BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 74

1980

DAVID

His cassette player was at full volume, first with one cassette and, when that failed to alter his mood or even divert it, then another, and now it is silent, the need to strip sensation swollen to the bursting point. The windows are rolled down but the noise of air rushing past and his wheels on the highway don't mask the shame, embarrassment, loss, self-loathing or the host of other malicious emotions.

He considers stopping to buy beer but feels incapable of human interaction. It makes him shudder to think about. In tears, his throat buckled with never encountered feelings and barely allowing breath into his lungs, he might have been able to drink but not to coherently speak to another person.

The miles melt away, his speed untied to the legal limit but held back by his vehicle's economical engine. Traffic lessens. Expanse between houses increases. Distance in both time and space start having an effect on the conflicting emotions that hound him. A plan arises, he has his gear in the back, he doesn't need to face his parents just yet. The Taber camp can be shelter for the night.

***

The car, always partly camouflaged by its nondescript make, by its model and dusky color, by the dust layer covering it after miles traveling gravel roads, sits behind one boxcar, out of view to those traveling the roads intersecting nearby. He lays his sleeping bag on the ground between the boxcars, nearer one than the other, crawls in, tries to sleep. Dusk's process not fully finished, he rolls to the boxcar, rolls under to avoid the remaining light, seeking comfort of some sort, the kind a mother gives a child, a cat its kitten, but a kind unavailable to him as an adult. The nearness of the boxcar floor, the hiddenness from light, from view, the closeness of the ground, gives the comfort that proximity to the inanimate provides. Spiders, bugs, even snakes may lay in wait but there are bigger threats taking his attention, an overwhelming shame, a sense of being cosmically ridiculed. It rolls in like a fog bank, thick enough to preclude any notion of existence beyond it.

He is safe here for the moment. Still, he listens for threats, his hearing focussing like a set of binoculars, pulling in first more obvious sounds and then adjusting for smaller, even minute ones. He hears sprinkler pipes being moved somewhere far off, the bounce of an aluminum latch ringing for twenty steps, the clang of a pipe meeting the end of a pipe already in place, a set of sounds indicating connection between the two, a short wait before the rattle of another bouncing latch begins.

It's a rhythm, soothing in itself but also in its rephrasing of his own not-so-distant experience moving lines. He still catches himself counting to twenty, the number of paces it takes to move a pipe fifty feet. And he catches himself, too, repeating the words "move pipe", often the first thing he does as he wakes, a mantra he started in his drinking days to force himself to get up and go to work rather than go back to sleep and lose his job.

Those aren't pleasant memories, there isn't anything pleasant about moving pipes while you do it, though he has no doubt that as an old man he'll recall it fondly—dreary work becoming a nostalgic task. Not pleasant at the moment they occurred, yet those recollections offer solace in comparison to the pounding alternatives now working at him. A spiky handful of cactus on a cliff face, that's what those pipe moving memories are, and though he doesn't appreciate being in a position of falling he is grateful for the cacti's presence, eagerly seizes them to exchange a familiar pain to avoid a more threatening one.

Now, another familiar sound, a counterpoint to the lullaby of the whipping pipes. The rattle of a wheel move's drive line, coming from a different direction, the noise of the gasoline motor that powers it lost amid the shaft's turning, a quarter-mile of one inch tubing, supported by cheap bearings, wobbling this way and that, striking the pipe below it and emitting a cacophonous clatter. The wheels roll once, twice, three times, and the motor shuts off.

He knows that sound, too, has cursed it, spent countless hours waiting for one line to turn, to shut the engine off, to detach it, to move to the next and the next, morning after night after morning all summer long, a maddening routine often undertaken in a hangover's throes. But familiarity, even a despised one, plays better than a new dis-ease. It chatters less, creating less friction, operating in a well-worn if recalcitrant groove.

The pipe noises eventually dissipate, to be replaced within a few minutes by the tick-tick-ticking of sprinkler heads rotating. First, the initial sputter, as water from the pump travels down the quarter mile long lines, pushing out air, making lazy spurts and spits, then sounding not unlike a jet preparing for take off as all the disparate discordances eliminate at once and gather a single intention. All of a sudden, the multiple sounds of sprinklers in various stages of readiness give way to rhythmic spraying, a jet of water arcing from each into the air, an arm poised aside it to break the stream and as it does so forcing it to rotate.

David doesn't know how many lines he hears, how many sprinkler heads turn in the penumbra of his aural range, but they provide every bit as much comfort as the mother's heartbeat does for the baby in her womb, and only an occasional hum of a vehicle's tires on the paved highway or the alternative spray of gravel on a vehicle going north or south breaks the rhythm. He almost, though not quite, separates himself from the event of today. That the salesgirl who he bought the ring from won't see his picture or name in the paper doesn't bother him, for the moment. That his love that seemed so real was only imaginary seems a distant notion, temporarily. That the futures he imagined, that once he took as possible, were no more than idle daydream, at best a child's manufacturing and lacking any substance, he partially forgets, enough so that it lacks power to engulf or even bother him. He sleeps, exhausted in a new way he hopes never to replicate. He will wake in the morning, he knows, to sensations rivaling the madness of his worst hangover, but for now, compressed in this moment, compressed into this space not big enough for him to turn in, he experiences peace.

©2025 Ralph Thurston