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Show Go Love/180 bedroom, back past the washer and dryer by the garage door, and O.W.'d razz him about a hot date or the beard he'd grown that summer. Or sometimes Traceleen would just die to play us all a song on her cassette player, and it would be a bubblegum love medley and we'd all crack up and have supper at the table where O.W.'d pray, and we'd all hold hands, then eat chili or spaghetti or hamburger stroganoff steaming on the table. Outside, these big intense spider webs stretched, twenty yards from one end to the other, gleaming under the pear and apple trees. O.W.'d say amen, and Mama'd look up, and we'd see each other and know that this was right, and EM T.s would attend the man who'd wrecked his scooter on the train track, take his pulse, check for internal bleeding and O.W. would say amen. Our future was deep with hope, all good things were surely headed our way there on Willy Ray Street in the delta with its pure gold earth. And then a rabbit would squeal and cargo planes rattled the glass fixtures and one of us would flip on the tv and O.W.'d take to the recliner and Beach Bikini Bingo would just be starting on Saturday Matinee Our lives moved forward Up through the hallway I see Renee with Dee, Lara in her lap, on the loveseat beside the fireplace where Mama's picture-the one from the viewing-has been propped up against the glass beside the gold poker and shovel. Brother Dell's nowhere to be seen. Uncle Bold's outside smoking with Aunt Judy. Traceleen's out there, her little big boy Douglas Mean and her son are sour-faced, somebody's got their goats. A car is being sent this second, a long black limo from the funeral home, the one the monkey man'd been laying the shine to when Shurl explained the four days of the human body When the woodpecker blazed high in a hickory, hammering its way between the living and the dead. A horse had neighed-people drove by on the highway, going down the road with their radios on, singing bubblegum love songs and cracking up-the world |