The opening of SLOW FALLING: PROLOGUE The song goes: “She wants what she wants when she wants it...” sung in a slow drawl. The steel guitar comes in right on time between this line and the next, which is essentially the same line repeated many times, and then fades into the background where it belongs. You can hear the music outside the old country tavern next to the row of Harley-Davidson motorcycles which are all outfitted in chrome and leather and wearing a thin veil of dust. An orange-pink glow hop-scotches along silvery, polished mufflers like distant slow lightning, the reflection of a rapidly dwindling sun. Engines tick away road heat like old clocks winding inevitably downward, and for a moment the bikes become the mechanical counterparts of flesh and blood riding-beasts of old, though these hot-blooded animals drink in high octane and spit fire and their masters are the riders of dragons, if in no other place than their own minds. For now the masters are inside tanking up and telling tall tales while their mounts outside bide the time. Inside, they are, to a man, doctors, lawyers, and sundry account executives, the starched white-collars usually worn on week days now hanging in dark closets, having been placed there by paid maid services or dutiful wives who dream of the men they could have or should have married instead. The wide boards beneath their boot-shod feet are oak planks with even cracks between that could swallow a silver dollar, but which usually swallow grime and spilt beer. “I’m telling you, they went over that cliff,” a high-pitched, sand-papery voice intones. The speaker is white-haired, close-cropped, and he hasn’t shaved since Friday morning. He thumps the table. “Boom.” “More like tumble-tumble-tumble-tumble–OOF!” another voice states, and laughs out loud. “It’s not funny,” White-hair says. “Those are some hair-pin turns up there, and the bottom is five... hundred feet down.” “You almost said ‘five-thousand.’” There is no reply to this quip. Instead White-hair tastes his beer with a thin, quick tongue. Winces. “Besides,” the other voice says, “I think it’s someone’s practical joke.” His voice is deep, commanding, yet bored. Also he is younger than White-hair by ten or fifteen years. “You go out and put up a cross at a particularly bad hair-pin turn way up in the hills, you tack a board to it and paint ‘Lee and Grace—Rest In Peace’ on it, and what do you get? I’ll tell you. Every guy on a bike heading into that turn slows way the hell down just to read it. It conjures an image, you know. I can almost see them myself. Grace has got her arms around Lee. She reaches down and gives his junk a good squeeze, he turns his head to smile back at her, then all of a sudden she’s screaming in his ear. He looks up but it’s too late. Through the guard-rail and down in slow motion like Thelma and Louise while Grace is screaming and flailing her arms about and Lee’s yelling ‘Mommmmaaaa.’ It’s bullshit. That’s what I say.” “I think there’s a story there,” White-hair says. “It could make a good book, maybe.” “The sad story of Lee and Grace,” the other man says. “I thought you were a bankruptcy lawyer.” “I am,” White-hair says. There are a dozen peacockish men and a few rough-looking women in the long, undulating room, and toward the back brood a pair of coin-operated pool tables with tell-tale wear spots crying out for new felt. Blurry, color-faded balls click into one another while clouds of blue cigarette and cigar smoke slowly tumble about eight feet overhead like indoor weather. In essence, the place is its own time zone wrapped up in a time warp and shielded from the remainder of Earth by an IQ-dampening field of blaring, introverting, badly-written and badly-sung country music—not that there is anything particularly wrong with that. You could call the place Honky-tonk Heaven or Nowheresville or Shit-kick Inn, take your pick, except for the fact that a long, hand-painted sign on the tin roof outside proclaims it as Sonny’s Place, whoever the hell Sonny is or was. The bartender’s name is Pud. “Hey, Pud! Another pitcher here!” Pud slaps his meaty arm across the counter and flexes his fingers. “Ten bucks,” he says. “Come on, Man. You know I’m good for it,” the voice says. “Ten bucks,” Pud repeats. Pud sweats. He sweats constantly. He sweats as much behind the bar as he does at home in the middle of the night while wondering if there exists a woman that is thin-waisted, thin-wristed, and as pretty enough for his tastes as she is—and of necessity must be—unmindful of his smell, the last of which he is too well aware. His doctor has labeled his malady as adrenal-fatigue, which sounds too much to him like an old-woman’s disease. He knows it will kill him one day, suddenly and without warning. Alexander Hamilton crosses Pud’s palm and cool, salving medicine is administered from a rusted spigot. The front door opens with nary a rustle. In walks a thin man. Not just thin, though. Gaunt. The word that comes to mind is ‘emaciated.’ His clothes are nearly falling off of his bony frame and are apparently held up by their heavy soil content alone. The man is covered in dirt from head to foot. He could be a grave-robber, but upon closer inspection—if one can look for more than a fleeting glance at such a specimen without wincing away—the bets shift over toward the grave-robbee column. And, as is traditional when confronted by the supernatural, the weird, the fantastic, or the downright ugly, conversation in the room comes to a grinding, gear-stripping halt. “Falling,” the man croaks into the room. The music blares on. The incident of the appearance of the gaunt man is palpable, and the passage of time has no power over it. Pud takes three steps to his right and unplugs the juke box, whereupon a species of silence ensues. The silence is made even more thick by the distant, oscillating rattle of the deep freeze somewhere to the rear of the kitchen and by big trucks moving along the interstate a mile away over the fields. Every head turns. Not a few faces register disgust. “Falling.” “Say, Old-timer,” White-hair speaks up, his voice little more than a thin whistle. “You look like you could use a drink.” “Or a sandwich,” Pud says. “Or two,” the man who thinks road-side crosses are the first relative to a bad joke intones, then adds: “Or a bath.” White-hair titters and very nearly speaks, but the bulging eyes of the dirty man track toward him, fall upon him, devour the words before he can form them in his mind. “The Falling,” the man says, and then, heeding his own words, tumbles forward onto the oak floor. “Shit,” Pud says, and comes around the bar as chair legs scrape backwards around the room. They gather around him in a circle, the formerly mildly-inebriated now stone-sober. Pud begins to reach downward but his thick slab-of-lard hand pauses in mid-air. The figure stirs, coughs, and flecks of blood spray the floor. “Shit,” Pud intones again. It is his anchor-word. It is a word that ends all words. “Faw-ling,” the man says. A trickle of blood runs from his mouth, followed by a syrupy flood of it. It pools there on the board and runs into the wide crack. “That man,” a busty woman wearing a skin-tight tank top says, “is dead.” “What the hell do we do?” White-hair asks. “Good God,” Pud says. “I think maybe I better call Sonny.”
Posted on: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 12:57:59 +0000
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