Boy's a Gemini; what do you expect, I guess. Jack, most people call him. He's some kinda combination of nephew/cousin of mine--whenever they try to explain it to me I get lost round about the third removal stage. Kin nonetheless. Favoring the Rayburn side, I'd say. Unfortunate, that. Boy's got two minds and they run on wildly, willfully divergent tracks, only intersecting on some kind of a random whim. Teachers, I suspect, cower a bit when they see his name on their rolls.
Certain the boy's got some kind of a conscience, buried somewhere under layers of grime, branch mud, pockets of gadget parts'n'pieces, firecracker soot, boy thoughts, and whatever Good Book brimstone Calloway the Younger's able to batter him with whenever the boy sets still for five minutes, which is probably about as often as an equinox. He ain't devilish, just three days' walk from angelic. Strangest belly button I ever seen, though. One of them lads always lifting his shirt up to rub a stomach that ain't got no heft to it. Pig's ear like. The navel, that is.
Anyways, we's all come together last week for DaddyBlue's 95th, which means nothing but Ned's Drive-Thru's Budweiser stock gets depleted and it's time for DaddyBlue to find a new wife. He's run through and put in the ground one every decade since he's fifteen. No long-sufferin' wife, any of them. Ten years the shelf life on 'em. Expiration date. One of the Aunt Saundra's (we got three in this family) showed up with some parlor game asking all sorts of bunk questions for you to ponder; none of yourn business, was my standard reply. Eventually she pull out a card asking the best piece of advice you ever heard. Don't answer fool questions in public, naturally I said. The particular Aunt Saundra shot me roller pins through those itty bitty glasses she wears. Well, the boy happened to be there on the veranda that minute, catching wind for another half day's devilment, I suspect, and he blurted out, "All play and no work make Jack a dull boy." Chortle chortle on that one. "Ain't that the truth," shot that grizzly mistake of a man with the state flag tattooed on his shoulder, which who just might be the boy's father, come to think of it. "You ain't worked a lick in your life and you duller than a parson's penknife." The boy didn't like that. "No I ain't," which taking the boy's age and disposition and usual activity was about ninety percent of all that came outta his mouth. He slouched off with me thinking maybe under all that twisted tomfoolery the boy's got half a whit of something wise. "Never a borrower or a lender be," said Aunt Calpurnia, the parsimonious spinster who never gives me a smile, let alone a quarter to flip to see if it's gonna be Bud or Bud Light this time. "Get that yard cut sometime this year, boy," shouted the state flag tattooed man, but by then that boy was scattered.
Of course later we all had to adjourn inside for another of the Aunt Saundra's (the third's mute, praise the Lord) card readings (inside always, the sun and air disturb her medium powers' equilibrium is why), which for the thirty-second at least time running revealed that soon I'll meet the woman of my destiny, which if ever true, tar and feather me today, draw and quarter me tomorrow, all the money's in the hollowed out Joy of Cooking book behind the cistern. So when that voodoo was all through I repair back to the veranda and hear it first then see it: that boy blasting by riding high on DaddyBlue's four-wheeler with the Rayburn heirloom Toro rigged up on the back of it all and sure enough it was getting the aforementioned yard cut very rapidly and somewhat straight-lined. Ain't ever seen a boy reveling in boyishness more than that one swooping about the yard. Soon enough he come up close to the veranda to get around the shrubbery and paused long enough to shout over the din at all of us there, or none of us, more than likely, "I ain't dull nohow."
Gumption. I might have to sidle up to that boy more. One of these urchins round here's gonna have to see me through my dotage.
No comments:
Post a Comment