(Perhaps we, hidden as we were, looked to find our bearings: the direction of where behind the mountains behind the clouds was George’s sheepfold surrounded by tree branches, and George, so young, surrounded by a great circular loneliness. Would his hands remain as strong, as unquestioned during such a rain?) The last flies swirled around the rooms, as if drugged almost dead like tiny inkwells full of black ink that fell off the shelf of a childish disease; a passing troupe performed in the big café of the upper neighbourhood; the troupe also included two midgets. Children had great fun; they felt that they had suddenly grown; they could now look deep in the water well or to climb up to the attic and scare away the small geckos and cockroaches. Ribbons, tied on the hair of the girls, became alive, pinned the hair behind the ears of the girls, their necks leaving their faces clear, powerful like steel (those kids of another era, of the upper or the lower neighbourhood?)
August Your sign under the grapevine and the heatwave of August sweat under your armpits the body’s salt taste of the world as the thought of winter comes like a perennial thief to erase the heat off your forehead and off the wings of the sparrow that suddenly started chasing the cicada which quite unexpectedly performs strange mid-air configurations just to avoid the sparrow’s beak enough to manage to reproduce the new generation of cicadas and you took my hand, together to help the cicada in its task
– Ed wins again, someone hissed, he dies. – Ladies and gentlemen, O’Donnell began, reaching inside the oil can . . . Members crossed fingers and nibbled hangnails. They squeezed crosses, mouthed prayers, stroked lucky charms. – The winner of the Spring Festival draw this year is . . . My friend says it was so quiet inside Ed’s garage that night you could hear air escaping a radial. For the winner of the Dodge Car Club draw the experience was everything the previous attendees had said it would be. Five leggy beauties piled into the vehicle for the languorous cruise along the parade route. Miss Brake & Muffler was instantly besotted with the club’s appreciative representative. Later that same evening, the smoke from the barbecue pits dissipating, the last notes from the bandstand fading, the couple took a spin up Little Mountain. There, under a draping laurel vine, the beauty queen shared with the lucky draw winner the qualities that had earned her that esteemed title. Alas, it was the club’s final involvement with the festival. Ed’s garage, encouraged by the cumulative efforts of termites, flopped over on its side one gusty afternoon. Adulthood beckoning, the membership soon disbanded. Because he didn’t know what else to do, Ed applied to the military. Because its brass couldn’t convince anyone else to sign up, he was accepted. As for the Dodge, the central character in this story, it vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. I didn’t see much of O’Donnell afterwards. Sgt. McManus retired to a place not unlike the lake of his imaginings. On torpid summer afternoons, his rowboat drifting in the afternoon breeze, he often wondered about that car and the ruffians who deified it. McManus went on to an old folks’ home and then a grave without learning more. Years later a police museum was built at the rear of the station house. A call went out for exhibits. McManus’s widow was invited to submit items of interest. She donated her late husband’s many citations, his oft-used hickory stick and, because he always wrote everything down at the end of each shift, his logbooks. They hadn’t been opened in decades.
