In the Black Camaro

Through the orange glow of taillights,
I crossed the dirt road, entered
the half-mile of darkness and owl screech,
tangled briar and fallen trunk, followed
the yellow beam of Billy Parker’s flashlight
down the slick needle-hill,
half crawling, half sliding and kicking
for footholds, tearing up whole handfuls
of scrub brush and leaf mold
until I jumped the mud bank, walked
the ankle-deep creek,
the last patch of pine, the gully,
and knelt at the highway stretching
in front of Billy Parker’s house,
spotted the black Chevy Camaro parked
under a maple not fifty feet
from the window where Billy Parker rocked
in and out of view,
studying in the bad light of a table lamp
the fine print of his Allstate policy.
I cut the flashlight, checked up
and down the highway. Behind me
the screech growing distant, fading
into woods, but coming on
a network of tree frogs signaling
along the creek. Only that, and the quiet
of my heels coming down on asphalt
as I crossed the two-lane and stood
at the weedy edge of Billy Parker’s yard,
stood in the lamp glare of the living room
where plans were being made to make me rich
and thought of a boat and Johnson outboard,
of all the lures on a K-Mart wall,
of reels and graphite rods, coolers
of beer, weedy banks of dark fishy rivers,
and of Billy Parker rocking in his chair,
studying his coverage, his bank account,
his layoff at Lockheed, his wife laboring
in the maternity ward
of the Cobb General Hospital. For all
of this, I crouched in the shadow
of fender and maple, popped the door
on the Camaro, and found
in the faint house-light drifting
through the passenger’s window
the stripped wires hanging below the dash.
I took the driver’s seat, kicked
the clutch, then eased again
as I remembered the glove box
and the pint of Seagram’s Billy Parker
had not broken the seal on. Like an alarm
the tree frogs went off in the woods.
I drank until they hushed
and I could hear through cricket chatter
the rockers on Billy Parker’s chair
grinding ridges into his living room floor,
worry working on him like hard time.
Then a wind working in river grass,
a red current slicing
around stumps and river snags, a boat-drift
pulling against an anchor
as I swayed in the seat of the black Camaro,
grappled for the wires
hanging in darkness between my knees,
saw through the tinted windshield
by a sudden white moon
rolling out of the clouds, a riverbank
two counties away, a place to jump and roll
on the soft shoulder of the gravel road,
a truck in a thicket a half-mile downstream.

David Bottoms, “In the Black Camaro” from Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems. Copyright © 1995 by David Bottoms. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Source: Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1995)