In winter the heat-rocks keep the dining room -- the thermic
core of my home I like to call it -- several degrees warmer. Sometimes when I
get blue, which happens more as the days go short, I cook up all the snake
tank lights and lay down on the floor with my sunglasses on just to feel
better; that’s why there’s no furniture in there anymore, because as everyone
knows I am very, very tall.
So when Hot-cha, that’s what we call Jason White because that’s what he
calls himself, comes by that Friday to get me, I’m laid out on the dining room
floor trying to make my back feel better and trying to get a better feel for life.
“Yo, git-cho punk-ass up off dat floor, Stretch!” He jiggles the door handle
as if he means to tear it off. “Don’t make me put some caps in this door, you
long old piece of schnizzle.” I don’t think Hot-cha knows what he’s saying
when he says a lot of the things he says, but I like the way he makes up
words: poetry if not particularly poetic.
The bones in my back feel loose and good as I rise, the nubs of my slack
spine giraffe-necking in graceful cooperation until the ax-chop through my left
hip stumbles me. “C’mon then,” I say, opening the door with one hand and
holding onto my left hip bone with the other. My hips, doctors say, flare out
like an open baseball mitt and put too much pressure on my lower vertebrae.
Hot-cha, meanwhile does his dance shuffle through the door, tugging at his
parachute pants and his shirt and wobbling his head as if he’s making fun of
my limp, but that’s not true. That’s the way he’s taught himself to walk.
“Why doncha just get those hips removed so you’re not gimping around
like my dead grandmamma? My sister, Janice, worked with this chick at Target
that had her hips taken out, she couldn’t have no babies anymore, but so
what, right? You ain’t looking to have no fifteen foot tall babies, is you?” He
actually waits for me to answer. “Aw-rightden.”
On Fridays we go to Stiv and Lois’ Steakhouse on 41, and usually we meet
Carlton there. Sometimes Carlton brings Alan, but only in the winters because
Alan works the megafarm out near Dakin. Russell shows up sometimes too,
when he doesn’t have a date, which almost never happens. I suppose a few
others duck in enough to merit mention.
Hot-cha knows all the waitresses and both cooks and usually we can count
on them holding the same table near the kitchen where I won’t draw so much
attention. I don’t mind people staring after me, or asking me if I’m in the NBA,
or even pointing, which is what the children mostly do. But what makes you
think I don’t know what you all say when you lean into your table, head and
eyes swiveled my way, and talk in whispers? I am taller than you are and my
hearing is extra terrestrially acute. And I can smell things no other human
being can smell – like fear. I might be tempted to tell you that I also obtained
extra sensory peremptory powers, but know you’re inclined to be skeptical.
Why, you’ve already glossed over the details about Hot-cha, thinking that you
know the kind of person he is and the role he plays in this story. And if you’d
seen me in person you’d have made similar assumptions about myself and
what the kind of story I might tell, which is all right, that’s very a human thing
to do, but you’d be dead wrong. Just like you were wrong in thinking I
misspoke when I said ‘peremptory’ instead of perceptive. The lesson here:
Don’t ever equate tall with stupid.
Hot-cha’s car is a sedan, which is good for me because he also has
independent seating that can go back and lay all the way down. Sometimes,
because I lay so far back, I think it must look like a child with a very enormous
head is riding in the back seat and I think again about what Hot-cha said
about never having children and thank my lucky stars there’s still time, if the
right woman comes along, though the idea of children seems more realistic --
plausible, so to speak -- than the ideal woman somehow and I remember a
similar thought I had several hours ago which caused me to have a lie down in
the thermic core.
Hot-cha’s car has license plates he paid $50 extra for to say “HOT CHA.” He
buys lots of things that say Hot-cha. You could say that this is a hobby for Hot-
cha, and one time, when I was at a truck stop outside of Omaha, I found a
keychain that already said “Hot-cha!” on it and I bought it for him as a prize
possession. I had never before considered that there might be more than one
Hot-cha in the world, or that Hot-cha might be a name that he did not make
up, or that it might have other meanings, but because I was in Omaha to get
my back looked at by the very important doctor there I decided that this
meant good luck for me and for Hot-cha.
One problem with riding in Hot-cha’s car is that he plays very loud rap
music. And because my head lays down in the backseat it is very close to the
big thumping speakers he put in himself. The first time he put these speakers
in he didn’t read the directions and the back seat caught fire which ruined the
speakers and the seat at which time Carlton said a very funny thing,
“Ooh…Hot-cha!” When I think about Carlton saying that, with the perfect
timing which is necessary for good jokes, I giggle. But Hot-cha can’t hear me
over his fat beats which he spells p.h.a.t. and which stands for pimps, haters,
and thugs, according to Hot-cha.
So when we pull into the parking lot there is a man leaning against the
trunk of his sports car in the spot next to the one Hot-cha chooses. In
addition to my abilities to hear, smell, and sense things I always know when
someone is trouble. I call this power Nuture-vision since I don’t think that it is
genetic, because when you grow to be as tall as I am at an early age there is
always someone looking to make trouble with you. And when Hot-cha gets
out of the car and starts arranging his pants and his necklaces the leaning
man says, “What up, Homes?” There are many ways you can say a statement
like that, and there are probably many ways you can say any word or phrase.
Carlton once told me the Inuit peoples of Canada have over 3,000 ways of
saying the word snow, for example, so that they know if they mean snow
storm, or snow cone, or snow that I just peed on. The way the leaning man
said “Homes” was clearly mean and sarcastic, which no question hurt Hot-cha’
s feelings.
“Sup?” he says back, but he says it very quietly, as if he doesn’t want both
me and the leaning man to hear him.
“What’d you say, HOT-CHA?” the man says, you could tell he read that off
the license tag and used it to make more fun of Hot-cha. The man pushes
himself off the car he’s been leaning on with a snap of his spine. My back feels
so sore that I envy the ability to do something like that, but you should know
I’d never use body language to start a fight. There are times, though, when I
can to use my body language to stop a fight, so I get out of Hot-cha’s car very
slowly. I crawl, putting my right foot onto the ground and then pushing my
shoulders through the door opening so that I can reach around with my left
hand and slowly place it on the roof of the car. My hand spreads out like a
tarantula when I do that and I find that it is a good first maneuver. Then I
grab the top of the door with my right hand even more slowly pull myself
upright, which at this time shoots a terrible pain down my right leg that I
channel into a very displeased look that this man should be messing with my
very good friend Hot-cha, and I turn slightly to look down at him.
“Holy cripes,” the man says, and he jumps back around to the other side of
his car.
I slap the roof of Hot-cha’s car so that it makes a loud tingly splat that we
can all feel in the back of our necks and I say to Hot-cha: “Aren’t you ready to
eat yet? I don’t need to sit here all night with you yakking away while I feel
hungry enough to eat the bones off a bear!” Me and Hot-cha laugh a little
and then head toward the restaurant.
Hot-cha turns to the guy as we walk by him and says, “Have a good night,
Homes,” but here’s the difference: Hot-cha says it nice, like he really means for
the man to have a good night, not like he’s making fun or being mean.
I don’t like to play that card because it doesn’t always work. Sometimes a
mean guy will see how tall I am and he’ll get what Carlton calls David
Syndrome. Maybe I’m strong compared to some, but because I don’t ever
want to fight with anybody the mean guys can sometimes beat me, unless
they’re too drunk, which a lot of them are and which makes a lot of them mean
to begin with. That’s also why Hot-cha and I don’t drink, which I’m guessing
you didn’t imagine when I first told you about Hot-cha. Hot-cha’s dad died of
cirrhosis, and Hot-cha still misses him because before he got sick his dad did
things like take Hot-cha fishing for channel cats on the Platte River and throw
the ball around in the yard with him and bowling sometimes, too, when he had
the scratch.
My dad couldn’t throw the ball around with me on account of how tall we
both were and how that made it so I wasn’t very coordinated for a long time.
For a long time the doctors thought I might need to walk with crutches if I
didn’t stop growing and that I could be crippled, but that didn’t stop the
basketball coach from wanting me to play, even though I couldn’t run and
couldn’t catch the ball he said God wouldn’t have brought me to this town if it
hadn’t been to help him win a championship. So for one whole season I stood
in front of the basket and made sure no one put a ball in there. I set the
state record for blocks in a game, but there is a rule against guys my size that
says they can’t stand in the painted part under the basket for more than 3
seconds or the other team gets to take free throws, and so we lost enough
games that made our coach question God’s wisdom and he too started
drinking and giving me a hard time when I see him around town, which
thankfully isn’t very often.
Stiv and Lois’ is quiet for a Friday night and it’s no problemo for us to find
the big table by the kitchen door where Carlton is sipping on a tall beer. Stiv
used to be in a famous punk rock band and though they play muzak over the
house speakers now, the walls are all covered in pictures of Stiv mugging with
other famous punk rock stars and with people such as John Belushi, who liked
punk rock stars. We never see Stiv in the restaurant anymore, though he
used to come in and wander around the tables barking at the busboys and
waitresses and telling stories about how such-and-such punk rock star used
to take suitcases full of drugs or how such-and-such punk rock star used to
pee all over every hotel room he ever stayed in while people enjoyed their
steaks. I love the earthy smell of the steaks at Stiv and Lois’ which remind me
of when my dad worked at the Kroger and would bring home day-old steaks
for the grill which made him very happy on account of how we got to eat
steaks so cheaply.
Lois still comes to the restaurant to do some barking but she doesn’t tell
stories. She met Stiv at a show he did in Minneapolis and thought she’d really
hit the big time, but then Stiv said he couldn’t keep going with all the punk
rock. Who was he supposed to be anyway, Iggy Pop? So he took the money
from that song “I Love My Little Huffer” that everybody in the Mid-West knows
by heart and bought this steak place and a gas station on the other side of
town by the interstate. I don’t even know where they live but Hot-cha says
he does. He says he has a cousin who put a pool in their backyard and that
their house is really weird and full of stuffed monkeys.
Carlton wears fingerless gloves, no matter the weather, after something
he saw in a movie. “Though you might be tired and pushing hard, your sheer
presence and thoughts inspire others,” he says to Hot-cha as we sit down at
the table. “You might keep a lot inside,” he says, turning to me. “As a result,
sometimes you react more strongly than necessary.” Carlton also memorizes
the horoscope every morning and he knows that Hot-cha is Aquarius and I’m
Capricorn, though, he told me, I’m really a cusp and could be considered a
Sagittarius in some cultures.
Our waitress drops a couple of menus in front of us and sloshes some
water into the dimpled plastic cups before she leaves. What I like about
waitresses is that they tend not to be judgmental, probably from years of bum-
looking guys tipping big bills and the occasional guy in the top hat and spats
sticking out his empty pockets at the end of the night like the poor tax card in
Monopoly. “Yo. Did you check that out?” Hot-cha says.
“Did I check what out?” I say.
“Her arm, man. Somebody ain’t playing nice. Check it out when she comes
back.” And I do. Her arm has a dark purplish bruise on it in the outline of a
human hand. It wraps all the way around her forearm the way an expensive
piece of Egyptian jewelry might.
“What’s with your arm?” I ask, but when I look at her face I can see that
she had put a lot of makeup on to hide more bruises. Her face is pretty under
all that make-up and I can believe she turned a lot of heads in her day. Her lip
is split but healing over, which lips have to do very quickly because most
people use them so much. Some people speak over 40,000 words a day,
which would be ballpark for Hot-cha but more than twice my output. Carlton,
it depends. Some days I could see him speaking 40,000 words, like when
there’s going to be an eclipse or when he’s beat another Russian player in the
online game World of Warcraft. But mostly I’d guess he hovers around the
20,000 mark as well. Inwardly, though, I can fly through millions of words in a
day. My extra peremptory powers of perception tell me that our waitress is
inwardly verbose as well. Her eyes, for example, move around the room like
conductor’s hands while she waits for our order and I’ll bet each mental note
rings out a dozen or more words. And just so you know, in case you want to
start keeping track, you can’t count what I’m telling you here because these
are my words, not yours.
Our waitress explains, “My ex-boyfriend’s a falconer. I help train.” Carlton
leans back in his chair and throws one of his legs onto the corner of the table,
nearly spilling his beer and all our waters. He does this when he wants to
show off his knee-high deerskin boots with the fringe down the calves, though
why he wants to impress our waitress is a mystery.
“Last time I counted, falcons don’t have four fingers and a thumb,” I say,
though your guess is as good as mine why I would get involved. The older
you get the deeper your troubles, and, pretty or not, she’s much older than
me.
“Know what you want to eat?” She chews a rope of hair and then spits it
out, turning the wounded arm slowly away from our views.
“Falconry is the sport of kings,” says Carlton. “It dates back to the Assyrian
king Sargon II. He would train the falcons to snatch young goats and children
from the neighbor kings’ land.”
“Yo. My brother went to this boyscout thing at his scoutmaster’s house
with falcons and one lifted its tail and shot a load across the room like a
bullet,” Hot-cha says, slapping his hands together and then letting one hand
dribble down the other for effect.
“Little known fact: French barons used to hunt with buzzards,” Carlton
adds, pushing his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. He’s worn the
same pair of glasses since eighth grade. We must be excellent friends to
know each other so long.
“You want me to just come back when you’re ready?” our waitress asks.
She slips her order book into her apron and covers the bruises on her arm
with her free hand.
“That will not be necessary,” Carlton says. “My comrades and I enjoy the
same victuals every Friday at this fine eatery…” And he goes on and on to
order our steaks until I’m sure she wishes her last question had been more
like a statement.
next page
core of my home I like to call it -- several degrees warmer. Sometimes when I
get blue, which happens more as the days go short, I cook up all the snake
tank lights and lay down on the floor with my sunglasses on just to feel
better; that’s why there’s no furniture in there anymore, because as everyone
knows I am very, very tall.
So when Hot-cha, that’s what we call Jason White because that’s what he
calls himself, comes by that Friday to get me, I’m laid out on the dining room
floor trying to make my back feel better and trying to get a better feel for life.
“Yo, git-cho punk-ass up off dat floor, Stretch!” He jiggles the door handle
as if he means to tear it off. “Don’t make me put some caps in this door, you
long old piece of schnizzle.” I don’t think Hot-cha knows what he’s saying
when he says a lot of the things he says, but I like the way he makes up
words: poetry if not particularly poetic.
The bones in my back feel loose and good as I rise, the nubs of my slack
spine giraffe-necking in graceful cooperation until the ax-chop through my left
hip stumbles me. “C’mon then,” I say, opening the door with one hand and
holding onto my left hip bone with the other. My hips, doctors say, flare out
like an open baseball mitt and put too much pressure on my lower vertebrae.
Hot-cha, meanwhile does his dance shuffle through the door, tugging at his
parachute pants and his shirt and wobbling his head as if he’s making fun of
my limp, but that’s not true. That’s the way he’s taught himself to walk.
“Why doncha just get those hips removed so you’re not gimping around
like my dead grandmamma? My sister, Janice, worked with this chick at Target
that had her hips taken out, she couldn’t have no babies anymore, but so
what, right? You ain’t looking to have no fifteen foot tall babies, is you?” He
actually waits for me to answer. “Aw-rightden.”
On Fridays we go to Stiv and Lois’ Steakhouse on 41, and usually we meet
Carlton there. Sometimes Carlton brings Alan, but only in the winters because
Alan works the megafarm out near Dakin. Russell shows up sometimes too,
when he doesn’t have a date, which almost never happens. I suppose a few
others duck in enough to merit mention.
Hot-cha knows all the waitresses and both cooks and usually we can count
on them holding the same table near the kitchen where I won’t draw so much
attention. I don’t mind people staring after me, or asking me if I’m in the NBA,
or even pointing, which is what the children mostly do. But what makes you
think I don’t know what you all say when you lean into your table, head and
eyes swiveled my way, and talk in whispers? I am taller than you are and my
hearing is extra terrestrially acute. And I can smell things no other human
being can smell – like fear. I might be tempted to tell you that I also obtained
extra sensory peremptory powers, but know you’re inclined to be skeptical.
Why, you’ve already glossed over the details about Hot-cha, thinking that you
know the kind of person he is and the role he plays in this story. And if you’d
seen me in person you’d have made similar assumptions about myself and
what the kind of story I might tell, which is all right, that’s very a human thing
to do, but you’d be dead wrong. Just like you were wrong in thinking I
misspoke when I said ‘peremptory’ instead of perceptive. The lesson here:
Don’t ever equate tall with stupid.
Hot-cha’s car is a sedan, which is good for me because he also has
independent seating that can go back and lay all the way down. Sometimes,
because I lay so far back, I think it must look like a child with a very enormous
head is riding in the back seat and I think again about what Hot-cha said
about never having children and thank my lucky stars there’s still time, if the
right woman comes along, though the idea of children seems more realistic --
plausible, so to speak -- than the ideal woman somehow and I remember a
similar thought I had several hours ago which caused me to have a lie down in
the thermic core.
Hot-cha’s car has license plates he paid $50 extra for to say “HOT CHA.” He
buys lots of things that say Hot-cha. You could say that this is a hobby for Hot-
cha, and one time, when I was at a truck stop outside of Omaha, I found a
keychain that already said “Hot-cha!” on it and I bought it for him as a prize
possession. I had never before considered that there might be more than one
Hot-cha in the world, or that Hot-cha might be a name that he did not make
up, or that it might have other meanings, but because I was in Omaha to get
my back looked at by the very important doctor there I decided that this
meant good luck for me and for Hot-cha.
One problem with riding in Hot-cha’s car is that he plays very loud rap
music. And because my head lays down in the backseat it is very close to the
big thumping speakers he put in himself. The first time he put these speakers
in he didn’t read the directions and the back seat caught fire which ruined the
speakers and the seat at which time Carlton said a very funny thing,
“Ooh…Hot-cha!” When I think about Carlton saying that, with the perfect
timing which is necessary for good jokes, I giggle. But Hot-cha can’t hear me
over his fat beats which he spells p.h.a.t. and which stands for pimps, haters,
and thugs, according to Hot-cha.
So when we pull into the parking lot there is a man leaning against the
trunk of his sports car in the spot next to the one Hot-cha chooses. In
addition to my abilities to hear, smell, and sense things I always know when
someone is trouble. I call this power Nuture-vision since I don’t think that it is
genetic, because when you grow to be as tall as I am at an early age there is
always someone looking to make trouble with you. And when Hot-cha gets
out of the car and starts arranging his pants and his necklaces the leaning
man says, “What up, Homes?” There are many ways you can say a statement
like that, and there are probably many ways you can say any word or phrase.
Carlton once told me the Inuit peoples of Canada have over 3,000 ways of
saying the word snow, for example, so that they know if they mean snow
storm, or snow cone, or snow that I just peed on. The way the leaning man
said “Homes” was clearly mean and sarcastic, which no question hurt Hot-cha’
s feelings.
“Sup?” he says back, but he says it very quietly, as if he doesn’t want both
me and the leaning man to hear him.
“What’d you say, HOT-CHA?” the man says, you could tell he read that off
the license tag and used it to make more fun of Hot-cha. The man pushes
himself off the car he’s been leaning on with a snap of his spine. My back feels
so sore that I envy the ability to do something like that, but you should know
I’d never use body language to start a fight. There are times, though, when I
can to use my body language to stop a fight, so I get out of Hot-cha’s car very
slowly. I crawl, putting my right foot onto the ground and then pushing my
shoulders through the door opening so that I can reach around with my left
hand and slowly place it on the roof of the car. My hand spreads out like a
tarantula when I do that and I find that it is a good first maneuver. Then I
grab the top of the door with my right hand even more slowly pull myself
upright, which at this time shoots a terrible pain down my right leg that I
channel into a very displeased look that this man should be messing with my
very good friend Hot-cha, and I turn slightly to look down at him.
“Holy cripes,” the man says, and he jumps back around to the other side of
his car.
I slap the roof of Hot-cha’s car so that it makes a loud tingly splat that we
can all feel in the back of our necks and I say to Hot-cha: “Aren’t you ready to
eat yet? I don’t need to sit here all night with you yakking away while I feel
hungry enough to eat the bones off a bear!” Me and Hot-cha laugh a little
and then head toward the restaurant.
Hot-cha turns to the guy as we walk by him and says, “Have a good night,
Homes,” but here’s the difference: Hot-cha says it nice, like he really means for
the man to have a good night, not like he’s making fun or being mean.
I don’t like to play that card because it doesn’t always work. Sometimes a
mean guy will see how tall I am and he’ll get what Carlton calls David
Syndrome. Maybe I’m strong compared to some, but because I don’t ever
want to fight with anybody the mean guys can sometimes beat me, unless
they’re too drunk, which a lot of them are and which makes a lot of them mean
to begin with. That’s also why Hot-cha and I don’t drink, which I’m guessing
you didn’t imagine when I first told you about Hot-cha. Hot-cha’s dad died of
cirrhosis, and Hot-cha still misses him because before he got sick his dad did
things like take Hot-cha fishing for channel cats on the Platte River and throw
the ball around in the yard with him and bowling sometimes, too, when he had
the scratch.
My dad couldn’t throw the ball around with me on account of how tall we
both were and how that made it so I wasn’t very coordinated for a long time.
For a long time the doctors thought I might need to walk with crutches if I
didn’t stop growing and that I could be crippled, but that didn’t stop the
basketball coach from wanting me to play, even though I couldn’t run and
couldn’t catch the ball he said God wouldn’t have brought me to this town if it
hadn’t been to help him win a championship. So for one whole season I stood
in front of the basket and made sure no one put a ball in there. I set the
state record for blocks in a game, but there is a rule against guys my size that
says they can’t stand in the painted part under the basket for more than 3
seconds or the other team gets to take free throws, and so we lost enough
games that made our coach question God’s wisdom and he too started
drinking and giving me a hard time when I see him around town, which
thankfully isn’t very often.
Stiv and Lois’ is quiet for a Friday night and it’s no problemo for us to find
the big table by the kitchen door where Carlton is sipping on a tall beer. Stiv
used to be in a famous punk rock band and though they play muzak over the
house speakers now, the walls are all covered in pictures of Stiv mugging with
other famous punk rock stars and with people such as John Belushi, who liked
punk rock stars. We never see Stiv in the restaurant anymore, though he
used to come in and wander around the tables barking at the busboys and
waitresses and telling stories about how such-and-such punk rock star used
to take suitcases full of drugs or how such-and-such punk rock star used to
pee all over every hotel room he ever stayed in while people enjoyed their
steaks. I love the earthy smell of the steaks at Stiv and Lois’ which remind me
of when my dad worked at the Kroger and would bring home day-old steaks
for the grill which made him very happy on account of how we got to eat
steaks so cheaply.
Lois still comes to the restaurant to do some barking but she doesn’t tell
stories. She met Stiv at a show he did in Minneapolis and thought she’d really
hit the big time, but then Stiv said he couldn’t keep going with all the punk
rock. Who was he supposed to be anyway, Iggy Pop? So he took the money
from that song “I Love My Little Huffer” that everybody in the Mid-West knows
by heart and bought this steak place and a gas station on the other side of
town by the interstate. I don’t even know where they live but Hot-cha says
he does. He says he has a cousin who put a pool in their backyard and that
their house is really weird and full of stuffed monkeys.
Carlton wears fingerless gloves, no matter the weather, after something
he saw in a movie. “Though you might be tired and pushing hard, your sheer
presence and thoughts inspire others,” he says to Hot-cha as we sit down at
the table. “You might keep a lot inside,” he says, turning to me. “As a result,
sometimes you react more strongly than necessary.” Carlton also memorizes
the horoscope every morning and he knows that Hot-cha is Aquarius and I’m
Capricorn, though, he told me, I’m really a cusp and could be considered a
Sagittarius in some cultures.
Our waitress drops a couple of menus in front of us and sloshes some
water into the dimpled plastic cups before she leaves. What I like about
waitresses is that they tend not to be judgmental, probably from years of bum-
looking guys tipping big bills and the occasional guy in the top hat and spats
sticking out his empty pockets at the end of the night like the poor tax card in
Monopoly. “Yo. Did you check that out?” Hot-cha says.
“Did I check what out?” I say.
“Her arm, man. Somebody ain’t playing nice. Check it out when she comes
back.” And I do. Her arm has a dark purplish bruise on it in the outline of a
human hand. It wraps all the way around her forearm the way an expensive
piece of Egyptian jewelry might.
“What’s with your arm?” I ask, but when I look at her face I can see that
she had put a lot of makeup on to hide more bruises. Her face is pretty under
all that make-up and I can believe she turned a lot of heads in her day. Her lip
is split but healing over, which lips have to do very quickly because most
people use them so much. Some people speak over 40,000 words a day,
which would be ballpark for Hot-cha but more than twice my output. Carlton,
it depends. Some days I could see him speaking 40,000 words, like when
there’s going to be an eclipse or when he’s beat another Russian player in the
online game World of Warcraft. But mostly I’d guess he hovers around the
20,000 mark as well. Inwardly, though, I can fly through millions of words in a
day. My extra peremptory powers of perception tell me that our waitress is
inwardly verbose as well. Her eyes, for example, move around the room like
conductor’s hands while she waits for our order and I’ll bet each mental note
rings out a dozen or more words. And just so you know, in case you want to
start keeping track, you can’t count what I’m telling you here because these
are my words, not yours.
Our waitress explains, “My ex-boyfriend’s a falconer. I help train.” Carlton
leans back in his chair and throws one of his legs onto the corner of the table,
nearly spilling his beer and all our waters. He does this when he wants to
show off his knee-high deerskin boots with the fringe down the calves, though
why he wants to impress our waitress is a mystery.
“Last time I counted, falcons don’t have four fingers and a thumb,” I say,
though your guess is as good as mine why I would get involved. The older
you get the deeper your troubles, and, pretty or not, she’s much older than
me.
“Know what you want to eat?” She chews a rope of hair and then spits it
out, turning the wounded arm slowly away from our views.
“Falconry is the sport of kings,” says Carlton. “It dates back to the Assyrian
king Sargon II. He would train the falcons to snatch young goats and children
from the neighbor kings’ land.”
“Yo. My brother went to this boyscout thing at his scoutmaster’s house
with falcons and one lifted its tail and shot a load across the room like a
bullet,” Hot-cha says, slapping his hands together and then letting one hand
dribble down the other for effect.
“Little known fact: French barons used to hunt with buzzards,” Carlton
adds, pushing his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. He’s worn the
same pair of glasses since eighth grade. We must be excellent friends to
know each other so long.
“You want me to just come back when you’re ready?” our waitress asks.
She slips her order book into her apron and covers the bruises on her arm
with her free hand.
“That will not be necessary,” Carlton says. “My comrades and I enjoy the
same victuals every Friday at this fine eatery…” And he goes on and on to
order our steaks until I’m sure she wishes her last question had been more
like a statement.
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| r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal winter 2008 fiction Snake by Darren DeFrain |
| food and work series by tamar factor |