The young man stood and took a long look at the land, the difficulty of it. Knotted cherry trees lay to the east shrouding the two-lane highway; before that a concrete irrigation duct splitting two sides of caked dry earth, paths to fishing holes and forts made from splintered lumber and leftover produce crates. To the west behind the house of whose porch he occupied lay an infinity of weeds, golden in the heat and worthless. He peeled the sweat from his neck balling up in his fingertips a gnat or a fly and removed the soft cigarette pack from the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. He lit the Marlboro with a steel-plated lighter, although he mused it might have just lit itself in the mid-morning scorch. His throat opened arid against the invading smoke. After some minutes his moustache felt wet against his forefinger as he held the cigarette to his lips. In his other hand he absently flicked the stiff edge of a photograph with his thumb. There appeared a moment when he nearly tapped the crown of ash on the picture but seemed to think better of it. Instead he allowed the cigarette cinders to collect in the dairy dust of the gray boarded porch.
The tractor plow hibernated in the fields to the north, rust entangling its limbs like kudzu or ant trails. He’d spent the night sitting in the shell cab with a bottle of Early Times and a tall boy, the picture right where he’d taped it some odd years prior, to the left of the steering mechanism next to his father’s makeshift cup holder. A curious thing is a forgotten memory rediscovered. His head pitched to the right as he waited for eyes blurred by alcohol and sky-gazing to focus. There was no reason it would have moved; still, it caught him off guard. The Polaroid picture. One edge curling apart from the clear tape. As he remained in the cab drinking he didn’t try to ignore it. He would occasionally look down at it in a sentry-like fashion, as if the photo were a dormant spider or a slumbering ghost.
Later stumbling drunk through the house he felt like he was looking for something without a name. In the kitchen there were yellow Post-It notes littering the room like polka dots, with direct yet vague imperatives like “Paint” or “Scrub” written on them in neat block lettering. He bent at the waist to pick one off the sink plumbing and came back up too quickly. With the blood surge sugaring his head he crashed unmanned marionette-like to the linoleum, still checkered forties yellow and sea foam. The room spun slowly until he closed his eyes and righted his body against cabinets nailed shut to keep out the prying hands of drifters. He looked about the room and had the feeling of gazing upon a lost lover instantly familiar but wholly changed. The distant vacancy of it brought tears to his eyes, which he repelled with a snort and a stretch of his jaw.
He took the picture from his front pocket and spent a drunk’s minute scratching the remaining vestiges of tape from its white frame. He closed his eyes again; he didn’t need them to know what the picture captured. Dizzying brightness. The teeth of a wide childsmile, sky so pale blue it’s nearly nothing, a thousand shards of sun skipping on the water. His mother held their hands, his brother to the right, he to the left. Her left arm appeared pulled, nearly hyper-extended by his grasp. There was something just out of his reach on the rutted dock. His caramel apple had slipped off its tongue depressor and fallen victim to a yellow wasp. To her other side his brother, slightly smaller, fit underneath her right arm using it as a canopy from the heat, smelling her linen and the lotion of her tan bare legs. Of the three he’s the only one looking forward with an expression of quizzical understanding. It’s a simple look, a philosopher’s envy. His father took the picture.
The tears welled up again and for no other reason than the complete absence of anything else the young man had begun to sing the hymn his mother wrote until he’d inexplicably forgot the tune of the refrain and trailed off into the hummed engine silence of the last few stragglers headed home to violent beds from the highway beyond the orchard.
He put out the cigarette and placed the picture back in his jeans pocket. He had tried last night to make sense of it, to name the emotion the picture evoked, but he was foully soused and unable to stop the slow rotation of the world around him. But now, head full of ache and clarity, he defined the feeling as the memory of the bee sting he suffered during the moments the photograph developed and later the strawberry welt and the small chip of distrust impressed upon him. His mother remained a figure stenciled into the backdrop of his memory dead before he was eight while his brother he imagined perpetually sheltered, maybe holed up somewhere a few miles away in the town they grew up in.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment