ISSN 1758-6488
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Radio Talkers Fiction |
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Nothing. I made it up. People hear that, they pay extra. They ask, I glare at them, like, You’re kidding? And then I explain, as if they’re right off the boat, I go, it burns cleaner and catches faster, all right? They apologize to me. They say to their friends, we bought three cords of dry cured. A little extra, but worth it.
Where do you get this wood?
You drive around, find a farm or house or something, tell the guy you’ll clean out his brushfall for only ten dollars and haul it away. They pay you. I mean, they pay you.
What’s brushfall?
I made that up too and even guys been farmers all their lives never ask. Not once. No one goes, What the hell are you talking about, ‘brushfall’?
Years later, I pick him up at the airport back from Vietnam and ask, You have to kill people?
Sure did, he goes. Not enough, he goes, but some.
20 years after that, Ray inherits hundreds of thousands in a windfall. 23 years after that, which is like two years ago, Ray puts his own dad, who does not want to go, into a hospice deal and moves into his dad’s house. Ray has burnt through the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He gambled at the track where trotters run. He gambled on line and at an Indian casino and he bet on boxing and lost and lost playing the market.
He has goggle glasses, white beard, is bald and works as a clerk for a community college. At stoplights, I hear people listening to guys talking on car radios. From inside their cars, like madmen raving under water, the radio talkers sound like, Gungdin bun COW rab? Dab bad HODER si tee mirk...Bix DAY braw queet fir FIR na tisTOO
And it ricochets and is canned loud.
There’s a heavy bag in the basement of Ray’s father’s ex-house. Ray boxes that bag still, making now weak sounds, bump bump bumpo. On the floor are cigarette butts. He chops wood still. I never make gloves anymore. It’s hot in Oklahoma, where we both wound up now. One day, now, this summer, we are both old men, I am at his father’s ex-house, (his father is languishing in a miserable square hospice room, alone, like 95 years old) and Ray is downstairs and it is hot and some asshole is talking on the radio non-stop. All those years. So I finally get up and throw the radio at the wall.
