As Long As You Remember

Jun 1, 2014 | Southern Verse

[title subtitle=”fiction: Marla Cantrell”][/title]

He came up from Texas, in a Dodge Ram that blew a gasket on the outskirts of Big Town, and that stalled him for a time, but still he came. It didn’t matter that the Dodge was not his, that it belonged to a blonde he met in a dive called Lonesome Somewhere, where the drinks were watered down and the juke box played nothing but Waylon. The blonde, sitting on his lap by then, was near about passed out when he fished her jangly keys out of her jacket pocket and planned his getaway. “Give Chick a little sugar, Sugar,” he said, and she turned her face to him, and her eyes looked right into his soul, which at that moment was a waxy thing, he said, something a flame could whittle down to nothing.

The cab was a mess, filled with McDonald’s cups and beer cans and trash sacks of dirty laundry. A dream catcher swung from the rearview mirror, fast as a schoolyard swing, when Chick tore out of the parking lot. There was a picture of a cotton-topped boy glued to the dash, no more than three, Chick said, and an ID badge in the ashtray from the casino where the blonde worked.

Sorrow is what he felt in that truck, but still he kept going. Sorrow, Chick said, was everywhere, in the pearl-colored moon, in the spiky arguments rattling the windows of the houses he passed on the way out of town, in the bellyaching of the ambulance that caused him to pull the Dodge off the road as it passed, its lights blood red on that navy blue night.

That’s why he kept singing like he did, to ward off the sorrow. Mostly, he sang Johnny Cash songs, he said, the sorrow and the stolen truck with the picture of the boy the things that seemed to push in on him, that seemed loud as hornets on stretch after stretch of highway. He didn’t travel the interstate. He didn’t trust big roads with big signs that made big promises about motels that felt like home, or diners with meals like your mama made, or churches where the good Lord welcomed you no matter how junky you dressed, no matter if you didn’t know when to rise and when to set back down again.

How he got to Louisiana he couldn’t quite say. It wasn’t how he intended to go. What he intended was a straight shot, crossing over in Texarkana, cutting through the guts of Arkansas, and ending up at Good Samaritan Hospital, where I was. It could have been the singing, Chick said, because Johnny made him cry, even “A Boy Named Sue,” which most folks took as a jokey song, even though it cut like a chainsaw when you thought about it. A drunk, mean daddy who cuts off part of his son’s ear, and still the boy loves the old cuss, deep down he loves him, which is an abomination when you come right down to it, the way the daddy acts, the way the boy aches, all that hurt leaving scars wider than any two-lane highway.

In Shreveport, the Dodge with the dirty clothes caught fire while Chick slept nearby on a park bench at a roadside rest stop. He woke to see it, the flames orange and blue and jumping, the windshield booming apart, glass everywhere, he said.

He walked after that, straight down the road, his belly empty as a cave, his thumb stuck out. He had two dollars then, and sixty-six cents, and a picture of me, and my phone number written in red on the corner of a Valentine I’d got him once, all inside the wallet he made in Leatherworks when he was in county lockup six months back.

The second guy who picked him up, Chick said, was a squatty businessman who had an answer for everything, even when there wasn’t no questions asked. “There is nothing new under the sun,” he said to Chick, when they passed a subdivision going up, trees getting knocked down, men scrambling up scaffolding to lay down bricks on new houses that would all look the same, cement trucks churning out concrete like giant ants with the stomach flu.

“I come alive,” Chick said, “brand new. Every morning,” and the guy seemed to puzzle the thought, stroked his chin where a pink scar cut across just under his bottom lip, and then he adjusted the rearview mirror on the Buick.

“But every day you’re older.” the guy finally said, “And every day you fall into your old, hard ways,” and then he switched on the radio to an Oldies station that played Steppenwolf like it was 1972. “And I must say, I feel like I’ve known you, or someone like you, in my past, and that we’ve had this exact conversation before.”

“I get that a lot,” Chick said, not because it was true but because it hurt his head to talk to people who didn’t know how to live. Outside, Chick said, the grass waved along the highway. Red clover stood amidst it. Black-eyed Susans, long-legged, yellow as a kid’s rain slicker, seemed to rock along with the radio, and all this guy could see was yesterday’s news.

Chick got dropped off in Donette and worked for four days hoeing soybeans. The plants tangled low to the ground, and as he walked through the sharp vines cut at his bare legs, since he’d taken to working in his T-shirt and boxers. If he wore his jeans, he said, the morning dew soaked him through, kept him soggy until the sweat started and then he was damp all over again.

He cut out as soon as he got paid, five twenty dollar bills, four ones, seven pennies. He’d eaten with the other workers, he’d slept in a row house on a army cot, and it wasn’t bad, he said, if you didn’t mind the snoring, if you didn’t mind the lies the young guys told about the girls they had in town.

Chick swiped the foreman’s ride, an El Camino, half truck, half car, turquoise blue, and rode through the river bottoms late that night, the windows down. The sorrow he’d felt earlier was waning then, and the moon was blameless that night, big and round and fuzzy at the edges. He loved the river bottoms. He loved the irrigation systems that looked like giant metallic caterpillars, arching up and inching down, and they shone like starlight every time the moonlight hit them. He switched the radio on and Dolly was singing and he could see her if he closed his eyes, which he did on the straightaway, her blond hair curling, her red lips smiling.

He left the El Camino two towns over, just as morning broke. The foreman had been kind, he said, and the car was spotless when he took it, so it didn’t seem right to snatch it clean away. He bought a bus ticket to bring him home, and he settled in next to a round old woman who chanted the names of all her dead relatives as she rocked back and forth. “They are not dead as long as you remember,” she said, when he asked her why.

A chill ran through him, Chick said, right then and there, and he spied another seat, right up front where he hated to sit, but he took it anyway, just to get away. And he started to relax, and then this happened, Chick almost said my name: Sylvia. He opened his lips and the sound started and he closed his mouth tight against it. The next thing he did was shut his eyes, rest his elbows on his knees and press his thumbs into his forehead. When he opened them again, the sky had dropped the way it does when the clouds roll in. Dirt from the cotton fields was blowing up, swirling like a magic spell, he said, hanging above the thorny plants.

He didn’t eat the last day on the bus. He drank Red Bull and he chewed gum, and in the bathroom he raked a bum razor across his whiskers, and when he sat back down he swallowed my name again and again. When the Greyhound pulled in the station, he jumped, missing the bus steps altogether, and he took off for Good Samaritan.

It was ten blocks away, and Chick was running fast as he could, his work boots slapping the city streets, his button-up shirt wadded up and clutched in his right hand, the wind blowing through his sandy hair, cars honking as he plowed through rush hour traffic. Folks shouted but he couldn’t hear right, so all the yelling blended into everything else until he felt like he was inside a bee hive, and all the sounds were wings flapping to keep something alive.

There is a trick light plays inside a hospital. Night could be day or day could be night. You look at the window and the sky is always the same: gunmetal gray, even at midnight, even at noon. It’s hard to walk steady under light like that, and so I quit walking, and then I quit looking, and then I just quit. So I did not see Chick racing along the sidewalks, his big arms pumping, his legs stretching farther and farther out as he got nearer and nearer to me. I did not hear him reciting the names of those who’d crossed over: his Grandmama Beverly; his second grade teacher, Miss Jones; his old dog, Ratchet; his brother, Brodie; and on and on, until even his first parole officer got named. I did not hear one name at all until he got to mine, until he said, “Sylvia, Sylvia, Sylvia,” the same way he said it on the night we met, urgent, as if he was trying to ground me to him. “Sylvia, Sylvia, Sylvia,” he said on that first night, when I was still beautiful, and we stayed up until all hours, watching the sun rise together, watching it set again. We lay in each other’s arms in those first fresh days and kept every bit of trouble away. What I want to tell him is this: We kept it away for longer than most people do, Chick, we surely did. We kept it away for longer than I ever expected we could.

Do South Magazine

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