Steven Womack - Dead Folks' blues

“In fact, I’m going to be tied up most of the weekend.”

“Hey, great, who is she? Anybody I know?”

“Just somebody I’ve been seeing.”

“Anything serious? She the one you were talking about before?”

“Yeah on both counts. I think it’s serious. I don’t know. Maybe.”

“For a guy who’s just found true love, you don’t sound too happy.”

“Oh, no, man, I don’t mean to sound that way. It’s just that, well … Damn, man, I don’t know. Life’s just complicated sometimes.”

“Ride with it. Enjoy it while it laste. Life’s too short.”

“I know that, Harry. Believe me. After this week, I know. Listen, man, I got to go.”

“Yeah, I understand. Have a good weekend.”

“You, too. Got any plans?”

“I’m hoping my landlady will invite me down for Cream of Wheat, maybe show off her new dentures.”

“Funny, Harry. Trezz-amuzzante… ”

I hung up, disappointed. I was getting more sour and grumpy by the minute, and the four walls of my office were closing in fast. I set the answering machine up, on the long shot that somebody might actually want to communicate with me. Then I flipped off my light and eased out into the hall.

Sounds of laughter and music came full tilt from Ray and Slim’s office. I knew from past Fridays that the party would go on for another couple of hours, then they’d head over to Second Avenue to a restaurant. Later, they’d wind up at a songwriter’s bar swilling beers and picking tunes until they got too drunk to hold their guitars steady. I’d hung with them a night or two, but not tonight.

I left the building quietly, crossed the street, and walked four floors up the parking garage to retrieve the Ford.

I drove out Main Street until it swerved and became Gallatin Road. I didn’t even feel like Mrs. Lee’s Szechuan chicken tonight, so I pulled into a grocery store parking lot, picked up a six-pack of beer, a couple of frozen nukeable dinners, and headed for my apartment. Catch a movie on the tube, drink a few beers, get to bed early.

After all, Mrs. Hawkins wanted her grass mowed tomorrow.

Nashville sits nestled deep within a natural bowl, surrounded by high ground on all sides. This has the effect of making the entire city a natural garbage dump for stale air, automobile exhaust, heat inversions, and organic pollution of every kind imaginable. We’ve got more pollen, mold, dust, and varieties of airborne fungi than any place ever chronicled in National Geographic . If you don’t have bad sinuses when you come to Nashville, you’ll soon get them. You’ll wake up one morning hungover beyond belief when you haven’t had a drink in weeks. Your eyes will puff up like adders. Every part of your body will itch like crazy, including some parts too intimate to scratch. And your cheeks will be so swollen your teeth will hurt. The river running down the back of your throat will make you feel like you ought to rent a canoe and shoot the rapids.

And you’ll go to the doctor convinced that a terminal virus has got you in its grip, and if it’s not Lyme disease or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Epstein-Barr, it’s probably something even worse. You’ll find yourself reviewing your sexual history over the past two decades wondering which one it was who gave it to you, asking God to give you enough time to track the person down and give them one last terminal bit of your enfeebled, senile mind.

Then to add mortal insult to grievous injury, you’ll stagger into the examining room, every orifice from the neck up seeping stuff you neither want to think about nor endure a second longer, and you will relate your laundry list of symptoms to your trusted, faithful family physician.

And he will laugh.

Yes, he will laugh, for he has heard it all before. And he will assure you that despite desperate hopes to the contrary, you are not going to die. You do not have some awful disease. Your body has not been taken over by some alien being.

You simply live in Nashville. And like all other long-time residents of this city, you will learn to clear your throat politely, to keep a box of tissues always nearby, and to study the qualities and characteristics, if indeed not the actual chemical composition, of every over-the-counter remedy from Benadryl to Sudafed. And like all other Nashvillians, when you find one that works, you will buy it five hundred at a time and write letters to the pharmaceutical companies asking when they’re going to start selling it in the large size.

And you will dread days like the one I’m having today, the days when you have to cut grass.

It was ninety degrees outside when I woke up at 9:15. The air conditioner was frozen shut again, as useless as an ice-covered airplane wing. The motor, now too hot to touch and in great danger of setting the whole house ablaze, chattered away as it strained futilely to move air through the clogged filter.

I unplugged the machine, determined to watch it for the next hour with the fire department number nearby. I made coffee, then went out on the landing with a steaming cup and sat on the hot metal in a pair of cutoffs. My night had been full of bad dreams. In them I had committed some unspecified crime and was locked away in prison. My cell was tiny. I could stand in the middle of the cell, turn to face the door, and touch both walls without fully extending either arm. I lived alone, and each day was planned, each moment accounted for. We ate at the same time every day, showered three times a week, and ate food at the same times every day seated silently at long tables.

I sat on the landing a long time, until the sun shifted in the sky and began to beat down too hard on me. I retreated inside and made a plate of scrambled eggs and polished off the rest of the coffee, read the paper, stared at the air conditioner. Finally, there was no way to delay the inevitable.

Mrs. Hawkins had a shed out back, a largely decayed wooden frame structure, that had been built by her late husband. It mostly served as a honeymoon hotel for the neighborhood stray cats and as a refuge for brown recluse spiders. As a matter of personal policy, I kept as far away from it as possible. But since she stored the lawn mower in there, at least once a week during this summer and for all my future summers there, since it looked like I’d never have the money to move, I’d risk life and limb to get what I needed to make her happy. I kept hoping one of the neighborhood urchins would crawl in to sneak a smoke one day after school and burn down the damn hovel. So far, though, my customary luck held out.

I suited up in my cutoffs, an old T-shirt, a dust mask I’d picked up at the local hardware store, and my old workboots. Just as a matter of habit, I kicked the door and rattled it on its hinges just to make sure whatever critters were inside knew I was coming.

The lawn mower roared to life after only the twenty-ninth pull. By then I was sweating torrents, covered in dust, and swearing like a drunken sailor on leave in a Hong Kong whorehouse. The cloth filter in the plastic face mask was about as effective as holding a minnow net over my mouth, and soon I was choking, spitting, and generally miserable. I pushed that unholy wheeled contraption around the yard for two hours, in the process nicking the corner of one of Mrs. Hawkins’s flower beds and playing hell with some lilies.

The one good thing that came out of the day’s work in the sun was that-while clogging my sinuses-it cleared my mind. For the first time since Rachel first stepped into my office and back into my life, I spent a few waking hours with my mind on something else besides murder and desire.

Only that didn’t last very long. Late in the afternoon, after I finally finished trimming borders and edging the driveway, I went upstairs, cranked up the now thawed air conditioner, and sat down on the floor with a cold beer in front of the television. I was too dirty to sit on even my worn furniture, so I simply rolled on my haunches across the hard wooden floor to get the remote control.