Kingdom Come Draft
Dear Lynda,
I’m writing this to the P.O. box the postcard had as a return address, this was the last postcard, the one with Space Needle on it, night-time, and the sky is red. It’s a few years old and if you aren’t Lynda then please, stop now and give it to her. This was written for her eyes first, and for her child. I don’t know the gender of the child, so I will continue to write to them as “child”, for the rest of the letter.
Before you found a husband and moved out of Uncle Tor’s place and sent me the first postcard with the space needle on it from a hotel room in Utah, and everything seemed really distant for a while, like you were in a fog and I could see your outline, but not all of you at once, before that, when I had that apartment on Cherry Oak for only two hundred a month, the small place with the salmon colored bathroom, back when I took community college classes and you had a year of high school left, that’s when I knew, when you were still quiet and didn’t bury your face behind dark hair, when your hair was still light brown like market store bread, that’s when I knew you would be a mother. Aunt Sadie meant so much more to you than she ever did to anyone else. But I am still talking to you, this is meant for your child, and I don’t want to be rude, so I’ll stop here, and get on with the story.
This, boy or girl, is how your mother broke a spell cast over me. I’ll start at the beginning.
When I was twenty and your mother was seventeen, we both lived in Anchor, a town that didn’t have a body of water inside of it, but had a lighthouse on the sign welcoming you inside. All you need to know about it our hometown was that it was small, in Illinois, and was surrounded on either side by sprawling fields of corn or pasture for cattle, and depending on which way he wind blowed people sneezed or held their noses. Lynda lived with her father, Tor, in a green, dutch looking place that had green painted wood paneling, white trim, and a green door. I lived eight blocks up in a one-bedroom apartment that my mother paid the first three months rent for, gave me food too. Where my mother lived wasn’t important, she didn’t live their long, but there is somebody else you have to know, Cole, he would be your great uncle-in-law, and he was my mother’s husband and my father. He was born and raised in Anchor and was friend of Tor’s, he worked in a factory after his “Gold Years” as bartender in Sauget, IL. He would have loved to tell you about it in microscopic detail, like the ridiculous bastard he was. He is important, remember him.
Your mother and I were always fairly close, we grew up together, my mother and her mother were close as sisters could be, had the same strong brow structure, talked like they were always excited around one another. When they weren’t around one another they were quiet. Cole didn’t like there to be much talking in the house, and Tor wasn’t a man who talked, was plenty pleasant, but never spoke much. Sadie loved to draw and to read, she had stacks of things, clippings of newspaper, magazines with “good uses of color”, your mother knows more about it, she has the trunk. The trunk is for later, remember that too. We were not a good family, to simply put it on paper like that, we weren’t. There’s a lot to say.
Every Thursday I meat Lynda at Uncle Tor’s green door and we would drive to the gas station near the VFW to get cigarettes from a friend that we both knew from schooling. Your mother never really liked anything besides menthol’s but would smoke 27’s on occasion, and since I usually bought its what she usually smoked. We would walk inside of the store to see if Julio was working and if he was then we would get the smokes and a cheap see-through lighter for free and if was his father then we would get matches, which was fine, I had plenty of lighters in my car. We would smoke our cigarettes in the car or outside on these sets of swings down by the catholic grade school across the street from the retirement community, the school was out and all the teachers with pinches up faces drove compact cars out of town. We mostly talked about how each of our mother’s got screwed up. This is important too.
This was the way a lot of nights went with the two of us, we had sleepovers at my place, smoked a lot of cigarettes, until Cole got remarried and tried to place himself back into everyone’s lives. She was someone he met in a frozen food aisle, and they dated for about three and a half months before they got married and started making phone calls, mostly to Tor and Lynda, but I got one too, he even decided to tell my mother. I wasn’t going to have any of it, the family ties were basically gone for me and I hated him, but Tor seemed quite numb after Sadie left him, Lynda was getting that way too, and wanting to stay peaceful and have a friend in Cole, Tor took them over to Cole’s home and they had dinner.
This is when she stole Kingdom Come. Which is the most important thing. Kingdom Come was a bat that Cole had saved from his “Gold Days”.
No comments:
Post a Comment