In my mind I am driving up Argyle in summer past the fair grounds, Bobby’s house is on the right, the McCutch homestead on the right, I can turn down to where my father is staying in the now, a garden and deck and weem can have some very strong coffee and feel the sun, or I can continue on down the road straight ahead into the past. The house on the very next left was at one time coming back from Bosnia livable by a woman who was ten years my elder who kissed me and we turned on soft lamp shades and I jumped out her window at 21 when her old man came home. Jesse lived in the next house, then there is a right turn to where Meagan Bell lived who owned a hot tub, who weem figured out that making love in hot tubs was not the best thing when making love the first time around.
There is a field on the right where bobby grove rode dirt bikes, sometimes with Cody. On the left there is the Solinger house. Jenny Solinger so much older and beautiful. Then there is a corner fork in the road. A house, a weird sort of double wide with dented white panels and a roof that leaked.
This is where weem lived
Cars would come crashing down through history all night and every night so much so that my father threw a bunch of railroad ties out into the yard. The most amazing thing happened when he was out to sea seeing, weem were trying to kiss this girl, screw this girl and there was a screech and broken glass sound, weem walked out into the front yard and there was a 84 vw rabbit impaled on one of the railroad ties. Two nights later the class of 88, Don Galt and all those boys came down and poured a bunch of gasoline upon the front yard … 88 it said for as long as Friday harbor can remember, tried watering it, digging up gentle swaths of earth unnoticeable. Nathan and nothing ever came out of it, scars are like that.
laughed about it years later with Donny. Laughed about all the streets there are in the home town and all the different directions to take in history but it is always there like onion skin going back deeper than you shall know.
I became me quite literary just recently. On top of a mountain with Kim and witness. I became me on all these new roads without my history and that alone is the beauty of it, the creativity, in creating you.
She slithers towards the couch when the English premiership plays football. We spent too much time thinking about our childhoods, for all the hell we teach children. It is time to think about us and now.
So as I was saying she slithers towards the couch and she sleeps. How do you turn off like that I think?
If I was to point out her strong points I would say this: Her mother had a gate that they needed closed at all times. A field full of grass that became hay, which became hay bales that became work on the hot summer nights. I would say that there are chunks of the lawn that siblings would argue over about mowing. There were more clocks than you knew what to do with and dogs and cats and crows and owls and salamanders that moved about the room when you tried to think.
We went outside and she smoked and watched the chicken follow that fucking duck that raised up every time you walked by, and the Australian collie that led them so…and I dipped chew.
The sun always looked good screaming down as it did so and we would gather ourselves, but what she never knew is how much this stuff hit home. My grandmother Valeria, my grandfather Harvey. God their house was full of the eccentric. There were piles and piles of books and there was a jungle of plants. My father would take me there and I would get lost every time, I would find some sort of book that I wanted to take home with me, I would crawl back behind the plants and find some sword or something. I would crawl out like a little Dutchman. A conquest.
At kim’s there were many conquests. I could find them in the model plane that hung over the water bed in Jon’s basement bedroom. He is a pilot. I can find them in her elder brother Matt who joined the army and became an officer who became a black hawk pilot… most of all I can find them in Kim who became a teacher, like her mother, her father, and the holy ghost.
She walks she talks she is all the things a kid needs
I think and debate about calling her up. I check the fantasy football scores. Her teeth I think her lips I think.
My legs moving, my mind running my heart dreaming.
Do you understand what it is to call her up a million miles away? Me in Friday harbor her in all lost Alaska… maybe she won’t like me in the morning when I take her out for bacon and blueberry pancakes… but who doesn’t like blue berry pancakes and bacon? I mean I was taking her out on the phone in her dreams and sleep.
I called her every morning and thought about her hearing my teeth which she hates now; I called her and tried to interest her in lumber yards and hard work. The skin falling off of my hands the truck that was running, frost on the lumber, Karl calling me a dick weed….
I called her and most of the time and most of the time I woke her.
She would answer the phone all confused.
I thought to myself then and there I would love to be there. And I am. In her bed. Finally I did it; I flew up there and got there. The warm winter sun and a room so white. We laid down and I thought about never waking up.
Kodiak
The beginning of the race, I am just waiting for the starter gun.
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