So, I was in the Piggly Wiggly the other day buying a tin of coffee and a carton of cigarettes for Flo, and I felt a weird vibe like I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Something unfortunate and potentially unpleasant was about to happen and the dim gray aura of it was floating all around me. I wrongly attributed this feeling to the fact that I have apparently developed a habit of walking into the Piggly Wiggly, picking up certain items, and carrying them out to my truck without paying for them. A half a dozen times in the last three months, Albert Sands, the head honcho of the store, has called out to the house and reported that, “Dewey Lynne, we’ve got you on camera walking out with a tub of Crisco and bag of Gold Medal Flour.” I can’t argue with him because, hey, they have me on camera. They don’t know it, but I also have a pantry full of Crisco and Gold Medal. I guess that I plan on somebody making a few thousand cathead biscuits someday like Grandma used to make. Also, I don’t want to make a scene with Albert and the rest of the grocery store folks because it wouldn’t do to have the law brought into the situation. Not because of things I’ve done or may currently be doing in conflict with the law, but because my nephew Lance is the country sheriff, and I don’t need to ruin his reputation with a shoplifting charge. After each of these calls, I’ve sent Florence down to the store with a $20 bill, which is fifteen more than what the merchandise is worth, and so far my transgressions have been forgiven, but it still felt strange for me to be inside the Piggly Wiggly by myself.
Anyway, I’m a standing there in the checkout line looking at magazine covers with the latest auto mag pistols, Bigfoot babies, and who-wears-it-better challenges because there are a couple of other shoppers in line in front of me, and I have no choice but to wait anyway because the cashier has to go off somewheres to get the carton of Ultra Slims that I’m gonna need when I get to the front of the line. Essentially, I am stuck. I can’t go anywhere. I can’t walk out without the cigarettes nor without paying for my coffee though I’m thinking seriously about doing it anyway and then begging for forgiveness later because I hear a thing that manifests all of those bad notions I’d sensed, the voice of Mabel Vines.
“Dewey Lynne Bugler, what in the world have you done? You oughta be ashamed. You know that baloney makes you horny.”
Mabel really didn’t say that last sentence, but her voice and dumb country-hick accent have always reminded me of when Sissy Spacek played Loretta Lynn in that movie about being born a coal miner’s daughter, and that’s the only line I remember from the movie. If you can recall that line yourself or fast forward to it on one your services, you’ll get a pretty good idea what Mabel Vines sounds like in real life. No acting going on there.
Now, Mabel Vines is school classmate of mine. I guess that I should say “was.” We started in the first grade together and graduated together twelve years later. In those twelve years of being together at the school, we were never what I would call close friends, but we did hook up twice while we were in high school. By “hook up,” I mean we had relations of the carnal sort. Once, it was in the back of Kevin Storey’s Ford van parked in the alley behind the movie theater, and the other time, we were in a tent at the Blanchard Springs campgrounds. I think her boyfriend and my girlfriend were down on the creek bank, and we had snuck up and had a quickie in somebody’s tent. I don’t recall we even knew whose tent was. I was drunk both times we hooked up, but I can’t speak to her state either time. I don’t think I took my shoes off either time, and I seem to recall her jeans around her ankles both times. I don’t know why that seems the way it was, but who knows? We also spent a weekend together in a one-bed tow behind camper on Beech Fork a month or so after I got out of prison. I remember that thing shaking back-and-forth like there was an earthquake. I was pretty sure we were going to tip it over once while we were in the throes. I recollect how slippery with both got with sweat because it was so hot in that little ol’ metal can with no kind of fan or AC. It was damned hot! I had been on a two-week beer-guzzling bender when she caught up with me at the camper on Beech Fork, but again I can’t speak for her state or even the reason of her showing up out there in the middle of nowhere. Come to think of it, how did she even know where I was?
Anyhow, because Mabel has shared her sexual favors with me, and though they are fairly common and nothing earth-shattering, she feels like the tokens that she has presented to me entitle her to access into my private, personal, and family affairs. We have not had congress in more than thirty years, but I still get plenty of her counsel any time she comes around where I am. This day was one of those days, and I was stuck in the checkout line at Piggly Wiggly.
“Dewey Lynne Bugler, what in the world on your doin’ airin’ your family’s dirty laundry out on the Facebook and all over the Internet? Your Aunt Charlotte is just beside herself with shame and embarrassment.”
Now, you know how dumb it was of me to engage, but, like a fool, I did it anyway.
“I ain’t doin’ anything but makin’ up stories, and besides that I already asked Aunt Charlotte about whether she minded me makin’ a story about her and Uncle Boog, and she told me it was fine.”
She really didn’t tell me it was fine. Aunt Charlotte had only looked at me puzzled like she didn’t know what I was asking because she’s so brain-addled from smoking pot all these years, so I took her lack of any answer as being okay.
Well, me telling her that I was making up stories instead of telling the truth and Aunt Charlotte being ok with it set Mabel off, and she launched into Why-I-oughta hen cackle that shook the white bread and donuts off the metal shelves in the store, and knocked down two pyramid displays of canned vegetables, and people were looking at her and staring at me, but I wasn’t bothered in the slightest. I had already wandered off in my mind to a place where the sound of Mabel Vines’ voice didn’t exist, and I was thinking to myself that I don’t owe Mabel Vines a gawddamned explanation about anything, and I don’t. However, I do have some friends who deserve to know why I decided to open up my life like a book, and I reckon there are some strangers out there who would wonder why they should bother reading these stories that I’m throwing together. I figure I owe something to these friends and strangers, and I am fixing to explain to all of you good folks why I am sharing my stories.
By the way, Mabel Vines, if you read this on the Facebook or the Internet, you can just to Hell. That will be the last place the two of us will ever hook up again. I promise you that.
Anyway, here is the deal, straight up and as honest as I know how to be.
Three months ago to the very day that I am jotting down this note with pen and legal pad, I was sitting on my back porch early of morning, drinking my coffee, and enjoying the scent from the smoke of one of Flossie’s cigarettes wafting out through the screen door. I haven’t smoked in over twenty-five years and will not pick one up in other twenty-five, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t take pleasure from it when and if I did. Now, I have made plenty of money in my day, unlike my daddy, and how I made that money may come up in my stories, but just know that I have enough money that I own a pretty nice place, a big house with an open back porch along the entire back that sits above and looks over a two-acre yard that I keep mowed like a golf course with my five thousand dollar zero turn mower. The big, well-kept yard slopes gently down into a small stream that is only a ditch except in the spring when it becomes a small river in the lower part of my yard. At the bottom and up on the other side of the creek is my hayfield that is not fenced in, so I keep no cows on it and bale it two or three times a year. This little creek is lined with huge American sycamore trees with bark on them white like sun-bleached bone with mottled with gray splotches, and two of these magnificent ghostly trees sit on opposite sides of the stream like mirror images of one another, one on the hayfield side and one in edge of the yard. Each has a limb about fifteen above the ground that sticks out from the thick trunk at a right angle toward its twin on the opposite bank. The limbs come together in the middle, and they curl up and intertwine exactly in the center of the creek as you look at it from my cushioned glider on the back porch. The picture that one gets from the limbs and the trees is like a magic mirror, a portrait frame, a fancy gate…no…that’s not quite it. I had to go to a thesaurus and find a word, but it was perfect, “portal.” The mirror image white-barked American sycamores and their bottom limbs form a portal, a gateway that opens into an alternate reality. I don’t know what that reality is, but it’s not this one. When the fog is settled in the bottoms like it was on this morning I’m talking about three months ago, it looked a feller could go walk through that swirling, misty portal and come out in a time or place in any reality that he had in his mind. Well, that morning as I was sitting in my cushioned glider, blowing on my coffee, and a looking down at the nebulous portal, the strangest thing happened.
I saw somebody walking up from behind the mist and fog, and he strolled up right into the middle of the portal and stopped and stood still. He should have been standing in the creek with his feet down in the water, and the grass on the side up to his knees, but he was kind of floating in the mist and vapour, not touching the ground but still appearing to have a physical weight and gravity. It wasn’t a ghost or a spirit. I knew by the way the man blocked out the space behind him. I put my feet on the ground, leaned forward, and squinted behind my glasses. I knew this fellow appearing in my magical mirror. I had met his acquaintance before. I just couldn’t figure out from where off the top of my head. He was a wearing blue work pants held up by a black belt with a thin silver buckle and lace up work boots that seemed a good brand like Red Wings. He was shirtless, and his arms and shoulders were knotted and bulging with muscle. His chest was broad and chiseled. The man reminded me of Daddy back when he was a young man and spent his weekends busting firewood and splitting cedar rails with an axe, a maul, and a wedge. Back then, Daddy would pull his shirt off while he worked, and he looked like the guy on the Incredible Hulk TV show except for shorter. But, this man in the portal wasn’t Daddy. Daddy was dead, and he, besides that, he hadn’t looked like a body builder since I was a kid. Then, the man raised his hand and waved, and, to my overwhelming shock and surprise, I knew it was Daddy.
You see, Daddy got his right hand all gnarled up in an accident with a chainsaw when he was seventeen or eighteen years old while working in Colorado in the log woods. This accident cut tendons and ligaments in his hand and made all of his fingers but the middle one stay curled like making a fist. He could move those fingers and use them fairly normal most purposes, but if he wasn’t trying to unbend them on purpose, they stayed bent. The middle one, though, stuck up straight like a normal finger should. The effect that this had was that it made it look like Daddy was giving you the dirty finger whenever he waved at you. It was always from the palm side and not the backhand, but Daddy flipped off every person he ever waved at with his right hand. And most people thought it hilarious because Daddy was one of the kindest, nicest, easiest to get along with man that most people ever knew. Still, he flew the bird at every person that he acknowledged without meaning a single thing by it.
Anyhow, I am sitting there a realizing that my daddy, who died while I was away in prison and who I haven’t seen in thirty-two years, is standing down there a hundred yards away from me and I want to ask him just the most basic of father/son questions. How you doing, Daddy? Where did you come from? What are you doing here? But, I can’t do that because I am convinced that if I move or make a noise, any kind of sound, he will disappear back into the portal, and I will never see him again. I am puzzling over what I can do, and I’m frozen with anticipation and desperation like my mind is in a vice, and nothing I think about turns the screw handle. I want to talk to my daddy. I want to say I’m sorry. I want to say that I love him, and I miss him. I want to ask why he died and left me, but I’m just a big ol’ turd-lump sitting there with tears streaming down his face. You know, right?
Suddenly, I notice out of the corner of my watering eye that there is a little tow-headed boy about four or five years old standing next to me. His round cheeks are pink with morning cool, and he’s smiling but wide-eyed with curiosity about why I’m sitting there a crying. He’s wearing Key overalls over a white t-shirt, and the overall bottoms are rolled up over his bare feet like they oughta be, and he’s a looking at me and out to where I’m a looking, and he’s a wondering what I’m a seeing that he should be seeing. I’m not entirely sure that he’s real and not apparition, but I take the chance that he won’t disappear if I speak to him.
“Little boy, do you see that man down there in the sycamores by the creek?”
“I don’t see nobody, Papa.”
Well, the word “Papa” shocks me back into the wide awake world and out of the weepy dream, and Daddy disappears, and the fog is gone from the portal, and this cute little feller is still standing there on the porch right next to me when I hear Flo give a harumph from behind the screen door, and I figure I’m about to get to hear a lecture about something that I’ve done wrong.
“Donnie Dean, you run on down to the shed and feed those new pups. Take care you don’t step in any poop in your bare feet. If you do, you wash’em off with the hose out by the flower garden.”
“Yes,m!” he said and trotted down the steps and off into the wet grass of the yard. Florence watches him for a moment and then turns to me. She is in her white pajamas with the red stripes, leaning against the doorjamb, holding a cigarette in her right hand, and staring at me like she just found a shart stain in my tighty whiteys. You’ve seen that look, and when you see it in a woman’s eyes, you know that a talking to is coming.
“Dewey Lynne, you’re gonna have to go to the doctor, and you need to get referred to a specialist.”
“Why? There ain’t a thing wrong with me.”
She huffed aloud and thumped her cigarette ashes onto the floor in the house.
“You didn’t even recognize your own grandson whose been livin’ with you better’n two years.”
“Oh, I did too recognize him. I was just funnin’ with him.”
She dragged in a deep breath of smoke and blew it out with an audible sigh of exasperation.
“And I imagine you were just seeing your daddy or some other of your people down in the yard by the sycamores.”
“I didn’t say anything about seeing Daddy.”
Truthfully, I hadn’t said anything about Daddy.
“Dewey Lynne, you act like this is the first time this has happened. Honey, it’s not.”
Like a flood of incomprehensible memories, the realization swept over me that she was right. This was not the first time I had seen Daddy nor the second nor the third, and Daddy was not the only person I had seen down in the sycamores. I had also had vision of my grandparents, all four of them, standing in the portal, aunts, uncles, and friends long gone, and dogs, horses, cows, and cats that we had had on the farm when I was a kid. I recognized that each time I saw one of them or all of them it took longer to remember who they were. Then, I was choked with the biggest horse pill of all. Without the aid of the sycamore portal, I cannot recall what my Daddy looked like or my Granny or my Pops. My dog Frisky. My horse Thunderbolt. Mrs. Davis, my third-grade teacher. They are all just names of faces and figures that I have no memories of. I sensed that I was losing my whole life and everything that had meaning in my life to nothingness while I was still aware and conscious of living in the present. Fear and I had not been cozy for a long time, maybe since I learned about being in control from Uncle Boog and the dogfight, but now it was sitting here in my cushioned glider with me on the back porch, drinking my coffee, whispering in my ear, “Won’t be long till you know nothing.”
Now, you probably think that I told Flo to get in the house and call a doctor and get me an appointment, but, Nope!, that is not where my mind went. I figured that if I am going to lose my past, eventually, and sooner probably than later, I need to start getting it down in words so that somebody can remember me and remember the things that happened to me and remember how I happened to other people. I realize that it is fair of you to ask why. Why are this man’s memories so important to me?
I am not a good man. I am a dissembler, an agent of chaos. I have murdered, and I have had people murdered. I am not a thief, but I have taken from people because I am strong, and they are weak, and they don’t deserve and can’t protect what they have. I am not a liar, but I have made truth bend to my will and my desires. I’ve treated people worse than animals and still felt I treated them better than they deserved. There is not a one of my stories that ends like a fairy tale, happily ever after, but there are plenty of moral lessons to be learned from them. The greatest one may be that a good and decent society would be better off if folks like me were put down before they ever became a nuisance. What else may be learned, I’m not sure. There should be a lot, but I suppose that we will all find out together. It may be nothing.
The next day after the vision of Daddy, which I think was on a Sunday, I called another high school acquaintance of mine who wishes to remain nameless but who fancies himself some sort of poet and artist. I think he has published a few things, but I don’t know if anybody’s ever read any of it. Anyhow, everyone around here knows that this feller can throw a few sentences together in a legible manner, so I called him and asked if I made notes if he would put them together in form that folks might be able to read, and, since I don’t reckon he has anything else to do, he said, yes.
And so here we are, putting together my life, my past, so that other people can read about who I was, who I am, who Dewey Lynne Bugler continues to be.
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