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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
April 20, 2008
Previously unpublished fiction.
© 2008 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Junkyard Dog, 1969
© 1969 by Bud Grossmann
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LET SLEEPY DOGS LIE
Monday, April 14, 2008
I am not going to bother you, Lou Ann, with a play-by-play of my current cough-cough, but I’ll tell you I am into my fifth day of it and felt so worried on Saturday that it might be bronchitis or pneumonia that I asked my doctor to listen to it on the phone, and accepted his offer of a phoned-in prescription for cough syrup and an antibiotic.
This morning, feeling no better, coughing no less, I drove to Cappella to see the doc during his walk-in, stagger-in hours. He did the walking, I did the staggering.
Who should pull into the clinic parking lot right behind me but my beloved sister, who was born on this date in 1954 and to whom I had just minutes earlier mailed a card, which Cynthia at the Fjord post office had assured me was in time for the Monday delivery. I don’t know what Yvette’s reason for a doctor visit was, and she didn’t ask mine, but we exchanged a few pleasant words.
If my trust and will were signed and sealed, I might have chosen to just roll over and die when I woke this morning, and I would leave you to figure out what to do with your vacation time in June. The house would be nice and quiet for you, though you’d have to get the storm windows off and air out the place, if no one had thought to check on me by then. You could drag my corpse out and plant it by the rhubarb before you mow the lawn. The key to the tool shed padlock is in the right front pocket of my everyday Levi’s, slung on the chair across from my bed.
Besides my not having my trust and will finished, I had another reason to see the doctor—no more refills on the blood pressure pills that don’t work so great except in combination with codeine cough syrup. He was kind enough to make no mention of my being due for a physical and its inevitable Moment of Unpleasantness, an omission I appreciated but did not say so. Let sleepy dogs lie. What’s the harm, who’s going to believe a sleepy dog?
My gorgeous cousin Genevieve, an RN (I have several gorgeous cousins) works for my doctor, and she always lifts my spirits with her smile, but today in addition she pressed two fingers against my neck to judge my fever as she passed by me in the waiting room. “Stay away, Gen! Wash your hands!” I gasped. “Why do you think my hands are so rough?” she said. “I wash them all day long.” “Cough, cough,” I gasped. I had not thought her hands were rough. People frequently reveal premises of which I am skeptical; I am often foolish enough to tell them so.
I am sick sick sick, miserable beyond easy description.
But the doctor said I’m fine, or will be, and he said my blood pressure is fine or fine enough, but, to make me happy, or happy enough, he gave me a month’s worth of samples of something new, which I will try when I finish the last few pills I have on hand.
I was terribly thirsty, so I stopped at Pick-N-Save on my way out of town, for three dozen cans of Mountain Dew and Pepsi, not to be consumed all at once, but I don’t care to find my canteen empty when I cross the desert. Also bought a couple jugs of orange juice, a couple of apple juice, six cans of frozen o.j., and three items Dad requested.
I dropped off my groceries at my house and headed out to the farm to gaze upon my sick mother (throwing up this morning, before her pills) and sick father (whose cough sounds like mine).
We had frost this morning. By noon the day was sunny but still crisp. Snow survives in shaded places. Thinking I would not likely make any stops from Fjord to farm, I changed out of my go-to-doctor shoes, and wore white socks with black Scott zori.
At Ted and Cheryl Reese’s farm, just south of my parents’, I had to park my Subaru and get out and subject my unfashionable feet to Cheryl’s commentary because what should I see in the Reeses’ yard, on a flatbed trailer, but an old car, a happy, hideous heap of rust that turned out to be a 1941 four-door Chevrolet Deluxe, complete. It belongs, Ted said, to one of my high school classmates who lives now in Wisconsin Dells. The shed it has been parked in for forty years and the land beneath the shed have been sold. The vehicle was so gritty with rust and sand I couldn’t bear to look for coins in the seat cushions.
Someone, Ted said, has offered $100 for it, or it might go for scrap. I myself don’t want it, but I have put in a call to a California friend fond of Chevrolets.
We got to reminiscing about Chevies, Ted and Cheryl and I, and also discussed a recent almost-confirmed almost-sighting of a wolf among the Reeses’ sheep. Ted, you may recall my saying, is the older brother of quiet Bonnie Reese Dunn, a year ahead of me at FHS, who borrowed his black 1964 Impala Super Sport one summer night circa 1968 to show me and two other boys in my class how to make the tires leave long marks on a paved road.
Ted told me today a story I hadn’t heard, or didn’t remember, about him and sister Bonnie and that same Impala when it was new, on a country road, on a summer Sunday early afternoon, returning from the funeral of an elderly aunt. Ted was driving east, probably not at a leisurely rate of travel, and came over a rise to find a farmer’s car, full of farmer, wife, and kids, just pulling out of a driveway, likewise going east. Ted would have hit them, but he braked hard, swerved into the left-hand ditch, slid and spun, returned to the road, and stalled, now facing exactly west.
No contact, no evident harm. The farm family did not pause. Ted and Bonnie got out of the Impala to check for damage. They got right back in, though, for they found that the skid, Ted said, had slung a long, plump, spotted adder out of the grass and onto the roadway where it looked to be in good health and perhaps a bit discontented.
I know other returning-from-funeral stories. I hope to postpone telling any about my own.
Love, Dave
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