Wind and Rain - John Henry Fleming (ap literature book list .txt) 📗

blowing up balloons all day and throwing them into your playpen. I remember the taste and the smell of those balloons. Like a hospital, clean and dry.
By the time Father came home, I was out of breath and a little dizzy. I could still smell the clean smell of the balloons until Father crouched down next to me. Then I smelled him. I’d never smelled him before. I moved my face away and frowned. Father didn’t say anything, but he might have noticed because he left the room then to take a shower. I tried to make an animal out of the balloon he’d blown up for me. It popped in my hands and I smelled him again.
Once I noticed that smell, I couldn’t forget it even when I tried. Even when Father took a shower, I smelled it. When I was almost old enough to start working myself I thought, I never want to smell like that. I didn’t mind the smells on the golf course--the grass, the machines, even the chemicals. All those things were better than the smell of someone else’s garbage.
I never asked you, Louis. Did you ever smell Father that way? I smelled it on him even when he lay in this same hospital breathing through a tube like you. We both went to see him, and I wondered then if you smelled him, too. But I couldn’t ask. Now I wonder if you can smell me. For the last few months I’ve taken a long hot shower before I came in here, hoping you wouldn’t be able to smell the garbage on me. Now I’ve changed my mind.
I’d take showers for myself, too. Every day I’d come home from loading garbage and I’d stand in the shower for twenty minutes, soaping up and shampooing, trying to get the smell out. I checked myself after I’d dried off, smelling my arm and blowing into my cupped hands. I smelled something. I wasn’t sure.
Out on my route, too. After I dumped a can of garbage into the hopper, I’d put my nose right up to my arm and sniff. There, I’d think, that’s me. I’m a garbageman. Everyone knows it, just like they knew it about Father. If they forget, all they’ve got to do is get near me. They’ll smell the rotten vegetables they threw out last night.
I had a girlfriend for a little while. She moved in with us when I was between the two jobs. Her name was Melody and she was sweet and understanding. I didn’t deserve her. When I took the sanitation job, I couldn’t tell her right away. It hurt too much. But she figured it out. From Mother, maybe. Maybe from the smell.
One day I asked her how she liked the way I smell.
I don’t mind it, she said. It just smells like you’ve been chopping bell peppers.
I had to kick her out. I couldn’t stand that she smelled me. She might have smelled bell peppers all right. But someone else had chopped them.
I hated myself, and I tried to make it worse. All day long at work, I’d hold my arm up to my nose and smell it. I’d smell my work shirt, too, and my trousers. Before I emptied the garbage into the hopper, I’d stick my nose into it and take a big whiff. It made me feel good to hate myself. Smell that, I said to myself. Nothing changes. It’s the smell you’re going to smell all your life. The smell of garbage. I started to bring a flask to work. I thought if I drank enough by afternoon, I’d forget to stick my nose in the garbage and I wouldn’t hate myself so much. Sometimes it worked.
Then one day I stopped in to see you on my way to work. I’d never done that in the morning before. That day I just sat there and looked at you from across the room for a minute and that was it. I didn’t say a word to you. But when I got to work I still had that hospital smell with me, and it reminded me of those balloons I’d blown up as a kid. I didn’t think much of it until I got out on my route. Then I took a big whiff of that first garbage pail, and this time it didn’t smell like garbage. It smelled like rotten vegetables, sour milk, grass clippings, wet newspapers, shampoo bottles, diapers, even plastic bags and cardboard boxes. But not garbage. That one smell had become all those separate smells. I smelled every can I emptied that day and none of them smelled like garbage. They smelled like whatever was put in there--bell peppers or potato skins or splintered wood. Every can had something different in it. Some cans had almost the same smells in them. But none were exactly the same.
After that, I began to pay attention to all the individual smells. I stuck my nose in the garbage like before, only now it wasn’t for self-pity. Now I wanted to pick out all the smells. I wanted to know what was in there by its smell. I got good at doing it, too. The other loaders saw me and started testing me. They’d have me close my eyes, and they’d put a piece of garbage up to my nose. Once they held up a dead gerbil. Once a carton of rotten eggs. I didn’t mind. Almost always, I could tell what it was by the smell. I’d get worried when I couldn’t. Sometimes there was no wind and I’d be smelling the same thing all day. That can dull your nose. It’s all becoming one smell again, I’d think. Then the wind would pick up and I’d be okay.
That’s how I got good at smelling. I can smell just about anything. I can smell the difference between royal palms and coconut palms, between sea grapes and sea oats. I can smell what kind of animal is hiding in the bushes. I can smell a woman’s perfume from half a mile away. When there’s a breeze coming in off the ocean, I can smell what kind of fish are running offshore. Let me tell you. I can smell. And the important thing about smelling is to pay attention to the wind.
Here’s what I’ve found out, Louis. The wind is talking to us all the time. Most people don’t listen, though, because they don’t know how to smell. But smelling is the only way to understand the wind. You can’t talk back to the wind, but you can listen to what it says, and if you know how to smell, you’ll know that it says a lot. The wind doesn’t make its own smell. It carries the smells of everything else. That’s how it talks. It might take the smell of a pine tree’s sap and carry it down the street to an old man sitting on the porch of a nursing home, looking out at traffic. Then that old man smells those pine trees and remembers when he was a kid and used to chase lizards and squirrels up those pine trees, and after, when he’d hop down and look at his hands, and they’d be covered with sap and little pieces of bark stuck to the sap, like he’d grown a new skin. He’d think, Mama’s gonna be mad at me because that ain’t never gonna wash off. But now he looks at his old, trembling hands and he sees that it has washed off. He leans back in his chair and smells the sap, remembering what it felt like on his hands, remembering until the smell fades because the wind has taken it somewhere else. The wind has been talking to him and he has listened. It was saying something sad, but something he wanted to hear anyway.
A boy might be walking home one night and he’s mad at himself because he lost all his money shooting pool. He’s had a few drinks so he’s looking at his feet to make sure they move the way he expects them to, and then he smells something, stops, and looks up. He sees that he’s in front of his girlfriend’s house. He has smelled what he smells when her mother opens the door for him, her mother’s housedress that smells a little like floor wax, all the little knickknacks her mother collects that smell like they sat in the Salvation Army story for a year before she bought them, the paint on the mantel that’s just beginning to chip. And from all the smells of the house he finds the ones he knows belong only to his girlfriend. The cup of her palms, the inside of her forearm, the shoulder scar from her vaccination, the curls in her hair, and most of all her breath. He reaches out for these smells especially, and he grabs onto them and holds them for as long as he can. Standing before her house he smells all this and he is happy. The wind has brought these smells to him. It is speaking to him. He is just drunk enough that he might go up and rap on her window.
When these things happen, you might start to wonder if the wind is good or evil. But the wind doesn’t care one way or another. It talks, and it wants us to listen. And the more we listen, the more it will talk. Not everything it tells us is good, but it’s always something we ought to hear.
The only time we should be scared is when the wind stops talking. When the wind is quiet nothing changes. The sky stays the same. The earth stays the same. People stay the same. They smell the same. They smell just like their fathers. When the wind is still, a man can swing a golf club and the ball will go exactly where it is aimed. A man can raise a gun and his hand won’t blow to one side or the other. He can fire the gun and the bullet will go exactly where the gun is pointed. Nothing will change its direction. The time between makes no difference. It doesn’t count. Nothing will change what happens.
When people want to hurt each other, they throw things at each other--rocks, spears, golf balls, bullets. You take aim and then you let your rock fly, hoping your aim is exact and the rock will hit the other guy’s forehead exactly between the eyes, knocking him