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Show Blue Run/85 This is a crooked, crooked life. "Yea," I say. "Right as rain." Monarch Boat Factory is built on Lake Pine Bluff-a sprawling military-industrial looking place with high fences and a central check-in point for drive-throughs. Just now a guy in uniform stands looking like he's about to salute or shoot a trespasser without hesitation-one or the other This is the place O.W. drove for all those years after the house fire, when we'd moved up to Lonoke where he and Mama got Jesus. He'd blow his air horn at end of Willy Ray, and come driving up with cabin cruisers stacked on metal racks, flattening out the trailer's natural arc. Big glittering boats bound for California from Pine Bluff with its stinking mill and arsenal and castrated courthouse. O.W. was driving for Monarch-hauling piggyback boats-the summer he sort of kidnapped me, and I first saw the western states-the first time I'd remember them, anyway-from the cab of his Peterbilt I kept up with the states we entered and departed by sticking state stickers from the truck stops on a green suitcase with my mother's smell on it I'd wonder about her and Jimmy and baby Traceleen, look up at the milky way and feel like I was drifting into pieces, little islands of myself coming apart. Then in the dark, I'd watch the midget television up under the dash, and think about the way O.W. did things, how he chewed food and forged his log books and farted while he pissed His every move alien to me as the dusty Wyoming mesas where, at any moment, a hoof or an ear would twitch and there would appear a herd of antelope shining where before had been nothing at all. Outside Rawlins, not far from the Big Sky State Prison, O.W. claimed to know a place where gravity ceased to exist. He pulled off roadside, where he was all the time swerving at eighty miles an hour, laying into the airhorn and scaring roadside hippies shitless in their sleeping bags. |