"I think you can just wheel it out," she said.
I walked very carefully over to the baby buggy. I didn't want to stumble over the past and break my present-tense leg that might leave me crippled in the future.
I took the handle of the baby buggy and pulled it away from the 1900s and into the year 1947.
Though I was in the garage for just a short time, when I emerged pushing the baby buggy, the afternoon seemed extraordinarily bright. It was a cloudy day but it seemed as if the sun were out and shining in full magnitude.
I helped her close the garage door. She was just about too old to do it by herself. I guess when she got too old to close the garage door, she'd go live in an old folks home with other people who were too old to close their garage doors.
She padlocked the door with a very ancient and fragile lock. The lock was only a symbol of privacy and protection, but that meant something in those days. If that lock were around today, a thief would just walk up to it and blow it off with his breath.
"Do you want me to come back and do some more errands for you?" I said.
"No," she said.
I shrugged my shoulders and pushed the baby buggy away into my life where I pretended that it was a covered wagon for a while and pulled my sisters* and other kids around in it. I pretended that I was at the head of a wagon train of baby buggies crossing the Great Plains going West in the pioneer days to homestead Oregon.
There were many perils to be overcome: hostile Indians, the burning sun and lack of water, and also sudden unexplainable snowstorms that we got lost in and had to find the trail all over again.
After a week the romantic possibilities of baby-buggy pioneer days wore out my imagination and I changed it into a beer-bottle carrier.
The baby buggy gave me a tremendous ease of mobility and the chance, because of its capacity, to become a beer-bottle millionaire.
Before I got the buggy, I used gunnysacks to transport the bottles. Now with the baby buggy, I was breathing on the neck of John D. Rockefeller.
Maybe I was thinking about that as I walked over to the sawmill to investigate the night watchman's capacity for beer drinking and how it could help me see a John Wayne movie or experience the awkward joy of trying to keep one lick ahead of an ice-cream cone on a hot summer day. Shitty tennis shoes were not a problem at this time.
In the area just around the pond where the people came in the evening and set up their furniture, there were two other ponds and half-a-dozen sawmills with their accompanying log ponds.
The center of the area was an overpass on the highway.
Underneath the overpass travelling north and south was a railroad line that the sawmills used to supply America with houses. Coal-burning trains were constantly coming and going along the tracks. I used to pretend that pieces of coal that fell off the tenders were gigantic black diamonds and I was the richest kid in the world and bought everything a child could use or imagine with the coal that fell off the passing trains.
Besides the sawmill activities that went on in the area, there were also open fields and some agricultural lands with livestock: horses and cows and sheep. There were two previously planted and domesticated orchards that had been totally ignored, abandoned for reasons unknown and had reverted to the wild, bearing apples and pears and plums and cherries that had a tremendous amount of character. They made the fruit that you bought in the store seem like a bunch of sissies.
All of this started when I opened the front door of the auto court cabin where I lived and I never got to explore all of it because it just kept unfolding new territories until my childhood ended when I was twelve years old on February 17th, 1948, in yet another abandoned orchard five miles away in the opposite direction where I was always headed, though I did not know it at the time.
But now it was still the summer of 1947 and I cut over from the pond to the railroad tracks and walked north along the tracks toward the possible beer-bottle riches of a used-up old man who watched a sawmill at night, so nobody would drive carefully up in a truck with its lights out and steal the saw which would cause a lot of commotion when the mill hands came to work the next morning.
"Where's the saw?"
There were three sawmills north of the overpass along the tracks and the night watchman's was the last sawmill. It was just past quitting time when I arrived there. He had a shack to the side of the mill. There were a hell-of-a-lot of tall weeds growing around the shack. There were millions of weeds in that area, but these weeds were so tall that they attracted attention where normally that would not have happened. They would have just been another patch of weeds and gone very unnoticed.
The old man was sitting on the front porch of the shack surrounded by his weeds. He had a bottle of beer in his hand. That was a good sign. There was an empty bottle lying on its side next to the chair he was sitting in. That was even a better sign. The old man didn't know that as I walked toward him all I really saw was two cents.
"Hello, kid," he said. "Come to pay me a little visit?"
The dry gray chair he was sitting in looked just like another weed. Sometimes I thought about that. I wondered if it was possible to make a chair out of weeds. If they had ever made one, he was sitting in it.
"Yes, sir," I said.
"Nineteen empties," he said.
"What?" I said.
"You've got that empty-beer-bottle look in your eyes," the old man said and then repeated, "Nineteen empties."
"Oh," I said, looking down at the ground that somehow seemed very far away. I didn't know that it was that obvious. I wondered what I could do about it and then realized that there was nothing I could do about it. It was the truth and would always be the truth, so I looked up from the distant ground.
"Nice day," I said, trying hard to assert my twelve-year-old personality.
"They're on the back porch in a gunnysack," he said. "Why don't you get them while I take a real good look at this nice day of yours. Just go right through the house and I'll tell you what I think when you get back."
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't thank me," he said. "Just thank the fact that I'm an alcoholic."
I knew that did not need a reply, so I walked up the five weed-attacked steps to the front porch where the old man was sitting in a chair that the weeds had already conquered, with a bottle of beer in his hand which he very carefully drew to his mouth to take a sip. Rembrandt could not have drawn a more direct or finer line.
Before I open the screen door and go into the shack I'd like to make an observation. I keep referring to the sawmill night watchman alcoholic as an "old man." But looking back down upon that long-ago past now from the 1979 mountainside of this August afternoon, I think the "old man" was younger than I am now. He was about maybe thirty-five, nine years younger than I am now. To the marshy level of my human experience back then, he seemed to be very old, probably the equivalent of an eighty-year-old man to me now.
Also, drinking beer all the time didn't make him look any younger.
I knew very little about him. I knew that somehow he had gotten out of the Army and had spent the rest of the War in Mobile, Alabama, where he drank a lot of beer and married a woman who left him after two years of marriage because she didn't want to be around a man who drank so much beer.
She thought that there were better things in life, so she divorced him. He had loved her very much, so the divorce just contributed to him drinking more beer.
Once when he was talking about her to me with his inevitable bottle of beer in hand, I realized that he never spoke of her by name, so I asked him what her name was. He took a very long sip of beer before replying. Then he said after what seemed like an hour to me that her name was not important and to just think of her as the woman who had broken his heart.
I didn't say anything to that either.
I knew that didn't require an answer either.
I opened the screen door and walked into his little one-room shack, which for some strange reason was very tidy.
He may have been a drunk but he was neat.
Besides a few sticks of elemental furniture, there were very few personal effects in the shack. A picture of Jesus on the wall seemed out of place, but that was his and His business, not mine. The picture of Jesus was hanging crookedly, so I didn't think that he was much of a Christian.
Maybe the picture of Jesus covered a crack in the wall.
He had some letters on the table. They were always the same two letters. They had both been opened very neatly. One of the letters was from Pensacola, Florida, and it was postmarked September i, 1939. I guess if he drank as much beer as he did, people didn't write to him that often.
There were no bills on the table.
He had very carefully arranged a lifestyle that denied even the remotest possibility of getting a bill.
I never touched his mail. I wasn't that kind of kid. I mean, of course, I was a sneak, but not that kind of sneak. The imagination was where I snuck around.
I always walked very slowly and close to the table and nonchalantly glanced at his mail. That was as far as I carried it. Another letter was from Little Rock, Arkansas, and it was postmarked April 4, 1942.
It was from a man named Edgar Peters. I wonder why that name still sticks in my mind after all these years. I've forgotten a lot more important things. I've even forgotten things that I don't even know that I knew. They are totally gone, but there's Edgar Peters like a Las Vegas neon sign someplace in my brain.
There was a postcard tacked to the wall beside the kitchen sink which was right next to the back door that always led me to empty beer bottles.
The postcard was extremely intriguing to me and I always eagerly waited to see it again. The contents of the postcard were facing the wall, so I don't know who it was from except that the card was postmarked July 12, 1938, and it was mailed from New Orleans, and the postmark should have been on the other side.
The picture on that postcard probably meant more to me than the existence of that "old man" other than his capacity to make me money by drinking beer.
It was a color photograph of a flatbed truck with a huge catfish on it that took up the whole bed. The catfish was maybe the size of a whale. Think about Moby Dick to my twelve-year-old way of looking at things and you're very close to the truth. The postcard was some kind of trick photography, but 50% of me believed that it was real.
Once that 50% gained total control of my mind and I asked him if that was a real catfish. Maybe I had spent too much time fishing in the sun that day.
"Are you kidding?" he replied.
"I guess so," I said. "How did they do that?"
"I don't know," he said. "If I knew how they did that I wouldn't be the night watchman of a half-assed sawmill out in the middle of nowhere."
No reply from me was forthcoming.
Another thing about him that I was aware of back then and it gave me pause to think, not long but a little, was that all the few personal references to his life had something to do with the South.
He had spent the War in Mobile, Alabama.
He had a catfish postcard from New Orleans.
He had married a Southern woman.
He had one letter from Pensacola, Florida, and another letter from Little Rock, Arkansas.
He had all these things that related him to the South, but he didn't have a Southern accent, not even in the slightest. The sound of his voice was at least a billion miles away from Robert E. Lee.
So I thought about it briefly sometimes, but not that often. If I had something better to think about other than the fact that an "old" alcoholic sawmill night watchman didn't have a Southern accent, I would think about whatever that was gladly.
I opened the screen door and stepped out onto the back porch into an army of huge weeds that grew over the porch, almost trying to get into the shack and find out why that "old man" didn't have a Southern accent and maybe even the name of his wife who had left him in 1944 because he drank so much beer and she didn't want to sleep beside another beer fart in the middle of a hot Mobile night with the wind not stirring at all.
I picked up the sack of beer bottles and journeyed back through the house to the "old man" waiting for me on the front porch with probably something cynical to say about my "nice day" observation, but I didn't care because I had his beer bottles and I had looked at his catfish postcard and his letter from Edgar Peters, writing to him about something that will always remain a mystery to me. Maybe the contents of the letter told him to stop drinking so much beer all the time or his friends would give up on him.
When I came out the other side of the shack onto the front porch, lugging my beer bottles, he totally surprised me by saying, "You're right. It is a nice day and you've got nineteen fine beer bottles in that sack. I had a lot more last week. Three cases or so. Too bad you didn't come by then. You'd be rolling in dough."
He smiled when he said that.
Three cases! I thought.
"Some other kid got them," he said.
"Who was that?" I said, trying to sound casual while mentally running through a list of kid enemies in my mind. Sometimes other kids got to the "old man's" beer bottles before I did. Anyone who took his bottles other than myself was not a friend of mine.
It's interesting that the "old man" never returned any of the bottles himself because I knew that he wasn't rich. I guess he just went to the store and got the beer and brought it back to the sawmill and sat there and drank it and then waited for us kids to come and scavenge the bottles away like empty-beer-bottle hyenas.
"It was some kid you don't know," he said, lowering my curiosity. "He lives in the opposite direction from you. I think he lives somewhere near Melody Ranch."
Melody Ranch was a cheap roadhouse dance hall where there were a lot of fistfights on the weekend between drunken men who would never sit in the chair where Harry Truman was sitting. It was out of my territory, so the kid was an unknown competitor, just another vulture circling the alcoholism of this "old" night watchman.
I used to wonder what he would do if somebody actually came to the sawmill at night and tried to steal something. He had a thin beer-brittle physique. Some men get fat when they drink a lot of beer. Others just get thinner until their bones come to resemble dried-out weeds. He was that type.
Also, there is something else that I haven't mentioned about him. He was a very fancy dresser and his clothes were immaculately neat and clean.
Sometimes he wore a suit with a tie while he watched the sawmill with a faithful bottle of beer in his hand. He looked like an insurance agent instead of a night watchman. I wondered about his capability and desire to defend the sawmill against sawmill thieves because he looked as if he couldn't defend a marshmallow against a three-year-old.
Perhaps he had a gun.
I asked him about that once.
"What do I need a gun for?" was his reply.
I didn't pursue that subject but finally I had to ask him what he would do if somebody came and tried to steal something.
"I'd let them steal the whole God-damn sawmill. I wouldn't help them load it, though. I wouldn't want to get my clothes dirty. They only pay me fifty dollars a month to watch this God-forsaken place, plus I get to live in this shack for nothing and they take care of my utilities."
He laughed when he said the words: "my utilities." Then he said them again but this time much louder, "My utilities!" and laughing even louder. I tried to think what was so funny, but I couldn't, so I left.
Anyway, that was a few months ago and this was now and I had a sack of beer bottles and I was ready to go on my way again. I had to get back to the pond.
The people who brought their furniture with them when they went fishing would be arriving soon, and they were much more interesting than this carefully dressed "old" beer-drinking sawmill night watchman who didn't give a damn if thieves came and took the whole place, mill, pond, logs, lumber, and just left him there drinking beer with everything gone except for his little shack and his weed-like chair on t
he front porch.
"I have to be going," I said, taking a step back and away from his world.
"Well, don't go to Mobile, Alabama," he said, starting to laugh.
My second step was a little more hurried.
"Mobile, Alabama!" he repeated:
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
Dust ... American ... Dust
The afternoon sun was appropriately lower in the sky and the wind was beginning to die down and there was an advanced feeling of evening approaching with its refreshing contents and renewed hope after a long hot summer afternoon.
While I'm a quarter of a mile away, walking back to the pond with a sack of beer bottles over my shoulder, I'll talk about something else that is more interesting than just walking along various well-worn paths and then railroad tracks leading to a final path ending or perhaps beginning at the pond again.
As a child I was very interested when other children died. There was no doubt about it that I was a morbid kid and when other children died, it always fanned the flames of my forensic curiosity.
Later, in February of 1948, this curiosity would become a personal reality and engulf and turn my life upside down and inside out like Alice in Wonderland taking place in a cemetery with the white rabbit as an undertaker and Alice wearing a grave-eaten shroud to play her games in.
But in my life before that was to happen, I was fascinated by dead children and the aftermath of their passing. I think it all perhaps began in 1940 when we moved into an apartment that was annexed to a funeral parlor.
The apartment had once been a functioning part of the mortuary. I don't know exactly what part, but the undertaker to get a little extra cash had changed the former dead space of his funeral parlor into an apartment where we lived for a few months in the late spring of 1940.
I used to get up in the mornings and watch the funerals out the window. I had to stand on a chair because I was five years old and I wanted a good view.
Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away Page 24