A Little Help

Moments Aren't Returnable

Photo by John on Unsplash

Ernest Laggio, Ern, Big Ern, E Dog the Niteway Logistics Company Softball King, thought maybe he was finally getting that nap. Thought he was in it, that dimensional moment when one can almost hear themselves starting to snore.

The knock started as ignorable, but somehow escalated to incessant.

You could almost imagine a machine doing the knocking, a robotic lathe with a stuck component  repeating the programmed process until a human addressed it.

Ernest swung his thick legs from a sofa that would have been discarded years ago had it not conformed perfectly to his resting body, stepped down and turned his reading glasses into multiple shards of unsalvageable plastic, lower lip power spit a fuck, then opened his diaphragm and said, in one word, “Hangoncocksuckit.”

***

There were many things in Asten Codden’s life that might have made you bite your lip and say, with a whine “But he’s just a little boy.” 

Had you, on July 23rd, only witnessed a closeup of an enraged Ernest Laggio ripping his door open as though the interior of his home was on fire and yelling at Asten, you might have admonished Mr. Laggio with those exact words, “he’s just a little boy” and quite possibly added some profanity of your own.

Asten was too young to have put together all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, much less put together the pieces of what he had witnessed and what he was attempting to do.

For the record, Asten didn’t have any jigsaw puzzles at home. The home he lived in was so light on toys and craft supplies for a child that on a first visit you may have assumed no children lived in the home, which was a written observation made by one of the multiple CPS officers who visited.

On this afternoon of July 23rd, Asten was not in his home, he was doing what had come to be termed a chore. 

The chore consisted of taking a garbage bag out into the streets and finding as many returnable bottles as he could and returning them home.

It should be noted that an abnormally large haul of bottles brought rare praise, so Asten had been conditioned to believe that picking discarded things up off the ground was a good thing.

***

There would be a few things that Ernest Laggio remembered forever, things that he would repeat to the therapist he met with, a therapist suggested if not demanded by his immediate superior at Niteway.

One was that when Ernest pulled the door open like he was in a hinge snapping contest and screamed before he realized the knocker was a child, that the child didn’t flinch.

Ernest had almost flinched himself from the decibels of his voice echoing in his faux marble foyer.

***

Asten only had four cans and one bottle in his bag when he turned back down onto Archdale.

He knew there would be fewer discarded bottles on a residential street, but it was late enough in the afternoon that people had begun to put their trash on the curb and that opened the possibility that there were returnables, though Asten was just barely tall enough to see over the tops of the cans.

Before he could approach a can, Asten saw one of his most favorite things of his young life: A motorcycle.

The motorcycle was going fast. Asten didn’t yet have a concept of speed, but he knew he liked things that moved fast, whether they were vehicles or bugs that scurried away from his hand when he reached in garbage cans.

This motorcycle was going very fast. Asten stopped moving, content for the moment to watch the motorcycle zoom past him. He thought for a brief second that he might wave at the man on the motorcycle, and as he had that thought the motorcycle no longer zoomed.

The motorcycle somehow fell, and began to slide.

It slid fast, though Asten thought the motorcycle wasn't supposed to be sliding.

Where there once had been a cool zoom sound, there was just a hissing, like the night his father fell asleep boiling water for cheesy noodles and melted the pan to the stove.

The motorcycle and the person on it slid past Asten, and slid right up onto a lawn with garbage on it.

The garbage –not in black receptacles, but piled up–separated the man from the motorcycle and they both stopped.

Hurt was a concept that Asten wasn’t sure about. He heard the word in different ways, didn’t understand all of them. 

But he knew, somehow, so very vaguely, that hurt and help were related.

And inside the little boy that was Asten Codden, there was this thing– Ernest Laggio could have told Asten Codden that the word was energy, coupled with a few more complex terms– that made Asten Codden want to help.

***

It was easy for Big Ern to look over the head of the little boy on his porch. The boy didn’t come up to his belt, and Ernie told the therapist he didn’t even remember making eye contact.

He remembered first that he saw discarded aluminum siding strewn all about Don Huigwye’s lawn and out into the street.

Don wouldn’t have done that, so Ernest Laggio’s first thought was teenage pranksters.

He told the therapist that the word prank was in his mind, that it only made sense that some delinquent would have scattered Don’s trash.

***

Like all little boys, Asten Codden wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers. But he did. Well, he didn’t say much, but they talked to him.

He had unruly brown hair with just enough curl to make it look messier than it already was, perpetually dirty clothing and a lower lip that pouted for him, as though there was a small facial muscle missing.

Today he would have to talk to a stranger.

He knew he couldn’t say the word accident, and he didn’t know how to describe what had happened without that big word.

Asten was not a child who had been listened to, and in the absence of that listening he didn’t grasp the concept of being believed.

Though he couldn’t put this real life puzzle together in words, somehow Asten needed to help the motorcycle man, and to do that he needed to be believed. 

Asten made a few decisions, all at once.

***

You hear people say that something seemed like a bad dream. Ernest Laggio never got that feeling. He knew it was real, because he had woken up, and what kind of twisted dream would have Don Huigwye’s old garage aluminum siding in it?

It was all real. 

Strange, stranger than Ernie could imagine, but very much real, unforgettable and achingly regrettable life.

The entire episode was littered with what ifs, and what if nots, and the therapist, Bradleigh Pelzman, worked at getting Ernest to discard those thoughts.

“That child will understand one day what a truly odd an unfortunate incident it was,” Pelzman would say.

Ernest Laggio would wear his guilt like a too tight sweater for a time, though that sweater would have strangled him if not for the therapist.

Ernest Laggio had looked down, and seen paint on his porch. At his first therapist visit he wanted  very much for Bradleigh Pelzman to believe he thought it was paint.

Paint, you know, from a prank.

Ernest’s thick, strong arms struck down.

He had realized it was a child on his porch and told his brain to stop swearing, but somehow his big, softball home run hitting arms didn’t get the message in time.

***

Asten Codden just wanted to help. He was willing to talk to a stranger to do so. 

He wasn’t sure he had made the right decision by knocking on a stranger’s door, but he had seen a light in the window, the light Ernest Laggio had been reading by before his nap began to take over.

Asten had wanted to prove that there was an accident, that a man, a motorcycle man, needed help.

***

On therapist visit number four, Big Ern was still apologizing for vomiting on the carpeting in therapist visit number one.

Bradleigh Pelzman thought it showed great self-awareness and a clear path toward healing, that Ernest Laggio had vomited not from the memory of the sight of a man’s severed hand bleeding all over his porch, but from his own act of breaking a little boy’s wrist, slapping what he thought was a prank out of Asten Codden’s hand.

***

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