The Smell Of Bleach
I have a scar on my hand and another on the back of my head. I got them both when I was 22 working on a construction crew down south.
The scar on my hand came from trying to beat back loneliness. And for a time I did. I shattered it one night along with a pane of glass.
The scar on my head came from the business end of a shovel swung by a guy whose jaw I broke trying to save a girl.
As it turned out the girl saved me….though that took the better part of a year.
A scar is where the true gets forced in.
That’s never easy. Something is usually broken when it tries.
That year what’s true about loneliness and bravery, about the stains we all carry and the hope of absolving them cut their way into me.
Some nights I can feel them reach toward each other, trying to meet somewhere in the middle like the true is trying find its way down into the heart of me.
My scars are a kind of map. They are full of right turns and wrong places.
But it’s always the wrong turns that end up getting us to the right place.
And the only way to heaven is by wrong turns.
So that year, one night I started toward heaven by making a wrong turn into an alley. I broke a guy’s jaw and I found a right place.
And then trying to slow that same lonely broken I felt starting in on me I put my fist through a window.
These scars are what’s left of my wrong turns and right places….where the true forced its way first into my hands and then, at last, into my head.
Now every time my heart aches I think it’s the true trying to get in.
That guy had it coming. But so did I.
We all do I suppose.
Part 2
That part of Florida was full of vast tracts of undeveloped land. A banker on vacation from somewhere up north looked at it one winter and saw a way to sell warmth to people shivering in places like Minnesota.
So he hired a company of locals to start building a few very small, very cheap spec houses.
And I hired on with them.
Those houses had no real foundations. They were built on a foot of concrete slab and rebar, then framed, wired up and sold.
They all looked cozy and quaint. Pretty like the way we all want life to be before we actually move into the living of it.
But it wasn’t long before they all began to shift. The foundations, poured by men paid by the job, usually had a crack.
The men also had a crack in them, a kind of flaw at the bottom of each. And that crack found its way into everything they did.
At 22 I too had a crack. I had already seen the kind of heartache that ties itself to the back of you. That kind that no matter what just keeps clanging away in between the sound of your own heartbeats at night.
And like those houses I was leaning.
The foundation of me had shifted. My dreams were no longer plumb.
But nothing in this life stays where it’s supposed to. Not hope or happiness and certainly not love. And every bit of living leans.
Trouble always starts way down deep from a crack no one can see.
And though it’s hard to feel, the world is perpetually in motion. It keeps spinning like its forever looking over its own shoulder trying to find something it lost.
It all seems perfect and still, but it all has a lean in it from the start...from the crack that's in everything.
The county sent an inspector that took soil samples and walked back and forth shaking his head. He finally nailed a condemned notice to a few doors. Eventually they set up No Trespass signs.
A few Minnesotans moved out and sued. And those houses sat quietly shifting, condemned by the flaw hidden at their core.
A year later in the middle of one Saturday night the first of them, already leaning like a drunk, collapsed into the arms of a Sunday morning.
Eventually all those houses, full of both the weight of their hopes and the crack way down deep, fell in time.
And exposed in the rubble was the crack that ran across the foundation… like a scar.
Where what's true had forced its way in.
Part 3
The banker, trying to cut his losses, let some of the crew live in the leaning houses off the books.
I lived in one that year. Every night I would walk past the No Trespass sign, feel the lean in my heart and the lean in my dreams and the lean in the world around me.
Inside the drywall had a crack that ran like a scar from the floor to the ceiling. The windows frames were all warped and painted shut so it was hot all the time.
The floor was oak but stained so dark that all the flaws in the grain were clear to see.
It was ruined but that made it more beautiful in a way and over time the flaws seemed to change to highlights as they sometimes do.
A crew chief that lived there had left an old second hand washer. It was unbalanced and would thump thump thump each night like it was trying in vain, with all its might, to beat the dirt away.
When I was born the doctor told my parents I had a heart murmur. I had it checked every couple years as a boy and heard the doctor warning my mother about it.
Frightened I asked her what murmur meant. She looked at me with sad eyes and kissed me on the cheek and said 'Your heart knows things you don't yet son. It's just doing its best to try and tell you.'
So every night just before sleep I would try to listen to the murmur in my heart. Trying to hear what it was trying to teach me.
It wasn’t until that year that I could hear it clearly. Sleeping in the leaning house at night I began to hear it whispering in the space between each pulse.
It was full of some echo of all it had been forced to feel.
My first job that summer was about a shovel and the dirt, about sweat and about time.
The sweat and the hours get into the dirt and it makes a kind of mud. The days and the dirt keep coming and the mud finds its way in through some crack in you.
They call it day labor because you drag the dirt from daybreak to dark. Then from dark to daylight you listen to your muscles groan as the weight creeps into them.
Each day it seemed like I was trying to drag the earth toward something it should be… but never will.
In the dark before dawn a pickup truck would slowly edge down through the streets collecting the crew.
I was new and young and dumb so I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open.
And each morning I began to hear an unspoken groan in the men around me. It was in the way they kept their eyes down and the way they looked at the dirt.
Later I heard that same muttering in my muscles like some part of me was learning to speak that same language.
It was full of broken words, half heard curses and a kind of plea that could no longer see the point of saying itself.
That year I began to hear it under everything around me. I could hear it getting closer like it was trying to get into me. And I feared, one day, it would find its way down into my murmur and my dreams.
The dirt that filled those days found the crack in each man and poured itself in until it seemed that each was slowly being buried above the ground.
Every night I would come home alone covered with dirt and mud and sweat.
I’d step inside and strip and leave those clothes in the machine. I'd listen to it try once more to beat away the dirt of each day.... like it was trying to make the world be what it should... but never will.
The old man that ran the day labor was named Justin Tyne but everyone called him Hours because he kept track of the clock and the checks. And every Friday the slab crew would holler 'Just in Time!' as he handed out the pay that always went to beer and ex-wives and child support.
Every morning of his life Hours would work up the mud used slap the drywall in place. He had done it for so long that it had dug its way down into the crease across his palms.
There's a kind of dirt that just will not wash away.
His wife had tried everything to scrub it out but some stains are just too strong. So she finally gave up and let the dust in his hands hold hers each night.
Hours saw me looking at them one day.
‘Clean hands are hard to come by son’ he said.
Then staring down at what they used to be he whispered to himself 'Hard to come by.’
The world's a dirty business and even a clean heart doesn't mean you won't end up with ruined hands.
I learned to lean into every day. And each day weighed the same… like ten thousand shovelfuls of dirt.
The weight of it got into my hands and then into my back. And then it finally climbed up into my eyes.
Two months in one of the rebar welders didn’t show up for a week. He had gone on a bender after his girl couldn’t stand the groan in him anymore and left. They needed a pair of hands and picked me.
Part of that job was working with sulfur and sulfur stains a rust color. So I would go home each night with my hands red like each day had exposed some rusted out part in me.
I’d be out of water by noon. And I could feel that thirst …the kind that starts at the center of yourself and steadily works its way up into your ears. That wordless kind of plea. But by 3 it was circling around me.
And I would labor away alone listening to the plea in my head and the murmur in my heart and the groan in my back until they all seemed to sing.
Part 4
Some of the slab guys started to take me along with them to their shot and beer joint.
It was a real dive out near the groves in Ocala. Just a ramshackle converted barracks with bars on the windows and a few booths and tables. Cheap booze and warm beer. It was the kind of place you go to get you where you’re going and drink away your 8 or 40 or 365.
One old boy that worked a backhoe would step it each evening and holler 'Finally made it...Heaven!'
That stuck so a lot of the crew started calling that joint heaven...though it seened more like purgatory, or perhaps limbo to me.
The old lady that ran it tried to keep it clean which was hard with every man dragging his dirt in each night.
She took to washing away the mud and the drunks and the fights that always followed with bleach.
Each night after closing she would pour it out on the floor and mop the place with it.
So the bar always had the smell of bleach in the air, like it was pointlessly trying its best to clean away something that could never be clean.
Some guys would drop half their weeks pay there. A fifth of Jameson became some kind of way down deep cement for a fracture they all felt in themselves but could never quite reach to repair.
They would pour it on each night like they hoped it could fix some unseen crack.
And even though each felt that crack in themselves they seemed powerless to stop all they ever wanted in this life from falling in on itself.
It made them seem truer.
There’s something about getting up each day that requires forever trying to correct some kind of uncorrectable flaw.
There’s a kind of bravery in that. The trying in vain to become something larger than the flaw you feel at the heart of everything.
Sam Albright, an old 300 pound redneck, had been pouring concrete slabs since he was 16. But no matter how many he poured he could never quite repair the crack in his own foundation.
Here he was pushing 50, alcoholic, carrying the pieces of a few broken marriages. He tried with booze then love then booze again to fix the lean in himself…but that flaw was so far below the surface that it couldn’t be reached.
Still he was a show up every dayer, the kind of guy that thought of work like breathing. If he ever stopped he’d suffocate from the stillness.
Sam’s crack started way back from his first beer at 12. It stretched from the never enoughs through the too manys.
Never enough money, too many debts. Never enough love, too many dawns. Never enough time and what’s true and too many spinning tires and gravel dust from one more badly built marriage.
Who do you see to get that kind of crack repaired?
He’d show up every dawn with a shovel and a 12 pack and pop the first by 6:15. Then staring into my innocent eyes he would whisper ‘That’s right son…Breakfast of Champions.’
That year all that was left for Sam was the work. The shovel and the gravel. The float and the concrete.
He was trying quietly every day, like all of us, to somehow save his foundation from the flaw hidden in his own hands.
Sam bent over one day to pick up a shovel and finally collapsed.
He fell to his knees for a moment, reaching for his fractured heart, trying to prop up the lean of it once more I suppose.
His eyes were suddenly clear and blue and the pain in his chest felt just like regret.
Then he dropped to the dirt, like he was already buried above the ground.
And his heart, full of some hidden crack, finally broke in two.
That night the old lady that ran the bar once more poured her bleach on the coarse wide plank pine floors.
She tried once again to wipe away the fights and the dirt...then the heartache, the fear and the doubt that the working men carried inside them.
And each night the smell of bleach, as hopeful as it was pointless, would fill the air.
Part 5
The INS inspectors used to come by on Fridays dressed like diggers looking for illegals even back then.
They might as well have packed up the entire place because even the Americans were all refugees from something in themselves.
The old woman hired a broken down biker to stamp hands on weekends. His name was Peter but because he was from that town over by the gulf everyone called him St. Pete.
St. Pete’s real job was to keep those INS pricks out.
His face was weathered by age and battered by bad habits. And he had one eye put out from a broken bottle in a bar fight, so he could barely see.
Instead of carding people at the door he would grip your hands and feel for a hardness, for some callous or scar. Soft hands weren’t getting into Heaven.
Sometimes it was almost as if he was feeling for what had been lived into them. Feeling for the struggle, for the broken and the true.
Mine were stained red and rough. They were cracked and they were dirty. St. Pete would grip them and stare at me through his one scarred eye and whisper ‘That’s alright son. Nothing to be ashamed of…Clean hands are hard to come by.’
And though my hands were full of the kind of dirt I lived into them back then I still believed that my heart, full of its own buried crack and murmuring to me each night, was still clean and true.
Part 6
Sometimes on a Friday night you can hear the world exhale in relief, like it has been holding its breath from Tuesday on.
By evening the old woman would crank up her prehistoric jukebox.
It was filled with soul music. Not black music per se. Soul can be swing…it can be country…it can be rhythm and blues or jazz or rock.
But each of those songs had a plea at the bottom of it. Each sounded like it was trying to wring some strength from your heart… or searching for an end to that kind of lonely you can hear under each breath.
The quarters would roll down and into the slot and the songs would rise into the air full of something taken that can’t ever be replaced and the longing that grows in the empty space it leaves.
It sounded like each singer was trying to find his way back into what was.
It was like each song was full of the kind of longing that knows full well it’ll never quite be able to reach what it needs, but can’t stop trying.
Sometimes the old lady let the migrants in from the nearby fields. Mostly Mexican. Family people. Pickers.
Stoop work makes a soul humble. You bow relentlessly and the bowing somehow crawls into you.
Each day these people would stoop 10000 times like they were trying to find hope buried in the dirt beneath a bean bush.
Do it long enough and your heart will end up bent in half, from all the hoping and all the humble.
They didn’t drink much. Just came to hold each other and dance to the weary and beautiful tunes.
They kept their eyes down and eventually their dreams followed. It was like they believed the dirt and the next step were the only thing that ever mattered in this life.
And that shortened hope in them made each seem full and against all odds sometimes even regal…like being stripped of everything but each other’s eyes and arms somehow made them larger.
I can recall being tuned up on cheap whiskey and warm beer and watching them dance around me to something lost and just out of reach under the sound.
They danced like they were certain they would never have anything in this world...except each other.
I suppose none of us do, but I didn't know that back then.
Some nights it still feels like hope and regret are chasing each other in a tight circle. Back then I'd watch the couples caught in that slow spin.
I could see them gathering strength from each other, like an old washer, until they found a way to clean each others stains.
So on the weekends in that ramshackle bar at the edge of the groves the migrant couples would hold each other and listen to the plea in the verses. And then they would lean in hoping the chorus, like a hymn, could reach down past the stoop in their hearts to raise them up.
Part 7
A brick crew hired on from out of state. Mostly Alabama boys that hated the idea of drinking with Mexicans.
Their first night in town an old Mexican man with thirsty eyes stood innocently by the bar asking for a glass of water.
One of them grabbed him around the neck. 'Por Favor Senor! C’mon let me hear you say it. You want Agua?’
The old man said nothing. He kept his eyes down waiting once more for the trouble he had learned to expect.
The bricker looked around at his smirking redneck buddies ‘I got some agua for you.’
There was a puddle outside from the afternoon thunderhead. He dragged the old man toward the door. “Plenty of free agua out here.”
Otis Redding began to sing. His voice filled the air and rose inside the melody. It was full of the kind of want that pulls, over and over, against all that is.
The Mexican men standing in the shadows watched silently. Their eyes were full of an old kind of pain that had learned to expect itself.
I was drunk and really just a kid, but I stood up and stepped between the two.
‘Back off Mister…this old boy didn’t mean you no harm.’
He looked at me like I was arguing against the law of gravity.
'Shut the fuck up boy. These pickers don’t belong up in here with working men. Keep that pie hole shut or you might just find some missing teeth.'
I felt my back stiffen and the Irish in me start to cough like it wanted to say itself with my fist.
But one of the slab boys pulled me back. And one of the brick guys bought a round and that was enough to shut him up for a time.
And the jukebox, full of Sam Cooke and Van Morrison, Otis Redding and Merle Haggard began to howl in the verse for some loss and pray in the chorus for its return.
The people with hard hands and dusty dreams edged once more onto the floor and began to dance to it. The sound drew them closer and the longing in it mated with the callous of their hope.
Night after night the only kind of solace there ever was rose from inside the ache.
It’s the kind that uses loneliness to retrieve something in each other and that none of us is able to reach on our own.
And as the smell of bleach would fill the air I would stare at the red sulfur stains on my hands and wonder if there would ever be something strong enough to clean the rust from me.
Part 8
The next Friday that same Alabama brick guy was there with his girl.
She had dark hair and uncommon features. The kind of girl that could startle you with a little makeup but tried to hide her beauty like it was a burden. So she kept her hair back and her head down and tried not to look the world in the eye.
Illegal of course. No family.
Somehow she ended up with a guy that let the groan in his muscles reach his heart.
Maybe that’s the only kind of guy there is.
For him and a million others on Monday it’s a whisper but by Friday it’s a howl. All anyone wants is a way to silence it.
So he would try and drown it out with cheap booze.
That Friday she was sitting alone at a back table eyes down, waiting on him. She was trying not to look at anything the way a woman does when she wants to be invisible.…when she wishes she never had a body and there weren’t so many drunk guys in the world.
He called to her and she got up and walked across the room toward him and as she did the world suddenly began to fall away.
I felt my heart lean a little harder like the crack in it was widening. I could feel the pull of her at it.
The jukebox was playing. And the echo of Sam Cooke’s voice begin to sing in harmony with the murmur in my heart. Together they reached down and in, past the stoop labor of living in me.
“I was raised by a river...in a little tent…and like that river I been running ever since….’
A Mexican couple edged onto the floor and put their arms around each other. They began to dance in the shadows to the sound.
Some cut in half mercy began to rise from under the lyric. It crept up between them until at last it found itself, whole again.
“It’s been too hard living…but I’m afraid to die…’
The bricker whispering with the girl at the bar turned to see them. He threw a glass and hollered “Don’t want to see you Spics going at each other in a working man’s place.’
The girl grabbed his arm but he shook her free and she dropped her eyes in shame.
As he stood he fell backwards off the stool, got to his feet and stumbled drunk toward the jukebox. He found the cord and yanked it from the wall. And the sound full of the plea whirred to a stop.
Beneath it was a near inaudible groan that filled the quiet.
Then muttering to himself he stumbled toward the couple. And though he was much smaller he pushed the Mexican back.
The Mexican clenched then unclenched his fist. He looked up to the roof like God and every bit of bruised faith hid somewhere in the rafters.
Then he held his breath and stepped back as he had a thousand times before.
The bricker grabbed migrant’s wife by the arm “Listen Mamasita you just don’t belong up in here.’
He touched her on the cheek ‘Keep coming around and maybe some night I might be willing to get you some good seed.’
He looked through the window out toward the darkened groves. ‘Maybe then everything you spit out won’t end up buried in some orchard.’
The old woman hearing this came from around the bar and pushing past, stared at the silent men in the shadows all around them.
Then, filled with contempt for the world and everything in it, she shoved the bricker. And already full of his own kind of lean he fell drunk to the floor.
The dark haired girl stepped from the shadows and reached down. She put her arm around him and tried to lift him. And like a bad drunk will he started pushing her off and swinging away and hollering in the only language bad drunks know.
It is the language of groans. It’s full of gritted teeth and muttered contempt and doubt turned inward. It’s a sound like a curse from the bottom of a want that knows what it’ll never be more than what it isn’t.
She tried again and managed to get him upright and they shuffled toward the door and out.
I was tired from the week and half drunk. My hands were covered with sulfur stains and all I wanted was to be clean way down deep. So I paid and left.
The wind was picking up and spun me around as I walked toward my car. But as I passed an alley I saw two figures like shadows on the wall…the man and that girl.
He was swinging away trying once more I suppose to hit what can’t ever be struck. But she was the nearest thing to it and he had driven her to her knees.
She was pleading ‘Why Poppy why?’ and crying out ‘ I love you …I love you…’…like she thought it was a shield from the groan in his fists.
‘I love you Poppy…why?’
It sounded like Sam Cooke.
I turned and ran toward them. He was hollering something about how she would just not ever shut up and dammit he was going to break her jaw if that’s what it took.
And as he reached back I threw my shoulder into his chest and drove him to the ground.
All I wanted was to stop him. But he struggled against me.
‘Who the eff are you?’ he hollered. ‘Why don’t you mind your own effin business Mister.'
I shook him hard once and he stared up at me “I’m gonna find you boy...and when I do I’m gonna eff you up permanent.'
The Irish in me began to cough and once more wanted its say. So I hit him.
‘Gonna find you son...Gonna make you wish your mama never had you.’
He was gagging on the rage and he began to convince me that someday in some other alley when I wasn’t looking he would try to darken things for me with a bat or a gun like they already were in him.
“I’m shooting you straight boy.”
There’s always a choice. I could have walked away then and been free of it. But I didn’t understand then how things you do can follow you forever. That clean hands are hard to come by.
I was angry at the threats, at the crying girl, at all the dirt in the world and the stains on my hands.
I was angry at the groan I had started to hear in myself and at the prospect that it might someday bury me above the ground.
So I cocked my left hand and threw it until he was unconscious.
She crawled out of the alley holding her face, bent over, full of the stoop labor of living.
The wind picked up and the dust in it looked like rain in the arc of the lights from the bar.
I started to step away but felt the drunk reach out for my ankle.
I wore steel tip boots then from the job…covered in dust and dirt and red sulfur stains. But as I shook my leg away I realized that there would be no getting free of this.
“It aint gonna be just your jaw now boy…no sir…I’m shooting you straight son.’
There’s a kind of cost hidden in everything. It's that part that gets dusty and dark from just living. It can follow you. It can reach out for you. It says 'You owe and someday you're going to have to pay.'
And even when you’re certain it’s the right turn you can end up in the wrong place.
I leaned down close so he could hear and I half whispered at him ‘So you’re gonna break my jaw?’
He muttered something that sounded like a vow.
So I grabbed him by the shirt and set him up…his face upturned in silhouette. And just for a moment he looked contrite, the way a person does when they understand they are going to have to pay something more than they can afford.
I felt the break with the first kick. I suppose it was the true trying to find its way in.
It felt like a kind of justice. The stained up kind. Full of what he was trying to do to her.
But I also felt some part of the groan in him pass to me, through my steel toes.
She was scared and hurt and when I asked if she was ok she threw her arms around me crying like I was the last bit of mercy left in the world.
‘Where will you go?’ I asked. She shook her head like she didn’t want to hear the words.
Her face was bruised and swollen, but in some other way completely untouched. She was nobody’s victim. No more than any of us.
I could see that old common kind of courage...the kind that pays and pays then pays some more. It’s the kind that always still somehow believes the future will untangle itself from the past and that the crack in us all will someday be made whole.
It was foolish…but I was young and a fool as all young men are so I nodded and squinted and tried once more to see the right place.
And the world seemed to pause. I could feel the weight at both ends of a decision…what you want and what that want demands.
There’s a reason the world keeps spinning in circles. It keeps reaching around trying to undo all it has spun into itself. Like an old washing machine.
Everything is full of its own circular plea for the better and its simultaneous surrender to the worse. We’re all caught in some kind of cycle between what we want and what we regret.
But the only way to heaven is by wrong turns.
So I unlocked my car door. She hesitated… then slid in.
We drove without a word and when I finally shut off the engine in front there was a stillness. I turned to look at her and could see a sadness that had long ago settled into her features.
Sometimes a heart becomes more not because of what it longs to feel, but because of what its forced to endure. Sometimes it has to beat the murmur out of itself.
And there's a kind of bravery that feels the pain of living under every breath but still wants nothing more than the air of it all.
After a moment I said ‘I don’t want nothing from you.’ She looked up into my face like she was trying hard to believe me.
Then I said ‘I can see the brave…..’
That word hung in the air and the sound went someplace besides the ear.
It felt like it was reaching in toward some unreachable part in each of us. It touched me and then her like there was something else under the whisper of it. Like there was a jukebox in both of us playing Sam Cooke’s broken and unbreakable sound.
It started to rain and together we walked past the No Trespass sign.
She slept in the bed with a blanket wrapped tightly around her. And I lay down on the dark stained floor like I was one of its flaws.
Just a boy covered with sweat and dirt and blood stains and a girl bruised up by doubt and loneliness and the groan that’s under everything.
Otis Redding and Van Morrison and Charley Parker started to call out to me in my dreams. And I could feel my bent in half heart start to dance, like a migrant, toward some unfound mercy.
It felt near now but still just beyond my reach.
Part 9
There’s a No Trespass sign in each of us. It is that last small inviolable space between what we want and what we can’t quite reach. No one ever really teaches you about it. But everyone feels it.
So we call that nearness love and we call that distance lonely.
We try to tear down the No Trespass signs in the back of each other’s eyes.
And we try to love away the lean in the places we choose.
Try to make right turns. Try to make something of the wrong places they sometimes lead to.
And we throw our arms around each other and pray with our wordless hearts that we might be able to whittle that space down.
But that takes a kind of bravery.
Because it remains and always will. No trespass.
And some nights you want with everything in your heart to feel some woman’s wind blow clean through. But it’s always there…invisible… like glass.
I woke in the middle of the night sweating in that hothouse and got up quietly trying not to wake her. I walked to the window and I pulled and pulled at it… but it wouldn’t give. Warped from the lean in the walls and painted shut.
Coat after coat locking it down tight.
No Trespass.
I strained and strained some more, trying not to make a sound.
And when I couldn’t stand it anymore….the God awful world…the language of groans…the plea in me …the beaten girl in my bed….the thirst and the heat of it all rising up around me, I began to beat at the frame.
I pounded with my forearms trying to break it free. But it wouldn’t give.
And then when I could not stand it anymore I finally reached back with my fist and broke through.
You can barely see the scar now. But it’s there…where, that night, the true started to force its way in.
But it wasn’t the glass I was trying to break.
I was trying to break Lonely’s jaw.
I was trying to knock down the No Trespass sign forever.
Maybe every heart is painted shut. Maybe there’s only ever one way through that glass…to break it. To shatter it.
And so I did, like any young man will...with his fist.
The girl awake now and watching in the dark stood and touched my hand, broken and bleeding, and walked me away.
Clean hands are hard to come by but that night she cleaned the cuts without a word.
Loneliness gets broken like that.
It takes the brave in you to do it. You have to be willing to beat against it…to break it out and then try to clean the wound of it from you.
I started to lie back down on the floor but she took me by my wounded hand and led me back toward the broken window and the bed.
That night the wind finally blew through and the heat along with some down deep thirst began to recede.
The groan gave itself up to the murmur at the heart of me. And the true, at long last, began to force its way in… through a scar and a broken window.
Part 10
When I'd get home each night I’d step inside the back door where the washer was and strip down completely.
But the stains get harder each day to wash away. The red rust of the sulfur gets in way down deep. And it burns.
I’d leave them there and then step into a shower as hot as I could get it, trying to blast the stains from me, knowing all the while I’d be back out in the world the next day filling my hands with a kind of irredeemable dirt of it all.
Each afternoon she would find the pile and wash them out by hand a couple times. Working at the stains. And then she would load them into that old washer and pour in bleach.
It would churn and thump like it had 10000 times before trying once again to make the dirt give itself up. Then she would leave them on the line waiting on the wind to blow them dry.
The loneliness that shattered gave way to a kind of love.
It starts as nearness. Then a man and a woman see each other clearly and a recognition takes hold. They leap toward each other...as though through a broken window.
We began to work each day, digging at the cement mooring of the No Trespass signs each had in the back of our eyes.
And we began to throw a kind of tenderness back and forth like a ball of yarn the way young couples do. Eventually, it knit us closer the way it always does.
She began to love me the way a woman will when she sees beneath the rust into whatever stainless steel is still at the bottom of a man.
And I began to love her the way a man will when he sees the broken edge of an unbroken spirit.
That summer it rained nearly every night and like those other stains, in the dark, with lightning all around and the wind blowing through a busted window, she would try to wash the day from me.
She poured herself like only a woman can until she herself became a kind of bleach.
Some tender part of her worked at the coarse in me determined to wash away the dirt that collected between the lean of my heart and the stoop labor of trying to find some lost hope.
That cleansing each night became a kind of holy thing. No one talks about it and it has no name except love. But that’s not it. Not really.
It’s something else. Some common wordless act between a man and a woman. It’s some forgotten sacrament that has no name.
It is full of the cleansing of baptism and the communion of two souls. And it’s the last rites of hopelessness and lonely.
It surrounds your scars and scrubs at them until the true that was forced in reaches up and out.
It saves us again and again, night after night from the ruined in our hands.
And somehow, in the dark, it makes all the wrong turns find the right place.
But this kind of redemption is never a onetime thing. You have to wash yourself out forever.
You have to roll away that stone each night.
You have resurrect yourself again and again before you can walk above the dirt you’re buried in each day.
So every day I would die a little and feel the dirt rise all around me, trying to bury me above the ground.
And each night she would dig me out.
Like the old woman, she learned to use the strongest part of her. She would pour it, like bleach, first on those clothes and then on the man.
And as each day revolved into night I could feel the world turning ...wash, spin and rinse…trying again and again to clean the groan from its own heart.
I remember listening to the rain beat against that old tin roof and further in the back hall the washer churning away at the stains and the girl in my arms trying with every bit of her heart to bleach me out again before the coming day.
All of it spinning up around me each night.
Saving me again and again, from the stains of myself.
Part 11
I got sent to this job out on the county line. Out there it's just dirt and hope…a lot of land that some developer was trying to scrape into a town.
They built the roads first. They went on for miles. They put up the signs and waited for investors that never appeared. There were no houses. Just a lot of dreams digging at a lot of dirt.
The folks around there called it Critterville because the only thing that lived out there were possums, snakes and the occasional drainage ditch gator.
They’d roll their eyes when the local paper would run an ad about mortgaging a quarter acre slice of heaven. As usual it took a wrong turn to reach it.
The developer’s son was a preacher so when they finished with all the standard street names like Main and Elm and Magnolia he started using names like Faith Bypass and Old Hope Road.
Faith Bypass was supposed to be a shortcut but it flooded alot and usually took longer.
There are no shortcuts.
Old Hope Road became one of those two lane blacktops that goes on forever and changes it name every few miles. But it’s still just the same old road…hoping for a way through.
There was a street way back in called Forgiveness Road. The local kids used to drag on it and some one of them was always stealing the sign.
No matter how many times they put up a new one some kid would try to steal Forgiveness and hang it on his bedroom wall.
As a result it was nearly impossible to find Forgiveness Road, which I suppose was the point.
But each weekend in the middle of the night the local kids, looking for some forgotten straight away, would find their way through the tangle of streets to Forgiveness Road. And there they would practice racing their old hopes.
They’d take bets on each other and pour bleach on the road and spin their tires in it trying to get some traction like they could burn away the stillness in themselves.
And then they’d roar down the empty streets trying to reach some finish line they could never quite get to…hoping to gun it hard enough to somehow get near all they ever wanted.
Sam Albright was working the Critterville job. He saw me and idled over and smelling like his prenoon 12 pack told me the Alabama brick crew was back working in that part of the county.
‘That old boy is asking around. Looking for you son.’
He stared at me through bloodshot eyes. 'Yes sir that boy means business. Got a gun on his hip now.’
‘Of course he does.' I thought.
He had a gun and a memory of sipping Jim Beam through a straw for two months. He was filled with the echo of my steel toes and looking for an ear to pour his groan into once more.
“I’m gonna shoot you straight son.”
Back then you could buy your fortune at any county fair for a buck. But I didn’t need a gypsy to know how this would end. Some things get buried above the ground.
He’d be drunk and he’d find her or me or both of us. He would shoot at himself once again… but he would aim at us doing it.
She would be ruined and so would I and so would he.
And the world would record it in agate type and stuff it into the back pages of the police report in the local paper. One more tiny bit of merciless rage turned back on itself as it always is.
We all have it coming.
So that night in the house with a lean, surrounded by the flaws of the darkened floor and a broken window I told her - ‘He’s back.’
Her eyes went wide with worry.
‘He’s looking to settle the score.’ I explained.
But no one settles any score. We are all forever running behind some wrong trying to catch up and get even with it. And even when we do it just makes us lose another part of ourselves that we’ll miss forever.
‘He’s got a gun.’ I said. And as I did she stood up and walked to the washer and began loading it.
She turned it on and it began to whirl and thump, like she thought it could somehow get a hold of what was and force the stains from it.
It was a pointless and hopeful kind of thing. It was a woman trying to make the world, full of its own dirt, into something it can never be. Clean entirely of the past.
I got up and walked into the back hall and put my arms around her waist.
I whispered ‘This guy won’t ever stop honey. Some things just have no brakes in them.’
And then I told her how it would end.
She spun around and looked up into my eyes like she wanted the truth to become something other than what it is.
And when she saw it wouldn’t, she turned back around and opened the washer and poured in the last bit of bleach. She poured it until the jug was empty.
Then letting out a small cry she threw it at the window like she hoped it might bleach away every bit of the world’s stain.
Some things follow forever. But sometimes they run ahead of us.
He had the memory of steel toes in him. And the crack in his jaw had somehow found a way to run from his past ahead into our future.
You can scrub all you want but some stains just won’t lift. We carry them way down deep inside all we’ve ever done.
And it’s nearly impossible to find Forgiveness Road.
There is no sign of it.
That night she cried inconsolably the way a woman does when she’s afraid for all she feels and of losing it.
But I think she was filled too with something like pity for the way the past seems to follow and the world has to spin.
Then finally, in the dark she whispered to me that she had a cousin in Tuscon and that we both should go together.
That night I thought long and hard. I thought about what I felt and what I wanted. About what I would lose and how it might follow me forever.
I thought about how living digs footers in us all and about the kind of dirt that gets inside…..into the bones of us.
I knew if we started down Old Hope Road together that the broken jaw would follow and so would the gun.
And I knew if I tried to hang on to what we had saved in each other the crack that we built it on would widen until it found us. And the lean in it all would collapse us.
I could see too that going together would stain her future, like sulfur. It would fill it with the kind of rust that burns slowly and ruins everything it touches.
I would rather give her up forever, live with the loss and the memory of what might have been than open her up to that kind of might.
So by dawn I knew what was for the best.
For the best always feels like for the worst…that’s how you know it.
So that morning I told her I would never see her again and that I never really loved her anyway.
Not because it was true. It wasn’t.
I just wanted it to be true.
It would be easier for her and maybe years from then it would be easier for me too. But she threw her arms around my neck and I couldn’t help but pull her close.
And though neither of us said a word, we both knew it was a lie.
And there’s a kind of truth in that.
She reached down feeling for that lonely old scar and squeezed my hand. And I could feel the true forcing its way in once more.
Then trying to say the worst thing I could think of, to make my heart feel accustomed to it, I whispered that I would never see her again.
But that was a lie too because she was already in my dreams and I knew she would dance there, like a migrant, forever reaching for my heart.
And that was enough. It would have to be.
Part 12
Eventually the things you give up…the things that hurt the most turn themselves inside out.
It’s the things that wander into your half sleep and beckon from a world that will never be that somehow become the things of which you’re most proud.
But that’s a lot of hard dirt to dig through.
So I paid it out of myself.
And looking in the mirror that dawn I could see the longing in my eyes slowly begin to cure itself and harden into something like regret.
But it’s a package deal. Love and sacrifice. It gives and it takes all at once.
You think it is what's given that will make you bigger. But it’s always what's taken away.
That night I felt the sting and the first hard pull of what was taken.
Eventually…it took years, but that pulling at my heart made it bigger.
It hurt though. The permanent kind.
Becoming always does.
Like soul music, we are made larger only through the longing....the want of what won't ever be.
I had saved some money so I went down to the bus station and bought her a one way ticket to Tuscon. The streets were filled with migrants. The picking season had ended and they were all trying to find a bus to the next hope to harvest.
I hid the ticket under a loose floor board of the dark stained floor and tried, once more, not to look at its flaws.
I had learned to speak all I could of the language of the unheard. I was finished with all that. I could translate the groans and the quiet and the lonely and sometimes I could see them peering out through the bars in my eyes trying to get free.
Sometimes even now they seem like they were all I was ever meant to feel or say.
That week I gave the crew boss, a half deaf old man from Tuscaloosa my notice. When he asked why I told him.
And he nodded like he was listening. But I could see he had heard this kind of thing a thousand times. The way happiness gets poisoned by yourself, against your will.
He finally said ‘That boy’s looking to end you son.’
And he stared at me like he had seen this again and again.
He said 'No sense bending your back around here waiting on getting hurt so bad you never recover.'
'That old boy is just trying to ruin the world in the same way as him.’
‘Yes sir….same as him.’ he said and he spat on the ground like he hated every last bit of the earth just for being what it is.
Then he looked out past all the diggers to Old Hope Road. ‘Besides you’re cut out for better things than the sulfur and mud.’
There are no better things though.
There’s just living. And it’s a dirty business building anything especially a life. Your hands get stained and your heart gets full up with the mud of it all.
We fight the flaws in our foundations and we pray with the language in ours hands trying to convince living to be what we want instead of what it is.
And we spoon out each day in shovelfuls trying to force each into the shape of our dusty dreams.
And at night the world spins like an old washer forever chasing our wrong turns in a circle, trying to find some right place and trying to be freed from the dirt of itself.
Part 13
Hours told me to finish the week and come for the last check on Friday. He said he’d even buy me a warm beer.
That last night before she left I went home and stripped before that old washing machine once again. And I scrubbed at my skin and then at my heart trying to wash away the doubt.
That night a thunderhead blew in from the sea and late at night in the dark the walls and windows shook so hard I was afraid the lean in them would finally give way.
She whispered my name and it sounded like the part of living that had forgotten me, the part that still believed that love could reach in and save me from the stains.
And all night long I heard her calling faintly in the dark, without words, like a murmur. Trying one last time, with all her heart, to bleach me clean.
And she did. As best as a dark stained heart …it’s floor full of flaws, can be.
That morning I put her bag on the bus and we stood alone in the shadows.
The bus driver, an old Indian with eyes that had watched a thousand goodbyes gently said
“All aboard Miss. Got to get gone now.”
She started to cry. And I wanted to say ‘brave’ but all I could do was murmur.
She looked up into my eyes one last time and blinked back the tears and nodded. Then she reached out and gripped my hand, feeling for the scar and what was true between us.
Got to get gone….
Then the bus moved off away down Old Hope Road toward the interstate and every bit of some country still unstained by doubt.
Part 13
That morning I walked onto the job site out by the county line to pick up my last check. The brick guys were working on the second story of some office building that would never be rented out in Critterville.
But I was done with all that now.
That crew chief was working the site. He grinned coldly at me and hollered once again “Its better to be a hammer than a nail.’
That was the last thing I heard.
Broken jaws follow you forever. They sneak up behind you. They wait patiently like every day with a shovel.
They try to bury you above the ground.
I felt the crack at the back of my head and heard a groan rise up over the murmur.
Hours and three of his guys dragged him off me.
But I was out cold, lying face first in the same dirt she had tried so hard to clean from me. The back of my head split open, the blood matting my hair and darkening the floor of my neck.
The scar is still there, hidden though, as most scars are. I carry it in the back of my head and the hard to reach underside of my heart.
The old man hollered for a truck and the crew chief had two of his guys load me into the flat bed.
“It’s better to be a hammer than a nail.’ was the last thing I heard before passing out.
Every nail gets beaten. So does every heart. Sometimes they break off from all the hammering.
And sometimes I can feel my heart stoop, bent over on itself, from all its beating.
But a nail can hang on for years. They hold everything together. Small towns and forgotten houses and storefronts and churches are all filled with their same silent constant effort.
You can keep your hammers.
I’d rather be a nail.
They let me out a couple days later and I bought a bus ticket for NYC.
So she went west and I went north. But we were both riding on Old Hope Road.
I have three inch scar on the back of my head from where the true tried to force its way in.
And I never saw her again.
And now many years later sometimes I still find myself in a half dream in an alley at the edge of love and loss, once more taking a wrong turn to find a right place.
Sometimes I want to break living’s jaw. I want to make it tell me why I had to have this true forced into me and leave the scar of that girl.
I want it to speak clearly…not all this murmuring at the back of me. I want it to tell me at last what it wants from me.
And sometimes I still want to break the jaws of the lonely that gnaw at me each night.
I can still feel it, like a dark figure reaching out at my ankles trying to bury me above the ground.
She ended up in Tuscon married to a kind man with sad eyes that ran a spare parts yard. They had three children and she grew old with him.
She wrote me once many years later to explain how it had all worked out for her. How she thought I had saved her, first in that alley and then with that bus ticket.
The truth is she saved me. But redemption isn’t a onetime thing. It demands a kind of repetition. Like a prayer.
So we work the dirt into our hands and pray that the true will find its way through our scars into the cracks.
I suppose we all save each other from the windows painted closed in each of us.
She wrote that she still dreamed of the nights in that tiny place with a broken window and a young man filled with stains.
She said she loved him in the way a woman does when she knows it’ll never be spoken of again…or breathed again...or felt again except on a hot summer night when all you want is to feel the wind once more….and you remember what it was to be afraid of the lonely in your bones and then feel the brave rise in you and echo back above it all.
So I traded the dirt and the migrants and the bar for the steel and the glass and the concrete.
And I left that summer of the scars and the shovels behind, though I can still feel the earth of me trying to be something more than the dirt of itself.
But some stains you can’t ever quite bleach away.
Memory’s one. Lonely’s another. They get way down deep in our bones.
I carry them to this day.
Part 14
Late last week passing a café I heard an old song rising from the shadows. It was some old soul singer on a jukebox.
And I heard once again a voice calling out from beneath the melody, trying to retrieve what was lost.
Sam Cooke and Van Morrison still sing in the very back of me. Together each night we try to reach what is unreachable.
And sometimes I wonder if the world could have stopped being what it is...just that one time…and allow the want to finally reach the get.
In the early blue black of dawn I still sometimes hear them...trying to explain.
And something in the sound says each of us is made holy... not by the getting of what we need...but by the want of it.
In the end that’s enough. It comforts me.
In the space between each beat I can hear my heart murmur the true of it. Some nights I hear it sing, full of want for what was.... like Sam Cooke.
Part 15
It took years but all those leaning houses finally fell. The rubble was swept away and the grass grew over the cracked foundations.
And nothing is left but the streets with no names that all seem to empty into Old Hope Road.
I still think of the year I was, for a time, buried above ground and then resurrected by a girl.
I think of the crack and the dirt, of that old washer and a broken window and the lean in everything.
I think of the lonely and sacrifice and the true that found its way down deep into me …through my scars.
And I can see the flaws of me. I no longer try to hide them.
Sometimes I think I'm like that old floor stained so dark that the flaws are clear. But over time the ruined can become beautiful and the flaws finally yield to a kind of highlight buried beneath.
It is only through the imperfections, through the cracks, that the true finally finds its way in.
Someday I think St. Pete, that old blind biker up above, will ask me to hold out my hands.
And he’ll feel that jagged edge of my scars and smile sadly and whisper in my ear about loneliness and bravery, about love and sacrifice.
And he will say “Clean hands are hard to come by.'
He will murmur 'The only way to Heaven is by wrong turns.'
And I will hear a jukebox inside whispering that sound of something lost…. and finally explaining why.
The night I left, the owner was making some repairs. He was sweeping that dark stained floor and checking the old washer to make sure it was stilling thumping hard enough to wash out the next day's stain.
Outside the dust waited patiently to be pushed once more into the shape of a dream.
And though it seemed still the world was spinning, like an old washer, trying once again to clean the dirt from itself.
Some nights I still dream of a woman’s arms. And I can almost smell her scent and beneath churning far below, in the back hall of me the smell of bleach.
As I turned to go I noticed he was painting the window.
Painting it shut again.
WLM
I have a scar on my hand and another on the back of my head. I got them both when I was 22 working on a construction crew down south.
The scar on my hand came from trying to beat back loneliness. And for a time I did. I shattered it one night along with a pane of glass.
The scar on my head came from the business end of a shovel swung by a guy whose jaw I broke trying to save a girl.
As it turned out the girl saved me….though that took the better part of a year.
A scar is where the true gets forced in.
That’s never easy. Something is usually broken when it tries.
That year what’s true about loneliness and bravery, about the stains we all carry and the hope of absolving them cut their way into me.
Some nights I can feel them reach toward each other, trying to meet somewhere in the middle like the true is trying find its way down into the heart of me.
My scars are a kind of map. They are full of right turns and wrong places.
But it’s always the wrong turns that end up getting us to the right place.
And the only way to heaven is by wrong turns.
So that year, one night I started toward heaven by making a wrong turn into an alley. I broke a guy’s jaw and I found a right place.
And then trying to slow that same lonely broken I felt starting in on me I put my fist through a window.
These scars are what’s left of my wrong turns and right places….where the true forced its way first into my hands and then, at last, into my head.
Now every time my heart aches I think it’s the true trying to get in.
That guy had it coming. But so did I.
We all do I suppose.
Part 2
That part of Florida was full of vast tracts of undeveloped land. A banker on vacation from somewhere up north looked at it one winter and saw a way to sell warmth to people shivering in places like Minnesota.
So he hired a company of locals to start building a few very small, very cheap spec houses.
And I hired on with them.
Those houses had no real foundations. They were built on a foot of concrete slab and rebar, then framed, wired up and sold.
They all looked cozy and quaint. Pretty like the way we all want life to be before we actually move into the living of it.
But it wasn’t long before they all began to shift. The foundations, poured by men paid by the job, usually had a crack.
The men also had a crack in them, a kind of flaw at the bottom of each. And that crack found its way into everything they did.
At 22 I too had a crack. I had already seen the kind of heartache that ties itself to the back of you. That kind that no matter what just keeps clanging away in between the sound of your own heartbeats at night.
And like those houses I was leaning.
The foundation of me had shifted. My dreams were no longer plumb.
But nothing in this life stays where it’s supposed to. Not hope or happiness and certainly not love. And every bit of living leans.
Trouble always starts way down deep from a crack no one can see.
And though it’s hard to feel, the world is perpetually in motion. It keeps spinning like its forever looking over its own shoulder trying to find something it lost.
It all seems perfect and still, but it all has a lean in it from the start...from the crack that's in everything.
The county sent an inspector that took soil samples and walked back and forth shaking his head. He finally nailed a condemned notice to a few doors. Eventually they set up No Trespass signs.
A few Minnesotans moved out and sued. And those houses sat quietly shifting, condemned by the flaw hidden at their core.
A year later in the middle of one Saturday night the first of them, already leaning like a drunk, collapsed into the arms of a Sunday morning.
Eventually all those houses, full of both the weight of their hopes and the crack way down deep, fell in time.
And exposed in the rubble was the crack that ran across the foundation… like a scar.
Where what's true had forced its way in.
Part 3
The banker, trying to cut his losses, let some of the crew live in the leaning houses off the books.
I lived in one that year. Every night I would walk past the No Trespass sign, feel the lean in my heart and the lean in my dreams and the lean in the world around me.
Inside the drywall had a crack that ran like a scar from the floor to the ceiling. The windows frames were all warped and painted shut so it was hot all the time.
The floor was oak but stained so dark that all the flaws in the grain were clear to see.
It was ruined but that made it more beautiful in a way and over time the flaws seemed to change to highlights as they sometimes do.
A crew chief that lived there had left an old second hand washer. It was unbalanced and would thump thump thump each night like it was trying in vain, with all its might, to beat the dirt away.
When I was born the doctor told my parents I had a heart murmur. I had it checked every couple years as a boy and heard the doctor warning my mother about it.
Frightened I asked her what murmur meant. She looked at me with sad eyes and kissed me on the cheek and said 'Your heart knows things you don't yet son. It's just doing its best to try and tell you.'
So every night just before sleep I would try to listen to the murmur in my heart. Trying to hear what it was trying to teach me.
It wasn’t until that year that I could hear it clearly. Sleeping in the leaning house at night I began to hear it whispering in the space between each pulse.
It was full of some echo of all it had been forced to feel.
My first job that summer was about a shovel and the dirt, about sweat and about time.
The sweat and the hours get into the dirt and it makes a kind of mud. The days and the dirt keep coming and the mud finds its way in through some crack in you.
They call it day labor because you drag the dirt from daybreak to dark. Then from dark to daylight you listen to your muscles groan as the weight creeps into them.
Each day it seemed like I was trying to drag the earth toward something it should be… but never will.
In the dark before dawn a pickup truck would slowly edge down through the streets collecting the crew.
I was new and young and dumb so I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open.
And each morning I began to hear an unspoken groan in the men around me. It was in the way they kept their eyes down and the way they looked at the dirt.
Later I heard that same muttering in my muscles like some part of me was learning to speak that same language.
It was full of broken words, half heard curses and a kind of plea that could no longer see the point of saying itself.
That year I began to hear it under everything around me. I could hear it getting closer like it was trying to get into me. And I feared, one day, it would find its way down into my murmur and my dreams.
The dirt that filled those days found the crack in each man and poured itself in until it seemed that each was slowly being buried above the ground.
Every night I would come home alone covered with dirt and mud and sweat.
I’d step inside and strip and leave those clothes in the machine. I'd listen to it try once more to beat away the dirt of each day.... like it was trying to make the world be what it should... but never will.
The old man that ran the day labor was named Justin Tyne but everyone called him Hours because he kept track of the clock and the checks. And every Friday the slab crew would holler 'Just in Time!' as he handed out the pay that always went to beer and ex-wives and child support.
Every morning of his life Hours would work up the mud used slap the drywall in place. He had done it for so long that it had dug its way down into the crease across his palms.
There's a kind of dirt that just will not wash away.
His wife had tried everything to scrub it out but some stains are just too strong. So she finally gave up and let the dust in his hands hold hers each night.
Hours saw me looking at them one day.
‘Clean hands are hard to come by son’ he said.
Then staring down at what they used to be he whispered to himself 'Hard to come by.’
The world's a dirty business and even a clean heart doesn't mean you won't end up with ruined hands.
I learned to lean into every day. And each day weighed the same… like ten thousand shovelfuls of dirt.
The weight of it got into my hands and then into my back. And then it finally climbed up into my eyes.
Two months in one of the rebar welders didn’t show up for a week. He had gone on a bender after his girl couldn’t stand the groan in him anymore and left. They needed a pair of hands and picked me.
Part of that job was working with sulfur and sulfur stains a rust color. So I would go home each night with my hands red like each day had exposed some rusted out part in me.
I’d be out of water by noon. And I could feel that thirst …the kind that starts at the center of yourself and steadily works its way up into your ears. That wordless kind of plea. But by 3 it was circling around me.
And I would labor away alone listening to the plea in my head and the murmur in my heart and the groan in my back until they all seemed to sing.
Part 4
Some of the slab guys started to take me along with them to their shot and beer joint.
It was a real dive out near the groves in Ocala. Just a ramshackle converted barracks with bars on the windows and a few booths and tables. Cheap booze and warm beer. It was the kind of place you go to get you where you’re going and drink away your 8 or 40 or 365.
One old boy that worked a backhoe would step it each evening and holler 'Finally made it...Heaven!'
That stuck so a lot of the crew started calling that joint heaven...though it seened more like purgatory, or perhaps limbo to me.
The old lady that ran it tried to keep it clean which was hard with every man dragging his dirt in each night.
She took to washing away the mud and the drunks and the fights that always followed with bleach.
Each night after closing she would pour it out on the floor and mop the place with it.
So the bar always had the smell of bleach in the air, like it was pointlessly trying its best to clean away something that could never be clean.
Some guys would drop half their weeks pay there. A fifth of Jameson became some kind of way down deep cement for a fracture they all felt in themselves but could never quite reach to repair.
They would pour it on each night like they hoped it could fix some unseen crack.
And even though each felt that crack in themselves they seemed powerless to stop all they ever wanted in this life from falling in on itself.
It made them seem truer.
There’s something about getting up each day that requires forever trying to correct some kind of uncorrectable flaw.
There’s a kind of bravery in that. The trying in vain to become something larger than the flaw you feel at the heart of everything.
Sam Albright, an old 300 pound redneck, had been pouring concrete slabs since he was 16. But no matter how many he poured he could never quite repair the crack in his own foundation.
Here he was pushing 50, alcoholic, carrying the pieces of a few broken marriages. He tried with booze then love then booze again to fix the lean in himself…but that flaw was so far below the surface that it couldn’t be reached.
Still he was a show up every dayer, the kind of guy that thought of work like breathing. If he ever stopped he’d suffocate from the stillness.
Sam’s crack started way back from his first beer at 12. It stretched from the never enoughs through the too manys.
Never enough money, too many debts. Never enough love, too many dawns. Never enough time and what’s true and too many spinning tires and gravel dust from one more badly built marriage.
Who do you see to get that kind of crack repaired?
He’d show up every dawn with a shovel and a 12 pack and pop the first by 6:15. Then staring into my innocent eyes he would whisper ‘That’s right son…Breakfast of Champions.’
That year all that was left for Sam was the work. The shovel and the gravel. The float and the concrete.
He was trying quietly every day, like all of us, to somehow save his foundation from the flaw hidden in his own hands.
Sam bent over one day to pick up a shovel and finally collapsed.
He fell to his knees for a moment, reaching for his fractured heart, trying to prop up the lean of it once more I suppose.
His eyes were suddenly clear and blue and the pain in his chest felt just like regret.
Then he dropped to the dirt, like he was already buried above the ground.
And his heart, full of some hidden crack, finally broke in two.
That night the old lady that ran the bar once more poured her bleach on the coarse wide plank pine floors.
She tried once again to wipe away the fights and the dirt...then the heartache, the fear and the doubt that the working men carried inside them.
And each night the smell of bleach, as hopeful as it was pointless, would fill the air.
Part 5
The INS inspectors used to come by on Fridays dressed like diggers looking for illegals even back then.
They might as well have packed up the entire place because even the Americans were all refugees from something in themselves.
The old woman hired a broken down biker to stamp hands on weekends. His name was Peter but because he was from that town over by the gulf everyone called him St. Pete.
St. Pete’s real job was to keep those INS pricks out.
His face was weathered by age and battered by bad habits. And he had one eye put out from a broken bottle in a bar fight, so he could barely see.
Instead of carding people at the door he would grip your hands and feel for a hardness, for some callous or scar. Soft hands weren’t getting into Heaven.
Sometimes it was almost as if he was feeling for what had been lived into them. Feeling for the struggle, for the broken and the true.
Mine were stained red and rough. They were cracked and they were dirty. St. Pete would grip them and stare at me through his one scarred eye and whisper ‘That’s alright son. Nothing to be ashamed of…Clean hands are hard to come by.’
And though my hands were full of the kind of dirt I lived into them back then I still believed that my heart, full of its own buried crack and murmuring to me each night, was still clean and true.
Part 6
Sometimes on a Friday night you can hear the world exhale in relief, like it has been holding its breath from Tuesday on.
By evening the old woman would crank up her prehistoric jukebox.
It was filled with soul music. Not black music per se. Soul can be swing…it can be country…it can be rhythm and blues or jazz or rock.
But each of those songs had a plea at the bottom of it. Each sounded like it was trying to wring some strength from your heart… or searching for an end to that kind of lonely you can hear under each breath.
The quarters would roll down and into the slot and the songs would rise into the air full of something taken that can’t ever be replaced and the longing that grows in the empty space it leaves.
It sounded like each singer was trying to find his way back into what was.
It was like each song was full of the kind of longing that knows full well it’ll never quite be able to reach what it needs, but can’t stop trying.
Sometimes the old lady let the migrants in from the nearby fields. Mostly Mexican. Family people. Pickers.
Stoop work makes a soul humble. You bow relentlessly and the bowing somehow crawls into you.
Each day these people would stoop 10000 times like they were trying to find hope buried in the dirt beneath a bean bush.
Do it long enough and your heart will end up bent in half, from all the hoping and all the humble.
They didn’t drink much. Just came to hold each other and dance to the weary and beautiful tunes.
They kept their eyes down and eventually their dreams followed. It was like they believed the dirt and the next step were the only thing that ever mattered in this life.
And that shortened hope in them made each seem full and against all odds sometimes even regal…like being stripped of everything but each other’s eyes and arms somehow made them larger.
I can recall being tuned up on cheap whiskey and warm beer and watching them dance around me to something lost and just out of reach under the sound.
They danced like they were certain they would never have anything in this world...except each other.
I suppose none of us do, but I didn't know that back then.
Some nights it still feels like hope and regret are chasing each other in a tight circle. Back then I'd watch the couples caught in that slow spin.
I could see them gathering strength from each other, like an old washer, until they found a way to clean each others stains.
So on the weekends in that ramshackle bar at the edge of the groves the migrant couples would hold each other and listen to the plea in the verses. And then they would lean in hoping the chorus, like a hymn, could reach down past the stoop in their hearts to raise them up.
Part 7
A brick crew hired on from out of state. Mostly Alabama boys that hated the idea of drinking with Mexicans.
Their first night in town an old Mexican man with thirsty eyes stood innocently by the bar asking for a glass of water.
One of them grabbed him around the neck. 'Por Favor Senor! C’mon let me hear you say it. You want Agua?’
The old man said nothing. He kept his eyes down waiting once more for the trouble he had learned to expect.
The bricker looked around at his smirking redneck buddies ‘I got some agua for you.’
There was a puddle outside from the afternoon thunderhead. He dragged the old man toward the door. “Plenty of free agua out here.”
Otis Redding began to sing. His voice filled the air and rose inside the melody. It was full of the kind of want that pulls, over and over, against all that is.
The Mexican men standing in the shadows watched silently. Their eyes were full of an old kind of pain that had learned to expect itself.
I was drunk and really just a kid, but I stood up and stepped between the two.
‘Back off Mister…this old boy didn’t mean you no harm.’
He looked at me like I was arguing against the law of gravity.
'Shut the fuck up boy. These pickers don’t belong up in here with working men. Keep that pie hole shut or you might just find some missing teeth.'
I felt my back stiffen and the Irish in me start to cough like it wanted to say itself with my fist.
But one of the slab boys pulled me back. And one of the brick guys bought a round and that was enough to shut him up for a time.
And the jukebox, full of Sam Cooke and Van Morrison, Otis Redding and Merle Haggard began to howl in the verse for some loss and pray in the chorus for its return.
The people with hard hands and dusty dreams edged once more onto the floor and began to dance to it. The sound drew them closer and the longing in it mated with the callous of their hope.
Night after night the only kind of solace there ever was rose from inside the ache.
It’s the kind that uses loneliness to retrieve something in each other and that none of us is able to reach on our own.
And as the smell of bleach would fill the air I would stare at the red sulfur stains on my hands and wonder if there would ever be something strong enough to clean the rust from me.
Part 8
The next Friday that same Alabama brick guy was there with his girl.
She had dark hair and uncommon features. The kind of girl that could startle you with a little makeup but tried to hide her beauty like it was a burden. So she kept her hair back and her head down and tried not to look the world in the eye.
Illegal of course. No family.
Somehow she ended up with a guy that let the groan in his muscles reach his heart.
Maybe that’s the only kind of guy there is.
For him and a million others on Monday it’s a whisper but by Friday it’s a howl. All anyone wants is a way to silence it.
So he would try and drown it out with cheap booze.
That Friday she was sitting alone at a back table eyes down, waiting on him. She was trying not to look at anything the way a woman does when she wants to be invisible.…when she wishes she never had a body and there weren’t so many drunk guys in the world.
He called to her and she got up and walked across the room toward him and as she did the world suddenly began to fall away.
I felt my heart lean a little harder like the crack in it was widening. I could feel the pull of her at it.
The jukebox was playing. And the echo of Sam Cooke’s voice begin to sing in harmony with the murmur in my heart. Together they reached down and in, past the stoop labor of living in me.
“I was raised by a river...in a little tent…and like that river I been running ever since….’
A Mexican couple edged onto the floor and put their arms around each other. They began to dance in the shadows to the sound.
Some cut in half mercy began to rise from under the lyric. It crept up between them until at last it found itself, whole again.
“It’s been too hard living…but I’m afraid to die…’
The bricker whispering with the girl at the bar turned to see them. He threw a glass and hollered “Don’t want to see you Spics going at each other in a working man’s place.’
The girl grabbed his arm but he shook her free and she dropped her eyes in shame.
As he stood he fell backwards off the stool, got to his feet and stumbled drunk toward the jukebox. He found the cord and yanked it from the wall. And the sound full of the plea whirred to a stop.
Beneath it was a near inaudible groan that filled the quiet.
Then muttering to himself he stumbled toward the couple. And though he was much smaller he pushed the Mexican back.
The Mexican clenched then unclenched his fist. He looked up to the roof like God and every bit of bruised faith hid somewhere in the rafters.
Then he held his breath and stepped back as he had a thousand times before.
The bricker grabbed migrant’s wife by the arm “Listen Mamasita you just don’t belong up in here.’
He touched her on the cheek ‘Keep coming around and maybe some night I might be willing to get you some good seed.’
He looked through the window out toward the darkened groves. ‘Maybe then everything you spit out won’t end up buried in some orchard.’
The old woman hearing this came from around the bar and pushing past, stared at the silent men in the shadows all around them.
Then, filled with contempt for the world and everything in it, she shoved the bricker. And already full of his own kind of lean he fell drunk to the floor.
The dark haired girl stepped from the shadows and reached down. She put her arm around him and tried to lift him. And like a bad drunk will he started pushing her off and swinging away and hollering in the only language bad drunks know.
It is the language of groans. It’s full of gritted teeth and muttered contempt and doubt turned inward. It’s a sound like a curse from the bottom of a want that knows what it’ll never be more than what it isn’t.
She tried again and managed to get him upright and they shuffled toward the door and out.
I was tired from the week and half drunk. My hands were covered with sulfur stains and all I wanted was to be clean way down deep. So I paid and left.
The wind was picking up and spun me around as I walked toward my car. But as I passed an alley I saw two figures like shadows on the wall…the man and that girl.
He was swinging away trying once more I suppose to hit what can’t ever be struck. But she was the nearest thing to it and he had driven her to her knees.
She was pleading ‘Why Poppy why?’ and crying out ‘ I love you …I love you…’…like she thought it was a shield from the groan in his fists.
‘I love you Poppy…why?’
It sounded like Sam Cooke.
I turned and ran toward them. He was hollering something about how she would just not ever shut up and dammit he was going to break her jaw if that’s what it took.
And as he reached back I threw my shoulder into his chest and drove him to the ground.
All I wanted was to stop him. But he struggled against me.
‘Who the eff are you?’ he hollered. ‘Why don’t you mind your own effin business Mister.'
I shook him hard once and he stared up at me “I’m gonna find you boy...and when I do I’m gonna eff you up permanent.'
The Irish in me began to cough and once more wanted its say. So I hit him.
‘Gonna find you son...Gonna make you wish your mama never had you.’
He was gagging on the rage and he began to convince me that someday in some other alley when I wasn’t looking he would try to darken things for me with a bat or a gun like they already were in him.
“I’m shooting you straight boy.”
There’s always a choice. I could have walked away then and been free of it. But I didn’t understand then how things you do can follow you forever. That clean hands are hard to come by.
I was angry at the threats, at the crying girl, at all the dirt in the world and the stains on my hands.
I was angry at the groan I had started to hear in myself and at the prospect that it might someday bury me above the ground.
So I cocked my left hand and threw it until he was unconscious.
She crawled out of the alley holding her face, bent over, full of the stoop labor of living.
The wind picked up and the dust in it looked like rain in the arc of the lights from the bar.
I started to step away but felt the drunk reach out for my ankle.
I wore steel tip boots then from the job…covered in dust and dirt and red sulfur stains. But as I shook my leg away I realized that there would be no getting free of this.
“It aint gonna be just your jaw now boy…no sir…I’m shooting you straight son.’
There’s a kind of cost hidden in everything. It's that part that gets dusty and dark from just living. It can follow you. It can reach out for you. It says 'You owe and someday you're going to have to pay.'
And even when you’re certain it’s the right turn you can end up in the wrong place.
I leaned down close so he could hear and I half whispered at him ‘So you’re gonna break my jaw?’
He muttered something that sounded like a vow.
So I grabbed him by the shirt and set him up…his face upturned in silhouette. And just for a moment he looked contrite, the way a person does when they understand they are going to have to pay something more than they can afford.
I felt the break with the first kick. I suppose it was the true trying to find its way in.
It felt like a kind of justice. The stained up kind. Full of what he was trying to do to her.
But I also felt some part of the groan in him pass to me, through my steel toes.
She was scared and hurt and when I asked if she was ok she threw her arms around me crying like I was the last bit of mercy left in the world.
‘Where will you go?’ I asked. She shook her head like she didn’t want to hear the words.
Her face was bruised and swollen, but in some other way completely untouched. She was nobody’s victim. No more than any of us.
I could see that old common kind of courage...the kind that pays and pays then pays some more. It’s the kind that always still somehow believes the future will untangle itself from the past and that the crack in us all will someday be made whole.
It was foolish…but I was young and a fool as all young men are so I nodded and squinted and tried once more to see the right place.
And the world seemed to pause. I could feel the weight at both ends of a decision…what you want and what that want demands.
There’s a reason the world keeps spinning in circles. It keeps reaching around trying to undo all it has spun into itself. Like an old washing machine.
Everything is full of its own circular plea for the better and its simultaneous surrender to the worse. We’re all caught in some kind of cycle between what we want and what we regret.
But the only way to heaven is by wrong turns.
So I unlocked my car door. She hesitated… then slid in.
We drove without a word and when I finally shut off the engine in front there was a stillness. I turned to look at her and could see a sadness that had long ago settled into her features.
Sometimes a heart becomes more not because of what it longs to feel, but because of what its forced to endure. Sometimes it has to beat the murmur out of itself.
And there's a kind of bravery that feels the pain of living under every breath but still wants nothing more than the air of it all.
After a moment I said ‘I don’t want nothing from you.’ She looked up into my face like she was trying hard to believe me.
Then I said ‘I can see the brave…..’
That word hung in the air and the sound went someplace besides the ear.
It felt like it was reaching in toward some unreachable part in each of us. It touched me and then her like there was something else under the whisper of it. Like there was a jukebox in both of us playing Sam Cooke’s broken and unbreakable sound.
It started to rain and together we walked past the No Trespass sign.
She slept in the bed with a blanket wrapped tightly around her. And I lay down on the dark stained floor like I was one of its flaws.
Just a boy covered with sweat and dirt and blood stains and a girl bruised up by doubt and loneliness and the groan that’s under everything.
Otis Redding and Van Morrison and Charley Parker started to call out to me in my dreams. And I could feel my bent in half heart start to dance, like a migrant, toward some unfound mercy.
It felt near now but still just beyond my reach.
Part 9
There’s a No Trespass sign in each of us. It is that last small inviolable space between what we want and what we can’t quite reach. No one ever really teaches you about it. But everyone feels it.
So we call that nearness love and we call that distance lonely.
We try to tear down the No Trespass signs in the back of each other’s eyes.
And we try to love away the lean in the places we choose.
Try to make right turns. Try to make something of the wrong places they sometimes lead to.
And we throw our arms around each other and pray with our wordless hearts that we might be able to whittle that space down.
But that takes a kind of bravery.
Because it remains and always will. No trespass.
And some nights you want with everything in your heart to feel some woman’s wind blow clean through. But it’s always there…invisible… like glass.
I woke in the middle of the night sweating in that hothouse and got up quietly trying not to wake her. I walked to the window and I pulled and pulled at it… but it wouldn’t give. Warped from the lean in the walls and painted shut.
Coat after coat locking it down tight.
No Trespass.
I strained and strained some more, trying not to make a sound.
And when I couldn’t stand it anymore….the God awful world…the language of groans…the plea in me …the beaten girl in my bed….the thirst and the heat of it all rising up around me, I began to beat at the frame.
I pounded with my forearms trying to break it free. But it wouldn’t give.
And then when I could not stand it anymore I finally reached back with my fist and broke through.
You can barely see the scar now. But it’s there…where, that night, the true started to force its way in.
But it wasn’t the glass I was trying to break.
I was trying to break Lonely’s jaw.
I was trying to knock down the No Trespass sign forever.
Maybe every heart is painted shut. Maybe there’s only ever one way through that glass…to break it. To shatter it.
And so I did, like any young man will...with his fist.
The girl awake now and watching in the dark stood and touched my hand, broken and bleeding, and walked me away.
Clean hands are hard to come by but that night she cleaned the cuts without a word.
Loneliness gets broken like that.
It takes the brave in you to do it. You have to be willing to beat against it…to break it out and then try to clean the wound of it from you.
I started to lie back down on the floor but she took me by my wounded hand and led me back toward the broken window and the bed.
That night the wind finally blew through and the heat along with some down deep thirst began to recede.
The groan gave itself up to the murmur at the heart of me. And the true, at long last, began to force its way in… through a scar and a broken window.
Part 10
When I'd get home each night I’d step inside the back door where the washer was and strip down completely.
But the stains get harder each day to wash away. The red rust of the sulfur gets in way down deep. And it burns.
I’d leave them there and then step into a shower as hot as I could get it, trying to blast the stains from me, knowing all the while I’d be back out in the world the next day filling my hands with a kind of irredeemable dirt of it all.
Each afternoon she would find the pile and wash them out by hand a couple times. Working at the stains. And then she would load them into that old washer and pour in bleach.
It would churn and thump like it had 10000 times before trying once again to make the dirt give itself up. Then she would leave them on the line waiting on the wind to blow them dry.
The loneliness that shattered gave way to a kind of love.
It starts as nearness. Then a man and a woman see each other clearly and a recognition takes hold. They leap toward each other...as though through a broken window.
We began to work each day, digging at the cement mooring of the No Trespass signs each had in the back of our eyes.
And we began to throw a kind of tenderness back and forth like a ball of yarn the way young couples do. Eventually, it knit us closer the way it always does.
She began to love me the way a woman will when she sees beneath the rust into whatever stainless steel is still at the bottom of a man.
And I began to love her the way a man will when he sees the broken edge of an unbroken spirit.
That summer it rained nearly every night and like those other stains, in the dark, with lightning all around and the wind blowing through a busted window, she would try to wash the day from me.
She poured herself like only a woman can until she herself became a kind of bleach.
Some tender part of her worked at the coarse in me determined to wash away the dirt that collected between the lean of my heart and the stoop labor of trying to find some lost hope.
That cleansing each night became a kind of holy thing. No one talks about it and it has no name except love. But that’s not it. Not really.
It’s something else. Some common wordless act between a man and a woman. It’s some forgotten sacrament that has no name.
It is full of the cleansing of baptism and the communion of two souls. And it’s the last rites of hopelessness and lonely.
It surrounds your scars and scrubs at them until the true that was forced in reaches up and out.
It saves us again and again, night after night from the ruined in our hands.
And somehow, in the dark, it makes all the wrong turns find the right place.
But this kind of redemption is never a onetime thing. You have to wash yourself out forever.
You have to roll away that stone each night.
You have resurrect yourself again and again before you can walk above the dirt you’re buried in each day.
So every day I would die a little and feel the dirt rise all around me, trying to bury me above the ground.
And each night she would dig me out.
Like the old woman, she learned to use the strongest part of her. She would pour it, like bleach, first on those clothes and then on the man.
And as each day revolved into night I could feel the world turning ...wash, spin and rinse…trying again and again to clean the groan from its own heart.
I remember listening to the rain beat against that old tin roof and further in the back hall the washer churning away at the stains and the girl in my arms trying with every bit of her heart to bleach me out again before the coming day.
All of it spinning up around me each night.
Saving me again and again, from the stains of myself.
Part 11
I got sent to this job out on the county line. Out there it's just dirt and hope…a lot of land that some developer was trying to scrape into a town.
They built the roads first. They went on for miles. They put up the signs and waited for investors that never appeared. There were no houses. Just a lot of dreams digging at a lot of dirt.
The folks around there called it Critterville because the only thing that lived out there were possums, snakes and the occasional drainage ditch gator.
They’d roll their eyes when the local paper would run an ad about mortgaging a quarter acre slice of heaven. As usual it took a wrong turn to reach it.
The developer’s son was a preacher so when they finished with all the standard street names like Main and Elm and Magnolia he started using names like Faith Bypass and Old Hope Road.
Faith Bypass was supposed to be a shortcut but it flooded alot and usually took longer.
There are no shortcuts.
Old Hope Road became one of those two lane blacktops that goes on forever and changes it name every few miles. But it’s still just the same old road…hoping for a way through.
There was a street way back in called Forgiveness Road. The local kids used to drag on it and some one of them was always stealing the sign.
No matter how many times they put up a new one some kid would try to steal Forgiveness and hang it on his bedroom wall.
As a result it was nearly impossible to find Forgiveness Road, which I suppose was the point.
But each weekend in the middle of the night the local kids, looking for some forgotten straight away, would find their way through the tangle of streets to Forgiveness Road. And there they would practice racing their old hopes.
They’d take bets on each other and pour bleach on the road and spin their tires in it trying to get some traction like they could burn away the stillness in themselves.
And then they’d roar down the empty streets trying to reach some finish line they could never quite get to…hoping to gun it hard enough to somehow get near all they ever wanted.
Sam Albright was working the Critterville job. He saw me and idled over and smelling like his prenoon 12 pack told me the Alabama brick crew was back working in that part of the county.
‘That old boy is asking around. Looking for you son.’
He stared at me through bloodshot eyes. 'Yes sir that boy means business. Got a gun on his hip now.’
‘Of course he does.' I thought.
He had a gun and a memory of sipping Jim Beam through a straw for two months. He was filled with the echo of my steel toes and looking for an ear to pour his groan into once more.
“I’m gonna shoot you straight son.”
Back then you could buy your fortune at any county fair for a buck. But I didn’t need a gypsy to know how this would end. Some things get buried above the ground.
He’d be drunk and he’d find her or me or both of us. He would shoot at himself once again… but he would aim at us doing it.
She would be ruined and so would I and so would he.
And the world would record it in agate type and stuff it into the back pages of the police report in the local paper. One more tiny bit of merciless rage turned back on itself as it always is.
We all have it coming.
So that night in the house with a lean, surrounded by the flaws of the darkened floor and a broken window I told her - ‘He’s back.’
Her eyes went wide with worry.
‘He’s looking to settle the score.’ I explained.
But no one settles any score. We are all forever running behind some wrong trying to catch up and get even with it. And even when we do it just makes us lose another part of ourselves that we’ll miss forever.
‘He’s got a gun.’ I said. And as I did she stood up and walked to the washer and began loading it.
She turned it on and it began to whirl and thump, like she thought it could somehow get a hold of what was and force the stains from it.
It was a pointless and hopeful kind of thing. It was a woman trying to make the world, full of its own dirt, into something it can never be. Clean entirely of the past.
I got up and walked into the back hall and put my arms around her waist.
I whispered ‘This guy won’t ever stop honey. Some things just have no brakes in them.’
And then I told her how it would end.
She spun around and looked up into my eyes like she wanted the truth to become something other than what it is.
And when she saw it wouldn’t, she turned back around and opened the washer and poured in the last bit of bleach. She poured it until the jug was empty.
Then letting out a small cry she threw it at the window like she hoped it might bleach away every bit of the world’s stain.
Some things follow forever. But sometimes they run ahead of us.
He had the memory of steel toes in him. And the crack in his jaw had somehow found a way to run from his past ahead into our future.
You can scrub all you want but some stains just won’t lift. We carry them way down deep inside all we’ve ever done.
And it’s nearly impossible to find Forgiveness Road.
There is no sign of it.
That night she cried inconsolably the way a woman does when she’s afraid for all she feels and of losing it.
But I think she was filled too with something like pity for the way the past seems to follow and the world has to spin.
Then finally, in the dark she whispered to me that she had a cousin in Tuscon and that we both should go together.
That night I thought long and hard. I thought about what I felt and what I wanted. About what I would lose and how it might follow me forever.
I thought about how living digs footers in us all and about the kind of dirt that gets inside…..into the bones of us.
I knew if we started down Old Hope Road together that the broken jaw would follow and so would the gun.
And I knew if I tried to hang on to what we had saved in each other the crack that we built it on would widen until it found us. And the lean in it all would collapse us.
I could see too that going together would stain her future, like sulfur. It would fill it with the kind of rust that burns slowly and ruins everything it touches.
I would rather give her up forever, live with the loss and the memory of what might have been than open her up to that kind of might.
So by dawn I knew what was for the best.
For the best always feels like for the worst…that’s how you know it.
So that morning I told her I would never see her again and that I never really loved her anyway.
Not because it was true. It wasn’t.
I just wanted it to be true.
It would be easier for her and maybe years from then it would be easier for me too. But she threw her arms around my neck and I couldn’t help but pull her close.
And though neither of us said a word, we both knew it was a lie.
And there’s a kind of truth in that.
She reached down feeling for that lonely old scar and squeezed my hand. And I could feel the true forcing its way in once more.
Then trying to say the worst thing I could think of, to make my heart feel accustomed to it, I whispered that I would never see her again.
But that was a lie too because she was already in my dreams and I knew she would dance there, like a migrant, forever reaching for my heart.
And that was enough. It would have to be.
Part 12
Eventually the things you give up…the things that hurt the most turn themselves inside out.
It’s the things that wander into your half sleep and beckon from a world that will never be that somehow become the things of which you’re most proud.
But that’s a lot of hard dirt to dig through.
So I paid it out of myself.
And looking in the mirror that dawn I could see the longing in my eyes slowly begin to cure itself and harden into something like regret.
But it’s a package deal. Love and sacrifice. It gives and it takes all at once.
You think it is what's given that will make you bigger. But it’s always what's taken away.
That night I felt the sting and the first hard pull of what was taken.
Eventually…it took years, but that pulling at my heart made it bigger.
It hurt though. The permanent kind.
Becoming always does.
Like soul music, we are made larger only through the longing....the want of what won't ever be.
I had saved some money so I went down to the bus station and bought her a one way ticket to Tuscon. The streets were filled with migrants. The picking season had ended and they were all trying to find a bus to the next hope to harvest.
I hid the ticket under a loose floor board of the dark stained floor and tried, once more, not to look at its flaws.
I had learned to speak all I could of the language of the unheard. I was finished with all that. I could translate the groans and the quiet and the lonely and sometimes I could see them peering out through the bars in my eyes trying to get free.
Sometimes even now they seem like they were all I was ever meant to feel or say.
That week I gave the crew boss, a half deaf old man from Tuscaloosa my notice. When he asked why I told him.
And he nodded like he was listening. But I could see he had heard this kind of thing a thousand times. The way happiness gets poisoned by yourself, against your will.
He finally said ‘That boy’s looking to end you son.’
And he stared at me like he had seen this again and again.
He said 'No sense bending your back around here waiting on getting hurt so bad you never recover.'
'That old boy is just trying to ruin the world in the same way as him.’
‘Yes sir….same as him.’ he said and he spat on the ground like he hated every last bit of the earth just for being what it is.
Then he looked out past all the diggers to Old Hope Road. ‘Besides you’re cut out for better things than the sulfur and mud.’
There are no better things though.
There’s just living. And it’s a dirty business building anything especially a life. Your hands get stained and your heart gets full up with the mud of it all.
We fight the flaws in our foundations and we pray with the language in ours hands trying to convince living to be what we want instead of what it is.
And we spoon out each day in shovelfuls trying to force each into the shape of our dusty dreams.
And at night the world spins like an old washer forever chasing our wrong turns in a circle, trying to find some right place and trying to be freed from the dirt of itself.
Part 13
Hours told me to finish the week and come for the last check on Friday. He said he’d even buy me a warm beer.
That last night before she left I went home and stripped before that old washing machine once again. And I scrubbed at my skin and then at my heart trying to wash away the doubt.
That night a thunderhead blew in from the sea and late at night in the dark the walls and windows shook so hard I was afraid the lean in them would finally give way.
She whispered my name and it sounded like the part of living that had forgotten me, the part that still believed that love could reach in and save me from the stains.
And all night long I heard her calling faintly in the dark, without words, like a murmur. Trying one last time, with all her heart, to bleach me clean.
And she did. As best as a dark stained heart …it’s floor full of flaws, can be.
That morning I put her bag on the bus and we stood alone in the shadows.
The bus driver, an old Indian with eyes that had watched a thousand goodbyes gently said
“All aboard Miss. Got to get gone now.”
She started to cry. And I wanted to say ‘brave’ but all I could do was murmur.
She looked up into my eyes one last time and blinked back the tears and nodded. Then she reached out and gripped my hand, feeling for the scar and what was true between us.
Got to get gone….
Then the bus moved off away down Old Hope Road toward the interstate and every bit of some country still unstained by doubt.
Part 13
That morning I walked onto the job site out by the county line to pick up my last check. The brick guys were working on the second story of some office building that would never be rented out in Critterville.
But I was done with all that now.
That crew chief was working the site. He grinned coldly at me and hollered once again “Its better to be a hammer than a nail.’
That was the last thing I heard.
Broken jaws follow you forever. They sneak up behind you. They wait patiently like every day with a shovel.
They try to bury you above the ground.
I felt the crack at the back of my head and heard a groan rise up over the murmur.
Hours and three of his guys dragged him off me.
But I was out cold, lying face first in the same dirt she had tried so hard to clean from me. The back of my head split open, the blood matting my hair and darkening the floor of my neck.
The scar is still there, hidden though, as most scars are. I carry it in the back of my head and the hard to reach underside of my heart.
The old man hollered for a truck and the crew chief had two of his guys load me into the flat bed.
“It’s better to be a hammer than a nail.’ was the last thing I heard before passing out.
Every nail gets beaten. So does every heart. Sometimes they break off from all the hammering.
And sometimes I can feel my heart stoop, bent over on itself, from all its beating.
But a nail can hang on for years. They hold everything together. Small towns and forgotten houses and storefronts and churches are all filled with their same silent constant effort.
You can keep your hammers.
I’d rather be a nail.
They let me out a couple days later and I bought a bus ticket for NYC.
So she went west and I went north. But we were both riding on Old Hope Road.
I have three inch scar on the back of my head from where the true tried to force its way in.
And I never saw her again.
And now many years later sometimes I still find myself in a half dream in an alley at the edge of love and loss, once more taking a wrong turn to find a right place.
Sometimes I want to break living’s jaw. I want to make it tell me why I had to have this true forced into me and leave the scar of that girl.
I want it to speak clearly…not all this murmuring at the back of me. I want it to tell me at last what it wants from me.
And sometimes I still want to break the jaws of the lonely that gnaw at me each night.
I can still feel it, like a dark figure reaching out at my ankles trying to bury me above the ground.
She ended up in Tuscon married to a kind man with sad eyes that ran a spare parts yard. They had three children and she grew old with him.
She wrote me once many years later to explain how it had all worked out for her. How she thought I had saved her, first in that alley and then with that bus ticket.
The truth is she saved me. But redemption isn’t a onetime thing. It demands a kind of repetition. Like a prayer.
So we work the dirt into our hands and pray that the true will find its way through our scars into the cracks.
I suppose we all save each other from the windows painted closed in each of us.
She wrote that she still dreamed of the nights in that tiny place with a broken window and a young man filled with stains.
She said she loved him in the way a woman does when she knows it’ll never be spoken of again…or breathed again...or felt again except on a hot summer night when all you want is to feel the wind once more….and you remember what it was to be afraid of the lonely in your bones and then feel the brave rise in you and echo back above it all.
So I traded the dirt and the migrants and the bar for the steel and the glass and the concrete.
And I left that summer of the scars and the shovels behind, though I can still feel the earth of me trying to be something more than the dirt of itself.
But some stains you can’t ever quite bleach away.
Memory’s one. Lonely’s another. They get way down deep in our bones.
I carry them to this day.
Part 14
Late last week passing a café I heard an old song rising from the shadows. It was some old soul singer on a jukebox.
And I heard once again a voice calling out from beneath the melody, trying to retrieve what was lost.
Sam Cooke and Van Morrison still sing in the very back of me. Together each night we try to reach what is unreachable.
And sometimes I wonder if the world could have stopped being what it is...just that one time…and allow the want to finally reach the get.
In the early blue black of dawn I still sometimes hear them...trying to explain.
And something in the sound says each of us is made holy... not by the getting of what we need...but by the want of it.
In the end that’s enough. It comforts me.
In the space between each beat I can hear my heart murmur the true of it. Some nights I hear it sing, full of want for what was.... like Sam Cooke.
Part 15
It took years but all those leaning houses finally fell. The rubble was swept away and the grass grew over the cracked foundations.
And nothing is left but the streets with no names that all seem to empty into Old Hope Road.
I still think of the year I was, for a time, buried above ground and then resurrected by a girl.
I think of the crack and the dirt, of that old washer and a broken window and the lean in everything.
I think of the lonely and sacrifice and the true that found its way down deep into me …through my scars.
And I can see the flaws of me. I no longer try to hide them.
Sometimes I think I'm like that old floor stained so dark that the flaws are clear. But over time the ruined can become beautiful and the flaws finally yield to a kind of highlight buried beneath.
It is only through the imperfections, through the cracks, that the true finally finds its way in.
Someday I think St. Pete, that old blind biker up above, will ask me to hold out my hands.
And he’ll feel that jagged edge of my scars and smile sadly and whisper in my ear about loneliness and bravery, about love and sacrifice.
And he will say “Clean hands are hard to come by.'
He will murmur 'The only way to Heaven is by wrong turns.'
And I will hear a jukebox inside whispering that sound of something lost…. and finally explaining why.
The night I left, the owner was making some repairs. He was sweeping that dark stained floor and checking the old washer to make sure it was stilling thumping hard enough to wash out the next day's stain.
Outside the dust waited patiently to be pushed once more into the shape of a dream.
And though it seemed still the world was spinning, like an old washer, trying once again to clean the dirt from itself.
Some nights I still dream of a woman’s arms. And I can almost smell her scent and beneath churning far below, in the back hall of me the smell of bleach.
As I turned to go I noticed he was painting the window.
Painting it shut again.
WLM
I wish I could think of something to say to explain the way that touched who I am. Pam
ReplyDelete