Hick - Andrea Portes [6]
And you better just learn to throw yourself twenty feet across the room and let it play, just let it play. You better just learn to put each day and night up onto that screen and just keep on watching. Here’s what you’ll see. You get to see the incredible shrinking man. You get to see a man six foot tall turn in on himself and slump forward into nothing and then gone. Poof. You get to see a great tale of revenge and lust with a beautiful blond with flip-up hair. You get to see her get gussyed up each evening and put on lipstick and giggle loud and bat her eyelashes at strangers, straying a little bit behind the Alibi on a Saturday night, no, better, make that Sunday. Hell, she might run off with the devil himself if he walked in, leaned his elbow on the jukebox and tipped his hat just so.
You get to see all these attractions and then some. You get to see Elvis-style dreamboats and slutted-up little girls and eyes swirling wild by the side of the road. You get to see naughty pink parts and coming attractions and wait, just wait, there’s more, keep watching, keep watching, let it play, let it play.
THREE
People think we’re poor but I made a list of things we have, just to set them straight.
We have one seventy-year-old farmhouse, complete with barn, shack and an acre of tall wheat with weeds sticking up. We have all this luxury thanks to my grandpa who gave it to my mama when he died, on account of she was marrying a no good, ne’ergonna-make-nothing-out-of-his-skinny-bone-self like my dad. Despite the fact that it is, at first glance, a farmhouse, we don’t farm it or anything like that. We wouldn’t even know where to start. Tammy’s been trying to grow an avocado tree out of a pit for three years.
All told, we got a yellow farmhouse and a green barn and a blue shack but they’re all faded to about the same color anyways. The paint’s cracked and the wood on each of these little monuments that make up our own private village is washed out to gray, light gray, gray-blue or dark gray. The barn has a huge loft in it full of hay and smelling like horses, even though there haven’t been horses here for twenty years. Just about the only animal life in there are the bats that flutter around thirty feet up top the loft making it Halloween all year round.
It’s so thick with cobwebs up there I’m surprised the bats don’t get caught and eaten up by some imaginary spider of hideous proportion with sinister, darting eyes. On the other side of the cobwebs, facing out into the wheat dusk air, is a white-circle silhouette of a horse centered on each side of the barn, staring proud off into the setting sun.
In front of the barn is our humble abode, which is faded yellow inside and out, with tiny-blue-flower wallpaper on a white-and-gold background in both the entry, which we never use, and the dining room, which we use even less. Everything in our rickety faded buttercup house, dead straight across from the biggest cemetery in Lancaster County, built around 1910, for the gravedigger and his wife, actually still runs properly, with the one exception of some hullabaloo about the water.
Some orange-vested worker men from Lincoln came out here a few years back, noodled with the well tap and warned us that we had too much lithium in our water, declaring that it’d be best for everyone if we just relocated. This is something we never did, of course, because we didn’t have nowhere to relocate to, and Mama says, “Shit, wull, if we have lithium in our water we might as well see it as some kinda healing bonus and make the best of it . . . some people might even pay extra for that.”
Sides all that, we got one RCA color TV with wood on the sides and that sky blue Chevy Nova my dad takes pride in scurrying around and underneath on weekends, fixing and tinkering and muttering to himself about