Other things

Angel
I picked her up on the seventeenth of December. The sky was an envelope of black clouds, and I was giving the jackdaws and pines that line the side of the road in Michigan new names. That’s how damn tired I was. I kept closing my eyes and thinking how my mom used to make me watch Lawrence Welk, how he always called everything “wunnerful.” It struck me as funny then, but maybe I was just too drunk, or tired, or both.

Anyhow, I was in the middle of that long lonely drive on the way to Benton Harbor where my mother was having her funeral. She could have picked a better spot to croak, but she wanted her ashes spread over the old St. Joseph’s River for some reason. We never talked a lot about where she grew up.

So I’m calling out to Joe, whose standing on the side of the road, a beautiful red maple with red veined leaves, and he starts screaming at me, “What the hell are you doing?” The next thing I know I’m all tangled up in Joe and a few of his friends, and something on my head is bleeding as if it was a fire hydrant hose.

And Joe and all his friends are screaming bloody murder at me, and I realize I’ve been talking to the trees for a little while too long. Then, this angel appears.

She’s screaming at me too, “Are you all right. Can you feel your legs?”
I look down, and they look kind of smashed up, but I’m sure I can feel them. She looks so damn concerned for me that I want to marry her straight off, no questions asked. Joe was a mess though, I’d severed his arm, and it was coming through the right side of my windshield.

“Lucky I didn’t meet you before,” I said, gesturing to Joe’s arm puncturing the passenger side seat.

That angel gave me the strangest look, “I don’t understand what you are saying,” she says, bending back to the window. “Are you all right?”

“I’m flying high as a kite,” I say, sliding my legs from beneath the steering wheel. “Ole Joe already punched a way out of this car for me.” I climbed through the shattered front windshield and onto the hood of the car. And I must confess this first, the variegated striations of light, coming off that glass, from the sun, a million miles away, was—shit I don’t know.

“I called 911,” she said, some sort of worried look in her eyes.

“Do you have wheels,” I asked her as if we were in a movie. “I’ve got to get to my mother’s funeral,” I told her. “Joe’s already screwed up my schedule.” I lifted my middle finger toward Joe, who was just as dead as he’d always been.

“Did something hit you in the head? Are you all right?” she asked, running a finger across my forehead. She pulled her hand away, and it was red on the tips.

“I promise not to bleed in your car,” I told her, holding a hand over my heart as if I were a Boy Scout—if Boy Scouts do that, my mother never let me join them.