Three More Mini-Essays

Here is yet another triad of short-short essays from a book of same for which I am seeking a publisher. A lot of near-misses so far, but I have to keep searching. The first appeared in the excellent Eclectica magazine, and the latter two appeared in Ron Slate’s engaging online journal,  On the Seawall. Those two, however, appeared as poems, from which I  have “translated” them, expanding them some in the process.                    

Familiar Stranger

He stepped into our general store, trailing a faintly smoky odor. I could just hear him humming a song, and though I didn’t know why, something about it intrigued me, its cadences stirring a memory, for the moment ungraspable

The stranger’s features were mostly as undistinctive as his clothing. Yet when he turned, his eyes had a ghostly quality, and when they locked on mine I swore I felt something like a burn. Had he singled me out from among our little knot of customers, and if so, why? I quickly looked away.

After a moment, undetected, I hoped, I turned back to watch him browse the shelves. He didn’t seem to be after anything specific, but at length he chose a lighter. An incurable sucker for metaphor, if that’s the right term here, I thought the choice accorded with the mild feverishness his presence had kindled in me. Yet I soon discovered I couldn’t liken anything about him– tune, eyes, odor, or warmth– to anything or anyone else I could summon, figuratively or otherwise. 

So what about him primed me to imagine misfortune?

Everyone in the store flinched when a siren erupted outside. That’s a common enough sound in big cities, but we rarely hear it in our small upcountry village. Through the plate glass window, we all followed a state police cruiser as it shot by. All, that is, but the out-of-towner, who waited back-to at the register.

I didn’t ask anyone else, but to me that shrill noise seemed more than just abnormal. It not only pierced the more or less pleasant routine of our neighborhood, but also, I thought, sent a cryptic signal from some unknown dominion. Pure nonsense, of course, as I well knew. Even so, it left me unsettled, to use an easy euphemism.

At last, the visitor nodded affably at our little group, shoved open the screen, and left, still humming that barely audible air.

My neighbors seemed scarcely to notice. They went on with their palaver, none beside me appearing the least concerned with this man but rather, quite understandably, with what that siren might signify.

Then I had it.

One autumn morning when I was thirteen, Eddie and I rode in the truck as his father hauled a boar hog to the abattoir. When we arrived, he told us not to get out, and we didn’t dream of it. He was a man you took orders from.

I heard the tailgate clank behind us. Turning to look out the rear window, I could tell the pig sensed something grim in the offing. An attendant, who smoked a short black cigar, prodded the poor thing into a chain-link passageway and then through a low steel door, which he emphatically slammed.

The man walked Eddie’s dad back to the truck, and, for a minute or so, they conversed through its open window. Then, having stubbed his stogey, the attendant retreated into the squat, gray building by another entrance. Before the hired man cranked up the window, however, I clearly heard the other man whistle, though it was more like breathing. It was the tune I’d half-recognize more than sixty years later. I had caught a whiff of the abattoir worker’s tobacco, but I chiefly noted his spectral eyes.

Just then I flinched at the sudden scream of a siren.  Why did I never ask Eddie how any of this affected him?

The siren had only blown to announce the noon hour, but just after it wound down, a different scream poured out of the slaughterhouse.  We boys squirmed when we heard it, and Eddie’s father, so rugged and seasoned, sat staring through the windshield for what seemed a long, long moment, hands clenched on the steering wheel.

Then he started the engine. But its rumble came too late to cover that cry, which, these many decades later, I likewise failed to repress.

                   Unknown Saints

As for most, my early adolescence was an uneasy time. Mixed parties began to happen, with games of Post Office, Spin-the-Bottle, and others– much needed, since initiating any interaction with the opposite sex seemed hopeless, at least to me. I just couldn’t seem to kick my shyness.

Was I the one, or was it Bruce, or perhaps my nemesis Phil, who contrived the notion of forming a band? We needed some ploy to blunt our loneliness, though in fact, I have no business saying we, because I wished small luck on Bruce and still less on Phil.1

Those unreachable girls would politely lift needles from their Elvis tunes and endure our efforts. Phil sat at some household’s piano, Bruce blew his trumpet, and I played clarinet.

We had a paltry repertoire, just two or three half-learned numbers to labor through before we offered our self-styled, and consistently unsolicited encore, When the Saints Go Marching In, which was as close to rock n roll as folks had discovered by then.  White folks, that is: we didn’t know R&B, any more than we did that our signature song derived from Second Line, up-tempo numbers performed as funeral processions returned from New Orleans’s so-called colored graveyards over half a century before.

These unnamed saints coaxed jitterbug wiggles out of us witless young Caucasians,

1  Here and throughout I have changed many of my “characters’” names.

gathered in living rooms with rugs rolled up to walls. Did I dream of a wife or children,

let alone grandchildren, back then? That seems unlikely, but even if I did, I doubt I imagined they’d one day be my heart’s desire.

Today is such a day, though for the moment I am quite alone. The late-May sounds of upper New England seem to add a further touch of shame to the shameful old sounds I recollect. Tree frogs trill their melodies and water coursing in freshets is undersong to other wondrous music around me.

Meanwhile I’m stunned at how more than fifty years have gone by while I’ve lived here beside rough dirt roads in stamp-sized towns in far northern states. Scarcely for the first time, I marvel at fate: there are so many different other ways in which I might have fashioned a life. By this time, however, I just can’t imagine them. I’m old enough too that I wouldn’t really want to.

Though this world appears so distinct from that old one I conjure, I can hear Bruce’s trumpet in the black flies’ hum; Phil misses the third in a chord– it’s a raven; a blue jay squawks from the crown of a hemlock– my reed’s got a chip. For the briefest instant, I’m again as guileless and baffled by the world as I was back then, when a makeshift, discordant trio strove to invite those unknown saints into our lives.               

                   Fantasies in ’56  

Hank Nicci worked as the pump attendant at Greville’s Sunoco all that summer. He had a softball-sized Valentine heart tattooed on one shoulder. It read Mom– what else in those days, unless you were a Navy man?

Hank’s girlfriend was the prettiest woman I’d ever seen. She drove a smoking-hot ‘48 Mercury with some newer and bigger V-8 under the hood.  Its glass-pack mufflers made a guttural rumble as it idled, but a roar– louder, more thrilling– when she tromped the throttle. That scarlet Merc glistened like a candy apple. What I wouldn’t have done for a street rod like that!

Her family must have had money. The car was much customized, and was so radically lowered that sparks sprayed from its bumpers whenever she drove onto the lot. Just watching her arrive made my own sparks fly, which of course she never imagined. Her name was Roy-Anne, and I knew if I were ever to tell my mother about her, she’d announce that my dream-love was cheap.

Roy-Anne and Hank could fight like wildcats. I once heard her scream, “You can kiss my ass!” before peeling out of the station. How could that have thrilled me so too? If such cursing or anything else about her meant she was cheap, well, cheap was all I longed for. Bad language. Cool automobile. Hell, I’d kiss her wherever and as much as she pleased. On the rare occasions when she got out of her Mercury, I’d invent some way to get close to her, and I got dizzy just whiffing her scent– perfume, shampoo and spearmint gum.

What kind of idiot could Hank be? He didn’t seem to think about Roy-Anne’s feelings at all. She could scream her lungs out at him, and he still wouldn’t lay off flirting with every woman who drove in. Why did he risk losing her? I kept thinking I’d behave however she told me to if Roy-Anne were my sweetheart.

Just say the word, I whispered one evening. She didn’t hear, needless to say.

I was old enough for summer work, but still too young to drive, so after mucking out stalls or pitching hay or driving turkeys at my uncle’s place, I had to thumb my way down to Greville’s, where I hung out every late afternoon until suppertime. My hope that one day Roy-Anne would be driving by and would stop to give me a ride didn’t come true. None of my hopes did.

Truth is, in those days I’d have hung out at the Sunoco, pretty girl or no. For one thing and for whatever reason, Hank seemed to enjoy having me around. I loved sizing up the various cars that came in with him, sneering at the four-door family sedans and station wagons, lusting for the V-8 coupes. All this enthralled me, no matter how many lectures I got from my mom about wasting precious hours at a dirty old gas station. I never told her anything, naturally, about Roy-Anne, or much of anything else.

Mom pressured me to set my sights as high as I could, often using the phrase “bright years ahead.” I needed to work hard, she insisted, so that I could be admitted to what she called a good college. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any bright years. Once I got to an Ivy League campus, she claimed, I’d discover new goals. As for me, since I’d never found any goals in school, I wondered why on earth I’d discover them in college.

My only goal that summer was to turn into Hank Nicci– big arms, red tattoo, giggly housewives blushing and spluttering as I filled their gas tanks, and above all a girlfriend like Roy-Anne. I don’t know how many times I heard her shout and curse, but she stayed with Hank at least until I did go off to a famous university.

What I truly believed back then seems laughable now, though not quite entirely: if I couldn’t find someone exactly like Roy-Anne, I figured I’d just up and die.

Well, I’ve lived a long, long time without her, thank heavens, or anyone like her and long ago found  a woman every bit as beautiful, inside and out. But when I was fourteen, yes, I plain ached for that girl! It was so frustrating, because, unlike Hank, I’d have treated her well enough that she might even have let me– at least now and then– switch spots on the seat and take the Merc’s wheel.