Between Wrecks by George Singleton

Author:George Singleton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Between Wrecks
ISBN: 9781497654822
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2014-10-16T21:00:00+00:00

There on the western edge of the Gulf, my uncle said, “Hey there, comrades, anyone here from ASA Radio Research?” which I later learned was some kind of battalion or platoon of soldiers who scored high on military intelligence tests. “Anybody here spend time in Bing Bang Ding Dong?” At least that’s what it sounded like to me.

Everyone nodded. They didn’t nod as in, Yes I Was in Your Platoon, but more like You Are in the Right Place. A jukebox in the corner played a song that skipped right in the middle of a yodel. “Name’s Cush Waddell,” my uncle said loudly. “This here’s my boy, Start. Just graduated first in his class up in South Carolina, so I’m taking him out on a little celebratory vacation, show him how his old man’s about to save the lives of veterans down in Florida.”

The bartender wore a decorated garrison cap that somehow balanced on the right side of his head. “We could use some saving, long’s it ain’t the born-again kind, you know what I mean.”

I said, “I’d like a Budweiser, please.”

“Nah, nothing like that,” Uncle Cush bellowed out. He couldn’t’ve have been louder with a megaphone. “One thing I was reading near a year ago was how all our brothers who made it out of ’Nam came back home to unemployment, demons, post-traumatic stress, suicidal tendencies, and freak accidents that lead to death and maiment.”

I didn’t say, “‘Maiment’ is not a word.” I looked at the bartender. He wore a military name tape over his pocket that read WARREN. I didn’t say anything to my uncle about how that could be a sign—that this bartender might warn others about the hoax that Cush had in the works, the hoax I’d not been privy to at this point. I said, “Or whatever you have on special, bottle or can, Admiral Warren.”

“I read that same article,” a man at the bar said, nodding. “Got all these old boys like us dodged bullets and landmines, come back here and get shot in the head minding our own business in line at the Snack ’n Gas. Them’s the kind of maiment I can’t figure out.”

I wanted to go kick the jukebox. Why didn’t anyone bring up the skip? The more I listened to it, the more it sounded like a troop of howler monkeys I’d seen when Cush took me to a zoo for another one of his celebratory side trips.

Cush pointed over at the man and said, “There you go. What I have in mind here for y’all, and you boys look like you might could use the money, are mini parachutes to be worn at all times. I read another article—I bet you read it, too—about all the sinkholes in Florida. You think the government’s going to stop everything, come down here and build a stronger manmade foundation for Florida? They ain’t. It’s every man-woman-child for hisself. Sinkhole drops out from under your feet twelve or twenty stories deep, you gone need one these parachutes to slow down the descent.

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