The Graybar Hotel by curtis dawkins

Author:curtis dawkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

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The key to the beginning of the end of the swans, I believe, was tattooed on Crash’s left bicep: “Sheila” with the red outline of a heart surrounding the name. No one knows why, but it is a universal law as certain as gravity that the minute you apply permanence to anything in this world, the end begins. It was true with Sheila (and everyone else whose name was tattooed on someone else’s body), and just as true when Crash commissioned a mystical swan airbrush painting on the side of his conversion van. Painted onto the side door was a flock of galactic, time-and-space-traveling swans, some of which were coupling but most of them trailing flame from their tail feathers as they rocketed through the dark universe to distant, heart-shaped planets. The writing was on the proverbial wall.

Of course, Ricky and I had discussed killing the swans ourselves; it was a regular topic of conversation as we cruised the country roads around Louisville. Swans would be easy targets—they don’t run from you, just the opposite, they engage intruders immediately. They may be beautiful, graceful creatures at a distance, but inside their territory they’re brash, violent, and very wild. They guard their ground fiercer than most dogs bred for that purpose. In weed-fueled ramblings inside Ricky’s Trans Am we deduced that their territorial nature is likely the reason that they mate for life: their mate, they feel, is their territory.

Still, anyone willing could kill the lot of them with a baseball bat in a matter of minutes.

As much as we hated the swans, we wouldn’t hurt Crash by killing them. He loved those birds, and showed anyone who came around the intricate symbolism of the swans on his van, the points of pure white in the vast, dark emptiness of space. There was a bridge in the picture, from the moon to infinity, or at least to the edge of the passenger-side door. It had something to do with bridging the gap between imagined, timeless love and the reality of that ideal exemplified by the swans. That’s what Crash said, anyway, when he philosophized about the van after two joints of his Afghani.

The paint still smelled when the first swan died. It didn’t yet seem mysterious—a rogue swan had found its way up to the road and was struck by a car, knocked back over the edge of the bridge to the sand below. That Saturday night we had come to get Crash to buy us alcohol; we found him pulling himself and his lifeless legs in haphazard figure eights, his metal crutches strapped to his arms. His head was hanging as if he searched the ground for something he’d lost. He was grieving—killing time waiting for us, or anyone, to dig the hole, which we did. Then we got high and prepared for the eulogy by blasting “Stairway to Heaven” from his Swiss speakers pointed out his back windows. The whole scene was awkward and we were impatient for it to end.

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