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Authors: Paul Guest
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back to my life. I felt murderous, embarrassed, ready only to vanish.
When we turned at last into our driveway I could see our house. The sloping front lawn with a wild dogwood in its center and the backyard, fenced in, shadowed by the limbs of a large pecan tree. A ramp had been built, long and turning at right angles, rising until it reached our porch. A cement path led through the lawn, uphill to the ramp. All this was new. I’d enter and exit our home this way. Taught well the expense of everything my injury could ever touch, spilling ever outward, I knew it must have cost thousands, and my heart slumped in my chest. Some nights after my accident I would dream of sepia-tinted mushroom clouds. Seen in the old newsreels shown to us in school, to show what the end really would look like. I woke from those dreams startled, in a contentious sweat, no no no . Sitting there, imagining storms of fissure sprout around our house like weeds, I felt my heart slump in my chest. If I could be transparent, unseen, then I would not feel so bad.
People began streaming from the house and from inside the garage. They held signs above their heads and were applauding. People I knew from church, adults and their children, and relatives, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents,and friends from school I had not seen since before my accident, some close to me and some not. Some that had been at my accident. Adam. Jody wasn’t there and wouldn’t be in the future: I saw her once more, though she didn’t see me, years later, shortly before she died of cancer. Neighbors. Friends of family, who had tirelessly raised money and babysat and cooked, the sorts of things small communities are programmed to do when there is awful news. When there is a death.
Here I was, their tragic occasion, their almost death. They clapped in the growing dusk while my parents lifted me from the car seat and into the rented electric wheelchair. They shook their glittered signs at me, saying notice . Shouting praise Jesus and amen and weeping where they stood in the grass and I drove through them, nodding stiffly, making eye contact with no one, up the new ramp while everyone clapped all over again, as if there had been worry over the successful navigation of it all, clapping and clapping and clapping like a congregation of fools and for the first time since breaking my neck, I thought, I want to die .
chapter SEVEN
I rode the short bus, awful slang for a bus intended for children with special needs. Every morning, just past seven, the short bus lurched to a wheezing halt in the street, a frenetic suburban artery. Cars waited in long chains on either side as I was raised from the ground by a screaming hydraulic lift. When I had been belted in and my chair strapped by the driver, she rammed forward again, jolting all her passengers to the bone. I hated it. Hated the everyday exposure to the plain impatience of all the drivers who waited, sometimes querulously honking their horns. Hated the ensuing jostle, the careless velocity through every pothole and over each speed bump which had the temerity toappear in our path. And, though I was ashamed, a part of me hated the other passengers, who were blameless. Guilty only of their parents’ poverty, or the faulty replication of DNA, they greeted me with loud hellos, or wordless recognition, waving, clapping silently, laughing, turning to me to chat when the short bus began again. One girl, her voice all twang, who lived on a hill above a Church of God of Divine Revelation, always wore the same shirt. She always asked me the same question.
“Do you know who Ricky Van Shelton is?” she cooed. I didn’t. Her shirt showed me: he was mostly cowboy hat and serviceable pout, brooding with his guitar. A country singer, a knockoff of better, more authentic artists, but to her he was Elvis. Elvis reborn, I guess.
“I’ve never heard of him,” I said, trying to be honest. She suggested I listen to him sometime. “I might do
When we turned at last into our driveway I could see our house. The sloping front lawn with a wild dogwood in its center and the backyard, fenced in, shadowed by the limbs of a large pecan tree. A ramp had been built, long and turning at right angles, rising until it reached our porch. A cement path led through the lawn, uphill to the ramp. All this was new. I’d enter and exit our home this way. Taught well the expense of everything my injury could ever touch, spilling ever outward, I knew it must have cost thousands, and my heart slumped in my chest. Some nights after my accident I would dream of sepia-tinted mushroom clouds. Seen in the old newsreels shown to us in school, to show what the end really would look like. I woke from those dreams startled, in a contentious sweat, no no no . Sitting there, imagining storms of fissure sprout around our house like weeds, I felt my heart slump in my chest. If I could be transparent, unseen, then I would not feel so bad.
People began streaming from the house and from inside the garage. They held signs above their heads and were applauding. People I knew from church, adults and their children, and relatives, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents,and friends from school I had not seen since before my accident, some close to me and some not. Some that had been at my accident. Adam. Jody wasn’t there and wouldn’t be in the future: I saw her once more, though she didn’t see me, years later, shortly before she died of cancer. Neighbors. Friends of family, who had tirelessly raised money and babysat and cooked, the sorts of things small communities are programmed to do when there is awful news. When there is a death.
Here I was, their tragic occasion, their almost death. They clapped in the growing dusk while my parents lifted me from the car seat and into the rented electric wheelchair. They shook their glittered signs at me, saying notice . Shouting praise Jesus and amen and weeping where they stood in the grass and I drove through them, nodding stiffly, making eye contact with no one, up the new ramp while everyone clapped all over again, as if there had been worry over the successful navigation of it all, clapping and clapping and clapping like a congregation of fools and for the first time since breaking my neck, I thought, I want to die .
chapter SEVEN
I rode the short bus, awful slang for a bus intended for children with special needs. Every morning, just past seven, the short bus lurched to a wheezing halt in the street, a frenetic suburban artery. Cars waited in long chains on either side as I was raised from the ground by a screaming hydraulic lift. When I had been belted in and my chair strapped by the driver, she rammed forward again, jolting all her passengers to the bone. I hated it. Hated the everyday exposure to the plain impatience of all the drivers who waited, sometimes querulously honking their horns. Hated the ensuing jostle, the careless velocity through every pothole and over each speed bump which had the temerity toappear in our path. And, though I was ashamed, a part of me hated the other passengers, who were blameless. Guilty only of their parents’ poverty, or the faulty replication of DNA, they greeted me with loud hellos, or wordless recognition, waving, clapping silently, laughing, turning to me to chat when the short bus began again. One girl, her voice all twang, who lived on a hill above a Church of God of Divine Revelation, always wore the same shirt. She always asked me the same question.
“Do you know who Ricky Van Shelton is?” she cooed. I didn’t. Her shirt showed me: he was mostly cowboy hat and serviceable pout, brooding with his guitar. A country singer, a knockoff of better, more authentic artists, but to her he was Elvis. Elvis reborn, I guess.
“I’ve never heard of him,” I said, trying to be honest. She suggested I listen to him sometime. “I might do
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