Where the Answer Blows

I’m not talking ‘bout moving in, and I don’t want to change your life, but there’s a warm wind blowing the stars around, and I’d really love to see you tonight.

All the feels, that song gives me. I switch off the transistor —yes, I said transistor, all I can afford— and, having mopped the floors, I step out for a cigarette. There is indeed a warm wind, just as the song said, a warm spring wind that disseminates the potpourri of evening rain and mown grass and Bradford pear; perhaps it is blowing the stars around, I do not know, for I am surrounded by the gas station’s theatrical lighting. The night is silent save that warm wind, and the occasional car, hushing by on the street still damp from the evening’s cathartic rain. The cracks in the gas station’s lot act as rivulets that meander to that street, and I hear, too, the sewer draining the pollen-green runoff.

But mostly there is the wind, not sighing breeze and not heavy storm but an even flow of pay attention to me, and I do, because the wind is an inconvenience: I cannot light my cigarette, and about the parking lot it has childishly strewn trash which I must attempt to collect. Even though to those passersby, heading to the twenty-four hour slots or to Wimpy’s Burger Bonanza to curb the late night marijuana munchies, I will look like some Vaudeville act or a Charlie Chaplin fill-in, I know I must attempt to clean that trash because there are cameras, and I need this job.

The station’s windows are pollen-yellow and some letters have been blown off the marquee —GET YOU  OLD BEE HER— and the vinyl sign advertising JUUL: THE SMOKING ALTERNATIVE is excitedly waving ta-ta to the plastic ropes that are desperately trying to keep her shackled, and because Corporate will expect me —third-shift employee making $8.50 an hour— to sharpen up these cosmetic distractions that would surely send business elsewhere, I curse the wind’s interference.

But still, it is a warm wind, and its mere presence is quite reminiscent of the days when I, like the wind, was under a lot of pressure, especially that early-spring morning when Lila was leaving, taking the kids, squishing across my just-mown lawn in her slippers, her rollers hidden under a green shower cap that made her retreating head look like pissed off cabbage.

“And across the lawn, no less.”

“This patch-a-grass ain’t no lawn. You need to find Jesus, Hank.” She was still clutching her stomach dramatically.

“So, if I find him, will you bring the kids back?”

The cab door slammed.

I’d thought I was doing pretty well, actually, with the whole husband/father thing, performing my domestic duties with a relish uncharacteristic of a wife-beater-wearing grease monkey, case in point: I’d voluntarily hung the laundry to dry on a windy afternoon, just last week in fact, because I intuitively knew —again, uncharacteristic of the trailer trash I’d been called, with the pink flamingoes and the Bathtub Mary on said-patch— that if our bathroom had such wind, there’d be no mold, and didn’t fabric softener advertise Spring Fresh? The problem was, this wind also carried the pollen, and when she got home from work at the diner and found all the whites a pretty pollen-green, her own allergies flaring from the fine patina of immature plant sperm, that’s pretty much what she compared me to.

“Hank, you’re ‘bout as dumb as that pollen that’s stuck to our clothes like flies on paper. D’jou pray for guidance ‘fore you thought to ‘help’?” Lila held Gavin under one arm, his arms flailing and legs fluttering like he was practicing the front crawl. Under the other she held a watermelon. I pictured her in a chiton, wearing sandals. I nearly bowed, m’lady.

“You might’ve spent your time fastening the shingles on the roof. You know Mordecai’s been getting dripped on.” Yes, there was that. Damn wind. “And don’t go blamin’ the wind ‘cause the wind ain’t gonna fix it.”

It was a different wind, back then. Smelled different, like hay and Doritos. I lay on our double mattress, supine towards the yellowing acoustic-tiled ceiling, my fingers interlaced behind my head, the single-wide rocking on its cinderblocks from the wind and pelting rain that angled in through the broken vinyl siding. I had my eyes closed, and imagined I was adrift on a yacht, with horses, party mix, and a mist fan.

It was a pleasant reverie until I heard the flip…flip…flip, roofer’s tongue for “sounds like a shingle problem.” I took a broom handle and pushed up a tile; temporarily blinded by insulation dust, I fiddled with my phone’s flashlight, but before I shone it I made some high-pitched squeaks —meep, meep, meep— because that was the last time I was “up here”: when Lila was right about the bats she’d heard.

“Are you serious right now?”

“Go back to sleep, pumpkin. Just checking the roof.”

“With your mating call? Christ, Hank.”

“…for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain.” Citing the King James Version, which I’d heard so often, I turned on the cell light. “Yup, we’ve got a leak. Several, in fact. Looks like they’ve been…”

“No shit, Sherlock.” She was now on to Arthur Conan Doyle, and I had no other immediate retort other than fuck you, Watson. But now was not the time. Nor had it ever been, for I was an obedient husband. I’d gone into this marriage like a willow in the wind, wanting to raise my children right and always deferring to her partialities.

The winds of change, they are coming, my father had prophesied. Get out now, son. But the boys had been born, and men don’t leave.

It wasn’t the time when I errantly hung those clothes out to dry, or my unattendance to the battered roof, or the time when she caught wind of my having a beer at Dell’s with the boys when I was supposed to be shopping for Huggies, or even the time when she’d come home four sheets to the wind after a bachelorette party for Vickie Lynn and resumed castrating me with her scorpion tongue, far more incendiary now than when she’d left, a worthless piece of shit at least had a purpose.

It wasn’t the time I’d broken wind at her parents’ house during Thanksgiving dinner.

“Oh my, what is that smell?"

“That’s my husband, ma. Ain’t he grand?”

It wasn’t the recent time when I’d thrown caution to the wind and quit my job at Larry’s Fine Tune because Elmer had called Maurice a fucking n*gger —I’d had enough of their fiery racist intolerance— or any of the times when my Lila, to have and to hold, took the wind out of my sails with any of her belittlements when I was simply trying to do right.

It was the one time I’d snapped, the time I punched her in the stomach, knocking the wind out of her. “I won’t have any more of that,” I’d said to her head that bowed before me, my liege.

Back in elementary school, my mother would have said, “Good for you, the bully deserved it.” My father would have said, “Son, I am proud of you. You stood up for yourself, and sometimes enough is enough.” Both my mother and father had warned me of Lila. “Son, if I were you, I’d pack my things and run like the wind.”

Lila is pressing charges. I don’t think the courts will see it my parents’ way.

***

I drop my cigarette and grind it with my shoe. I close my eyes and take a deep, diaphragmatic breath. The air feels cleansing; the wind seems…purifying, this spring wind of hope, disseminating the pollen to give life to the plants that are essential to our survival; spreading this trash that is a passive-aggressive reminder to us to respect our Mother, like when my own mother taught me to clean up after myself by leaving her own panties and brassieres littered about the house when my friends came over to play.

I am in a better place now, I tell myself. Everything is okay. This wind suddenly is no longer an inconvenience. It is an alarm.

I go inside the station to grab the broom and dustpan. The transistor has long since left that one hit wonder that always gives me the feels, and is on now to Coldplay. I snap it off. No way.

A car shushes up to a pump, and a woman gets out. This is a dangerous neighborhood; she has no business being here alone. The door slams open as I exit; the wind appears to have picked up. It smells even more beautiful now, like rose, geranium, and lavender. I slowly walk up to her, so as not to frighten, and I ask if she’d like some assistance.