The CB Radio
As a kid I’d sneak out my window and run. I’d run to listen to CB radio in an 18-wheeler stuck in a pasture. Ghost whispers nicked at my ankles and rattles of snakes bit my ears. The stars made my neck hairs stand and the moon knew it all. I’d rip the cab door open and close it and let silence bake me. The cab had dirt on the seats, bushes growing through the floors, cicada shells, hog tusks and whatever little bones I’d found lined the dashboard. I’d turn the knob and listen to the world.
It was my uncle’s truck. He was married to Adelaide, who wore smoke stains and cracked lipstick. She had the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. Airplanes saw her smile. She told me they’re white from chewing on bones. After meals, she’d sit in the den in a rocking chair, listening to the radio with a scotch, chewing on bones. Once, my uncle came home two weeks late from a timber haul, and my mother told me to run into the woods outback and don’t come back in the house till she said so. I watched behind an oak. My aunt ran to the pasture where my uncle parked. A shotgun at her hip. She shot a couple tires, the air escaped and flared her dress and then she shot my uncle.
At first I only listened to the radio. I'd listen to the drama and the news on the road. How many people were on the run or wanted to have sex. I didn’t even know what sex was until I asked a man named Darcy. He said I was old enough and should try it out with my cousin. I told him I only had boy cousins, then he said maybe a babysitter, but my only babysitter was my aunt. Adelaide. I remember his sigh and lost static between words. He told me his first time was with his cousin who was older than him. The longer he talked about her the more open he became. Eventually his words ran out and you could hear his throat open and close and static fill the air again. It was then I knew he was hiding tears because he was in love with his cousin.
Her name was Maryann. She had white hair and brown eyes. The town he grew up in thought she was an albino. He said in all the ponds, dirty and murky, her skin would shine through the water like a rare fish. No opal of a pond could hide her body. As a boy on family trips, he couldn’t help but watch her when they swam. His father and mother would yell at him for staring. His aunt and uncle started to keep an eye on him at dinners. But he said she felt the same. One evening, after Thanksgiving dinner, he was only thirteen and she seventeen, they ran off, drunk on whiskey and wine, into the barn. All the rats and mice watched from the hay. The moon peeked through the rafters and that’s when he told me he knew about love.
I never heard of the Dakotas until a driver named Shepard told me. The prettiest place in America is the Dakotas he said. He said this: “People claim California or Northern Washington, but they don’t know what holy is. In the morning, when the sun shows her blood to wake the world, the Dakotas light up purple. Calves drink their mother’s milk at fence lines. Hay bales lay on medians. Tractors hum in the fields. In the fall, pheasant’s fly and when winter strikes it’s all quiet and cold and blue. If heaven is real, I hope it’s like the Dakotas.” He also told me about a place there called the Badlands. Bisons and coyotes run the world there and from a distance, you can see all of God’s knuckles across the land.
At night when I’d turn off the radio, I’d see the pasture out the window and all the little bones lined up on the dashboard. The moon painted the grass and sage. All of this watched me and there was always an ache inside my heart. I didn’t know if the ache was me or God or an angel but it told me to seek out. The little place I lived, with my mother, my father, my aunt, and baby brother, was not the center of the world.