Hard Mouth by Amanda Goldblatt

Author:Amanda Goldblatt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640092433
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2019-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

Wrestling is the natural way of fighting in this county—as boxing is too quick and requires much thinking and concentration.

CARSON McCULLERS, The Ballad of the Sad Café

When I pushed Gene from the tower it was not an exorcism. Nor was it heroic. I watched him plummet but he was gone before the ground, evaporated up. Later that day the rain stopped. I did not and do not connect the two.

I gathered up my things. I dressed, in a shirt and overalls and boots, all only slightly dank. I wasn’t sad. What I was, in this new absence, was finally alone. By the time I was ready to descend the tower the rain had started up, again, harder.

So I waited. In a tantrum of boredom I threw my carbon steel blade into a post beam and it stuck there. It may be there still. I had a whole angry standoff with the hole I’d ripped in Earl John’s overalls. The sucker had nothing to say. Soon, shiftless, I fantasized that on the plank floor sat a bowl of gleaming oranges. I wanted to eat one like an apple, sink my teeth through the oily peel and bitter pith, down into the popping pulp. Did I wonder if Gene would come back? At the time I assumed he would. I didn’t spend time or hurt on it, not then. Rather I dedicated my heart to the cat. Though I assumed it was dead, or halfway to Tipperary.

The rain stopped, started again, poured then drooled then spat. At last it stopped and seemed to stay stopped. I waited to see if it would start again. I waited half a day, then through the night, wondering if another storm would roll in. By and by—as I watched the light once more surge into the crevices of the valley—I began to think about how I would fix the cabin. Whether I could find some way to call Earl John. I recognized: I had an unwillingness to call Earl John. I had an inability to fix the roof. But I would return to the cabin and figure things out from there.

Perhaps my first plan was the best: I would return and set about securing the tarp—and perhaps some blankets and other things as insulation—against the cabin’s gash. Then I would return to swimming, return to my ecstatic ignorant lonesomeness. When it got even cooler I would cease swimming and search for peace inside, I mean, indoors. Perhaps at last I’d learn how to tie those knots properly, should the need again arise. Then I could expire as scheduled, in some new future quiet.

Softly I remembered the push of my hands through air. In the end Gene was the Lucie and I was not.

It was dawn and then sunrise and then day: the sky stayed a markless blue. In this day I was not anything to anyone but myself. Only briefly did I reflect on the desire for faith: prayer beads, powders, herbs, a god. I had felt this want in clawing flashes.

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