This blog is devoted to a select group of poets. We're starting with poets from the Ann Arbor area, but, hey, if you're from Detroit, Grand Rapids, Saginaw or the Upper Peninsula, then that is okay, too.
Today's poem or short story prompt is "cars(s)".
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DURING A FRIENDLY GAME OF CARDS
ReplyDeleteThere was a noise outside.
It wasn't much of a noise, just a loud "bang"[2]. I tried to ignore it but couldn't. I turned my head just in time to see the tall man enter the saloon. He was dusty, like he'd been blown across the fields of Oklahoma in May, 1934[1]. His skin was sunburned red leather, his hair thin, grey, and shoulder length. He'd never read Joyce or Emerson or Palahniuk though once, on a long trip, he'd thumbed through a copy of "For Whom The Bell Tolls" looking for quotes for a speech he thought he might have to give someday.
Garrison barked for me to bring my attention back to the table. I looked at my cards. Eight of hearts, King of Clubs and a picture of a unicorn standing beside a very well-rendered drawing of a damsel in distress[3]. She looked so real I thought she might get up off of the card and walk across the table. She might push two more of my chips into the pile. The pile wasn't very big and I guessed most of them would fold if I raised. So, I took her advice and did.
Sam drew a pistol[4] and pointed it at me. "You selling brushes, Lou?" I shook my head. "Never have, never will." We'd played the game a hundred times but it never stopped scaring me. Sam wasn't too stable, from what I could tell. Two of them folded but Garrison kept playing. He raised me another two dollars. I turned to Sam. I considered telling him that Garrison sold brushes on the side but thought the better of it. I never attended Catholic School[5] but I knew that God was watching us all the time. I was pretty sure God was the one who kept Karma working. It was the only way I could make sense of it all.
The tall man leaned against the bar and made a strange sound. A cloud of dust spewed from his mouth and floated across the room. It landed on the piano keys more than three weeks ago and just now recognized it. The piano player wiped it off last Sunday but now it was back.
He tried again, and this time he ordered whiskey. The bartender poured him a shot. He gulped it then said, "another".
"What about the damage to my front wall?"
"From the vase?"
"From the vase."
The man took off his hat and shook it. The dust fell straight to the floor in a neat pile[6]. He dropped his hat on the bar and reached for his gun-belt. He unclipped a medium-sized leather sack. He rested it on the bar and started to open it.
"I'm sorry about that. The Missuss. She sometimes gets a little frisky." He untied the string[7] at the top of the sack. "Now, friend, I have to tell you that I have no money in here, but I have a fine collection of brushes that you could bring home to your wife. Or maybe your girlfriend[8]?" he winked.
Sam turned his head.
I knew that the rest of the night would not go well.
- Mike Fedel
July, 2013
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ReplyDeleteNOTES
1. "A gigantic cloud of dust, 1,500 miles long, 900 miles across and two miles high, buffeted and smothered almost one-third of the nation today, " a United Press story in the Hastings Tribune of May 11, 1934 reported. He probably wasn't in that storm, but he could have been.
2. I didn't know until just now that the noise had been a ceramic vase smashing into the side of the building. His girlfriend, Daisy, had thrown it as him after he dismounted the horse and made it clear that he was going into the saloon to "look for some company." I hadn't known because I couldn't because I hadn't written it yet.
3. Alicia wasn't really a damsel-in-distress but she often did nude modeling for artists who felt drawn to that particular subject.
4. Sam's pistol was especially important to him in that it had been handed down from his father's father to his father and then to him. Both of the two men had used it to shoot brush salesmen who they'd suspected of seducing their wives.
5. I actually did attend Catholic school, but my character did not. They had no Catholic schools in the town in which my character grew up. I would tell you the name of the town, but I haven't chosen it yet. It will be somewhere in the Midwest, though. I'm fairly certain of that. Most of the towns my characters grew up in were in the Midwest. Most of them had a mean annual temperature of 98.6F.
6. The pile was actually in the outline of a square. Nobody believed it, so I decided not to write it that way.
7. The string was actually a twenty-inch piece of catgut. On one of his trips about 94 weeks and three days ago, he'd met a violin player who was changing his strings. They got to talking and the man offered him the catgut because his bag was untied. The tall man wasn't interested until the violin player explained that 'catgut' was not actually made from the guts of a cat, but from the intestines of various other animals, in this case, a pig. The tall man was reassured that no cats had been injured just to bring Brahms to the West. He accepted the catgut, a small book of Persian poetry, and the cord from an electric battery charger. He considered using that to tie the bag closed but wasn't sure it would hold.
8. It was -- and still is -- not uncommon for men to make jokes like this with each other. They are pathetic attempts to relive one's glory days in which one might actually be able to maintain both a wife and a girlfriend. Everyone knows it's a lie and everyone goes along with it. We all laugh. It's like catching a large bass and throwing it back, very very late at night.
- Mike Fedel
July, 2013