Grady painted water towers.
He dangled in human bird cages secured by ropes. He moved from town to town, traveling with crews who followed the work. Sometimes in the early spring or fall, the sun glared off the white paint, blinding his eyes but feeling pleasantly warm on his back. Some winter days his hands were so cold he couldn’t grasp the rollers. In summer, the dog-day heat stole his water, his urine stream weak and dark. The men who painted water towers spoke of falls. Each carried stories, macabre stories about men bursting apart on impact, men impaled on fences. The farther a man fell, the luckier he was, they said, a soaring, and then a painless blackness. The men joked that they feared the stop but not the fall.
Grady had a wife. She waited tables and then waited in her cornflower blue dress, moving the curtains aside when she heard his truck tires crunching the gravel. Grady had a son, his hair curly and dark like his father’s. Grady always brought the boy a surprise when he returned, a bag of candy, a Matchbox car, and finally a bike, a Huffy with a breadloaf seat. He ran behind the boy as he pedaled on the gravel, his hand on the boy’s back, finally freeing the boy when he could maintain his own balance.
Grady fell from a worn cage in Waycross, an early Autumn storm blowing the platform away from the edge, Grady leaning to grasp the guide rope. He wasn’t lucky; he fell less than twenty feet, no time to soar and no blackness, just a cracking sound, a pain above his belt that stole his breath, a four hour ride in a pickup bed, swaddled in painter’s tarps. Grady lay in the bed for three weeks, the trailer smelling like sweat and sickness. He took the pills, and he slept, and then took the pills and slept again. He awoke and swooned and slept again and when he awoke again they were gone, they were all gone, the cornflower blue dress, the Matchbox cars, and the bike with the breadloaf seat.
Grady traded pills for a ride to the pharmacy for more pills. Then he slept, and when he awoke, the pills were as gone as the dress, the cars, and the bike with the breadloaf seat. Then they came looking for the pills that were gone and beat him for hiding the pills he no longer possessed. Then they came again, and beat him again, and told him to leave and come back when he had more pills.
Grady left, stumbling west along Highway 78, his left leg dragging a trail through the Autumn leaves that gathered along the shoulder. Grady shuffled and faltered. Some time after he turned north, Grady noticed that he was being followed, a tall and lean dog, black with white socks, a white spot on his forehead shaped like a heart.
Grady and the dog rested, and then slept, beneath an aged and sagging church pavilion.
When they awoke, an old man in overalls was raking sweetgum balls from the gravel on the ancient graves.
The old man helped Grady and his dog into the cab of his truck. Behind the old man’s trailer was another trailer, older and smaller than the first, but clean, a large tulip poplar dropping its yellow leaves on the trailer’s roof. The old man unlocked the door and led Grady and the dog inside. The earth tones comforted Grady and the rooms smelled neither of sweat or sickness. A pitcher of water and a loaf of unsliced bread waited on the table.
Alan Caldwell has been teaching for 29 years, but only began submitting his writings last May. He has been published in almost two dozen journals and magazines since.
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