Leath Tonino
I wanted to get on Academy Boulevard in the south and walk its tattered edge, far as possible. I wanted to spend hours balancing the curb between ratty storefront shrubs and the road of floating plastic bags, an aching head and a sore foot. I thought of Academy as the archetypal American hell-strip, a sort of nonplace where materialism and consumerism and desperation and sadness gather together to howl in harmony a tragic song we all have heard but perhaps not heard clearly enough. I wanted to listen, prick my ears. The hum and cough of trucks. A culvert. Torn pants. Maybe something I couldn’t predict.
Early spring in Colorado Springs. Some random Tuesday. The sky over Academy a heavy gray weight, a steel pillow snowing white feathers. I walked hard, squinting into the wind, the cold pinching my cheeks. Then I stopped, or was stopped, by a baseball bat lying on the sidewalk. The bat called up in a thin, tight voice. I bent over, reached out. The grip was soft, polished by the sweat of vanished hands. My hands were red and sore.
Roads crack under years of weathering and choke you with exhaust. Academy is a road. The bat was a bat, wooden and the color of wood, in good condition, sized for an adult. I carried it with me, sometimes swinging it, sometimes accidentally knocking my Achilles tendon or the ball of my ankle or the outside of my knee. I tried to use it as a stylish cane but it was too short and made me limp. I tucked it in the crotch of my armpit so I could free up both hands to blow my nose. I never stopped walking and I never put the bat down. One foot ahead of the other. This foot. That foot. Five miles, eight miles, thirteen miles. The sidewalk’s blur-parade of pawnshops and ninety-nine-cent chicken sandwiches and wet rags and hair salons and cigarettes. At intersections, in cars waiting on glowing lights, drivers looked at me and my big bouncy strides. The bat would wake in my arms and speak again, its voice a wire in my tired body.
I want to bash windshields.
No, I will not let you.
Afternoon, afternoon, afternoon, evening. I pressed on, all the way to Woodmen Drive, where I ass-slid into the bed of Cottonwood Creek, leaving the pavement behind. Steep banks channeled me to a spot where I slipped on icy rocks and dunked both sneakers, both shins. The water felt sharp and good, the bat solid as a gunstock. Shopping carts, broken glass, paw prints, graffiti. A cobwebbed underpass. Cooing pigeons. I stumbled toward a guy standing on a gravel bar in waders. He worked for the US Geological Survey and was taking sediment samples. He said that sometimes rusty pipes get ripped and sewage waterfalls into the creek. He said that two girls died in the creek in a flood one spring. Goodbye, I said.
From the outside of my left shoulder, across my sternum, to the outside of my right shoulder, I span about twenty inches. I know this because that night, alone in my kitchen, drinking whiskey from a chipped ceramic mug, I searched a cluttered drawer for a ruler. And then I measured.
I often picture humans as these little half-broken bugs that drag around town, streaky yellow trails staining the ground behind us. The trails are only twenty or so inches wide and printed onto a world that seems to spread endlessly in all directions. I moved away from Colorado Springs, didn’t walk Academy again. If I had, I would have marked a different path through the sprawl and picked up something that wasn’t a baseball bat. This something would have been welcomed into my life. Today it would sit on my mantle. I would cherish it and hold it and only forget it in hazy old age.
A road is a road. What you pick up is what you pick up. Once upon a time, upon a Tuesday long ago, I explored what we all already know. Hello. How you doing? Cut with sadness? Cut with beauty? Cut straight through the middle?
I want to bash windshields.
No, I will not let you.
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Leath Tonino is the author of two essay collections, The Animal One Thousand Miles Long and The West Will Swallow You. A freelance writer, his prose and poetry appear in Orion, The Sun, New England Review, Outside, National Geographic, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and many other magazines, journals, and anthologies.