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Show Blue Run/81 My mouth is salty, I don't know why. The sign says, Welcome To Arkansas- Land of Opportunity Me and Mama, we crossed here once on the way down to Jacksonville, Florida. A relation had lost a child, a baby boy. I've forgotten its name, but this child had died, had in fact drowned in a bathtub, of all places. He'd been bathing with his four-year-old brother who'd left him alone for a few minutes to check but the ice cream truck outside. As a kid, I pictured him hearing loud music from a warped speaker howling all down the street-that's how I always saw it. The one brother leaving the other in piss-warm water. So this four-year-old leaves his baby brother in the tub, runs out naked to the red-eyed ice cream man with his three notes blaring. Who can say where the rest of all creation was? The little boy whose name won't come slipped down in the bubbly water and he drowned. They dressed him in sailor suit in a little baby casket. Mama and I were living with Dee then, some apartment with a tiny square of yard where I witnessed a mailman get arrested, thrown bucking and screaming into the backseat of a cop car He'd talked to Mama like he knew here, like he'd come to speak to her personally. This mailman had screamed at Mama. He'd looked at me like he owned me, like I was his property. And then this little boy drowned and the two events somehow twined in my mind. When I hear an the ice cream truck in our neighborhood, about the time Lara starts screaming for quarters, I think of them both-the little boy dressed in a sailor suit in a baby casket and the mailman's face, his red lips pressed up against the cop car's rear window. Mama told me the story on a bus that crossed this same river bridge, bound for sunny Florida, retracing the drive we've just made My name is Joey Harvell-a Stepwell on my mother's side I'm an adoptee, a step-son, a half-brother, a father, a husband. I'm good-crazy, mojo-city |