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Old 08-06-2014, 09:24 AM
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joseph engraver joseph engraver is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2007
Location: Sarzana,Italy
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Default The Day God Found Me

Here is a new painting and another short story.
There is a roadhouse on the outskirts of Lynchburg where the beers are cold and the bands are loud but good. It is a rough and tumble place with a red tin roof, called the 501
Club.
The owner was a woman who had seen all of humanity at its
worst. Drunkenness, fistfights, knife fights, gunfights, fornication, you name it,
Grandmotherly Bea had seen it all. Bea sat in front of the swinging doors to the saw dusted, wood dance floor. If you wanted to dance
you paid the $3 fee with no exceptions.
That Saturday night Red dressed in her sexy jade green pantsuit and white high-heeled dancing boots.
I dressed in jeans, white shirt and brought along a sketchpad and drawing pen.
When we arrived, I drove the Pinto into the nearly full parking lot, found a space near the back.
Parked, then walked around and opened the door for Red.
Together, hand around waist; we made our way into the bar of the 501 Club.
Red and I had been here several times and we were on first name terms with Bea.
I knew that Bea would never let us into the dance floor without collecting the cover charge.
All the money I had was a ten-dollar bill and a few crumpled ones.
I gave them to Red.
“If we both go in to dance, there won’t be enough for two beers. You take it.
Go in, and have a good time. Meanwhile I’ll try to make a few dollars doing portrait
sketches and when I get some money, I’ll join you.”
She smiled; I kissed her and watched her disappear through the swinging
door that Bea stood guard over.
It turned out there wasn’t a redneck in the place interested in having their
Likeness put down onto paper, so I sat at the bar, did quick sketches of the pool
Player´s and listened to the music of the band.
Only one woman was interested in a portrait but she had no money, I settled the price of the sketch at one Coke and a bag of peanuts.
I was roughing out the shape of the woman’s head and the volume of her
hair, noting the details of her face when that I noticed she had a badly cleft
lip.
As I sketched I minimized the deformity. Once the drawing was completed
and before I gave it to her, I checked it over once again. It was only then
I noticed that one of her eyes was way out of alignment.
I looked at her face again. This time I saw her as a whole object rather than form and shadow. It was not until that moment that I saw she had a distorted head.
She was very happy with the sketch and asked me to sign it, which I did she took the drawing, looked intently at it, cooed, then said, “You’re just the sweetest fella I ever did meet.” Shortly after that, the band took its break. Red appeared, followed by a tall well-dressed but slightly drunk man. I got down from the barstool and greeted them. Red introduced me. “Mac this is my husband Joseph, Mac is from Alabama.” We said hello and shook hands. Then Red said, “Mac has a new van, its outside.
Want to see it?”
“Sure,” I replied.
We went out to look at Mac’s new van. After spending time admiring the plush interior, and fully stocked bar. I decided it was a bedroom with wheels.
We left the parking lot and walked back into the 501club where the band was
preparing for its next set.
Red wanted to know if I had made any money. I explained, no one had money to spend on portrait sketches. I gave her the little change I had left, encouraged her to go dance and have a good time, kissed her, and walked her to the swinging doors of the dancehall.
Time passed quickly while sitting on that barstool. I was through sketching the back bar with its glass, bottles, mirrors, reflections and lights, when the music ended and the partygoers started coming out the swinging doors.
I put away the sketchbook and pen and sat waited for Red to show up.
Soon the crowd began to dwindle and alas, there was no one left.
“What the hell?” I thought. “I better see what’s going on..”
I walked over to the now-open doors.
A very empty dance floor greeted me.
The only people around were the band members and a big guy with a broom pushing a mountain of bottles, cans, and assorted trash towards a garbage can.
I walked over to the woman’s room, knocked on the door, and then peeked inside.
“Red, are you in here” No answer. “Hey, Red, are you OK?” no one there.
I was so sure she was in there that I entered and started looking in the stalls to see if she had passed out or was sick.
Empty.
Confused, I went back out on the dance floor. The band players had packed up and headed for the back door.
“Hey guys, you see a good looking redhead wearing a green pants suit?”
“Sure man, she left out the back door about a half an hour ago” someone from the band answered.
I was dumbstruck and blindsided. I had not seen it coming. I charged out the back door looking for my wife.
The only vehicles left in the darkened parking lot was my red Pinto
and the band’s pick up.
“He’s gotten her drunk and kidnapped her,” I thought as I ran around to the
other side of the club expecting to find Mac, his van and kidnapped wife.
It was empty and very deserted, abandoned, a black nothing.
I drove downtown, checking the all-night restaurants, the local motels, and
all-night establishment I could think of…all empty, totally void, no signs of Red or Mac’s rocking and rolling van.
Around 4 a.m., I called the Lynchburg police department and reported Red missing.
The person I talked too listened to this tale of woe and then asked me
for the details, when I mentioned the 501 club, he interrupted me.
“I see,” said the voice on the line sympathetically. “I’m sorry but we can’t help you now.”
“What do you mean you can’t help me now?” I groaned in desperation, “Some guy from Alabama’s got my wife?”
He explained, a missing person report could not be filed before twenty-four hours passed.
Despondent I drove back to our two months-behind in rent trailer
house, where our four-month-old Dobby greeted me.
She was whining and wiggling at my feet as I unlocked the kitchen door.
“Come here Tilly,” I muttered.
Picking her up and holding her to my chest, I carried her onto the sofa where I crashed, a deceived, confused, 41-year-old man.
I lay my distraught body down, and tried to sleep.
I lay awake, not moving, eyes open, staring upward at nothing, until the first colors of sunrise filtered through the Venetian blinds. Zombie-like, I got up, brushed
my teeth, fed Tilly, and went outside into the cold morning air.
In the yard grew a tall magnolia tree, its branches reaching heavenward, solid and black.
Beneath it I prayed, “Please, let Red be OK. Let me find her.
“GOD! I DO NOT DESERVE THIS PUNISHMENT”; I screamed at the top of my lungs.
There was no answer.
I returned to the trailer house, took a sheet of paper from my sketchpad, and wrote:
Red,
I don’t know what was going on last night. I have been looking for you. If you come home and find this note, I’ll be back.
We can straighten this out.
Love, Joseph
I tore off the sheet of paper from the tablet and taped it to the front door in full sight, petted Tilly, got in the Pinto, and drove back to Lynchburg.
I started back at the 501 Club, and then drove out of town looking in every motel parking lot for Mac’s van.
North, south, east and west I drove. Every minute, every mile , driving me further into the deepest black despair.
I found nothing, not a trace, it was late in the afternoon when I finally
gave up and returned home, worried and exhausted.
I pulled into the dirt driveway where Tilly was waiting, the nub of her tail
wagging back and forth. I picked her up and walked to the door.
There on top of the note I had taped to the door was Red’s response
.Her elegant handwriting below my scribbled note. It said it all:
As Ronny Millsap says, “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” Gone to Alabama with Mac,
Love, Red
Those words in her delicate feminine writing struck like a sledgehammer with the knowledge that I was a complete failure. My mother was right. I was worthless. I brought grief wherever I went, I would never amount to anything.
I was a bastard. I was stupid, and would become someone special when hell froze over.
I gave up as I looked at Red’s note. I could go no further, and endure no more.
I turned around, Tilly still in my arms and walked back to the Pinto. I got in and drove a quarter of a mile to my neighbor’s house.
Somehow I managed to get myself together long enough to leave Tilly with them.
“My wife has left me,” I explained. “So I’m going away and I can’t take Tilly with me. Would you take care of her?”
They would take care of Tilly; they were honest, simple country people.
I could feel myself coming apart as I stood there, dog in my arms.
I put her down, returned to the still-running car, and drove off down the red dirt road and back to the highway that led to Lynchburg, Virginia.
A plan had formed in my mind. I was going to kill myself, no bullshit this
time, no outs. I was going to do it with the Pinto and make it look like an accident.
I did not want my children to bear the burden of a father who had blown
his brains all over hell. Besides, I did not have a working gun.
Yes, I knew exactly what I was about to do. Just a short distance from town was an overpass. It had two large support structures in the center of the highway. Those two towers of concrete and steel were going to be the final destination.
“Fxxx you God, Fxxx all of you and to hell with it” I yelled, then pressed the accelerator to the floor. I was less than a mile away from the final moment on earth, both hands gripping the steering wheel as if welded to it.
I was screaming at the top of my voice, not words, just piercing screams.
My foot on the accelerator pressing it to the floorboards, the Pinto was going as fast as it possibly could. Tears were streaming down my face so freely I could hardly see to drive.
Suddenly, the Pinto started to lose its forward movement.
Seventy-five the speedometer read, then sixty, then fifty, I was screaming and crying. I stomped on the gas. The engine roared but the car continued to go slower. Finally, I saw it was hopeless and pulled the car off the highway as it rolled to a dead stop.
By then, I had stopped screaming, but my foot still had the accelerator pushed to the floor the engine was still roaring. The transmission was in drive yet the car remained motionless.
I killed the engine, stepped out of the car, pounded on the hood, then giving the door a hard kick, I screamed to the sky, “God! What are you doing to me now?”
If that fluid line to the transmission had not broken at that precise moment, in another 5 seconds I would have destroyed myself.
Leaving the Pinto where it had stopped, I walked the few miles back to the trailer house.
A bottle of French Brandy sat on the top of the refrigerator. It was full and I considered getting drunk, but instead of taking it down and opening it, I sat down at the drawing table and stared in a zombie-like trance.
I may have sat that way for twenty minutes or twenty hours, I do not remember. I do not remember sleeping or eating.
I just sat reviewing my life, and those festers of shame that no one knew about.
The corruption of my childhood, my humiliating academic and military career, my inability to stay at one employment, the awful and tragic marriage and divorce that had left me bankrupt.
Everything swept away. My mother’s words, “I wish I never had you” reverberating in my ears.
Alone at the drawing table in that silent trailer house I wondered.
Who am I?
What am I?
The answer then came to me.
“You are Joseph, you are my creation.”
What is my purpose for living?
“To be happy, to be proud of yourself, to learn as much as you can while you are
on this earth. This is your reason, this is your purpose.”
Late Sunday evening I made a decision. I was going to continue learning to engrave. I was going to make myself a credit to the human race.
I was going to go Italy to learn
Attached Images
File Type: jpg The Fractured Man 002.jpg (61.4 KB, 0 views)
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