Memories

One time there was the screech of tires on pavement and then that unmistakable crunch. It was loud. I followed the sound. I was small, still in short pants, but with a little ribbed dago’t. I’d run a little, then walk, then run a little more. It took me forever to get there. The ambulances were gone. The cars were there. They were under a viaduct.

One was a big, boxy Buick, or Oldsmobile maybe? There was a dent in front, enough to crack the radiator and leak it to the gutter. I can’t remember the color the fluid was back then, but I remember it dripping from underneath the car. It didn’t seem all that much damage to me. It was back a car length from the other car, a little sports car it had hit head on.

I was fascinated by the way the front end was folded up and over the back of the little convertible. It seemed impossible to me the two car were in the same accident. The big one was barely damaged. The little sports car was completely destroyed. There was glass everywhere aroud it and inside on the seats. Only the taillights were still intact. Everything else was broken. I remember squinting through my glasses, crooked on my face, seeing my shattered image, like a Picasso painting in the side view mirror.

In the back seat were a decapitated armless doll without any clothes on and a crumpled magazine. On the passenger side floorboard was a scrap of a woman’s blouse in a pool of blood.

I told all my friends about it, described in detail the small V dent in front grill of the bigger car, how it almost looked like it was just parked. I told over and over how the little car looked like it had been in a different accident and there wasn’t a piece of glass on it that wasn’t broken except for the back tail lights. I told the way the car was folded over on itself like a U on its side.
I left out the scrap of blouse it the blood.

I can still see it. It was a white, silky material, a few folds up above the watery blood. I remember staring at it for a long time, how my eyes kept coming back to it, how it stayed with me afterwards like the firemen and the dead cats with the maggots crawling out of their eye sockets and nose. It’s the same way, if I want to, I can “look” and see a taught mooring line with the water drops squeezed out and dancing, and the line breaking, folding back through the air, striking like a monstrous snake, lifting a sailor off the deck of a tug and slamming him into the steel bulkhead behind him.

There’s a lot back on Peoria street to remember and sometimes it’s hard to look, to see Pete’s bloody head, to here Trixie’s toenails on a warn linoleum floor, to remember the sickly sweet smell of the plastic’s factory. You get the good with the bad I guess, like a tray of fresh baked long johns cooling in a window sill of the bakery, rosting potatoes in a campfire pretending to be hobos one night in the back corner of the truck lot with my cousin Wayne and his friend Angelo, or Old Pete coming down the street with puppies in his pockets.