Watching the Skies
by Rebekah Anderson
Ezekiel can’t sleep. The freight train runs through the river valley miles below his neighborhood, its mournful whistle carrying up vapors of hobos swinging into the black chiasmic doorways of open boxcars filled with pallets of stacked orderly soup cans bound for some mysterious southern destination like Portland or San Francisco. Or so he imagines. When Ezekiel can’t sleep he goes to the window and adjusts the leveler blinds—pointing them down and away at a 45 degree angle. That’s exactly the angle where you can see out but no one can see in.
The moon weighs low in the sky tonight, its light glowing behind the pine trees that line the ridge above the valley and glancing off the fender and bumper on the neighbor’s back patio. The shadows on the weed whacker make it look like a toothy robot from where it’s propped upside down against the side of the house. The fuchsia box lists in the cold but gentle wind off the Sound. Ezekiel smells the condensation on the windowpane and feels the coolness of the glass behind the blinds. If the blinds didn’t make so much noise, he would raise them and rest his cheek against the window. He listens carefully to his older brother’s half-snore breathing, the result of a wayward softball to the nose. Isaac is sound asleep. When Ezekiel can drive, he thinks, he’ll go down to the train and find out where it goes. He’ll park the family car in a gravel lot--somewhere they can find it--swing into a black boxcar doorway like a hobo and let the train take him.
A line of light from the hallway seeps under their bedroom door. He wants to go to the bathroom, wants to relieve himself of this fullness that will surely keep him awake. But he’s afraid of what might be out there in the hallway beyond the safety of his dark bedroom and the reassuring steadiness of Isaac’s breath.
What seemed so bright under the door in his dark room is only a dim hall light, and as he walks to the bathroom, Ezekiel feels a feeling he has often felt at church, like someone is watching him. He looks cautiously over his shoulder at the slick outline of the Komodo dragon that has been hanging around his house since yesterday and stops. The dragon stops too, its long body and thick tail extended down the hallway, its expressionless eyes blinking, its sensory tongue flicking. They are about the same size, a boy of ten and the five-foot Komodo dragon. Ezekiel shimmies into the bathroom and when he comes back out the dragon is still and waiting. Ezekiel traces a path with his eyes—there is no way around the thing—the dragon’s bulk spreads across the narrow floor, stubby legs sprawled, and tail strewn heavily. Ezekiel twitches in hesitation then leaps over, misjudging, his foot passing through the dragon’s tail. He swallows a yelp, and bounds up again, toward his room, shutting the door fast but silently and letting each foot touch the dark floor only once before landing on his mattress. He kicks his older brother’s bunk above him with both feet as hard as he can and pretends to be asleep. Isaac’s breathing only pauses for a second and then continues its raspy broken-nose pattern. Ezekiel asks God for forgiveness and rebukes any lurking demons just in case and forces himself to sleep.
In the morning, Ezekiel stays in bed until after everyone else is up. Mornings make Ezekiel nervous because he knows that, when you least expect it, Jesus will come to call his faithful followers to heaven. They will float from the Earth alive, leaving behind half-eaten sandwiches, moving cars, bewildered relatives, anything they may have been doing when The Rapture comes. It will be a global event and mark the beginning of the End Times. Those who have behaved properly will rise from the ground and ascend into the sky while Hell breaks loose on those who weren’t ready. Some of those left behind will be Christians who weren’t completely righteous. Or Catholics. Or Jews. Or Atheists. In fact, not very many people will go, but those who do will be spared the battle of Armageddon. Pastor says you should live every day as if The Rapture is coming tomorrow, but plan as if it will never come. In his dreams, Ezekiel wakes up groggy and stumbles out to the breakfast table. No one is there. A box of fruit loops lies on its side on the cold floor, colored O’s dotting the kitchen tiles as if there had been a scuffle. His stomach tightens. His parents and brother are not in their beds. He races around the house, screaming for them. They are not in the garage, not in the yard. He is panicking. The car is in the driveway. Everyone is gone. He’s been left behind.
Being left behind is the worst thing that could happen to a Christian. Ezekiel would go to live with his grandparents. His grandpa uses curse words like GODDAMN IT and CRAP. His grandma smokes cigarettes and drinks beer. He likes them anyway even though they’ll probably go to Hell when they die. Last summer, Ezekiel and Isaac stayed with their grandparents while their mother worked. They deliberately ignore the TV restrictions at Grandma’s house. Isaac plays outside with Erica, the little girl across the street, but Ezekiel stays glued to the TV. Once, when their grandparents were out working in the yard, Lord of the Flies came on. The boys sat together cross-legged on the floor, eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches and watched the black and white movie on color TV. It had never occurred to Ezekiel that kids could get along so well on their own, without grown ups to feed and clothe them. But when the boys killed Piggy and threw his shredded body into the ocean, Ezekiel knew what living like that would mean, and he looked at his brother with less trust from then on. Isaac was exactly the kind of boy who would break your glasses and throw you in the ocean for being weak. The crashed pilot creeped Ezekiel out the most, that strange helmet that made him look like a bug, his complete anonymity and helpless adultness. Isaac said he wished he had a boar’s head on a stick, and then he stomped a war dance across the mottled brown carpet shaking his baseball bat in the air.
The only way to know for sure if today is the day the house will be empty is to get up. Ezekiel reluctantly slides his feet out of the warm covers onto the cold hardwood and heads for the kitchen. He pours himself a bowl of cereal and takes it to the living room, glancing periodically over his shoulder at the dragon. When Ezekiel looks at the Komodo dragon, it looks back silently, its yellow reptilian eyes blinking slowly, its forked tongue flicking in the air, smelling for something. Reptiles smell with their tongues, he remembers from his encyclopedia. Ezekiel draws a deep breath and stops chewing; the dragon smells like a pile of raked leaves’ underside, the damp, disintegrating middle. It reminds Ezekiel of the black and yellow garter snake he and Isaac found dying in the garden last summer. It had been bitten by a cat, two reddish meat-exposing holes in its scales, and couldn’t get away. Isaac poked it with a stick and a misty liquid came out of its tail and a moment later they smelled the musky smell, a dark smell like a dank cellar and old leaves and mold. “Ech,” Isaac said, and scraped the dying snake away with the toe of his sneaker, dusting the snake’s glossy surface with crumbs of garden soil.
Ezekiel pulls the encyclopedia from the shelf. The dragon watches him from the hallway while Ezekiel reads from the splayed volume and makes notes in his Mead notebook. Ezekiel sits on the green shag carpet in the living room and looks back at the Komodo dragon. It stands at the end of the hallway and won’t come any further. Ezekiel has checked. It doesn’t look like a fairy tale dragon at all. It opens its mouth wide, and Ezekiel freezes. It just yawns, showing two neat yellow half moons of short dull teeth and thin whitish flesh. He wonders if it will ever come out. He wonders if the dragon could be like a pet dog, rolling over for a scratch, its underbelly exposed, tail thumping on the hardwood floor, a wagging that would shake the whole house.
In his notebook, he writes:
Scientific classification: species Varanus komodoensis, genus Varanus, family Varanidae.
Komodo Dragons live in Komodo Island National Park in Indonesia. The area of Komodo Island National Park is 200 sq mi. There is one village on the island, population 450. The island is an active volcano that only turns green during the annual monsoon season. Vegetation is limited to lontar palms and tamarind trees.
Komodo dragons are giant monitor lizards that grow up to 10 ft long, weigh up to 300 lbs and can live 100 years. They have poisonous bacteria that grow in their mouths. They are the largest living lizard. They are descended from the Mosasaur, a marine lizard that lived from 136 million to 65 million years ago (?) and ranged up to 33 ft long. They are named after the Meuse River in the Netherlands where the first fossils were found. They used their legs like paddles and their tails like rudders. Some people think this is where ancient people got the idea of fairy tale dragons from.
Monitor lizard characteristics:
• Long, forked tongue like a snake
? Swallow whole prey
? Fast runners
• Tapered heads
• Long necks
• Strong legs
• Long, powerful tails
Diet: insects, birds, reptiles, eggs, small mammals, carrion (definition?), Komodos will also eat goats and pigs.
That afternoon the brothers ride their bikes to the end of the cul de sac. Ezekiel lets his Converse scrape against the pavement down the low grade keeping him from moving too fast. He doesn’t trust the brakes. His mother can’t figure out why his shoes wear out so quickly. The cuffs of his hand-me-down corduroys are too long and fray around his heels. The boys’ parents are at the afternoon prayer group and will come to collect them for the camp meeting services that evening. Isaac pedals faster ahead. Ezekiel imagines him losing control, hopping the curb, skidding through the Craft’s lawn and into the huge oak tree in their yard. He imagines Isaac skidding off the other side of the street into the ditch, his bike landing on top of him, face embedded with gravel, clumps of dirt and dried grass. Instead Isaac peels out a one-eighty at the dead end and raises his arms victoriously over his head.
The dragon is not a ghost, Ezekiel thinks, his whole body vibrating from the rake of his shoes against the gravely asphalt as he coasts down the hill to catch up with his brother, because ghosts are just demons trying to trick you into believing they are your dead relative so they can get you to sin. But it doesn’t seem to be a demon either. Ezekiel has seen the sooty shapes of demons on people’s chests. Pastor says they are waiting for a bad thought to open the door to a person’s soul so the demon can slink down their throats. He’s seen them come out too, wailing and cursing and eventually whooshing out the person’s mouth and up into the rafters of the church, green eyes darting wildly below. But the dragon doesn’t look like one of them; it just looks like a big transparent lizard with yellow lizard eyes.
Seeing how much further behind Ezekiel is Isaac leans onto the handlebars and waits. “Need some training wheels?” he asks. Ezekiel frowns, listening to his feet bump along the road. Jason, the neighbor kid, waits for them on the trail, backpack slung low over one shoulder, sandy hair pushing against his collar. Ezekiel gets off and walks his bike onto the dirt path. Isaac passes him, still riding, turning his front tire back and forth, weaving on the path to keep from moving faster than Jason can walk. “Fuck you, dickhead”--Isaac’s standard greeting for the neighborhood kids.
“Fuck you, Jesus Freak,” Jason spits back, and he and Isaac laugh together, an easy comfortable laugh of camaraderie. Ezekiel walks his bike behind them, watching the dust kicked up by Isaac’s tires.
Jason lives next door on the east side of the property line. His family has a junk pile on their patio. Ezekiel and Isaac’s window faces it the old tires stacked ten feet high, car fenders, a rusted BBQ, a dirty birdcage with the door perpetually open, a broken weed whacker, the bumper for a ’65 Mustang and a fuchsia suspended from a gutter drain that hangs semi-detached from the roof. The boys’ parents complain of the unsightly mess. Not to the neighbors of course. Only to each other. The living room windows look at Jason’s front yard and driveway where they park all their useless cars, but Ezekiel’s parents have planted a hedge of rhododendrons to block the neighbors out. These neighbors are each other’s second marriages and between the two of them they have seven children, three apiece and then they have Jason together. A junkyard Brady Bunch as Isaac calls them. Jason is the youngest and the only one left at home. The other children are all grown up and moved out.
The trail leads down what remains of the driveway of an abandoned farmhouse set back from the edge of the cul de sac. The tall wheat grass grows along the edges almost as high as Ezekiel’s elbow. Old two-by-fours make an X across the house windows and “No Trespassing” signs hang on the door and front gate. They avoid the house. That’s where Ezekiel’s parents say teenagers have wild parties and have sex and do drugs and listen to rock music. You never know what might become of you in there; Satanists might make a human sacrifice of you or hippies might cut off your head and leave it floating in the river. Even Jason steers away from it, though he doesn’t act scared, more like indifferent. Around the back of the farmhouse sits an abandoned storage shed, the prefab kind sold in catalogs. Jason picks the lock easily and the door coughs open on a dirt floor littered with cigarette butts and crushed beer cans and crumpled pages from porn magazines. The boys collapse cross-legged on the ground and Jason slowly unzips his backpack, the renting of each tiny zipper tooth making Ezekiel more agitated and Isaac more excited. He reaches inside and shows his wares with a born salesman’s flourish.
“Pack of smokes.”
“Too fucking stinky, man. My mom’ll smell that shit a mile away.” Isaac’s consumer know-how has been honed over the past few months. “I’ve told you that a million times.”
Ezekiel watches quietly as his brother sifts through Jason’s pack of stuff, carefully and manipulatively handling every object and rubbing his chin with the deft bartering skills of a pro-garagesaler. He is always cooking up schemes to get his hands on the things of the World, the forbidden contraband of the other half, but it was the getting and the having that interested him, and once he got and had, the objects held no fascination for him any longer and were easily discarded to his younger brother to make room for the getting of new treasures. Isaac negotiates for an old rock album for three bucks, and while they haggle Ezekiel begins to feel light-headed, an image coming into his mind. He sees Isaac growing as a lontar palm tree on Komodo Island. From the palm fronds, snakes rustle down and surround the trunk piercing its bark with venomous bites until the palm tree collapses with a loud cracking sound.
“What’s with him?” Jason asks, jerking his head toward Ezekiel.
Ezekiel’s face glosses with sweat and his eyeballs feel hot like he has a fever.
“Zeke, are you okay?” Isaac leans into him. “Zeke!”
Ezekiel’s vision is spotted with pinpricks, but he rolls his eyes toward his older brother. “I want to go home.”
Jason and Isaac pack up their bags to leave, and Ezekiel lags behind. When he gets home, he knows Isaac will dump his bike in the lawn and leave the front door hanging open. Ezekiel’s body aches. He thinks when he gets home he’ll wash his face with a cool washcloth like his mother would do if she were home and then maybe he’ll lie down for awhile.
Back at the house, Ezekiel and Isaac are supposed to be catching up on homework before their parents get home, but Isaac sits cross-legged on the top bunk reading a book he checked out from the church-school library. All the bad words have been covered with Liquid Paper, and he carefully scrapes at the clumpy white paste with a pen cap trying to read them, “’God damn,’” he reads aloud slowly, a pang of disappointment in his voice, and then paints back over from his own bottle. This is how they’ve learned many of the swear words they know. Isaac likes to have them ready to use when they see the neighborhood kids, “those heathen fuckers,” as Isaac calls them.
Ezekiel paces down the hallway. The dragon paces placidly behind him, its trunk-like tail and body scissoring along the floor. It turns easily in the narrow space, its transparent body swinging through the walls. “Have you seen the ‘E’ encyclopedia?” Ezekiel asks.
“On the bookshelf, stupid.” Isaac answers, intent on his scraping.
Ezekiel and the dragon walk back down the hall. The encyclopedia sits on the shelf where he left it, spine in, its leather cover worn in the corners. E. He was working on a project for church-school researching his own name and read the article on Evolution. Pastor says if you trace the genealogies of the Bible back to Adam the Earth can’t be more than six thousand years old, not millions like scientists claim. But Ezekiel doesn’t know what to believe anymore. He closes the encyclopedia E with a dusty thumps and slides it back into place on the bookshelf and says a silent prayer of repentance just in case.
Before they leave the house for church, their parents check the boys to make sure they’re dressed to Church Code: black pants whose hems rest on the tops of their black shoes, white button-ups with striped clip-on ties. Ezekiel’s hair grows over his ears, and his mother fingers the knob of the drawer where the sheers are kept, but they don’t have time. It’s already six o’clock.
The vast parking lot of the church is dark and shiny with the day’s rain. There’s a clean smell in the air, a combination of water evaporating off pine needles, damp Madrona leaves swept into piles against the curbs and salty sea air wafting up from Puget Sound. The street lamps glow warm over the Winnebagos and trailers and cars with out-of-state plates. Brethren from the satellite churches drove in for the weeklong camp meeting. Ezekiel’s father drops them off in front and parks the car. The Chapel is an enormous structure, capable of seating three thousand, and the outlying buildings house the Church School and Bible College. Windows from floor to ceiling expose the foyer and Chapelites pour by the thousands from the parking lot into its many doors, Ezekiel, Isaac and their mother among them. Double doors lead from the foyer to the Sanctuary. Rows and rows of numbered pews radiate out from the Pulpit. Red carpet and red curtains line the entire room, representing the Redeeming Blood of Christ. They have assigned seats for camp meeting, not their usual seats, but seats in the second tier where the staffers sit, not the first tier where the elders and those who are favored by Pastor and Pastor’s Wife can sit. Ezekiel hates being at church. Hates sitting still for three hours, hates the sound of Pastor’s lisping voice, hates thinking about all the reading he could be doing at home instead of being here.
He reads the notes he made in his notebook:
Ezekiel is the name of a book in the Old Testament and also the name of a prophet who wrote the book 597-571 BC with the help of disciples just like Jesus had. He was a priest who lived in exile in Babylonia before Nebuchadnezzar II took over Jerusalem. In the book of Ezekiel he predicts that Judah will fall, Jerusalem will be ruined and the people will be exiled because they have turned away from God. They called him the prophet of doom after that.
During service, a little girl, Miriam, from church-school second grade plays with tiny grown-up dolls under the pew in front of him. She silently mouths their conversation and bounces them on the red carpet as they talk. He jabs her hand with the toe of his shoe, and she gives him a snarly look. “Pay attention,” his mother whispers. His father looks around her with furrowed eyebrows. Isaac went to the bathroom at least twenty minutes ago. “Going to the bathroom” is what the kids at church say when they’re too bored to sit still anymore and want to see who else is wandering around the sanctuary. Isaac was probably kissing Hannah the public school girl in the coatroom.
Pastor’s Wife leads the congregation in an intercession for a woman with cancer. They pray in tongues, some standing with hands raised in the air, some sitting with heads bowed intently. Ezekiel has never prayed in tongues before. He tried once but his mind went blank and no mysteries took over his tongue. He didn’t feel filled with the Holy Spirit. He didn’t feel filled with anything at all. As Pastor’s Wife prays, the sound washes over him, the drone hypnotic and trance-like. He feels dizzy. He wants to go home, he thinks, but he doesn’t really. He just doesn’t want to be there. He doesn’t want to see dragons anymore; he doesn’t want to see dark, shapeless demons waiting. The shapes in front of his eyes separate like he’s wearing 3D glasses. Something presses on his chest, and he closes his mouth tightly in case it’s a demon. His mouth feels dry and his ears ring. He feels himself slipping out of his body; it’s almost like the feeling of falling asleep, quiet and slow, liquid. He looks down on his own head, black hair tucked neatly behind his ear. His mother will cut his hair tomorrow. Demons watch him but he could go anywhere. Everything goes bright, like trying to open your eyes underwater. He hears a rushing as if he put his head out the window of a car. His eyelids feel fused shut but he fearfully tears them open. And then he remembers the green-eyed demons that must be above him, swimming in and out among the rafters, and with a gasp he sucks down into his body. The hum of prayer surrounds him again, but instead of saying a quiet one of his own, he nudges his mother’s arm, “I have to go to the bathroom,” he whispers, his upper lip glistening with a thin layer of sweat.
When they pull into the driveway that night, their father stirs the two boys awake in the backseat and motions them toward the front door. Isaac careens groggily behind their parents toward the house, but Ezekiel lingers behind, his breath misting in the dewy air, his eyes adjusting to the darkness of the night. His face feels tight with his own dried sweat and his scalp is damp still and cold in the breeze that stirs the evergreens overhead. They are unlocking the door now, and he’s left behind in the driveway. Past the trees, the ridge drops sharply into the river valley flanked by the mountains and beyond that hangs the murky expansive sky, comforting him, blanketing him with possibility. The front door hangs open, waiting for him to come inside. The dragon is gone. The echoes of a freight train whistle smoke up from the valley as Ezekiel trudges alone into the house and down the hall to his room.