Keith Partin

Hell, Jason. I don’t know what Big Daddy did. I don’t think it matters any more, anyway.

– Keith Partin, circa 1990

I woke up early Sunday morning with PawPaw’s smiling face by my side as expected, and he smelled like Old Spice and unfiltered Camels and black coffee like every weekend of my childhood memories. I hopped off the couch and hugged him tightly with my face against his; PawPaw’s cheeks were as smooth as one of Auntie Lo’s fancy Teflon coated nonstick skillets.

MawMaw was sleeping in. So were Linda and Craig and the baby, though I didn’t hear them come home; I had slept so soundly after my Saturday of second hand smoke and chocolate chip cookies that I wouldn’t have heard a rifle shot. But if I woke up with PawPaw smiling I knew everything must be okay.

I dressed in the bathroom and walked out wearing my walk-around tennis shoes and work-in-the-yard clothes that MawMaw must have laid out for me. I checked my height in the hallway mirror and hadn’t grown.

PawPaw and I ate breakfast by ourselves and were quiet to let everyone else sleep in. I brushed my teeth and returned to the kitchen and took off the 1972 Kennedy half dollar on dog tag chain Brian had given me. I used some of the tools shoved to the side of the kitchen table and pushed and poked at it. Brian was right: a drill bit was round and did not match the square hole. I picked up a large nail the size of a #2 pencil and just as sharp and held it in my hand like a stick I’d poke in the ground to conjure up night crawlers. The ends of nails that big are cut to a point with four edges that are square, not round, and I was about to solve the mystery of a square hole in Kennedy’s head (though probably not how Brian could whack a nail when he only had one arm). But the crunching sound of someone pulling into the driveway stopped me in mid-poke and I looked up at PawPaw to see who was there.

He peeks out the carport door’s little square window and smiled; all was good.

It was Kieth, Daddy’s little brother. He opened the door and ducked his head and twisted his shoulders to step inside. He took one look at me and said: “Wow, Jason! Look at how big you grew.”

Keith looked just like Big Daddy, with wavy strawberry blonde hair and wide open sky blue eyes. Like Big Daddy, Kieth was always smiling. addy looked like Mamma Jean, with narrow dark brown eyes and a perpetual scowl. They all said the same things, but when Keith said them the room lit up as if he were sunshine coming through on a cloudy day.

“Boy,” he said, flexing his bicep. “Show me how big your muscle got.”

I flexed like Kieth and he practically fell backwards in shock.

“Boy!” he exclaimed. “We’re gonna have to get you to load that wood for us.”

PawPaw said I’d be helping that day, and MawMaw said she’d have cookies waiting for when we took a lunch break. We crawled into the bucket seat of PawPaw’s big Ford F150 with me in the middle. Keith was so big he blocked the view out the window. The back of the truck was piled so high with tree branches from yesterday’s work that I couldn’t see out the back, either. The engine roared to life, and PawPaw backed up and crunched the gravel and took off slowly so that none flew up. It was only about half a football field to the barn and fishing pond where we burned wood.

PawPaw drove through the wide opening that was framed by old rusted metal square bars; the equally rusted gate with was leaning against one of the square frames, but the gate was made from round bars welded horizontally, like a ladder leading up to the same clouds Jack climbed to on his beanstalk. We parked just inside the gate, and Keith did all the heavy lifting of moving logs while PawPaw grabbed branches and let me carry a few sticks to help. The burn piles had been added to every Sunday that month, so they were already big. PawPaw was a little wiry man, only 5’2″ or so, and Keith looked like a giant next to him, especially carrying those tree logs over his shoulder and effortlessly tossing them onto the burn piles, where they’d crash with the force of a 15,000 pound bomb dropped in battle. PawPaw would lay his branches on the piles, and I’d toss my sticks like Keith heaved his logs.

PawPaw asked me to stand by the truck while he and Keith poured diesel, never gasoline, they both reminded me. Daddy’s big burn scar over his leg was from gasoline fumes, they said. You can pour diesel over a fire and it won’t blow up, but just to be safe I had better stand by the truck and wait.

Soon the piles were smoking heavily and blocking out the barn. Having several small piles was better than one big one because of that. They moved branches around to get the flames higher, and tossed more diesel where the thick green logs weren’t burning.

I was bored and couldn’t resist the siren call of that gate. I didn’t see myself as Jack with a beanstalk, I saw myself as Spider Man, the wall crawler who was on The Electric Company and did things like trap trick the abominable snowman by leaving snow-cones out for him to sit on, then flinging a web over him and sending him back to his home near Santa Claus. Spider man could climb bricks and steel, not just trees and beanstalks. And he was raised by his aunt and uncle to be a good person. I could climb like that, too, I knew.

Rusted metal round rung by rusted metal round rung I climbed higher and higher. I was higher up than I had been in the tree that morning, but with the ladder I could always get back down. I kept going. I was taller than Keith and I kept going. My right hand stretched and I grasped the top rung with a wide open palm that barely covered the rounded top; my left hand soon followed. But the rungs weren’t grooved like the tree, and the top few must have still had some slick paint or old oil on it, because when I moved a foot to step up I began to slide off. I held on with both hands and tried to kick my foot back onto the rung, but the other slid off instead, and I dangled there for a moment and felt entire gate began to tip over. My hands slipped next, and I fell from the sky like that giant at the end of the Jack and the Beanstalk story.

I hit the ground and the gate came crashing onto my head, crushing me under it.

I must have screamed loudly enough for everyone on Earth to hear me. I could see the Earth tilted sideways, like PawPaw was in the mornings, but I couldn’t move to right myself up. Then there was smoke and flames and nothing else to see.

Then I saw Keith leaping in giant leaps and blocking out even the smoke. He reached down and lifted that gate and tossed away like one of my twigs, and picked me up in his arms and shouted over my wailing screams:

“Ed! Ed! Come quick! It’s Jason! He’s hurt bad!”

I saw PawPaw leaping through flames and tunneling through smoke.

“Get in da’ truck!” PawPaw shouted, waving his hand at us. “Get in da’ truck! I’ll drive!”

Keith took two mighty steps to the truck and flung open the squeaky rusted door and stepped inside and slammed it shut.

“Oh God! Oh God!” he said. “Hurry Ed! He’s bleedin’ bad”

The vinyl seat’s old butt dimples filled with ponds of blood the color of the 82nd Airborne’s maroon beret, and rivers streamed down the cracks and cascaded over the edge and formed waterfalls splashing around Keith’s feet. The driver’s door opened, and PawPaw hopped in and slammed it shut and didn’t take time to say anything; the Ford followed his lead and roared to life and we whipped around so fast that the waterfalls curved in air and the ponds of maroon spread across the seat.

“Oh God! Oh God!” Keith said again. “Hurry Ed!”

But again, no one had to tell PawPaw to hurry. His little foot floored the gas pedal and that old Ford took flight. We took the turn onto Hooper road and sent a tidal wave of gravel flying behind us and were approaching the intersection of Plank at the speed of sound.

PawPaw clutched the steering wheel with his right hand and stuck half his body out the window and waved his bright white nose-blowin’ handkerchief up and down with his left.

“Get out da way! Get out da way!” He shouted again and again. With one hand straining against that mighty steering wheel with the force of God, he heaved and pulled the Ford in a screeching left turn through the sea of cars that had seemed to have parted to make way for us. We took the turn onto Plank Road so fast that all my blood flew from pools in the bucket seat and filled Keith’s floorboard.\

I don’t remember what happened after I passed out. The next memory I have is waking up with PawPaw by my side, sideways as usual, but in a chair and with his head bent to one side and his eyes closed.

I leaned up and the world straightened. PawPaw’s eyes opened. A spider web of red veins was stretched across the white of his right eye; the left was still white and had a perfectly round brown pupil undisturbed in the middle. His cheeks and chin were a wire brush of black and gray bristles. Dried salt was caked across his cheeks and pooled in the wrinkles under his right eye. He smelled only like Camels, though there was smell of something like Pine Sol but much more mild and coming from everywhere.

He smiled and said: “Hey d’er, Lil’ Buddy. ‘Bout time you woke up.”

He wiped his eye and blew his nose with a stiff and dirty white handkerchief that stood out against the white walls of the room and the bleached white sheets of my hospital gurney that smelled like mild Pine Sol.

I don’t know how long I had been unconscious, or what had happened. But I stayed in the hospital at least a few more days. Because I remember so much before passing out, I may have had a subdural hematoma, slow bleeding deep in the brain that gradually builds pressure and leads to unconsciousness; that would also explain why I don’t remember my time before waking up to see PawPaw beside my bed.

I was in Baton Rouge’s Our Lady of the Lake Medical Center, which I’d soon be disappointed to learn didn’t actually have a lake where I could go fishing, much less a lady who lived there. PawPaw got cleaned up again and must have gone back to work at Glen Oaks, but MawMaw took his place most days and PawPaw would usually be there after Saturday morning cartoons. He told me he’d take me fishing in the pond and maybe even a trip to False River as soon as I got home, which would be any day now he kept saying.

There was no lake for fishing, but Our Lady of The Lake did have a color television in the children’s recovery ward playroom, the first color screen I had ever seen, and it was a monster bigger than MawMaw’s refrigerator at home. It was so big they had to cut into the wall to hide the bulbous back, and the front was almost flush with the wall and had a screen bigger than the hallway mirror at home, the one where I could stand and see myself head to toe. The only mirror I had in the hospital was a handheld one a nurse carried around and looked just like what MawMaw kept in the bathroom by her hairspray. The nurses would use hers to show me my head wrapped in bandages like some kind of swami on TV, and again between changing bandages, when I was as bald as PawPaw’s jowls on a Saturday morning.

The TV was what stuck in my mind the most, though. I got used to my new look quickly and forgot I ever looked different. But the TV changed every few seconds, bright, full color flashing cartoons and commercials that kept my eyes and the eyes of all the other bandaged kids – even the one with one eye bandaged and the other who had eyes but had to be walked in and out because he couldn’t see – glued to the screen and locked on to the sounds emanating from it. The screen was so big that a gaggle of us kids in bandages could gather around and watch it all together and see cartoon characters practically as big as we were, except for that one kid who just sat there and stared blankly but seemed to enjoy all the sounds. A few kids just rode around on the foot-push scooters, the ones that moved like Fred Flinstone’s car, and I’d play with them when the television wasn’t on, but mostly I just sat on one of the scooters and watched cartoons with the blind kid and the kid with one eye.

I was at the misnamed Our Lady of the Lake long enough to watch cartoons with enough regularity to know that Saturday mornings were for the Super Friends, and I remember that’s where I saw Batman teach Robin and the other kids in the room and me a magic trick one time, and Aquaman taught us another on a different episode.

Batman showed us how to pretend to be strong by rolling up a newspaper and showing that Robin couldn’t break it, but then easily breaking it (the secret was that he somehow had a cup of water hidden behind him, and when Robin was busy trying to break the rolled up newspaper in half, Batman dipped his fingers into the water, and when he took the newspaper from Robin he made it wet and could break it; I never could get that to work, and never did figure out how to have a glass of water hidden behind me).

Aquaman showed something that I still use to this day, and is one of my favorite things to teach kids; he sat at a table and made an empty glass disappear under a crunched-up piece of paper, like a stiff napkin or newspaper (the secret was to start by saying you’d make a quarter disappear from under the glass, then cover the glass with paper and whack the top and lift it to see; everyone would look at the quarter, and Aquaman used that as misdirection to let the glass fall into his lap; when he put the paper back over the coin to try again, it was already gone but he pretended it was still there, and then slapped the top and showed that the glass went through the table instead of the coin; later in life, I’d then pretend to pick up the quarter, but send it sliding into my lap, and hold up my fingers and pretend I was holding a coin, then make it go through the table, too.)

I also saw the first commercial I remember, one for Stretch Armstrong that showed a bunch of happy kids playing with Stretch and pulling him like an exercise band. According to Wikipedia, that would have been 1976, the year Stretch Armstrong was released and marketed heavily on Saturday morning cartoons. At that time The Fantastic Four was popular and had that one serious guy who stretched and was boring; and there was Plastic Man, the funny stretching guy with sunglasses. Kids in the cartoon stretched Stretch Armstrong and had so much fun playing together and getting big muscles from the exercise that I couldn’t help but want one more than anything I had ever wanted before. I told MawMaw and PawPaw that every time they visited, and again after I got home and I saw the same commercial on our black and white TV the size of a dinner plate and with rabbit ears instead of the hospital’s cable system. The commercials weren’t as interesting on our TV, but the image had been bored into my brain so deeply that just hearing the name Stretch Armstrong and seeing the tiny black and white kids stretching something in their little hands made my mind’s eye see the glory of owning my own Stretch Armstrong.

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