Voyagers
The best pool player I ever played was my uncle Bill.
My dad and his business partner, Ed, were standing in their office
when their friend Frank walked in. They laughed. They talked.
“What are your other kids doing, Paul?” Frank asked my father.
“Paula is a CPA in Chicago. Scott’s in electrical engineering at Purdue.”
Ed turned to Dad and said, “You know, Paul, two out of three isn’t bad.”
And, yes, I was there, wearing one of five polyester leisure suits
(one for each workday), perhaps my favorite, lime green,
which went with all of my pastel turtlenecks, each neck
hidden by a beard that won’t become fashionable for forty years.
An impediment to real estate sales, I see now.
But if you had been an English major with a minor in psychology
and your father said, “Come home and work for me,” when you
were playing 5-card draw, shooting bumper pool, and pinning
psychiatric patients to the floor in Nashville, you might have come home, too,
you with your undergrad accomplishments: your American Lit paper,
“Pip Squeaks,” where the mad cabin boy in Moby Dick says,
“Cook! ho, coo! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey,
hey, hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake done!”;
your knowledge of fellow Hoosier, Kurt Vonnegut; and
the study you conducted, “A Glance at Eye Contact.”
“Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers,
the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage . . .”
began Pip’s crew-mate, Ishmael. And though I don’t mean to imply
that playing backgammon with fellow salesman, Dick Romerhaus,
as in Dick “Picture a house roaming around” Romerhaus, interspersed
with infrequent showings and yet more infrequent sales
compares to a shabby part of a whaling voyage, I do wonder
what would have happened to me if I hadn’t come home.
The World Series of Poker? A career in bumper pool?
Professional wrestling?
The best pool player I ever played was my uncle Bill. A POW
in World War II, he lost fifty pounds and all of his teeth.
When he came home, he was hit by a train. He lived.
“I’m a lucky man,” he’d say with grin. No one told a joke like him.
No one would have enjoyed his funeral more than he.
“Luck, good or bad, is not the hand of God, said billionaire
interplanetary traveler Winston Niles Rumford in The Sirens of Titan.
“Luck is the way the wind swirls and the dust settles eons
after God has passed by.” At Saint Joseph Cemetery,
my uncle’s honor guard showed up without a bugler. Instead,
they brought a boom box. But first they fired the guns.
And soon they’d fold a flag and hand it to my cousin Gary.
When the war ended and the Germans opened the camp gates,
Uncle Bill, less than a hundred pounds by then, walked
across Czechoslovakia in search of Americans. At the cemetery,
we’d thought my uncle’s wind had finished swirling.
But before his dust settled, with his family and friends
gathered solemnly around, the bugler pushed a button.
You should have seen the look on that man’s face when,
instead of “Taps,” the box boomed “Reveille.”
Mark Williams lives in Evansville, Indiana. His poems have appeared in “The Southern Review,” “Rattle,” and “The American Journal of Poetry.” His fiction has appeared in “Indiana Review,” “The Noncomformist,” and the anthologies, “Boom Project: Voices of a Generation,” “American Fiction,” and “Running Wild Novella Anthology, Volume 5.” This is his second appearance in “Landslide Lit (erary).”
