Andrew Hudgins

Today I’m thinking of St. Paul—St. Paul, who orders us,Be perfect. He could have said, Touch your elbow to your ears, except that if you broke your arm, then snapped your neck, you might could manage it. The death inside the flawed hard currency of what we touch bamboozles us, existing only for that flaw, that deathward plunge that’s locked inside all form, till what seems solid floats away, dissolves, and these poor bastard things, no longer things, drift back to pure idea. And when, at last, we let them go we start to pity them, attend their needs: I almost have to think to keep my own heart beating through the night. I have a wife and four pink boys. I spin on all this stupid metaphysic now because last afternoon we visited some friends in town. After the pecan pie, I drank until my forehead smacked the table, and woke to find my shirt crusted with blood. When Mary didn’t yell at me, I knew she finally understood that I was gone, dissolving back. As we rode home, I tried to say,I’m sorry, Hon. The carriage bucked across the mud-dried ruts and I shut up. And she, in August heat, just sat, head cocked as if for chills hidden in the hot, damp breeze, as if they were a sound, time merely distance. O Death, I know exactly where it is— your sting. And, Grave, I know your victory. That night, around the tents, the boys caught fireflies, pinched them in half, and smeared them on their nails, then ran through pine-dark woods, waving their hands. All I could hear was laughter, shouts. And all that I could see for each one of my sons were ten blurs of faint, artificial light, never too far apart, and trembling. Like fairies, magic, sprites, they ran and shouted, “I’m not real! I’m not real!” The whole world fell away from me—perhaps I was still drunk— as on the night Titania told dazed Bottom, “Put off your human grossness so, and like an airy spirit go.” But even then the night could not hold long against the light, and light destroys roots, fog, lies, orchids, night, dawn stars, the moon, delusions, and most magic. And light sends into hiding owls, fireflies, and bats, whom for their unerring blunder, I adore the most of all night fliers. But owls, hid in a hickory, will hoot all day, and even the moon persists, like my hangover, some days till almost noon, drifting above the harsh, bright, murderous morning light—so blue, so valuable, so much like currency that if the moon were my blue coin, I’d never spend it.

My fingertips marveled at the silvery shimmer, already less silver, less shimmery than when it lived. I never again should cause flesh this beautiful to be less beautiful, I thought. At supper —swordfish—my brother offered up his neighbor for conversation. He'd shotgunned every TV in his house, even the puny black-and-white on the kitchen counter. Buckshot shattered black granite and splintered yards of Golden Oak. It wasn't election time or football season. Maybe his kids had watched Debbie do Dallas. In the unexpected hush as we considered slaughtered appliances, my brother's drinking buddy told my girlfriend she was a pretty lady, a real pretty lady. She looked like a dream. One day she'd make a real man really happy. I barked three hard flat laughs. The lit friend winced as each blast turned his cheeks a richer red. My girlfriend closed her eyes and opened them, her azure eyelids shimmering with jade.

Our Father who art in heaven, I am drunk. Again. Red wine. For which I offer thanks. I ought to start with praise, but praise comes hard to me. I stutter. Did I tell you about the woman whom I taught, in bed, this prayer? It starts with praise; the simple form keeps things in order. I hear from her sometimes. Do you? And after love, when I was hungry, I said,Make me something to eat. She yelled, Poof! You’re a casserole!—and laughed so hard she fell out of the bed. Take care of her. Next, confession—the dreary part. At night deer drift from the dark woods and eat my garden. They’re like enormous rats on stilts except, of course, they’re beautiful. But why? What makes them beautiful? I haven’t shot one yet. I might. When I was twelve, I’d ride my bike out to the dump and shoot the rats. It’s hard to kill your rats, our Father. You have to use a hollow point and hit them solidly. A leg is not enough. The rat won’t pause. Yeep! Yeep! it screams, and scrabbles, three-legged, back into the trash, and I would feel a little bad to kill something that wants to live more savagely than I do, even if it’s just a rat. My garden’s vanishing. Perhaps I’ll merely plant more beans, though that might mean more beautiful and hungry deer. Who knows? I’m sorry for the times I’ve driven home past a black, enormous, twilight ridge. Crested with mist, it looked like a giant wave about to break and sweep across the valley, and in my loneliness and fear I’ve thought, O let it come and wash the whole world clean. Forgive me. This is my favorite sin: despair— whose love I celebrate with wine and prayer. Our Father, thank you for all the birds and trees, that nature stuff. I’m grateful for good health, food, air, some laughs, and all the other things I’m grateful that I’ve never had to do without. I have confused myself. I’m glad there’s not a rattrap large enough for deer. While at the zoo last week, I sat and wept when I saw one elephant insert his trunk into another’s ass, pull out a lump, and whip it back and forth impatiently to free the goodies hidden in the lump. I could have let it mean most anything, but I was stunned again at just how little we ask for in our lives.Don’t look! Don’t look! Two young nuns tried to herd their giggling schoolkids away.Line up, they called.Let’s go and watch the monkeys in the monkey house.

Our father liked to play a game. He played that he was dead. He took his thick black glasses off and stretched out on the bed. He wouldn’t twitch and didn’t snore or move in any way. He didn’t even seem to breathe! We asked,Are you okay? We tickled fingers up and down his huge, pink, stinky feet— He didn’t move; he lay as still as last year’s parakeet. We pushed our fingers up his nose, and wiggled them inside— Next, we peeled his eyelids back. Are you okay? we cried. I really thought he might be dead and not just playing possum, because his eyeballs didn’t twitch when I slid my tongue across ’em. He’s dead, we sobbed—but to be sure, I jabbed him in the jewels. He rose, like Jesus, from the dead, though I don’t think Jesus drools. His right hand lashed both right and left. His left hand clutched his scrotum. And the words he yelled—I know damn well I’m way too young to quote ’em.

When we first heard from blocks away the fog truck’s blustery roar, we dropped our toys, leapt from our meals, and scrambled out the door into an evening briefly fuzzy. We yearned to be transformed— translated past confining flesh to disembodied spirit. We swarmed in thick smoke, taking human form before we blurred again, turned vague and then invisible, in temporary heaven. Freed of bodies by the fog, we laughed, we sang, we shouted. We were our voices, nothing else. Voice was all we wanted. The white clouds tumbled down our streets pursued by spellbound children who chased the most distorting clouds, ecstatic in the poison.

Without intending to hide, the imagined copperhead hid on the path ahead, unseen on bronze leaves, unheard, and a mortal likelihood at every step. This was childhood, mine, the wood’s jihad against a boy who’d intruded among monkshood, wasp, tick, and nettles haired with needles. Scrub brush abhorred him with a horde of  welts, bites, and stings, but he’d never seen a copperhead, though he’d looked hard taking, as he’d been ordered, heed. The snake wasn’t a falsehood, though, to him. Dread was his nature, and he hared through sunlight and shade, head swiveling for the copperhead he’d begun to covet, the ballyhooed killer a camouflaged godhead on which his inborn faith cohered, and his priesthood.

As we sipped and mingled, regaled with oldfangled canapés and beguiled, or entertained at least, by gargled oldies, I disengaged and angled across grass tenderly groomed, past where electric tiki torches gleamed, and, alone, gazed, now truly beguiled, at my hosts’ grand expensive vista, mortgaged, yes, and, yes, remortgaged. A low gold moon glowed against a plush black sky gauzed, even filigreed, with stars. Gowned in old-growth oaks glazed with moonlight over their autumn gilt, the hills glowed in concord with the golden moon. I lingered, glad—discomfited and glad— at what my friends’ greed for beauty afforded me. I argued, self against self, what they’d gained and lost, and me with them, entangled as friendship entangles. I nearly groaned aloud with want before my friend grabbed my elbow. “Gorgeous, eh?” I grinned and agreed, my voice greased with hidden envy. From behind us, grilled sirloin, pedigreed meat sublimating on embers, triggered another hunger. Life was not just good, but too good: aged beef, aged wine after bourbon. We hungered, and all the way back to his engorged glass table, hunger was our guide.

Almost droll in its assault on magisterial, my father’s funeral sermon made me prowl, —agitated—from bean casserole to escarole salad, then taco casserole, and back all afternoon, in thrall to Dad’s every growl, cramped certitude, and corporal wavering lost to shrill sacral cant: The pastoral story was Dad’s own, though, frail as it is: faith and God steamroll death. His wife’s and daughter’s role was to die—a trial of faith, not cruel so much as natural, when the supernatural is, as it was for him, literal. His cloistral withdrawal, according to the minister’s drawl, was grace, and his temporal forfeitures fat collateral on eternity. It felt surreal (can there be a funeral without, now, the word surreal?) to hear Dad’s stoic control and loneliness spiral heavenward on genial praise, real enough for the general, one supposes. An orchestral hymn flared through the stereo’s cloth grill. Cold waves over the deep water roll, we sang, some voices shrill, mine guttural, my brother’s slow as a crawl— our voices one and several, a visceral, not unmagisterial, chorale.

I worked the river’s slick banks, grabbling in mud holes underneath tree roots. You’d think it would be dangerous, but I never came up with a cooter or cottonmouth hung on my fingertips. Occasionally, though, I leapt upright, my fingers hooked through the red gills of a mudcat. And then I thrilled the thrill my father felt when he burst home from fishing, drunk, and yelled, well before dawn,“Wake up! Come here!” He tossed some fatwood on the fire and flames raged, spat, and flickered. He held a four-foot mudcat.“I caught it!” he yelled.“I caught this monster!” At first, dream-dazed, I thought it was something he’d saved us from. By firelight, the fish gleamed wickedly. But Father laughed and hugged me hard, pressing my head against his coat, which stank, and glittered where dried scales caught the light. For breakfast, he fried enormous chunks of fish, the whole house glorious for days with their rich stink. One scale stuck to my face, and as we ate he blinked, until he understood what made me glitter. He laughed, reached over, flicked the star off of my face. That’s how I felt —that wild!— when I jerked struggling fish out of the mud and held them up, long muscles shuddering on my fingers. Once, grabbling, I got lost. I traced the river to the marsh, absorbed with fishing, then absorbed with ants. With a flat piece of bark, I’d scoop red ants onto a black-ant hill and watch. Then I would shovel black ants on a red-ant hill to see what difference that would make. Not much. And I returned to grabbling, then skimming stones. Before I knew it, I’d worked my way from fresh water to salt, and I was lost. Sawgrass waved, swayed, and swung above my head. Pushed down, it sprang back. Slashed at, it slashed back. All I could see was sawgrass. Where was the sea, where land? With every step, the mud sucked at my feet with gasps and sobs that came so close to speech I sang in harmony with them. My footprints filled with brine as I walked on, still fascinated with the sweat bees, hornets, burrow bees; and, God forgive me, I was not afraid of anything. Lost in sawgrass, I knew for sure just up and down. Almost enough. Since then, they are the only things I’ve had much faith in. Night fell. The slow moon rose from sawgrass. Soon afterward I heard some cries and answered them. So I was saved from things I didn’t want to be saved from. Ma tested her green switch —zip! zip!— then laid it on my thighs, oh, maybe twice, before she fell, in tears, across my neck. She sobbed and combed my hair of cockleburs. She laughed as she dabbed alcohol into my cuts. I flinched. She chuckled. And even as a child, I heard, inside her sobs and chuckling, the lovely sucking sound of earth that followed me, gasped, called my name as I stomped through the mud, wrenched free, and heard the earth’s voice under me.

Half  awake, I was imagining a friend’s young lover, her ash blonde hair, the smooth taut skin of  twenty. I imagined her short legs and dimpled knees. The door scraped open, but eyes closed, I saw nothing. The mattress sagged. She laid her head on my chest, and murmured love against my throat, almost humming, approaching song, so palpable I could hold her only chastely, if  this was chaste. I couldn’t move my hand even to caress her freckled shoulder. So this is how imagination works, I thought, sadly. And when at last she spoke, she spoke with the amused voice of my wife, my wife who was at work but also here, pleased at the confusion she was causing. This is a lesson about flesh, isn’t it? I asked.Blowfly, she whispered on my throat as we made tense, pensive love.Blowfly, blowfly.