She had huge glasses, my great-grandmother. When she shouted about shooting everyone in the room while I sat on the floor and watched Wheel of Fortune, they shook on her face—shook in that slight, bobbing way you'd expect to see on a ninety six year old person's nose. What exactly was being argued, I'm not sure. At age eight, nine, ten, however old I was, long ago I'd learned to ignore the subject matter of the arguments between my grandmother and great-grandmother. I knew the gist: the latter didn't remember something the right way, or the latter had brought up the subject of putting the former into a care-home. Normally, you could count on both to happen in a single sitting.
Inevitably, this led to death threats, normally involving my departed great-grandfather's service revolver and fishing it out of the dresser-drawer to shoot everyone then occupying the house dead (for some reason I always excluded myself from the list of the soon-to-be-executed as I sat in the floor, I guess because I thought my great-grandmother liked me, which could be true, seeing as how I shut-up when I watched tv with her, something most other of the great-grandchildren didn't do). Though, the revolver was never fetched, everyone (my supposedly rampage-pardoned-self included) knew that it was well within my great-grandmother's means to fetch and operate the pistol in the manner she excitedly suggested on occasion of such arguments. The woman was mean, hardened by age, and so ready to die that death itself had turned into as much of an impossibility or, at least, inconvenience as it was to me that day, age ten. That is to say, death was something, but it wasn't, in the end, any worse than the cold she'd been fighting for two weeks or the army of aches and pains that assaulted her bones whenever she attempted to move no farther than down the hall from her bed into the den in which she spent the majority of her day seated, watching television and enduring the never ending trickle of visiting family members that crept through the door from lunch till dusk.
So, sure, had it been in her hand, or had she not thought that her children were anything but talk (I do think that's what she thought about them), she would've shot everybody. She didn't care about dying on a personal level, and, well, as a sort of unconscious philosophy that I think was inherent in her thought process at that time, I'm pretty sure she didn't care about killing her kids if they every tried anything. At ninety six, she'd possessed well over the average life-time (encompassing two-world wars, a depression, the rise of cancer and AIDS and all types of other lethal and depressing shit) to do that pile of arithmetic that yields the ultimate value of human life, and, inversely, to have that very arithmetic done to her, on her. Towards the end, it's safe to assume that she probably reached some sort of answer, though I don't know what answer she got. If I had to guess (and I do) I would say it was a low number, say, like, 1—her life. And if her children were going to do something like take the little life she had left and squeeze it out of her in some retirement home, she would've killed us all. You have enough shit happen to you, you get old enough to think about all that same bad-shit all the time, 'suppose you get kind of set in the jaw, a bit ruthless. She was.
Still, watching Pat Sayjack (?) that day, the details of this didn't bother me. The gun was in the bedroom; to get it she would've had to stand up and make an excruciating five minute (bare minimum) journey, one-way, to her bedroom, giving everyone plenty of time to leave or just go take the gun from the dresser and dump the bullets into their pocket or purse. Young as I was, I had an understanding of all this, simple though it may've been. This allowed me to tune most of what I heard into a handful of familiar phrases involving so-and-so drinking or setting something on fire and another set of phrases to refute these claims.
Wheel of fortune was a 4:30 staple, and whenever we came over, it was normally playing. I sat on the floor because chairs were for adults to sit in and accuse on another of outrageous things or make death threats from. These arguments normally stretched beyond the thirty minutes it took to spin the wheel of fortune until two people went home with toasters and one way-too excited woman or man in a bad tie or blouse won fabulous cash and prizes like an Altima and six or ten grand. When the dust settled and Pat and Vanna waved goodbye, the five o'clock news stormed in on its heels, thundering updates about cops shot dead in Memphis, planned tax hikes, arrested criminals, tragic house fires, or what common house hold product—probably sitting in the room with you as the anchor was speaking—would make you turn green and throw up your guts until you died in so much pain that the funeral had to be closed-casket, unless of course you kept watching and found out what to do about this simple, yet mega-deadly bullshit.
As was the case with the death threats, I'd learned to tune most of that sort of noise out long ago. Local News is prone to have a nasty, bleak character to it, no matter where you go, and is often delivered in a sterile enough fashion to make anyone of any age thoughtlessly swallow, let alone a ten year old, or someone in that age vicinity. Memphis Local News is this formula set at triple strength, served even colder than usual. On this particular afternoon, however, in late spring, when The River Delta was in constant danger of flooding from one of several storms that popped up as hurricane season began firing up, a feature story caught my eye and prized open what would have otherwise been my strategically deaf ears. Some low level field reporter, attempting to sweat his way towards greatness a lousy story at a time, stood on the flood plane, flat land at his back and made a simple pronouncement that, hyperbole though it was, caught my ear. There was, it turned out, an eccentric man(the eccentricity was implied in the reporter's tone while announcing the story-trailer before the commercial break) that had learned how to beat the floods that made living on the plains a perpetually stupid and dangerous idea, to beat nature.
Not that it matters too much, but this guy's name escapes me. It was a while back, and I just don't recall it; I was ten. Everything else, however, is pretty vivid. Weathered as one might expect him to be, looking like he was maybe seventy or so, the old man was slender. He wore a mesh-baseball cap, like you might find at the CO-OP or get for doing business with a grain-elevator company, or for having feed delivered on a regular basis. Underneath, thin gray hair that swept down to a shaved face full of wrinkles that exploded cracking lines from slit eyes and a conservatively toothed mouth that chewed tobacco. A rough looking, though holeless pair, of Faded Glory overalls (I suspect they were this because they looked just like my father's),a plaid shirt and worn-out work boots covered the rest of his lanky frame, exposing only hist hands from the wrist down and his head from the neck up. It was a decidedly old school look—the kind of thing that only someone who had eaten everything short of dirt during the Depression would sport during June in West Tennessee—and it matched the three legged hound dog sleeping on the porch of the trailer-home on blocks that the old man was being interviewed from.
In the course of the interview that followed, I lost track of the threats shouted behind me. This old-timer had, in the span of his life, seen many houses come and go on the flood plain, smashed to splinters and washed a piece on down, if not on down to the Gulf altogether. At some point, he got tired of watching his possessions, his life, get washed down river, but he refused to run, to leave the place he'd spent the majority of his life on this earth. He was a codger, a grizzled cuss, and had it not been for what followed, I would be tempted to call him a crazy-old-fuck of the sort that sits up all night with a shotgun on his porch, praying for trespassers while listening to the Martha White portion of the Opry, or something equally antiquated.
It floated, the house behind him, every part of it. The whole thing was up on blocks. He'd devised a way to quickly unhook both the water pipes and power-lines from the trailer. The bottom was covered in styrofoam and various other floating substances. Each corner had large-size tire-rims fastened to the frame. Driven through the tire-rims were four, extra large telephone poles, each one cut as smooth and even as possible to prevent the center holes from catching as the flood water floated the house upwards. The poles were driven into the ground an almost excessive length and tamped in with quickcrete to resist the push and pull of flood water as it attempted to wash everything away. When the water came, the poles stood their ground and the house, like a trashy, ingenious miracle, floated up, up, up, taking old-man river and his hound dog closer to God with every inch of flood water. Hell, he'd even designed the front deck of the trailer (which also floated) to house a small motor boat which could easily be guided on and off as he tooled around over the smashed remains of his stupider neighbor's flooded homes.
This man I concluded, despite his appearance, was a fucking genius. He'd beat the system, beat Nature. Not only that, he'd figured out a way to do it with everyday shit, trash basically, you could find along the road-side—from the trailer and telephone poles down to the styrofoam. The look on his face affirmed, to me at least, that he shared this opinion, too. Old-man knew knew himself to be sharp. The Big-City news crew interviewing him only served as further evidence to this point. He might be old, he might be dressed way too warm for the weather, his dog might only have three legs (might have just been a bad limp, can't remember), but he wouldn't be run out of his home, he wouldn't watch his life wash away. He was there to stay. The whole thing impressed me to the point that even after it ended—giving way to news of some 5 a.m. crack-house raid—I still saw the man, heard him talking in the high drawl between chews and spits as the dog sprawled on the porch and beat the flies on his side with the tip of his tail.
Of course, old as he was then, the old man's probably dead now, and the house—despite the merits of its genius—has most likely been torn down, if for no other reason than being an eye-sore for everyone that is not a stunned and amazed ten year old. Chance it got washed away, too. Who knows? And even if the old man is still alive—he'd have to almost be 100, maybe older, by now—he couldn't keep the place up on his own, and is probably in a nursing home. I know that's eventually where they put my great-grandmother when she forgot so much that she couldn't remember she owned a gun, let alone to fetch and shoot it. Rest her soul, she died, age ninety-nine almost ten years ago. The kids and grandkids divided the furniture and possessions—included in them the service revolver—amongst themselves and all 26 of the great-grandchildren. I never got anything, but I'm not sweating it. The only thing of hers I ever really liked that much was the wheel chair by the washing machine in the hall. She used to laugh when I raced it up and down the hall and crashed it into one or another of my cousins, or the wall, or the washing machine.
If I had it my way my inheritance from her would be to go back to her house every year, race that wheelchair up and down the hall four or five times, watch a little bit of Wheel of Fortune, play with the magnifying glass she used to read in conjunction with her NASA approved prescription bifocals, maybe punch the hop-scotch sized buttons on the telephone beside her recliner. The stuff of my childhood, the things that drowned out all the death-threats and pointless shouting of so many hot afternoons. As is the case with most shit, however, I don't have my way, and, in this instance, never will. The State knocked the house down--the family still owned it, but no one had lived there in years--and widened the highway to four lanes over the top of it. More lanes for logging trucks, state troopers, and loose-tied cub-reporters fishing for backwater stories that don't involve people getting beat down, cuffed up, shot dead, or blown off the map by some act of a righteous God.
