Out Of The Slammer And Into The Fire - Part 10

There was only one true witness to this accident. An eight year old girl I had never met who was riding on one of the ponies and being led by Mitch’s new wife’s twelve year old daughter.

The five year old girl, Kelly, had been picking blackberries in a little enclave on the side of the road. A wall of blackberry bushes kept her from seeing the van at all. All she saw, was the pony come into her view across the road, and she started to run toward it. The lip of asphalt tripped her and she sprawled out across the asphalt just as the slow moving van was approaching.

The driver of the van was a man who was returning from his mother’s estate. His mother had passed away a little more than a week before, and he was moving some of her things to his own place. His van had been full of boxes of heavy things like books and furniture, and when asked of the incident with the little girl, he had no knowledge of it. The screams he thought he heard while slowly and sadly driving down the lane, away from the party, he attributed to the happy squeals of little girls playing.

Mitch and Marissa, of course, were devastated. Marvin and the mother of the dead child were in complete shock and disappeared from any of my dealings.

I went home and spent the next few days scribbling furiously on a pad of paper with oil pastel crayons. I felt like there was a big block of wet wood inside of my chest and an ocean on top of me.

June the bed-maker called after two days.

“My younger sister just blew into town from Canada. She brought someone with her that wants to meet you. His name is Scott, too.”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“OK. Tomorrow.”

Tomorrow came and a big green station wagon came cruising into our yard and out of it popped June’s younger sister. She was tall and blond with an upturned nose and upturned breasts and legs almost as long as mine. Her driver got out and I immediately thought “Boy Toy” (I am serious) as Scott stood up and I realized he was taller than I was. He had the craggy, good looking face of a romance novel cover and the body of a professional swimmer. He was 6-5 with dark hair and blue eyes and probably about 30 at the time.

He had a strong and unfiltered New Zealand accent with perhaps a twist of Ozzie surfer tossed in in places.

One of my very first thoughts when meeting him was ”I could so easily take this guy arm-wrestling.”

We sat out on a picnic table we had, out in the sun, and I got caught up a bit on Scott’s story. He had met June’s sister Emily at a hostel in Australia. They had exchanged addresses. Scott had gone back to New Zealand, landed a job with a big group of Christian carpenters, and had converted to Christianity, or was trying to. Six months passed and Scott had amassed a bit of savings. He then set out for “America” and flew into Canada where he met up with Emily. Emily had a boyfriend, who had gone to LA “to wait tables in Hollywood”. She talked Scott into driving her this far, and now she wanted to take a bus further south, and Scott wanted to stay and “see if he could find work”.

This is where I fit into the plan.

I told Scott about the wedding and the girl, and how I was laying pretty low, but that, sure, as soon as I was up and running again, I would call him.

The next day, I attended the funeral of the little girl with about two hundred people who had been at the wedding. Almost nobody actually knew the little girl, but we all sat in a big room together and cried and cried. Mitch and Marissa looked like they hadn’t slept since the wedding. Marvin and his girlfriend Kim looked shocked into some other time and place altogether. When it was time to hug the mother and leave, Kim got through maybe six people before she broke down and they helped her out of the room and away from caring yet prying eyes.

A few more days passed, and I got a call from Lulu on my answering machine.

“Scott. Where are you? I need you. I need you to work on my house.”

(to be continued…)

ADDENDUM- The above pictures were taken today, by me out in the yard. I almost forgot about this piece. My artist-healer girlfriend Lee convinced me to "do art" as a way of coping with the way I was feeling, and I started making masks of people and painting them and giving them to them. This is one I did of my own face and was done probably the week right after the death of the little girl. I've tried to give this thing away many times, but everyone said it was too sad and scary and they didn't want it. It has been sitting on a shelf in my shop for years and years, collecting dust and sawdust. I took an air-compressor to it to take these photos.

"Why the marbles?" (there were once three) people asked.

"They are hidden from me, you see, implying that I lost them..."