Tyler Anderson had long ears like a donkey.  They had always been that way.  When he was born, the doctors immediately suggested corrective surgery, or at least a trimming, but Tyler’s parents were Christian Scientists, and it was out of the question.  When he was old enough, he could decide.  Once he’d had a chance to live for awhile with the ears God gave him, if medical science could really transplant a human ear in place of those long hairy monstrosities, he could go for it.  But for now he was a perfect baby as God had made him, with perfectly floppy grey donkey ears, and no knife would come to him.  Of course they circumcised him.

As a child he was teased, but not excessively.  The children at first were in awe of the ears—they weren’t sure whether the ears were things to be celebrated or scorned—and once they got used to them, they became too obviously a part of the classroom character to serve as the butt of a joke.  Much better to rag on something a kid had said or done than something they were all well aware of, every day, and which made their class unique from all other classes.  But this is not to say that comments were not uttered, often by a boy in dire social straits himself, looking for a step up.

He couldn’t fit them into a football helmet, but his father cut holes in his little league cap, and even bored holes in a batting helmet.  And the boy could hear.  He knew when you were coming from a mile away.  

It was this quality which saved him—and his compatriots—in high school, when they were laboring a keg into the flatbed truck of a neighborhood boy, having paid for it, yes, in cold hard cash, but having intimidated their way into its possession through display of a switch-blade knife.  Tyler could hear the sirens a mile off, and told them, “If we don’t get it in this time, we’d better leave it be,” but they heaved and got it in, and scrambled inside the cab and, the remainder, into the other cars parked outside the A-Mart, and were off, and Roger said, and Edgar said too, that it was a damned good thing that Tyler had told them what he’d heard, for it was there in the local paper the next morning, about a gang of youths brandishing a knife to get a keg, but no names were there, for no names were known, and no license plates, for the owner of the A-mart had not dared to venture outside.

So Tyler had helped them get away with a keg.  But he was not all brigand.  Tyler had the heart of a poet.  But he kept it secreted away inside his bedroom, letting it out only at around three or four o’clock in the morning, maintaining, to the outside world, a hard exterior to compensate for his stunning ears.  During this period in which he opened the poet from his jail cells—at around three or four o’clock in the morning—Tyler let the poet do what the poet wanted to do.  And that was write poetry.  He kept it in a notebook hidden under a pile of sweaters in his dresser.  And the poetry wasn’t about ears, or about the difficult state of being of those who are different.  It was primarily about women.  Here’s how one of them went:

In your eyes I long to be,

to swim within the blue green sea,

for when I look into your eyes

the sparkling emeralds hypnotize

and when I lose control and stare

all’s forgotten, nothing’s there

except these eyes of green and blue

which force me into loving you.

Rather pedestrian, true, it makes you feel a little embarrassed, and the rhythm is off—it could be missing a couple lines after “sea” and before “for”—and it could also be taken as horribly narcissistic, for Tyler’s eyes were both a little green and a little blue, but in this case there was a girl Tyler knew—they were sort of friends—who had sparkling blue green eyes; they were magnetic; and this poem was for her.     

But he wrote other poems for other girls, and some poems for nobody in particular; instead, for an audience that would never materialize, for a mysterious other who fed on poetry jotted down early in the morning, or late at night, who ate feelings and demanded sweet pure ones, ideally ones that never could be acted on in daylight.

He was sitting in the library with the girl for whom he wrote the poem, ostensibly studying, but listening, as he was always listening, to the static hum of the room, to the occasional footfalls, to the birds outside, to the raucous sounds of the hallways.  And to her.  Listening to her breathe, listening to her turn the page, listening, or so he thought, to her cogitate.

“Were there really Aryans?” she said.

“I dunno,” he said, “they’re people in a textbook.  They came down into India and killed everyone.”

“I know what it says,” she said.  “But didn’t Hitler talk about Aryans?”

“He was probably just making things up,” he said, “after reading about the Indian Aryans in a textbook.”

“They didn’t kill everyone,” she said.

“They enslaved them.  Set up a caste system.”

“And wrote beautiful poetry.”

“Or maybe it’s just all garbage in a textbook that we’ve got to memorize.”

“I don’t know how you stay motivated if you think like that.”

“They weren’t very nice to women.”

“Nobody was.  And what about you guys?  What’s the locker room like?  It seems like an unhealthy atmosphere.”

“How would you know?”

“I just mean it seems like there would be a lot of misogyny.  Is there a lot of misogyny?”

“Sometimes there’s a place for misogyny.” 

“You don’t really mean that.”

“I just mean that the sexes each have their space for camaraderie, and that’s a good thing.”

“Camaraderie at the sake of hatred for women?  You do know what misogyny means?”

“Maybe not hatred.  But for talking about women.”

“What do you talk about?”

“I dunno.  We don’t hate women.”

“Then it isn’t misogyny.  But the truth of your statement depends on what you say.”

The locker room before baseball practice was filled with buoyancy; there was no dread of what was to come, for baseball practice was fun; there was only an expectancy, and, in truth, while some talked of girls, Tyler mostly listened, and caught the fear, below it all, that one might not know, and might not ever, really know.

Two weeks later, their history class spent a period in the library to find books on the industrial revolution.  Tyler was happy to be in a place he shared with her, with which he had grown familiar, the burnt orange carpet, the rows of books, the globe, the card catalogue that nobody ever used.  Just now, the librarian was telling them how to use the card catalogue, because it was a very important research tool.  Tyler was listening to a classmate, Fred, try to dress him down.

“So what do you have for that, captain comeback?”

“When Fred speaks, no comeback required.”

“Weak,” said Fred, and two other boys laughed.  The girl, her name was Alice, was standing with a group of girls, listening intently to the librarian.

There were science fair projects shielding the back of the library from the rest of the room.  These were neat affairs, with block letters, and bright construction paper on which typed pages described the hypotheses, experiments, conclusions, and so on.  When the librarian finished, they were given time to explore.  And the girls who had been listening merged with the boys who had not, and exchanged spare words, hellos, little more, as they traipsed through the library.

“Don’t forget that this is the genesis for your entire study,” said the librarian, patting the card catalogue, but only two or three students approached it.  Tyler was walking with three other boys near the back of the room, where the science projects were, and he noticed that, across the room, Alice was walking with another girl directly opposite.  Tyler wasn’t paying attention to the two boys, and soon they departed for a remote aisle in which to insult each other’s mothers, and he turned behind the science projects, just to see what was back there, and soon saw Alice, standing there too.  He listened to the wind outside; it was battering the flag, and, a block over, it was blowing into the face of a man who was cutting his grass.  He and Alice were crouched behind the science fair projects.  He smiled, and she smiled, and he thought, now is the time to kiss her, now or never, so he put his hands on her neck and did so, quickly, afraid she’d pull away, so afraid that in fact he pulled away before it was more than a mere grazing of lips.  But it was that.  She folded his ears down his cheeks and said, “Well . . .”

“Hey Anderson,” came Fred from his narrow aisle.  “Who are you bumping uglies with?”

“Just Alice,” said the other boy.  “Mwah!”  Tyler took her hand and they walked out from behind the science fair projects, and she said, “I’d better go look at the card catalogue,” and then she was gone, and Tyler walked over to the two boys, one of whom was humping a library book.

He saw her that day after school, in the library, before practice, and he saw her each day afterwards and, soon, he saw her on weekends too, when Tyler’s father drove them to the movies or, if Tyler was lucky, Tyler’s sister drove them and stayed quiet, and always picked them up a little late.  Tyler no longer felt the need to write poetry at night, for his day was exciting and bright; when he slept, he slept thoroughly and peacefully, and when he woke, he was refreshed and happy to start his day.  He wondered how long this could last.

Alice’s parents wouldn’t let her have guests over at night on a weekday, and there was a movie she wanted him to watch, Days of Heaven, right away, so they both rode their bikes to the video rental after school, in the interim before after school activities began, and found two copies of it.  “What is this, a cowboy movie?” said Tyler, looking at the amber fields on its cover, and she said, “no silly, it’s a love story, a love tragedy, or something like that, and I’m going to watch it at the same time as you are, we’ll synchronize our watches, and then, when it’s over, you’re going to call me.”

And so he watched the movie knowing she was watching it at the very same time as him—they had in fact synchronized their watches and were set to begin exactly at eight o’clock—and he listened to the faraway, detached youngling narrator, detached yet full of wonder, and took in the images, and knew that she was taking them in as well, not just the same, in her way, but taking them in.

“It’s not a love story,” he said to her afterwards.

“There’s love in it.”

“With who, with both of them?”

“Maybe with both of them.”

“I don’t think that’s what it’s about.”

“Well what’s it about?”

“About how beautiful the world is.”

“Every movie and no movie is about that.”

“But you have to admit it’s kind of about that.”

  “There are lots of pretty shots,” she said, “but there’s a story, you know.”

“Well aside from a love story with two men and a woman who pretends one’s her brother, and rejects him, but the other one goes crazy anyhow and they both die in the dirt, what’s it about?”

“Maybe it’s about how beautiful the world is, and how the world destroys a man.”

Alice got her license two weeks later and, to celebrate, she and Tyler went for a drive in her family’s faded blue Chrysler station wagon, first to the McDonalds by the school where they waived to some kids hanging out on the curb, second to the 7-11, where they tried, and failed, to purchase cigarettes, and third to the driving range, where they hit fantastic balls in wonderful parabolas, slicing a little, but good distance, both of them.  He thought he ought to try to teach her how to swing, as he’d seen that before on television, but she already had a good swing, and he could get close to her later, and it wouldn’t have made any sense.  

Afterwards they drove along a high side street, running near a freeway, but cordoned off with tall pine trees and sycamores, and he looked out the window at the full moon hovering there like it always belonged, and listened to the wind passing, and to the sounds within the wind.  They came to a little detour area with parking spaces, which was deserted, and she parked the car.  He took off his seatbelt and kissed her, and she kissed him back, and soon they were tangled in the front seats, Tyler’s leg caught in the console, and she said, “Hold on.”

And he said, “What?”

“Try this,” she said.

“Ok.”

“Here, let’s try this.”

And so it went for several minutes more until Tyler’s pants were down around his ankles, and she said, “There, relax.”

And so he relaxed.

And then she said, “Hmmm.”

“What?” 

“No, it’s just I thought, you know.”

“No, what?”

“Donkey ears,” she said.

“Those are may ears,” he said.

“I know, and so all the girls always said . . .”

“What did they say?”

“Don’t be so obtuse.  You don’t have a donkey dick.  That’s all.  You have a regular sized dick.”

“How do you know what’s regular sized?”

“Oh come on.  I just know.  Regular’s not bad.  So you don’t have a donkey dick.”

“Were you only spending all this time with me because you thought I had a donkey dick?”

“Of course not.  I just thought, also, you know, you just had one.”

He rolled down the window and spat.  “Why are you rolling down the window and spitting?” She said.  “Why aren’t you, you know . . .” she looked down.  “I guess you don’t feel like it.”

“I wrote poetry for you,” he said.

“Well that’s sweet,” she said.  “I wish I hadn’t mentioned it, you know.  I shouldn’t have mentioned it.  I didn’t even mean to . . .”

“It’s probably—” he said.

“—it’s just so regular,” she said, “like there isn’t anything wrong with you.  That there isn’t anything wrong with you.  You’re just regular you, is what I’m saying.”

“I heard you,” he said, “the first time.”

They sat for awhile.  She slipped her sweater back on.  “Well do you want me to take you home?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

She started the engine.  He thought she might ask, “Are you sure?” but she didn’t, and he felt foolish for expecting that, to think she would keep offering.  “Well,” he thought, “maybe this will blow over,” as though it weren’t ultimately up to him whether it would.  But maybe she would hold this against him, as much as he would hold it against her, he thought.  He wasn’t ready to turn things back around, but he thought, maybe in a day or two he would be, and he wondered if, during that time, she would grow stubborn and hard towards him.  He had to be ready to drop it though, or else he might lose his sense of pride.  People had written books about that, and it was true.  They drove down the access road, which wound through the forest, and Tyler thought, what a nice night it was, and how impervious the night was to all that had happened in Alice’s car.  He heard an owl, and watched a plane blink its way through a smattering of stars.  

“Well,” she said, “it’s still early.  Do you want to go anywhere else?”

“I am kind of hungry,” he said.

So they drove back to the McDonalds, and Alice parked the Chrysler in the parking lot, and they got out, and saw all the kids sitting outside on the curb with their bags of McDonalds.  The management only half-heartedly went over and told them to leave every couple hours or so, since they were paying customers, and the McDonalds, which was only a couple blocks from the high school, was so popular with students.  Tyler knew some of these kids well enough that it made sense to go over and talk to them.  Alice knew some of the same kids, and some different ones.  “Let’s go over and talk,” said Tyler.

“Of course,” she said. She slammed the door.

As they walked, he reached out for her hand.