Utah's Best Poetry & Prose 2022 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LUW Press

THE COLONEL

BRYAN YOUNG

“Hey, man, you don't talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. . . . He's a poet warrior in the classic sense.”

– Dennis Hopper as The Photojournalist, Apocalypse Now

The Colonel was a terribly polite fellow and, perhaps, the greatest rockabilly bluegrass singer I’d ever seen perform live. He’d pour so much soul and scream into his voice that every show he played would surely be his last. His shows were so high energy that they all, invariably, ended with him dangling his almost emaciated frame from the rafters, singing into an old fashioned microphone, dripping sweat from every pore. In most bands, the drummer set the pace, but in this case, the Colonel did.

But as nice as he was and as incredible as his shows were, you couldn’t leave him alone for five minutes with your girl.

The night I learned this hard lesson came on the heels of a night that would’ve been unforgettable on its own. It began as many evenings for many people do: I picked her up at 7:00.

The her in question was a beautiful, young girl named Katherine, and I had eyes only for her.

I drove us to dinner before the show, where we both ordered blueberry hefeweizens with our meals.

We talked of this and that, of books, and movies, and little things in each other’s lives, as we often did, but when the conversation came around to us, my heart leapt in my chest. “We” were my favorite subject. Who doesn’t like hearing about what a pretty girl thinks of us?

But I was never the best at expressing myself, cursed forever to send mixed or confusing signals.

“If you like me so much,” she asked, a confused pause in her cadence, “why has love never once come up?”

I furrowed my brow, twice as confused as she appeared to be. “Are you serious?”

The blank stare on her milky, freckled face and the still bob of her curled hair that had escaped her top bun told me she was completely in earnest. She puckered her lips and looked left and right, trying hard to remember anything that had been talked about previously.

Then, she shook her head, shyly, sheepishly.

“Literally the last time we were out, that happened.” I took a long gulp of the tart beer and set the mug back down on the table, harder than I’d intended.

Her shining brown eyes darted back and forth as she held her breath, rifling through her memory, searching for that shred of an event she’d clearly missed.

I drew in a sharp breath of my own that pulled with an airy weight that tugged down at my heart. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would have to set the scene all over again. “We’d gone to see a movie, then ended up at the restaurant, drinking. I stopped at one, knowing I’d have to drive, and you kept going as we talked . . .”

“We talked about my mother and my brother-in-law.”

“And the movie. And politics. And that Graham Greene book I lent you.

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