Shrove Tuesday Today the fifth anniversary of his death she comes across the journal he kept the one semester he was a student at Pfeiffer not much there a few clumsy poems a para- graph about life and something he scratched through the beginning of a character piece on Walt Rainey who woke up one morning to find fifteen hundred dollars missing from the old coat he used as a safe in the abandoned Ford chassy where he lived still lives off of Sunderland Hall Road still out riding his rickety bicycle every day rain or shine eighty-two years old hardly make a run down Church Street without seeing him and today nothing will do but we get in the car and go find old Walt to give him five dollars she says because he's one of the angels who inhabit the earth and watch over us and for all we know he doesn't have any food to eat or a coat for this cold front coming in tomorrow and like that until after a sweep up Church and down Union God grants us a vision of Walt taking a break across the street from the Dairy Queen sitting cross-legged on the curb with a paper napkin tucked in his collar dipping his fingers into a banana shake and throwing away the chunks of fruit like peanut hulls not anywhere near starving from the looks of it but she gets out of the car anyway and bends down to whisper some kind of benediction trying to fold his sticky wrinkled fingers around the five when all of a sudden Walt grabs hold of her wrist and jerks her down into his lap and while she's screaming bloody murder and struggling to get up again milk shake all over her Walt jabbers away a mile a minute holding her close and rocking side to side like Ray Charles doing Georgia on his mind and by the time I get over there and pry them apart she has balled the five up in her fist and drawn back ready to hit him in the face with it calling him a wooly booger and a false prophet and every other name she can think of till I've got her locked up safe in the Camry again where she suddenly stops talking altogether scrooched over next to the door all the way home staring at the jack pines like they were people lined up to say I told you so and as usual in these matters I keep my distance and don't volunteer any counsel because sure as I did it would all be my fault because I don't believe in angels or redemption and because I am always making up damn fool questions like if Jesus was without sin then why did he ask John to baptize him or if he was truly a sinner and really needed to get baptized then wouldn't he be somewhat less than perfect somebody that wanted his cake and eat it too which when I brought that one up she quit speaking to me for a whole week and started going to the cemetery all by herself without even asking me to drive only tonight is different tonight she's standing in the bathroom with her flannel robe pulled tight around her staring at herself in the mirror still as a statue whispering it like she was at confession that what Walt Rainey had told her was he would be a angel or anything else she wanted him to if she would just take him home with her and wrap her sweet mama titties around his dick and not look away when he shot some pomade on them Shirley Temple curls James Lineberger |