As a youngster, I lived where the rain cleaves the land. One side, all clear and sunny. Other side, it rained… and rained,
Once the rain exited, bees would shake water off their fuzzy brown and yellow-striped backs and fly. They’d do their due diligence, sipping nectar and picking pollen for their own sustenance while carelessly dropping pollen across the yard plant to plant.
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Plants would green; fruit trees flower; flowers bud.
But it didn’t. The rain never seemed to stop. It
Just
Kept
Raining.
I got used to it, the cloud following me around my middle class melancholic mediocrity (as one of my high school teachers put it) as the piss-poor family living across the swollen creek acted as if there were no care in the world. The woman held up her family in her threadbare gingham while the man sweated (when he was working) as part of the lunch pail brigade, carrying a butter and honey white bread sandwich with perhaps an apple. Then there was their boy. My age (not exactly as I was born a bit later during a very wet spring), cocked head thick with dark hair sporting a shit-eating, know-nothing grin as the previously mentioned wearer of translucent gingham, fell all over the place making sure that grin didn’t disappear. Sure as shit, it really didn’t for the most part. Course I don’t know all. Kid moved away to the city soon after we moved on from grade school.
I went by Ogle. Not oh-gull, like staring at someone uncomfortably, but ah-gull. Ogle Moser. I drove Chevys, period. Changed them way one of them far backwoods southerners changed underwear, perhaps less often. Just ran in my blood. I, like all Mosers, apparently came from a long line of French who decided to stay after America achieved its independence. Hatred for the British ran deep in my veins since my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather ducked behind trees with the best of Lafayette’s men. Blindly wrapping his wrist around maples like all brothers of the Legion, he shot indiscriminately toward oncoming Redcoats. Whether he ever hit one was of no consequence to him. He got a free boat ride to the new land. One the revolution was over, the newly-formed government, as a reward for all foreign fighters, armed each of them with a secret land provision far, far away so he elected to stay.
Far, far away meant in the wooded far western United States, which at that time meant what is now Tennessee. The freshly-named Mississippi created a not-so-navigable water wall no one dared cross, so my “great-great-squared” as I had creatively shortened it, decided a few miles east off the treacherous Mississippi against a small meandering creek was fine for his few acres.
Plowhorses turned to tractors, quarterhorses to cars. Ford, while alliterate for a Frenchman, could not hold a candle to the meaning of Chevrolet. Chevrolet was incorporated by a Frenchman, Louis Chevrolet, in 1911 (his parents were born in Switzerland but we ignored that fact). The first Chevrolet was designed by Etienne Planche, another Frenchman. Just stood to reason, you know? Fate, you could call it, led the Mosers.
I worked on Chevys as had my father, grandfather and great-grandfather. My great-grandfather’s father had sold the farm to a huge dairy (a stroke of luck, the farm land was later declared eminent domain by the federal government for the TVA project). From the Chevy Series C to the original Malibu, all of us Mosers (originally Montdure, but changed for the purposes of assimilation) had changed oil and transmissions for nearly a century. Our auto shop, smartly located in the bustling city of blues and barbeque, Memphis, had changed hands from one generation to another. Other than adding expertise to a variety of auto lines of what became General Motors, us Mosers kept at it. Frankly, we gained a reputation for being fair, something not heard of in our line of work. Hell, if a battery needed a simple re-charge, we’d re-charge it, not replace it. Not hesitant to tell a customer what was wrong with their engine, we were equal at making sure they knew what was right with it as well as what we did to make it right for nothing. Contrary to popular belief of the French or descendants thereof, we were lauded in Memphis as the best auto techs in the Memphis section of the massive Mississippi Valley.
The mid ‘60s brought us Cadillac. Now to be fair to Cadillac, it had been around longer than Chevrolet, just didn’t carry the French non-subtle class we loved at that time. French stubbornness won over so us Mosers stayed away from Cadillac for nearly three generations. Once we decided to expand, we took them on. Hell, the size of the automobiles (we could barely fit the obese beasts into our bays) was far more daunting than the engines. Engines, while bigger, were exactly like the rest of the General Motors’ line-up. We got used to slowly moving the boats into our bays. Never had more than a scratch in the nearly 15 years we had been working on them.
I could hear them. Not customers, those I heard all the time. Mostly good words, but I’d have a few delusional ones rain down on me. No, these voices were different. Distant, but close. Wasn’t exactly conscious to figure it out at first, but it came to me soon enough. Besides, they’d never now until they got into my position, lying on a cold steel slab unable to feel coldness or the warmth of their breath as they lowered.
Jesus Christ, sometimes one day runs right into the next. All the same. Then comes this kind of day. Don’t this beat all. Not the best way to be found,
Still think about it being having sex?
Hell… yup.
Thinking about the goings on in…
Oh yeah. What about that? Just gets odder, huh.
Heard they’re familiar.
Familiar? More so. Grew up across from one another.
No shit.
Dead serious.
They laughed, both of them. Guess when you’re used to it, it all has to become funny or you become funny in the head. Least that’s what my thinking was and ever shall be.
No shit.
Yep. Know Tupelo?
Been there couple times.
Seems there’d been a creek. Little thing meandered like a Cottonmouth straight to the Mississip.
There’s a lot of them. It’s what makes the Mississip the Mississip.
Masks pulled up, they’d continued. Breathable spun cotton or whatever it was couldn’t deter voices from being heard.
Said was a creek?
Swallowed up by government from what I heard.
Ah, right. Like others.
Bijou I think.
French-named like all the others no doubt.
Funny how it ends up, you know? Both fathers out there. Both.
Not exactly in the Good Lord’s plan.
Nope. Generations aren’t supposed to cross over as they cross over.
I hovered. Strange as it were, I felt fine. Complete would be a good way to put it. I felt, not smug, that wouldn’t do. Satisfied? Could be. Complete was better.
As they took the tiny whining saw to my breastplate, I looked over. Poor fellow. On my right, he was. He floated too, no doubt. I could see that much, but his image was sad, curled up like he was in the womb. He looked worn, tired. I reached over to him, but there was nothing left.
Started poor, ended poor in my opinion.
I lived my whole life with that rain, actually came to look for it as it was my constant. Staying in the middle certainly meant no reward, but no risk either. Once used to the water, I had tilted my head up and drank it all in. Once the rain came down on him, he drowned in it.
Funny. In spite of our pre-teen years growing up across that creek from one another, him in that rental the size of a single wide, me in our paid-for modest ranch, we never played with one another. Ever. Later on, once I took to the family business, getting my cuticles peeled back, blood coagulating with grease, I toiled on many of his Cadillacs. Now here we were. Doesn’t this just beat all. Lying on this steel slab was the closest I ever got to the King.
