Happy Sad Makes A Soul – a song lyric
by Russell Scott Day
Twenty years in the blink of an eye
Happy sad makes a soul.
Never tell her thank you.
Think like a dog.
Think like a cat.
Mama stays home.
Daddy roams.
The kids learn to lie.
Hungry pigs
Escape the sty.
If you do good
twenty years
Your name never dies.
Twenty years in the blink of an eye.
It Was So Cold
The snow was swirling in 70 mile an hour winds across the flat underblack of the nightlit, airport. Oddly this airport in this American city not even really right on any border had spawned kidnapping and murder and made getting on a plane dependent on searches by poorly paid Black women who seemed to possess a cultural willingness to pry into baggage and look at everything in the travelers pockets as compensation for their lack of pay or power as if they had become perfectly suited to be nosey and enjoyed making people uncomfortable and enforcing the destruction of civility or privacy, as a perfect personal revenge on a society that was pledged to hatreds.
He drove the 5,000 gallon fuel truck across the tarmac ramp seeing it as the place he was working and feeling like a witness to his own work alone then in the cold where white snow moved like a herd of white snakes.
It was cold and beautiful and it inspired in him awe because it was beautiful.
The Mac truck pulled the 5,000 gallon tank stretched out behind him like all the pain in his back. Always he had to think about what he was dragging behind him. Once he had nearly crumpled up the wing of a GII when turning in the sunlight in Fort Lauderdale where he had done much the same job in different weather.
There had been differences. Fort Lauderdale had been a vacation town where he had fueled the private planes of rich white people who flew in for vactions away from the cold he was now working in.
The Sun had beat down there in Fort Lauderdale so that your sun glasses were part of your clothing and you wore them everyday all day from morning to sundown. There it had been bright and hot.
He knew it would be cold outside the oily insides of the cab of the truck.
There was nothing to think about but what he was seeing which he knew to be another extreme and therefore worthy of memory.
What was the point of remembering anything?
If something, some experience did not have the ingredient of the extreme he saw little reason to click the shutter of his brain. It was as if if you need a picture of someone you love, you don’t really love them enough. If you really love them they will come to you in a dream.
He knew he had then everything that a man gets to have. He knew that he could think of something important as he drove across the airport in the cold night of blowing snow. He was sure it was all an adventure that would end with his success no matter the pain.
He was seeing three women who were all interesting and liked him no matter his or their station in life.
His theory was that three women was the correct number for a single man. They then amounted to one, and he had joked that, "Yeah, then you are seeing one, and have one on the way in, and one on the way out."
His favorite was married, Japanese and English and freckled and lithe and he liked the way she looked at him as if he was something actually to watch as he had watched some women and just watching them had been enough.
Sometimes she would show up at his door and stand there at the door and look at him like a cat that wasn’t sure whether or not it wanted to come in and had to be assured that it was welcome before it would enter a room to be petted.
He hadn’t really meant to have her at all, but she had wanted him and he had liked her style of hats and gloves and willingness to see him in his poor room of nothing but a suitcase and a mattress and a clock and a radio.
He knew better than to mess with a married woman and had looked at hands looking for rings after he had asked a woman out before looking and her husband had shown up where he was working on a sunny day and pulled out an engraved 45 and showing it to him had said that he was very happily married since when she had told him she was married he had blurted out, "Happily I hope."
On the ramp the light was bright reflecting on and from the white of the snow that was in the air and on the ramp still or moving. The 737s, and the 727s and the DC9s and the MD80s all parked sitting there, their tails and their bodies turned away from the wind that blew the crystal snow like smoke on a pictured blackboard.
He knew his life was being written for him and hardly cared at that moment to do anything other than look at it.
Out the window of the truck it looked cold. He knew it was cold. He knew he would get out of the truck cab and drag out the hose and engage the spumeing pump as the sloppy diesel pumped two and a half thousand gallons up into the wings of a thing that was beautiful to him moving or standing still.
He had had that job in that place for two years and that had been as long as he had had most any other job and he was thinking about how to get out, go somewhere else. Somewhere else was always there to go to and he was a tourist and a spy in his own life and like a sailor he expected forever to only visit and he did not yet know that he would eventually get old and tired and be stuck someplace that he did not yet know the name of and thought he could still name his own life.
He did not care about anything than it was beautiful and cold. It was so beautiful that he became nothing but awed memory.
He achieved in the context of the night and his relations and his sight and the feel of the wind on his skin, face, hands feet, covered or uncovered a oneness with machines and was a robot and a servant to machines that needed him to give them fuel.
The controllers in their tower were tired, and their eyeballs floating in caffeine could see the truck move from one plane to the next if they looked out the windows.
There was no reason for anyone to talk to anyone outloud.
It was cold, very cold.
Force of Nature:
Grover was Angry
Grover was angry that Carl had taken the plane without telling him. He knew he shouldn’t be since it was really Carl’s airplane, but all the same he was pissed off. He’d driven the Packard out there to the field to discover the plane gone. The lineman Zack told him Carl had taken off sometime after lunch.
Carl’s Harley was in the woodshed hangar they had built. Grover felt like kicking it. He got a Coke out of the red machine conscious of the bottle he pulled past the rollers, noting the grinds on the glass. He turned and ran his hand over his bald head feeling the sweat and heat of the sun on the back of his hand.
Grover drank the Coke and watched Zack fueling a Staggerwing. He forgot about how mad he was because the Staggerwing was so beautiful it was a distraction. He wanted it. He walked down the steps from the Line Shack to the pad and asked Zack where the pilot was.
Zack was a tall skinny guy who had simply hung around at the field so much making himself useful one way or another that they had gotten together and hired him to operate the surplus Fuel Truck they had bought. Zack had a long face and was wearing herringbone coveralls. They thought him a bit odd for though he was 28, and had survived combat in the Pacific, he somehow seemed to be still a teenager, or 05be he had decided to go back to being the self he had been before he was wrenched from school to fight.
Looking down from the ladder holding the hose into the wing while pumping the gas from the whinning truck Zack said, "Pilot went to the Hotel, and passengers went to Graduation."
Grover remembered then it was Graduation Day at Duke.
He looked at the plane and wondered what it would be like to fly in anything that and fast at the same time thinking the cabin had about the same interior as the Packard.
Then he heard the sound of the Taylorcraft and looked at the treeline and watched as Carl landed. He finished the Coke and put the bottle in the round tall galvanized trash can for empty oil cans and rags strapped to the back of the still army green fuel truck.
Carl nodded to Grover as he taxied past headed up the line past the tie downs towards their little hangar. Roger Adams was in the plane with him and he could see the huge camera Roger used held up to Rogers chest in the cramp of the cockpit.
Gover walked down the line following the plane and arrived while Karl was chocking it. Roger was looking around through the Speed Graphic. Grover thought of the photograph he had taken of them in the plane they had put up in the gas station.
Roger pointed the camera at him and Grover made the snarling face he put on whenever a camera was pointed at him. From youth he had snarled whenever told to smile for the camera and as somepeople smiled automatically whenever noticing a camera pointed at them, Grover was in the habit of snarling.
He heard the sound of the shutter, a light sound like a swoosh and a click different from the mere click of the Brownie he himself used to take pictures on holidays.
"Fuck you Roger." Grover said.
"Nice to see you too." Roger said smiling as he took down the camera and stuck in a slide and pulled the film holder out of the back and turned it around and stuck it back in its place and then pulled the other slide out.
Carl was sitting on the Harley by then and kicking it. It started on the third kick and Grover and Roger looked at Carl who gunned the engine and grinned at them. He let the engine die down and sat there as it ticked over.
"I’ve got to go, anything important to know?"
"Paul’s at the station. Buddy’s gone with the new driver to Brooklyn, and Dad says Mother wants a television for her birthday."
Carl put the Harley in gear and creeped it up to where Grover and Roger were standing. Grover noticed that Carl had looked at the Staggerwing as he moved the bike next to him.
"I looked at an RCA up at Tobys the other day. He wants 4 hunderd and 25 dollars for it. He says if you put up an antenna it’ll get the station from Raliegh. I told him he ought to throw in the antenna for that price."
Roger walked off toward the Staggerwing looking at it through the viewfinder while he walked and Carl and Grover watched him while they looked at the plane as well.
Carl nodded at the plane and asked, "Think we could make any money with one of those?"
"’Bout the same as a taxi or a limo I imagine." Grover said.
"Be more sensible to buy a plane like a truck, since we know about trucking."
"Taxi’s make money too."
They watched Roger take his picture and start to walk back towards them and Carl said, "I’ll pick up the TV from Toby tomorrow. Are we spliting it 4 ways or just between us two and Matt and Paul can get Mom something else?"
"Four ways, but less from Matt works far as I know." Grover said as Roger walked up and got his equipment bag out of the plane and closed back the door.
Roger then turned to Carl wearing the bag and holding the camera and said, "Thanks for taking me up. I’ll call you when I get the money from Arnold." Arnold was an attorney involved in a land dispute and had hired Roger to get some aerial pictures which was something Carl had come to think was about the only moneymaking thing the Taylorcraft was good for. He thought he had about talked Roger into buying it from him.
"Okay and tell that shyster we want to talk to him about 05be buying that airport you say he’s got a line on in Florida."
"What are you talking about?" Grover said.
"Roger told me Arnold knows some people who are leasing land on the airport in Fort Lauderdale."
Before Grover could say anything else Carl revved the Harley and dropped it into gear, nodded to Roger, and letting out the clutch yelled, "See you guys later." as he rode off leaving them watching him run up past the line past the shack hangars and tie downs and turn on the road toward town.
Force of Nature
Carl was what they meant when they say, "He was a force of nature."
He was standing looking at the airplane he had just bought with his pay and poker winnings and every other scheme besides the money from the family gas station they all ran for a living.
It was a Taylorcraft, painted red now sitting there in the perfect evening light of the damp chilled morning. -Trees off behind it. Eight O’Clock in the morning now.
The prevailing winds came down out of the northwest that time of year, and he stood at the south of the grass strip so that what sun there was made the leading edges gleam with the advertisement of their bright soul.
He’d been out of the Navy since ’46 having come in just that late in the war to miss it, except for the loot.
They had all from the top to bottom loaded any ship at any port leaving there at the very end with anything they could cram in a corner or hold or stacked in the paid spot on the deck.
He’d won enough poker, collected enough favors owed, fed enough, to put ten German motorcycles on the ship for the trip back.
He bought the little plane with the money from the motorcycles because after after the Navy he wanted to go further faster. Ships had been too slow for him. He liked women and the time between ports and whores was too great.
It made his temper bad.
The plane was sitting there in the gray of a misty 11 day. The grass was just brown now, the strip cut out of the pines, pin oaks, maples dogwoods and blackberry tangles now raw at the edges of the strip. He’d bought it where it stood from the brother of the man two years dead in a bomber over Germany.
After Carl had figured out how to start it he’d driven it back and forth on the runway listening to the engine and feeling when the bounce got lighter. He’d done that all alone there on the strip which was often oddly to him, deserted.
The second time he’d let it hop a little.
As patiently as was possible for him, he had read the brown paper of the cover creased and cracked half folded manual and noted what speed he might expect to get off the ground.
He was stubborn and living was a joke to discover on your own terms for him. Six foot three two hundred and twenty pounds, not full bald yet, but seeming in happy anticipation of the event with the short military haircut.
All the men of the family went bald, so he looked like the rest of his brothers. There were three of them. They shared laws and treaties among only themselves, the brothers down from the uncles and grandfather and father and they were from Dutch traders and sailors and livery owners and then after the two wars and the depression it came down to the gas station and five tractor trailer trucks.
He was now back and knew that the gas station, Durham, the trucks would not be enough. -At least not the way he saw it.
Carl there just 23 concentrated beneath the heavy oval Dutch head. The short military bristlecut standing up. Just looking at the airplane wondering what it would show him without knowing he was even thinking or wondering.
He saw his future and it gave him peace.
Real peace was foreign to his thinking so much that only a beautiful and dangerous thing would have even the glitter of peace that he would ever love. For the violent and angry, compelled, it is only beauty that will stop them long enough to at least feel something like peace.
They did things, and made other people do things, go places, carry things as they carried and did things as if it had always been so in their family to move freight and know how to get horses, boats, trucks or cars to move. They made all around them move and carry as quick as possible.
He stood a moment more. If anyone had been around they would have been surprised to see him stand still that long.
Then he went to the plane.
It was too small for him. He scraped his head getting in the hole in the side. For the rest of his life there would always be a blood crusted spot on the top of his head from all the cockpits, door openings, wheel wells that he put his head in and out of. No plane was ever really big enough for him. 05be there would have been a ship, but he was done with ships. He didn’t seem to notice it from then on a perpetual scab, or care about it then or from then on.
This time he scraped his head bending his neck while he lifted his leg into the space infront of the seat. His right leg was up and the panel had held his attention more than what he was doing. – Altimeter, airspeed dial in familiar knots, turn and bank indicator, fuel guage, magneto switch, radio.
Finally he was in the thing and he got it going right off and let it run and ran it up with his feet on the tops of the pedals and then taxied out to the end of the strip bouncing a bit here and there and got it turned into the wind and steered it down the runway.
He liked the sound of the engine the way he liked the sound of a motorcycle engine and felt everything about it as he went from one end of the strip to the other. He felt the way the grass drug at the wheels and way it felt to have a wing above him feeling them as if they were attached to his shoulders. He felt it when it was not the brakes but the rudder and wheel yoke in his hand that had influence and we was off the ground climbing in a changed sound and experience of gravity and rush of air.
He was surprised at how soon he was lost.
Grover
Grover bought his wife some shoes at the Belks downtown. He hated it in the tight cramped streets of downtown Durham. He preferred to be at the gas station, or playing cards at the Elks.
Paul and Buddy were fishing. He thought about going to find them, but just drove aimlessly around in the Pontiac until he found himself on the fringe street past Roxboro Road where the whore kept an apartment.
She was up stairs that ran up the side of the two story thick white paint siding claboard outside walls of the split up house that had once been a home to some one prolific family.
He had trouble fitting the Pontiac down the tight drive past the wild boxwood shrubs and scrub and cedar, honeysuckle and all other manner of competing grasses and weeds run up in the wire fence till he was parked in the back on the thin gravel facing another fence overrun by vines.
There was another car there, a 38 Ford with the swoop down back end.
Grover turned on the radio and listened to part of a football game between Duke and Carolina. He had played football for Duke. He’d been Quarterback and Captain and he listened to the game remembering the way the guys had looked at him in the huddle. It had always been interesting to him when he saw others move along with his will.
The flying adventure with Carl had made him and the rest of the poker table laugh to tears in the telling. As his three years younger brother he puzzled when he found himself vulnerable to Carl’s influence. Rightly he had to keep the upper hand and so had emphasized every misstep of his brother, and the way Carl’s head had a perpetual scab somewhere on his scalp now.
Still secretly to himself he had admitted that he was swayed and it had been hatching in his own mind that the family might need to go into another business.
He himself was tired of the gas station and the tractor trailers they ran didn’t seem to be making as much money for the family as they ought to. He was dreading the trip to New York with one of their hired drivers and the load of cigarettes. He knew he needed to find out what really was going on and suspected that somewhere along the line the family was being robbed.
Grover didn’t want to have to go back to driving himself as they had done when his father had put the brothers behind the wheels of anything that moved as soon as they were big enough to fight the machines and the weather and anyone who was stupid enough to attempt to stop them.
His father had had to quit driving himself after he had beaten near to death a teamster on the docks who had threatened him.
After Paul was hijacked they had all bought pistols, but hadn’t had to use them except for show after his father found a Business Agent to pay off so they could get in and out of the Brooklyn Pier.
Still the whole thing still seemed more trouble than it was worth sometimes.
The guy who had been with the whore came down the stairs. Grover looked at his watch. It was 4:30 in the afternoon on a Saturday and he had a box of shoes for his wife on the floor in the front.
He had started the car and backed up turning when the whore came out and stood outside her door on the landing. She was smiling and looking down at him when he backed into the place he had been parked in the other direction.
She was wearing a flowered dress that hung clasped to her hips and fit tight to her moderate, but perfect breasts, in his opinion. He thought he would miss her when she graduated from NC State. She had come down from Carbondale Illinois where she had worked for a Madam in a brothel and started school at the University of Chicago for nursing.
The first time he had had a black girl was when he was 15 and it had always been a part of his secret life only shared with others who had lives and interests like his and knew the need for secrecy and information shared over cigarettes and beer or liquor on the back porches of poker games taking a break from the game.
It was a nice day, and he had some time.
His dutiful but boney wife would not miss him or expect him till dinnertime, so he got out of the car and walked across the gravel and up the stairs.
She stood there smiling and looking down at him as he came up the stairs looking at his feet till he got close and could near smell her. She had an unusual smell to him, clean and musky at the same time.
Her matter of factness and technical skill and the thicker feel of her skin was what he bought.
"Well Carlotta, you got anything left for me? Your visitor seemed young enough." Grover said when she stepped back opening the door and inviting him in.
"I heard your car and got a look out the window and got him gone in right good time I thought." Her face coming up out of her chest and the smooth brown skin framed by the flowered dress was there round and round in brown curves of her body and eyes and cheeks and face with lips twice as big and soft as his white women.
She turned and took a bottle out of the cabinet and poured him some Scotch into a glass and put it on the white enamel of the kitchen table.
Grover sat down and she stood leaning her butt on the edge of the kitchen sink.
Carlotta thought he was the largest of any white man she had given it to, and she liked him for his lack of timidity or worry. She had taken to thinking of him as "The Dutchman" remembering how the Dutch had been different as far as white people she had come across. He reminded her of her pimp who she had researched and made an agreement with when she had come to town looking for protection and humor. Once on her own she had imagined the two of them with her.
She kept such thinking to herself in a private ration that she regulated carefully and unspoken.
Her father had been a butcher in Chicago and her mother had resented it when Carlotta had become old enough and commented on the "Uncles", and "Cousins" who visited when her father was at work.
She hadn’t seen her father since she was 7 but she remembered him as big and shaped much the same as the man sitting in the hard wooden chair at the chrome legged white enameled table in that apartment kitchen where she lived and worked.
She knew exactly what she would do with him in just a little while. He would finish the drink and look at her and she would go into the bedroom and he would follow.
Grover wasn’t looking at her face but at the V formed by the lay of her dress as she still leaned back against the kitchen sink when he asked, "Have you ever been in an airplane Carlotta?"
"No." She said. "Black people don’t fly, you know that Mr. Grover."
It was 7:15 when Grover left. He marveled that he felt no guilt about what he had seen under his hands.
"Black people don’t fly." – Was a wisp of a thought as he drove out between the houses and out towards his home. He wondered what size shoes Carlotta wore and planned to get her some shoes as a present. The one thing he really knew about women was that they liked shoes.
Using the Lumberfile
So she bought the ticket
and got on the plane
towing her boyfriend, viagra 60mg
And they came to her Other boyfriends` home.
Willing, salve all tested.
Then he watched some
then put his fingers where they would do the most good for her.
The member moving in and out of her, drugs
So that she knew that
She was loved
and had it all for herself.
Not to give to anyone.
Not the baby crying in the night
or morning to suck without orgasm her tits.
But the act become primitive
and unconnected to any possible event
Making her a god.
Digging to China
I'm digging a hole here in North Carolina, herbal
Seems I'm digging all the way to China.
As much as I'm digging I might get there, sick
before the War Starts.
Diggin a Hole here in North Carolina, help
I'm digging enough dirt to get to China.
Making a big hole here.
I ain't got much to fear…
Well I'm not stupid But I'm not famous.
You won't be hearing me
Before the coming Catastrophe.
I'm just Digging a Hole here In North Carolina.
They'll be scared when I pop up in China.
They made me a Yo Yo I'm taking with me.
Up and down all around
we never learn and we never forget.
Slaves and servants, soldiers,
05 as well be winter leaves.
Every nation with a buck to bank at the top
sends out their fearful, sells out to slavery
the ones they can.
They've got buddies they do business with.
Look up, look down,
Pull the string on the Yo Yo
and see what you are.
I'm Digging a Hole here in North Carolina.
Somewhere else they're digging a hole for me,
not on the ground,
but from offices that look down.
They're still at the top of a falling tree.
When I look up, I see it falling on me.
I'm just Digging this hole.
It's a real nice day.
I'm just Digging this Hole In North Carolina.
Home
What perfect man would there be
To turn the tide of history?
Is it you?
It's sure not me.
Or if it is
I shirk the role
Hide out beyond prying eyes
Avoid all printed truths or lies
Read the headlines while buying beer
and turn away from all I fear.
11/25/97
The Outsider
Conversations in the night.
10 different jobs every year.
Towns and cities, stuff
Women & sometimes men.
Judged and abandoned, abortion
Leaving some just the same.
Filled with fear of dying in advance of destiny.
Working for others to get a meager meal
or scraping on my own to finish a deal.
Forever, forever, forever Alone.
I am the outsider,
And my life is my own.
The Essence of Love
I imagine Spirits berift of identity, treatment
Thirsting for this granted life
Of curses and bafflement.
We suffer, clinic
and are made souls.
Forever singular, salve
Unique yet.
The experience Giving the right,
And even demanding,
That we give to God
Exactly what we ask for.
Forgiveness Forgiveness,
the essense of love.