First story... I know it's long, big thanks to everyone who takes the time to give it a read. Any sort of feed back is greatly appreciated, and I will do my best to read and critique you all's work as well. Cheers, SoCo
The first thing that I remember is I drove past a bird on a telephone wire. I needed some sort of medicine to get me by because I had cabin fever from going from little room to little car to little broke souvenir shop every time the sun woke up until it fell asleep. And it was when I began my few-hour exodus from the town when I saw him; the insane-est little bird, just standing there on the telephone wire and doing nothing at all. The sun was going away now. It was sinking into the sea, streaking the sky with its fingerprints as it fell. At the souvenir shop we used to sell this brochure. Like a traveler’s guide to tell all of the happy tourists what they oughta look at. It had a page titled “Nightlife”. What a fucking tragedy.
Here is your Nightlife. When it gets dark in our little town, when you’re driving over crevices and potholes on Sailor Street, on the very edge of our little slice of the state, in our smaller slice of the world, when the street lights are like scrap parts stolen out of ghost towns, it doesn’t matter how many girls you kissed last week.
You are always an unlucky bastard. The buildings are crumbling all the time even if you can’t see it happening. They line the street like a wall, little shops with old wrinkled shopkeepers and a few overworked employees each, and the little side street offshoots with their broken cobblestones, half covered by pavement and dirt, not wide enough for two cars, hide the poor old one-story houses of the people who live there.
Your suspension is shaking, always feels about to collapse. You are always low on gas. The one gas station in the whole town is owned by a greedy grit who has a monopoly on the market; you always have to do the math to see if your paycheck will cover the cost of driving anywhere. You could find a twenty on the sidewalk and your luck is still on the god damn down and out.
It’s an aura that no one can understand looking backwards, or reading out of words on print. People say that letters on pages can give you feelings, like you were there, but they can’t. That’s why when I write things like this I put them on plain sheets of notebook paper that I put in a box with a lock on the shelf above my closet; because my stories are just for me and useless for anybody else.
I’m not a writer type or anything, I don’t have messy hair or glasses and I don’t just sit by myself and hide from the world and write on my walls, I just like to jot down some thoughts now and then. Some stories sometimes. Like mementos or something.
My lips were dry. The Styrofoam cup sat shaking in the console cup holder, and the little pond of black coffee an inch below the lip rippled. It shuddered and sloshed. I was holding a point-blank stare at the fog through the windshield and I didn’t even feel it when it as it splashed on my jeans. I guess your brain forgets to tell you about some things.
It’s true what they say, the air is thicker when you’re at sea-level. Even with no fog. But this night had fog, the kind that causes catastrophic car crashes. This fog, it soaked the darkness like it had already consumed the rest of the world; like everything was underwater. Nights like this, you feel like something really important is happening. You feel like there’s something out there that’s not quite real. It’s trying to reach your soul—doesn’t quite get there.
I had my back hunched, leaning forward and squeezing my eyes almost shut like it might help me see the road ahead; like maybe it might give me some sort of x-ray vision. I drove past Erik’s Tavern. The shingles had been recently repainted; they used to be orange, now they’re bright red. There is a fake palm tree outside the bar’s entrance that might be the most out-of-place looking thing in the world. Maybe the place will close down soon. I wouldn’t care. A few of my friends might.
Here’s a whole other unwritten story, one that I’m just remembering—two weeks ago, in the bar, Ruse got slapped by a girl. They sat on bar stools right beside each other. She was drunk, but not drunk enough to go home with him. Her slap missed his face, hit him blunt in the neck. It didn’t even make a sound. But his face flushed like the slap had landed square after all, and no hesitation he hit her right in the temple, balled up fist and everything. Knocked her unconscious, slumped right on the wooden bar counter, and she slid off her stool and onto the floor like a bird smacked on a window. We ran like hell out to my truck, and I guess no one cared to call the cops. Funny that I don’t even take note of those kinds of things anymore.
It was late. The bars had closed and the drunks had stumbled home. I drove past the back of the wooden sign that welcomes in the tourists and vacationers might come if everyone forgets about Disneyland and Coney Island. The sign just screams for attention, it might as well say “We are quaint. We are serene. We are down to earth. We’re begging you to please come again soon”. Our town fronts as a getaway. What a joke. I had officially left it behind me. I was on the state highway now. Around town we just call it the stayway. If you follow it long enough it won’t be dirt any more, and if you keep going on the paved part for long enough, you might just reach an actual city. My pickup truck must have looked like a dirty white ghost, spinning sad vinyls down that god-forsaken road alongside the sea. It was like a still shot out of some old motion picture that I was inside, and I could hear that soundtrack playing perfectly to the moment. Time could freeze like a photo at any moment, and sit in God’s dark room and develop, and then resume again and no one would ever know. He could place it in a photo album of random moments—his children doing things that He loves and things He hates.
There was no wind, no sounds except from the radio. Smooth lullaby jazz guitar strings were plucking, and a lonesome voice. I knew the song. My little highschool brother loves it. He plays it on repeat in his room. I’ve heard it through the walls when I visit home. But that night, cruising that forlorn street, I swear I felt it on my skin. Like the sound waves were real physical things brushing against my arms and my neck.
These death-row murderers
Eat their steaks and smoke
Their cigarettes
But baby I would
Stand against that pole
Without no last wishes
Cause I heard
You love somebody else
You love someone else, yeah.
I closed my eyes for a second and let my spine shiver. The background singers howled their laments into their studio microphones. When I opened them back up, my whole body seized, and my foot stomped the brakes. A silhouette of a man had stumbled his way onto the road. He held up a limp hand as if to stop my screeching pickup from gaining any more ground.
Not without a couple stiff jerks, my truck stopped about thirty feet away from the man. He waltzed up to my passenger side window, and when I rolled it down, I recognized him.
- Ford?
Ford smiled out of the corner of his mouth. His eyes drowsily spanned from the dusty dashboard to the beer-stained backseat. His black hair lay like strings down his forehead. The nostrils of his little pig nose flared, slowly, lazily.
- You heard the good news?
- Good news?
- Jesus Christ came down, down from heav’n. He’ll save your sins. If you want to, if you want to let’im in.
- Your humor is fucked up.
The lock on my passenger side door is broken. Ford slammed his fingers haphazardly into the handle and opened the door. He crawled like a dead man onto the seat.
- Where you drivin’?
- Out.
- Well I’m comin’.
We rode in silence past the wharf, and by the fishermen’s hut. The people in the town live on fish and bread, and the fishermen only drink beer brewed in their own sheds and basements. My uncle was one of them, with the necessary beard, scraggly orange and gray hairs. He carved me a wooden tackle box for my sixth birthday that sat under the back seat of my truck, filled with old stamps and a fifth of Vintage Jameson Whiskey. That bottle cost me almost fifty dollars. I was saving it for a day when I would come across someone who I would really want to impress, and he would ask me to have a drink with him. I was never sure who it would be. Some sad celebrity? God, maybe. My hopes were always higher than they should have been. God would laugh at me. I think He probably doesn’t drink anymore, probably got sick of it a long time ago anyhow.
I looked out on the sea through the right-side window that Ford was resting his head on. It was a giant black lagoon underneath the fog, and I thought that I might see all of the fisherman who had died in those waters, and they might rise up and float up to heaven. I expected my mind to start playing tricks on me, like I was in a dream, or under hypnosis, but my eyes just followed the shoreline. They traced its jagged edges, and stayed sharply tuned to the water flickering in and out of the sand and rocks like dying flames against the coast. I almost wanted to park, climb down the short cliffs, and float out in the ocean, my back submerged in the cold salt water.
I knew the road well. It went straight ahead without the slightest of curves for another twenty or so miles. I stared at Ford until he became vaguely aware of me.
- What were you doing out here?
He picked up his head up off the window.
- Drowning.
He breathed out heavily and laughed.
- In Colt Forty-Five.
I kept looking out at the ocean. I felt like maybe I was luckier than I thought I was. The song that played on the radio now was a folk song, with a banjo strumming out chaotic chants. The voice of the singer quivered as it weaved in and out of the words he had arranged. The lyrics were just as miserable as the last one.
We floated right down the river
On a raft we built with silk and string
And when the village people mourn
I think I’m gonna sing
Oh how all, oh how all
Oh how we were sinking
Oh how we left, oh how
We left our debts all to our children
When the road curved away from the ocean, the fog began to lift, became more like a mist. The world seemed much clearer than before; so clear that it seemed odd to me that it could ever dance around and cloud up and confuse people the way that it does. There was gum of the sole of my right shoe and it stuck to the gas pedal as I pressed it down. It crossed my mind that maybe it would stick my foot there completely and the truck would just keep going faster and faster until I could not control it any longer and I would crash and explode into a giant inferno, all before Ford’s drunk ass would notice a thing. The thought was stupid and impossible. I looked at Ford again.
- Girl problems?
He was motionless; limp against the window.
- What?
- Why you were drinking. A girl?
- Oh, uh.
His head picked up just slightly, like it was a puppet on a string, and it laughed. I remember the laugh seemed both shrill and low. Drunken, but piercing.
- Yep. Girl problems.
- Shir’?
- Yep.
The road went on and on and we were quiet for maybe ten minutes with the radio still only playing sad songs. I imagined the guy picking the songs, up on a hill in a tower, probably. He must be lonely. It would make sense that he would play depressing music. Maybe they hold him prisoner there. Maybe he just likes being lonely.
Ford broke the silence.
- I been thinkin’.
I didn’t respond, I let the melancholy droning of the radio fill the void.
- I think, been thinkin’, I’m convinced there’s people who can tell the future.
- Hm.
- Knowwhat makes me think that?
- No.
- Suicide.
He was very drunk. His eyes wandered from place to place.
- You’re a fuckin’ idiot.
- It makes sense.
- You can’t make a full sentence. You’re stunned.
I could see him trying to concentrate. We drove past Lake City Baptist Church. Lake City does not exist anymore. It was burned to the ground by Indians way back in the frontier days. They had spared the church alone, and it stood there like a monument. I’m not sure if services are ever held there. Ford’s eyes were locked to the glove box like he didn’t know what it was.
- Think you. Would’you kill yerself?
- Uh. I don’t think so.
- Even if things were real bad? If e’erything was jus’ goin’ terrible.
I tried to figure where he could be going with this train of thought. It seemed totally derailed to me.
- No.
- Why?
- Things get worse, things get better. Anyone should have that pretty much figured out if they have any smarts at all.
- See, look at it now, we’re thinkin’ the same damn thing.
He seemed perfectly serious. He spent a moment in his head, looking straight out of the windshield at the lines on the road, trying to formulate his final idea.
- What I’m sayin’ is, there’s lots’a times when guys who’ve plenty’a smarts go and kill ‘emselves. An’ we both said that life goes up and down and gets bad n’ good.
- Yeah.
He was excited. You could hear it his voice and see it in his hands. He was doing his best to annunciate all of his words.
- So what I think is that they tell the future for themselves! They see it’s gonna get real bad and not have enough good, so that’s why they have to, y’know, it’s just not worth it and they know that.
- Cause they see into the future.
- Don’t y’dare tell me that don’t make sense.
I drove faster. I had developed an urge to find a place to spot to stop, to escape this conversation. I kept driving. We would get where we were going soon enough.
Ford was looking at me, I could sense his anticipation.
- Well say somethin’.
- You did a good job finishing your sentences.
- Y’think I’m right?
- Sure. But look, this is my car, and I say we only talk about girls, or just nothing at all.
He looked like he was mulling over his options.
- You got that? Girls, Ford, or you shut the hell up.
He got so quiet I thought he might have had some sort of heart failure and died in his seat. It made me uncomfortable, forced me to say something.
- I scored with that girl who works at Swishers. The barista.
He looked at least a bit interested.
- Th’ bunny with the mermaids ‘nd fish tattooed on the upper half ‘er arm?
- Yeah. That one.
I looked at him, searching for some look of approval, or maybe pride or comradery. He did say she was cute.
- Somethin’ ‘bout that always unsettled me I guess.
- What?
- Her tattoo. The mermaid.
I felt somehow offended. We drove past the cemetery, where all the half-oval gravestones were lined up, all the same, just all with different words and numbers carved into them. Sort of funny to think that all we are can get put all into a couple words and numbers.
My pop’s in there somewhere, and his father. I guess I will meet them there eventually. I’ve been there just once before; it looked much prettier then, in the daytime. A few graves had had flowers then. They would be purple and yellow and arranged as perfectly as you could think. I remember they were so bright. Those ones all seemed more important, the ones with the flowers. You can tell some of the newer ones because they’re some kind of plastic and not stone, people can’t afford the stone ones a lot now. I don’t think I ever want to visit it again, it would remind me of all of the things that are gone that are never going to come back.
- What the hell do you mean?
- Well ya’know, her face—like her mouth open, big ol’ eyes—I always thought she’s drownin’.
- The girl?
- No dum’ass. The mermaid on ‘er arm.
- And that makes you feel strange.
- Well it’s odd t’thinka ‘bout, y’know fish got the gills on their neck to let ‘em breathe underwater.
- Yeah.
- Well mermaids got human necks. So I know they ain’t real but if there’s a mermaid out there like those ones we think about, she’d be a goner if she goes underwater too long.
- She’d drown.
- Yep, like the one on the girl’s arm looks like she’s drownin’.
My neck felt stiff so I swiveled it back and forth a few times. The lights from the streets of our town were like a separate planet, faded in the rear-view mirror. I suppose anything can seem funky and interesting when you get far away enough from it. I was just looking out the window for a sign that would tell me what to say next. Ford was sobering up. That past five minutes his form had held less slack than before to the passenger seat and his words came more easily, made more sense. He talked about how he thought he was maybe an alcoholic. He said that his father told him once that if a man drinks alone, and he isn’t fishing or hunting, then he is either a writer or an alcoholic. Ford would make an awful writer.
We neared the place. The air changed, it smelled different somehow, like it had gotten replaced. It had been maybe forty minutes since I had left my apartment. Ford was feeling awkward, he hadn’t talked in a while. In the light fog, the evergreens silhouetted against the moon like children’s hands making shapes with a sheet and a flashlight. When we came to a fork in the road, I turned left and then made an immediate right onto a little dirt path—probably some hiking trail. My guess is that the tires of my truck have traversed it more than shoes in the past year or so. The place I stopped is a clearing, about a quarter mile down the path. The singer on the radio whispered out mid-verse as I turned off the ignition.
I got an empty bottle, and I swing and I sway
And I dance every day
So I’m running out of air, yeah now
I’m running out of oxygen to—
I felt hopeful. As I walked away from my truck Ford walked beside me, quiet. I looked back, feeling like I was someone else. This other person might look the same way, seeing a truck that looked like a broken down frame, left to rust. This other person figured that the truck had been there for five, maybe even ten years. It seemed to this other person to be the loneliest thing in the world.
Ford felt comfortable enough to speak again.
- What is this place?
- I go here sometimes to unpack my head. I just call it my spot.
- That’s funny. S’what I call this little birthmark.
He pointed to something on the back of his neck, invisible in the darkness. He wore the dumbest grin.
- Weird how words can be like that, huh?
- Yeah Ford. Definitely weird.
I’ve never written about my spot before. It has this crazy thing about it where it always looked haunted. It’s another one of those things that you can’t really put your finger on, or explain it by writing about it. That’s the problem with human language. There’s some things that it just doesn’t quite cover. All I know is, that place is the dead ghost of some sort of ghost hunting convention.
The way it looks is simple enough, there’s a clearing in the evergreens that’s not too big. It’s maybe the size of couple parking spots; only it’s a perfect circle. There’s a wooden picnic table, and a fire pit with a bent metal grate laid slant-ways inside it. Even if the grate was straightened out, it would still be useless because the pit is much bigger than the grate is. Whoever dug the pit had made it far too close to the trees. If you started a fire in that thing you might burn the whole forest down.
Every time I go there I come up with some new theory as to why the place seems so eerie. Most recently, I had decided that the thing about the spot that made it so unnerving was the fact that it is so clearly a place made for camping, but there’s no good place to pitch a tent. What’s more, there’s no place like it anywhere in the area, like most campsites would have. It’s isolated, at the end of an obscure hiking path, as if it’s intended to be the final destination of your quarter-mile hike.
The entire idea is ridiculous.
I sat down on top of the picnic table, and Ford sat down next to me. He was looking up with big eyes at the big blurry moon. I looked up too, and when I did, it felt like the rest of the world had continued to spin on its axis while the picnic table alone remained utterly still.
- Feels lika place they coulda shot the Ex’rcist.
- Yeah, for sure.
- Pretty too, though.
- Yeah.
- Shit like this’ll make y’thinka ‘bout what’s life all about, huh?
- Sure.
- Y’know? Makes y’thinka ‘bout whatcha want now that yer here livin’.
I wondered what the singers on the radio would maybe say if they were here on this table. I wondered what had happened between Ford and Shirley. My head was filled with people other than me. I thought I might as well be a statue on top of the bench forever, just considering other people’s lives, and how they must be so interesting.
- I know what I want. I think you should once you’re older than twenty.
- I guess I’m jealous a’you for that.
- I want to be in a magazine article. That’s what I want. It’ll be for a big magazine. A national one. I want to be featured, and they’ll title it The Success Story from the Small Town.
- Gahdamn, you really do dont’ya?
- And they’ll talk about my shiny Rolex watches and my velour suits and sleek Lambos that I had traded from my old worn flannels, sandals, and paddle boats.
- That’s real clever.
I wasn’t sure why I was talking to him like that, I’ve never been one to want to go on about myself more than maybe a sentence. I still felt as if I was somebody else.
- You know, they don’t make articles about the kids who grew up rich and smart and got richer and smarter. You gotta come from nowhere. You gotta be a good story, or you’re nothing. I just want to be story that people want to read.
- Really clever. Damn.
- Don’t you want to be rich and famous too? I think everyone does.
- I don’t know, don’t really think I’m the type’a guy for all’a that.
- What do you mean?
- Guess I’m sensitive. Y’might not think it. I’m like a writer type only I ain’t good with words.
- So you don’t want to be rich because you’re a faggot.
He laughed, tilting his head back.
- Watch out, I might try’an kiss you.
We both laughed. I popped my knuckles, just to do something with my hands. The coffee I had earlier was making them shake. Ford laid down on the table, and I remained sitting. It was like that for a moment—me looking up at the misty moon and Ford thinking about slithering green Martians or cylinder-tube time machines or God knows what. He sat up again.
- I really did mean it you know.
- What, about kissing me?
- Git bent. No, about how I’m like.
- Okay.
He paused.
- You’ever heard a song that’s so beautiful that y’think your life ain’t ever gonna be the same when it’s over? Like it changes your mind about everything?
- Can’t say so.
- Even one that makes y’feel something that y’think’s gotta more than just music?
- I don’t think so.
- I ain’t no inta-lec-chal, I just heard a song or two made me feel drunk‘nd confused. I think there’s somethin’ t’that.
- Something like maybe you’re going crazy.
He had a lighter in his hand at that point. He was slowly spinning it between his thumb and index finger. If Ford and I were in a movie that night, in that moment, who would be the hero and who would be the villain? I always wonder things like that—what people would think about me if they watched my life on a movie screen. The lighter was pale blue. Ford’s eyes were narrow now, eyeing the lighter, trying hard to focus.
- I ain’t crazy.
- I’m just fucking with you. I know you’re not crazy.
- Heard this song once, was ‘bout how ev’rybody went to heav’n. You’d think it’d be happy, but it was the saddest ‘nd prettiest thing I think I ever heard.
I was imagining Ford inside a Bond movie. He has some cliché villainous creature in some kind of tank or cage behind him. The picnic table is a marble desk that he sits behind; upright, confident and conniving.
- What?
- Y’know you always think ‘bout how e’erything you do makes more sense if you get another go when y’die, but what if the part after y’die’s just the same ol’ thing over again, just forever?
- Then I guess it’s just the same damn thing over again, Ford.
- Anyways, that’s what this song was all ‘bout. How e’erbody in heaven is just as sad as e’erbody else down here.
- Well that’s depressing as hell.
“Make no mistake, Mr. Bond.
I am a very powerful man.”
The tiger paced in its cage. It snarled.
- Well it made me think that nothing’s got no meaning or nothing after all, and it’s sorta sad but there’s just something really pretty ‘bout it somehow. Y’get what I’m saying?
“If you continue down this path, everything you love—your entire future—will be decimated.”
The animal was a shark now. A big ol’ great white in an enormous pearly fish bowl—it swam menacing circles and bared its ugly teeth.
- Let’s not talk about the future. It’s like that’s all you talk about. It’s making me dizzy.
- This ain’t even ‘bout the future, it’s just what I think is all.
- Just shut the hell up for a second. I need a drink.
Invisible spirits taunted from the safety of the trees, making my ears ring. I began to walk back to my truck. Ford was still sitting on the table. He puffed on a cigarette. You couldn’t see any stars in the sky because of the mist. I picked up a rock, and threw it in the air as high as I could. It vanished, and didn’t make a sound when it landed out of sight. I opened the door to the backseat, and I looked back at Ford, maybe fifty feet away. His body rocked and his head nodded up and down slightly, like he was laughing at some joke he had said to himself.
There is almost always a box of beer in my backseat, been that way ever since I was seventeen or so. I spotted the white and blue box of Miller Lite lying on the floor, the big gold label in the corner, facing me. I grabbed it. It lifted right up—it was weightless, empty. I dropped it to the ground and kicked it into the trees. Ford didn’t look over.
I wanted to hit something. I wanted to ball up my fist and just cock my whole body back and hit something or someone so hard that I would leave a mark that would never go away. I would punch my father’s grave for claiming him before he could teach me how to fish. I would punch God for dropping my ass in this sad little town on this sad little planet. I wanted to die and be reborn as a boxer with a ball of fire in my chest. I would unleash my hate on a black bag, wearing a black hoodie in a concrete basement with black gloves, and the rain would shriek like a passing train outside, and my life could be a movie that people would watch, and they would get that ball of fire in their chest too when they watched me.
I reached under my seat for the tackle box. On the lid my uncle had carved a picture that I’d never paid much attention to. There’s a circle sun in the top right corner, and five or six curved v’s flying away from it with the double-u waves that span the bottom ridge. Like the scribblings of a child. I took the Vintage Jameson out, I walked back toward Ford, with tunnel vision; I hoped I wouldn’t pass out and break the bottle. Ford stared at his cigarette. I sat down next to him, I opened the bottle.
Ford looked over at me.
- You fuckin’ jokin’ me?
- Huh?
- Where’d ya’get that?
- Oh, it was a present. Take a pull.
- Ya’sure?
- Please.
I handed him the bottle, he just took a sip. He looked guilty.
- Real smooth.
He gave it back to me. I closed my lips around the mouth of the bottle, tilted it back so the bottle made that faint bumping as the liquid poured down my throat. I felt like my sense of taste had left me. Like maybe it had gone up into my head cavity somewhere, taking up space and breathing up the oxygen in there.
My head felt crowded, was like a bustling city where people couldn’t help but knock shoulders with each other constantly as they walked down the street. They look guilty but they never apologize. I could see it like some hallucination projecting out of my skull onto the thin clouds all around my eyes. Ford was looking at me. I put down the bottle on the table and swallowed what was still in my mouth.
- You hear about Milly?
- Nah.
The men in the streets in my head wore round sunglasses like John Lennon does. They had distinct jawlines. They whispered about big mergers. They talked stocks, shared shares.
- I guess she’s been saving up her money a long time cause she’s planning to go live in New York. Find some kind of work there I guess.
The women in the city floating around me through the clouds were all dressed in black. They wore high-heels. Their skirts were short like the girls in the posters for the big companies, and their legs were all so smooth and they shined so beautiful.
- Huh. Always thought Milly’s a gran-ma name.
- Really? I think it’s sorta hot.
- Yeah, she’s deece’. Think she’s smokin’ weed?
- I don’t know. Why?
I couldn’t take my eyes off of the girls and their big smiles that asked me to sit down for a drink. Their bodies were sculpted from perfect pretty-machines and their eyes were bottle caps that collected water that shined in just a little light.
- That’s what they all do in all ‘em big cities. In their suits and they take lots’a photagraphs. They’re all ‘heads, just got cash not like ‘heads here ya’know? Think so at least.
- Well she doesn’t live there yet.
- Guess yer right.
The men and women that I saw inside my head still scrambled to move amongst their own endless bodies. There was frost on some of the tree trunks around us. It looked like shaved diamonds. Some of it was melting, rolling down the bark like raindrops on car windows. People always talk gossip when they can’t think of anything to say.
- Lory left’to Chicago an’ we ain’t seen ‘er since. Maybe’s gonna that way with Milly.
- Maybe.
- I’m bettin’ she’s still cute though.
- Who knows.
- Lotta cute girls ‘round here. All ‘em always wanna leave.
- You ever gonna leave?
Ford grabbed the bottle and drank again. This time he was not so sheepish.
- Who’all even drinks whiskey now’days?
- I don’t know. My dad did.
- Thought ya’don’t remember him.
- My mom told me.
- Ah.
- She said that he would talk about how Jesus didn’t really turn water to wine but he actually turned it into this stuff.
- Sounds lika funny guy.
- Said it was Jesus’ best miracle I guess. Better than getting out of the grave.
- Maybe ya’got your bein’ so clever from him.
- I don’t know. You didn’t answer my question about if you wanna leave someday.
The bottle looked alien. Something you might dig out of the ground and put in a museum. Ford sat there, his mouth open halfway. A lot of times I think I don’t know anyone. Ford seemed like someone I knew. He looked straight up, up into the mist.
- I’d like to go t’ outer space.
I laughed. I took another drink and laughed again. Ford smiled.
- I ain’t kiddin’.
- Better study your ass off if you wanna be an astronaut Ford. Not everybody just gets to be Neil Armstrong ya’know.
- I ain’t gonna be no space-man. It’s just a dream is all.
- You know it’ll never happen?
I was being condescending.
- You just see yourself in a space suit when you fall asleep? You dream about being in the bar and about telling all the blonde-hair biddies how you were the moon man? Dream on I guess.
- It ain’t that. I just wanna get away sometimes ya’know? Get outside, but all the way outside. Maybe find’a ‘nother earth like this where people can live but they jus’ don’t. Jus’ so I can see this place like we can see the moon. How cool’d that be? I just wanna be sure that e’erything won’t be different none inna ‘nother place, y’know? It’s sorta ugly down here but they say when yer up there the planet’s crazy pretty.
I had stopped paying attention to what Ford was trying to say. The mist above me suddenly felt more solid. I began to think of it like it was ceiling. Maybe there are angels way up in the sky but they can’t see through the clouds. They can’t know anything we are doing. I felt as though everything above me was crushing me, like I was at the bottom of the ocean. I felt warm, wrapped up in a blanket. I knew that I could not go anywhere. I liked this feeling. Maybe it was the whiskey. I’ve felt this squished down feeling before once, in the library back in the town. I asked the librarian about it. She told me that people call that feeling claustrophobia.
I guess claustrophobia makes me happier somehow.
- You sound drunk.
- I’m not. Swear, I’m sober like I’m hearin’ sirens.
Ford tossed his cigarette into the fire pit. He was still holding the lighter; I wished he would start spinning it again. My eyelids were growing heavier.
- I think I’m going to head back home. Let’s go.
- Lemme stay here. I’ll be okay.
- Okay.
He grinned. He winked at me.
- Good night, John-boy.
- Night Ford.
I began to walk back to my truck. Maybe I’ll have to find a new place to get my head unpacked. It felt like the air was buzzing, like tiny bees, like radio static. It felt like the perfect conditions for the world to end. It would come sudden, everything would be obliterated like it had never been there in the first place. All of the soldiers in their bunkers and all the children in their cribs would just disappear.
Spontaneous combustion.
The future would hold no goodbyes or old friends or success or failure. No more New York, no more Chicago. I think they call that limbo. The only people who would be left would be the astronauts. They would watch the earth become a big flame like another sun, fizzle out, be gone. Floating up there in their clean white space suits, they would wonder what happened. Ford was yelling.
- Come pick me up t’morrow?
- Sure thing Ford.
The astronauts all wave goodbyes into the emptiness.
- Hey. We’re a lot the same y’know. I know y’don’t think it, but we are.
- Sure thing.
I remember screwing the cap back on the whiskey and putting it back in the tackle box. I don’t remember turning the ignition, but I remember driving home. That night and every night since, I catch myself thinking this same thing over and over, and it’s so strange. It’s just one more thing you just can’t capture and release with a pen. The shoreline spoke to me in real syllables and sentences on that drive back to my apartment. I wish you could’ve heard it. It laughed at me—told me I was insane. More insane than the bird standing all alone on the telephone wire going nowhere.
I guess that whiskey got to me. I think it somehow got in my veins and now it’s stuck there until I die. I wished I could drop in a dime for my dad and ask him what he wants me to be. Ask him if he can see through the clouds. Ask if he has big feathery soft wings that sprout from his spine and a silver halo that floats above his head without strings to support it. See if it really is just the same thing up there, upstairs, up in the sky; as it is down here, down on the dirt.
I sang along with the sad songs playing on the radio, and closed my eyes when the patches of interference drowned out the voices. You should’ve seen it—I rolled down the windows and I drove as fast as my trucks beaten-up engine would allow. I pretended like I was some pretty person with an important place to go, with a specific plan to exist in a specific way. I wish I could sum up what kind of a thing it is to be alive in a couple words—you know, like we do with streets and songs and people. Put a big nametag on it so me and everyone else will know all about it. You know, maybe the world will end tonight, but my best guess is, it won’t.