PINTA PARADE

 

I sit at the desk in my room with a giant recalcitrant Z slashed down the middle. It is like I am committing suicide with the needle point lead of a pencil, slashing into the white of the page in lieu of my wrists, spilling out the congested marrow and blood stilled inside my pores. It is like I am hurting.

It is probably the first sincere missive I have ever wrote.

I am talking about emotions.

The first thing I feel compelled to tell my father is to lay off of Patrick. I tell him that he is my best friend at Manual. I tell him that it wasn’t his fault via the whole snafu .  That most days if it weren't for Patrick and Tim I don’t know where I would be at school.

I then talk about Renae.

I then tell my father with the gruff beard how she means to me. I tell him how happy I am when she is next to me. I tell him how lonely I feel all the time and how blessed I am to have circle of friends albeit who all go to a different school. I thank my father again for always being there when I need someone to impart my feelings and for helping me with the route every morning.

 I slip the letter under my father’s door.  He wakes me the next morning for the route.

He is quiet the entire time we are walking down the icy-glossed avenues of West Peoria. As has been our routine we do Cedar to Sterling. We then come back home and I do the remainder of Sherman. I have no clue whether Father has perused my letter. I am waiting for him to tell me that he read the letter. I am waiting for him to admonish me telling me that I am just to young to be reeling these kind of emotions. That I have plenty of opportunity ahead of me. That the Young Columbus is six weeks away.  That I should focus on my stress fracture healing so that for thee incumbent track season I can hang with the fastest in the mid-state six if not the state.

He says none of these things to me. Instead as I am slipping my papers into my paper bag he notices the gift Renae gave me. The identity bracelet.

“Sure is a nice gift your girlfriend bought you.”

I tell him yes.

“What are you going to get her?” He inquires.

I tell my father I’m not sure. I think about how last year when David Best was dating Renae he bought her a sweater and I gave him shit.

 

“Well, you should really get her something nice. She seems like a really special person.”

 

Dad smiles and then walks inside the house.

 

I find the letter that I wrote to my father years later, after he died, in a diminutive pine box he kept in his bedroom. Inside the  box where he kept pictures of my mother and my sisters when they were in the same age he taught at Roosevelt Magnet.There are two vials of cheap cologne. There is a letter from someone that years later I will transcribe that my father kept is the most important chest he will ever own. When I see the letter again I notice that I wrote it in pencil.When I open the letter I see typo’s. My handwriting looks jagged, as if the missive were composed with sandpaper letters. There are misspelled words. I am holding the letter up like a glove compartment atlas to a foreign country. I find in ironic when I tell my dad to lay off of Patrick when Patrick and Hale stood next to me at my father’s deathbed, Patrick telling me when I can’t go into the room that he will hold me up and that if he gets tired hale will hold the both of us up. Patrick telling me that I need to be in that room. I laugh when I use the word love thinking about Renae, unaware at the time that the anatomical ping of lust mingled with down-home Lutheran guilt will mar our relationship in less than a months time.