Alan Sincic

Not many people have a street named after them, so when we hear that Roger Babson will, within the week, be arriving, presumably to eat pie, and to make a speech, and (who knows?) cut a ribbon, we gather in twos and threes. On the curb at the mailbox we gather, and over the back fence, and in the bright of the breeze with the sheet on the line and the wash in the hamper heavy. On porches we gather, and in the shade of the oak, and with the yo-yo in the holster, and the fist in the pocket, and the ribs in a swivel at the hinge of the hip. Such a fine figure we say. Fine figure of a man.

There are some who believe he has a power. At the intersection of Roger Babson and Balboa, the halt and the lame assemble. They’ve heard the news, a version of the news. Rumor has it he conjures a wind with a whisper, that leaves rustle in the key of C at the sound of his voice, that clouds coalesce in a more orderly array the moment he wakens. A random, a sideward sort of power, they say. Children who touch the hem of his garment bloom, ever so slightly, a deeper shade of pink. Oranges ripen and fall as he passes. And so the faithful gather at the hillside and on the roof of the garage and at the bend in the river with their lawn chairs and their binoculars and their crackly sack lunches. Upon word of a sighting they extricate the bag o’ chips -- the Lay’s BBQ and the Utz Onion and Garlic in the Krinkle Kut -- and lo, the chips they multiply, inside the cellophane they double and triple and quadruple, the wrapper fattens, ka-pow!

Others say no. Such a modest demeanor they say. Look. Look at the photo, the daguerreotype at the grammar school graduation: placid as a pie, the face. The chubby little thumb at the collar, the tug at the tie, the sketch of a smile. Not a fella given to miracles. At the most, maybe, here and there, he’ll make him a modest adjustment to the cosmic order. Which is as it should be, no? A nibble of a miracle. The blind are blind, the deaf deaf, the dead dead -- gone. Gone. But supposing (would he could he) settle the unsettled belly? Uncouple the crick in the neck? So we gather. We wait. By golly we whisper as we run our withered fingers over the cowlick suddenly, as if by magic, cured.

To each his own. From each according to his abilities, to each according to whatever, right? The menfolk shoulder the push-brooms and the shovels. Across the black of the asphalt they march, onward to the white icing of sand in the gutter. They turn, they sweep, they shovel. With a blast of the hose they scour the tar to render it, once again, as on the day of its birth -- when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy – evergreen. Innocent. True.

Some say Roger Babson rides a horse on these forays down the road that bears his name. Others swear he rides an old school velocipede of the kind gentlemen rode in the day of his youth. A tiny saddle atop a wheel the height of a horse, itty-bitty wheel in the back for balance, and the handlebars in a downward bend, and above which the Roger, the Babson -- with a twist at the fob of the watch, with a tap at the top of the derby, with a kick and a wobble -- rides.

Still others say he sends an emissary – a squirrel, a sparrow, a spy in the guise of a troubadour. Monkey’s knuckle of a man with a wooden leg, and a beard like a brush fire, and a hurdy-gurdy on a sling at the shoulder. Does it matter the spy is blind? No. It’s what he hears – in the tone of the voice, in the rustle of the fabric, in the hum of the heart – that matters. The children gather in his wake as he wobbles along. Step on a crack is what he sings, Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. The children sing along.

Or maybe not. But does it matter? Time to make ready! Time is what matters! The house numbers we patch. Paint. Bolster with a tack or a smudge of rubber cement. A fella in a suit -- bare boulder of a head, shambles of a tie -- orangutangs down the street with a T-square in the one hand and a sledge in the other. Each and every mailbox he tips or taps or, with the hammer, whams it back into trim.

And good for him! It’s gotten round, the stories of people, people who receive the letter embossed with the initials RB. No name, no return address, nothing but the embossment in red wax with a foil of gold. In the envelop, a sheet of onion-skin – tri-fold – with a flower pressed in the belly. A sprig of parsley. Mint leaf. Wing of a dragonfly. The scale of a trout or feather of a jay. Fragile. Delicate as a whisper. Fleet as the print of a single flake of snow.

Imagine that. And some there are who’ve -- or so it’s been said -- held the letter, the actual letter. Here. Like so. In the clamp of the hand. Not nobody we know, but who’s to say it wouldn’t, it couldn’t be so? A worthy recipient, right? Some one of us with a pedigree. Kin to the chimp and the ape, spawn of the trilobite and the dimetrodon and the amoeba.

Is it any wonder we hustle to make a welcome worthy of the day? Chalk in hand, a girl in a red jumper hovers up over the apron of a drive. Letter by letter she scrivens away. GREETINGS. From out the back shed, a pair of pudgy dads wrestle a four-by-eight sheet of plywood. Round the house they go, clunk into view of the womenfolk who maneuver the balloons and the plastic cutlery, the Dixie cups with the red-checker trim, the Kleenex paper napkins in avocado and gold. It just goes to show you what a bit of stick-to-itiveness and take-chargeability’ll do. And there’s more — the spinster with the tablecloth of Irish linen, the granny with the bunting in the red and the gold and the white and the blue. Up onto the sawhorses the dads lever the board. The table dressed. The table set. A speech in the offing. A potluck supper. A cake!

Shh. Shush. Into the tin mold a mother pours the batter. With a spatula, she laves and folds it into a disk of putty, sweet to the touch and rich with the scent of vanilla. Into the oven it goes. She herself is an oven. The baby on her lap swims away at the air as he licks the blade of the spatula. She pulls a Lucky from the pocket of her bathrobe, snaps open the lighter, gives it flick. To the tip of the smoke she ferries the flame. Inhales the heat of it. Holds it, the heat, in the heart of her.

Rumor has it Roger Babson wandered the land when it was still a wilderness. A boy was he, and barefoot, and with a dousing rod, and not in search of water, no, but love. He was soon to learn that love is not found in the soil, nor in the roots of the grasses, or the tubers that grow in the deep, or the runners that spider out over the crust of the earth. Love is a metamorphic, a burl in the bosom of the rock. Only through a process of extraction, an industrial enterprise on par with the great public works projects of the 1930s, do we arrive at the essence of love. An elixir is what it is. In a decanter you carry it, from a delicate chain you dangle at the neck. And so it was. And so he did. And even now he carries it, this love, in the decanter on the chain, the delicate silver chain, hand-wrought with a tiny hammer and a anvil the size of a thimble.

All the more reason then, right? From out the shed, and from under the bunk, and from back of the tarp in the bed of the pickup, the neighbors fetch the folding chairs. One by one they clack them open, sort them into rows, out over the lawn assemble a space of a kind to fit a congregation. From an abandoned church, the Farelly brothers rustle up a pulpit of plywood and particle board and Formica. Onto the bed of the pickup they anchor it, upright and at the ready and facing out the rear. Onto the Goodman’s lawn they back the rackety Ford. A grandstand now, the bed of the truck. The pulpit a podium.

Something in the air. Better than the air. The dogs of Roger Babson gather, sniff the wind, signal with a twitch of the tail the arrival of a new, of a piquant, of a propitious aroma. Shaving soap from out the day of the straight razor and the Sweet Georgia Brown pomade. Aqua Velva. Sen-Sen. Pepsodent. Whiff of salt in the hatband of the boater, sarsaparilla in the smoke of the pipe.

Some say he visits, once a year, at midnight, when the moon is full and the coyote howls in the glade, when the moth flits and the streetlight fizzes. It’s the power, see? Out beyond the ken of the spooners of pudding, the threaders of needles and the fluffers of pillows and the runners of baths, the sweat-dabbers and the belly-scratchers and the nibblers at the seam of the Pillsbury Toasted Coconut Slice ‘n Bake Cookie Dough, it ripens. The glacier calves. The lava bubbles. The moon bullies up over the sea.

A premonition. A preparation. And now it’s our turn. Between the palms of his pudgy hands, the Tenderfoot torques the pole that carries the flag. The drinker buries the bottle. The neighbors don the colorful garb of the Babsonian people – the flamingo print of the party dress, the tartan blazer with the blast of red on the collar, the kiddies in the Keds with the squeegee heel and the white rubber tip at the toe. Up and down the block they sally.

We us got a border at the Golf Club Parkway to the north, border the intrepid travel, beyond, and ever northward, and goodby to them we say, bon voyage to where the bones of the wooly mammoth and the malamute and the wreck of the airship Italia fatten the maw of the glacier. We got us a border, Balboa, to the south, at the end, the dead end, where the asphalt evaporates into the woods and you follow the crow as it flies to where the equator waits, and beyond, and over the ziggurat and the alpaca and the Strait of Magellan to land, in a frazzle, in the heart of the empire of ice. If we were a crow or a gull or some other such person of low repute, we’d fly to the north or fly to the south and away, but no, we’re not. Loyal is what we are. True.

Do we hanker after the berg of the ice or the embrace of the Patagonian viscacha? No. Do we clamor to battle the barbarous people to the east and to the west -- covet their land, their cattle, their women? Not a chance. Not on your life. For us, for us homebodies, the here and the now is the whole of it. Onward and upward!

The Overman girl tosses a baton up over a telephone wire. Martha Nell Bergdahl recites The Sugarplum Tree by Eugene Field. Bobby Straley builds a model Parthenon with a stack of sugar cubes. And here. Over here, now – look. How the seed bubbles open. How the unborn baby in the cupboard of the mother curls. Talk about a boon! The squirrel shatters the cracker. The cardinals dapple the oak. A fleck of sun hits the fin of a jet, and from a yonder and over a curve of the earth, a cloud catapults into the blue.

Some would say that somehow, in the fullness of time, in a manner unique to him, and without recourse to the niceties of courtship or the traditions of biology, he fathers – here and there and now and again – a child. How wealthy the wind that blows, of an April night, across the bare breast of Roger Babson, there in the moonlight, on top of the water tower that rears up over the road that bears his name! An assignation. An immaculate conception. From off the skin of the belly, and the back, and the shoulders, and the arms, he sheds the invisible mist of a billion mitochondria. Into the air he exfoliates a signature of the self. Out over the houses, and in through the screens, and into the gap at the base of the door it travels. And so goes the earth, and so turn the seasons, and the children born here in the shade of the trees, they swagger when they walk, holler when they run, babble when they roll in the leaves in the chill of December. Am I the one? they wonder.

Don’t be ridiculous, the others say. The very thought. As if the progeny of Roger Babson would spackle themselves with the molder and the till of the earth. Still others say --

But no time for that now. Too late for that now. The wind kicks up a warning. Yonder up the block, a marching band rat-ta-tats into position. A megaphone crackles. The kids mount the bikes and the trikes and the scooters, set off in the direction of the fife and the drum, the popcorn and the cotton candy, the whistle of the bottle rocket and the boom of thunder at the border of the land and the sky.

The bunting billows. The table creaks. Up top of the stack – there. There. Look out! A triangular finger sandwich -- trimmed at the crust and capped with an olive and a dapple of schmear -- vibrates in the breeze. The lime Jell-O -- chubby now with chunks of pineapple and blits of marshmallow white -- bobbles in tune to the hub-bub and the blow and the breath of it all.

The oak roars. The pulpit rattles. The snackers turn as one to face the call, to break for the intersection, to climb up onto the chairs for a better view. They clutch to the bosom the basket of sandwiches and the macrame sweater and the baby, the purse and the pipe and the Brownie Junior with the rotary shutter and the nickel fitting and the fine meniscus lens. The expendables – the napkins and the candy wrapper and the ash of the Lucky and the Camel and the Cool – sail away. In a skitter they go, off and away in pursuit of the rumor.

Is it any wonder? When they plowed the path and poured the tar and strung the wire to feed the phone and the Philco and the toaster with the Radiant Control and the slimmer snap-in-able crumb tray for easy cleaning, was it not in the name of Roger Babson? When they summoned the builder, the broker, the popsicle man in the bloomers of white at the wheel of the cart with the jangle of bells, was it not by virtue of the power of the name?

And so it is the photographer braces. Hugs the tripod. With a twist of the tips of the fingers, like a safecracker not but a click away from a lift, he tweaks the lens of the Rolleiflex so as to freeze – hurry now, hurry – the landslide of the every and the all.

Hold it now. Steady. By the power of the name, the squirrels, they muster atop the telephone wire that hums across the intersection. To attention they stand. Up. Up, the hindquarters aquiver, and face front, as if awaiting a word. The sky darkens. The stars bristle. The earth hurries into place. On the count of three now, and the sea sings out a warning, and the smoker of pipes readies the pipe, and the setter of bones readies the bone, and the saver of souls readies the soul. At the sound of his voice will the pipe ignite? The bone bind? The soul sing? Who can say? Who’s to say that it wouldn’t, that it couldn’t be so?

From out the wood he comes, through the hole in the hedge that borders the wood and, beyond that, the wild.

Hand on a sleeve, an elbow, in a hover atop the head of a child, he makes his way through the stragglers at the fringe. Fixed as they are on the grandstand and the bunting and the cake, the crew at the corner with the banner and the bugle and the drum, the cheers of the crowd and the blare of the siren, they pay him no mind. In his hand a coil of ticker-tape, a tangle of striplets in shades of yellow and bay. Riven the skin. Ruddy as a red potato the terrain of the face.

As if this were his only -- his singular -- destination, he makes his way toward you. With a hobble he walks. Heavy the bones he bears, all of a piece through the heavy air. As he draws near to you – half-hidden here in the fold of the skirt of your mother – he smiles. Certain as the sky, this smile of his. In the hold of his hand, a secret.

You tug at the skirt of your mother, but so taken is she by the bright of the banners and the shoop and the boom of the fireworks, by the cries of the busker and the cop and the baby, by the air that hurries the scent of the cinder and the orange and the salt of the sea, by the chair in a shiver beneath her feet as she shoulders up at the sky, she pays you no mind.

He drops to one knee. From out the suit of white seersucker, it dangles, the string tie. Stetson the hat – white with a silver trim. Crocodile skin the boots. Fine. Fine figure of --

Onto your shoulder he lays a hand. Not but a wisp of white, the goatee. Slender the bones. Taut as a bow, the rigging. He leans. His face he lowers. The moon overhead whoas to a halt. The sea surges up to swallow the stars. Into your ear he whispers.