If for some reason you to find yourself in the middle of nowhere one early morning and turn right on a dirt road, the road just before the one that leads to the county dump and landfill, you would pass between two rusty paint-peeling cattle gates on which a wooden sun-bleached sign hangs askew. It reads, Panther Valley RV Park, both P's are colourless and unreadable. It is a place scooped level probably by the same bulldozer used down the road at the dump. It is a short drive down the hill, then the road loops around and brings you back to where you started. Only the adventurous, or very lost, or those lacking in the money to find a better place to stay, would pass through those deleterious paint-peeling gates. If you're the resort type, drive a few miles father down the highway to Curlew Lake to the Golden Eagle's RV Park, where everything is neat and clean and green.
The Panther Valley RV Park could double as the seventh hole on a golf course in Hell. Other than several small patches of uncut grass withered by the lack of water, or the half dozen waist-high wooden posts which support electric outlet boxes and water spigots, the place has the look and feel of any unkempt abandoned lot.
A lone travel trailer is parked amid the tufts of parched grass clumps. The trailer isn't long or short, new or old, but somewhere in-between. A red and white stripped awning snaps in the wind, frayed and torn in places, but still serves the useful purpose of providing shade in the hot months of Summer. A dusty truck is parked next to the awning, it too isn't new or old. On the back bumper of the trailer sits a two-foot high chainsaw carved piece of wood in the form of a feather, as a symbol of truth. The trailer doesn't have the look of a Summer vacationer, and it isn't. It is the last possession of Nathaniel Levee Heart.
If the old saying that you don't have to ride the garbage truck all the way to the dump is true, Panther Vally RV Park is about as close as one can get and not be there. A peaceful quite place, except for muffled traffic sounds that filter down from the old highway above. On the far side of the highway, a sheer rock cliff rises hundreds of feet, topped by changing shades of blue throughout the hours of the day. Clouds of whipped meringue moisture pile high where eagles circle. The air is fresh and clean, despite the closeness of the dump...a juxtaposition of incongruities one might say. Nathaniel Levee Heart sees the beauty in it.
On an August morning, like any other day, was a knot on the string of his life, nothing had changed...everything had changed. The dogs whined to be let out. Twisting and tucking his hand-woven wool blanket just right so no heat would escape, he told the dogs to...Hush! They were not accustom to waiting, and sat by his bed wagging their tails in the dark. The bigger dog Sarah had a long tail and it thumped hard on the trailed floor as if it were the heart beat of a mother drum at a native ceremony. The little dog Micky, forced air to escape from deep down in his throat...it was a silent whine. The man opened his eyes slowly. He was thinking of the cold of winter.
Summers didn't last long in the northern mountains. An August frost was not unheard of, and winter temperatures of twenty to forty degrees below zero wasn't something to joke about. he wondered if the fear of cold and hunger would ever leave him, it was something he carried from childhood. This place would change all the fears he had ever had about himself, and the world around him. This was the place he had chosen to make his stand against all the falsehoods he had mistaken for truths.
Many times while shaving he would look closely at that pie-faced man in the mirror, peering through the steam that fogged his glasses. Most mornings, a smiling ageing mask with warm eyes of sadness nodded acknowledgment; on some days it was the cold eyes of fear, or the strong eyes of anger, but eyes always looking. With a soapy bent finger he would balance his glasses across the bridge of his nose, then lower his now callused palm to swipe first one stubble cheek, and then the other. If he could grow a proper beard he would never shave, but his beard was thin and patchy in places, so shaving over the years had become a sisyphifistic routine, like letting the dogs out, or praying.
Sarah nosed her square head under the man's suntan arm that lay atop the frayed Navajo blanket. Her tail now banging a heyoka(clown) round of missed beats against the wall of the narrow trailer. Bang! Thump, Thump, Bang! He gently scratched her soft long ear, which quickened the tempo. Micky had founded his voice and yodeled in a high-pitched yapping that would have earned him a smack from most of those who call themselves dog-lovers. "Hush, little brother" the man whispered through his tobacco stained teeth. "Let me pee first and get my pants on." Swinging his feet to the floor, he winced as he slowly stood up. In a stoop he shuffled down the short hallway to the bathroom, his hand running over the light switch along the way. The dogs sat waiting, quite now, for they were use to being let out first. Their confusion in the change of habit must have stunned them to silence, as an owl hooted from somewhere in the tall pine trees along the road bank.
Nathaniel Levee stood barefoot in front of his less- than- palatial trailer door. He arched his back and stood on this toes, trying to straighten the effects of sleeping curled up in a ball all night. He fastened his trophy silver belt-buckle slowly, the one he had never worn before, because it reminded him of something he thought he could never achieve again. With a gnarled hand the old man opened the trailer door to the blue-gray of morning. "Well, you gotta pee or what?" Both dogs bolted, each to their own way.
It would take several minutes for the water to boil for his coffee. The man sat down on the trailer step rolling a cigarette, thinking of other mornings. "Don't go there Natty-Boy" he said, through the hacking cough of his first puff. "Damn things, gonna kill me one of these days." He took another puff to ease the spam. In the quite of morning, his bare feet rested in the cool dirt, an old man waiting...for what he did know. With a gravely voice he sang, "Wakantanka unsimalaye"...a song for mercy. The dogs came trotting up to sit next to him, and they waited too. After saying good morning to the blood-red sun rising slowly in the smoke-gray sky, he drank two cups of coffee with half & half and the last of his brown sugar. He tinkered with this- and-that then said, "Come on kids, we're going to the store. This man can't live without his sugar." Saying this, he chuckled to himself. His wife Corissa has left him almost three years ago to the day, their tumultuous ten-year marriage had been one he had gambled everything on and lost, or so it seemed.
He told himself there must have been a time when Corissa Kickking was happy, he just couldn't remember when, no...that wasn't true. There were happy times, just to few. Nathaniel understood many things about his wife, things maybe she didn't even understand about herself. There had been something about the way she had smiled at him on that first day in his classroom. He knew better, he understood and had learned to deal with his student's occasional infatuations. He had no time for such foolishness he told himself, and yet all during that tedious semester she sailed her moon-shadowed dhow closer into his heart. Nathaniel was a veracious student in areas she cared little about: he enjoyed making love, she had sex, he liked expensive wines and exotic foods, traveling to places where tourist are seldom seen, She was happy with a six-pack, ordering a Big Mac with fries to take home and sit in front of the wide-screen. He shuddered and married her because he loved her.
She had been born with a gross defect that had required multiple surgeries to correct. By the age of four, she had experienced more pain than most people experience in a lifetime. A thin hidden scar attested to the world-renowned surgeon's skill with a scalpel. Corissa was a miracle baby, but the scars she carried within had never healed, and throughout the years of her life, she had acquired new ones. Those deep scares were unseen yet fully known icebergs that gashed open the hull of Nathaniel Levee's life.
No comments:
Post a Comment