Be careful what you wish for
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His name is “Dustbowl”
“Gotta protect yerself at all times”
I see Dad when he eyeballs the Tombstone, staring at him like he’s already pinned him in a corner. They dance around each other like feral cats waiting to pounce on a rat. Even though I can see Better now, I don’t get what they’re doing. They look like they’re play fighting.
“What’s happenin?” I ask Aunt Nolie, who’s followed me up closer to the ring.
“The Tombstone is throwin’ a few jabs.”
“What ’er jabs’?”
“Well, see, a jab ain’t usually a hard punch, but it lets the other fella know yer in the game. Jabs kinda make the other fella pay attention. They’re holdin’ their gloves up by their heads ’cause in boxin’, ye gotta protect yerself at all times.”
The Tombstone jabs, trying to get Dad’s attention. Dad’s smiling like he’s watching a funny picture show. Aunt Nolie tells me more. The Tombstone throws another jab, then a straight right, but Dad easily ducks under it and comes up with a left hook to the jaw.
“Well, lookie there, he’s done it,” says Aunt Nolie.
The Tombstone went down fast, laid out flat on his back, out like Lottie’s eye. The fight is over before the first bell had a chance to ding. Dad had been paying attention alright.
The Ranger folks, some who like Dad and some who don’t, hoot and holler that one of their own just beat a stranger, a foreigner on Ranger soil. My dad is a hero.
Dad doesn’t brag though. He smiles without his teeth showing while he stares down at the bloodied man. The referee counts to ten. The Tombstone twitches his eyeballs. Knowing he’s not dead, the referee raises Dad’s right hand up in the air and declares him the winner.
Walking home, I think about how good it was to see Dad do something good like that, something Better than drinking Pearl beer and ignoring me.
The next morning I ask, “Were ye scared Dad?”
“Naw, I ain’t afraid ’a nothing. Besides, that pissant couldn’t fight the gnats off his butt.” I laugh at the picture of the Tombstone trying to swat gnats off his hind-end while wearing bandages on both hands.
Excerpt from No Hill for a Stepper, my father’s story
A tough memory
Early one morning, when my son was a teenager, I got a call from a police officer. They’d arrested him. My husband and I met them on location where I saw my son sitting in the back of a police car. It was one of the worst days of my life. It was too hard to even look at him.
He had been with another kid he didn’t know well. Together they “tagged” a high school.
That evening I painted this. It pretty much explained what I was feeling at the time.
Today, my son is a loving husband and father. I count my blessings every day!
Weekly Photo Challenge – Danger
The searching-for-a-penny-in-your-poop kind of Lifestyle
Dad can catch a housefly in one hand without blinking, so it shouldn’t have surprised me none that his open palm slams fast across my face.
As I put my hand to my face he says, “Oh fer cryin’ out loud, Cono! I’ll swannin’, ye bit the your new toothbrush in two! Can’t ye do…”
I don’t hear the rest of what he’s saying. He’s walking away from me shaking his head back and forth. Half of my face stinging like it’s been resting on a yeller-jacket’s nest. The other half just feels sorry. How can you build up something so high, just to watch it fall down so hard? With the brush part still inside my mouth and its handle still in my hand, I think maybe I’m not so big after all. I guess I’ve found the baby Devil’s Claw after all. It’s me. I’m the baby.
I think about what I’m supposed to do with these two pieces. Maybe I can just swaller the brush part that’s not doing anything, but napping on my tongue. At least then, half of my dumbness will be covered up. Then again, Ma is always saying to me, “Cono, ye need to ‘member that anythin’ ye swaller is gonna have te come out the other end.” She reminds me about this all the time, ever since she saw me swaller a penny. No sir, she won’t let me forget about that penny. I’d picked it up off Ma’s night table, looked at it, sniffed it and after licking that penny, it just slid down my throat as easy as ice cream.
When Ma saw that penny go in my mouth and not come back out the same way, she said, “Times bein’ hard, ye gotta look at yer ba’ll movement ev’ry time ye do one. Don’t use the outhouse. Go in the fields. When ye find it, clean it off real good and hand it over to yer Mother. She needs it a whole lot more’n yer belly does.” I knew she was right. No one has much money. Most folks around here are six pennies shy of a nickel.
I watched each poop that turned up. I waited hoping it had melted and I’d already peed it out, but that didn’t happen. A few days later, when I saw that penny come out, I stared at it for a while. I just didn’t have it in me to pick it out of my poop and clean it off.
Every few days Ma would ask, “Find that penny yet, Cono?”
“No ma’m,” I’d say, “Must be makin’ its way back up.”
Now if I would have swallered that penny in front of Ike, he would have grinned and tilted his head to the side and said, “Well, aren’t you smart!” Then we both would have laughed and that would have been the end of it. Except, that ain’t the way it happened. It was Ma who saw me swaller that penny.
A few days later, Pa took me to Adam’s Grocers to get us some cheese and crackers like we always do on a Saturday. We sat on the breezy side of the house and watched the nighttime roll over to our part of town. It was so quiet, that when we opened our cheese and crackers, our crunching sounded like a two-man band. And when the music of summer bugs joined in? We were better than a revival choir.
“See this tooth right here?” Pa says jabbing his finger on a back tooth.
“Yeah?”
He puts that finger up to his nose, sniffs it and says, “It shor’ do stink!” Pa sure is funny sometimes.
Spitting out a cracker crumb with his tongue and a puff of air, Pa reached into his pocket, pulled something out and said, “Here ye go, Cono. I think this is yer’n.” I looked down and smiled at his open palm. There, sitting smack dab in the middle of his calloused farm hand was a shiny penny.
“Thanks Pa,” I said, staring at its purpose.
“Mm, hmm,” said Pa. “Ever’thin’s copacetic, ain’t it Cono?”
“It sure is Pa,” I said. Pa loves that word, “copacetic.” He told me “copacetic” means that things are tasting good on your tongue and that everything’s going to be alright.
I put the penny in my pocket to keep it safe while I ate my crackers. When we’d finished eating and as the sun was getting further and further away from the day, I ran into the house and saying real loud to my mother so Ma could hear, “Mother, I think this is yer’n.”
From my novel, No Hill for a Stepper, my father’s story. (available on Amazon)
Snake panic, friend panic
Tanner finally stops. He looks around but doesn’t see me. He settles on a hefty rock and lights a cigarette. “Tanner,” I say quietly so I don’t scare him out of his railroad pants.
He flinches but recovers quickly. “What?”
“I have two things to say. The first is a question. What was in Olvie’s freezer?”
“Creepy mannequin parts,” he says staring at the creek. “Arms, legs, a couple of heads.”
Jeez! Why would she keep them in an unplugged freezer? Oh, never mind. Plastic doesn’t need to be preserved in the cold.
“Next?” he says, still not looking my direction.
I take a few steps forward and settle on the ground a good ten feet away. “I think Austin’s different from where you live. You know, maybe not as bad.”
“Maybe. But Clarksville is surrounded by whites. I don’t understand why he didn’t move to east Austin with the other coloreds. There, I could go in any restaurant, pee where I want, go to the park or to the movies and not feel threatened. I wouldn’t have to watch everything I do or say. Like in my own neighborhood in Fairfield.”
“Yeah, well your uncle and the residents in Clarksville worked hard to stay where they are. They like their houses so why should they leave?” I don’t say more because I see it. Coiled. “Be still, Tanner. There’s a rattler to your left, about ten feet away.”
He turns his head slowly. When he spots, he heaves his body off the rock and runs toward me. “Come on! Run!”
I laugh through my panting at his Panicked voice.
He stops by the street curb, his hands shaking. “What’s so damn funny?”
“Two things. You’re scared of snakes and you always wear those hickory striped pants.” I point to his denim trousers.
“They’re railroad pants. No other word for them. And, I’ll have you know, I own more than one pair. Ever heard of the Underground Railroad?
“Sure,” I say, more indignant than necessary. “It was a way to help slaves escape to safe places during the Civil War.”
“I wear these pants to remind me. I intend to drive my own life-train and not let anyone take it from me.” His eyes are focused, determined and serious.
“It wasn’t a real train with real tracks,” I say.
“Still, for me, it’s symbolic.”
“I have one for you,” I say. “Every heard the expression ‘you can catch more flies with honey’?”
“So?”
“Try being nice.”
“You want me to cow-down to the white man. Let him treat me like shit because of the color of my skin.”
“You do that anyway, don’t you? In Alabama? Maybe it’s time to stop cowing down and stand up for yourself.”
Tanner spits beside his Converse’s.
“That was mean. Just when I think you might be decent enough to talk to, you end up showing your stupidity. You don’t know me at all. And,” he points a finger at my chest, “you don’t know what it’s like to be a Negro.”
Tanner doesn’t understand me either. The meanest thing I’ve ever done was kicking Donna in the ass and chasing her with a stick because she didn’t keep her promise. We’d made a deal. She was supposed to help me clean up after making brownies. As Dad would say, “deal breakers chap my ass.”
I just wanted him to know that having me as a friend might be worth fighting for. When Tanner stomps off, I don’t follow.
My WIP, set in 1963
“You’re not going to believe what I have to tell you”
The Masked Man
Sometimes, you just have to paint a naked man. 😉
by CD-W
A Baby Girl Sock Without the Baby Girl
Cono (my father) and his sister, Delma
Mother’s holding Delma in her skinny arms, and Dad walks toward them. He’s clenching his jaw, which makes his brown eyes look black. He looks different, like something bad is about to happen.
“What’re ye doin’, Wayne?” asks Mother. Dad doesn’t answer. He just keeps walking up to the porch.
“Wayne?” says Mother again. Dad snatches Delma right outta her arms, turns back around, and starts walking back to the car he had borrowed. Then all hell breaks loose.
“Wayne, what the hell do ye think you’re doin’?” says Aunt Nolie.
“It ain’t None of yer concern, Nola,” says Dad just as calmly as if he was taking a sack of groceries to his car instead of my whimpering baby sister.
Mother cries and pleads with him to bring Delma back. She follows on his heels, pulling on his sleeve, but he shakes her off like a horsefly. When Dad puts Delma into the car, Sis starts crying too. I know she must be as confused as we are. She never goes anywhere without Mother, and now she’s watching her Mother cry and try to get to her. She’s watching me, too. I’m helpless. I can’t move. I can’t do nothing.
Dad leaves, and I can hear my baby sister crying for me to come rescue her, but I can’t. I just stand there, holding on to Mother’s skirt. Mother’s holding on to Aunt Nolie’s arm.
“That crazy son of a bitch,” says Aunt Nolie.
“I hate his guts,” sobs Mother.
Right then and there, so do I. I hate him. He has taken my little sister and left my mother’s arms raw from the friction of loneliness.
Excerpt from No Hill for a Stepper, my father’s story
Don’t even think about it, Grand-Dog
Image
Carolyn Dennis-Willingham 