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Ms. O’Connor, my hero

Richard said, “I guess that door done gone and got the water in. It’s a full half inch in at the bottom. That kinda thing happens round here this time of the year.”
Richard drove a truck for the State. Sometimes it carried salt, in the winter especially when it was cold and the frozen precipitation would spill from the sky. Sometimes it was okra that had seemed to take to the landscape only second to kudzu, another Asian foliage.
In summers his whole truck, leased by him, and rented by the state via him, would carry truckloads of okra as far as Raleigh and the Polk Youth Detention Center. He reckoned them boys ought to like okra alright. Hell, from what he had heard, everything went as it wanted to in that prison and things resembling okra were a-okay as well. In the mouth or other places, it mattered not. He measured his successes and failures by the fact that he had never had to eat delivered okra in a concrete building 350 miles from home.
Cassard Willoughby bought the inn in town around 1953 and had owned for the last ten years or so. The economy of Shelby had not changed that much in the time despite so many of the local college folk had decided to stay around. He did not know what they did to make a living, nor did he care. He heard there was one man who worked for the United Nations as a translator and was not around that much, always flying on big airplanes to this city or another, and that was alright with him. The place had always seemed small when he was growing up and, although he had no desire to leave, other than the occasional romp in Charlotte, he thought it lent the town a certain air of cosmopolitanism that it had always needed and deserved.
Priscilla made cakes at Ms. Lucille’s place. Ms. Lucille was dying and fewer people called on her these days. Those in the know, however, knew that her cakes were the best this side of the Mississippi river and so she kept fairly busy through word of mouth and the local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter.
Priscilla made cakes and had been hand-trained by Ms. Lucille since the trip to Myrtle Beach immediately after high school – the trip on which she and Richard had met. Myrtle Beach had seemd so odd to her. Even the beach had seemed so odd to her. She understood nothing of waves falling, changing of tides, drunken men or the danger that was entailed therein. She liked baking cakes because it made sense to her. Her mother had baked cakes before the fire, and she had always love them. Red velvet cake for a Sunday when Rev, Lewis would arrive.
Richard met Priscilla Dean Carpenter when they were on their post-graduate tour of the greater coast region of South Carolina, and it was within minutes that they had fallen in love. She loved the creases of his permanantly sun-burned neck. They way is crazy eyes fell over her on the quartz sand of that summer evening. She loved the way he talked of being state senator one day. How he, alone, could make it better for everybody.
Only if things could have been so, she supposed.
It was within three months of their return to Shelby that Richard had scrapped and scraped and managed to put a ring on her finger and declare his undying love. She had realized him in the interim to be a redneck and alcoholic and that it would take some great deal to make him any better. She had allowed him, upon his asking, to slip the ring deep upon her finger. His friends appeared out of a small junkyard car and sang a lullaby and ‘He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. He had arranged it all, but somehow it was not enough. At least not right now. She had dreams, and who could shoot down a dream, forgodsake!
She allowed him to slip the ring deep down on her finger and she at first swooned. Then thinking more properly of the family order, of what the kinfolk would say, she remembered his drinking. She remembered the situation of her mother. The way in which her mother had always wanted a doctor. That Richard could change a tire, but doctors could now change a heart. She could wait, she thought. She said fuck it. She used the “F” word the first time, in a non-performative sense, that she ever had. She thought of mother, father, friends and other family not frequently thought about. She realized that the opportunity should never be blown. And, Priscilla thought of how she could never marry him, not now, or ever.

Hey Darling,
I know it’s hard to get the waves to match, to amplify. Or for there to be any moment, or semblance, of simultaneous empathy.
Days seem to be measured out in such a way that getting home makes every hour epic – or at least that’s how I want it to be. Occasionally family stuff comes up – a birthday necessitates a call home, and it feels like it cuts into the long story. Used to be hours felt like short stories, microfiction. Now they want to be that too, but I demand a journey.
Of course, I don’t always get what I want.
I didn’t realize where you were tonight when I put you to bed. It was a different place from me and a conversation with my father about sports and our favorite teams and the fact that no player should earn over $1 million. That, when we buy Nike shoes, we are paying that $90 million Lebron James got in his contract with the company. It’s important chatter in a way. But it’s not the long story on a night like this.
I’m sorry about the way it all went down in the end.
Now that I think about it, I should’ve finished the movie with you.
Love, Harvey

writer and muse

“I don’t think he should be talking to you that way,” he said to her, as he departed for the bathroom. “I think he should only say sweet things, with a girl that looks about like you needs to have sweet things said to her. Otherwise, you gonna run and run far away.”
To Pen he seemed like the sweetest specimen of man that she had ever come across. In this place of alkali dryness, rain a few weeks of the year. Cacti grew up out of the barren soil and took root in something much deeper. She was once told that a cactus’ root could extend for miles just to find ample water. She believed it. Her mother lived in Santa Fe and her father in Phoenix, and her kids were now scattered across the country because of the multiple divorces. The one departing for college, and then work in NYC, and she hoped he would be the one that could help keep her up in these “waning years”, as she liked to call them. Her nourishment came in the occasional phone call, a week per summer in Destin, the occasional mariage in the family in which they all, miraculously, managed to return, or to be together. It was a strange phenomenon and it left her satisfied, but feeling a prisoner.
Truth is Ricky was a shit. Had been since the day he had caused the great chasm between his mother’s left and right pelvic bones. She believed that he must’ve spit fire upon being extracted. His first word must’ve been “motherfucker.” And as a mother she took offense to it all. He welded and drank and sucked from the government nipple when times were tough. He had once gone six months without having to work a day, gaining full pay. A point which he proudly proclaimed to her the same night that he had first asked her out.
He had said, “Awh Pen, I’ve seen you in here every night for 2 years and this place ain’t changing, Hell the whole country ain’t changing. I’ve bought you a beer or two and you’ve given me a ride home and more than that. We danced in the cemetery that one night, and what I didn’t tell you was that it was over Ma’s grave, and that she would be happy. Our hearts are one-of-a-kind. We can make these mistakes, but it is okay. I think we’ve got something here, girl. Whaddya say.” Next week he was moving in from a rented truck into the house that she had got out of the last marriage. Only good thing she had ever done in her life. Or so she felt tonight.
During the day she made quilts out of fabric that she gleaned from local thrift stores and sold them to the kids outside of the club on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. They thought she was a bag lady in a way. Most of them secretly admired. It was only the suburban ones that thought she was bonkers and that the quilts would make them sterile or infertile, depending on sex.
Gwen was her oldest and she had moved to Texas when she was 18 to be with a “sweet” boy who was in the Army that she had met while he was on leave and that she immediately fell for some kind of bad. She moved out there, and a quick wedding occurred which she was never invited to, and three years and one child later they were split and he was stationed in Okinawa, or something like that. Gwen called home at least once a week and sometimes Pen just let the phone ring, and it made her feel guilty.
Pen had Thursdays and Sundays off and Ricky, would always call on those days. To the diner, or the law office and request a dinner that would end up in his drinking and her watching it all go down and sometimes sex and sometimes a fight. She’d accepted the savior long before and none of it really mattered, whether it turned into a fight or turned into sex, she knew all was okay, in the big scheme.
Rick’s brother was Hick and that was a whole different story. He came around too often and wanted booze and drugs and sex and a place to lay his head. Pen was still not sure where Hick laid his head most nights, but at least three nights a week he hoped that it would be with her and Ricky.
It didn’t really matter to her as on those nights it would at least mean that Rick would leave her alone. It all seemed so romantic when it had all began. When she had let him into her life. Somehow it had all soured a bit over the ensuing months and she knew that it would end at some poing. But how? Ricky was a mean son of a bitch, and she was not sure how to deal with him anymore.
One night he had tied her hands to the headboard with bailing twine and made her go down on him until he came. Except he didn’t come. Only if he had come she could have been done with it. His inability had only brought wrath, and from that wrath a day off of work, and it was a Thursday and she was off too.
In the morning, he packed a picnic and woke her up and they went to the lake and played rollerbat by the water, and he told her that one day he would kill her or himself, and for a while she believed that the options were about 50-50, but soon that all changed.
Pen was named by her parents, of course. Her father who thought not of names, but of ideas. Who fancied himself a man of letters and thought that his daughter was, or should be, mightier than a sword. Her mother, preferring something more traditional, and a compromise, chose Penelope and all was good in the O’ Shea house. Pen had never thought as much as her parents about her name. A point which she felt was a true attribute.
But oh reader, this is not a sad story. Sure theer is death and found remains. There is heartbreak and bad decisions. But there is redemption, and strange happiness, and baseball, and flowers in the spring. Remind me to tell it all to you if I seem to be getting lost in my own thoughts.

Fourth, on fourth, and Maris is going for the winning run,
I made it to the bottom of the well faster
and therefore
would never be declared the winner.
Making our way out
of Potemkin and around
to a side of equal-bashing
buttermilk stew
I made a killing with that stuff
out on the streets till
all hours of the morning
as the drunks came and went
they sang “Katie Dear” and “Start Me Up”
they gazed at the crazy man with the limp
who stood on the corner, even at this
hour, selling comic books
Vintage hero, super whimsy
drawn in all color on the cover but
just a newspaper on the inside
sells them for a quarter but some
are worth a whole lot more.

Twenty six thousand four hundred and fourty four rare, used and (some) new parts. A call and within twenty four hours you too can have a new alternator for your late model Lincoln. Why shop anywhere else when all that you need is here. The outside may rust, but the inside is more than enough. Please make offer at front desk. Management on duty must approve all sales.
Jimmy worked hard with an adjustable wrench and a crowbar for 6 years out of high school. Hubcaps and waterpumps. A guy from Elizabeth City once broke down on the highway and he took the pickup truck out to meet him after the call. Helped to fit the pump on the Duster right then and there at the side of the road and did not charge labor. “Elizabeth City,” that always seemed a funny name.
Wayne lived in back of the yard with 3 kids and a doberman pinscher. Funny name, “pinscher.” He had a job at the factory and worked a Stuart’s on the weekend’s short ordering hash browns and fried eggs for late night drunks that had decided to lap it over till Sunday morning. Sylvia had left him three years earlier to follow a mountain man to the gulf coast of Florida.
Horton was the oldest’s name. After his grandfather, all hopes were he would be a famous MLB pitcher. He seemed to have no interest in baseball though. Preferring to read the E volume of the World Book Encyclopedia as of late, as he had already made it through the first four volumes. He could tell anyone in Enoree more about daffodils and the Bastille than they would ever care to know. He had CODed a picture of the Eiffel tower from a catlog that Wayne had ordered him from the magazine that comes in the Sunday newspaper. One of those with the business reply card, put your name and address here and the catalog number that you are interested in there and within eight to ten weeks you should be receiving it in the mail, no postage necessary. It was from somewhere like the Paris visitors bureau as all of the language, as much as Wayne could read, seemed a little off to him.
Mamie was the youngest girl, named by her mother because she had always thought it a beautiful name, and because the woman who had cared for near incessantly as a kid, while mom was doing whatever it was she was doing, was named Mamie. Mamie, the younger, seemed to have a proclivity for singing and could pick out a countermelody to any song on the radio as she and Wayne drove to the truckstop for more chewing tobacco, cigarettes, and Coca-Cola. She had a tendency toward picking up the impulse-buy chocolates at the register and forcing them into her mouth before Daddy could object. Only in the waning minutes of the transactions telling him that his bill would be a full five cents greater. Dolly Parton never sounded so good as Mamie harmonizing in the truck on the way home… “and all of this at six years old,” thought Wayne.
Then there was Deborah. A completely different story. She was twelve at the time the old lady left and Wayne had begun to resent the fact that he let her mother put too many letters in her name. Why could’ve it not been DEBRA? That would have sufficed wouldn’t it? As a solution, Wayne had started calling her Deb since her mother had departed and she didn’t seem to mind.
Deborah had recently started cavorting with a hispanic boy who went to school with her and Wayne had become distraught. It seems like she had never listened to him. Even as a child in the cradle by the bed, he would wake up at night and see her eyes open. He would start to tell her stories of how she would be the princess of a tropical island one day, and that all the boys, always, would love her, and that she would read signs in the way a sunset fell over the river, and that, through her, all of the world’s problems would go away. She would only stare into the corner of the room where her mom had begun painting a mural with a bright sun and rainbow that was only half-finished. She would laugh, and this struck Wayne straight to the core. He found nothing funny in what he was saying. He was filling her and himself with all the hopes of the world, and all she could do was stare at a half-painted, never-to-be-finished, bad painting on the sheetrock of the corner of the bedroom. He’d usually get pissed off and go into the living room and watch true crime documentaries on cable television until he feel asleep and awoke 2 hours later and finally returned to the bedroom where Deb was finally asleep and he, himself, would finally fall asleep on his good hip, so as not to disturb the other, inflamed one, and on occasion he would dream of Sissy Spacek, naked, in the middle of a freshly plowed field of sweet potatoes, singing ‘My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys’ as he wandered up the row to her on horseback in full western regalia, embroidered shirt, silver spurs and all, and pulled her aboard behind him with one fluid swipe of his hand and they slowly trotted through a now snow-covered field, up to a cabin with plumes of long white-grey smoke coming from the chimney. He never felt as good as the days after the nights of these dreams.
MORE TO COME…