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Writer's picturePaul Hawkins

Asphalt and Dragonflies


It was an angry morning that threatened a storm as the young lady pushed the old man in the wheel chair onto the porch of the wide white house that some genteel lady might have made into an antebellum charmer but he just let rot. He looked out beyond his land at a stand of dark trees that began on the other side of the dirt road and dove toward the sluggish creek. Then his eyes focused on the dragonflies lofting between here and there, in the grey humid air of the disturbed morning, dipping and zipping, angular but eventually all headed in the same direction.


“They migrate don’t they?” he asked.


“I don’t know.” As flat and bored as possible.

But he persisted. “Yes, they do. South to North in summer. North to South in winter. What month is this?”


“They’re moving West.”


“West?” He waved a big hand at the end of a spindly wrist. “You don’t know your directions.”

“Yes, I do. And it’s birds what migrate.”


He waved her off. The dark things dipped and darted and occasionally zipped just inches in front of them.


“West.” he said. “Must be a weather system moving in and messing them up.”


She just stood behind his chair.


“Remember, when I die they’re to burn my body. Every scrap of it. I don’t want scientists messing with my DNA. I don’t want another life. One is enough.” He said “scientists” the way other folks might say “Jew” or “communist.” He spat it. He actually had to wipe the spittle from his chin.


“I’ll make sure nobody clones you.”


“Gawd,” he said. “One life’s enough. It’s more than enough.”


“You get your fresh air I’ll get started on your breakfast.” And with that she left him.


He looked out at the flat wide ground and the dark treeline and the grey sky above.


His head had the same shape and consistency of a half-boiled lima bean. He was lean and bent inside and out like a candle that had been dipped on a curl of barbed wire and then mostly melted away by years of hot summers. He was alone. His wife had died decades ago in a car wreck.


“Damn,” he said. The clouds grumbled but only half-heartedly, and the confused dragonflies bumbled and darted around. In his mind he was fast enough to reach out and grab one and eat it so that it energized him. But he could not do it. He thought he could even hear a tiny metallic whir of their wings.

ii

By noon he had signed the papers. He had been tidied up for the event - it was embarrassing - this woman who made no effort to hide her disdain for him washing him and scrubbing him, combing his scant hair and then buttoning him into a once tailored but now cavernous suit. The damned suit was from the 1960’s. It had narrow lapels and a stylish cut but now it smelled like mothballs and cedar.


He had been an important man once, and that meant that he had to sign a lot of papers before he died. His damned kids came by for the event and acted like they were happy to see him. They spoke too loudly to him and thought he couldn’t hear their whispers amongst themselves. He hated them. He liked some of his grandkids but could not interact with them. After all was said and signed and his lawyers had made their strange emotionless pacts with the children’s lawyers he found he had ended up placed in a corner looking out at it all. His caregiver was behind him. Suddenly he felt like she was behind him for a reason, to hide herself from this odd commotion and to assert her responsibility amongst all their carelessness and officiousness, and if nothing else to let them know she was a caregiver and not the maid, and so suddenly he felt he liked her. “Damn them all.” he whispered hoarsely so she could hear it, and he gave a little laugh, and he let her shush him for being an old fool.


“And I’m to be burned!” he hollered out to the room so that they noticed him again. “You put that in writing, didn’t you, you vultures? No gawking church service - no wax me in a coffin. I’m to be cremated with no ado.”


His lawyer confirmed. “It’s in there.”


“Well good. No organ, no cell, no viscera, no semen is to survive me. I foresee a future run by ghouls in white smocks making promises but working for the Devil and building a paradise out of parts from the dead. I want no part of it.”


They all looked at him. His children chuckled nervously to their spouses.


“Well if it’s done, then I need my nap.”


He was wheel to his room and he napped but they lingered and had what passed for a family reunion and so when he woke late in the afternoon they were just leaving, each pausing in the doorway to kiss his mostly bald head or mutter some insincerity for renewed health. He was well behaved to the degree he could manage, pretended to reflect their pretend sincerity and managing to compliment some of his grandchildren (a few of them he truly loved). He was glad to see the last of their vehicles depart as twilight fell. He was curious to see if the dragonflies would return in the softening torpid atmosphere of the fading day and whether they would still be confused by the threat of rain that couldn’t figure whether to unleash itself.


iii

In the space age he had been a big man with the state highway department, and he had several engineering degrees and while other men poked in the ground for oil he designed and built roads like crisp new dollar bills or grey shiny hatbands emancipated from the haberdasher’s and stretched to the state’s furthest corners, not just for transportation but to make a show of optimism and to herald prosperity (mostly on Uncle Sam’s dime - Oklahoma always had Congressmen close to the federal spigot). He built roads because everybody knew the economy was strong and America was on top of the world and Detroit was on top of America and the future would bring education and opportunity and success to every damned corner of the state, even to where they still nursed Model A’s (or mules) well past their golden years.


It was a quiet, more unified, and more easily understood world back then. There were rockets but no hellfire. There was no born-again movement yet because, in the strange sense in which nature works, its opposite had not evoked it. Oh, there were the brimstone-spewing clapboard churches each one block and one schism away from each other but no collectivist strident fundamentalism yet - certainly no voting bloc, just the same old crackpot prophets on puny local a.m. stations and on the shortwave radio - hell, always on the shortwave, and now and then on some Mexican station whose MW rating exceeded FCC limits by magnitudes - railing about the judgment and the hellfire and the utterly abject fallen state of unsaved human nature and the End. But it was easy not to think about the End when one was spreading endless roads to nowhere, and it was even easier to switch the radio in the console of his large sedan as he drove from one corner of the state to the other, inspecting the handiwork of his department. Or else he could just wait until the puny station died away, washed to bits and nothing by the static, giving way to blue grass or Johnny Cash.


He had pulled aside from the road once to a diner in a place he did not now remember to watch the first man step on the moon. He had almost forgotten about it until he heard it on the road, so he pulled over. He walked into the low greasy place and sure enough the proprietor had it on the TV and he and the wiry greasy fellow were the only people there but their eyes looked at the imaging fading in and out from the TV screen and they were transfixed. They tried to make sure of what they were seeing in the static.


“Buddy, that his foot?”


“I think it is!”


The man gave him a soda on the house. They watched the conquest of space together. Afterwards he got in his car and continued inspecting the roads. At night in his hotel he remembered that his wife had given birth that day. He hastily had a place he knew send over the biggest bouquet of flowers they had. He called his wife and pretended that he had remembered, and he insisted that they name their son Neil.


iv

He woke from his nap and they ate supper in silence that night, his caregiver at one end of the table and he at another. It was so quiet they could hear the clatter of the flatware on the china.

“What’s up with you?” she said. “You’re usually a storm of opinions. I caint get you to shut up.”

He looked at her and said nothing, and so she rose dutifully and took his blood pressure and temperature while he sat in the obedient, silent position.


“Shoot, you’re normal.”


“Hah.”


“You had too big a day. You eat what’s in front of you then rest.”


He nodded and returned to his soup. She turned on a game show on the TV in the other room just to have a little noise and then came back.


“Was it that bad?” she said. “Your kids are okay. Honestly, everybody gets to be assholes once they’re grown up. Trust me, I’ve waited hand and foot on lots of them. Your kids are better than most.”


He tried to look at her but she had returned to her food. Consciously, maybe, from manner or professional habit. Like all women she was intuitive even when she was not trying to be, and she had guessed at something in his mind, something that had burrowed past his hardness. The gaggle from that day had all left again and he was surprised that he felt alone. He felt an oddness and a strangeness within him like a flush beneath his chest. He did not know what it was and he did not want to tell her how to do her job, but he knew the sensation was different and it quietly alarmed him and he thought that if it did not let up he would die soon.


A rumble shook the house.


“That damned storm ever going to come?” he said.


“I hope so. I am tired of those danged fool messed up dragonflies pinging into the windows.”


v

He slept and the pressure in his chest did not relent and he had turbulent dreams mixed up and roiled like the weather once the light of day had left. He saw blobs of color and he never dreamed in color, but here they came in blobs and waves and pierced his inner eye. They formed the faces he had seen this day, and other faces, strangers from the roadside of his many drives while banding the state in asphalt, hopeless nameless directionless fateless forgotten. He rolled violently. He saw his wife of forty years and he realized he had never loved her. He hadn’t had the time. His life with her darted from the march of faces he had seen the prior day, formed from all of them and sprang from the periphery and cast the other images aside and once the center of his vision flashed at him an accusation and a ghost. He knew what it said. He fought back against the idea of having done things and done nothing. She had been gone for years and he had plodded on like clockwork, a busy man, like stone. Only now with a violence and the relentless pain in his chest his heart opened like a fresh wound. She had been torn from him in blood and violence, but she had never broken his heart because he had never broken it open himself in the way that youth and love and life itself usually desperately compel like a hunger, in search of joy and consolation against loneliness, the way an islander might raise and split a melon into oozing halves against a rock. Even in his marriage he had been his roads, his suits, his roles, his trajectories, his atoms. The grey lines rose to crucify him, every dragonfly an iron filing, a shred of steel from an industrial lathe in some grey factory running night and day in limbo, forever, the darting lively forms the bits discarded in the process. They sprang and whizzed and when they struck the flesh they stung, the slivers that wrapped quickly into coils when shaved away incessantly to make the thing that was a nothing.


He awoke and found himself on the grass in the back yard in the storm.


Oh dear God he said and he had never believed in God. He did not fit his plan his time his suit his promises his blueprints his occasions.


He had never loved her until now. Now his heart welled and ached. he saw her and he loved her like an orange rose and then like the bright blood of a wound ripped suddenly, red with a brighter red at the center, she in an organdy sleeveless dress of summer length, strident orange with abstract flowers of some designer who never intended to make sense, she walking to their tail-finned sedan who knows how many decades ago, white gloves to her elbows and her hair high, a highball or three in her system, already beaten inside to the point she was now barely aware of him, but still one tiny flicker left of life from all the hammering of his neglect. She looked over her shoulder and was unsteady on her feet.


“Well hurry up. Your damn sketching’s made us late.”


She unsteady and disinterested, but one thing still beautiful about her because she was alive, something precious in spite of his neglect and her own scorn, some reflex of bodily existence and femininity and the power of life, the curve of her hips beneath the dress, her hand on the sedan’s door to steady herself and the delicate tilt of her powdered face with arched scornful eyebrows looking back over her shoulder.


“Well, hurry up.”


And he reached but in a torrent of rain like curtains, like static swallowing the signal on the radio, the orange and the organdy mixed with grey and then diffused, fading the more he strained until whatever he had seen was gone and the grey pelted and was blinding. He was in the backyard, in the storm, body splayed in the slick wet grass and the dragonflies around him.


“Dear God.”


He rose to his elbows but a stab like lighting shot through his chest and he fell to the grass and the rain fell in sheets and he thought he saw the window of the caregiver’s room light up. But he could not focus. He tried to rise and walk out into the world but the world beat him senseless. It told him he had been foolish to think he could ever tame the world. It pummeled him to the ground.

Perhaps the caregiver came to help him. He did not know. In a corner of his mind’s eye he thought he saw the woman hastily wrapping herself in her bathrobe and dashing out the back screened door towards him, but the rain was too heavy and the winged creatures like metal shards were all around him. He was being unknit.


“You old fool.”


But she was miles away and fading and diffusing. He felt himself becoming nothing and knew that once he had become completely weightless he would have no power of his own direction - he would float and dissolve and be or not be as the forces chose.


“Good God forgive me,” he thought, or said, but in the end there was no difference. The dragonflies had taken him - he weighed nothing. In the middle of the storm the last stray scraps of his electrons lifted on the empty air, with one imagined glimpse of a scene from above, of the caregiver bending over his spent carcass, and then perhaps with a sudden changed perspective looking up and past the clouds at the faintest blush of crimson, or perhaps not, and in any case bearing no promise as to whether it was strengthening or fading.

And in degrees the dragonflies rose and lifted, each here and there at its own motive, but with a singular direction pronouncing itself against the past days’ confusion. Here and there the ones of them directed themselves north, corkscrew shards of energy in rain, rising and disappearing in fits and strays and groups, their migration abating only toward the morning.

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