Previous draft published on my Patreon a while back, but I’m not sure anyone saw. It’s way too long for a regular post, but maybe if you’ve got some time to read this weekend, it’s for you. The John Prine lyric was a jumping-off point, for which I am grateful.
You go to sleep sometimes and you think this will be it, and you’re kind of glad of it, in a way that doesn’t seem right by the way you were raised. But there’s a sense of letting go, the relief you used to feel when you packed the kids and Lo and the dog into the car and got on 82 and saw Prattville fade in the rearview. Whatever you forgot, whatever you put off, it was someone else’s problem now, even if that someone was the you of two weeks from now. You’d jumped out of the plane.
But you wake up, or at least you always have so far, and if you slept good you feel it, and if you did not, you feel that, too. You wriggle and flex a little till some of the stiffness goes away, or until your bladder won’t let you fuss with the rest, and then you swing your legs over, you pad down the hall on that flat brown groove in the old green carpet, and you hit the head.
You generally sit down every time now, but you’d never tell anybody that, but nothing’d be worse than surviving another night’s sleep just to bend down to clean your own dribbles off your own bathroom floor and seize up and crack your damn head on the sink. Sitting’s nice, too, and you wonder some mornings if you oughtn’t to make a case for it, come out of the closet, so to speak, and free fellas everywhere from standing on their aching pins when they could relax and think a bit.
Course, it’s a misery all its own if you sit too long and your feet turn into numb bags of blood, and you gotta hup two three and keep a hand on the windowsill before you venture to stand up and let the feeling spangle back down your legs. Those first few steps back out of the bathroom are doozies, real Frankenstein foot-dragging shit, and you think about how you used to play football and it makes you mad that you were ever that fast.
It's especially distressing now, which is the hell of it, because it shouldn’t even matter any more. You didn’t do much right in this long and stupid life, but you figure you at least earned a chance to slow down and hurt, to let your knees settle while you had some coffee, but it doesn’t seem that way. You get the pot on and you sit in Lo’s old chair, the one with the shiny bend in the aluminum leg that’s gonna up-dump you on the floor one of these days but never has so far, and you strum your fingers on the table to work the soreness out of your knuckles and you think about Joe out there.
How do you find someone? You’ve never had to, now that you think about it. People just showed up whether you wanted them to be there or not. You remember wishing you could get a damn break from them, even from Lo and the kids, God forgive ya for saying it now, of course. They put you in a whole consolidated school district full of ‘em, told you to tackle some of them in high school, put you on a boat and pointed you at others of them later on and told you to kill ‘em before they killed you. Then you come home and rattled around in a town full of them from then till now, as they winked out one by one.
The ones that are left are as close as the black telephone sitting in front of you, its push buttons rubbed smooth, dull gray on the receiver from the decades of touch. Linda’s been after you to get a cell phone, and she gets upset when you remind her you got a pager on her say-so once and then knocked the damn thing into a porta-potty at the fair the year you all went to see Keith Whitley. She thinks she gets mad because it’s a stupid argument, because of how long ago it was, but you know it never sits well with her to talk about anything you all did with David.
Joe was the baby until David was, and Joe never forgave David for coming along, little as he had to do with it. And then David grew up and went to the Middle East and came home in a box not even a month later, and Joe was the baby again, at an age when you just couldn’t claim a thing like that anymore without it being unseemly. You wondered then, and still now, about the whole thing. If you’d taken the boy out back at a young age and put a bullet in his head, you’d have been put to death yourself as a monster, incurable, unfit, irredeemable. But a government did the same thing to him at the age of nineteen and every one of them got away with it.
You think a lot, especially now when you’re pondering Joe so much, if it woulda been kinder for everyone, Joe included, if the boys could have swapped places somehow. You wonder if thinking such a thing makes you a monster of some quieter kind, but you don’t wish Joe ill, not even now, with what he might be doing out there. It’s a stain on God’s balance sheet either way, you figure, and a crime on the world that David is gone, and pondering what he might have done with his rightful life in the years since he was taken was no sin. It couldn’t lead to anything, and it doesn’t mean you love Joe any less.
And then you wind back up where you were when you woke up, and when you dozed off last night, and where you seem to be every morning now when you realize the coffee’s been done for fifteen minutes and soon it’s gonna be scalded and not fit for man or beast, like Lo used to say. You pour yourself a cup and you get back to your worry, the one you skirt around as long as you can every morning till your brain decides it’s time to just walk in the front door and be done with it.
You start to ponder on where Joe’s at, and what he’s done now, and how on earth you do your duty and go out there and fetch him.
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