Narrows.
The truck slams up against the slate wall on the south side of the road and shaves off a couple hundred pounds of black stone, stratified like stacked knives all through this short corridor, lost now under the robotic efficacy of the new highway perched 300 feet over it’s shoulder.
Paul eases back into his blue vinyl seat. The truck slows down and stops, and Paul takes a long slow drag off his Pall Mall, the Peterbilt just stuck in the middle of the road, steam clicking, rumbling on idle. On the radio, Roger Miller starts up: “Trailers for sale or rent . . .”
The truck’s wasted. The slate wall pulled off a fender, the mirrors, and one wheel. But it was a cheap truck anyway—company too cheap to even wash them once a week. Paul eyeballs the damage for a minute, grey navy shirt untucked over stiff jeans that hang off his ample ass and cup his heels in the red dirt. He flicks his cigarette out into space, grabs the remaining mirror brace and hauls himself up into the cab. He flips on the emergency lights, drives the truck 13 miles an hour all the way to the plant in Sylacauga, leaving me ghosted and whisper thin on the side of the road.
The stripper whispers, “Oh my,” and I snap back into now.
My uncle’s disembodied head floats over his skinny band-aid colored blanket. It looks like he’s digging the music and I think maybe there is some kind of wisdom in it, in the unmindful musical program and the picture-perfect practice-run in the other room, when I catch my Uncle’s eye.
The tears rimming his red eyes are not evidence of a sad acceptance or a grave resolution or even of a merciful stroke-induced retarded fugue.
He’s laughing.
He’s looking at me and he’s fucking laughing and I look back at him and I realize that he is trapped in there, that HE is in there in that retarded body, unable to crack a joke, unable to say a Goddam thing and he knows I’m wanting to blow my brains out from embarrassment and there he is stoned on Methadone, shrunk to next to nothing, with long lost family kicking themselves in the ass to try and make him feel better and his wife, Lucky, the waitress-cum-stripper-cum-illuminated high heel cash register pilferer-cum-do-rag-mummer already illustrating his funeral and his sister has the audacity to sing “I’ll Fly Away”? It is the very essence, the nectar, of the backwater Tobacco Road banjo hallelujah I ran away from so many years before. And he knows it and it’s killing him.
I walk quickly out of the room, out into the gallery. I cry fast and hard and get it out of the way and Lucky comes out and she starts to hug me but I step out of it, indolent and guilty, rigid with horror.
Lucky rubs her arms, the spent hug running its course, and looks around at something to pull us out of it. I feel gigantic in the rickety room next to her, wipe my eyes on my sleeve and bravely walk back into the boxcar room where he’s laid up.
The automatic methadone drip’s done its trick. He’s asleep, his scruffy balloon of a head perched over the scrawny wrinkles in the blanket where his arms and legs are splayed out and useless. One of the John Waynes from the box set I sent him is muted on the TV and everyone stares into the old west.
My eyes wander along a crack that runs out from behind the TV along the unfinished cement walls to the unfinished window casings and the gaps in their settings that have never been filled or mudded over, down to the flimsy nightstand where his CPAP machine is guarded by amber bottles and a wad of clear plastic bags full of pills.
As I’m staring at the ribbed, milky hose that curls out of the CPAP unit, a wasp climbs up the backside. It rests there, feet stabbed into the ribs of the hose, wings twitching a slow semaphore of menace.
“I swear,” Lucky says to nobody, hunched down into her bony arms, elbows cupped in either hand, staring off into the achromatic chaparral of 1953, “this room. I could reach out and touch both sides.”
###
About the Author
Bull Garlington is an author and syndicated humor columnist whose work appears in various literary magazines, including Slab, Bathhouse, and the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. He was the humor columnist for Chicago Parenting, New York Parenting, Michiana Parent, Tulsa Parent, Birmingham Parent, and Carolina Parent. He is co-author of the popular foodie compendium, The Beat Cop’s Guide to Chicago Eats. Garlington’s features have appeared in newspapers and magazines across the nation since 1989; he won the Parenting Media Association’s Silver Award for best humor article in 2012. His book, Death by Children, was a 2013 book of the year finalist for the Midwest Publishers Association, and was named 2013 Humor Book of the Year by the prestigious Industry standard, ForeWord Reviews.
Other books and stories by this author
Bullfighter
Largemouth Bass
Many Boats on the Night Ocean
Reliquary
Gone
Jenny’s Parents Are Cool
Out
Birdhouse
Lucky Jim
Chaste
The Beat Cop’s Guide to Chicago Eats (with Sgt. David Haynes)
Death by Children–I Had Kids so You Don’t Have To!
Connect with Bull Garlington
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