Saturday, August 08, 2009

I did I did(last supper)


I have moved house this week and yesterday as I was cleaning out the old house I talked to my neighbor for the first time. He was making Bar B Que , and the smoke made an occasional roll over the chain link fence and palmettos. I commented on how it smelled good and he asked If I wanted some. I inquired if it was ready and he said not yet but that he would hook me up. I was drenched in sweat and black dirt and termites and cat excrement. The car needed gas and I needed a break, so off to the corner store I went. I put up 15.00 dollars for the fuel and bought a cold 24 oz. can of Modelo beer with the change from a twenty that the wife had earned from waiting tables the night before. As I filled the tank, a song about Pina coladas and getting caught in the rain seamed to be coming from a retiring sun and framed my view of the old East Coast Railway station now converted into dorms and trimmed in fresh princess palms. When I got back to the house, the neighbors wife had met me in the oak root rutted driveway with two chicken legs. She was wearing a fitted pair of tweedy bird yellow dungaree Capri’s. The blackness of her skin was made darker by a titanium white cotton tee she had stretched over her volumes. As she reached out and put the warm legs, wrapped generously with napkins, into the heart of my palm I noticed her arms were covered in tattoos. Against her skin the monologues of blue ink appeared as formless patches of still darker black. I said thank you and we chatted about the house I was moving out of and into. She figured that we needed more space and I was looking for a chance to complain that the rent was too high. The glint of profound mirth that peeped through her eyelids made me think she had no concern for rent and its impositions. We nodded and pretended to laugh at one another’s banter and made movements of parting. I stalled my exit long enough to watch her walk away. As she passed back through the palmettos, I noticed the printed word GIRL on the back of her shirt. I went back into an empty house to my stashed Modelo. I reached inside the fridge, stark white from bleach for what would be the last time. I removed the can from the plastic bag the merchant had wrapped it in and by the time I placed the beer on the counter it had already textured its height of white and blue with beads of sweat. I thought about how my neighbors wife walked. I took a large draft from the cold can, sweet gold bubbles washing down charred tang of chicken flesh. She moved like A sock filled with five eggs the whole of which half dipped in a pint of canary yellow paint. There was an egg for each quarter of her symmetry and torso, and with each step they rolled. I finished one of the legs and decided to share the other with my son who was waiting for me at our new rental three blocks away. I knew how much he liked Bar B Que and this was good Bar B Que.

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St. Augustine, Florida, United States
I spill ink ,it collects here.