I'll say more about the "truth" of fiction
versus the "truth" of nonfiction in a later post. For now,
allow me to present you with what is perhaps my best known piece of
creative nonfiction, a story called "Winter Count, 1964." It
originally appeared in Brevity, a wonderful zine of
short creative nonfiction. After that, the story was reprinted in the
magazine that the great editor Lee Gutkind' publishes, Creative
Nonfiction, arguably the most respected and best
known of the growing number of magazines that are devoted to the
genre. From there, "Winter Count, 1964" was reprinted
in the popular reader for college composition courses, Literature: The
Human Experience (Reading and Writing). So "Winter
Count, 1964" has led a good life in print so far, I'm
delighted to say. The title of the story refers to the histories or calendars
in which events were recorded by pictures, or pictographs, with one
picture for a memorable event that occurred in a given year. Such
calendars were kept by citizens of some of the nations that arose
on the great plains of North America, such as the Lakota Sioux (If you're
interested in finding out more about winter counts, The Smithsonian Institution
has created a lovely exhibit about them, which you can find at <http://wintercounts.si.edu/index.html>). At
any rate, here's "Winter Count, 1964" as it originally
appeared in Issue 19 of Brevity:
Winter
Count, 1964
By Stuart Lishan
When Sherri Luna rammed Jerry Kruger’s crew cut head into the handball court wall at Kester Avenue Elementary School on February 15, 1964, I knew she loved him, a swirling, butch, embarrassed sort of love that denied itself even as it was expressed. She loved him the way a 9-year-old, beefy-ankled, white-socked, scuffed-up saddle-shoed, Valley girl chicana loves a drawly, red-necked, red-haired, red-freckled, cracker son of a Pentecostal preacher from Oklahoma who wouldn’t let his kid slow dance in Miss Arlington’s A4 class, not because Miss Arlington was a wafer-thin woman with a 2-foot-high beehive hairdo that made her look like an alien from some planet of white-porcelain doll people with blood-red lips and fingernails long and sharp as steak knives, but because Jerry’s preacher pa didn’t believe 9-year-olds, much less anybody, should be cradling one another’s bodies in their arms and breathing softly on their necks as they swayed to music. Nosiree, Sherri Luna didn’t love Jerry that way, the slow dance, fandango way, where holding someone close is as sweet and natural as lying on your back in the back yard watching the clouds and letting the sunlight kiss your cheek, but she loved him just the same. I knew it when I first saw her rub her body up against Jerry’s blue jeans as she slugged him in the arm by the water fountain the first day he came to class that winter. Plus, she didn’t want to slow dance, not because she didn’t believe in it, but because she was constitutionally against any request that curled out of Miss Arlington’s pouty lips.
“Just do it, honey.”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No, I said!”
So, “Ka-Chunk,” went Jerry’s head, cradled in Sherri’s gentle headlock when Miss Arlington was putting a scratchy waltz on the mono record player that Ricky LaConte had lugged out onto the playground after lunch. Ricky, a fat kid who liked to have us punch his stomach in the boys’ room until his bubbly flesh was filled with blotches like lesions, liked to do such favors, his arm shooting up like a rocket ship out of its socket every time Miss Arlington asked with those pouty lips just who would like to do this or that for her. And that’s a sort of love, too, don’t get me wrong, only it wasn’t Sherri Luna’s sort of love. She needed to touch the someone she loved, even if she didn’t understand what the yearning in her heart was asking her 9-year-old body to do.
So, “Ka-Chunk.”
I was breathing my face into Melinda Coates’ blond ringlets, getting hairs twisted in my glasses’ hinges and imagining myself in heaven and then feeling embarrassed for even thinking such a slack-brained thing as that when I heard it.
“Ka-Chunk,” echoing into the mauve plastic handball court wall that rose out of the blacktop playground surrounded by bungalows, chain-link fence, and honeysuckle rustling in the winter breeze like our breaths on one another’s necks as we danced.
“Ka-Chunk.”
“That was fun,” Jerry laughed. “Do it again,” with again drawled out so long, so slow, that it slobbered and dribbled out of his mouth into a dopey-grinned, three-syllabled, shrieky a-gaaa-in.
“Do it a-gaaa-in.”
Poor Ricky. He was right next to me, swaying sort of sad-like, out of time and out of step with Louise Dolan. He wanted to be in that headlock, too, I guess. Maybe he thought that the bumps on his forehead would go with the blotches on his stomach. I don’t know, but I know this. Sheri would have none of him. Ricky wasn’t Jerry in any way, shape, or form, and Sherri Luna loved Jerry. That was that, end of the story. We were dancing that Strauss waltz you hear in 2001 when the ship docks with the space station, and I swear I saw her gently bend over as pretty as you please and nibble out a tongue-licked hickey on that sun-burnt, freckly red neck of his when she thought no one was looking. We stared and stared. Not even the creamy touch of Melinda Coates could keep me from it. No one in Miss Arlington’s A4 class in 1964 had ever seen such a thing.
And then she counted to three. And then she did it again.
And then she did it again. And I swear she didn’t miss a beat, not a one, not a single one.
When Sherri Luna rammed Jerry Kruger’s crew cut head into the handball court wall at Kester Avenue Elementary School on February 15, 1964, I knew she loved him, a swirling, butch, embarrassed sort of love that denied itself even as it was expressed. She loved him the way a 9-year-old, beefy-ankled, white-socked, scuffed-up saddle-shoed, Valley girl chicana loves a drawly, red-necked, red-haired, red-freckled, cracker son of a Pentecostal preacher from Oklahoma who wouldn’t let his kid slow dance in Miss Arlington’s A4 class, not because Miss Arlington was a wafer-thin woman with a 2-foot-high beehive hairdo that made her look like an alien from some planet of white-porcelain doll people with blood-red lips and fingernails long and sharp as steak knives, but because Jerry’s preacher pa didn’t believe 9-year-olds, much less anybody, should be cradling one another’s bodies in their arms and breathing softly on their necks as they swayed to music. Nosiree, Sherri Luna didn’t love Jerry that way, the slow dance, fandango way, where holding someone close is as sweet and natural as lying on your back in the back yard watching the clouds and letting the sunlight kiss your cheek, but she loved him just the same. I knew it when I first saw her rub her body up against Jerry’s blue jeans as she slugged him in the arm by the water fountain the first day he came to class that winter. Plus, she didn’t want to slow dance, not because she didn’t believe in it, but because she was constitutionally against any request that curled out of Miss Arlington’s pouty lips.
“Just do it, honey.”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No, I said!”
So, “Ka-Chunk,” went Jerry’s head, cradled in Sherri’s gentle headlock when Miss Arlington was putting a scratchy waltz on the mono record player that Ricky LaConte had lugged out onto the playground after lunch. Ricky, a fat kid who liked to have us punch his stomach in the boys’ room until his bubbly flesh was filled with blotches like lesions, liked to do such favors, his arm shooting up like a rocket ship out of its socket every time Miss Arlington asked with those pouty lips just who would like to do this or that for her. And that’s a sort of love, too, don’t get me wrong, only it wasn’t Sherri Luna’s sort of love. She needed to touch the someone she loved, even if she didn’t understand what the yearning in her heart was asking her 9-year-old body to do.
So, “Ka-Chunk.”
I was breathing my face into Melinda Coates’ blond ringlets, getting hairs twisted in my glasses’ hinges and imagining myself in heaven and then feeling embarrassed for even thinking such a slack-brained thing as that when I heard it.
“Ka-Chunk,” echoing into the mauve plastic handball court wall that rose out of the blacktop playground surrounded by bungalows, chain-link fence, and honeysuckle rustling in the winter breeze like our breaths on one another’s necks as we danced.
“Ka-Chunk.”
“That was fun,” Jerry laughed. “Do it again,” with again drawled out so long, so slow, that it slobbered and dribbled out of his mouth into a dopey-grinned, three-syllabled, shrieky a-gaaa-in.
“Do it a-gaaa-in.”
Poor Ricky. He was right next to me, swaying sort of sad-like, out of time and out of step with Louise Dolan. He wanted to be in that headlock, too, I guess. Maybe he thought that the bumps on his forehead would go with the blotches on his stomach. I don’t know, but I know this. Sheri would have none of him. Ricky wasn’t Jerry in any way, shape, or form, and Sherri Luna loved Jerry. That was that, end of the story. We were dancing that Strauss waltz you hear in 2001 when the ship docks with the space station, and I swear I saw her gently bend over as pretty as you please and nibble out a tongue-licked hickey on that sun-burnt, freckly red neck of his when she thought no one was looking. We stared and stared. Not even the creamy touch of Melinda Coates could keep me from it. No one in Miss Arlington’s A4 class in 1964 had ever seen such a thing.
And then she counted to three. And then she did it again.
And then she did it again. And I swear she didn’t miss a beat, not a one, not a single one.
***
I had a vague idea, which I still
hold, of writing other winter count stories, for other years of my
life. "Winter Count, 1964" is the only one I've finished so
far. Novels, poems, and other writing projects have intervened have kept
me from returning to this idea, but I still hold hope. I'll keep you
posted if other winter count stories arise. In the meantime,
I hope you've enjoyed this one. Until next time,
Be well and write well.
SL
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