How would God respond to making a mistake? Would planets collide or mountains slide into the sea? Or would the ledger of all life simply remain out kilter until a series of small events forced that ledger back into balance again? It's probably the l...
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August 7, 6:19AM
just leaving Alligator Alley
I slept dreamlessly after the game last night. When I first got up, I wasn't sure about that. I thought I might have had a dream about my last Halloween in Baltimore, but now I'm sure I was just remembering because there were too many details and the story made too much sense. It's just that I'm so tired right now that it's hard to tell the difference.
Anyway, what I remembered was how Crow and I used sneak onto the Huntington's porch on Halloween and peek through their windows. The Huntingtons lived around the corner from us in Baltimore. Their house was a gloomy shade of brown house with just a hint of purple mixing in. It was kind of like a bruise that was emerging from the inside out. And judging from the noises inside the house, that seemed like the perfect color. There were arguments all the time. Some kids even swore they heard gun shots, but I never did.
Sneaking up there on Halloween became our version counting coup or something equally childish. The last year before we moved to Wyoming, we looked through the window and saw a picture of a woman on the wall. She was beautiful. Blonde bangs, tilted head, and tilted hips. She was naked.
I knew it wasn't Mrs. Huntington because she was rail thin and sour looking. And it also wasn't their daughter because the Huntington's daughter was just a baby at the time. I remembered telling Crow that the woman in the picture was the one the Ouija board had picked for me. The perfect woman. It was the mythical Charon. As emphatic as I was, Crow was equally emphatic that the woman was named Persephone. In a weird way, it felt like we were both right.
Anyway, since no kids ever came to the Huntington's house on Halloween to get candy, we stayed on their porch for most of the evening. We looked through the window - imagining what life would be like if the Ouija board had actually told the truth. Ever since that day, there's a part of me that expects to see that face whenever I meet someone new. It's like ghosts hanging onto my shadow.
⌂⌂⌂
The drive through Alligator Alley this morning was like never waking up. The filmy threads of sleep stuck to me for hours and the scenes outside my window made me think about that kids' newspaper they passed out each week in school. One week, the newspaper had pictures of the Everglades with swamp mist boiling off the surface. It was beautiful. And now that I'm here, I see that it's almost as frightening as it is beautiful.
The mist gathers into clouds that look like ghosts. Most of them creep lazily over the water, but some of them hover so close to the guardrail that it feels like you can reach out and touch them. Every few miles, you'll see a car stopped on the side of the road. The driver will be leaning over the water trying to pull in a ghost. They're so real that you even swerve to avoid the mist if it drifts in front of you.
What's funny is that I didn't think I was the type of person who'd actually stop my car and try to touch the ghosts. But a few miles ago, I did exactly that. From a distance, I saw this ghost forming under a tree that was so heavy with Spanish moss that it looked like it was ready to collapse. It was exactly the kind of the picture that I saw in that kid's newspaper a long time ago.
