Dust Devil

I never lived anywhere but this fucking town. Everyone makes fun of it elsewheres, bout all the baby mamas and tweakers and trailer trash. And I’m all like shit, it aint my fault I been born here. Been thinking about movin up north actually, soon as I get some money saved. Got to get my license. They been suspending my license since before I could even drive. Reason is, I can’t seem to stay away from the alcohol. Been hospitalized twice on its account, from drinking that is. One time I was dead for like twenty seconds or something but I don’t remember that at all, just remember waking up in the bed and the bright lights all around.

Used to be I worked as a dog trainer. Attack dogs, security dogs. Lots of German Shepherds, dobs, rots, pits. Gotta wear special wire mesh clothing that they can’t get them fangs through if they have occasion to turn on you but one still turned on me once and got through the sleeve and I let out a howl. Lotta money in them dogs. Best to crop the ears when they still pups, makes em look fiercer and that way they don’t get them floppy ears all hung up on anything. If they are like jumping through barbed wire or a shattered window or lord knows what. Anyway I quit that job though the boss said I was one of the best he’d ever seen with the dogs, a natural he said, though he still owes me a few hundred I know he’s good for it and anyway he gave me a pup to keep for myself free of charge. Love that pup. At night she eats all the spiders that try to crawl into bed with me. Got hella spiders up there in the corners of my room, cobwebs and shit, and I tell em, yall just stay right up there and I’ll stay right down here and we can live happily ever after and they all good about it in the daytime but come nightfall, well suffice to say it’s a different story altogether.

Used to have a job on a lil concrete crew too, just haulin and mixin, had a little wheelbarrow but then tire went flat so I had to move with them orange five gallon buckets, and eventually the fucking handle gives way and the bucket hits the dirt and slops concrete up all over my eyes. Concrete’s got lye in it and it burned my eyes to shit. I hit the ground pretty quick. Took about twenty minutes of my moanin and rollin around down there for my boss to take me to the motherfuckin hospital, and then I was blind for like two weeks. Total darkness, if you can imagine. Suffice to say that that was the end of that.

Then there was a few stints of cowboyin but I never took much to that. Little roofin, but the company made us jump from one roof to the next, that way they could get a whole block done without havin the boys going up and down and movin the ladders, save money I guess, and the houses were all clustered together in one of those neat little neighborhoods where all the places are just the same, but still, it was too fucking hazardous for my blood. Now I been on this firefighting for a while and I aim to stick with it for some time, it’s good work, basically just cruisin round in the woods. Maybe get my saw certification in the next couple years and work my way till I’m a big faller, and eventually I’ll start my own business, could be pullin like two hundred grand a year, someday.

Got kicked out of high school for throwing a chair at the teacher. Course she’d been provoking me something awful. Like one day I show up and I forgot my textbook at home, so I figure I can borrow one of those classroom copies for the day same as I seen other kids doin, but no, she sends me straight down to the principal’s office. On top of that I was already on their shit list for getting caught drinkin on school property, course it was after classes had let out but still, I got the minor in possession. One thing after another and eventually I lost my temper and that was that, no more school. Thing was, all my friends were still in school so I have a whole lot of nothin to do all fuckin day. Aint shit to do in this town. Eventually I wound up headin back down to the school anyway just to hang out. Got close with the art teacher, big ass totally bald dude we called Mister Clean. He got me real into all these drawings I been doin. Used to be I would only do em when I was like fryin balls or drunk or stoned or something, then it would all open up, but thanks to Mister Clean, nowadays I learned to do em anytime I want. Frogs and faces and waterfalls and trees and big machines nobody even invented yet, all sorts a shit. Sad thing is, I went a lookin for Mister Clean bout a year back. He aint there no more. State cut the program. Aint no more art in this town.

I gotta kid, little one-year-old daughter. Course her momma’s the wicked bitch of the west but I can’t hold that against the youngin. That was eighteen minutes of fun I’m gonna be payin for the next eighteen years. Already I’m months behind on the child support checks. I gotta new girlfriend, friend of my sister’s, course I don’t see any of em much nowadays seen as I’m always away on these fires. When I am in town we all go out to the reservoir and jump off the high rocks, backflippin n shit, get a case of Bush and shotgun bout half of em right quick and then drink the rest all casual till we fall asleep. Or we go out four wheelin. One time I was on a four-wheeler and the darkest fuckin dust devil I ever seen picked me and the rig up clear off the ground and carried us away. It was the damnedest thing, cuz first off I was so scared I threw up and all the throw up was spinnin around in there with me and soilin my clothes. But then I got a strange feeling. It was like, I got happy, even happier than before I got picked up, and all the troubles I’d been havin didn’t matter to me at all anymore, I was just spinning around light as a feather, effortless like, graceful. Eventually the dust devil threw me down, and then threw the four-wheeler near square on top of me, missed by a lil hair, lucky to, the thing woulda crushed me sure. I had no idea where I was, but the four-wheeler was still runnin, so away I went. Took me till nigh on midnight to find my way back.

Went snowmobiling once and had another disaster, or near disaster, rather. Had it up to like eighty on this seemingly frozen solid lake. Apparently it wasn’t as frozen as I thought cuz sure enough when I slow for a second the whole fuckin piece goes down, through the ice, into the water. Freezing, cold you can’t imagine. Crashing down with me on it. It was the middle of the night, starry too, luckily I managed to crawl out and I seen a light and found a house right quick. Course it being late it was all shut up but I start bangin and hollerin and soon enough this old woman comes out and takes me in and gets me warmin up. Next day we hired up couple local kids to pull the machine out of the drink. They said it happens all the time.

When I was younger my momma was a junkie. She’s six years sober now, went back to school and works as a drug and alcohol counselor, but I still remember in my mind the way we was. All sorts of junkies all over the fucking house all the time. Doin it all. Fucking meth, that trash was the worst of it, no question, but heroin too, and horse tranquilizers and shit, sometimes crack, all of em chain smokin and drunk all the fuckin time. When she decided to clean up everyone was like nah, you’ll never do it, you’ll never be able to get straight, and I reckon that’s just what made her so determined. Cold turkey she did it, and it’s been six years.

Not that it aint still obvious her shit used to be all up in the air. Like she only goes the grocery store in the dead of night, I mean mad late at night, and no matter how much shit she is buying, how much or however little, it still takes her like a fucking hour cuz she wanders around in a daze, especially in the cereal aisle, she is totally fucking captivated by all the bright colors and the exotic animals on the boxes or something. Ironic thing is that she don’t even like cereal, she don’t even touch the stuff, still she’ll spend like half the night reading all the ingredients on all those boxes she aint never gonna open anyway, no way no how. Then there is the produce section, that one tends to rope her in too. She gotta stop and smell all the plums and the pears, and again, she never buys or eats any of that shit, and the kinda budget she’s on she couldn’t afford to even if she wanted to. So in the end, after hours of this wandering around and me half crazy from that shitty ass music they play in them joints all night to keep the people calm or whatever she winds up walking out with the same old meager bag of shit she walks out with every fuckin time. Bread, cheese, milk, eggs, a big ass bag of frozen ground beef marked down to nearly nothing cuz the shit gonna spoil so soon. Bag covered in bright orange stickers, like the color the folks wear on the road crew so they wont get run down.

My old man’s a different story. He and mom split before I was born (same thing my kid will probably be saying by the time she’s my age) but anyway he was in Vietnam and then the Merchant Marine and lord knows what kinda strange evil power brought him out to these desolate parts. Fact is he was never actually married to my mother, and she says that she never even really loved him. He was a roughneck, working cleaning out old oil tanks and pipes and whatnot, full hazmat gear, oxygen tank and shit, the whole nine yards, anyway he gave that up when he got into firefightin and that’s what got me into firefightin, got me to give up that job with the dogs, though that there was a good job despite my gettin a lil chunk taken outta my arm that one time.

After seein at such a young age, even before I got kicked out from the school that is, what some of those chemicals can do to you, did do, to my momma and her handful of junkie friends, I vowed never to touch that crap, and been real good on that count so far. Not to say I’m some kinda saint, I drink too much, smoke too much, sleep too much, but at least I eat my veggies when I’m able.

Most important thing is to get the fuck out of this town. There’s like this big jumble of images confronting me here, and it’s got so tangled I can’t no longer make hide nor hair of it. There’s like the water tower, the old rail yard, the nursery and the mill at night and all the dusty roads, just four wheeler roads mostly with game trails crossing em ever fifteen feet or so, and little buttes and mesas and the like, or else dry lakebeds, creek beds, piles of junk and so forth, but sooner or later it all looks just the same with them dust devils always spinning around in the distance.

I got plenty of regrets, but one of the biggest is the animals I killed in my youth. Not like huntin or killin pests, but just the little senseless killings. I guess all kids do it but somehow it stuck with me something awful. Like at recess back in middle school frying a big carpenter ant with the sun and a magnifying glass. And pinchin off the tail end of an earth worm with a rusty nail, ya know to see if it’s true what they say that they just keep on goin so long as you leave half the length or more connected to the head end. And once, there was a cat.

So like, I had some real good friends in my day (though I reckon it still is my day), but none that can compare to Spike. We all call im that on account of he’s got this big ass beard that hangs down from his chin like an icicle, ya know, in the shape of a spike or something. On topa that he got hella sharp features and a bit of an attitude. In fact he has a big attitude, two guitars and an attitude. Spikey you could call him if you wanted to perk his ears up a little. Anyway, Spike has an abnormally strong interest in heavy metal music. He has this crazy collection of black t-shirts from all the shows he’s been to over the years. He has a white van with like a cot n shit in the back. So if he aint workin (he works at the mill) he’ll drive clear outta state for a show and rage it and then sleep in the back of the van. Spike don’t drink or smoke or eat meat even. Some of the guys in town said he was like some kinda queer but that’s bullshit, I reckon Spike don’t have no use for sex one way or the other, not in any respect, just aint somethin he needs.

Anyway these t-shirts man, you wouldn’t believe em. Tool, Metallica, Lightening Bolt, Pantera, Slayer, Boris, Iron Maiden, Napalm Death, Melvins, Tomahawk, Mastodon, Harvey Milk, Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Faith No More, Cannibal Corpse, Dimmu Borgir, the list goes on. Spike always has letters lying around from someone in Tennessee, though I don’t know who they from and somehow I reckon it aint my place to ask so I never have.

Lately I been thinking a lot about God, which always brings me back to that time with the dust devil. See, way I was raised, God wasn’t really something you meant to think on, rather, he was just there, like on Sundays, when someone dies or gets married or something, when someone’s off to war, shit like that. But these days God seems to be everywhere all the time. Like even in the grocery store and at the gas station and shit. And when it’s late at night and I’m all drunk and pissing on someone’s lawn with my hand up against a telephone pole, I kinda feel him then, in a funny way. At first I figured this must mean my time was near through. Like I was gonna die soon. But in the last week I started thinking like maybe it’s a good sign, like he’s watching out for me or something.

I been thinking what to do with my future. I was thinkin, first thing’s to get the fuck outta here, then get my own spread somewhere else, all pimp n shit, and then take care to see to my momma and kid n girlfriend if I still gotta girlfriend at that point that is to say. Maybe get Spike some more of them t-shirts and a new van or something, a black one. Also, I’d like to find Mister Clean and if he aint flush on all the art supplies he needs I’d get him up to speed, maybe even try to get em his old job back. This town needs all the help it can get and I reckon getting the art back would be as good as any place to start. After all that, I reckon I could spend more time with the drawings, maybe try to sell a few even on the side of my sawing business. That would really be something, getting paid for something like that.

Copyright © 2010
 971 MENU