Call It in the Air by Ed Pavlić

Author:Ed Pavlić
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions

Salida, CO. Michael tells me he won a full scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago & so he joined the Navy and went to Vietnam. By the time we talked he’d long been a successful jeweler and maker of hot-air balloon ornaments out of recycled, burnt-out light bulbs. He called that business “Balloonatics.” A few years later, he’d be swept up in a child sexual abuse scandal and legal case that seemed patently false—economically motivated, ridiculous—to me and everyone who knew him. In the end it destroyed him, took everything but his talent & his strange and quirky dignity. About the case Michael told me, “look, I’m weird. But I’m not that weird.” By 2020, Michael’s been dead for a number of years. On his grave and on my soul, I’d have left my little children with him any day. And he loved my sister in a real and truly imperfect way, unlike anyone else.

Soon after my sister’s death. I asked Michael about you, Kate.

He said: “Your sister could be like a ray of sun come through the clouds. The light alive in a July blizzard blown up off the Sangre de Christo.” He says, “when I got back from Vietnam, I lived in a houseboat in Sausalito. It could be bright and sunny and, in minutes, without warning, a fog could roll in that’d make you wonder if you were standing and trying to lie down, or lying and trying to stand up. You’d blink and all of a sudden, you don’t know if it’s day or night? Summer or winter? Your sister could be like that. Above all, we were all awed by her truly strange talent and her perfect little body.” That’s what he said.

And he said: “I’d worked all day every day at my bench through most of three marriages. I’d be on my bench in the store and Kate’d pass by the open door. She’d always flash me something or other and I’d say to myself: ‘Shit, Michael, no matter what you tell yourself, this does beat floating face down in the Mekong Delta.’”

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