https://open.spotify.com/track/4qA8M5hJn45rtFyWH5Ixar?si=0a94d8318d774222
Note: Write-On was cancelled last night, but I felt like I’ve
been neglecting my writing lately, so I did a prompt night on my own. I found a
prompt “Write something inspired by a random song.” Well, it wasn’t random as I
put on John Prine’s “Bruised Orange” album on the turntable. The opening song “Fish
and Whistle” is upbeat, but the lyrics have the usual Prine hard reality undertones.
I latched onto things like the mention of the car wash, hurt ankles, forgiveness,
and fishing. I don’t know if this going anywhere, but it’s just a couple scenes
about some folks living through hard times.
***
Cars were lined bumper to bumper from the door of the
automatic wash at Suds Even for Duds to the car wash’s entrance and into the
eastbound lane of Lincolnway. It was early March, the sky was blue, and the air
temps unseasonably warm leaving all the car owners of Jordan itching to wash
away the layers of dirt and salt collected during the long, cold winter. John
watched the procession of cars, most of them white or black, from the swing on
his porch across the street.
His left foot was propped upon a box with an Amazon logo on
the side. Ma had ordered something she probably had already forgot about, the
delivery guy left it in front of the door the day before just in time to get
soaked by a late afternoon shower. Lucky for John, the cardboard held enough
integrity to handle his foot and ankle. The later was wrapped tight with brown
gauze.
“You smokin’ out here?” John’s father crashed through the
front door wearing light blue basketball shorts and no shirt. He was fifty-two,
the skin of his chest was a permanently red and cracked like old leather. He
was missing half his teeth, and the other half were hanging on by threads.
“Nah, I ain’t smokin?” John said. “Just watching the rich
folks awashin’ their cars.”
John’s father, a man named Ozzie, stretched his lower back
and belched. He was fifty-two, but looked twenty years older, worked on the
roads, when he worked at all, and smoked three packs a day. Still, he couldn’t
forgive John for catching him smoking five years earlier when John was
thirteen.
“That Buick there,” Ozzie said. “And that Escalade there.”
“Yeah, what about them?”
“Those two together cost more than this here house,” Ozzie
blew air between the two remaining teeth behind his upper lip.
“Shit, the gas they’re burning idling costs more than this
here house.”
“That’s the way the world goes around.” Ozzie said. “I’m
goin’ fishin’. Don’t sit on your ass all day.”
Across the way, the Escalade honked at a Ford F150 to move
ahead. The guy in the Ford lowered his window and stuck his middle finger out.
John struggled to his feet, keeping weight off his bad ankle, and lifted the
Amazon box and hobbled toward the door.
***
John dangled his swollen ankle in the river, the gauze was
stuffed under his buttcheek to keep it from blowing into the water. The cement
pad below him was warm from the sun, the shadow from the Route 6 bridge hadn’t
reached this far over yet. His father was a hundred feet down yonder, casting
just below the dam. A cigarette dangled between his lips and a cooler filled
with buds was at his feet.
Ozzie was a slender built man with a paunch protruding
noticeably over his belt buckle. John was built the same, he just hadn’t aged
and ate enough yet for the paunch. There was no doubt that Ozzie Frey was
John’s father. They could have been twin brothers if not for the obvious age
difference.
“Hi ya, John boy.” Deanna Ploge plopped down beside him. She
had been a year ahead of John in school before she dropped out at sixteen. Now
she was an entrepreneur, selling medicinal and physical recreation activities from
the backseat of her Oldsmobile.
“Hi ya, Deanna.”
“Heard you busted up your ankle.” She wore a top with a
plunging neckline. She’d lost some baby fat since her school days, but she was
still on the pudgy side. John supposed guys around here got hard up enough to pay for a go
with the likes of her.
John lifted his foot from the river, the gnarly bruises
enhanced by the cold water.
“Ouch! All that from a hole in the street.”
“Walking home from Donnie’s last night. Just heard a snap
and went down in the middle of the crosswalk there by the laundromat, had to
drag myself across the rest of the road.”
“Cripes, you go to the doctor.”
“Ma went to a lawyer this morning, he’s going to pay for a
doctor supposedly. We’re going to sue the city for everything it’s got.”
“You mean a Dairy Mart and a three-quarters empty mall?”
“That’s probably the extents of it.”
The river rushed by, smelling of dead fish and sewage. John
supposed he might have added an infection to the list of his problems by
dipping his injured ankle in it. Deanna sat with her legs folded under her. She
was probably waiting for the high school to let out in about an hour. The
students bought quite a bit of her medicinals.
“Well, time to do a bit of collectin’.” Deanna stood and walked
down the way toward Ozzie.
“Collectin? What does he owe you for?”
Deanna didn’t answer, just patted her ass twice and kept walking.
