I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive

The night was at that lost and lonely time when all the bars closed, the last stragglers were wondering home, and everyone was somewhere interesting besides me, or so it seemed. There was barely a car on the road, the gas station was the only flickering sign of life, and the darkness seemed to have swallowed everything and everyone, reluctantly to regurgitate them the next morning, which seemed like a hell of a long time away from here. 

I pulled into a Chinese restaurant called The Panda where two skinny Asians were inside sitting at a table, smoking cigarettes, having coffee I presumed by the porcelain cups they leveled now and then to their thin lips. The neon open sign was still burning. There was still time for me to get some crab rangoon. I could see them through the belly of a giant happy panda bear which was painted on the glass like a terrible tattoo. It was on Route 41, which led to nowhere and which came from nowhere. It used to be a diner, and someone said that a hundred years ago it was a fruit stand, but I wasn't around to know.

Those two Asian men were having an interesting conversation, it seemed. They didn't appear to notice me out in the gravel parking lot, idling there in my truck. I was drunk, or at least almost drunk and the fumes of my exhaust slowly altered my mind. It was another Saturday night in Greenfield. Watching the hula girl on the dashboard was about all in the world I had to do. Listening to old country music on cassette tapes that belonged to my father, which were my inheritance. 

I thought to go inside and get some chow mein, changing my mind from the crab rangoon, but as I decided to go one of the men pulled a chain and the open sign went from burning red to black. Then the lights shut off and the darkness had swallowed yet another living thing before me, satisfying it's hunger while I remained unsatisfied in mine. There was nothing to be had but sleep, and all I was doing now was postponing the inevitable. I was like a pill on the tongue of night, heading fast for the belly.

I drove out 41 towards home, which was an apartment in Greenfield above a tattoo shop. The lady who owned it asked me everytime she saw me if I was ready for a tattoo. I didn't have a tattoo, and I am 47 years old, so the thought of doing so now seemed silly to me. My skin had only so many years left of firmness and vitality before it thinned and became droopy, after all. And surely the tattoo would fade and stretch and become some nearly unrecognizable blob of ink. Besides, I was too indecisive and couldn't decide what to get. 

Indecision has ruined me. The paradox of choice. When there was more than one pretty girl at a bar, invariably I'd end up going home alone because I couldn't decide upon one or the other. Or the one I did pick would turn out to be the wrong one, or she would not like me. Jukeboxes were hell for me. 1,000 songs to choose from. Buying jeans. Shoes. Cars. It all required a choice, and I was horrible at making choices, especially good ones. 

I was married for 20 years to a woman I didn't love and who didn't love me because the decision to leave her was one I wasn't prepared to make. I sat in my garage by myself and played Hank Williams songs until I learned them all. Every song Hank Williams ever wrote, sung, or recorded. She didn't like Hank Williams, but slowly as she wasted away in the glow of a TV, I morphed into him. 

Our marriage ended when she told me she was having an affair with a car salesman named Gary, and Gary was taking her to Lake Erie for the weekend. I packed my things while she was somewhere in Margaritaville or on a boat and I moved out. I slept in my office until I found the apartment. I could have cheated on her several times, but I felt guilty for even thinking of it. Hail Mary, full of grace. 

I'm so lonesome I could cry. 

I went to Nashville and didn't make it. They had enough Hank Williams impersonators, it seemed. Some were good. Some were not so good. And so I drove home defeated like so many others before me. But before leaving, I ran into another Hank impersonator who was about my age and who came to the same glum conclusion. We had dinner together at a diner just outside of Nashville and talked about our day jobs. He was a podiatrist. We both thought we were pretty good, and maybe we were, but Nashville already had enough Hanks. We both had sad stories. His wife had died of cancer. He wore a powder blue suit very similar in style to mine. He was black as the ace of spades. 

I don't write my own music. No one wants to hear my songs. I became a Hank Williams impersonator because he is the quintessential country artist and because I resemble him. I do pretty well, except I don't have any Drifting Cowboys. It is just me and my guitars, and sometimes at a bar, people that sing along. Not normally, but sometimes they do. 

I had a tailor in a nearby town make me a suit that looked like one Hank might have worn. It was the kind of frivilous thing you can only buy when you're not married anymore. It was white with sequined cactuses and skulls on it. His songs were relatively simple to learn. I must have sung Hey, Good Lookin' a hundred thousand times. 

I sell insurance in Greenfield. I am not the only insurance person. There are a few others. There is a highly-motivated bitch named Susan Menendez, who sells for State Farm. She visits my office from time to time to brag about her numbers. If Susan Menendez ever gets murdered, I will be the prime suspect. They'd have to rule me out before they look at anyone else. Even her cuckold husband. Even the boyfriend she fucks in the Blueberry Hill Motel every Thursday afternoon over in Hillsboro. Some grease monkey named Steve Bope. 

Steve was married, too, to an incredibly fat woman named Cassandra Peters, who thinks she's Elvira. I couldn't imagine Steve in his pursuit of happiness topping the great peak of life with a shitty lay like Susan Menendez — who acted like she was Jennifer Lopez. She even wore her monkey-piss perfume. 

I knew about Susan's sexual prowess because I was once Steve. And the Blueberry Hill Motel, Room 9, was our spot for nearly a year. Shortly after my ill-fated marriage ended with my wife taking off to Lake Erie with Gary the Chevy salesman, Susan and I crossed paths. She found it interesting that I also sold insurance and that I played guitar. She filled the void of my wife's absence. She was a bandage on a cut.

I would get the room while Susan waited in her absurd black Tahoe and I'd talk to Charlie the owner of the motel casually about baseball or football, depending upon the season as he filled out the form, having me sign, and turning to a wall of keys and every single time saying the same damn thing — "It's here, somehwere, damnit." Then "Bingo!" when he found it, dangling it in his finger like it was made of solid gold.

I knew it was time to call it quits with Susan when I enjoyed talking to Charlie more than fucking her. Charlie was old and could barely move in those days. I thought of all the energy he needlessly expended signing us in an out with a measure of guilt. He never asked any questions and didn't seem to care what I was doing with the room. The motel was more popularly known as The Nooner. 

When Charlie died and his daughter Helen took over, I called it quits with Susan because everyone knows Helen Lewis has the biggest mouth in Highland County and anything she knows, everyone else will, too. Her bullhorn mouth was the National Enquirer. And so Susan recruited Steve to lube and grease her valves. Every Thursday at noon on their lunch hour. 

Helen Lewis is the reason everyone knows Steve Bope's peculiar nickname. Apparently, Steve has two wings tattooed on his back and his wife pegs him every Sunday night which is why if you see him on Monday, he is hobbling around. So when the boys at the garage found out, they started calling him Pegasus. Or sometimes, Peggy, for short. 

Besides Susan Menendez and one or two others, there was a plethora of online insurance options, so brick and mortar businesses like ours were dinosaurs. You don't need a local insurance person. You can buy insurance from someone in Tallahassee or Tokyo. 

You don't need me, I told someone who came in for a quote. You're the world's worst salesman, they replied, and fairly so. I was a terrible salesman. But you really don't need John Silver at all. You can get it from that lizard online in 15 minutes or less. Or some fucking ostrich.

I often say what my mother used to say all the time — and I mean it.

I could just hang myself. 

My office is two doors down from my apartment and the tattoo parlor where Little Debbie sits on her fat ass and waits for people to come in and ask her for a tattoo. She is like a spider. She resembles a spider in some ways, though she doesn't have eight legs or eyes. She wears heavy tarantula mascara and lot of black shirts and leggings with spiders on them. But we are all spiders — us locals waiting for other locals to come by and throw us a money bone.

Shop local, they say. Our livelihoods depend upon it. 

I was vice-president of the local chamber of commerce. It didn't pay anything, and I didn't really do anything, but someone had to do it. I just have to listen to people complain about this or that and then promise to bring it up to the board at the next meeting. 

Little Debbie, as she calls herself in jest, and for the tattoo of the snack cake logo she bears on top of her Himalayan chest, has a distinct advantage over me. Her services cannot be ordered online. It is one of those old-fashioned sorts of things you got to get in the shop. Or in prison. A true service. Like prostitution. Like an oil and lube. 

So when she asks me if I am ready for my first tattoo, it is always, "Thank you, Debbie. But no thank you." And I scidaddle out of her office like a scalded dog and down the street to my office where I sit for approximately 10 hours everyday hoping for a new client so that I can pay my bills, or an existing one to upgrade their policy. Hoping not to get another cancelation call which will further sink my ship. I am somewhere between the Bismark and the Titanic. Hoping for a fire or a tornado so I can collect the insurance money and run. 

I don't have anyone to answer the phones because I can't afford someone. So I do it all by myself. I don't get many calls to necessitate an assistant, though. All day long I listen to old country music in my shirt and tie and sometimes I pick my guitar and hang my head and cry watching the paint on the walls dry or the cars rolling by down that lonely lost highway 41. Its almost over, its almost done. This cruel life of mine. Son, I was lost long ago, that much I know. Not sure when, though. Maybe when my wife went away with the car salesman in a new Chevrolet. I hang my head and cry. I could just hang myself and die. And I probably would if Jack Daniels ever left me. But he keeps coming back, and it is me and my dear friend Jack in between calls and these lonely four walls. 

I sometimes make up my own songs but I never write them down. There wasn't a single Hank Williams song I didn't know by heart. I wore my white cowboy hat to cover my thinning hair and my big ears. I was a beanpole, as my mother would say. 

I have no panda painted on my window like the Chinese restaurant. No mascot. No lizard or ostrich. Just my name and my business — John Silver Insurance. No bells. No whistles. 

I have a cowbell on the door that seldom clangs. It was on the neck of a Swedish cow who got slaughtered once upon a time for some ungrateful mongrels to eat her ass. It was probably on the necks of many Swedish cows before they were all likewise betrayed and then it was sold to a tourist and immigrated to the US and sold in a curio shop in Hillsboro. Now it is the portent of calamity and ruin, seldom the presage of profit. It is a cursed old bell says me and the cow that wore it before it was worn by my door. 

I've always felt thwarted from my purpose. Lost in life. Unlucky in love. Like I had missed my golden opportunity, never to get it back again. Or that I had made a bad choice about who to be with. My wife was as boring as a snail for twenty years until she went to buy a new Chevy and met the man of her dreams. Her favorite song was The Pina Coloda Song, though she didn't even drink. Not even at Applebee's. She sang it all the time in the shower. I should have got the hint. 

I still carry her insurance policy. I can't afford to cancel her on principal, so as long as she pays her premiums, she is a customer. Presumably, if she was in an accident she would call me and tell me and I would call the insurance adjuster and assure her it wasn't going to affect her rates. But she's never been in an accident, so I remain as needless as ever. 

She was a lover of TV shows and romance movies, but there wasn't a romantic bone evident in her entire body before her exodus to Lake Erie. She couldn't even fake it on Valentine's Day. She didn't drink so she was never not herself. She was like powder mashed potatoes with too much water. Gravy without pepper and salt. She couldn't have children, though she wanted to adopt and would show me kids from Guatemala online with cleft lips. I said no. I couldn't imagine if things went south having to pay child support for an adopted kid. Things went south. 

When we got divorced, I took the papers and filed them at court where a pretty girl asked me if I was hiring because she was looking to get into the insurance business, and the next thing I knew I was living above Little Debbie's tattoo shop and having sex with that girl who I saw again at a bar where I was doing a show. I didn't particularly want to have sex with her, but I figured I should because my wife was somewhere having sex with Gary and I needed to move on. It was the thing to do. 

The girl had never heard of Hank Williams, she said, but she liked Lovesick Blues, which she sang in the dark after we had sex. 

I'm in love, I'm love with a beautiful girl.

She was wearing my cowboy hat riding me like a grocery store penny horse. All I remember of her is that she had no hair on her vagina, which I soon learned was a common thing. Everyone is as bald as a baby these days. My ex-wife, however, had the vagina of a grizzly bear. 

But here I was driving back from a show in Washington Courthouse that went reasonably well. Only four people asked me if I knew any Garth Brooks or Chris Stapleton. I was mostly ignored, otherwise, which isn't all bad. They don't heckle you when they ignore you. No one booed, at least. No one tried to play the jukebox over me. But it is a damn lonely thing to hear no applause. To play to backs. To hear only silence between songs. To pack up your guitars and amp and wind your cords alone. To drive home, alone, to an empty bed. 

Driving back the fog rolled over the road and between the night and it, I couldn't see anything. It was as though I was driving through a great void. Absolutely nothing at all. I had a lot of beer in me and was worried about getting pulled over for driving too slow. I was worried about hitting an animal. The fog was menacing and rolled and rolled as though it were coming from an invisible black fire in gray undulating billows. 

The road was but another thing the night had devoured. It was merciless in its winding and relentless hills. It was hot and things were being killed in the dark. In the jaws of larger predators that use the night's deception to overcome their smaller prey. The natural order, they'll tell you it is because it isn't happening to them. If it was, it would be a tragedy. Occasionally, something cries out, giving away this dark and evil secret. 

I knew well the road by day, but at night it betrayed me. Patches of lonely fog appeared like apparitions at a distance, startling me until I got close enough to drive through them whereupon they dissipated as though my low-beams were proton blasters. 

But just as I drove into what I thought was a clearing, one of those unearthly visitants appeared suddenly in the image of a woman, who I instinctively swerved to miss. My body was cold and in shock. My truck gnashed and groaned in protest as it thumped and squealed to a halt in the basin of a culvert. The hula girl on the dash danced a raunchy luau for a horde of drunken wide-eyed tourists. 

She moved so naturally, this wraith, as though she were walking casually across the road. I tried to reverse to get my truck out of the ditch, but the rear wheels spun out on the slick grass and it became obvious that it wasn't going to move. I knew it wouldn't be long until a sheriff came along and saw me there, so I moved forward and straightened it out to make it appear as though I simply broke down and I set out on foot. If I waited for a sheriff, surely he would smell the alcohol and I would get another DUI and likely 30 days in jail.

I was only a mile away from the apartment, just on the outskirts of town. Still, the image of the fog resonated and I grabbed my guitar, locked my amp and equipment in the truck, and began the walk. It was a warm night and there was not a car in sight so I took the liberty to walk in the middle of the road, pleased by the sound of my boots scuffling along the cinders of the asphalt, at least until I saw a car and made my way to the gravel berm. My suit was white and the sequined skulls and cactuses that adorned it made it uncommonly luminous. What a sight I would have been. 

Then, just as I doubted her, I saw her again on the other side of the road looking back across at me. It was dark, but the fog had receded so all that remained was her distinct yet blurry shape stark against the black of the woods behind her. I knew then that I hadn't imagined her at all. She was real. A glowing yet faint and almost transparent figure who stared at me just as I stared at her. She appeared silent and lachrymose. 

"Hey!" I called. What a dumb thing to say. Hey. 

As soon as I called out, she took off as though in fright and ran up a hill towards the Traveller's Inn and the Old Burial Ground. I followed her, but lugging the guitar and in my boots, I couldn't keep up. When I got behind the building, she was gone. All there was before me were a field of doleful headstones that sat mum in a silent conspiracy against me. 

I stood there befuddled in the moonlight. The fog left the hill alone and settled over the road before dissipating altogether. And so there was nothing but me and a few hundred stones and sleeping souls beneath. It was hard for me to feel as though I was not disrupting them simply by being there uninvited for lack of known kinship to any of those buried there. Eventually, I gave up for the night and walked home. 

But I started going there regularly. Graveyards are peaceful places to reflect. It wasn't far from my office or apartment, so occasionally on lunch I'd walk down with a tuna sandwich. I eat fish and some seafood, but no other meat. Frankly, I can't get personal with a fish or a crab. But a cow or a chicken, and most certainly a pig, I could get very personal. 

I once rode a pig drunk. He gave me a ride home from a bar when I was in the Army and lived up in North Dakota. His name was Barry. When we got to the base, I rolled off the pig at the MP station. Then Barry turned around and walked back to the bar. The MPs were so impressed that they helped me up and carried me to my barracks. All my life, it is probably the most interesting thing I've ever done. If I am ever on a game show, it will be my personal amusing story. 

The graveyard was peaceful. Death is a peaceful thing. It gets a bum rap, if you ask me. It is something I longed for, but hadn't the courage to obtain. I'd watch a murder of crows from the dead branch of an elm tree descend upon the gravestones. They might have been ravens but, either way, they were blackbirds and their caws were loud and obnoxious but seemed much more communicative than other birds who sounded more melodious and simpler. 

I soon started going at night and it was dark and eerie. It felt to me that those sleeping souls were prowling about in pathces of frequent fog, dissipating upon scrutiny, and those blackbirds were replaced by owls and stealthy bats that preferred to remain concealed in the canopy of trees until they saw an unfortunate prey who they'd eat to death.

"Who was she?" I asked that green blanket of sleeping bones. 

An hour later, I saw her. But unlike the first time, I could see where she disappeared into the ground and I ran toward her and found her grave.

"Isabella Young," I read. Daughter of such and such. 15 years and ... months and ... some days. There was a poem written on the headstone but the letters were indiscernible, worn away by two centuries of sun and rain ... Died in 1825. 

"I know I saw you. I was not that drunk or crazy to believe otherwise. If you can hear me, I'd like to talk. I don't know about what, really, but I'd like to talk. About everything, I guess. What's it like to die? What's like in the afterlife. And why do you come back? Those sorts of things."

There was only the owls hooting and the clouds swirling, which whispered past the moon. There eventually came a point when there was nothing left for me to do but go home. The night had again swallowed everything when the fog disappeared and it consumed the girl with it. 

I was left to walk home in the void, to contemplate hanging myself because it seemed like a civilized way to commit suicide. Shooting myself was a bore. I would be found by Debbie, undoubtedly, and she would have to live with the thought of my brain spaghetti on the carpet for the rest of her life. It isn't like me to impose in that way. I've committed suicide a thousand times in my mind, yet still I live. 

"I really liked that carpet," she would fuss as the carpet people took it out in a giant duct-taped Swiss cake roll with all my learning and memory mashed somewhere with dirt in the fibers.  

There just isn't a good way to kill yourself, I resolved, which I thought of more and more. Particularly during the day when I was sitting in my office sharpening pencils in the old school metal pencil sharpener with the winding crank. The Bulldog. 

I didn't need pencils, much less for them to be sharp, but I enjoyed the whirring and whizzing of the sharpener and the clean look of a finely-sharpened pencil which I kept in the drawer. If ever there was a need for sharpened No. 2 pencils, I'd be the man to see. Ticonderoga. Dixon Orioles. Or Faber-Castell, which were the créme de la créme. 

Pencils were once all the rage. But now they are practically obsolete. I love the smell of the shavings. I would like to build a nest of them and burrow inside and never come out. 

I thought a little less of killing myself today and a little more of the ghost girl. Ghost girl sounded dreary so I began calling her, simply, the girl. I visited her grave at lunch and ate egg salad and talked to her again. I was quite convinced she could hear me. I don't know why, but after seeing her twice, I was convinced she was listening. But it is akward to have a conversation with a headstone. With grass and dirt. But it kept me going, and anything that keeps a person going ain't bad. 

Hallelujah.

Before long, I was visiting her grave nearly every night. I would leave a rose. I would complain about my ex-wife and my job and TV and movies and things that didn't much matter. I would tell her about country music and Hank Williams. Sometimes I would bring my guitar and play songs for her. I told her everything that I ever dreamed to do and why I didn't do it. I told her what I wanted to become when I was a kid and what I wanted to do before I died. I told her everything like she was my therapist. I told her more than I ever told anyone. Anyone I'd ever been with ever in my whole life. 

There are no therapists in Greenfield. There are bars with bartenders who are de facto therapists, I suppose. 

"I guess I'm looking for an old-fashioned woman, Izzy. Modern women aren't for me at all. They just aren't. They come and they go. They are annoying. I can't get into them because they'll start talking about some damn TV show I've never seen. Or drama. Or they'll want to go to Target or Applebee's or someplace like that. I ain't got it in me. I suppose I was meant to be alone. I suppose I drove my wife away. Emotional neglect, they'd call it. I never made the effort."

"They tell me 'Don't quit your day job.' No one can seem to understand why I am doing Hank Williams and not Jelly Roll or some absurd boob like that. Half of them don't even know who he is. I don't suppose you do, either." 

I exhaled, deeply. It was very cathartic speaking to her. And though I couldn't explain my attraction, it was no less compelling. 

After about a month, it was almost like we were dating, I saw her so often. Her headstone was like her face and the vines of the weeping willow that was in the distance behind her was her hair. The grass and the fresh air was her perfume with a natural redolence. There was six feet of dirt between us. That is all. Six feet of dirt and 200 years. I thought of digging a space beside her and dying, but I couldn't figure out how to bury myself so that no one would know. 

I bought a new rose every week and the lady at the flower shop smiled everytime she saw me in the way old women smile at the thought of young love. Only I wasn't so young, only to her in comparison of herself. Time was slipping away from me and the available women my age were few and far between. Most were married, twenty years deep on drugs, or dead of breast cancer. What was left was a damaged junk drawer of the misfortunate, or a buffet of neglected and cheating housewives. A widow here or there. The woman who had been betrayed in some terrible way. I was not prepared to be anyone's Alamo. 

Or there was the woman who lost interest in men, or lost her mind. Lost her faith in love or whose desire dried up like an aged grape. I don't ever really try to meet anyone. Those that I meet are just accidents I can't avoid like a grocery clerk or a bank teller here and there. I suppose I had given up myself and I was in my own junk drawer next to old batteries, paperclips, and super glue. Next to cheating men, alcholics, and drug addicts. 

If only that old lady knew who I was buying roses for it would make her toes to curl. Or the embroidered poodle on her sweater bark voraciously at me as though she knew I was a necromancing weirdo. Like dogs in movies bark at werewolves when they are in human form between full moons.

I wondered what Isabella looked like, but I suppose that doesn't matter. I wondered how she died at 15, but I suppose that doesn't matter, either. I suppose it was a sad story. An illness of some sort. People wept then buried her and wept some more. Maybe someone kept a lock of her hair. Then I thought it is too bad that people can't live to tell everyone how they died. Of all the boring things people do tell, it is the one interesting thing they can't. Maybe in the afterlife they do. It might be an introduction, of sorts. 

Hi, I'm Tom and I fell off a roof. 

I'm Margaret and I hung myself. 

Hello, Margaret. I'm Carol and I slit my wrists. 

Six feet of dirt. 

I was a lonely man. I got drunk and squeezed one out. I jerked off on her grave. I was in love with her and it was a romantic gesture. I imagined she was some beautiful 19th century maiden and I wormed my wormhole which I imagined was her clam trap. I deflowered her in the dirt if my mind. I've lost my mind and have become an old pervert.

Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum. 

She was the only decent thing I had. The only decent thought that I knew. The only good and clear thing in my head that wasn't muddled with problems or riddled with anxiety, skepticism, or pain.

Six feet of dirt. 

I've been heckled and booed out of the Catch 22 and Club 41 on several occassions. Both places got the numeric value of their name from the name of the road they are on because their respective owners were such clever assholes. Neither are upscale places by any means. The floors are sticky and the service is lousy. The interiors are rundown and the bathrooms smell like piss. Occasionally, a fat woman will beach herself at the bar and wait for the inevitable harpoon. Greenfield men are desperate whalers. 

"What now, Captain Ahab?" I said to the bartender, Mark, at Catch 22, who was not the brightest man I've ever known. It was my inquiry of the whale situation.  

He didn't seem to know what I meant and would just say something like, "Okay, how are you, John?"

"I'm okay."

Everyone's "okay" until they are not. Until they're bleeding from their asshole or cancer turns their body into a Golden Corral. Then they are pretty fucking far from okay. But until then, "okay" means they're alive. Goddamn the bougie people who say they are "well." Let them eat cake with transexual pitbulls in Hell. I strongly dislike pitbulls.

Catch 22 stopped paying me to play long ago, so I play for free. For the love of the music and to be a performer. To have something to keep me going. Some human connection. I have a tip jar and get a few dollars here and there. Mark often gives me a couple of free beers for playing Move It on Over, which is his favorite song. It was apparent that Mark had never read Moby-Dick, so he didn't know who Captain Ahab was. 

Mark loves obese women. He can't get enough of them. He has an unnatural desire for them. He married one but divorced her to marry another one who was even bigger. Traded up, he said showing off Tiffany's black lace boudoir pictures. I wouldn't be shocked to see Mark on My 600 Pound Life someday as the supportive husband with tears in his eyes telling Tiffany she doesn't need to lose a pound. 

They once fought in the Catch 22 and it was the unintentional entertainment of the evening. It was right when I was playing I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive. I kept playing through the hootin and hollerin. It was a good night to be a Hank Williams impersonator. Bottles breaking on the wall is good backdrop music. 

Moby Dicks — that is what I would call the place if I owned it. It is a far better name (and novel) than Catch 22. I would cut a whale from wood and call it Moby Dick's for its propensity to lure in very obese women. I would paint a small man riding the back of that whale. He would be wearing a tophat. I wondered what it was like to fuck an obese woman, but I have never been so curious to do so. I wondered if I would suffocate. I wonder if it is like jelly on a plate. 

Hello, my name is John. I suffocated under the haunches of obesity. 

I don't know what I want in life, but I do know this — I want buttons. I want big buttons and small buttons. I want switches to flip. I don't want touch screens or Alexa or Siri. I want nobs and dials that turn and click. Levers to push and pull. No remote controls. No Bluetooth. Cabinet TVs. Radios with cords and wires and antennas.

Susan Menendez was at the bar mocking me with her black walnut eyes. Taking long lurid swills of her Coors long necks. Her Colorado Kool-Aid. 

I had too much Jack Daniels to sound any good tonight. In a bar called Harry's. The bar that still pays me to play a hundred and fifty bucks and all I can drink. She is over there acting like Jennifer Lopez puckering her lips to some strange fellow who looks like a postman. Her vagina is as boring as a PBS documentary about Greenland. Somewhere it is there tucked away in her panties, her clam and oyster, under her jeans, waiting to be unleashed upon whoever she deems worthy. I wonder what happened to Steven Bope — her Pegasus oil and lube lover. 

She left with the postman and the bar emptied out. The night starts taking people again. Things get eaten. Swallowed. Things lurk opportunely in the darkness. Slowly but surely, every part of the day is vanishing. Shops close. Bars close. Cars again disappear. It gets quiet. I sit at the bar still wearing my cowboy hat pushed back on my head. I drink another beer. A Colorado kool-aid. 

I'm so lonesome I could cry. 

I read there are suicide pods in Norway. You can just go in and scan a QR code and the small space shuttle-like capsule will open for you like a pod. You get in, lay back, and nitrogen replaces the oxygen in the air. Within a minute you die, peacefully, they say. It's a good way to go. You can even personalize your experience. The fatal air you inhale can smell like anything you like. Pine needles. Lilac. Roses. Grass. Cotton candy. The ocean. Your grandfather's pipe and aftershave. Your dead wife's clitoris. Dirt.

I wonder how many people have taken advantage of it. If it has a name. If it is a company I could invest in and make twenty million dollars so I can relocate to a Florida beach. Maybe it will be common practice in 50 years so people don't have to die slowly in hospitals that bilk their insurance. 

My name is Nate and I died in a suicide pod that smelled like teen spirit.

I wonder at the moment that the lid shuts if just before the gas is released it asks you, "Are you sure?" in some Alexa-like voice. I wonder if you have to press buttons, or push nobs, or turn dials. I wonder if there is music and what sort. It would probably be Miley Cyrus or Pittbull so you don't change your mind and think of the good things in life. I wonder what it is like to die. 

I could just hang myself. 

I haven't done a crazy thing in my life. But I decided to buy a shovel. I don't own a shovel because I live in an apartment and don't need one. I have owned shovels and never thought much of them. They were everyday things in the garage. You don't think much about a shovel until you don't own one and you're standing in a hardware store at 9:30am after you spent the whole night thinking there was nothing more important in the world than a shovel. 

There were 13 different shovels for sale. The paradox of choice once more flummoxed me. Various spades, grips, and colors. That does not include a variety of hand shovels. Some had cool names like The Gopher. I bought the strongest of them made of US steel. It had an American flag on it and a good grip. 

Glenn was happy to sell me the shovel. Everyone called him The Honeybadger. He was old and seemed like he belonged in the hardware store and nowhere else. He wore a red tool apron and carried a tape measure. He mentioned he had the same shovel and vouched for its quality. $47.68 dollars for a shovel. 

Six feet of dirt. 

I parked in the lot across from the Old Burial Ground at ten at night and waited for the cars to die out as they do usually by 10:30. The hula girl sat conspicuously still. She didn't say anything to me at all, but her eyes said she knew what the shovel was for and she did not approve of it. She knew what I was doing, but there is no use talking about it. When your mind is made up, your mind is made up. 

I wondered why I hadn't seen Isabella again after that second foggy night. Why only twice did she appear to me, and quite by accident. I had to know. I don't know what I had to know exactly, but it was something. As much as I had looked, she hadn't appeared again. She was nowhere to be seen at all. 

The cars began to disappear, one by one, leaving only the occasional intrusion of a pair of headlights that would pay me no mind. No one would see me once I crossed the street. If a police officer discovered me, I'd be arrested. I'd lose everything, undoubtedly. Reputation is everything in a smalltown. No one would buy insurance from me. I'd have to move to make a living. I'd be one of those weird stories people read on their phone in the morning when they get to work and forget by the time they go home. 

Man arrested for digging up corpse. 

He probably had sex with it, everyone would think. It isn't a good idea. I lost my mind, I realized. Then the hula girl started to dance, even though I was perfectly still and the engine was off. She danced slightly at first, but soon erratically as though she were having a seizure. There was no movement in the truck at all. She danced wildly to the point I thought the spring in her would give out. And then, as quick as she had begun, she stopped. 

I've never experienced anything like it. But I assumed it was a sign that I should do what I intended to do. So I checked for cars and when it was clear I grabbed the shovel and scampered across the road. Once there, I was in the clear. There was no camera or way I could be seen from the road. 

Six feet of dirt.

I began to dig, carefully. I dug up the grass in a rectangular shape in front of her headstone, preserving the sod so I could place it back when I was finished with the hope that no one would notice. The process of preserving the top layer and carefully placing it on a tarp, that I had to go back to my truck to get, took about an hour. The rest of the digging went easier, but not easy. It had been a long time since I've done manual labor.

It isn't like it is in the movies, though. Easy digging. Done in thirty minutes. No sweating. It took hours. It was painstaking, grueling work. My back hurt. My hands blistered. Several times I thought to stop and discontinue my effort, but the strange incident of the dancing hula girl possessed me to dig deeper and to not quit.

I took several breaks and sat on the side of the hole. I thought of sacrilege and all that. I thought of my father who would be disgusted by me and my mother who would think I was a misunderstood romantic, despite what anyone else says. I thought of everyone and everything in my life at least once as though they were all tiny granules of the dirt I was carefully displacing with my shovel. Memories put out of my mind. Putting them aside on the tarp. It is amazing what you forget in the course of a lifetime if you've lived a halfway interesting life. It is amazing what hard work does for the mind and where your thoughts go under the strain of labor.  

I got to the point where I sat on the side of the hole and my feet dangled. It was progress. If I smoked, I would smoke a cigarette. Smoking is something to do when there is nothing else. 

Two feet of dirt. 

An hour later I hit what felt like metal. It wasn't the dull thud I expected of a wooden lid. It was 4:07am. I had less than two hours to get into the coffin and to replace the dirt to beat dawn and detection by the farmers traveling to the Saturday morning farmer's market, or cops on the early shift heading to the donut shop for a long john or a jelly. It was my name. I laughed in the thralls of a fanatical trance.

I've been called Long John Silver all my life. People squint there eye and "argh!" when they see me. I get called "matey" frequently. My mother knew damn well what she was doing. She said it was her favorite restaurant and there was no other restaurant like it. She cried when it closed in our town and we had to drive to a town 30 minutes away. All my birthday parties were there. She took me in and we ate fish and chips and she told them my name with hopes they'd give us free hushpuppies. 

I could just hang myself. 

It wasn't metal after all. It was glass. She was buried in a glass coffin. Thick glass. I couldn't bust it with the shovel if I tried. It was caked with dirt and I couldn't see in, even though I had cleared a spot as wide as the head of the shovel blade. It was like a crystal ball that refused to tell a fortune. I shoveled furiously, invigorated so close to the end. I wouldn't have to open it. I could see right in and rebury her if I must. 

It took more time carefully shoveling around the curve of the coffin lid. I appreciated the craftsmanship. It must have been an expensive coffin. But why glass? And suddenly an eery feeling overcame me standing six feet into the hole. The feeling that I, too, had been swallowed by the night. But I had no time for such feelings so close to the end. The end of such a wonderful mystery that would unburden me of the affliction of my curiosity.

The night was inching closer to dawn. At last, I uncovered the coffin, but the dirt that stained the lid and the darkness which consumed us made it impossible to see. Perhaps at noon I could see, but I didn't have until noon. I dug around the casket. There was no way I was going to be able to pull it out of the ground as I had planned, heavy as it was. So I dug room for myself to stand by and to unlatch the lid, but I couldn't figure out how it was latched. Then I saw the silver heart-shaped lock. The virtuous lock to ward off graverobbers, bodysnatchers, goblins, witches, or whatever they believed back then. To preserve the chastity of the dear deceased girl forever, if only from worms. 

In a fit of frenzy I struck the lock with the shovel, mad as a hatter, laughing. I recognized that I was mad. I could see myself from outside the hole. Looking down on myself sweating, crazed, obsessed, covered in dirt. What had become of me? What had become of my mother's little boy? 

Little Johnny Silver, she liked to call me, digging up dead girls. 

Finally the lock busted, but the shovel blade cracked with it and I cringed with the realization that it would make it practically impossible to put the dirt back in the hole once I had a good look at her face. All this to settle my voracious curiosity. I had to see her. I had to introduce myself face to face and to see the girl whose ghost I saw dance twice across the graveyard. 

A bottle of water came in handy and I poured it over the casket lid and wiped a spot to peek in, cupping my hands around my eyes as though by instinct. But it was thick cloudy glass and still so dark inside that it did no good. I expected to see bones, but I saw nothing at all. It was like staring into an abyss. Why a glass lid? I don't know. But I unfastened the latch and slowly opened it. I expected a horrid smell. Dust and cobwebs. I expected gas. A mist. Bats. Worms. Maggots. Dirt. Something to pop out at me. Something to explode. I expected anything but what I got. 

I shined my phone's flashlight onto her face and the girl was there remarkably as she must have been when she was buried. Certainly, no worse for wear. No decomposition. No rigor mortis. No smell. No nothing. Nothing but a beautiful pale face. Her cheeks stained as though from crying. A beautiful body buried in a black cotton, silk, and lace dress. It looked like a wedding dress had death been the groom. 

I stared at her. I got lost staring and was caught off guard when she cried out a gasp for air and her eyes opened exposing two blood-red orbs. I stumbled back, dropping the phone and the only source of light I had. I was lying on the outside of her casket and she was still heaving, loudly, asphyxiated by 200 years. It was a terrifying sound I've never heard the likes of in my life. That of an ensnared rabbit. Of something being tortured. It was the sound of screams from Hell as I would imagine them. 

My God, I was horrified! But I had no time to lie there in dirt and panic, frozen in fear. I luckily found my phone and frantically climbed onto the open lid and up and out of the hole, no longer concerned about replacing the dirt or the sod, thus, preserving the scene of the crime. Let them see what I had seen! 

I, at least, thought enough to grab the shovel and raced to the truck, not caring who saw me. I could still hear her gasping from hundreds of feet away that horrific blood-curling screech. I would assume her body was having difficulty adjusting after two centuries interred. Death and life were battling in her open grave, in the wound I opened. 

I sat in my truck and looked across the street in disbelief, out of breath. Then I felt terrible for running. For leaving her behind in an apparent state of agony, so I casually walked back across the street, though two trucks passed. I waved as though I knew them and hoped they didn't recognize me or the dirt on my clothes. I hoped they thought I was a groundskeeper. I was thankful I wore a hat. It wasn't likely they would recognize me. But night was giving way to day and the purplish sky was lightening, revealing the terrible crime I had committed. 

She was lying in the coffin when I returned, motionless. I watched her from above. The view of an owl over a rabbit from a tree limb. She was a lovely site. I hadn't seen a more beautiful woman in my life and I knew it. She had black hair and cream-colored skin. I looked at her and forgot everything else. I forgot all the pain and suffering of this cruel world. All the murder and death. The sadness and grief. I forgot about Norwegian suicide pods and pitbulls and fat women at bars and hecklers and haters. Hangovers and lonely nights. Broken promises and how the darkness consumes the world. 

It was light. Barely dawn, but it was dawn. I didn't need a flashlight to see her. Then her eyes opened and tears of blood cascaded over her temples and her eyes were no longer dark-red pools of horror. They were white and dark brown. She roused awake. She yawned. And all I did was watch her. Like I was watching the most usual thing in the world. A young woman being birthed from the womb of her own grave. 

Dirt is an amazing thing. The earth. We bury seeds and they grow to become things. Tiny, infinitesimal things grow to become great trees. Trees that house hundreds of animals. Or that become lumber or that produce food that sustains us. And people that are planted on this earth become celestial beings, all because they were once planted in dirt like a crop. But there she was, and just as I couldn't say anything, I couldn't look away. She stared at me. Maybe they don't all go to Heaven. Maybe some get left behind. 

"John Silver, I presume?" she said weakly.

She yawned again. 

"Forgive me," she begged. "I am still not quite awake."

I helped her out of the grave. It seemed like the decent thing to do. Her hand was cold and small. Her voice, meek. There was something very trusting about her nature. The view of me, even from the grave, didn't seem to alarm her. She expected me. She knew my name. She stood before me brushing dirt from her dress. She was short and slender and absolutely gorgeous. 

"How do you know my name?"

"I went to a witch. She told me the love I seek bears the name of John Silver. Yet, he was still not born. They suggested I choose another, but another wouldn't ever do. So the witch made me a potion to drink. A potion to sleep until he found me. They buried me in a glass coffin, I presume, to observe me. I imagine they let me lie in our home for a while hoping someone would come along and wake me. Or hoping their prayers would."

"Like Sleeping Beauty," I remarked. 

"Sleeping what?"

"Never mind. Forgive me. Go on."

"It was a sleeping potion they knew I took. But would I awake, perhaps they wondered. No. I've slept for so long, not once to stir or wake, confined in that hole. Though my soul stirred and was not so confined. Curious as I was, I looked for you. You are, of course, John Silver."

"Yes."

She smiled. "Bury me in glass, I wrote to them. Lay me for all to see so that he might find me when he comes. So that you might find me. But I suppose they had to bury me in the dirt, or be accused of witchery. They didn't know my love was not to come for — what year is it?"

"2025." 

"Two hundred years!" she marveled looking around at the gravestones. "I've left my body and walked the grounds, but my soul is confined here. There are the headstones of my parents. Everyone I knew is buried here. But I was only sleeping. I was waiting for you."

"I don't know about this. I —"

"You said yourself you were looking for an old-fashioned woman. I'd say I'm as old-fashioned as they come."

"You heard me?"

"Of course. I am a wonderful listener. Even dead, or sleeping, as I was. Can we go from here? Daylight is fast breaking. I wish to take my leave of this place."

I knew we had to go. There would be no replacing the dirt. They would find her grave empty and assume someone stole her corpse, for whatever reason. But we had to leave. Isabella's legs didn't work quite as well as they ought considering 200 years of lethargy, so I carried her to the truck. She looked at me while I did and smiled and it was the most beautiful moment I knew on this earth. 

For whatever reason, I thought of that Noweigan suicide pod. This was quite the opposite thing. She allowed me to put her in the truck and was startled when I started it — the growl of the motor. But she had it in her mind that this was a new world so far removed from her own and her eyes and ears would witness a million different things they've never witnessed before. And she absorbed it all with a quiet and credulous enthusiasm. I suppose her ghost had spied on this world for so long that it wasn't as foreign to her as two centuries removed would seem. 

I carried her into my apartment and ran her a bath. She soaked in it for hours and came out wearing clothes I left for her on the bathroom sink — a t-shirt, gym shorts, and some socks. 

She peaked her head out of the bathroom and asked if I had a razor. Under the sink, I said. There's a toothbrush and toothpaste in the cabinet. 

Toothpaste? 

I had to explain toothpaste to her. Toilet paper, she figured out. She said they used powders mixed with mint or charcoal. I could hear her harsh reaction to the toothpaste by spitting and crying. You should try mouthwash, I called. Does it burn too? She soon found out. 

It was all amusing and fun. Watching her learn. Watching her turn the TV on and off again. The look upon her face as she turned the switch of the lamp. Her excitement when I took her shopping for clothes the next day. Taking her to eat. Watching her drink a Coke and subsequently spitting it out. 

A few days later, it was in the paper that someone had dug up the grave of Isabella Young and everyone got riled up. Her body was missing. It got picked up in the national news and was on Facebook and X. But there was no clue as to who had done it or what became of her remains. Her "remains," they said.

A police investigation ensued and they discovered that a man had left a rose for her often. They interviewed the lady who sold the roses and determined that it was Hank Williams. They, of course, knew that I was Hank Williams. They figured out I bought a shovel the day before from The Honeybadger who never forgets a face. They came by and asked if I knew anything about it, believing full well I did. I told them they could search my office and apartment, which they did. A lady cop and Scotty, the captain. 

2

"Just so happens the girl you were leaving flowers for got dug up, John. What am I to make of that?"

"Well, I don't know, Scotty. Coincidence, I guess."

'

The three of us sat in my office and drank coffee. Then Isabella walked in. She had been shopping. Scotty stood up and took off his hat and the female officer smiled at her. She sat down next to me and I got nervous for a minute until I realized how unbelievable it all was. Then it amused me and I wanted to laugh, but I didn't. There she was, sitting right in front of them. Making small talk. Talking like she hadn't talked in 200 years, but they were none the wiser. And they left with a dumbfounded "sorry to bother you."

After they left, I took out a bottle of Jack Daniels and poured myself a drink. Isabella and I laughed about it. Then I got out my guitar and started practicing for the weekend's show. I played a few songs for her and then let her listen to Hank on my phone. 

2

"Do you have a fiddle?" she asked. 

"No. It's just me in the band. I don't have any Drifting Cowboys."

"You need a fiddle. I can fiddle for you. My pa taught me. Ma didn't approve, but he taught me, anyhow. Said music feeds the soul. I was an only child so I got all the attention. Many evenings pa and I played late into the night until my fingers bled. I can play for you. I can learn the songs."

We went to the music store and bought her a fiddle and she played a few songs standing there in the shop. 200 years removed and she hadn't forgotten a thing. The rest of the week she listened to the Hank songs on the set list and memorized the fiddle or improvised where there was none. I sat and listened to her practice when I got home from work. She had a natural ear for music and suddenly I went from a one man band to a duet. I had one Drifting Cowgirl by my side. 

By the night of the show, she had made friends with Debbie and got a tattoo. A cherub angel on her wrist. She bought a watch and I got her a phone. She loved to drink whiskey, but favored dark beers — Guinness, especially. She had amalgamated rapidly and she was beautiful in black, standing there beside me for the show. It was hard not to stare at her. 

"I'd like to introduce a special friend of mine," I began. "Miss Izzy Young is going to be playing fiddle for me this evening. So, with that being said, I hope y'all enjoy the show." 

I didn't care if they recognized her name from the various reports of the grave robbery. I don't think anyone did because it was a week later and everyone's attention span of news is about two days tops. Besides, very few of them actually listen to me. But even if they did, no one would believe she was one in the same. It is too incredible to believe. She whispered to me that she would like to go by Izzy Bones, so Izzy Bones she became.

The first song was Hey Good Lookin and as I paused to drink my beer to let her play her fiddle solo, the whole bar stopped to pay attention. Everyone's jaw dropped and several people began to dance. So I gave her the sign to play it back and I smiled at her watching her chin the wood and tenderly stroke the strings with the bow in the dim barlight. The neon light of a red Budweiser sign shined atop her black head like a halo. I realized then as I listened to her play that I had found my missing piece. Not just of my band, but of my life. And the cockamamie story she had told me about a witch prognosticating our affair 200 years ago seemed less batshit crazy to me until it was believable and then undoubtable truth. 

The show was phenomenal and people applauded and tipped our tip jar, several asking where we were playing next. Mark at the bar gave me a thumbs up and wink as though I were a naked fat woman. I had been missing someone to play fiddle. But not just anyone. The one. The only one who could. 

We made love that night. But I stopped as I took her clothes off. Before I pressed against her and touched her and pushed inside of her. Before I kissed her too passionately to stop. Before I felt her too intimately to turn back.

"What's wrong?" she asked.   

"I just thought about it. You're only fifteen years old."

"Fifteen?" she laughed. "No, darling, I am 215 years old. I was born in 1810, remember. It is the cradle that I am robbing, as they say." She unzipped my pants and disemboweled them with her hand. "Besides, you jerked off on my grave. I'd say we are past the point of humility and decency. Yes?" 

"You saw me?"

"I did. And I've been reading women's magazines to know all the proper terminology. I've stomached those magazines to know what to do and how to do it. I've been sexually liberated and educated on the matter in less than a week. I know what I'm doing, and I've been waiting 200 years to do it. I am the fiddle to your guitar, John Silver. So do as your fated."

And so with steel guitars and fiddlin' in my head, the slow stroke of a bow and the soft plucking of the fingers, in the deep dark of night when all was swallowed, or dead or dying besides for us, we made love. And all was right in the world. My only regret was that I hadn't dug her up sooner, but I was too happy to feel regret, too pleasured to feel disatisfied again, and too much in love to regret anything. We made love all night and again in the morning. 

I'll never get out of this world alive, but while I am in it, I am going to live it.