As I Walked Out One Evening

by Donald Wetzel

  Well possibly this day could come.

  Which is all that I am saying.

  I don’t mean to make too much of this.

  Sixty-seven. Senile dementia aside one is reckoned as properly being through with a number of things at that age I suppose although just offhand I cannot think of exactly what these things might be except maybe playing football or taking on the town bully activities by and large which were foolish even when I was a kid particularly a small kid which I was and am now a small old man but still quick enough and could surprise a mugger I believe with some tricky bobbing and weaving even yet if not with the lightnings and thunders of my fists that is if I heard the mugger coming up behind me which I probably wouldn’t.

  Generally I don’t think along these lines but the van showing its age and setting me afoot on streets on which I had not set foot in years and where the leaves on the walk and in the gutters seemed so damned prodigal and the walker, myself, so single and alone and anyhow something in the situation clearly had got me thinking about time and attrition and getting old and such, and the way this possibly for all of us happens by surprise even when all around us we see it happening and know well enough that not a one, not a thing, in time is exempt.

  The trouble lies perhaps in that all the parts and aspects of a man have not the same way of telling time.

  Or of being told.

  And then I noticed I was going down the street with one foot or one shoe going flop flop flop and I looked down and the whole front part of the sole of my shoe had come loose shoes that cost me eighty bucks shoes I had had less than a month; I could hardly believe it yet there it was the sole of the shoe hanging there curled out from whatever it should have been fastened to so it was as though I was looking down into the damn shoe’s guts, a terminal business in regard to the shoe even at a glance.

  But there was nothing for it but for me to go on flop flop down the street; and it was this necessary focus on the way I was shod I guess that got me thinking about the old man I had given a ride to a couple of days ago; in truth the old man is in some way I do not quite understand somehow the inspiration or if that is too strong a word the occasion for this piece.

  A really old man.

  Eighty-three he said.

  Name of Lucian.

  Chapter 6

  Always the good citizen I stopped the van at the stop sign marking the intersection of whatever the side street it was I was on and main drag which is Garden Street and which follows a section line straight through town from the turnaround at the Pier due east to some mythical heart out there of second-growth pineywoods/beanfield (soy beans) country that we still think of as “country” or “as the way things really are”—some of us still think that way anyhow—Garden street being to my mind to get a little fancy about it like a long straight straw sucking the country into the town or depending on your view of things like a long straight straw sucking the town back out into the country—a familiar and modestly dramatic evidence of the continuing and to me pitiful—if you take sides and I do—city/country urban/rural migration/flight etc tug of war that’s been going on here and elsewhere without end since the invention of the steam engine I guess—sometimes I see Garden street in this way to an extent that it depresses me—but anyhow on this occasion as I came up to Garden Street my view of it was in no way complicated and was visible both ways and both ways it was clear not a car in sight either way but the sign said stop so being a good citizen I stopped and a good thing I did, because as I eased the van to a halt the old man I had not seen until then stepped out from under some low hanging dogwood branches and into my path.

  He was wearing what looked to be leather bedroom slippers.

  They looked new.

  They caught the light.

  Also, along with the way he was shod it was immediately and vividly apparent to me that as far as he knew he was altogether and quite happily alone in the limited fullness of such space as was at that time occupied as well by the van and myself.

  He had no idea I existed.

  His mind was elsewhere.

  All of which is to say had I not been the good citizen and eased to a stop as mentioned above I might have leveled the old boy flat.

  Gave me a turn no doubt about it.

  For real. I almost heard or felt that thump—which any person who has ever struck a dog or cat on the highway has heard and felt and knows of as a kind of thump like no other anywhere ever—which I could still feel and remember from weeks before when little William’s golden colored cocker pup came charging out of William’s yard and I took the usual evasive action but not enough this time I guess and there was this slight little thump echoing through the van—it was a small puppy—an almost gentle little thump but enough—I knew so in my bones—and I stopped the van and walked back and sure enough little William didn’t have a puppy anymore; and William came out of his yard and we stood there in the street looking down at the motionless obviously dead puppy and I knelt and William came up into my arms and forgave me on the spot. One great kid.

  And so the old man came slow-stepping head-bobbing cakewalking—slow-strutting out in his golden slippers—out from under the dogwood branches into the crosswalk and it could have been like that.

  Thump

  Old man you’re dead.

  Beautiful new shoes and all.

  All over and done with.

  You can bet it gave me a turn.

  Made the old man special to me right from the start.

  For better or worse.

  The way things like that can happen.

  The way things like that can happen. I mean here I was in Alabama baby-sitting—if you can say that, and I used to say that just to piss her off—baby-sitting my fourteen year old granddaughter Lisa bless her little butt who in her hard little heart had absolutely no need of me or of being baby-sat in the least and she let it show but there I was and right up the street from us was where William lived; William not to be called Willy—no way—just a great little four year old who clearly found me right from the start a most interesting and worthy fellow and within a week a friend; he would come into the house during the day when Lisa was in school—they were not the best of friends Lisa and William—and I was writing and make his way through the house and into my bedroom-study and come up behind me when I didn’t know he was there—not that he was a sneaky kid just quiet and also as noted elsewhere I am somewhat deaf—and I wouldn’t know he was there sometimes until I felt the feather touch of his hand on my shoulder and then I would say hello William and while William couldn’t read of course he seemed to like watching the letters lighting up in rows across the screen sometimes he would very softly laugh and I had to wonder about that and then he would get tired of it and say I know where the gum is and I would say well help yourself then, and he would go into Lisa’s room and get a stick of gum from any of the several packs she always had there—he took one piece only as a matter of prior parental instruction perhaps or maybe just at his own instruction—but naturally Lisa wouldn’t know about any of this and it was kind of neat I thought.

  The way it worked.

  And that there was always gum there.

  I really liked the kid and when Lisa was home and William let himself in and wandered around the house Lisa would come to me and whisper please get him out of here particularly if she had some of her little friends visiting—I would call them her “little friends” just because I knew it pissed her—some of them were far from little believe me—but it always hurt me that she couldn’t be a little kinder with the kid at least or disappointed me I guess that she had to act like such an uncharitable self centered snot of a teenager just because she happened to be one.

  I have not meant to go into this quite this much.

  But to continue.

  Okay Lisa my grand daughter could be a royal pain in the ass and William was a neat kid and the puppy was dead at my hands so to speak but more of course by it’s own inappropriate instincts if you will or fool
ish instructions from the God of dogs if you like that better and anyhow Lisa had at least a genuine I believe warm and truly loving way with William’s puppy and would pick it up every chance and make over it with such a tenderness of touch and tone that was hard to believe at first for me but eventually I came to believe it and so naturally it was up to me that same day that same afternoon—I was on my way to school to pick Lisa up after band when it all happened—to tell her the puppy was dead.

  What with the total lack of intimacy that existed between us the brevity and absolute banality of such conversation that necessity alone had heretofore provoked between us I would have as soon tried to talk with the child about sex how babies are made and what to watch out for and so on; it could not have been a conversation more out of the blue or more in violation of the general taboo on familiar or even reasonably civilized intercourse that the child so far had maintained between us.

  Usually I get through to kids with humor which will work if you keep it slight and on the sly side the bright ones will catch it and you can see what a relief it is for them how welcome that you are human after all and after that when they see you the next time there will be an ease about them they may even grin and go eye to eye with you which is to me a pure delight; but no lightening things up with Lisa no sly jokes to break the ice no indeed forget it don’t even think about it no way no way.

  After all and in mitigation it’s true that I was Lisa’s kin and funny older kin can be an embarassment particularly when the joke turns out lame and the audience isn’t too bright either, and anyhow it is tough enough for kids to get it right with other kids without worrying about whether or not or how old people had or had not got it made I mean I have some sympathy for kids today trying to make their way through all the shit out there and not be a nerd or too obvious about it trying to find the coin in all the dross, the true good thing that connects them with their kind, that nurtures—as with the old country expression as when things could not be worse the crop has failed etc and the old farmer shakes his head and says nothing left to do but to go peck shit with the chickens which is what the chickens do when free to run they work through the barnyard looking through the turds of quadrupeds for stray kernels of corn or other goodies (the bird will as a general rule as I have been witness wait until the turd has cooled, in case this seems pretty disgusting even for a chicken) but kids today are a little like that out there pecking shit with the chickens although I may be getting a little wild here taking a certain poetic license—but I had it to do to tell Lisa the puppy was dead and no time to think about it which probably wouldn’t have helped anyhow. So I picked her up and said how did it go today? and she said fine and that was that until just before we got home I said do you remember the little puppy that used to live up the street? and she said what do you mean used to? and I said well I ran over it today.

  I had got it said anyhow.

  Understandably there was this silence and then all she said was what a horrible way to tell me.

  She was right of course.

  But even then it was as though she had said it to someone else.

  Or aloud to herself.

  Between us … nada.

  It was sad.

  And that’s almost it with William’s puppy I guess and whatever tenuous connection there may have been and may remain between that and the old man stepping out into the crosswalk in front of the van and the events which followed from it and are yet to be set forth except that there was a funny thing at the end in all of this—a redeeming thing I believe—which I might as well include as it happened and redemption is always worth a mention and what happened was a few weeks after the above conversation if you can call it that had taken place between Lisa and myself I once again picked her up at school and once again inquired as to how the day had gone to which as usual she had replied fine; and believe me I had not given it prior thought it was something just waiting there waiting to happen you might say and as we drove into the yard I said do you remember the little kid that used to live up the street? and Lisa rose up out of her slump even her hair flew up and she screamed, no! she screamed, and turned and looked at me really looked at me finally and I said just joking just joking and for one instant I saw it happen we communicated she saw it and I saw that she saw it that she had been had and had but good and her eyes lit and a grin started at the corner of her mouth—she approved! and I knew it had known it all along that there was character in the child and my heart went soft—and then of course she remembered who she was and who I was and she turned away and composed her face and slumped back into the captain’s chair and took back her dignity and was immediately again proper and aloof and did not by her manner allow in the least as to how anything of any significance had happened between us then at all.

  But for one great long moment there I had got her absolute undivided goddamned attention and we had connected and I didn’t really much mind at all when she got down from the van and looked up at me and said Grandpa you’re strange.

  Seemed only fair.

  Strange. Hard to argue with that for sure but at least the void had been bridged, the silence broken, deny it as Lisa might and did.

  And I remember also how I thought about it some at the time back there in Alabama even then, about the way I just said what I said there with Lisa the way I had started saying things to all sorts of people even strangers things that I would not ordinarily have said to anyone or even thought about saying even a few years ago and how it was starting to bother me a little how it seemed in fact considerably more a sign that I might be starting to tug at my moorings so to speak than thinking as I mentioned earlier about how it might be for a person to be a universal joint for instance.

  Now of course I say just about anything that comes to mind to anyone and it hardly surprises me.

  That is the least of the signs.

  Chapter 7

  One more thing about thump and I will be done with it possibly will have gone too far with it but all the same I will have at it, and here it is:

  Okay you stand in the highway and look down at the dead puppy or dog which you would seem to have killed I mean the animal the beast is dead all right but not by your intent or by exactly accident either and what I am getting at is this: does it take a hell of a lot of imagination to see a kinship here?

  To remember the shared ancestral cave?

  To invoke it?

  To understand the similarity of central nervous system blood and brain and flesh; the awesome similarity of that limited and finite instruction born into our very bones?

  Does it take some kind of mystic horseshit act of divination to see the parallels?

  To read the message?

  Read it plain?

  Do I have to be crazy to see it so?

  I would be crazy not to.

  Chapter 8

  Very well I guess I had better explain what I was trying to say in that last bit about our kinship with road-kill—that is what it is called these days road-kill—the same way in war the number of dead young men in any particular “engagement” is called a body-count or the way mothers and their children blown all to hell on their way to the bomb shelter are identified as civilian-casualties (I hyphenate these phrases because they are to be said swiftly as in casually or familiarly road-kill body-count civilian-casualties—as easy to say as breaking-wind or passing-gas for instance either of which in polite society is considered far preferable of course to saying fart—) but anyhow in that last bit about the significance of dead dogs in the street and our relationship to them the point I was trying to make and which I thought was a point Christopher Robin clear but obviously I had not writ as lucidly as I had supposed I had because a very bright young lady of my acquaintance who is no slouch in these matters even when it comes to my more obtuse ramblings said and I quote I will be flipped off (a euphemism) if I have any idea what you mean by this are we all dead dogs by-and-by or what?

  Well that was not the point or not exactly the point anyhow;
the point is that if we by which I mean humankind or humanity in general and particularly western civilization or any civilization that has advanced to the point that it gets around a great deal on wheels if we—collectively that is—continue honoring the wisdoms the instincts bequeathed us and our friend the dog back there in the primeval cave and therefore take it as somehow our creature duty now to chase automobiles under the illusion that we understand what they are and that they can and should be caught we may indeed one day—we, humankind, collectively, and that’s the point—catch one.

  And that should be simple enough I believe although I certainly used up quite a bunch of words to say what I consider a very simple thing.

  So if it is not asking too much kindly go back if you will and read that short chapter again and see if it after all was not quite well and succinctly said.

  I mean I have been a writer all my adult life and I believe even if I am not always that smart or even bright I think I know goddamn it how to write.

  To write a simple thing at least.

  It would seem indeed that I protest too much.

  Very well then: the simple thing I had hoped to say with my possibly simple-minded use of “a dog and us-folk” symbolism is that the “car” which we humankind are now pursuing—and with a very real chance of catching it finally—is the awesome and terrible machinery of modern total war. Be it biological chemical or nuclear or a combination of all three it will be, when caught, our collective thump; and there we will be—we, like our friend the dog, bora to a similar limited and finite instruction, we formed of similar tissue blood and brain—but we alone possessing consciousness—left splayed and splattered or anyhow dead out there among the stars from whence we came.

  And if I have not yet got it said then to hell with it I am old.

  And back to old Lucian. Or to humanity God help us as it really is.