Lying in a Creek

OU ARE THERE ON A COOL TABLE, bare ass naked except a paper thin gown that isn’t even covering up the part of you that is cold. You’re wheeled into the operating room that’s cold and dark except for the portable lights. There is the surgeon; he’s the one eating a sandwich because he missed lunch, then there are the two nurses, both with nice bodies under tight scrubs, the anesthesiologist; he’s the only one who gets to sit down during the surgery. In this case, you’d see the seven med students who are going to watch the surgeon try to fix your mangle leg, broken in five places, including the femur, which as hard as concrete—it’s the angle that really gets you, said the doctor. And they need to do something about your foot that’s nearly been ripped off as well. Then they hit you with the general anesthesia and that’s all there is to remember really, the doctor was saying something while you were drifting off, but it doesn’t matter, you let him worry about that.

I’ve had ten surgeries in the last three years and this is more or less how they go, except for the last one I had, which was done outpatient. I laid back on the paper lined table and the nurse practitioner poked me with a six inch need all around the outside of my knee cap after he cut the cast off my leg, then he poked hemostats into the holes were the rods went in and jerked, twisted, and finally pulled each one out, then wrapped the knee in gauze.

How all this happened was—there was this girl.

Tanned and black haired and she held her self well. She started working in the same grocery store as I did, she came in and really stirred things up around there. Every guy in the store had a hard spot in their pants for her—her and those tight jeans she liked to cram herself into. She’d walk in and the place would almost stop except for the scoffing old women and the kids that were too young to understand—but this isn’t about that. She started work in the summer of two thousand five. I came to find out her name was Wesley. I couldn’t deny the fact that I wanted her, not as a person—I didn’t know anything about her, but I did want her tight body. At the time, I had just turned twenty one and given in to the fact that I was going work at the Piggly Wiggly until I died and nothing I could do would change that fact. I was fine with this until she came along and showed me there were things beyond the store and my trailer and the liquor store—not many things, but defiantly other things out there.

She came to me one day and we started to talk about dogs because there was nothing else to talk about at the moment; a common symptom of grocery work. Grocery work has a way of ruining what you really love and makes you a bland person until you leave for the day or for good. As she talked, I starred at her lips, wet looking from gloss, they moved so quickly and never stopped it seemed. When I began to focus on what she was saying she said, so, do you want them?

Yeah, I said in panic. I had no idea what I agreed to, but it made her flash her white smile.

I’ll bring them tomorrow, she said.

Okay, I’ll be here, I said.

I could have been agreeing to take drugs.

Or machine guns or her dead grandma from her, for I knew.

But, the next day, she came up to me and asked me when I got off. It was time for me to leave now, I told her. I clocked out and walked with her to the parking lot; it felt good walking with her and seeing the look on the faces of the guys up front. Most of the time in a store, the meat, dairy, and produce departments are in the back; I worked in the meat department. For some reason the front end and the service departments never seem to get along. In the excitement I actually put my hand on the small of her back as she passed through the doors, I place it as close to her butt as I dared and to my surprise, she didn’t say anything. Outside the sun was blinding compared to the dimmed lights in the meat market and it was scorching too—it had to be a hundred degrees or more outside. In her car was an attractive girl that I’d never seen before, a friend from school, most likely.

Okay, here they are, she said, handing me two puppies that the girl handed her.

What—ah—thanks I appreciate it, I said.

I took the puppy home and on the way there I stopped and got a thirty pack of beer. I lived way out on the outside edge of Maplesap, where there are more cattle than people and the river cuts back down south. Out there you can drive for miles and not see a single person; they are lost in the fields, creeks, and trees. I got to my trailer on Rural Route three ninety seven. Went inside and iced my beer down and changed into shorts, a tee-shirt, and some sandals. I came out of the darkened room and the pups were playing. One was white and brown and the other was solid black, I had no idea what breed they were. I let them outside and grabbed the cooler and went out after them. I was amazed at how nice the weather was, it was hot, sure, but the sky was an impenetrable blue that not even the heat could shake. Under the oak I set the cooler down and put my lawn chair next to it and started drinking and for a couple hours, I didn’t have any problems, the only problem I could have possibly ran into was a shortage of beer. Other times I would think about being alone and how bad I hated it and how I wanted someone like Wesley to just fall into my lap—literally—but that day it didn’t bother me. It didn’t bother me that I failed out of my first semester of college. It didn’t bother me that nearly everything had fallen apart for me in that last two years, for those hours, I was shaded from all my problems under that tree. The shadows were getting longer and I was deep in beer, cans littered all around me, and I was really feeling it too, so I looked around for the pups and started getting ready to head inside.