revised prose

I remember the smell of the yellow flowers across the dewy grass when waking as a child, a breeze that fell upon my chest through the perched summer window. And I really remember hearing my grandmother in the kitchen—cooking pancakes with blueberry’s and chocolate chips. It was summer—always summer, these memories. For what is life without eternity—these small moments when we are truly awake, yet dreaming. A dream that displaces that feeling of being out in the distance (maybe not far enough)…
For there is a drunken Indian on my aunts reservation where she works, as a nurse, who has wet tears crusting around his eyes—his last drop of bourbon emptying out of an iridescent bottle, burning his lips at 11:30 in the morning. For that last drop was never enough to console him about his dead wife, his obese children, and that worthless monthly government check that hardly bought him enough to tie one on—day after day…
And there he is a few hours later, as my aunt and I approach the family park in her blue State issued ford pickup truck—drunker than hell where it is still nice—nice with the yellow flowers, the sun at noon with the little clouds dancing through the sky, and a place to dream with the little Indian children who still have the ability to imagine fame and fortune—rocking back and forth into the sky, on the new swing set the federal government finally purchased. My aunt told me Elijah (the drunken Indian) was always in the park—face turned in, and breathing the gravel. It was better than being at home alone she contended. In a matter of fact tone she looked over at me from the driver’s seat and said “he got in a car wreck a few years back breaking his wife’s neck, and shattering a few of his bones as well—that’s why when he is sober enough to stand straight, he walks with a limp…” My aunt sighed and squeezed the steering wheel a little, and told me she had been his nurse when he woke a few hours after the incident—where he learned the full details from the state trooper who was the first to arrive at the scene, and see Elijah’s wife’s flipped dangling head, and crooked neck.
My aunt said in some manner sincerity had always been a virtue of Elijah’s, and on waking from the shock he asked in his first conscious moment about his wife. The topper discontentedly reposed, but gave it out of the long nights stress, and the honesty it was worth to the fragmented middle age man, on the white linen bed surrounded by hospital equipment…“When I was about 100 feet out of the wreck—I approached what I thought to be a couple of parked cars on the highway, with engine trouble.” Pacing around and gulping some ice water never making eye contact with Elijah he continued, “and I came upon it sir, your wife next you…she, I perceived to be dead.”
In his thoughts the white 23 year old state trooper with good intentions, for the Indian reservation, and its people, was still there…coming upon the sight of the burning orange lights in the distance—the flipped rear ended red dodge pickup truck on the side of the two lane highway; a green Honda civic totaled from hood to steering wheel, and a bleeding man kneeling next to the right front tire of the crushed green steel mess with his head in his palms…My aunt said a little bitterly, “the man who was driving the civic had been drunk”.
In the bed below the bright fluorescent bulbs and the cackling fan wafting around stale air, something faded in Elijah’s brown eyes. He had seen the photos—that seemed to fill in the hazy edges were the New Mexico state trooper could not…which my aunt reasoned looking out at him now from the glaring windshield (in a recollective sort of distance from me) broke him down so much he picked up drinking himself.
As I watched him in the hot sun asleep on the grass I knew he owed the world at least that favor. What was pious sober living worth if it had brought him thus far? I knew he would rather see the rest of his days in a shade being removed. A place like the one he found himself as my aunt and I sat in the parking lot; with the children who had not yet even thought of driving on long dark highways…
That place where a butterfly could touch upon those swaying yellow mariposa’s, and return to cover as the heavy summer rain soaked the grass—and Elijah’s clothes when he was too drunk to pick himself up—a place where rainbows formed with low dark moisture and sunshine, and a place where all who saw him really tried, but could never really care—in the shade and comfort of a summer dream.