Lenny and Elmo

A crown of ash dropped from Lenny's cigarette to the quilt covering the bed, the quilt Mrs. Carberry had stitched with her own hands.

"Put that damn thing out, Lenny.  Damn if I'll let this house burn because of some one-eyed bum like you."

Lenny stood up and ground the butt into the hardwood floor with the heel of his hunting boots.

"Don't call me a bum, Elmo.  You have no call to say that."

"All right.  Jesus, Lenny, you stinking hot-head bohunk."

"I ain't no bohunk, neither, Elmo."

"Oh, you ain't?--hand me your drinking glass--what are you just?  Where did your granddad come from?  Wasn't it Bohemia?"

"Sure, Bohemia.  But they was German.  That's all my granddad talked ever was German."

"Kraut, Bohunk, what difference does it make?@  Elmo eyeballed Lenny, ASpeaking of nationality, drink some of Kentucky's finest."

Elmo handed the glass of bourbon to Lenny.  "Cheers, you one-eyed jizzer."

"And another thing," Lenny said.

"Yes?"

"I don't like it when your talk about my eye."

"Jesus, I hurt your feelings."

Lenny didn't say anything.  He grieved for his missing eye and the depth perception he once had.  He remembered the cold foreignness of the glass eye when it had first been slipped into his empty eye socket, how the doctor said it would make him look "practically normal" again, though when he looked in the mirror, he wept at the cockeyed boy he saw staring back at him.  Nothing he could do would bring the eye back; not his mother's coddling nor the sympathy of friends whom he jettisoned through his increasing coldness and ache.  He cursed the gun he thought was such a bargain, which he thought would bring meat to the table of his family; he cursed the deer he took aim at, and the moment the chamber exploded and sent hot shrapnel into his eye.  They had bandaged him so thoroughly, he thought he was totally blind.  But the day came and the doctor held Lenny's chin and said, "No, no.  This one here is going to be OK.  You are lucky, young fella."  But Lenny did not feel lucky.  He felt cheated, cursed.  Fate had taken the life of his father in a CCC work accident. And now his eye was gone, and every time he felt the glass eye move sightless in his socket, he thought of how cruel simple life could be, existence, earth.  Sometimes he thought that if he could have interceded, as a ghost or unborn spirit, with his birth...  but then, "Ah, what's the use," he figured silently.  "What's the use," and he enumerated the hedonistic, some would say sinful, pleasures of his huge body: smoking, drinking, eating, sleeping, fishing, a nice warm outhouse warmed by a bucket of coals in the dead of winter.  There had even, one summer carnival, been an individual whose silkiness to him had been the closest thing to religious ecstasy, and every time he found himself in confession (there were times) or in church before a niche of the virgin, he thought of this female as the keeper of the sacred mystery.

Lola and Charlene

"How can you walk and eat a potato at the same time?" Lola scolded Charlene.

"I," said Charlene, "can eat a potato and walk at the same time."  And then she strutted a few steps in front of Lola.  Charlene palmed the potato as if it were a tiara bestowed to her hand and she took a bite from it and chewed.

As they were walking, they could hear a Model A (who in this county could afford a newer car?) cough about a mile behind them, and they turned around expectantly, welcoming a ride from someone they surely knew.  But when the ride pulled up, the girls' smiles dwindled and then flickered up again in memory that the appearance of friendliness is one=s strongest shield, sometimes.

"Can I give you two ladies a ride?  How far you going?  I wouldn't want to be walking out in the cold like this."

"Not far.  In fact, we're almost there.  Thank you, but no."  Lola said.

The man had short-cropped red hair and a complexion like fried cheese.  He was no one they knew.

"You sure?  You've got another forty minutes on foot if you're going to that town up ahead.  I bet I can get you there in ten or less."

A"No; thank you kindly."

"How about you cutie?" the man addressed Charlene.  Charlene pantomimed who me? and then slowly shook her head.

"Suit yourself!  Dizzy little hen!"  the man muttered as he pulled out in a cough of exhaust.  His headlights glared on the hill ahead and Lola looked at Charlene and let out a long breath.

"Who do ya suppose?" Lola asked.

"Dunno.  Minnesota plate on the back.  Salesman maybe."

"Oh, and I suppose we look like the farmer's daughters."

"Or poultry."

"Ha!  I didn't like the looks of him at all.  Woo.  He can keep on driving all the way to Minneapolis as far as I'm concerned."

"Amen."

"Amen, sister."

continued...