Pete's Little Saga, Part III

There’s a trailer between James’s place and mine, a 70's model Fleetwood, single-wide, rental, proof positive there's no Government enforced regulations in these parts as to what is and what is not inhabitable. 

          

    The Trailer's current and primary tenant is a tattooed and heavily pierced young man, named James as well. He's come over a couple of times, talks incessantly, and always as if he were about to cry. Up-the-road James, says he isn't quite right, but has only offered as proof, Trailer James's lack of Drivers Licence and middle school education. With Trailer James—from what I’ve gathered—live a young woman, an undetermined amount of children (hers, I assume), a mother (also hers), who is missing a leg, and two dogs, Amy and Harley.

     Amy is a vicious little sausage of a dog. Not a wiener kind of sausage. Amy’s more along the lines of a Little Smoky, something you’d find stuffed and rigid in the pillowed recesses of some antique store—the classic lap dog.  

    Harley is a sausage as well, though much larger than Amy, a sort of black and tan Basset with stubby legs, mainsails for ears and a belly that is in constant need of rubbing.

      Trailer James and I seem to be caught in a similar Middle-School limbo. We never entirely grew up. He, I assume, for lack of education, and me, for lack of want. I've always been sort of a seventh-grader, doing things the way I thought grown-ups might do them—pretending. Trailer James might not be pretending so much.

     
     Never is my immaturity more evident than when it comes to dogs. Bring a dog into the room and you can pretty much count me out of the adult conversation. I love them with the complete abandon of a boy. I've never actually seen Trailer James get down in the grass and roll with Amy and Harley, like I do with my boy, Bo, but I wouldn't put it past him. Trailer James loves dogs, plain and simple.             

     Perhaps Pete sensed this love in passing. Perhaps his previous home had a similar abandoned quality to the Trailer. Perhaps the children, buzzing around the threadbare yard, were equally familiar. Perhaps Harley had invited him to come and sit on the porch. God knows it wasn’t Amy, viscous as she is. Whatever the case, the Trailer was where Pete arrived next on his journey.

      

Pete's Little Saga II

Pete showed up at James’s first.

          

     James lives about a quarter mile up the road. The way he tells it, he was letting Pete camp out on his front porch until he found who Pete belonged to, but then Pete got a hold of one of his favorite camouflage clogs, and that brought an end to the charity. 

     Rather than call the Pound, James ran Pete off.  In the direction of my house. 

     

   

Pete's Little Saga, Part I

When they finished their business, Harley and Bobo trotted out across the cropped and amber hayfield, due west, the sun rising behind them.

       

     Pete and I watched. It was cold and wet. Even still, Pete whimpered and tugged at his lead, desperate to follow the big dogs.

       

     ‘Not a chance, buddy,’ I told him. ‘You’re a house dog now.’

       

     Pete’s a pup. A stray pup. A stray pup with an eleven-inch pin and four loops of wire holding his left femur together. Spiral fracture. Hit by a car. We assume.

       

     I paid for the fix. All in all about twelve hundred dollars. Twelve hundred dollars I don’t have.

       

     Why?

     Pete asked me to.  

Freewrite for Lack of Chops

The car is white. A four door. Nissan maybe. An older model. Dealer tags.

          The passenger, in his mid twenties has his arm cocked out the opened window. No air. He’s shirtless and tan, spotted with dark tattoos.

          The driver gets out. He comes round to the front of the car. He’s wearing shorts and a white A shirt.

           ‘You know the man who owns that place,’ he says, pointing to the white house across the field of tobacco.

          The house is a rental, owned by the same man, the same family, who owns the old house I’m working on. It had burned a while back. Not badly. Not that you could tell from the outside. An electrical fire in the attic. Still, it wasn’t habitable yet, and the owner wasn’t sure he wanted to fool with renting it out any more.

          ‘Same fella who owns this old place,’ I say.

          ‘You reckon he’d want to rent it out?’ the driver asks. He's coming my way.

          ‘Don’t know,’ I tell him.

         The passenger’s eyes roll over my tools, the old house. I hate this shit. Not knowing. Having to assume that people are thieves, when I’d prefer to think the best of them.       

          The driver is standing in front of me. If he isn’t high, he needs a fix. His eyes won’t be still. They quiver.

          ‘I’ve got five grandbabies,’ he says, ‘that’d just love that big yard.’

          ‘It burned inside,’ I tell him. 'Needs work.'

          'I'm a carpenter', he says. ‘Like you.’

          I look over the driver's shoulder at the passenger, smoking now, his skin slick with sweat.

          I hate this shit.

           

Roadside

He leaves the stand, holding the sweet corn in his arms, eight, ten ears, as if he were already there, returned to that most precious feast of childhood.

   

So. This song comes on the radio...

Yeah.
And, I'm thinking, like you're probably thinking ... Slow Dance
And the partner that pops into my head at this moment of emotional raptitude?
Bobo.
Yeah. My dog.

Thus is the depth of my love.




p.s. no, raptitude is not a word.

Three Swell Books

Starting with Kate, because...

Well, just because. 

Short on Slippers

She had thought her name would carry her. Up. Out. Something.

       Not that she hadn’t made an effort. She had. The cello, the toe shoes, the Bauhaus decor. She had submerged herself. 

       She couldn’t keep up though, keep focused, keep thin. Not Claire thin. Not Claire sharp. Not without help. 

She shared a room now with a girl named Dakota, in a house occupied by twenty women, all of which had to dump their purses and pee in a cup each time they came through the front door. A front door that was locked after ten thirty, so you’d better find a day job.

       It was after one. Dark, but not dark enough. 

       She couldn’t sleep. It was too loud, the house, the road outside, the hood. It buzzed. All of it.

       It was the hardest part of being clean, the noise.  

       Quiet. She wanted some quiet. Just for a few minutes.

       Dakota slept, her breathe raking soft against her palate. 

       

       She had once thought of it as ignorance, Dakota’s peace, her ability to sleep, to shut off. She longed for it now, admired it at times.  

       She sat up. She put on her slippers, dark leopard prints she’d found at Goodwill. Very Dakota.  

       The window would let her out. Down. Something.

       Two blocks from the house she found a stop sign, planted in a small triangle of grass.

      She felt a curious connection to the sign. The cars, the power lines, the fluorescents, all of it, ignoring its plea.

       Stop!

       Can’t you see? Be quiet!

       She took hold of the signpost.

       Stop! Stop! Stop! She shook the post and shook the post and shook.

She wasn’t there for breakfast, Claire. 

       The women hoped quietly against the odds, said prayers.

       Dakota found the slippers, the dark leopard prints, on her way to work that morning, tucked up to the stop sign, as if it were a bedside.

       She left them be. It seemed so very, Claire. The corner, the sign, the slippers. All of it. 

       

       So very Claire.

       

Short While Stopped

They put Charlie Paxton away today. In Daubers, the Psychiatric Facility. 

       Charlie used to work heavy machinery. They’ve been widening New Shackle Road for a while now. He was on board that project, operating a Komatsu excavator. 

       Charlie was backfilling a sewer box a couple weeks ago, about noon. There was this cop there. You know how it is. There’s always got to be a couple cops standing around construction zones, wearing yellow vests, doing nothing. I guess this cop had a thing for standing next to Charlie’s excavator.

        “You ever have a fly buzzing around the room while you’re trying to read,” Charlie told the Judge.

       The cop was checking texts when Charlie swung the Komastu’s bucket around and clipped him at the base of his skull. Of course it killed him instantly, but the force threw him out into the street where he was run over three times before traffic could get stopped.

        “Same thing,” Charlie told the Judge.

        

  

     

As For Saturday (The Enigmatic Summation)

As it turns out, I didn't do anything particularly stupid.
Though I didn't do anything particularly smart either.
I sort of ... dithered ... somewhere in between. A full grown chicken.
A smitten chicken.

It's amazing the fun you can have with a stick.
And a dog.
A stick, and a dog.
Just amazing.

Three Days and Counting

Saturday, I am going to do something stupid.
Or very, very smart.

Bobo and I Have an Idea ...

You see, we heard that elephants will no longer be performing in the circus of all circuses, and I have a can of gray paint or two, and Bobo a trunk and floppy ears.

    

He could not recall when he no longer feared the creature that lived in the darkness beneath his bed, nor could he recall when the creature took up residence in his chest, and he began again.

  

Those That Have Ears, Let Them Hear ...

Christians are the new Sadducees.

I won't pretend that I don't pretend.

I do.

Even you.