
clouds. My mother also said that the older boy had a “difficult
birth” and that we should never laugh at how he exposed
himself to the little girls whenever they gathered around the
lawn sprinkler for that only “encourages him.” But we did
anyway, and he didn’t know any better as well as he rode
his bicycle, a red-and-cream Schwinn with battered fenders
and a hollow crossbar that resembled a jeweled comet drawn
by a monk in an illuminated manuscript. His bicycle was a
living fossil among the high handlebars and proud banana
seats with which we took aim at him playing “chicken,” trying
to show him how to ride by our example. We chased him
to the top of Elbrook, which was all downhill. We reared up
at him and popped rampant “wheelies.” But he refused to
learn beyond straddling his bicycle the way a toy cowboy fits
a toy horse. He only took these long steps, with his legs set
wide apart so that the bicycle pedals could spin freely around
unused and unimpeded. But every so often his immaculately
white freckled legs couldn’t avoid being struck and bruised
black and blue. Eventually he caught up. When he was finally
in our circle, he sat on his bicycle, in the eye of our
merry-go-round of string rays until we were out of breath
laughing, until enough of a gap formed through which he
could push off and coast downhill, homeward on a
draisienne, a dandyhorse—that’s the word, that ought to work
down ten spaces, that should solve the last hard words across.