Act 1
His head crescents down and then traces the curve back up slow and I can tell there should be a smile where his mouth used to be.
He swipes the field of dust on the barroom floor slow with his right foot in freshly polished black leather shoes, neatly double knotted laces, squats quick and then rises again, eyes closed, or at least as closed as they can be.
I had been on the road for four days, coming back home to help take care of the farm now that all of my heroes were dead. I say Home again Home again, jiggety jig into the bottom of the glass, first words I’d said out loud since stopping for gas yesterday, when the man in the bathroom of the nowhere gas station started talking like I wasn’t in the stall wiping my ass and I heard his eyes well up before the first sniffle came.
“I have a full tank, but it won’t get me there,” he says.
It was easier to give him words of comfort with the locked door between us and it didn’t matter that my pants were around my ankles and it didn’t matter what the words were. He needed to talk and he needed to hear he would be okay, like we all do.
I say “It’ll all work out, man. One way or the other it always does,” and I gather another wad of toilet paper.
I had camped last night beside the lake I followed signs for in the rain and dark, hoped the patch job on the tent would hold. The miles ahead of me would help me forget the miles behind and I flushed the toilet and came upon him leaning against the only sink, his uniform untucked, his bandana being used to wipe around his eyes.
“We thought we had more time,” he says, “She told me not to come last weekend.”
It sounded like she thought she had more time too.
Hug a stranger in the bathroom of a nowhere gas station once in your life. There are things that only that situation can show you.
I didn’t ask him to move so that I could wash up. I had to get back on the road and the sins caked on my hands would still be there later.
It was hard to light my cigarette and the sun was showing signs of rising and I turned and twisted in the wind with each attempt like the last time I saw Beth, trying to light my cigarette, walking down the driveway of the home we used to share with a broken door frame and a crying woman left in my wake. The seas were violent that night, waves crashing against the edge of the land, sounds that make one stand at attention, damage done that will take years to reshape and not a drop of water around.
Act 2
Two barstools over says, “that’s John. He talks to ya with dance.”
What’s he trying to tell me?
Two barstools over says, “hell if I know.”
What happened to him?
Two barstools over says, “He threw himself off a cliff and didn’t die.”
Bartender pours me another, but I don’t see it. I won’t be able to afford to pay the tab anyway.
You say he talks with dance?
Two barstools over says, Yep.
John has retreated now, placing each foot deliberately behind the other, heal toe heal toe, like he’s being tracked and wants to throw them off the trail.
I think, it looks like there is no retreating from whatever happened to him.
There is a woman standing at the door and her face is up in a way that tells everyone she doesn’t care we are watching, counting ceiling tiles. There are more than fourteen, I’m sure of it, but that’s where she stops and starts again and there is a man at the booth in the back scribbling mad on receipts and napkins sprawled across the table, stopping only to exclaim something that makes sense to nobody but him.
“The other side is not what we think.”
He says.
“It’s more lovely than we thought.”
We are all children raised by children who didn’t want what they were given. So, we wander. I read that somewhere.
He jumps now and the soles of his feet touch and align in the air beneath him before the dust plumes under his landing, each time. Again. Again. I can’t tell if he is looking at me, his eyes don’t focus on anything in particular, maybe he’s seen the other side and the sight of it was too much to bear.
Act 3
I roll a smoke and he leans in and I put the end of it where I think it should go and the end glows bright red and the ash falls onto his freshly polished black leather shoes. I tell him about the woman I loved who taught me how to roll smokes in Oregon and I tell him that I’m missing five teeth, but what’s one sad tale about getting kicked in the head by a junky to someone without arms?
Two barstools over says, “John was a lawyer, I heard, talked for a living. His old lady found his son in the bathtub. Ain’t no coming back from that, I reckon. Anyhow, he didn’t talk at all after that and they found him at the bottom of the canyon on the edge of town, messed up real good. I don’t think he meant to make it through. They had to take his arms on account of the injuries and such and his face was the first thing to hit the rocks so there ain’t much left there. He comes here every night and dances around for folks and they see and hear what they wanna see and hear. But if ya ask me, all he is doing is what we are all trying to do, get us another whiskey.”
I slide the few dollars I have left into John’s pocket, kiss where his forehead should be and walk my tab. The second hurricane of the season had stayed together far enough inland to toss everything foreign. I take a draw from the flask and place it back between my legs, turn the volume up on the radio, drive away from the lights of town towards home to the gravel road that has my family’s name. As I was taught, I put it in park and walk out into the night air with the headlights illuminating everything they can, beyond them darkness. I ask for permission to enter from those gone before me and from those that this land was surely taken from without asking. My mother in silhouette along the tracks at the western edge of the land is silent, as usual, and trembles with the anticipation of the next train and from the disease that took her from us young. My grandfather sits atop his favorite horse in the pasture, most of the mass of him gone that used to make me think him immortal. My great grandmother looks out over the soon to be harvested corn and says she can’t see God. The cousins traverse the iron fence line, making sure not to touch the ground where invisible monsters lurk, their laughter forgetting what happened on that lonely highway many winters ago. The native folks line the gravel drive with tired feet and point to home. I have been granted permission. I am home.
