After Linda left the room, he lay there flat on his back staring at the ceiling, only his eyes were closed, just hearing the semi’s on the interstate through the open window, the curtains blowing lightly. The sound of distant tires was like water, some sort of river whining over concrete, rippling through half a mile of corn fields into his ear. All he could do was float on the bed, feeling the moments drip into each other and the delicious warm behind his eyes.

He couldn’t see the rigs, couldn’t see them as he could when he came out the big front door of high school and looked over the rooftops to the elevated stretch of I-15 with the trucks rolling east and west, the school on one hill, the road equal to it. His eyes were wide open then, hands a little clammy. He stood there looking into the distance, talking to some girls if he knew them, waiting for the guys to melt away into their mothers’ arms. That rarely happened.

You didn’t want to fight. You wanted to go home, mind your own business, eat cookies, but these guys would wait for you. Sometimes they asked for a dollar or asked you to empty your pockets. When you refused, it started.

“Think you’re smart, don’t you? You a real tough motherfucker, huh?” The remarks got nastier as the guys worked themselves up to it, Blacks or Mexicans mostly, the words like sparks to get the fire started. In a funny way nobody wanted the fire to start, but it always did. The words flared into shoves, then fists and the burning sensation of a punch in the face. He lost and he lost and he lost until he learned to accept the impact, looked forward to it even, as if this was your job as a kid and doing it well earned you respect. Not whether you won or lost because you could lose well, but whether you could give and take, fighting through the tears that came from a hit on the nose or the blood from a split lip. Respect was when you finally stood there, lungs burning, hardly the strength to raise a hand. It was okay. You knew each other in a way that history classes didn’t allow. It was okay. Guys who fought like that rarely fought again. It was an education offered in the streets and alleys below the school, where the guys knocked over trash cans and swore and smoked, honing the skills that would help them get and keep a job at the mill or at Nick’s Automotive on Broadway, for all work involves pain and a certain level of injury. He knew that now.

It was here for him now in such detail, yet surrounded by  quietness as if it had happened to someone else. As if in this moment of effortless recall, he was able to dial in to different lives and see how they had lived. The events, the visuals remained, but the pain was gone, the anxiety, even the gloat of victory. Sometimes the feelings returned. In crowds with a hard jostle, something inside him bristled, the fins erected, and the membrane covering the ancient eye slid back, usually to reveal the elderly woman who had bumped him. That’s what happened to those soccer crowds in Europe. So crazy this thing called people.

But not here, not in this warm stillness that filled his head. More and more lately he returned here, closing his eyes, allowing his thoughts to dissolve. At such moments his mind seemed to work without friction. Memories drifted past like the green wreckage of lily pads after a big storm, tatters of leaf and root floating on a waveless lagoon while all the world tuned its engines and pushed its eighteen wheelers down the road. He was becoming the man who loved to do nothing. Go fishing? Nope. Go to see the Mets and the Angels? No. Drive out to the lake and ski? No thanks. His spunk had got drunk or something. But the important thing was he didn’t care. The lagoon was just fine.

He’d told Linda about this. He told her the fighting stopped when Bobby McCall went to shoot the tall black kid but shot his brother instead. The story of  that got out and the police came down on the after school scene. They were all over the place for two weeks, but that wasn’t what ended the fighting. He realized that now. It was girls. You could say love but it wasn’t really love. It was a driver’s license and double dating in the family car and the excitement of that, a different kind of war only you didn’t know it then. It all starts with a beating heart and then a hard on and trying to fit the two of them together and understand the huge place this female person suddenly takes up in your life. It gets more and more complicated and scary until it all gets simple again, like lying here doing nothing, dripping with the moments.

The family’s the thing. When you finally accept that, it gets easier. Some people never get that. Not that it’s easy. The trouble your kids get into turns a screw so deep inside. It’s not like the stress of too many things to do. That’s just normal reality, bad as it can be. But when Josh stole that car and tested positive for cocaine, that screw tightened down hard. He was desperate about what to do. He heard Linda’s shower water stop. The mirror would be too foggy to shave if she’d forgotten to turn on the fan. The clock stared at him from the top of the dresser. He stretched. Linda said they weren’t her babies. She said it on a Sunday morning lying on her side in this room. She said it so casual, like it was the most ordinary dumb fact.

“Mike, these kids aren’t my babies, so they aren’t yours either. God sends them through me, but I’m only temporary housing. They belong to God. He has his own uses for them, and it’s not ours to know what they are.” He remembered it almost word for word.

“Yes, but …” he started out.

“No,” she said firmly. “All we can do is love Josh. That’s all. Love him and try to understand God’s plan for him.” Linda insisted on that and wouldn’t cooperate on the punishments he devised for Josh. They did pull his license for a few months, but Linda had her direction on this one. She got him on the love train and Josh turned around, with the nudge of some community service from the judge. It wasn’t the courts that turned him, though, it was love. Even lying in bed that morning, much as he had resisted Linda, he also felt the screw loosen. It was love and the notion that you can’t control another life once it has God’s motion setting it toward some destiny. It was that easy. They are God’s children for a purpose our minds cannot grasp. If so, we were God’s children with similar destinations of our own. Clearly his was simply to drift on this lagoon, spunkless and happy.

He breathed slowly in and out listening to the telephone ring. He hoped it wasn’t for him. The door opened and Linda stepped in drying her hip. “I’m just letting it ring,” she said.