"What the Living Forget" by Tyrel Kessinger
I'd rarely come back to Needleville in the years since high school so it made sense that I didn't immediately recognize Sally when he walked through the doors of Ernst & Sons Funeral Home. He was a skinny gristle of a man now, whereas I'd always remembered him as a fairly meaty fellow, an uncoordinated kid wearing baggy t-shirts in an unsuccessful attempt to hide the layers of fat underneath. He'd decked himself out in what I can only imagine to be his best suit: some faded khaki carpenter pants, a raggedy jacket mired in a nightmare palette of black and purple, his tie a pattern of footballs tumbling downward in a never-ending waterfall.
Sally, on the other hand, had no trouble recognizing me.“Long time, man,” he said, taking an open seat next to me.I flashed him a weak smile, fearful that anything stronger might be construed as fake. “Yeah. Sure has.”He played with his tie, never actually looking at me. “What'cha been up to?”“Not much. Working. About it really.”“Uh-huh,” he nodded. “I feel ya there, brother.”Sally bent over, his hands clasped as if he might rip out a prayer on the spot. I almost told him not to bother, that, technically, this wasn't a church. That I doubted God would be here to listen to just any poor bastard's prayer. All we had in here was the flaccid conversation of the living and the dead body of my Uncle Freddy. I'm not sure I'd ever want to believe in a god that didn't have bigger clams to bake anyway.“You know, me and your uncle did a lot of fishin' together,” he told me. “Shame he's gone. Hard to find a good fishin' buddy 'round here.”“Yeah. That's true,” I said, even though I had no earthly idea how hard it truly was to find a good fishing buddy in Needleville.Silence settled in between us. Because we weren't the friends we'd once been. Or maybe because quietness becomes a funeral home.Sally remained in his near-prayer position, head cast down, staring as if an invisible void had tractor-beamed his eyeballs to one specific point on the floor. I looked over my shoulder at my parents, at the two dozen or so other attendees present. Twos and threes and fours knitted together in hushed groups, a few muted chuckles, greetings followed by rapid handshakes. People congregating in a house of the dead and doing their best to ignore it. Even my mom, who was Uncle Freddy's sister, spent more time smiling than looking anything like sad. Sally though, he kept his long face on. He knew exactly where he was.“So y'all did a lot of fishin', huh?” I asked, in an attempt to break the awkwardness. I winced inwardly, hearing my accent revert back to its original southern drawl. Being back home had an uncanny way of bringing it out in me.Sally pulled out of his dark reverie and lifted his head.“Oh yeah. Every day we could, I guess.”“Ya'll catch anything much?”Sally stalled before answering, the ends of his mouth tilting in an odd kind of half-smile. Like you're thinking about something that only one person finds funny or amusing and that one person is you.“More'n enough,” he answered, the scant ghost of that grin haunting his face.“When'd you last see him?”“Wednesday. Right before he went.”Sally cracked his knuckles and peeled his eyes straight ahead, again into some invisible fire of invisible flames. To tell the truth, he was starting to bug me out. The Sally I knew, that I remembered, wasn't so damn down and out nor ever so solemn a creature. This was the guy who was still snapping bras our senior year of high school.He placed his hands on the back of the pew-style bench in front of us and propelled himself to stand.“Well hell,” he said, “Best be headin' out. Just wanted to stop by for a minute and pay my respects. Figured I'd probably see ya here. How long you in town for anyway?”“A couple more days,” I said, standing up with him. “We should hang while I'm around.” I wasn't sure at the time if I meant it or not, but it was something to say.“Sounds good, Phil. I'll hit ya up before ya leave. S'good to see ya again, buddy.”“Yeah, Sally. You too.”We shook hands. He had a strong shake, one of those vice-like grips that only wiry, hard-working, small town people seem to have.“Not much like old times, is it?” he said, twitching his right eye into a wink.It wasn't a question though, I didn't think, and if it was he obviously didn't believe I had an answer worth a solid damn. He walked away before I could reply; a dingy khaki fade, the ugly bruise of his jacket out the white double doors and gone.Fuck no, I wanted to say. It wasn't much like old times at all. Sally wasn't at the funeral the next day. I wasn't surprised. People don't much enjoy the actual event of the burial ceremony, what with all the finality a buried body means. Not to mention all the crying and having to listen to some preacher of average oratory skills jawing on about life after death.When the service ended I lined up with my father and some other members of the Needleville community and we lugged out Uncle Freddy's casket. We loaded it in the back of a hearse so shiny it could have defined the word and found our way to our respective cars that would take us to the cemetery. There were a few tears at the burial but mostly just a herd of serious faces. Mom sat near the coffin, sniffing like an addict, the white tufts of used Kleenex peeking out of her clenched fist. Dad stood behind her offering the lame consolation of his hand on her shoulder, occasionally giving her a squeeze.When I was younger my dad was always out on the road, trucking across the land in his eighteen-wheeler, which meant he was hardly ever around, and so Uncle Freddy filled in for him as best he could. We camped and fished, went three-wheeling. He practiced baseball with me, hitting me flyballs, assuming the crouch of catcher so I could throw him speed demons with little control. In the summer, on most Wednesday nights, he'd take me into town for ice cream at the Dairy Queen. And unlike my dad, Uncle Freddy never bitched when I didn't finish my Nerds Blizzard.But I got older. I got a driver's license. I began spending more time with my friends. There were girls and other troubles. I was growing up and getting tired of Needleville's small-minded backwaterness and began pondering the prospect of college very far away. Somewhere, anywhere the hell out of Dodge. Once I made it there, I made it a point to only rarely return, to forget Needleville and the people in it. Things drifted, for whatever reason, and the less I came home, the less I saw of Uncle Freddy. It never dawned on me that avoiding him was a big deal. Even after Mom told me he was sick I failed to make it back on much more than very irregular occasions. I called him once but he didn't answer and I was much too busy, I told myself, to ever call back. I wish I knew the catalyst for it but the simple fact is, I just don't know. The way the cookie crumbled and all that platitudinal bullshit, I guess.I'd take it all back now. If I could. Who wouldn't? But sometimes you have to see how you were wrong before you can consider how you might have made it right. After the burial we all gathered in the dank basement of Needleville's Baptist church. A buffet line of ancient oak tables was pushed against the wall, heaving with food dropped off by every family and elderly lady within the county line. People ate heartily. They tossed back thick slices of ham and Hawaiian sweet rolls and wolfed down slices of pumpkin roll and red velvet cake. When they were finished they swarmed me, telling kind things about Uncle Freddy. A reiteration of material they'd already said at the funeral home. If I did know anything about my uncle it was that, mostly, he was a solitary man. He'd never had many friends, and he never participated in any type of social contract with the people of Needleville. But I knew they were just trying to be nice, so I earnestly agreed when they told me he was a hell of a man and laughed to myself when they told me what a good Christian soldier he had been. As if they actually knew anything about him.Although, at some point, I got honest with myself. Who was I, anymore, to think that I knew him any better? Perhaps he'd become a different man than the one I'd known, years ago. People changed. I could attest to that. Just ask the little boy whose uncle used to take him to Dairy Queen on Wednesday nights. It was entirely possible that the old Uncle Freddy had died once before, while I was busy renouncing the ways and people of Needleville, and the one reborn, the one who had just recently passed, I could and would never know. Once the crowd dispersed my parents and I packed up the leftovers and went home. In the car, Dad fiddled with the radio until he found a Rush Limbaugh program, adjusting the volume to the threshold of annoyance. Mom turned to me and smiled, her eyes faintly rimed in a pale redness.“It was a nice service, don't you think, Philip?” she asked me.“Yeah, Mom, it was nice. Really nice.”She turned back around and stared out the windshield, her hands folded across her lap. She sniffed a few time but I think she'd depleted her current reservoir.“Oh, it was nice alright,” my dad chimed in. 'Cept for all those goddamn freeloaders there just to stuff their goddamn faces.”Which meant Dad agreed with us in his own goddamn way. Later in the evening, my mom was loafing on the loveseat watching American Idol in that bland yet excited way that only middle-aged folk from the country can while Dad snored in protest at having been forced to change the channel before Gary Cooper faced down the Miller Gang in High Noon, a movie he'd seen at least 137 times before. I was trying very hard to make it through a book of poems by Donald Hall but, like those infamous train wrecks or grainy videos of nihilistic tornadoes, I couldn't help but watch the farce taking place on the screen. I pulled my eyes into the book only to have them leap to the canyon's edge of the page to witness some jerk-off singing a soulless rendition of “I Got Friends (In Low Places).”“Why, he sounds just like Garth Brooks, doesn't he,” Mom said, more a statement than a question.“More like Turd Brooks,” I replied.“Lord, Philly, don't be such a smart-alec,” she scolded, albeit, while trying to stunt a chuckle.Directly, I felt a quick pang of regret, at having let slide the memory of Uncle Freddy so soon, cracking scatological jokes and participating in the activities of the living in general. Things like the riveting enterprise of American fucking Idol. I wondered how you could bury a man one minute, and everything he ever was, and go on living as if there'll never be a time when someone wasn't going to do the exact same thing to you.But then again, what good did it do to dwell on it? I hadn't felt the earth shudder to a stop yet. It was possible that Uncle Freddy wasn't missing out on much of anything. When the phone rang I jumped at the chance to answer it, anything to get my mind off these things the dead are missing out on. I was surprised when the voice at the other end of my parents' primitive cord telephone asked for me.“Uh, yeah, this is Phil.”“Hey, man. What's up? S'me. Sally.”He sounded much more buoyant than he did at Ernst & Sons, more akin to the Sally I remembered.“Hey, Sally. How's it goin'?”“Aw, fair to middlin,' I guess. You?”“Same here.”“Well, yeah. I guess that's a dumbass question. Sorry, man.”“Nah, you're fine. So, what's up?”“Well, I was callin' to see when you said you were headin' out again?”“Day after tomorrow.”“Perfect, man, perfect. So by chance would you wanna go with me to watch em' tear down our old elementary school tomorrow?”I was aware that the school had been a derelict pisspot for close to fifteen years, that it had been abused by teenage hellions and wayward vagarants. But I had not heard of its planned and final demise.“They're tearin' it down?” I asked.Sally answered with a short burst of laughter. “Hell yeah, they are. That place ain't nothin' but a goddamn rattrap lawsuit waitin' to happen when it falls on some dumbass kid's head. Not to mention the sight of it's so damn ugly, it'll near blind ya.”To be honest, I didn't feel the same friendly reciprocal urge to hang with Sally as he obviously did for me. But I didn't want him to think I was being a dick either. So, in the end, I agreed that I would go with him to what he had already dubbed the ”˜demolition derby.'“Awesome. I'll see your ass bright and early then,” he said triumphantly. “I got the beer, you just bring yourself.”“Huh? Early? How early?”“Mmm. 'Bout a quarter til seven or so.”“Jesus Christ. A quarter til seven?”He snorted again. “They start early 'round here. Hell, you don't wanna miss the good stuff, do ya? See ya in the mornin,' buddy.”He hung up, not waiting for a reply, probably fearful that I'd back out. Though it wasn't like the idea didn't cross my mind a few hundred times before the sun reared its grapefruit-pink face through the window of my old bedroom the next morning. My parents were still asleep when Sally pulled up and honked his horn. In the bed of his faded red, heavily rusted Chevy S-10 I noticed several fishing poles along with a couple of tackle boxes. One had the letters “FD” crudely carved into the top of it, which were the initials of my uncle, Freddy Denton. I guessed Sally hadn't rustled up the heart to take it out yet.“You ready?” he asked through the hole of a wide smile.“Guess I better be,” I said. I was thrown back by the force of his peel out and the residue of skittering particles from my parents' gravel driveway tinked out a song on the chassis as we headed down 85 West and into town. I suspected Sally had thrown back a few already.Needleville Elementary wasn't all that far, maybe six or seven miles. I sat back and enjoyed being chauffeured, watching the landmarks of my hometown whip by. Past my old friend Shawn Daughtery's house where I used to spend almost every other weekend frog-gigging and fishing at the pond behind his house. We blew by the tobacco fields where I'd slaved away in the depths of hellacious Kentucky summers, cursing God at every turn for allowing man to invent such a heinous chore as hanging tobacco in rickety barns. We passed the old one-lane road that led to Uncle Freddy's house, nearly a mile back off the main road. I tried to stare down the avenue of it as best one can when speeding along at 70 miles per hour but I didn't see anything special. I damn well knew that it didn't lead to a house where my uncle lived anymore.Sally used his knees to steer while he pinched out some Redman and placed it in the lower right pouch of his mouth. The wind roared through the open windows, tousling the scraggly bits of hair that bled out from under his UK cap. I inhaled the tang of summer stagnation flowing through the cab, amazed at how hot it was. Even at seven o'clock the atmosphere felt like swamp piss. In the south, the absence of the sun does not equal the absence of suffocating heat.“Where you livin' now?” I asked Sally in an attempt to make conversation. “I mean, what part of town?”“I hadda place on the outskirts but when I got laid off I had to let it go. Been stayin' over at your uncle's, actually.”“Oh. I'd have never thought of Uncle Freddy as the roommate type.”“Eh. I reckon he wasn't normally the type, no.”“Either way,” I said. “Nice to know he had at least one good friend with him at the end.”Sally spit a stream of tobacco juice out the window. “Yeah. Least he had that.”A few minutes later we drifted by all the familiar landmarks that comprised the heart of Needleville. The post office, the town gas station/food mart, Loretta's Pit Stop and the Community Central Bank. Past the bank, Sally ripped his S-10 off the main drag and made his way up Logan Street. It was swarmed with run-down houses and trailers propped close to the road, just as I remembered it. I saw a man opening the driver's side door of a beat Metro Geo, lunch box in hand, waving as we passed. He looked familiar but I couldn't precisely place him. Which I chalked up to small town inhabitants all being mostly familiar looking.I hadn't been through this part of town this early since I was in the fifth grade, the year before they closed the school, at the tail end of an hour long mind and ass-numbing commute courtesy of bus 701. I played with the idea of trying to imagine I was ten again, that I was on my way to school. That I had no bigger concerns than the heartbreaking wait for afternoon recess or if I had remembered to bring money for extra pizza or cheeseburgers on the days we were served such delicacies for lunch. I tried to pretend that not much had changed and this place was still my home. But I'm no fool. I'm well aware the problem with the imagination is that it's imaginary.Four hundred feet or so before the school was our old baseball diamond that, as far as I knew, was still being put to good use by the town's peewee league and by several of the area's church softball teams. It was the very field where Sally had received his name.We were twelve and had just moved up to the big leagues of Babe Ruth, Sally and me and the rest of our friends. It was our first game of the season and we had managed to keep it tied one-to-one for most of the game. That is, until Sally, manning third, let a grass-burner get by, allowing our opponent's guy on second to score. Coach Decker, mad as a riled bee, made sure we all knew that Sally alone was the reason for our defeat.At the end of our next practice Coach Decker made Sally take up his usual third base spot and field ground balls while everyone watched and, furthermore, told us all that no one was going home until Sally picked up ten in a row. After what had to have been nearly ten minutes of Sally missing the ball and Coach Decker repeatedly calling him a “little sissy Sally,” Sally figured he'd had enough. So when he finally managed to scoop up a ball he charged Coach Decker, arm cocked, yelling “I'LL SHOW YOU SALLY!” as mightily as his pre-pubescent voice would allow. The ball connected right square with Coach's pork and beans and Sally took off like he had wings for feet. The name Sally rode like a legend into the sunset and Sally never took up the glove again. Of course, what really makes the story is the fact that Coach Decker was Sally's stepfather. I can only imagine the awkwardness of any sit-down family dinners Sally shared with him after that.Sally drove past the baseball field and pulled into the old playground across from the school. He turned the truck off, motioning toward the school with a swoop of his head. It sat silent and broken down, stooped in early morning shadows up on its knoll. A monolith of my youth now hanging its head in ruin. The small convoy of powerful machinery that surrounded the sad structure waited like a confident army, preparing to make war on what was left of my old elementary alma mater.“Good,” Sally grunted. “Bastards ain't started yet.”A small fist of men were huddled near the entrance of the school, smoking cigarettes and laughing. Presumably, at dirty jokes about someone's mother being fat, or a whore, or both. I briefly entertained the notion of what it might be like to work in such an atmosphere as these men. Under the hotness of the naked sun, thick arms lifting and pulling, cigarettes constantly dangling from grimacing mouths, perpetually wiping their brows and grunting out a symphony of curses when ever anything went wrong. It didn't seem nearly so horrible a life as I had once assumed it to be, this hard work and sweat. They were moving bodies, making visible changes to the landscape of the earth, and I was wise enough to see the boldness in that now.Sally hopped out of the truck and opened a tailgate that was banged all to hell.“Hope you like Busch Light,” he said. “It was your uncle's favorite and I still hadda shit-ton left over.”He dragged a red Coleman cooler across the scuffed bed of his truck and extracted two beers. One side of the cooler looked like it had been kicked in and I began to question if not everything in Sally's life was a little dinged up.“Sounds good to me,” I said, even as I cringed inwardly at the thought of any beer at seven a.m. Let alone the godawfulness of Busch Light. They were cold, at least. That kind of cold they make beers look in commercials, with thick rivulets of ice water snaking down the side of the can.We sat on the tailgate, legs dangling. I took cautious sips at my beer while Sally pulled fierce chugs. The sun was making more headway.“Reckon where they'll start first?” I asked.Sally wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “If I was them, I'd start with where Mr. Simpson's office was. I hated that peckerhead.”I laughed. Mr. Simpson, our elementary school principal, was a short man with an obvious “small guy” complex. He often resorted to physical force to keep us heathens in line, grabbing us by the neck with his judo action grip or roughly shoving us up against the wall in admonishment for all transgressions, great or small. It was the late 80's, after all, when those methods of disciplining children were still in vogue and our parents weren't sure we didn't deserve what we got.I was going to make some smartass comment about Mr. Simpson before I noticed that Sally had donned that far-away look I'd seen him wear at Ernst & Sons. His eyes examined the landscape, darting from the school, the playground, to the quickening burn of the brightening sky, to the beer in his hand. I surmised that he wanted to talk to me about more substantial matters than our dick of a principle, but wasn't sure how to go about it. He lived by the “code,” I could tell, the one that mandates men must button their blowholes and bottle up whatever eats at them. That to talk about anything other than beer, titties and demolition crews were forbidden. It was the same code my own father subscribed to, and Uncle Freddy. Like the Gary Coopers and John Waynes before them. I had escaped the main parameters of the “code” when I left for college, as I was forced to open myself up to the larger parts of a world I had no idea existed, to realize that feelings could and should be discussed from time to time. By now, Sally was a full-fledged, card-carrying member of this ancient order and had the stony reticence to prove it.I wanted to give him an inway, hoping he'd loosen and start talking.“So what have you been up to all these years, Sally? I mean, really. None of that ”˜just fishin' and workin' crap.”He cleared his throat and turned toward me. I understood, by now, that just because Sally looked at me, it didn't mean he was looking at me.“Well, lessee. 'Bout a year or so after we graduated I married Sarah Buckmore. You remember her, right? Thought she was pregnant, so I tried to do the right thing, ya know. Luckily, I got on over at Grayson's Paper Mill 'bout the same time so I figured I'd be able to afford a family alright.”Sally upended what was left of his beer and started on another before he went on.“Then there was 'bout four years of me and Sarah goin' at it like screamin' devils before we got divorced. Turns out that she wasn't pregnant an' it took awhile for us to see that was the only reason we'd ever struck out together anyway. 'Bout a year after that Grayson's laid me off and I been workin' piddlin' ass jobs ever since. Yard work here and there, patching up roofs and whatnot. Lotta fishin' and dickin' around, like I tolja, nothin' special. So ya see, I really ain't done much since you last seen me.”“I wouldn't say that,” I said. Because I felt like I should.Sally pshawed and adjusted his cap. He was fidgety, uncomfortable. I doubted he talked so in depth about himself very often. He hopped off the tailgate and went to the cab and turned on the radio, leaving the door open so we could get a waft of the music. It was on the local country music station. I heard the twang of George Strait's “Ocean Front Property.” It was a song I knew well, but it was one I hadn't heard in years. Not since I'd left Needleville. Christ, how I'd hated that kind of music back then. But at that moment, down that unexpected drop through memory lane, I found I didn't mind it so much at all.“Truth is, man,” Sally began again as he plopped back down on the tailgate, “it don't really bother me all that much. I was never gonna be doin' nothin' all that special anyway. I never asked much outta life. Didn't really figure on gettin' it if I did, ya know?”That was true. Sally had always been a C-/D+ kind of student and he'd never really excelled at anything other than being mediocre at most things. Except for kickball and bra snapping. I didn't feel he wanted inspirational speeches to remind him of his self-worth so I ignored the comment, averting my eyes and absently toying with the tab of my beer can.“What about you, buddy? Huh? You went and made somethin' outta yourself though, right?” He punched my arm playfully and grinned. “Most people around here figured you would. Freddy always did.”I shrugged my shoulders but refrained from saying anything. I didn't want to get into the details of how I had “made something” of myself. Sure, I had intended to, making sure everyone in Needleville know that I would. I had no desire to let Sally in on the true skinny on my life, the laughable nature of my having “made” it. How in the years since high school I had managed to plunge myself into $25,000 worth of debt for a history degree that was more appropriate for wiping my ass with than getting a decent job. How I lived in a one-bedroom apartment that I barely afforded and one that had been broken into on three separate occasions in the past two years. How I worked in a call center for a soulless corporate insurance firm, living under the constant threat of a layoff due to outsourcing, all for the spectacular amount of fourteen bucks an hour. That wasn't making it. That was the universe, demonstrating its keen sense of humor by taking a cosmic dump on the grand dreams of my youth.Sally hocked and spit out a nice slab of phlegm. He elbowed me out of my mental pity party and motioned toward the school again. The gathering of men on the hill had disbanded. We watched as one of them climbed into a bulldozer and took its first bite out of the dilapidated building, its giant maw snapping a crater-sized hole in the side of the library that had actually been a separate structural entity outside the main structure.“Gawwwdamn,” Sally yelped. “Look at that sunuvabitch eat.”We observed in hushed awe.The little kid in me cheered on the mechanical dinosaur making mincemeat of the stout brick wall, the loud noise and wholesale destruction. The more wistful, nostalgic side of my ever-aging adulthood was sad to see it go. The face of Mrs. Sheldon, our school's resident kooky librarian lady, raced to mind. I could only assume that she was much happier in death than in bearing witness to the end of the library she'd spent some fifty years cultivating. I hoped all those books she'd poured so much care over had been given a good home and not left as kindling for transients or as scraps for rat nests.Sally surprised me by taking off his cap and removing a joint from the inner band. He lit it, puffed, and passed it to me. I took it without question.“That's your uncle's strain, right there,” he told me as I passed it back to him. I choked but I couldn't tell if it was from the inhalation of the pot or from what Sally had told me.“Uncle Freddy?”Sally took a cool drag. “Well, unless you got another uncle I been gettin' high with.”I shook my head as he handed me the joint. I'd been right after all. Uncle Freddy had changed. It was one thing to know he smoked a little, quite another to know he was farming it.“How long has he been growin'?” I asked, astounded.“'Bout five years or so. When he first found out about the cancer. Doctor told him if he lived in California a man could get ahold of medicinal marijuana by the bucketfuls, but since he lived here in Kentucky there wasn't much he could do in the way of that. So”•” Sally paused to take another hit”• “Freddy being Freddy, he decided to grow his own.”Sally offered it to me again but I shook my head. He took another draw then doused it. “And by God, if he didn't master the art of growing fine herb in no time.”My eyes had gone heavy and my head drowned in a fog. I ignored the screams of the brain cells I had decimated and took in the world instead. Everything around me became powerfully beautiful; the smear of the sun, the stretch of open sky, the country music pouring out of the truck, the ocean of dew-coated grass where I'd once spent the mornings before school chasing down errant Frisbees and pestering all the girls I'd ever liked. Getting stoned wasn't a regular activity in my life anymore but I knew that yes, by God, my uncle had mastered the art.“I'll say, man,” I half-whispered.Sally and I looked at each other and fell into fits of hard laughter. I fell back on the truck bed, nearly crying, while Sally doubled over and clapped his kneecaps, his body bobbing as he cackled. When our amusement subsided I sighed and wiped the dampness from my eyes. I sat up and clapped Sally on the shoulder.“Jesus, man. I haven't laughed like that in a long time.”“Heh. Not me, man. Your uncle could make me shit myself he was so damn funny. He had me rollin' all the time.”“You know,” I said, with all the sobriety I could manage at the moment, “I'm kinda jealous of you and my uncle. Seems like you two were close. I used to be that way with him too, ya know, when I was younger. But hell if I know what happened. My fault, really, I know. I should have visited him more, called him, anything. Should have done it when I still had the chance. I mean, I hardly even spoke to him when he was sick”¦”Sally retrieved two more beers, opening both of them after wiping away their wet patina on his jeans.“Don't matter now,” he said. “He's dead and gone and that's a fact. I wish to God there was such a thing as a do-over, much as you, but there ain't. I know he loved you though, no matter how far apart you two got. So I hope that's good enough for ya, brother. Cuz' that's all I got.”I swallowed what was not quite a lump but something not far from the possibility of tears. Goddamn weed. Always makes me sentimental.“Yeah. It means”¦” I started. “I mean”¦it”¦ I”¦”Sally, sensing my struggle with emotion, cowboyed up. He let me know that he understood. That it didn't always take tears or a string of words for someone to know how you felt. That sometimes, the code actually worked.“I know, man,” he said. “I know.” We stayed until the high wore off and we'd finished the twelve pack. Until the wrecking crew had chewed its way through the gymnasium, the spot where Mr. Simpson's office had been, the cafeteria. We left the topic of Uncle Freddy buried with the debris of Needleville Elementary's library and moved on to other things. Nothing important. Nothing that meant anything. Things the living will one day forget, in the general course of time.Sally emptied the last can of Busch Light, crumpled it in his hand and drop-kicked it across the old stomping grounds of our recesses from long ago. I was reminded of Sally's innate talent for kickball as I watched the spinning can glitter in the sunshine and disappear into the overgrown weeds nearby. He asked if I was ready to go. I wasn't sure if I meant it or not, but I told him I was. To be honest, I didn't feel the same reciprocal urge to leave that Sally did.We rode back with the windows down, as if the hot wind being whipped around could cool us off. Back down Logan Street, back past the bank and Loretta's, the post office. Back by things that would someday be forgotten and left to rot.When we neared the thoroughfare that led to Uncle Freddy's house Sally finally broke the silence.“Phil, I, uh”¦ well, I wanna tell ya something that I, uh, ain't told nobody”¦ and well, I, uh, hope you don't”¦ take it the wrong way.” He stopped talking and I saw his Adam's apple ripple as he swallowed what I knew to be his own lump in his own throat. “It's just that”¦ me and your uncle”¦ well, we”¦uh”¦”I put my hand out the window and pushed it against the air, like I'd done a thousand times before, when I was a kid. When I was flying down these country roads with my parents or Uncle Freddy, or even by myself, after I got my license. On my way to a ballgame or a friend's house or on a date with a girl I could no longer remember. Both in the darkness and the light.The air pushed back and I smiled.“I know, man. I know.”He nodded and wiped his face on the shoulder-sleeve of his t-shirt. I'm sure it was mostly sweat. With a knee on the wheel he tucked a pinch of Redman in his lip and drove us back through a land we knew would one day be forgotten, but one, we hoped, that could not be so easily brought to an end.