King of the Road
The Narrows
Copyright 2014 Bull Garlington
It’s November in Alabama and my favorite uncle is dying.
I come from a family with nothing but uncles on both sides of the wedding cake. They’re a blue collar Rushmore and to a man they glare down at my doomed relative, the half-truck-driver-half-fast-food-restaurant-manager, the joker, the partier, the gray sheep, the one who borrowed money to go to culinary school but couldn’t finish, the one who married the stripper named Lucky who wore high heeled shoes that light up when she walks and boomeranged in and out of county jail for petty theft; the mad uncle who used to make me fried baloney sandwiches then take me drunken night fishing at the dam where we shot 44 magnums into the sky; the one who killed a perfect eight point buck out by the papermill with his Mac truck and earned the nickname “Deerhunter;” Paul, the youngest, who was dying, who was already dead.
I am in the car with my sister watching my mother drive, watching her beautiful resigned smile propelled west out of Birmingham in silence to bring me to the grim bed of her baby brother whom she has loved like he was her own son his whole life and especially these last ten hard years.
A whole ten years and more of helping, of loaning, of selflessly assisting and praying, all punctuated by his stroke, a blind fist to the side of the head that laid him out, stole his tongue, and left him cooped up inside himself like a scared dog under a bed.
We pull up to Paul’s rutted driveway, up to the long flat top of the hill, bare except for spindly pines and a barn-red clapboard shack nestled up against a giant silver propane tank. No cars. A narrow cement walkway runs fifteen feet straight out from the front step then stops abruptly in the middle of the yard.
I walk up to the door but Lucky opens it before I get there. She’s all oh-my-Gods and har yall do whens?, the very air between us darkened by the billowing orthography of her twang.
There is only one bedroom. The rest of the house is half rooms all crowded together. The whole shack is flooded with the mid afternoon light spilling through an enormous front window, the kind of double-hung ornate hunting-lodge oak-framed catastrophe purchased as a guilty afterthought by the son who almost finished building this tiny home.
There’s a lone spindly antique, its arcane purpose hidden under a thin flour-bag towel, where pictures of my uncle are lined up like an early requiem, as if the inevitability if his condition requires signage: Going Fast! Stay Tuned!
She’s been keeping track of his heart rate and blood oxygen levels on a flimsy sheet of notebook paper. My mother barely makes it through the door before Lucky has this paper out. She points to the numbers in the far right column. Each one of them is a tiny figure, written with cribbed, blocky rigor, as if she writes with her mouth open.
“His blood oxygen level is just dropping, Liz.”
Lucky says this with a giddy rush, her hands flying up to retuck wispy gray strands of hair behind her ears. I know her excitement is about the precision of her information and not actual glee. I know that what’s happened is she’s been given this incredible tool, this ledger, like the arc of the Goddam covenant, and she’s managed to wrestle the right numbers into the right boxes and add them up and has, miraculously, understood that the pattern of smaller and smaller results indicates a steady decline of air going into my poor Uncle’s desperate lungs. This is information my mother has gently and humbly requested of her, my mother the collegiate, the Reverend, the theological scholar and the occasional generous benefactor of tuitions and rents, and Lucky hath delivered, by God, and I know that’s what’s going on here. I know. But it looks like she’s fucking excited that his respiration is bringing him ever closer to his expiration.
I step around the edge of the living room wall into Paul’s room. My Uncle’s thrown back onto a gentle slope of yellow pillows. His head’s the same huge shaggy oblate thing it was in my boyhood but the look on his face is completely wrong. He’s already a ghost. We’re already haunted.
My sister and mother gather up and sing.
In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore;
In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore.
And they keep going, keep slogging onward, through an inappropriate liturgical glurge. They sing, in order: “Swing Low,” “I’ll Fly Away,“ and “Amazing Grace.”
I want to kick them in the ass but the stripper says, “Oh my,” like a choir of angels has walked through the door. I try to disappear.
Thirty-five years ago, the Alabama Department of Transportation started building new highways.
These highways were born from dynamite and bush hog work and kept a lot of people busy for a lot of years until the asphalt was finally poured and all six lanes finally opened. Suddenly, you could drive sixty miles from Harpersville into Birmingham going 80 miles an hour without stopping.
The moment the new highway opened, all the crooked, creek-running feeder roads simply died. They dried up, became burled sepia photographs of themselves. Driving through Shelby County went from picturesque to parallel in a single afternoon.
The most beautiful of these dead highways is more like a tunnel than a road. It has a high slate wall on one side, with touch-me-not trees and the rest of the forest crowding over its top, fifteen or twenty feet over your head; the slate is so close a brave passenger can literally reach out and touch it on the outside curves and there’s no shoulder at all. Maybe a foot and a half of gravel with occasional wide berths carved into the cliffside in case you get a flat and have to pull over.
The other side of the road sports a knee-high river-rock wall that gives the occasional drunk driver just enough lift to propel them and their car well out into the air over the creek, ensuring a quick and painless death.
Imagine a well-considered collection of famous Dead Man Curves nestled in the sharp teeth of a dark canyon. This is highway 41, but nobody calls it that. They call it the Narrows.
Mortified by my family’s maudlin hymns, my soul ejects itself into a story my uncle used to tell me about heading into forty-one at a hundred plus and living to tell the tale. Being that he was essentially full of shit, I never believed him. But my soul has decided to investigate and I end up in a chipper truck cab, 1977, driven by my Uncle Paul. He’s smoking a Pall Mall and listening to Johnny Cash.
Oblivious to my spectral presence, My Uncle bellows along with “Folsom Prison Blues,” on the radio. He’s completely lost in singing, mentally on stage with a rhinestone studded Washburn playing to a bunch of tax evaders and rapists, giving the finger to the press when a car jets out from one of the feeder roads into an oncoming pick-up truck, Detroit steel cart-wheeling in every direction.
Traffic skids to a stop, a train of unhitched cars derailing down the spine of the highway. Doors open, the backs of people’s heads fill their window frames as they try to see who bought the farm, blind and oblivious of the 5,000 pounds of volatile pine chips bearing down on them.
Paul’s in love with this new highway. If you’re a chip truck driver, speed matters. The more loads you cram into a day, the more money you make. The new highway means he never has to slow down, never has to stop. Until now.
Paul glances at the speedometer: 105. I’m scared shitless, my soul’s feet are planted against the plastic dash so hard my knees are turning white. But my Uncle is too busy to be scared.
He wrestles the huge steering wheel to the right, half standing in his seat as the truck shudders onto the shoulder of the highway. I lean out the window and stare down through the Come to Jesus bushes and granite rocks, 950 feet down into indistinct treetops and certain death.
Paul jerks his truck onto the right of way, which is filled with parked cars. The n
ew shiny connector road to the Narrows is less than 40 yards in from of him so he carves into a solid right turn. His truck skids around a sharp bend, bouncing impossibly across a shallow culvert and the edge of a gravel ditch, cutting across the bend of the feeder road well behind the crashed cars and rubberneckers, his pneumatic breaks screaming as the truck blows from asphalt to asphalt through the shallow debris of explosive highway construction, pebble-sized red gravel ably lubricating his slide across the oncoming lanes of Highway 41, then shaking itself straight, brakes blown out, engine screaming, chrome bulldog hood ornament pointed East, charging out of view around the edge of the mountain, into the deep green shade of the