The Diamond Explorer

Prologue
Malcolm

The white house on the prairie was my first house. It remains the site of my childhood dreams.
I loved the sunny, windswept days. I remember when the warm sweeping breeze carried the wispy clouds across the blue sky, a vast backdrop for planes and birds. I remember when the clouds, in the arms of the mighty wind, dared to block out the shine of the sun and showed me what courage can do.
I remember my father and me, him a taller and straighter version of me, and me a smaller, rounder version of him, on the John Deere riding mower. He’s seated behind, supporting me. The steering wheel is a moving thing pressed against my chest as I lean on him.
Each time we looked across the stretch of the prairie, the uncut grass bending and moving like waves, the tall blades, proud and green on one side, pale and shy on the other, we’d both release the air in our chests at once. It was our breathing place, the Minnesota prairie.
It seems now that all those days stored the air I’d need to pull me through all the moments to come when my breath was in danger of stopping.
How many times have I imagined my father and me elsewhere?
As we mowed, I pretended that we were on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Father and I fishing for sharks, parched with thirst, searching the map in our hearts for traces of home.
Home was an island that could not be found on a map, an invisible speck on the stretch of the horizon, that clean line of sky and sea. The rainbows of light leaping off the water.
I still feel the warmth of his chest against my head. Eyes closed in pretend slumber, I’d thump my head into the flesh and bone of the man who was my father. My small hands held fast to the round muscles on his arms and moved when they moved. We were a song then, the two of us together, caught up in the rhythm and melody of the sky and the earth and all that lived in between them.
A memory:
My father and I are mowing into the stretch of prairie grass, weeds and flowers growing in wild bounty.
“Why do you cut the grass around the house first?”
“So that I can kill all the ticks in the grass, so they can’t get you when you come out to play,” my father answers me.
When my father talks to me, he slows time. His words melt into each other like many-­colored liquids meeting, melding, merging.
I am once again on a boat in the flow of his words; my father becomes the timeless ocean, home to the sharks, the hopes of my fishing line, my child’s heart.
He gestures toward the green underneath us. “The lawn mower is very strong. Its metal blades move in a circle. The ticks will try to hold on to the grass, but they can’t. There’s a tornado made of metal above them.”
I imagine myself as a tick.
I’d be a cute tick. I’d wear a tuxedo. My eyes would be huge. My antennas short. My teeth would be sharp as vampire fangs.
I let air into my mouth and swoosh it around like mouthwash. I open one side of my mouth and pretend a fan is blowing at me. My top teeth chomp down on my bottom. My own arms are holding, holding, holding fast to the blades of grass that are my father’s arms. The whorl of storm, wind and metal, makes me scream from fear, “Ahhhhhhyahhhhhhhh!”
I laugh.
“What’s so funny?” my father wants to know.
“Nothing,” I say.
Later, I will overhear my father tell Fong, my only brother, “Malcolm and I mowed the grass short around the house today. The worst thing would be if someone didn’t like us and decided to set fire to the grass.” I scrunch my nose at the smell of burning grass.
I breathe in. Now, though, the air smells like grass that’s just come out of the washing machine. Still damp and full of the scent of clean.
A single monarch butterfly, with its wide wings, flies around us and lands on the tip of a fuzzy-­leaf flowering plant. I watch as it nuzzles into the orange blooms.
I tell my father, “I am ready to get off the lawn mower.”
On the soft carpet of the freshly cut grass, I imagine I am a monarch butterfly. I spread my arms wide on either side. I run as fast as I can in the blue flip-­flops on my feet. I curl my toes into the soft plastic of my shoes. They don’t fall off, and together we leave the ground behind, the mowed grass trails, our bit of land, and we fly past the tops of the birch and aspen trees, higher and higher, until we are in the sky.
I become a great American bald eagle. I’m soaring now, looking down with my laser eyes, trying to see frightened rabbits, the small field mice hiding in the clumps of grass, the rise of the molehills that dot the prairie. I am hungry. My talons are ready. My fingers curl in. I wish my mom hadn’t cut my nails. I blow an angry breath into the air. I feel my force against the wind. I soar. I coast. I calm down.
I am an airplane approaching a runway. I feel my wheels tumble against the pavement. I slow, slow, slow, put a brake on my heart, until everything stops. I sway forward but I don’t fall. My breathing is hollow, my eyes are closed, and I feel the sun and the wind heating and cooling me in turn, together, over and over again.
My father’s voice calls out to me, “Malcolm, come back to me!”
The white house on the prairie—­which, up close, is now faded, with peeling paint showing the gray wood underneath—­was the house of my beginning. A house of play. A house of possibility. A house where I could leave and always hear the voices of people who love me calling for my return.