“...I wanna hear and see / everything...”
Jimi Hendrix, Up from the Skies
The rainy scent of the Tennessee Mountains on a May evening floods the interstate—the traffic is light, the pace unhurried and leisurely, a drive I’ve made at least a hundred times.
A late eighties station wagon, a Dodge I think, pulls out in front of me. There’s something odd about this car: it’s transporting a body.
But the surprise of a body bag in full view doesn’t immediately sink in. What fascinates me even more is the driver.
He has a full head of thick white hair, slicked back and shining, not a strand out of place, late middle age, a dapper man, like the one who never talks in film noire. Though his window’s down, the hair doesn’t budge. His hands are long and slender, feminine. His taut pink skin looks shrink-wrapped over his high forehead and prominent cheekbones; his crisp white dress shirt matches his hair. This man doesn’t nail boards together on his days off. I’ll call him Charon, after the Greek underworld’s infamous chauffeur.
He looks straight ahead, leaning forward into the steering wheel with a grip that would put the Ancient Mariner’s to shame. The head of the corpse is less than six inches from his lap. To picture this fully you must imagine an old green station wagon, mostly windows. A juryrigged, makeshift stretcher lies in the center where the middle seats should be. I had always thought these kinds of ‘deliveries’ were shielded from the public eye behind pleated gray curtains but every day’s an education.
I watch the wind blow eerily through the bag, alternately expanding and deflating, rippling at times from head to toe. When it collapses, the nose and feet protrude.
In fact, I’m chasing them, increasing my speed as Charon does, passing when he passes, pulling in again right behind him, though I keep my distance. I can’t take my eyes off that immaculate hair, the resolute, forward gaze or the rippling body bag foreshortening feet-first a few yards in front of me like Mantegna's Dead Christ.
But not for a second do I feel the slightest morbidity in this game. To me there’s no one else on the highway; I’m welded to this moment by curiosity alone. It’s death and its business-as-usual aftermath I’m seeing, as plain as a cinderblock: no tears, no flowers, no hearts being weighed by Thoth, just someone’s fate and another’s job. What coin beneath the eyes, I wonder, nickel, peso, drachma?
After miles of this close pursuit, Charon shoots abruptly off the interstate toward one of those small Tennessee towns with a Native American name, his taillights swallowed by the exit ramp and the hips of crouching mountains. In truth, I could have turned off and followed him.
Their faces tonight
............after thirty odd years in the bellies of ships,
some who met the ‘blue-eyed boy’
............and those
who followed Jonah.
by Gary LeBel
Cumming, Georgia
first published in Abacus (2008)
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