I indicated in the Beautiful Agony Post below that Audioblogger was acing funky. Well, tonight it showed up three times, so I edited and here’s the best post of the three.

Marc reads!

Rah rah rah.

Anyway, if you are interested in the full text, let me know, and if I get enough requests, I’ll type it up, edit this post, and post it. Different than PostIts. Heh.

It was hot outside the day I moved out of my brother’s house on Highlawn. The crocuses had long since wilted and the heat radiated off of every building in Brooklyn.

Charlie and I had already moved the chair Gramma gave me out into the yard. I wanted to put the heavy desk into the truck first, so we just kept putting furniture and boxes in the yard, on the sidewalk, wherever we could find room for it.

I had gone inside to get a cold one after we almost dropped the daybed coming down the porch steps. Charlie said he was going to the corner to get an ice cream from the guy with the pushcart. I was going to miss that guy, and I almost went with Charlie, but I went into the house instead.

It was hotter in there than outside, so I grabbed a couple of beers, figuring Charlie would want one too. I nudged the fridge shut with my foot and headed back outside.

When I got to the porch, I was surprised to see a beautiful girl had perched herself on the daybed and sat there smiling at me where I stood.

All the noise of the city seemed to stop. The kids still played basketball in the cage across the street behind me. The cars still drove up and down Highland, beeping their horns in frustration at the moving truck in their way. But I did not hear them.

I stumbled down the steps, staring at this beautiful girl on my daybed. She wore shorts, her ankles were crossed, and her white skin glistened in the heat. I almost dropped the beer.

I stood there, staring at her. Grinning. Not talking.

“You dumb?” she asked.

I laughed and offered her a beer. She said sure, she’d love one.

“There’s room in this bed for you,” she said, before she slurped from the can I gave her. In this bed, I thought. Not on this bed.

“Um, I, uh, mmm. My name’s um. Hi. I’m Henry,” I managed.

“Well, Henry, I’m Margie, and I like it hot. Like it is now. You know. Aw, don’t be shy, you can sit next to me.”

Charlie walked up just then, his mouth blue from his ice cream, and said, with a low whistle, “Well, who’s the new girl?”

Margie just smiled, and I introduced Charlie to the woman that I eventually got up the nerve to ask to marry me. It only took me ten years, and even now, after forty years of marriage, when I look into my Margie’s brown eyes, dull from cataracts, I see the young girl full of piss and vinegar who, back in 1945, walked up into my yard and sat on my daybed. And she is as beautiful and vibrant now as she was then. And her smile still confuses me.

He was always bringing home somebody else’s trash. One Tuesday Mornings – Trash Day – he trolled the neighborhood looking for lost treasure.

“Aye, Matey,” he would say when I asked him if he was going out that morning.

Tuesdays were my least favorite day of the week.

And he would go, be gone, sometimes a few hours, sometimes ten minutes. He almost always came home with something strapped to the roof of the old dodge we bought when we were first married.

Sometimes, though, he would come home without anything at all tied to the roof of the car. Those days were my favorite, for on those days he had usually found something that would keep him busy for a while.

He’d come home and say, “Look, Honey! look at what I found over at Old Man McHenry’s!” Old Man McHenry ran an Army Navy Surplus store over on South Main an was known to throw away his inventory if it had collected dust for too long.

The day he came home from McHenry’s, it was gray and cold, not unlike most winter days in Akron. He splashed through the slush carrying a large red box.

I discovered the box was full of old felt cowboy hats. Some of them had red and white braided ties. Chinstraps, really, which hung down too long to be of any use to a child.

He spent that winter customizing the hats for all of the children in our neighborhood since we had no children of our own. He was forever out in the garage with hose hats and I got lonely after dark, which always came early.

For Christmas that year he had given me a necklace he had made for me out of the red and while chinstraps. He had fashioned it with what looked to me to be a part of some fancy fishing lure so that it hung just between my breasts. He was so proud of it and it broke my heart not to wear it even though I found it horrid.

That summer every kid in the neighborhood sported one of those cowboy hats. And they were constantly running through all of the yards, cutting through the bushes and catching their hats on the Dogwood trees by Mr. Swanson’s garage.

Today was Tuesday. He had been gone just over two hours when I heard the car ramble into the driveway.

I put down the dishcloth on the rack he had fashioned from abandoned wooden spindles. I checked my lipstick in the mirror in the hall, the one he found last year on the curb when Mrs. Brooks had died.

I was in the yard before he got out of the car. I wore my favorite white dress and the necklace he gave me. I hoped he would notice that I had gotten my hair done at Bonnie while he had been gone.

He got out of the car and smiled at me. He did not even tell me about his newest find. He did not even close the car door. He rushed to me and kissed me gently, held me tightly.

“You. Are. So. Beautiful,” he said.

I fingered my frayed necklace, breathed in the summer air heavy with the scent of lilacs, and knew that Tuesdays were alright with me.

When friends fail you, you still have to love them. Especially when they cannot tell you that they love you.

Ray sat on my porch railing throwing cigarettes into Molly’s planter. The sun had gone down enough so that it wasn’t in my eyes anymore, but just dappling the floor. The dogwood trees on the devilstrip were in full bloom.

And Ray and I had just finished work. He took the bus home from work, as he often does, instead of letting me give him a ride,

Ray is smart and funny and goodlooking. Some would say Ray was smart and funny and goodlooking, once. But I know it is in his essence. His drinking has obscured that for many people for over two decades. But I see glimpses of it on occasion. And I still love the old boy.

He took the bus home so that he could stop at Red’s and I smelled it on him.

Now he leaned on my porch rail remembering the days he and I would take over downtown. He told me he remembered when I met Molly. At Red’s, as it happens. When I met Molly, I stopped going to Red’s, but Ray had a tab there of almost two hundred dollars per month. He still goes to Red’s.

Now he sat on my porch, and I listened to him rambling. When your friend is a drunk, sometimes the only way you can show him that you love him is to listen to him when he talks.

So I put down my newspaper and sipped from my tea. And listened. And he talked. He loosened his tie and ran his hand through his now white hair and talked until Molly came out and told us that dinner is ready.

Ray’s wife, Virginia, had died several years ago, so it often happened that Ray sat down to dinner with us. And when I held the screen door open for him, he saw a martini on the table where he often sat. When he saw that, he told Molly that he loves her. And I believe it.

Usually I use an old photograph I have lying around for a muse. Today is a little different. Charles Harris, whom I found on a link from the NPR site as I was listening to a live Wilco show , agreed to let me hotlink an image I found on his site, and I went through a couple of ideas in my head over the next few days about what I would write.

So I am breaking with tradition in that I have seen the image more than 30 seconds before I write about it. So, I decided to go back to the original premise of writing only for 10 minutes. Recent writings were 20 minutes or so because I had someone else involved who was not used to the structure, and wasn’t ready to write like mad. For those folks, I extended it to 20 or even 30 minutes.

But now, I am back to bare bones. 10 minutes does not seem long enough, actually; 20 minutes feels about the right length in order to capture something raw and full of truth without too much over-thinking, so I will likely go back to 20 minutes in future endeavors.

But now, I present to you Driving to Warm Springs, 1985*

She looked away from me when I got out of the car. I kicked the dirt and inhaled on my cigarette. I had pulled off on a backroad off of 48 just outside of Anaconda and wanted to tell her how much I loved her and she sat in the car and turned away.

When she told me I had to take her to Warm Springs, I was not surprised. When she told me she wanted to ride in the back, I was not surprised. When she told me why she wanted to ride in the back, I was not surprised.

She said she wanted to remember the car the way she found it. And the way she found it, was as a passenger in the backseat when five of us clamored into it, me ending up at the wheel, for a ride on the highway, past Soquel, past Santa Cruz, after a drunken night on the beach back in ’77.

Seven years later, I’m driving her to Warm Springs and she won’t look at me and I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again.

It’s early morning. The smoke from my cigarette mixes with the fog in the air and I wonder where the past seven years of marriage went.

I flicked my cigarette to the ground and stomped it out for fear of starting a fire. I kick at the tire as I open the door and know that I loved her the best way I knew how, and that I infused our marriage with a tenderness borne of empathy and the understanding I had of her.

I got back into the car and started it up. I knew that it wasn’t my fault she’s mad, and I did not know if, or when, I would see her again. And I was sad. But I understood.

Full size image here

*Note: Warm Springs is where the insane asylum is in Montana.

So, Peppermint called for a writing challenge, and I challenged her to a match of Polaroid Fiction. This may become a regular feature, who can tell. Turns out she writes better on a keyboard, I write better longhand (there was a time when I wrote better on a keyboard, but this is another conversation). She accepts the challenge. I email her the pic about which we will write. We agree to 30 minutes. This is 10 minutes longer than which I am accustomed to writing in this fashion, so I take the opportunity to do a little research, different than my usual style, but pretty raw, none the less.

Anyway, here are the results of the experiment. Contrary to tradition, I hold off on posting the photo from which I drew inspiration. Instead, I encourage you to visit Peppermint’s take on things first.

[update] Peppermint dropped out of the blogoshpere recently. 06.05.07

08.21.1903 - Nothing Ever Happens in this Town

Charlie stood with his elbow on my shoulder.

“Nothing ever happens in this town,” he said, and I had to agree with him. Nothing ever did happen. Mom always had our peanut butter sandwiches ready for us in the afternoons. Dad always came home smelling like Benzedrine, rubber, and stale beer. The fish never took the worms from our hooks and the girls always figured out where we hid their dolls.

But today, something had happened.

I was eating my peanut butter sandwich at the table when there was a loud crash outside. Mom rushed out to see what the commotion was and said, “Oh, my Lord Jesus.” Mom never cussed like that, and so Charlie and me knew it must be bad.

Charlie stood up so fast his chair knocked over the plant near the table and I just tried not to let the screen door hit me in the head as I chased him onto the porch.

We stood there for a minute and saw the smoke coming from the cables. The car had jumped the tracks and almost run clean into old man Peter’s living room, where I knew he was listening to the Cleveland Blues on the radio. Moore was pitching a no-hitter in the bottom of the seventh and it was all I could do to tear myself away from the radio to go outside and have a look.

Dad came home from work at Firestone Aircraft just after ten, so I knew he ain’t on that train but I hoped Jessup waren’t on it, ‘cause he was out lookin’ fer work, today, an’ Jesus knows when he might come home.

We ran off the porch to see the wreck. People all hysterical and whatnot, but it seemed like everyone was okay.

Pretty soon, two police cars roll up. There musta been thirty people milling around, what with the conductors and the passengers all out in the road all shook up.

Mamma? She on the phone to Firestone telling them that there was a big crash just before stop 97. Gram came running over from Long Street ‘cause she heard it from Mrs. Tippet there had been a crash.

Well, it took them a long time a pullin’ the car out of Old Man Peters’ yard, but they did it. Turn out, the kids in the neighborhood done threw their shoes up in the cable. Who ever heard of sech a thing? Guess they daddy done made some money down in Texas at the oil fields and they ken ‘ford to throw they shoes aroun’.

Since no one got hurt we set on th’ porch watchin’ all the ruckus. Drinkin’ lemonade. I reckon we’ll git our pitchir’ in the paper tomoor’, seein’ as how Charlie an’ me stood out in the middle o’ th’ road in front of all o’ the people. I jus’ glad Daddy still at the shop with the hose between his teeth. All dusty an’ smelly like, before he stopped at the tavern on South Main on his way home. He usually walked there, but caught the last car home.

But I always thought he might go to the tavern early. ‘Cause sometimes. Sometimes, he came home before dark.

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View the photo that inspired the writing here.

Note on the photo: The back was inscribed in pencil with the following: ” Aug 21 -1903 Accident on [illegible]+[illegible] (34th). North side of car”

Unfortunately, tonight, I cannot find the photo that inspired this next piece. I’ll update and post it when I find it.

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We hadn’t ever known anything but the yard. The sun reflected off the steel cars bright in our eyes. The dust from the cinders. We had gone where the work was. Our fathers laid the track that the Northern Pacific rolled on and now we replaced the tracks and coupled the cars in the dead of night under a moonless sky. We filled the cars with lumber from the mills, coals from the mines, an dour hearts and souls.

Me and Tommy and Roy. Met back in ’38 and had been on the rails since. Me, I started work in Billings when I was caught riding the rails by the yardman there. I had caught the train from Butte and was trying to get east, to Chicago, maybe. I was sixteen then, and he told me he’d give me a job, that riding the rails was dangerous for a boy like me.

I took the job in Billings and learned how to hook up the cars. By the time I met Tommy and Roy – they were cousins – my body was hard with work and we had all three of us grown our whiskers. We worked fourteen, sixteen hour days and were glad to do it.

It was July, 1947, when Tommy left the trains to Roy and me. He holed up with some broad in Alberton for a few days, and her father put him to work at the house. He musta took a shine to her, ‘cos he never did come back to the rails.

The day I remember, though, is a hot June in ’47. We had been working since four that morning and word was that another train was coming in from Spokane, and it was a real red ball. The west siding switch at Spring Gulch had been removed, so that meant a re-route, and the kingpins always acted surprised when that happened and they got to the bowl, though it had made the invoices by the deadline. I bunged my hand up pretty good, and Tommy wrapped it in my shirt he tore up for that purpose. Tommy’s boots were hurting him, and Roy was having a hard time standing up for want of sleep, and for his blatant disregard for rule G.

We had just finished preparing the Bozeman bound rig, and the engineer was making his final checks. He gave the highball, and the sun was bright and the sky was bluer than I remember it being again after that.

The whistle howled, long and low, and I leaned on Tommy and Roy was leaning up against the car and I was tired and happy and aware of being alive.

She walked up the back dock unexpectedly, and she was beautiful. I hadn’t seen her since she moved from Chicago and I took a job at the Trib. When she left, she told me she wanted me to come along, but I had stayed behind, preferring the company of the boys at Chelsea’s and the girls who would go home with me when the lights came on there.

I hadn’t heard from her. And I didn’t know she was back in town. The beer at Chelseas’s had grown stale and the girls stopped coming home with me. Now, it’s eleven a.m. and I’m sitting on the back dock, smoking a cigarette, enjoying the shade, dreading the heat of the office and the clatter of the typewriter keys.

And here she is.

“Hello, Johnny,” she said.

She stood there, more beautiful than I remember, waiting for me to speak. When I didn’t, she shifted the camera she was holding to her right hand. She dropped her keys into her jacket pocket. She left her sunglasses on.

“Can you please tell me where I can find Jessop?” she asked.

I stumbled, and flicked my cigarette. I stepped towards her. She did not back away, but did not approach me. I steadied myself against the wall. I took the flask from my boot. Took a healthy pull.

Peggy stepped into the shade. Still, she did not remove her sunglasses. I wanted to see her big-as-the-Wyoming-sky blue eyes, and remembered how cloudy they would get when she was angry.

“Where’s Jessop?” she asked again.

“Peggy, you’re beautiful.”

“I suppose I’ll find him,” she said.

Every hair was in place. She looked…well, that dame was something.

My throat closed up. I couldn’t talk. I lit another cigarette.

Wordlessly, Peggy Marie walked past me and pushed through the heavy steel doors. She had no dust on her new leather shoes. Her slacks were freshly pressed. And she smelled of lavender.

I never did find out where she was living, nor how she came to be in Chicago again. Jessop rarely spoke to me, and I was too new a hand to approach him about it. I did see her photographs of the car show in Detroit that next week, and they had her name below them.

Peggy in Detroit, at least right now. That explained the fancy Ford she had stepped out of that Saturday afternoon as I watched her in the parking lot. Her calf had flashed briefly in the sunlight as she got out of the car, and I didn’t know, then, that it was Peggy Marie. The old familiar lust returned, and when she was close enough for me to see her, for me to know that it was her, the wind was knocked out of me. Like I was seeing her for the first time again. And I knew I was wrong to have stayed in Chicago.

———-

The back of the original photo has the following written with a blue fountain pen in a woman’s hand, “Taken by Johnny that Saturday afternoon. 4 - 28 - 45″

I found him down at the riverbank. Larry had disappeared on Thursday. No one had heard from him for three days. Found him down there shivering in the early October morning frost. Laying under a rotting log.

We stopped as we walked up the driveway, and Malcolm had come bounding out the front door. She checked herself at the top of the steps when she saw us, put her hands up to her mouth so that the dishtowel she was holding looked like some crazy vomit caught in suspended animation, flapping there in the wind.

Larry’s glasses were broken and lying in the mud when I found him. Now they hung off his face a little, dangerously close to falling to the driveway where his eyes were transfixed.

He hadn’t said much on the way home and I was afraid for him when he had to talk to Malcolm. He had told me about Amy, and I knew that it was bad.

We had walked home reluctantly, I’m not sure why I was so scared. My left hand was unburdened with gold. But his was heavy with it and Malcolm’s hand had a similar band.

I wanted to trounce him, but knew enough to keep it to myself. He was my brother and I was thankful, mostly, that he was alive.

Amy saw me at the jukebox on Thursday and had run out of the bar into the darkness. When I got to her house, Larry’s truck was parked in the yard. I went inside to find her, alone, crying by the fireplace. I had turned on my heel to go look for him, and walked the dirty streets of the North side until daybreak.

I slept briefly that day and set out again. Wasn’t ‘till this morning that I finally found him, shivering, and I had slept little and restlessly for three days.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he had said.

“I know,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

And now he stood in the driveway with his terrible secret about to spill out, like a deer gutted in the snow. I wanted to say something, anything. To him. To Malcolm. But I stood still, clasping my hands behind my back, and waited for one of them to speak.