The Same River (Summer Re-Run)

I’ve walked up this street so many times now. I can’t really remember how many times.

You can never put your foot in the same river twice.

Heh. High School. What do they know?

I can tick my finger through the slats on Atkin’s fence, and feel the rhythm of it in my bones. I can remember which are out of alignment enough to break the pulse of it. I know it. I painted it once for summer money.

I know when to shrug past the light pole and dodge around the mailboxes and the amount I’ve got to raise my foot to clear the curb without looking. The neighbor’s dogs don’t bark at me. They know me like I know them. I’m not the same as when I left, but I smell the same, I guess.

I like the way the rocker at 27 goes back and forth in the breeze. I could always look out the window and see how much breeze there was before I went out. There’s never a person in the chair, so it’s more useful. Funny, that.

The lawn’s gone to seed. Mom never could push that fiendish little mixer with the curling blades going swish swish and the finely shorn blades of grass cascading onto your shoes. It always made her peevish, to be so close to danger and to be expected to be disinterested in it. I could tell her a bit about that now.

Dad had to go and die on her. His back was too strong for his heart, she said. She says I got all his heart. She got the mower.

She’s alone, but not lonely, she wrote to me, because she has him and me in her heart always. She says death and the grave is nothing. Nothing but your troubles ends at the edge of the hole in the ground, she’d said while we each threw in a handful of gravel, eight summers ago. Mom cries when she reads novels but not in a boneyard.

I always put my right foot on the first step.It’s the spot already worn from dad’s boot. I wear away at the spot in his place now. Someday I’ll wear it clean through and I won’t know what to do, because the hole will be dearer to me than a religion, but how do you keep a hole? Dad will be gone in another hole.

The door has that heavy oval glass in it. I used to run my finger around the bevel, to feel the clean edge and marvel at the perfection of the curve of it. Dad said I’d be a man when I could reach all the way around without tiptoes. I showed him I could. He let me mow the lawn.

The paint’s peeling on the jamb — except around the doorbell, where it’s worn all away. There’s a lesson in that, but I don’t care what it is. I can see straight through the house from the stoop, the rooms opening one into another in a line. Mom’s in the kitchen, at the end of the parade. Her hair hangs in her face like it always did when she was working. A wisp on either side of her eyes. She brushes it back with the side of her hand, and her head turns, and she sees me there in the glass.

She stares at me a good long while. She leans on her hand on the tabletop, like I’ve seen her do a thousand times a thousand times when the kitchen gets too hot.

Maybe I should have wrote. Maybe I shouldn’t have worn the uniform. Maybe she don’t know me right away. Maybe I’m different now.

They Run And Hide Their Heads

I remember the way it used to sizzle on the corrugated roof.

Rain in the city is nothing. I love the sound of it still, but the whole place, from the scuppers in the parapet walls above, down to the pipes below the street, are only there to make it go away. It scours the street and washes away the children’s chalk on the sidewalks and makes its way to the sea. It doesn’t feed anything here.

I remember my father. He’d stand in that field, lean on the ash handle — bought rough and made smooth with his uncountable exertions– take off his hat, wipe his brow, and scan the skies for a long moment. I’d watch him and wonder what might rumble through a head such as his. If he spoke ten thousand words in his lifetime, I’d be surprised to hear it. I never heard them.

He was watching for rain, of course. A man with the fingers of green just coming out of the rows keeps his eye on the horizon. It’s not a matter of forgetting an umbrella and having to hustle from the trolley to the vestibule. It’s life and death.

“Be careful what you wish for.” was one of the few things my father did say. He’d say it whenever anybody said something stupid at the Grange Hall. “There’s no free lunch.” would usually follow. Father knew about a sword with two edges. Everything has two edges on a farm.

And so he would scan the skies with that squint of his, born of countless days under that forbidding sun, and pray for sweet, precious rain. He knew that if it did not come, we were done for, and those tender shoots would stand like the headstones they were in his field. But he knew also, in his quiet way, that the thing he prayed for might wash us all away in a maelstrom. It is an odd thing, to earnestly pray for the thing that might save you, that could just as easily crush you like the bugs we all are.

Father and the farm are all gone now. I reach out from under the porch eave, and let the drops hit my hand before the city throws them all away.

What Church Do You Pray In?

In a very real way, this is the church for me:

It takes a great deal of practice and talent and the contemplation of sublime and mundane things alike to stand before others in that fashion, and testify. The words are no more complicated than a ransom note. What is being held? What will it take to free it? All I can do is tell you about it, imperfectly.

Applause is not just an odd noise at the end of that silky skein of notes.

Saturday Morning Funnees

Ah, it’s Saturday. I’m self-employed. That means that means nothing.

I loved typing that last sentence. I knew you’d have to read it twice. We all have to get our fun any way we can.

I’m not sure of anything much, but I’m sure my four-year-old will watch this fourteen straight times.

Willie Horton’s Brother From Another Mother

[Update! Hey, they caught him this morning. According to a friend at town hall, he was caught in my yard, more or less. We slept through it. He’s going to pray for the death penalty, what with the poison ivy out there.]

Hey! A fugitive murderer let out on parole is running around my neighborhood. Ah, it’s just like old times here in Massachusetts. Is Mike Dukakis running for President again?

I’m sure all the people reading this in Detroit or Cleveland or New York are asking “Only one? Pikers.” Yep. Mass pikers, at that.

Well, you’re right, fugitive paroled murderers aren’t all that common around here. Any kind of people aren’t all that common around here. There’s only 4500 people in the town I live in. That’s only like .002% murderers by volume. He’s 6 foot 2, 230 pounds, so by weight the ratio might be higher. If New York City had .002% murderers, there’d be about 18,000 murderers there. Actually, that sounds about right.

He actually escaped from the police in the next town over, Mattapoisett, about a half-mile from my mom’s house. He was driving a delivery truck to an industrial park I go to fairly often, and bolted into the woods and left the truck in the parking lot. The police arrived shortly after. They wanted to talk to him, over what is being termed a “domestic dispute”. Someone must have warned him they were coming after him. Someone’s always looking out for murderers in Massachusetts. If he keeps walking straight through those woods, the first thing he comes to will be… hmm… let’s try Google Earth. Hey, that’s funny! That’s my house. Not funny haha. Funny like saying: President Dukakis.

We found out about all this because we received automated messages by telephone, first from our son’s school, and then from the police. I leave it to you to imagine what your first reaction might be upon hearing a school administrator’s voice telling you that a very dangerous man is on the loose in town. Why is the school telling me this? They wanted to suggest that for today, perhaps it might be better if our grade schoolers didn’t go home to an empty house. Just today?

For a while they wouldn’t say what he had done to end up in jail. Eight hours after he escaped, the news babe said he was a second degree murderer out on parole. The messages told us right along he was to be considered armed and dangerous.

Really? Silly me. Why would I figure someone considered dangerous, who is likely to arm themselves, wouldn’t be out on parole? I forgot where I live.

He’s not the first murderer I’ve encountered here. I bought the plot of land to build my mom’s house through a realtor a decade ago. I made an offer. He said: “I’ll go put it in the drawer, and see what he says.”

“The drawer?”

“Yeah, in the maximum security prison it’s got to go in a drawer in a bullet-proof wall, I can’t hand him the paper.”

“Whah… what are you talking about?”

“Oh, the owner’s in jail for killing his wife a while back. Never did find the body.”

I remember laying out the foundation hole and trenches for the drainage, and instructing the excavating contractor:

“No matter what you hit, man, just keep on digging.”

When that guy got out of prison (he got life, which I believe is fifteen years here; I think he only did eight, somehow) I was told he moved in more or less next door to me. You have to understand that next door around here means one town over about a quarter mile away. His family owned a campground on a local lake. That campground was — a more wretched hive of scum and villainy… People don’t camp at campgrounds any more. Lowlifes live there.

Our local area police blotter has no crime on it, more or less, but they were always going to the campground. Fights, drugs, the usual. A developer wanted to buy it and put houses there. People protested at the town meetings that the developer would be ruining the town by turning out the campground freakshow and building single family houses there. I actually saw the word “evil” used. About the developer, not any murderer. The developer prevailed, and I’ve never seen another police cruiser.

Until today. They’ve got roadblocks and helicopters. They’ve announced that they’re calling off the search at dusk, though.

You see, that’s why I love Massachusetts. You’ve got your murderers out on parole, and when they try to arrest them, they run away into the woods, and the police stop looking for them when the sun goes down. In our magic state, he’ll no doubt turn into a toadstool at sunset, and they can just pick him up tomorrow at dawn.

I’ll be right back. Someone’s at the door.