tobacco juice

My god, certain moments live too long in your memory, irrespective of how well you’ve learned to squirm, if you sit down in peace and quiet for too terribly long, they come by, paying visits, a lost, uncomfortable art. As a child, my grandmother would pay visits to each of the neighbors, all impossibly old, nearly always widows. Ruby lived across the street, and like every old woman on the block, she had a tiny little dog that yapped incessantly and bit your pant legs. Every visit began with grandchildren on display, and I would stand up straight, smile, accept the moist kisses on my cheek, wonder if there were anything in the world an old woman loved more than admiring a 5-year-old boy.

Ruby sits down in her recliner and they talk. She picks up a tin cup and spits tobacco juice. It’s a habit long out of fashion among today’s senior ladies, dip and chew. Occasionally a bit of the black liquid would dribble down her chin, and I would drop eyes downward, but her legs would be mercilessly uncovered, and so I would look back up, in time to see her wipe her mouth with her forearm.

Almost 30 years ago, I still remember what I was thinking, this lifelong habit of analogy. Everything has its counterpart in the natural world. And Ruby, for me, was like so many grasshoppers. I would stalk them in the waist-deep grass. Listen for their calls. Watch for their movement. See their reflection in the Texas sun. Strike out with my hands and catch them before they flew, both legs pinned together, and turn them over. They would dribble black fluid from their mouths.

Sometimes I would toss them in with the scorpions I kept, at the bottom of a coffee can, other times I would throw them into the garden spider’s web, and sometimes I would pierce them with a hook and cast them out into the creek. My god, I could spend entire days fishing.

And some days, I would fling them up into the air and watch them fly away.

We broke into the house one night, when I was much older. She had died, and the place was empty, and you made me crazy, and it was the bit of breeze that calmed me. But I had my first taste, nonetheless, in that spot where I once stood up straight and smiled, uncomfortable, accepting unwelcome, dark-stained kisses, thinking that I would let that next grasshopper fly away. I miss you. You’re undoubtedly married now, a new person, and my searches fall short, in vain, your maiden name lost like those memories, which, nonetheless, visit me when I sit still for too terribly long.