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Show Blue Run/78 father out in Arizona, I remember Mama telling me how deeply he'd loved us before he died, before the big accident she invented She threw away everything she had related to him except me Now Mama'll never know that I've actually talked to the man, looked his name up in the Tucson directory and listened to him lie at length. "I love you," he'd said once before we hung up. Then he mailed a ceramic indian with its ass end stuffed full of skunk weed What on earth kind of I love you's that? Say? Then came O.W., me and him all of a sudden dressed in the same spit-shined shoes and clip-on ties, saying I do, I do with the whole goddamn green world spread out thirteen floors down from Grandma Dee's Himalaya House apartment window You could see the Little Rock Zoo from that window, the dorky little train circling the duck pond, bells ringing. Tugboats butted up against barges on the Arkansas River, thin smoke curling from their engines "Hauling toilet paper," Grandpa Stepwell told me once on the way out 1-40 to the duck woods. "Enough for every shitass from here to New Orleans." Stepwells are like that, liable to say any old thing Like me saying I do at Mama and O.W.'s wedding. Freudian as all get out, every boy wishes to marry the mother who'll do for him what no mother has ever done. The truth is, I was afraid of O.W from the first time I saw him, his name stitched in red letters over his heart. He adopted me, sure. We learned to live with each other, deer hunt, pitch horseshoes out in the backyard, fill fifty-five gallon drums full of scrap and burn the Jesus out of some trash. He carved a soap box derby car for me during Webelo Roundup. Once I had a fistfight with a guy named Ricky O'Neal in our backyard and some way or another lost my shoes Thwack one went against the bedroom wall when O.W. hauled off and threw them, ashamed I hadn't kicked 0"Neal's ass. Thwack the other went He didn't exactly call me a woodpussv then, but I could see it in his blue-blue eyes. |
