And for the grand finale, I will read to you
from this new book that's coming out which
I'm fond of at the moment.
The first chapter of what was meant to be a novel.
I gave the publisher a book of short stories
and a novel to choose from and you put them together.
I didn't know that was a bad publishing idea.
Nobody buys a novella but anyway, it's a good novella.
"Trailer girl."
"I talked like a lady who knows what she wants
and other things which I would mention,
but Ernie's charging over here with kids behind,
screaming like they're chasing him and not vise versa and him
whipping a cut area like a wild man.
I get the tea instead.
My hands hold the tea and a can and an opener
as I make my way backward rear first out the front end
and down the cinder pile that is my stair.
I heap it all onto my card table and yell, what's the story?
Ernie is huffing and puffing all the way down my trailer side
and the aerial is blowing for or against me, I duck.
Those kids, he says.
And almost gets one but they disappear.
There's no thin air around here but kids have a way
with the edges of things.
By the time Ernie's huffed and puffed his button down self
across the four corners of my frontage, they've hightailed.
It they've gone.
See this, they broke it off.
Clean off the front.
It's not that the truck was ever going
to win any fancy costume contest or ever even turn over again
but to take the aerial.
Tea, I ask.
Being at the water I got going on the card table
is boiling away and I do want to drop before it's gone.
He says, no thank you.
Then he says, why don't you get the fence barb clean?
That's what you're here for.
But not nasty, no.
Just in a kind of drone that he goes
into when being the guy in charge comes over him
and he has to say something especially
when his first something doesn't mount up the way
it should given his position and the kids
and theirs and the aerial now down.
I think out my answer so I don't jerk
back in a bay and snort in wonderment
either at his backhanded harping.
I will clean the fence on Tuesday, I say.
And I put my already used three times teabag into my cup,
and pour the hot water all over it.
Missing with some, dredging the dirt.
Why I keep my table outside in the first place.
Is Tuesday, OK?
Tuesday is soon I guess he says and he
walks right up to the fence and pokes at it with the aerial.
Nothing of the stuff stuck on it comes off
but he keeps on poking.
I opened my can a turn and four cat show.
Want some?
I say to Ernie.
Instead of to the cats or me which
is who this is for a nice hot cat food
lunch in a pot on a hot plate.
Ernie sees it's tossed can and his nose
wrinkles his whole face.
Instead of saying, he produces what from his back pants pocket
from under that button flap men sometimes wear back there.
He produces a wad all stapled together
of tickets he has sometimes.
Tuesdays when these are due, he says
and he flattens the wad in my table.
Smiles up at me with my tea in front of my cat food cooking.
How about a chance?
I sip.
Behind me tack to the jagged open front flap of the door
are plenty of chances.
Oh, pardon me.
Some for girl scouts, some for jamborees,
some just chances taken for turkeys like a turn of the slot
machine for anything.
I shoo the cat that's pawing the pot.
Do I have to be present?
They say no but it never hurts.
It's only in town for the clinic in town.
You know these places.
They need these things to keep on with what they do do.
I know these places, I say.
I look around my breast front with my finger for money
being in an institution brings for a while.
It isn't real money anyway.
Money that I make or must keep.
Two please, I say as long as I don't have to be present.
Two is good.
They're giving away hams and a Frigidaire at this one.
You could use a Frigidaire.
He is looking at the hole in my trailer
where glass should be that I have plugged
with bags you can see through.
I have this trailer for free because of that hole,
but I know he's not really looking
that high into my trailer because he is casting
his eyes down again over the shelf of my bosom
where the money came from and it isn't so much the money
he is interested in.
He gives me my chances.
I put them up on the board with the others, move a tack off one
and stick to two under it.
He puts my money in a clip then in his pocket.
The kids giggle from somewhere one then two of them.
He grabs the aerial where it has been
lying between the green bottles of my bottle garden
and turns to face the giggling.
So fast the aerial slaps him.
This causes him to say many things which
the children although used to hearing a lot of everything
stop giggling to hear and thereby
with their silence as a frame, give themselves
and their whereabouts away.
Ernie's off with the next giggle tearing
through the court like his button
down pants pocket spouts fire.
His leaving fast like that, aerial whipping,
dislodges some of the chances tacked to my door
and there they go in flight out over the fence that
is so full of other stuff that the wind here
works to stick to it but the chances don't stop and stick.
They fluff up and go on off over the gully.
It's the gully where the cows stand with the wild girl."