I would like to tell you a story. Some of it happened, some of it did not, but it is all true.
My parents were busy individuals. My mother spent a great deal of her time mothering others as a member of the gifted education program in Wichita. She had been working in Lenexa, a town on the Kansas side of Kansas City, but decided to come home when her father became ill. It was a chance coincidence that my father had returned from graduate school that same month and that they met in their first few days back. Meanwhile, my father had gone into the business consultation racket and was making the big bucks being gone four days out of every seven. With both parents gone or otherwise involved for such long stretches of time it was only natural that I found myself in unusual situations with my pal Matty.
My father’s friend, a sports journalist in KC who liked to visit when the opportunity presented itself, had a son close in age to myself. We got along well together, and he never made jokes about my name. This was likely because his own name was so ridiculous. He was named after the newspaperman’s great grandfather Mathias. I called him Matt, but the mean kids back home had learned his name early and abused it to no end.
The two of us enjoyed hiding in the upper alcoves of the library imagining ourselves in different worlds. My parents did not mind, as long as neither of us was too violent with the books we used to build our castles and forts. It had all been great fun until the day the old man appeared.
On that particular day it had been raining pretty hard. The game my father’s friend had come down to cover (though George, my father’s friend, was the editor of the KC Moon-Gazette, he enjoyed getting down and dirty once in a while) looked to be rained out. This was a phrase of George’s. “The Royals game was lookin’ to be rained out, until those clouds just broke the way they did. It was a nice’un.”
On days that it rained Matty always wanted to play pirate ship. It may have had to do with the way the drops plunked against the Plexiglas dome in the Library ceiling high above our heads. Or perhaps it was the way the birds called louder and sharper in the air, like gulls on an abandon pier. Regardless, Matty wanted to play ship, so we played ship.
We were on a voyage from Persia to a way station in Africa carrying a full cargo of His Majesty’s Tea when we heard the man’s feet clomping off the port bow.
“Did you hear that, Matt?” I asked.
“Arr, mate, I sure did,” he replied. “D’ya reckon it’s Dad?” He meant, of course, his father George.
“I d’nah think so,” I whispered in an atrocious piraty accent. “Don’t George and Dad usually call us when they bring back the pizza?”
At that moment, I was interrupted by a smoky, scratchy voice that I did not recognize. The ship around us vanished, and in its place stood a bunch of books stacked like a large box with a broom as a mast in the center. We both turned to look behind us. An old, scabby man, wearing faded and torn clothing frowned at us.
“Hello, boys. I don’t mean to interrupt your voyage, but – Ha! – I thought I might point out that wave to starboard. If you don’t get the bow facing it head on, your – Ha! – ship will be in for a world of hurt.”
Confused, Matty and I looked at one another and then turned to what had been starboard. The Library vanished. The books were a boat again. And there, before us, was a fifty foot wave.
For a moment, the both of us were speechless. We could not think. We could not act. We were consumed by the towering Blue. Then a splash of water hit my face, and it was time to move. “To the helm, Matty!” I screamed.
The scabby, grizzled man – where was he? – was correct. To ride such a wave without capsizing, one must face it.
Both of us sprinted down the gangway and leapt for the helm. The water was falling all around us now. The Plexiglas ceiling of the Library was a dream from another world. My silk shirt and canvas pants –strange, wasn’t I wearing jeans and a t-shirt? – were soaked through. The wind was howling and had torn away my hat in our dash for the helm. We both moved to one side of the massive wheel and shoved, but there was no movement. The water, the ocean would not allow it. The sky was beginning to vanish as the hurtling wave came toward us.
“Matty, we’ve got to move this wheel if we don’t want to die,” I cried.
“Then let’s move it, Dewey. I’ve got you, if you’ve got me,” he replied. In his face I could see tears begging to be let loose. They were tears of confusion and fear.
I said, “Then I’ve got you.” We both turned once more to the helm. I gritted my teeth. And we heaved.
It is strange to remember those moments before the wheel began to give. In my head all of the sounds are gone. The terrible wave had caused a momentary lull in the rain and the wind. I could hear the heartbeat in my ears and feel it in my gut just below the ribcage. The only other sounds were those of Matt and myself breathing, yet those sounds were like fog horns or hurricanes against the stillness of the wave.
Then I felt a click, and the helm gave like a sideways top. Faster and faster it whirled, until Matt and I could no longer touch it. The ship's bow turned into the wave. And as the bow moved fearlessly into the wave’s path, the world exploded. The wave broke. I managed one quick breath, grabbed a railing, and hung on. A thousand watery hands ripped at my face and shoulders. My pants tried to pull away from my hips. I dared not open my eyes. My nostrils burned as the salt struck.
As the wave passed, I risked opening my eyes against the stinging salt water. The ship was totally submerged. We were easily twenty feet under water. Matt held another rail close to me. The mast appeared to be breaking the water’s surface, so I grabbed Matt’s shoulder and pulled him toward oxygen.
When our heads broke the surface, the water faded. Our clothes dried. The Library reappeared. The old, grizzled man stood in front of us. “Welcome back, boys. How (Ha!) was your trip?”
Matt looked to me. I did not know what to say. A moment before it was as if we had been older: men born and bred to the sea. Now we were children again, and we felt like it. Matt was only six years old. I was seven. The things I knew a moment ago faded away. Only the words we spoke and the visions we saw remained.
This man was older and more frightening now. He leered at the two of us as we stood silently before him. “Not ready yet, are ye?” he asked, looking through the window high above at the still rumbling clouds. “Ha!”
It was a violent word and with it came a terrible gust of aging breath. The man smelled of parmesan cheese and rotten olives. “You’ll want to pay (Ha!) attention from now on. You never know when the next wave might come crushing down. Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name.” The man turned, grumbling in a sotto voice neither of us could make out. He moved down one of the many spiral staircases out of sight. We leapt from behind our wall of books, rushed to the staircase, and stopped. There was nothing there. The front door flew open, and we both jumped. Then a strong, male voice called, “Dewey! Matty! We’re home, and we have pizza!” I heard a sob and turned. Matty, behind me, had slumped to the floor and was crying between clamped lips. I was exhausted.
It was sometime before this that I had decided Matty was somehow special. He had a demeanor that forced others to overlook him. He stood in corners with his eyes lowered. He never said much. He was quite a bit smarter than the babysitters and teachers who wandered in and out of his life. Had circumstances been different, he probably would have been the boy everyone in his hometown forgot. He might have gone off to college, entered a random engineering field, joined a company that may well have promoted him to some position in middle management, and died a quiet but content old man.
Such a story was not in the cards for Matty. As I said, he was special. Matty was introspective, as is common among the quiet and shy. He had to deal with that inner voice that told him no one liked him, and that he was not popular. But within that voice was also a strange confidence. Matty believed anything was possible. Maybe it was. He just needed someone to stand with him.
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