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Show Blue Run/13 "See? I told you you'd love us. And we'd love you. We're rich," he said and hugged me to his chest. Buddy Washer kissed me. "We're all rich," he sang out. And we danced and sang and smoked Marlboros and ate dog or goat or lamb burritos until the lights got turned out and we slept wherever we fell. Rich, my ass. I woke hungover to cigarette butts and spilt tequila, flies buzzing dirty dishes stacked in the sink. And that wasn't even the worst. Nor the cat licking the sink faucet of the shock of understanding that these people breathing out the sides of their mouths on the floor were now my people from here on out, no matter what, our blood was mixed in my womb. And that wasn't even the kicker, there was more. Outside looked like yesterday and tomorrow. Like I suffered from love at first sight, only in reverse-I'm sure some dopehead shrinks thought up a name for that way of being, how I found myself that morning. But even that, the let down, knowing how I'd been fished all along. That wasn't the worst of it, not by a long shot. Buddy'd slept on the broken recliner. Even like that, pants unzipped and flies on his ears, he wasn't so bad, not at all loathsome A natural liar-he made everything seem possible-all you needed was to believe. Believe in me. he'd say, and I believed in him. That was April 1960-1 ( was two months pregnant with Joey, full of hope and life and the promise of going west to the land of dreamy dreams, all that crock. So all this uncouthness I'd brought on myself, and my unborn child, I'd just have to work around it, nearly anybody can do that, can't they? My daddy always said, you want to see somebody's colors, catch'em down-see how they go about living the day when all hell's broken loose. Anybody can be good when life is sweet, he said, knocking pipe fire out on the prosthesis that was his right leg, painted flesh-colored. And then he'd say something like, "the higher you climb, the more of your ass shows," so who knows about him. |
