#22

Bongos

I think I might like to slide right under the table and through the floor. The story being told is I’d like to take him out fishing. I suggest it. “Wouldn’t you like to go fishing with Gramps sometime?” He looks up at me from some game he’s playing. We might have the skatefish blues. I’m lost. I’ve missed my train. That’s how this always begins. He wants to take us fishing. I have to go to the courtroom, answer a few questions in front of the District Attorney. A close friend of the family. We get up early to feed the pigs and we zero in on their eyes. My grandfather turns into a fish. She calls to tell me she’s pregnant. She arrives in a rainstorm. I take a book of poems off the shelf in a foreign bookstore. This is overpriced, I say. He takes it out of my hands and puts it back on the shelf. Three hours later we are drunk in a sweaty café and he takes the book from his back pocket and hands it to me. I make him wait outside while I make the call. I am trying to note the spelling of the name of a train station while he is standing in the rain staring at me with the gloomiest look he can make on his face. When I call my father he says he needs a catscan on his stomach. They take the men elsewhere. Leo suggests that we smoke a joint. Her baby is much older now. The dog had cancer in its left kidney. She found a typewriter in the swap shop, which is next to the dump. They liked to throw old glass bottles to see if they could make it into the base of a broken refrigerator they found in those woods. He left the letter on my front porch. Just to say, I hope it’s okay if I date her. I didn’t care. I saved the letter anyhow. Sometimes when I’d help my father by cleaning out his cabinets I’d come across official documents I should not have read.

Brass