Copyright © 2003 LeeAnn Heringer
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Copyright © 2003 LeeAnn Heringer
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Perry gets a chainsawhe’s spent the last few months playing Fred Sanford, clutching his chest & yelling skyward, staggering beneath the weight of our collective stupidity. his round Buddha belly shaking with rage, notebooks dying in his hands while we silently reviewed what we know about CPR & judged the distance to the phone & the 911 dispatcher. he reminded us daily that a year ago he’d had a heart attack for our sins. something had to give. it was his wife. she bought a house last month in Oregon 20 miles from town at the end of the road, 5 wooded acres & a riverfront, two hours by ambulance from the nearest hospital, & told him he could keep the job if he could do it from oregon. forcing me, his manager. me, the one who disbelieves in the social hierarchies of imaginary relationships & other long distance affairs, to be the one tasked to make his new arm’s length, dialing-for-dollars employment agreement work. I bought him a chainsaw as a moving-to-Oregon gift because a man alone in the woods needs tools. not knowing he’d already had the I-gotta-have-a-gun-rack-&-a-chainsaw talk with his wife & lost. because she knew & I didn’t his only experience with chainsaws was from horror flicks. not knowing someone would move to the edge of the grid thinking rural life was accurately shown in L.L. Bean catalogs. each morning now I get the weather report from southwest Oregon & a faint buzzing noise as if someone’s still yelling, but it’s becoming less & less necessary to listen. |
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