Broken Windows
By Roger Mensink
On July 4th, 1972, my mother, a recently converted hippie, drove me from our house in Redmond to the ferry terminal in Seattle. She was terribly frustrated because the Chevy’s cigarette lighter had stopped working. “What kind of boy scout doesn’t have matches?” she asked me more than once, and each time I gave the same answer—that I wasn’t a boy scout. When I got out of the car I carried a sunken rucksack and a hand-me-down sleeping bag. The rucksack held a jacket, a toothbrush, and a Swiss army knife. The sleeping bag, on the other hand, was a roll too big to get my arms around. I hooked my fingers under the cord that held it together and more or less dragged it along.
Next came the ferry ride. The sun blazed overhead, a steady breeze ruffled the surface of the water, and in the distance, over the green, swelling shorelines, towered the conical mass of Mt. Rainier, dazzling white against a deep blue sky. Because it was neither drizzling nor overcast, it didn’t take long for a boastful refrain to make its way among the adults on board: how days like this were what made it all worthwhile and how very fortunate we were to live in the great Pacific Northwest. On the top deck of the ferry, Mr. Adler exuded a bizarre happiness. In place of his usual drab suit and vast cloak of disapproval he wore the clothes of an inquisitive man—a cross between a bird watcher and a park ranger. He had on hiking boots and a pair of olive-green pants belted high, a pink polo shirt, and a sweater tied over his shoulders. The little hair he had left slapped playfully in the wind, from one side of his reddened scalp to the other.
After we docked, the two dads who had come along divided us into groups. My group was loaded into the back of Adler’s pickup truck; the other two were crammed into a couple of dented passenger vans with the logo of our high school painted on the sides. Every student from Adler’s freshman social studies classes had received an invitation for this end-of-the-school-year weekend at his cabin, never mind the oft-repeated warning that some of us had forever squandered the privilege. What’s more, it wasn’t just a cabin but a cabin in the woods on an island across the Puget Sound from Seattle, accessible only by ferry.
I had never been on either an island or a ferry, and so I’d been looking forward to this trip. But as I sat pressed against the bulk of my sleeping bag, I began to feel uneasy. Most of my fellow campers were unknown to me. To make matters worse, Kyle wasn’t on this trip, on account of him not having taken any of Adler’s classes. Kyle was a spectacularly talented athlete and liar whom I’d known since elementary school. It unsettled me, being untethered from Kyle in my present situation, and for the very reason that I was nothing like him. Kyle was Yogi Bear and I was Boo Boo, always expressing some scruple or doubt. “You got no hair, bear,” Kyle would say, or something like that. I took it in stride. I knew I was late in maturing, physically. There was a bit of a race going on there, and I couldn’t really compete. That was for sure.
Then again, Denise Lapham was on this trip. For the past four months Denise had sat at the desk behind mine in Adler’s social studies class, wearing the same five-button swabbies—the kind with raised anchors on the buttons—a black sweater, and a navy-blue parka she unzipped but never took off, at least not in class. Whenever I turned in my seat to talk to her she would lean into the back of her seat and look at me with her beautiful large eyes that fairly burned with interest, or so I imagined. I think it was because I was infatuated with Denise that she was so easily able to pull words out of me, the way a magician pulls endless streamers of silk out of his top hat.
One morning, after having enjoyed a lengthy visit, I twisted back around to find myself inches from Adler’s acne-scarred face on which, as always, was inscribed a permanent, lopsided grin that had nothing to do with joy or amusement. Come to think of it, my conversation with Denise must have been pretty one-sided, for surely she had seen him standing there and might have mentioned something. I tried to apologize, but Adler slammed his hand on my desk and screamed at me to shut up. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Even worse was the spittle that had collected in the corners of his mouth and on the tip of his tongue. Terrified, I wished with all my heart for him to move away before any of that cheesy adult unpleasantness landed on me.
How odd then that, in light of his classroom demeanor, the Adler who got into the cab of his pickup truck was still the same happy, one could almost say, carefree man I’d seen on the ferry. With the last of us squeezed in, he proceeded to drive like a madman over a twisting country road. Heedlessly, he veered over the freshly painted yellow lines that separated the lanes. It was clear he wanted to give us a thrill. Evergreens leaned in from both sides of the road, close enough so that we had to duck our heads to avoid being hit by low-hanging branches. But every so often the trees parted, and through the flickering light we could see strawberry fields bend gracefully toward silvery blue flashes of the Puget Sound. Not yet aware of our own mortality, we held on and squished into each other with each precipitous turn. We hooped and hollered and squealed as the truck careened its way along.
By the time we reached Adler’s dirt driveway it was already past noon. His cabin stood toward the end of a long, sloping lawn, coquettish before a wall of dense forest. To my eyes, it complied faithfully with the norms of what a cabin should look like: a slanted, corrugated tin roof, a porch, a limp flag hanging next to the door. We could sleep either inside or under the stars. A few sleeping bags were laid out on the grass already, and I puttered around to find a suitable spot—not too close and not too far from the others. Then I took a superficial look inside the cabin. The dads and a handful of students were gathered in the back around a rustic fireplace, busy starting a fire. From what I could see, the idea was to roast marshmallows and hot dogs and such. And there sat Adler, happily perched on the edge of the hearth, holding a long, narrow stick with the first of the hot dogs impaled lengthwise on the end of it.
This all struck me as deeply revolting. I’d had enough of any sort of classroom environment, enough of being inside. In Adler’s social studies class, for instance, when not talking to Denise, I’d mostly stared out the windows at the tops of trees. Those were conifers out there—this being the great Pacific Northwest—but a healthy selection of broad-leaved trees swayed in the wind as well, maples and birches that had been planted there probably when the school was built. I dreamed up all sorts of things. One day I visualized myself swinging from one of those trees to the other, naked like Tarzan. What would that feel like?
Alas, there were times when my discontent got the better of me, and one day I disgraced myself in an incident that involved the school’s math teacher, Mr. Schulz. Math classes were held in a portable temporary classroom, placed on one of the basketball courts. The front door, raised a couple of feet from the ground, could only be reached by a plywood ramp, and one wintry afternoon I saw a couple of guys from the other side of the lake persistently block Mr. Schulz from climbing the ramp. I could tell those guys lived beyond the reach of civilization by their hair, cropped unfashionably short, and by their size. They’d repeated a year, or maybe two. Mr. Schulz tried several times to step around them. He looked frightened and ashamed. He also looked tired and defeated, but then he always did. Poor Mr. Schulz. I can still see his long, beleaguered face, the pressed white shirt, the pack of camels in his front pocket, and, whenever he leaned in close to explain a math problem, the tobacco-stained fingers, the yellowed fingernails, the cracked skin. I remember Mr. Schulz was patient and kind, but what I will never understand is how he could have let himself be pushed around like that. Seeing it happen opened a sadness in me that on occasion I feel to this day.
That was the long-term impact.
The short-term lesson, regrettably, was that Mr. Schulz was vulnerable. Hence, the following week I jumped in like a hyena. It had snowed precipitously, a nice surprise that didn’t happen often, maybe once or twice a year. There was about a foot of the stuff on the ground, and lunch had been an hour-long rodeo of holding onto the bumpers of cars as they skidded into and out of the parking lot. This was followed by a monumental snowball fight, at the end of which I’d been cornered by a group of seniors. They laughed hideously as I put up my hands and begged for mercy. At that range none of them could miss, but none of them had made an ice ball either, so from my perspective they had bestowed on me what could only be described as an honor, and I was very much pleased.
With so much snow and so many snowballs, I ended up taking one into the portable classroom. I let it fly while Mr. Schulz was scribbling something incomprehensible on the blackboard, his back to the classroom. Alas, he turned around at the exact wrong moment, and the snowball hit him on the front of his trousers, halfway between the knee and groin. As he bent down to brush off the snow, he dropped his piece of chalk, which broke into pieces on the floor. He didn’t say a word, but I could read the disappointment in his eyes and how embarrassed he was for me. The rest of the class, meanwhile, from whom I’d expected to hear some sort of suppressed laughter or other reward, froze in shocked silence, as if an essential condition for life—some minimum respect or empathy, most likely—had suddenly whooshed out of the room. I might as well have pulled the plug on the bottom of a life raft, and for the remainder of the period I sat awash in remorse and misery.
Little wonder then that from the interior of Adler’s cabin I turned to the woods, where, it was plain to see, the unruly majority were already running wild. This was familiar territory—ferns struggling to grow over ferns, slabs of fungus clinging to the trunks of trees, old growth stumps rotting to mulch. A main trail, its dark soil peppered with stones, descended to a tight, secluded cove, itself part of a larger bay, narrow at the entrance. From this trail, others took off and twisted through the woods, and from these grew even smaller trails, and then fainter ones that were no more than veins of flattened ferns—a whole system of trails that doubled back, or made loops and linked up with each other, or went nowhere. For what remained of the day we ran over these trails without much purpose, like troops of baboons, grouping into various coteries that separated and reformed. Here and there, I saw glimpses of Denise, the blue parka tied around her waist. At some point, it felt like too much sovereignty had been hoisted upon us. Concerned about what exactly we were going to eat, I made another visit to the cabin. The scene hadn’t changed. Not much turnover. It dawned on me that dinner would be nothing more than whatever was skewered on a stick and held over Adler’s fireplace.
Toward the farthest corner of the lawn, a group of students had formed a loose circle. It was not like the circles that formed in the sports field behind the school, in which older students sat hunched close together with their backs to the world, and a bluish smoke vented ominously from their midst like the angry puffs of a sleepless volcano. In this circle, the students lay sprawled on their backs or on their stomachs with their feet in the air. They were preoccupied with a confetti-like display of white-winged butterflies that had descended over the group and flitted about nervously, both attracted and repelled by all the bright clothes and movement. I plopped myself down, and one of the butterflies landed on the tip of my outstretched shoe. While the rest of the world fell away, I studied the insect, astounded by how the slightest breeze folded its wings over. When I looked up again, I was surprised to see that everything looked exactly the same. As if on cue, the butterfly lifted off. I took its departure to mean I should return to the embrace of the woods. Did time even exist anymore, I wondered.
Late afternoon became dusk soon enough, and it was magic how Denise and I found each other, a miracle I’ll never forget. I dared to take her hand in mine. She could have pulled it away or let it hang passively. Instead, she returned my grip with a fierce little grip of her own that matched the wild look in her eyes.
Minutes later, in the excitement and in the lowering murk, I imagined myself a forest creature and jumped over a gully. I did it stupidly, without looking up. My head smacked into a thick, overhanging branch, and I rebounded downward into a clammy darkness. As I lay supine, stretched out in the sodden ferns, my first muddled thought was of a breezy morning when I’d stood on the mezzanine above the school’s quad, next to Kyle, who was busy waving down to his girlfriend, Nicole. Like Kyle, Nicole was enjoying a galloping rate of maturity. Her ample breasts pushed against her blouse, and on that day she wore a bright, dotted miniskirt. Around her, students were hurriedly walking from one side of the quad to the other, their voices bouncing off the walls. Standing still, Nicole pointed to her ears to indicate she couldn’t hear. Kyle turned to me and said she might be pregnant. He waved and blew her kisses. She waved and blew kisses back. Kyle’s outsized talent for lying and boasting was such that it was almost impossible not to feel unbalanced in his presence. The word pregnant had surely been delivered to elevate himself to a realm of postpubescent tragedy, and though I didn’t for a second believe this latest outrageous fabrication, it nevertheless awoke in me a terrible sense of urgency, perhaps the first of my life.
It was this sense of urgency that now gave me the strength to roll onto my hands and knees and, by digging my fingers into the dank earth and grasping the twisted cords of exposed roots, succeed in clambering my way out of that hollow and onto the surface of the world again. Back on the trail, I brushed myself off and looked around. Denise had moved on. I found her again near the cove. The spectrum of acceptable behavior in those delicate years was quite narrow, and when Denise turned to look at me I could tell she was worried more for her sake than mine. All the same, she reached out her hand. A group had gathered on the small beach by the water’s edge. As we passed them they laughed and shouted some words. We understood them to be words of encouragement. In return, we laughed self-consciously, like newlyweds.
A full moon had risen over the bay, the wind had died, and the water was as calm as a lake. We made our way to the far side of the cove, to a rickety and slanted dock. Cautiously, we treaded over its blackened wood, in several places stepping over gaps where the boards had either broken through or been ripped out. The whole thing creaked and bobbed under our weight, and when we got to the end we quickly lowered ourselves to sit, the way people do when they first step into a rowboat. On the beach, some of the guys had begun skipping stones. They ran sideways to the water’s edge and threw in an underarm motion that ended in a quick flick of the wrist. I felt suddenly awkward watching them like that, given that I was exceptionally skilled at skipping stones myself.
Not far inland from the dock, we found a small boathouse. It sat half-tucked into the trees with the abject look of a thing forgotten or left behind, no more than a tatty rectangle of weathered shingles and gridded windows turned opaque from salt and grime. We circled it, picking our way through a medley of satellite objects—plastic barrels, a cooler with the top missing, a broken rocking chair—then found the door around the back, under a pair of sun-bleached deer antlers. I stepped onto a cinder block, pressed up on the latch, and crossed the threshold into a single room pervaded with the smell of molded paper. The moon’s blue light filtered through the glass. Denise squeezed in behind me.
“It smells a little,” she whispered.
“Like magazines,” I whispered back, as if it needed to be explained. A rusted metal shelving unit sagged under the weight of them—stacks upon stacks of National Geographics from bygone eras. An old couch had been pushed against a wall, under a row of windows. A tangle of orange life jackets took up one half of it, along with a coil of rope strung with plastic buoys, long ago faded from red to pink. I took one of the magazines, dense from age and humidity, and gently nudged the life jackets to the floor. Then I let myself sink into the soft, stained flesh of the couch, and Denise sunk down next to me.
“Fire-Walking Hindus of Singapore,” “Fjords and Fjells of Viking land,” “High Lights in the Sunshine State.” We held the National Geographic between us and flipped through the pages. The photographs looked ancient, the colors artificial, like they’d been painted by hand. But they failed to interest us. At our age, everything looked ancient. From outside came a sound like a piece of wood breaking in two. Under the guise of protection I put my arm around Denise—the sum total of my move, but one thing led to another, and presently I felt Denise’s small tongue, tasting of raspberries, dart its way into my mouth. This was by far the best thing that had ever happened to me. Denise asked sweetly if anything was wrong. Then she pushed down on my shoulders and bent over me, her hair forming a tent over my face. I slid my hands under her sweater. I let them levitate in one of life’s few delicious moments. But then something jarred us, clanging against the side of the boathouse, enough for Denise to sit up and pull down her sweater. She looked around, then at me.
“What was that?” she asked.
Before I could answer, something else hit the boathouse, harder this time—a mean, percussive bang. Then one of the front windows imploded, showering shards of glass onto the floor. From outside came a reckless, triumphant laughter. In a flurry of movement we disentangled and found refuge beside the couch.
“It’s those guys,” I said. “They’re throwing stones at the windows.” And again the awkwardness rushed in. Those guys.
“But how do they know we’re in here?” Denise asked.
Another of the panes shattered. Then another. Their aim was improving.
“I don’t think they do.” I was surprised Denise would go so far as to think that. But then I thought, what if they did? It didn’t take long for the stones to bust through the row of windows. Still, they kept coming.
“It’s not funny anymore,” Denise shouted, as if it had ever been funny. Her outsized eyes stared into mine, demanding action. But we were literally pinned down. The stones were now flying straight through the boathouse and shattering the windows behind us. To make matters worse, I felt a little woozy from having earlier rammed the branch with the top of my head. I cringed from lack of volition more than fear, though that did nothing to diminish my growing sense of shame. I had failed, and all was lost. The sweetness that had flowed from Denise, like a vaporous mirror in which I had spied such a vastly improved version of myself, had vanished like the morning fog. The last tendrils of it curled up and away, and I now saw the bare outlines of Denise, the brittle cast of someone who thought I was weird.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.
“I have an awful headache,” I offered, as if that could be any excuse.
Denise might have gotten up herself then, to put a stop to it, were it not for what came next. From behind the racket, from behind the hollering and the busting of glass came another sound, high pitched and intrusive. As it grew nearer, the stones tapered away until the final one fell short of the far wall. Like a penny it rolled against my foot.
A short silence followed, as if the whole world had stepped aside to give room to that ghastly, unnatural note—made by what I recognized to be Adler, no doubt come flailing down the hillside, a monster beset by rage.
“Stop!” he shrieked. He wailed on the soft vowel for what seemed like an eternity. “Stooop!”
The next thing we heard was something like frightened animals crashing through the underbrush. Probably they hadn’t for a moment put together the boathouse with Adler or his cabin. How could they? The thing was just there, unattended, and who knew how it got there or what it was doing there. It was another piece of the stupid puzzle, like the woods, the beach, the water so oddly still it barely lapped onto the shore, and the ragged silhouette of trees that closed the whole bay against a moonlit sky.
It came as no surprise then that, with nothing left to chase, Adler ended up in the doorway. There he appeared his familiar self at last, wearing something like the coat he wore in the classroom, and rubber rain boots into which he’d tucked his pants. I half-expected him to amuse us with some version of the story he’d told so often in class, and always in great lurid detail, about how some of us were simply doomed. Great, wonderful speeches those were, during which the sardonic smirk stayed glued to his face and the spittle built up, white and porous, gathering in strength until gross bits of it flew in front of his ill-willed words.
But by some miracle he hadn’t yet seen us. He stood bent over, holding onto the sides of the doorframe and gasping for air. His eyes, dark and unblinking in their white orbs, greedily took in the damage. It wasn’t until his breath slowed that he lowered them. And still he looked right past us. But we were watching him of course, and when our eyes finally met it jolted him, like how a dog gets when it sees a cat. He straightened and froze, and for a dreadful moment he stayed that way. Then he took a stiff step forward.
“You!” he whispered hoarsely. “You!”
It was the second you that upset Denise, I think. It must have made her feel bad about herself, and she started to cry.
“Get out of here, you!” Adler said.
At which point, having stood up too fast, I felt a dizziness come over me, so that as we edged our way around Adler I held onto Denise’s sobbing shoulders like one of Brueghel’s blind men. Once we were safely out the door, Denise bolted, as if a trap door had been lifted. She ran over the slender beach with such zeal that a couple of times her forward momentum overpowered the traction afforded by the sand and she ended up on her hands and knees, but each time she scrambled back up and kept going.
By now the dads had showed up, stumbling about and slashing the beams of their flashlights through the dark like sabers. Denise ran right through them. I tried to keep up, but then thought the better of it. I slowed to a lurch and picked up one of those flat-bellied stones to put in my pocket. I briefly imagined it might be made of amber, such as the one I had recently seen in the science museum, a mosquito perfectly preserved in the middle.
When the dads reached Adler, the cry never again resounded through the forest and over the water. I didn’t dare turn around, but the immense hurt in that voice, the extent of its grief as I imagined Adler grasping at his confederates, did not fail to reach me. Moreover, I agreed with him. I even wondered why it had taken him so long to understand what seemed perfectly clear to me—that he shouldn’t have invited some of us in the first place. That there was no point to it at all.
One of the dads spoke up, directed at me: “Get back to the cabin please,” delivered in the crisp tone of a hall monitor. What vain, pointless words! Denise was halfway up the trail already, and all I could do was stand there, wonderstruck. She ran with the grace of a dancer, her arms outstretched for balance or to keep the rest of the night away. The bottoms of her swabbies swung to and fro. Her coat—had she left it in the boathouse?—was no longer tied around her waist. And from somewhere in back of me came the sound of boots crushing sand.
By the time I made it back to the cabin, the moon could no longer be seen. I felt my way along the dark, tilted lawn and crawled into my sleeping bag. Before long the interminable night settled over me like a wet blanket. The cold moisture of the earth seeped into the bag, my head pounded in rhythm with my heart, and an army of frogs on the other side of the road made an ominous racket. It was impossible to sleep, but somewhere in those long, aching hours I must have dozed off because I remember waking up hungry.
It wasn’t until after the dads had herded us back onto the ferry, with Denise avoiding me at all costs, and with that terrible Adler nowhere in sight, that the world stitched back together again. It happened after I’d prospected the boat’s metal deck structures, ascending and descending its many ladders and traversing its glossy, white surfaces. Eventually, I found my way to one of the side decks, to a long wooden bench opposite the railing. And there I sat, protected by the overhanging deck from the drizzle, which had now returned, blotting out all details of sea and sky into a steady, luminous gray.
An hour later I traipsed across the terminal’s parking lot to where my mother, in an oversized floppy hat and velvety bell bottoms, stood smoking beside the Chevy. Tilting her head back, she blew a thin stream of smoke into the damp air and waved me over. A bustle of buildings reared up behind her, dulled concrete and glass, the upper stories curtained by the lowering sky. Inexplicably, my mother began to laugh—a disbelieving chuckle at first, then a prolonged giggle, and then as if she’d lost her mind. I stood my ground, holding onto what was left of my barely rolled up, soggy mess of a sleeping bag. Obviously, freedom had come at a price.
But laughter begets laughter, and before long I too was in stitches, though I had no idea why. Through my tears I kept asking, “What’s so funny? Which only made my mother laugh more, pointing at me and crossing her legs as if to keep from peeing. A cold wind blew across the parking lot, and she had to hold onto her floppy hat to keep it from blowing away. The drizzle turned into a hard rain. “Get in the car,” she howled. One of the ferries signaled its departure with two long blasts of its horn. I threw the sleeping bag down and watched it roll open over the pavement. I watched it soak up the rain. Then we drove away, drying our eyes and leaving it there, like a gift.
Roger Mensink was born in Belgium and grew up in the Netherlands and the United States. He received his BA and MFA (in painting) from UCLA and currently lives in Salt Lake City. Recent fiction and nonfiction appear in among others Green Valley Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Kestrel, Your Impossible Voice, Literary Orphans, and Eclectica.