【by Birdie Stark】

I had never met anyone like Riggs Navarro, and I figured I never would again. In the way that adolescent boys do, we clung perfectly to one another until it did not seem so necessary anymore. You’ll find that certain sorts of people slip in and out of life like keys teetering on a sewer grate.

Riggs and I got to be good friends during recess. I was picking leaves off the great schoolyard mesquite tree and whistling to myself, stopping every now and then with a fistful of leaves in my hand to watch the boys play soccer.

One boy tripped and skinned his knee, kneeling to suck the blood from the wound and erupting into laughter. Trickles of blood ran down his chin and he chased the other kids around the playground screaming vampire, vampire! I turned to look at Riggs, who was one beanpole of a kid back then. He stood with thin fingers hooked through the diamond gaps in the chain link fence, rocking back and forth on his heels and squinting at me. I stopped whistling and said get a load of this crowd and he said yeah. This made me smile, and I began to rock back and forth, too.

Soon after that the two of us started eating lunch together. We ate in the chemical storage closet of Ms. Fletcher’s class, which was a pleasantly compact space of about five by seven feet. It had no windows owing to the sensitive nature of the chemicals, but there was a small panel of yellow light on the ceiling which could be lit by an assertive tug on a connected piece of fraying twine.

Riggs never brought food of his own, so sometimes I tore my butter sandwich right down the middle and offered him a half. On most days he accepted, but sometimes he liked to play noble and refuse on account of his being thirteen years old. I was only twelve and a quarter then, with no real faculties of persuasion.

The first lunches we ate together were silent, barring nibbles and burps muffled by the padded walls of the chemical closet. Then one morning Riggs sat down across from me with especially wide eyes. He blinked expectantly—the sort of way a hound dog might—and I figured I ought to tell him about the time my great aunt was peed on by a horse. When I finished the story he snorted and fell backwards out of his chair and shattered a Griffin beaker into a hundred little pieces. We were better friends after that.

The thing about Riggs was that everybody liked him. I think this was because he looked sad most of the time, and perhaps a little distant. People seem to like it when boys of that age have a poignant sort of face, and this made Riggs very lucky. His eyebrows drooped like fish tails and when he listened to a story he liked to tilt his head to the side as though to empty water out of his ear canal. I had never met a kid who could make grown-ups lean so far forward in conversation. He did not like to speak, but he was a good listener, and I suppose we all just wanted a nice face to talk at.

I talked to Riggs more than anybody. He listened, and we kept on like that for quite some time. I spoke garrulously of the weather, my father’s goatee, green grapes, and a family of rats which had taken up residence in the insulation of my house. Riggs nodded and nodded. I tried my best to think up wonderful questions to get him talking, but as the months passed he seemed to grow quieter and quieter. One week in February the only words he spoke to me were thank you when I gave him my butter sandwich. This worked out nicely, so I kept on.

I soon found that the only time Riggs ever condescended to poke his nose into other people’s business was when they spoke about his family. He had no father, so Riggs loved his mother indelibly. He had no other choice. She was a beautiful and substantial woman who wore thick eyeliner and jeans with rhinestones sewn onto the back pockets. She worked at a movie theater beneath a highway in South Tucson, and on Sundays she brought Riggs home a box of Raisinets and a large diet soda for dinner.

Each afternoon she waited by the school gates for Riggs to come flying outside with his schoolbag bouncing against his knees. Her great stomach shook with buttery relief as he kissed her cheeks and laughed and laughed. I observed this display with clumps of mesquite leaves in my fists. Sometimes a small smile met my lips.

The other kids shoved their thumbs into their pockets and looked away, and perhaps this was because they could not recall ever having melted so completely into the shaking bellies of their own mothers. The problem with all of this was that Riggs never seemed to realize the cost of such love.

On a certain spring day when the sun hung garishly in the sky, I sat with my pencil behind my ear in Ms. Fletcher’s class. The desk beside me was empty. We were discussing the properties of polar molecules when Ms. Fletcher fell silent as a series of thumps issued upward from the courtyard below. The windows were cracked wide open, and in with the breeze wafted the sound of cigarette lighters and coins clunking onto the asphalt. Then came bits of laughter and more thumps which now arrived at steady intervals. Ms. Fletcher shook her head and kept talking as the rhythmic, syncopated pounding echoed from down below. She grew quiet once more as the voices in the courtyard began to chant. Whore’s son, they were saying. Son of a whore.

Ms. Fletcher went to close the windows. When she looked down, her mouth opened up and she crammed half her fist inside. I think she was about to cry out, but by the time her tongue found words I had already begun to run. My sneakers were unlaced, so I spread my legs like a cowboy and skipped steps two at a time down the school stairwell. Something wonderful had built up inside of me, and it occurred to me I had never felt so human in my life.

When I stepped into the courtyard there were six boys there. One lit a cigarette, and I noticed that his fingertips were red. A colossal kid stepped forward and said don’t worry about it man, we just messed him up is all. I must have given him some sort of look, because all at once their eyes met the ground and they shuffled off.

Riggs was lying face down when I found him. His head had flattened a patch of pigweed which now compressed itself into an array of concentric spirals, and his hands gripped the ground in such a way that he seemed to be clinging desperately to Earth’s gravitational pull. A

great shiver overtook his spine, causing him to shake his head so drops of blood specked onto the cement and past the pool which had already formed in the pigweed.

I knelt next to him, using the palms of my hands to turn his head to the side. He did not open his eyes, but his mouth sputtered like that of a suffocating fish. I lay down on my stomach to hear what he might have to say. Two clumps of white froth had formed at the corners of his lips. He licked one and spat it out, flapping his lips until an ounce of sound came out. His eyes blinked open. I’ll kill him, Riggs said. Kill him like a dog.

I left school that day with a yellow slip of paper in my hand which read Strike 1, Truancy. It fluttered in the wind and I sensed that I had become a part of something important.

Ms. Navarro’s station wagon was not parked outside the school, and Riggs was nowhere to be found. I decided to walk the two miles to Catalina Park, which sat parallel to Riggs’ house on a potholed street. As I walked I thought about how his face reminded me of his mother’s, the way her eyes glazed over like marbles each morning after Riggs went into the school.

There was an engraved metal bench at the park. I sat for a while and let it burn my thighs as an old man picked lint out of his belly button on the ground beside me. After an hour, Riggs came down the street and said hello. He wore dark sunglasses over his eyes, underneath which lay two purple bruises turning gold around the edges. The waning light slipped between the branches of a nearby magnolia tree, illuminating Riggs’ face just enough to make him not quite beautiful. He placed a twenty dollar bill in my palm and told me thanks for the help, he was going to have a bath.

I did not see Riggs for a while after that. Two weeks passed, and I started getting very full eating both halves of my butter sandwich. I had begun to consider knocking on Ms. Navarro’s door to ask when her son would be back, until one day I came home from school and my father handed me the phone and said it’s for you. There was a woman with a feathery voice on the line who told me she was the receptionist at Saint John’s Institute of Behavioral Health. She asked if I was doing alright, I told her I was, and she said there was a patient in their institute who had placed an outgoing request for a visitor. The patient had been admitted ten days ago, and he was Riggs Navarro.

The sound of his name caused my heart to gallop as I turned this news over in my mind. She said nothing else, so I paused and swallowed and told her that Riggs loved his mother very much. Then I asked her how come they had to keep Riggs in their institute when he hadn’t beat up one single kid at the school. A great many papers shuffled on the line. She cleared her throat and called me honeydew and told me that Mr. Navarro’s stated cause for admittance was a suicide attempt.

I wrapped the phone cord around my index finger, pulling tightly until it turned a nice shade of violet. The receptionist asked if I was still on the line and I said yes and by the way why was it that Riggs tried to kill himself anyhow. In a scripted sort of way she said that sometimes it is hard to know why the people we love do the things they do. Life gets very hard for some of them. It’s decent young men like yourself that help heal the confusion.

I thought this over and said yeah and hung up the phone. A brilliantly large boulder had begun to slide over my chest, and I recalled once more what Riggs had said in the pigweed about killing someone like a dog. Then I remembered Riggs saying he was going to have a bath, and the thought entered my mind that I knew precisely who it was that he had intended to kill.

I agreed to come in for a visit Thursday. It was an hour bus ride from school to the institute, with one transfer and a short walk. A bell on the door jingled when I came into the waiting room. The place teemed with people, only the crowd did not buzz in the way that a subway car or discotheque might. It felt rather like we were all waiting in line for a Black Friday sale on caskets.

There was an open chair near a fat lady with purple pom poms on her sweater. I said mind if I take this seat and she said go ahead baby. Two turtlenecked twins with dyed black hair sat across from us. One cradled his head between his knees. A few minutes later a man with a leather bag came in and asked for the case file on someone named Alma Torres. It had not occurred to me that women ended up here, too.

A man with a walkie-talkie patted us down for weapon shaped lumps and bulges. We were shepherded into the cafeteria and told to help ourselves to apple juice while the first few patients arrived from a high security corridor.

The fat lady bounced onto a tatty sofa upholstered in the design of tessellated palm trees, and I watched as an old man in a cowboy hat came through the corridor and sat with her. The two of them began to talk, and each time the cowboy spoke his mustache bounced up and down on his lips like a caterpillar. The fat lady’s eyes darted all around the room to avoid the insect dwelling on his lips, which now floundered frantically.

Finally, Riggs came. He did not see me for a very long time, and I watched him wander the cafeteria as his eyes swept the room. Actually, his eyes were the very first thing I noticed about him. They sunk deep into cavernous sockets. His left lid seemed to have developed a slight twitch which spasmed each time he jerked his head to look for me. Tufts of hair clung to his forehead in little clumps.

Each patient found their visitor, and one by one they smiled and sat down with plastic cups of apple juice. Riggs stood in the middle of the room pushing his palms against each other and turning around in small circles. He had not seen me yet, and an eerie thought passed through my mind. I dug my heels into the floor and thought about leaving. In fact, I had begun to grip the edge of the table to stand up and go when he finally found me.

His body sunk into the chair across from me, and I saw he wore a nametag which said “Richard Navarro” in printed letters. He had drawn little antlers onto the “o” to make it look like a reindeer. I said hello. My nose twitched and Riggs said sorry for the stench, he hadn’t had a shower in ten days and the perfume his mama gave him didn’t work so good. I asked if his mother had paid him any visits.

Every week, he said, but she can’t bring in popcorn.

He fell silent then, and we looked at each other for quite some time. The minutes passed and each time his gaze dropped to the table, I glanced up at the clock on the wall to see if it was nearly time to go. After a while I said do ya want some apple juice and he said yes very much, so I went and got us each a cup.

When I sat back down I began to tell him how much I missed only having to eat half a butter sandwich at school, but something stopped me because a curious transformation had come over him. I noticed that his eyes seemed to be melting. He was not crying, not exactly, but his eyes had sagged downwards to such a degree that his whole face appeared to be made out of wax. Slowly his lips wilted toward the floor but he tensed them up, sending his chin into a wrinkled fit of quivering.

My throat hurt very much. I tried not to look at Riggs, but a quiet whining noise came from his body and I dug my fingernails into my palm and looked and he was melting and melting and looking at me and shaking his head helplessly. I could tell he wanted me to say something, but I inhaled and exhaled and could not think of anything at all. I decided not to look at his eyes again, so instead I observed the way the tendons in his neck tightened and thawed at intervals. I think this was his way of sobbing.

After some time, Riggs reached out and wrapped his fingers around the cup of apple juice. The cup was too full and it tottered and spilled on his filthy shirt and he dropped the cup and his fingers shook. I went to grab a napkin but Riggs shook his head, because the warden was ringing a little bell and saying that visiting hours were over.

When the bell rang each patient rose and left their visitor to form a straight line outside the high security corridor. They lined up with their hands on the shoulders of the patient in front of them, and the poor guy in the very front had to hold his arms out straight like a zombie.

I looked at Riggs, whose face had melted into a hardened, droopy shape. I raised my eyebrows a bit and tried to smile and he waved at me and slowly shook his head. The patient in front of him was the cowboy, and I noticed Riggs’ knuckles turning white as he gripped his shoulders too tightly. The cowboy craned his neck around to shoot him a nasty look. When he turned around Riggs was still shaking his head back and forth. The cowboy rotated forward again, and the caterpillar underneath his nostrils flopped about in a grand harrumph.

The door to the corridor opened and one by one the line marched forward. I sat there with the cup of apple juice in my hand and watched them go. My last glimpse of Riggs was a perfect, bloodless skeleton with legs like twigs and a sidewalk-fried constitution. His skin clung tightly to the hollows of his cheeks and his head shook back and forth and I think I loved him.

I let each patient march on, and I let the doors swing shut behind them. I watched them through the porthole in the door until the very last one rounded the corner, and I found myself staring at the pink linoleum tiles which lined the corridor floor. I finished my apple juice and caught my bus and thought about Riggs.

The thing was, he did not come back to school then. Not the next week as the magnolia tree bloomed, nor in October when its leaves turned crisp and plummeted artlessly onto the sidewalk. The last I ever saw of him were those glowing white knuckles and syncopated steps through the cafeteria door. On the ride home he sat silent in my mind, bloodless and perfect. He was saying please, please and crying a little and my fingernails made crescent moons in my palms as I let him melt into a pool on the asphalt outside. I even smiled a little, because I bet I’d see him soon. My heart still bloomed then. We were perfectly decent young men.