Boaz Bloom and Tumble-Down Row, Part Seven

December 11, 2007, 10:00 am; posted by
Filed under Articles, Featured, Job  | 3 Comments

The last of the Best of Job, continued. Lost? Read part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, and part six!

Well, Grandma, I did my deed. Your sweaters and stuff are now at the Salvation Army, your pictures boxed and shipped to New Hampshire. I’m sorry to take them from the heartland.

Your house was sold to a young couple from Texas or something. I thought you’d appreciate that. I found that $10 bill tucked in your TV Guide and took Becky to Dairy Queen with it.

We’re gonna write.

 

My last day in Chap, I ate all three meals in town and made my rounds, saying goodbye to a few people. Becky was on vacation with her family. In the diner, I saw the government man down the counter. Being two outsiders we naturally let our conversation fall into orbit, and I asked if he had the aerials with him, and if I could see them one last time. He obliged me and pulled them from his case, while encouraging the waitress to warm up his coffee. I thumbed through them casually at first while still maintaining a conversation with him, but then I began to become further engrossed in the photos.

Wait…

I thumbed back…then forward again.

Whoa whoa whoa.

I laid them out on the counter, moved the salt shaker, and laid out some more. Sound rushed into my ears and my brow grew hot. For the first and only time in my life, I placed my hand over my mouth in instinctual shock.

From the air above Chap, in a series of photos, I saw Boaz’s daily path complete. And I could see, before tears clouded my vision, that the path carefully, artfully, in cursive — wrote out the name “Amelia.”

Directly above the town, lovingly carved into the earth with vulcanized rubber, funded by aluminum, powered by 200 lbs. of ballast and the thrust of two tired legs.

Amelia.

The man noticed my reaction and asked me what was the matter. I explained in stutters.

“Holy sweet Jesus…” he said with a gasp.

In a daze he added, before we parted, “He did everything but dot the ‘i’…”

 

So I went home, got my car — not a Honda — and went back to school.

Graduated. Married.

House on Long Island.

Kids.

I’ve rethought that summer over and over again and I think of Boaz often, still — a man I will always admire but cringe at the thought of becoming.

I’ve replayed conversations over in my mind — you know what I mean. His death always bothered me. It was such an inglorious end for a man who turned out to be one of my life’s heroes.

Ugh.

But, hey, listen, let me tell you something and then I’ll let you go, aye?

 

On a rainy night last May, I was lying awake, with my wife on my shoulder, thinking. As you know, 2 a.m. is no man’s land for thought, and I let my mind wander if I can’t sleep. Car payments, my son’s touchdown last year, my first dog.

I smiled about the sculpture out in Missouri and wondered how it was weathering the years of rain and snow and wind without Boaz’s upkeep. Amelia was probably dead now too, it occurred to me — buried next to that rich punk. All of hers and Boaz’s little spots down in Florida overgrown or developed into housing units — the place where they’d met now a mini-mall with 50% off Dockers or something, ya know?

Rain steadily thumped my roof. In my drowsy haze, I retraced the lines of Boaz’s path in my mind, in service to him. Upkeeping the trail in my mind.

“Did everything but dot the ‘i’…”

I suddenly shot up in bed, rolling Katie over. Closing my eyes, I feverishly envisioned the photos as best as I could after 20 years. I could see the name “Amelia” in the hillside; up above, the highway.

And I thought, and envisioned, and gripped my comforter — and could see the ‘i’ in “Amelia” rising up and pointing at the highway, directly at the spot where Boaz had died.

Died, and dotted an ‘i.’

I fell back into the pillows.

My friend Boaz had died a cucumber.


Comments

3 Comments to “Boaz Bloom and Tumble-Down Row, Part Seven”

  1. Emily on December 11th, 2007 4:01 pm

    Wow. That story’s had me enraptured for quite a while now. Kudos on maintaining all of those cliffhangers.

  2. David on December 11th, 2007 4:23 pm

    Vey good story.

  3. Tom Maxon on December 11th, 2007 5:49 pm

    Big, big fan. Bweinh.

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