At the edge of town,
past Landers’ Rexall Drugstore, the road whipped right then hard downhill
over the tracks of the L&N Railroad,
and one night in ’65,
stoned on a glass of Mateus rose, with spaghetti
homemade by my girlfriend’s mother,
I gunned it for the thrill of the dip,
and peeled a little rubber coming back to the road …
Up ahead the river, the Etowah,
and the buttery glaze the moon spread
across the concrete railing of the bridge,
then the traffic light at the corner of the North Canton Store,
where sour Buck Cline
sat in his dark patrol car with the gold badge
of the Canton Police stenciled on his door,
waiting for some Romeo,
Don Juan, some small-town Lothario, to run the light
in his father’s Impala …
Yes, so much relies on the imagination ….
and what troubles he mulled
those tedious midnights, wrangling in
the rowdies, the would-be toughs
circling the Burger Chief
in their jacked-up street rods.
. . .
And imagination, of course, depends on so much …
Take the polished memory of my grandfather’s horse barn
with its hayloft full of jewels,
or the pasture and the riding ring, the dog lots
full of beagles, the swaybacked chicken houses crawling
with mice,
with cockroaches, slugs, with maggots of the dream-life …
Or Mr. Cantrell on the floor of his South Canton greenhouse,
his hands churning clods in the glazed filth.
I remember, yes,
the good rose requires good filth.
So you’d drive by slowly under the green signal and give Buck a nod,
and maybe in the dark cab an eye would flare,
or not,
having come to what he’d come to in middle age, making
his poor living
out-toughing the tough.
. . .
Call it perverse, Poe would,
that heady surge of folly that clobbered me
at the light as my foot revved and lifted and the V-8 squalled
under the jumping hood.
What else to say about that rush
in my heart as I caught Buck Cline
looking up from his clipboard in the dark car backed into shadows …
then the light going green
and me pulling out, turning left,
and the long slope of highway past the Burger Chief stretching out
like a drag strip under the stars …
Perverse, truly.
Three miles from home and a quarter-mile lead, and I floored it, barking
off some Firestone for the Burger Chief crowd,
forty-five, fifty-five,
and Buck growing smaller in my rearview,
eighty no sweat, and who-knows-what at the top of the hill,
nothing on me but darkness
and the curve past the rock barn,
the straightaway sloping toward the South Canton bridge,
nothing but the darkness my headlights butchered,
then tiny in my mirror
those blue lights throbbing …
. . .
Had the stars ever been so frazzled
and on fire, there on the shoulder of Highway 5 with our headlights killed
and the towered lights of the Pony League ballpark
long gone black,
only two small taillights far behind and fading?
Crickets and a rush of wind
and under the bridge, the river rounding
the big flat rock where Ace, the shoeblack at the Canton Barber Shop,
fished on Sundays in his ratty straw hat,
then the light in my face
and the growl behind it …
Shut up, he’d ask the questions …
And did,
glaring over the beam of his flashlight at the license I’d had for a month.
“You been drinking, boy? Didn’t see me back there?”
“No, sir. No, sir,” and over the trees
beyond the river,
the stars flared and calmed and flared again
as he glanced from the license to my face and back,
breathing my name twice, or my father’s …
“Reckon your daddy’d like to get you out of jail?”
“No, sir.” “No, sir” to everything,
and the dizzy stars
flaring again over the hazy trees,
the river jeering where the big flat rock jutted under the shadowy bridge
and deep under the current
the blue catfish wallowed the mud …
. . .
Something divine in the memory:
all those dusty little windows of the brain opening inward,
a mirror inside a mirror
inside a mirror. Glimpse Into Eternity, read the sign
at the Cherokee High School Science Fair,
and when you leaned into the peephole of the big black box
taller than your head,
somehow your eyes kept going and going …
. . .
Once in a theater line in Marietta, Georgia, an old saw from my hometown
shaved off some conversation.
Sunday evening, early nineties,
and across the square lush with dogwoods
the bells of the First Baptist chimed
an old hymn, far off, but loud enough
to bend him closer.
Something about his eyes I’ve remembered,
pale, but sharp,
the streetlight under the bleached stars catching them
in that gleam of deep reverie—like the eyes of a scientist,
or a saint,
when the clouds finally open …
“Your old man,” he said, “you should’ve seen him play football,”
meaning Canton High, 1941,
the fall before the war.
Everything was in those eyes,
and that word he edged toward, the way
he uttered it with such reverence over the church bells,
as if he’d tasted its weight
on his tongue for years, careful for the perfect usage,
that true word that said it all—“Tough.”
. . .
And stayed tough enough
even after the war
when the shrapnel gnawed into the small of his back
with every step he took
up or down the service ramp at Holcomb Chevrolet, every step
he took across the concrete garage
on that splinter of a bone
the Japanese navy left in his leg,
that memory always alive and violent, though never spoken,
having in its pain too much of the divine,
the unapproachable …
. . .
Tough also one night
at Little League when a drunk behind the backstop kept deviling the umpire—
big man in overalls, a mill worker, hard, poor, angry,
all the desperate adjectives,
and the words frothing out merciless and ugly,
and the man’s own boy at the plate
trying to see the baseball through that rain of curses,
until the umpire, Doyle Fowler, threw off his mask and charged around
the backstop,
the man, though, the mouth, had picked up a shovel,
and caught him with the blade
square in the face,
and my father, out of the dugout, fallen suddenly
on him, the mouth, the drunk,
arms around him in a wrenching hug,
not out of anger, but something else,
and them on the ground,
the one man weeping,
and my father talking, not shouting, but talking quietly
and hugging the whipped man harder and harder,
as though he’d known all along
a secret the man thought no one knew …
. . .
Like the generations of leaves,
Homer says, the lives of mortal men. Or something close, and that night
whole generations trembled
under the nervous stars as Buck Cline,
like a slightly stunted Ajax, leaned down
and speared me in the eyeball with the beam of his flashlight.
“You think you can whip my ass?”
I shook my head.
He held out the license like a gift,
“You think you can whip your daddy’s ass?”
I shook my head again,
looking up where his pocked and shadowed face
blocked the glare of the moon.
. . .
Maybe in the long haul,
as a friend says, most everything blows off steadily to the shoulder
of the road and wallows like litter
in the dark we leave behind, things
that have disheartened, haunted, obsessed, delighted,
until finally there’s nothing to distract us
from that last curve opening
onto the homestretch …
I agree. To the shoulder of the road, to the shoulder, but always waiting
to fly out of those gullies
on these sudden and unaccountable gusts …
. . .
And so much hangs on it,
the way memory toughens us up for that tumble
and drift of eternity, for the unpatrolled landscape
of the psyche unfurling,
and so much, certainly,
on those unknown connections, far back, we used to credit to the stars …
Buck Cline,
how many charming stars in your crown?
One certainly for the night you spared me
for my father
on the graveled shoulder of Georgia 5
with the bloody moon’s own halo glowing around your head.
Saint Buck, I kept saying all the way home, and lit in an uncluttered niche
of my memory
a little shrine … Saint Buck
of the handy blackjack,
Saint Buck of the billy, of the speed trap, of the dark patrol car lurking
in the shadows,
troubled patron of would-be toughs,
of war heroes and weeping boys,
street cop, surely, of the City to come …
David Bottoms, “Homage to Buck Cline” from Waltzing through the Endtime. Copyright © 2004 by David Bottoms. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press.
Source: Waltzing through the Endtime (Copper Canyon Press, 2004)
Leave a Reply