Oboy, I’m a big guy now…..
Car in the alley, the exhaust white in frozen dark air.
“Get in. You like jazz?
“Yea, my mom played Peter Gunn for me when I was little.”
He’s flummoxed. “Oh Christ, that old TV show. Well, see how you like this.” He punches in an eight track tape.
“Where’re we off to?
“You’ll see. Buckle up. So, tell me about yourself. It’s not a test, just talk about things you’d tell Allie. And I don’t want to hear about how you feel about Allie. She’s my sister. I don’t want to see her hurt, but it’s weird to hear that someone has feelings for her.”
The music puts me at ease. It feels so fucking cool to be riding in a car with a Senior; and the biggest/legendary badass in school. I talk about mom and dad, my grandma, my loving godfather (he knows his name; apparently, he does physicals for high school sports teams). I go through the ‘three strikes’ with the old man {blatant plug for earlier posts].
He considers this, revs it out of a stop light. (For show? Or a normal behavior?). We’re going past my homeland, but he knows this, so I shut up. “I tell ya, where you live couldn’t be much different than Allie and I.”
“Why?”
“We’re a real community. People live really close to each other, no lawns or trees. There’s stores, churches, businesses, even factories on the blocks with houses. It’s all thrown together. Your whole neighborhood looks like someone tore down a corn field and threw house after house in a row.”
“Not a bad guess. That’s a corn field over there plowed under for the winter.”
A chuckle. “Well, where we’re going is–“
“Doug, before you go on…..Was there really a guy sitting outside his store when Kennedy died?”
A sidelong glance. “In ’63?”
I nod.
No answer, he’s off in mists of time forgotten and not regained. “Allie remembered that, huh?”
I’m a clam, ain’t interrupting this.
“Yea, poor old fuck. Jaime Waters. Lost his wife to cancer after that. He had one of those old long Coke coolers that sat on the floor of the store. You just reached in and took one. Christ………I haven’t thought about him in years. The only place to get a Clark bar.” Eyes blink, we take a sharp turn at a sign that says “State Hill.” Oh shit, I’ve never been back here before.
“Yea, he was crying that day. I put Allie on my shoulders the rest of the way home, she tell you that?”
“Nope.”
I notice he doesn’t talk about his feelings that day.
We drive up a steep hill. There is an building that looks like an old hotel, complete with a wooden porch–‘The State Hill Inn.’ He parks into a nearby church parking lot.
“Okay. Enough old shit. Here’s the deal.”
Next time: Do WHAT???