Time Wounds
Jim Trappel sat quietly in his white plastic chair on his well-worn porch drinking his McGuthy’s Blended Scotch. McGuthy’s was good because it didn’t cost too much and it didn’t taste so bad. He savored maybe three variations of McGuthy’s drinks. Sometimes he mixed them with milk, sometimes they went hot with sugar, and tonight they were straight up. He had spent the day dogging the neighborhood side streets looking savagedly intent upon hot broken sidewalks and crazy mean tires going by and by now he felt the summery fog of a day spent kicking. He sat in his wet plastic chair on the porch that only had room for him and the wet chair: they stacked up well, one on top of the other. He on top.

It was the black and white hour to him but in France it was known as the Blue Hour, when the day drifts off and starts dreaming about the night. He felt alright sitting there even though his pants were damp from the chair at least he wasn’t cold. Evening felt like it might have a soul for once and that coupled with the McGuthy’s gave him a quiet, satisfying hum. Some kids started to fight a couple houses down and he listened to them as they fired each other up. Everything smelled like cat piss. It was early winter or what most people preferred to called Fall, but he liked “Early Winter.” To him there was Summer and there was Winter. Fall was the Summer turning to Winter and the opposite was Spring. It made him mad how flowered up things had to be.

His radio was on but was on it‘s own sucking binge tonight. It kept playing his favorite songs but none gave him his usual magic feeling and it pissed him off. It was starting to become some kinda pattern. He’d feel flat and then fear, flat then fear: flat fear. There was an article in the newspaper about a week ago that he’d read. Talked about how a lot of Americans were feeling...flat...after the terrorism and the stock scandals and the Conspiracy, and the Big Bad Feeling. It interviewed a couple of mid-range people and they said basically they couldn’t get into anything. (That would be fear then flat, he thought). Basically they were depressed, and now he was depressed. Fucking media. He bet himself that Jimmy Carter felt pretty bad too, probably worse. He could just picture those paper-bag eyes and big Southern smile and then he pictured Jimmy lifting a sweaty beer to his funny lips and mirrored the vision with his McGuthy’s. In his mind for just a second he was overlooking a sunlit field of knobby peanuts growing clear as the eye could see. A cruising breeze lifted his hair a bit and then his eyes shifted and the image of Jimmy Carter’s farm became the passing reality of the cracking side street in front of him.

The back of his neck was waiting to be itched and the evening gave a hot baton on to the impatient night.