Like I said, he was behind me running in little circles in little feet sticking shortly out of his denim overalls which looked like cold water the way night hit them “four miles. Ma uncle owns a treller park jess four miles down that roud.”
He’d said this before when I was on the bench. My feet touching the ground then, one below the other on the lip of a downhill, my bike unturning by my side not waiting or resting for it was and is a bike. I was on the bench there and he faced gravely and pointed with his whole arm to where the light stopped in a circle of blackness where it began
on the outskirts with hills and cows. I think they are hills. The town begins to stick itself up from the woods and fields with dog legged brick walls with their tops made white; then granite slabs poking sideways out of the river: lonely red and yellow gas stations with one light above them.
The speeding bike below me pumped toward the hotel as a hundred faces at a restaurant, their picnics laid out on the lawn sprawled basking in the sun that was not there for it was night, turned toward me their voices growing up big across the street and their wide mouths open in dotted calls till I me was behind them.
Alone I was on the bench and a rugged dirty-looking couple with a small concerned boy in light overalls approached and the boy had a face and and rocked on his heels like a grandfather whistling on a porch with grass poking through the boards. They told me about a hotel down the hill where the light was.
Though the man was not a man at all and the girl too had the stain of age behind her small face. They stood six inches below me and he had a mustache. She wrapped her arms around the boy who looked sadly for me, grewing old and younger when their two heads came one.
Just a children. All young stood seriously pitch-forked gray in the joyless. This were not costumes and never were. Children paced slow like adults in dim in streets in lines, stopping at trees with lights in them to fondle up padded hills with eyes free.
And the boy began to talking fast and metallic as I grabbed my bike he said “jess four miles down that roud, jess four miles down that roud, jess four miles down that road!” raising his arm to point to a dircle of carkness with chills and hows here it all began.
Stepping out of divine then in front of me a line of redheaded schoolgirls all braced up said “I’ve never seen anybody ride a bicycle before!” coming or going from a what, falling almost into me in a line of themselves like a blown stack, the boy merely a baby now silence standing over his feet, "I've never seen anybody ride a bicycle before!” or the sun cutting through buildings, "I've never seen anybody ride a bicycle before!” behind me went I, though she often had, and I know she had, often, seen someone often ride a bicycle before.
And my eyes and I move suspended to a blue doored motel with a white eyed man inside a smoky television room with cigarettes in a broken machine where a tributary runs by a waffle house in the parking lot and I in the sharp neon lite through the window take sleep until the next day and afterwards when the town was bathed in true sunlight and sitting old folks drank coffee on the streets all around and I humbled walking my bike past all folks homes and slept at the bottom of a hill in hard blue sheets where I’d slept the night before.
1 comment:
This takes on a tall-tale format and brings to life a whole country like town. The prose takes on a distorted and slanted feel to match the tall-tale format.
Post a Comment