Today, my dear phantoms-of-imagination, I’ll do no more than mention in passing my thoughts on time. The reason being, the last month just slid away from me there and I hadn’t quite realized I’d fallen off the blogsphere, as little my part in it plays.
So, I’ve got a rather long excerpt from a short story titled “My Pretty Pony” by Stephen King, located in ‘Nightmares and Dreamscapes.’ (He does write more than horror, you know ~ or at least, I wouldn’t lump this in with the ’scary stories’ myself. It’s about time, or the passage of it, and how it tends to….slip away and blur itself. While it does contain some stereotypical ideas (the wandering wife and the often absentee father being the most notable) at least it isn’t like another thriller book I read awhile back by someone I can’t remember the name of, which boiled down to a sentence was “Well, we’d really like to relax immigration policy, but see, look-at-that, we were right in the first place!” and twisted things so out of proportion deliberately that they couldn’t have been imagined unless you were set out to believe it in the first place.
The whole Good-People-Do-Bad-Things, is how I tend to read him, from the quirks in his character’s beliefs to what views are conventionally held. Now, some of his characters do rely heavily on stereotypes and could use a good scrubbing and reworking to get reality, and some of his books with badly-made characters I like (they are not, neccessarily, the same thing, though the two qualities often coincide), but they (particular characters) aren’t realistic from whatever perspective is taken, even with the mind stretch that is required. His writing, however, despite these often glaring faults, tends to be very good, he has a way of describing things. And I notice he has gotten better; not perfect, mind, not anywhere near for stereotypes, but better, none the less.
Awfully long preface of a thing for the one bit of an excerpt, eh?
So, onward ho!
When Grandpa opened his mouth, Clive thought he would say time to go back t’the house, Clivey, but instead he told the boy: “I’m going to tell you something, if you want to hear it. Won’t take long. You want to hear it, Clivey?”
“Yes, sir!”
“You really do, don’t you?” Grandpa said in a bemused voice.
“Yes, sir.”
“Sometimes I think I ought to steal you from your folks and keep you around forever. Sometimes I think that if I had you on hand most of the time, I’d live forever, goddam bad heart or not.”
He removed the Kool from his mouth, dropped it on the ground, and stamped it to death under one workboot, revolving the heel back and forth and then covering the butt with the dirt his heel had loosened just to be sure. When he looked up at Clive again, it was with eyes that gleamed.
“I stopped giving advice a long time ago,” he said. “Thirty years or more, I guess. I stopped when I noticed only fools gave it and only fools took it.
Instruction, now…instruction’s a different thing. A smart man will give a little from time to time, and a smart man – or boy – will take a little from time to time.”
Clive said nothing, only looked at his grandfather with close concentration.
“There are three kinds of time,” Grandpa said, “and while all of them are real, only one is ‘really’ real. You want to make sure you know them all and can always tell them apart. Do you understand that?”
“No, sir.”
Grandpa nodded. “If you’d said ‘Yes, sir,’ I would have swatted the seat of your pants and taken you back to the farm.”
Clive looked down at the smeared results of Grandpa’s cigarette, face hot with blush, proud.
“When a fellow is only a sprat, like you, time is long. Take a for-instance. When May comes, you think school’s never gonna let out, that mid-month June will just never come. Ain’t that pretty much how it is?”
Clive thought of that last weight of drowsy, chalk-smelling schooldays and nodded.
“And when mid-month June finally does come and Teacher gives you your report card and lets you go free, it seems like school’s never gonna let back in. Ain’t that pretty much right, too?”
Clive thought of that highway of days and nodded so hard his neck actually popped. “Boy, it sure is! I mean, sir.” Those days. All those days stretching away across the plains of June and July and all over the unimaginable horizon of August. So many days, so many dawns, so many noon lunches of bologna sandwiches with mustard and raw chopped onion and giant glasses of milk while his mom sat silently in the living room with her bottomless glass of wine, watching the soap operas on TV; so many depthless afternoons when sweat grew in the short hedge of your crewcut and then ran down your cheeks, afternoons when you noticed that your blob of a shadow had grown a boy almost always came as a surprise, so many endless twilights with the sweat cooling away to nothing but a smell like aftershave on your cheeks and forearms while you played tag or red rover or capture the flag; sounds of bike chains, slots clicking neatly into oiled cogs, smells of honeysuckle and cooling asphalt and green leaves and cut grass, sounds of the slap of baseball cards being laid on some kid’s front walk, solemn and portentous trades which changed the aces of both leagues, councils that went on in the slow shady axial tilt of July evening until the call of “Cliiiiive! Sup-per!” put an end to that business; and that call was always expected and yet as shocking as the noon blob that had, by three or so, become a black boy-shape running in the street beside him – and that boy stapled to his heels had actually become a man by five or so, albeit an extraordinarily skinny one; velvet evenings of television, the occasional rattle of pages as his father read one book after another (he never tired of them; words, words, words, his dad never tired of them, and Clive had meant once to ask him how that could be but lost his nerve), his mother getting up once in awhile and going into the kitchen, followed only by his sister’s worried, angry eyes and his own simply curious ones; the soft clink as Mom replenished the glass which was never empty after eleven in the morning or so
(and their father never looking up from his book, although Clive had an idea he heard it all and knew it all, although Patty had called him a stupid liar and had given him a Peter-Pinch that hurt all day long the one time he had dared to tell her that);
the sound of mosquitos whining against the screens, always so much louder, it seemed, after the sun had gone down; the decree of bedtime, so unfair and unavoidable, all arguments lost before they were begun; his father’s brusque kiss, his mother’s softer, both sugary and sour with the smell of wine; the sound of his sister telling Mom she ought to go to bed after Dad had gone down to the corner tavern to drink a couple beers and watch the wrestling matches on the television over the bar; his mom telling Patty to mind her own p’s and q’s, a conventional pattern that was upsetting in its content but somehow soothing in its predictability; fireflies gleaming in the gloom; a car horn, distant, as he drifted into sleep’s long, dark channel; then the next day, which seemed the same but wasn’t, not quite. Summer. That was summer. And it did not just seem long; it was long.
Grandpa, watching him closely, seemed to read all this in the boy’s brown eyes, to know all the words for all the things the boy never could have found a way to tell, things that could not escape him because his mouth could never articulate the language of his heart. And then Grandpa nodded, as if he wanted to confirm this very idea, and suddenly Clive was terrified that Grandpa would spoil everything by saying something soft and soothing and meaningless. Sure, he would say. I know all about it, Clivey – I was a boy once myself, you know.
But he didn’t, and Clive understood he had been stupid to fear the possibility even for a moment. Worse, faithless. Because this was Grandpa, and Grandpa never talked meaningless shit like other grownups so often did. Instead of speaking softly and soothingly, he spoke with the dry finality of a judge pronouncing a harsh sentence for a capitol crime.
“All that changes,” he said.
Clive looked up at him, a little apprehensive at the idea but very much liking the way the old man’s hair blew around his head. He thought Grandpa looked the way the church-preacher would if he really knew the truth about God instead of just guessing. “Time does? Are you sure?”
“Yes. When you get to a certain age – right around fourteen, I think, mostly when the two halves of the human race go on and make the mistake of discovering each other – time start to be real time. The real real time. It ain’t long like it was or short like it gets to be. It does, you know. But for most of your life it’s mostly the real real time. You know what that is, Clivey?”
“No, sir.”
“Then take instruction: real real time is your pretty pony. Say it: My pretty pony.”
Feeling dumb, wondering if Grandpa was having him on for some reason (“trying to get your goat” as Uncle Don would have said), Clive said what he wanted him to say. He waited for the old man to laugh, to say, “Boy, I really got your goat that time, Clivey!” But Grandpa only nodded matter-of-factly, in a way that took all the dumb out of it.
“My pretty pony. Those’re three words you’ll never forget if you’re as smart’s as I think ya might be. My pretty pony. That’s the truth of time.”
Grandpa took the battered package of cigarettes from his pocket, considered it briefly, then put it back.
“From the time you’re fourteen, until oh, I’m gonna say until you’re sixty or so, most time is my-pretty-pony time. There’s times when it goes back to being long like it was when you were a kid, but those ain’t good times anymore. You’d give your soul for some my-pretty-pony times then, let alone short time. If you was to tell Gramma what I’m gonna tell you now, Clivey, she’d call me a blasphemer and wouldn’t bring me no hot water-bottle for a week. Maybe two.”
Nevertheless, Grandpa’s lips twisted into a bitter and unregenerate jag.
“If I was to tell it to that Reverend Chadband the wife sets such store by, he’d trot out the one where we see through a glass darkly or that old chestnut about how God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, but I’ll tell you what I think, Clivey. I think God must be one mean old son of a bitch to make the only long time a grownup has the times when he is hurt bad, like with crushed ribs or stove in guts or something like that. A God like that, why, He makes a kid who sticks pins in flies look like that saint who was so good the birds’d come and roost all over him. I think about how long those weeks were after the hay-rick turned turtle on me, and I wonder why God wanted to make living, thinking creatures in the first place. If He needed something to piss on, why couldn’t He have made Him some sumac bushes and left it at that? Or what about that poor old Johnny Brickmayer, who went so slow with the bone cancer last year.”
Clive hardly heard that last, although he remembered later, on their ride back to the city, that Johnny Brickmayer, who had owned what his mother and father called the grocery store and what Grandpa and Gramma still called “the Mercantile,” was the only man Grandpa went to see of an evening…and the only man who came to see Grandpa of an evening. On the long ride back to town it came to Clive that Johnny Brickmayer, whom he remembered only vaguely as a man with a very large wart on his forehead and a way of hitching at his crotch while he walked, must have been Grandpa’s only real friend. The fact that Gramma tended to turn up her nose when Brickmayer’s name was mentioned – and often complained about the way the man had smelled – only reinforced the idea.
Such reflections could not have come now, anyway, because Clive was waiting breathlessly for God to strike Grandpa dead. Surely He would for such a blasphemy. No one could get away with calling God The Father Almighty a mean old son of a bitch, or suggest that the Being who made the universe was no better than a mean third-grader who got his kicks sticking pins into flies.
Clive took a nervous step away from the figure in the bib-overalls, who had ceased being his Grandpa and had become instead a lightning rod. Any moment now a bolt would come out of the blue sky, sizzling his Grandpa dead as doggy-doo and turning the apple trees into torches that would signal the old man’s damnation to all and sundry. The apple blossoms blowing through the air would turn into something like the bits of char that went floating up from the incinerator in their backyard when his father burned the weeks worth of newspapers on late Sunday afternoons.
Nothing happened.
Clive waited, the dreadful surety eroding, and when the robin twittered cheerily somewhere nearby (as if Grandpa had said nothing more awful than kiss-my-foot), he knew no lightening was going to come. And at that moment of that realization, a small but fundamental change took place in Clive Banning’s life. His Grandpa’s unpunished blasphemy would not make him a criminal or a bad boy, or even such a small thing as a “problem child” (a phrase that had only recently come into vogue). Yet the true north of belief shifted just a little in Clive’s mind, and the way he listened to his Grandpa changed at once. Before, he had listened to the old man. Now he attended him.
“Times when you’re hurt go on forever, seems like,” Grandpa was saying. “Believe me, Clivey – a week of being hurt makes the best summer vacation you ever had when you was a kid seem like a weekend. Hell, makes it seem like Sat’dy mornin! When I think of the seven months Johnny lay there with that…that thing that was inside him, inside him and eating on his guts…Jesus, I ain’t got no business talkin this way to a kid. Your Gramma’s right. I got the sense of a chicken.”
Grandpa brooded down at his shoes for a moment. At last he looked up and shook his head, not darkly, but with brisk, almost humorous dismissiveness.
“Ain’t a bit of that matters. I said I was gonna give you instruction, and instead I stand here howlin like a woe-dog. You know what a woe-dog is, Clivey?”
The boy shook his head.
“Never mind, that’s for another day.” Of course there had never been another, because the next time he saw Grandpa, Grandpa was in a box, and Clive supposed that was an important part of the instruction that Grandpa had to give that day. The fact that the old man didn’t know he was giving it made it no less important. “Old men are like old trains in a switchen yard, Clivey – too many damned tracks. So they loop the damn roundhouse five times before they ever get in.”
“That’s all right, Grandpa.”
“What I mean is every time I drive for the point, I go someplace else.”
“I know, but those someplace elses are pretty interesting.”
Grandpa smiled. “If you’re a bullshit artist, Clivey, you’re a damn good one.”
Clive smiled back, and the darkness of Johnny Brickmayer’s memory seemed to lift from his Grandpa. When he spoke again, his voice was more businesslike.
“Anyway! Nevermind that swill. Having long time pain is just a little extra the Lord throws in. You know how a man will save up Releigh coupons and trade em in for something like a brass barometer to hand in his den or a new set of steak knives, Clivey?”
Clive nodded.
“Well, that’s what pain-time is like, only it’s more like a booby prize than a real one, I guess you’d have to say. Main thing is, when you get old, regular time -my-pretty-pony-time- changes to short time. It’s like when you were a kid, only turned around.”
“Backwards.”
“Yep.”
The idea that time got fast when you got old was beyond the ability of the boy’s emotions to grasp, but he was bright enough to admit the concept. He knew that if one end of the seesaw went up, the other end had to go down. What Grandpa was talking about, he reasoned, must be the same idea: balance and counterbalance. All right; it’s a point of view,” Clives own father might have said.
Grandpa took the packet of Kools from the kangaroo pouch again – and this time he carefully extracted a cigarette – not just the last one in the packet but the last one the boy would ever see him smoke. The old man crumpled the package and stowed it back in the place from which it had come. He lit this cigarette as he had with the other, with the same effortless ease. He did not ignore the hilltop wind; he seemed somehow to negate it.
“When does it happen, Grandpa?”
“I can’t exactly tell you that, n it don’t happen all at once,” Grandpa said, wetting the match as he had its predecessor. “It kinda creeps up, like a cat stalking a squirrel. Finally you notice, and when you do notice, it ain’t no more fair than the way the Osgood boy counted his numbers was fair.”
(Well, one moment of your time, If you’ll be so generous as to indulge a question and perhaps a whim. Can anyone else ‘count like an auctioneer’? I remember to get on the swing (in elementary school, this was) you had to count to a hundred to get the kid off whose swing you wanted to take over. I’m thinking a largely percentage of those tykes in my years carried that skill into adulthood. I know I did, and I never did swing much, though I had to’ve done it enough to get the hang o’ it. Twas an easy skill to pick up, though I’ve found no use for it since then. Were a few of those in elementary school, if my recollection serves. So. How fast can you count to a hundred? Takes m’self 24 seconds, (Aloud, now, no cheating!) as of, oh, perhaps five seconds ago. C’mon, I’m curious, any timers to see how long it takes you?)
“Well then, what happens? How do you notice?”
Grandpa tapped a roll of ash from his cigarette without taking it from his mouth. He did it with his thumb, knocking on his cigarette the way a man may rap a low knock on a table. The boy never forgot that small sound.
“I think what you notice first must be different for everyone,” the old man said. “but for me it started when I was fourty-something. I don’t remember how old I was, but you want to bet I remember exactly where I was…In Davis’s Drug. You know it?”
Clive nodded. His father almost always took him and his sister in there for ice-cream sodas when they were visiting Grandpa and Gramma. His father called them the VanChockstraw triplets because their orders never varied: their father always had vanilla, Patty chocolate, Clive strawberry. And his father would sit between them and read while they slowly ingested the cold sweet treats. Patty was right when she said you could get away with anything when their father was reading, which was most of the time, but when he put his book away and looked around, you wanted to sit up and put on your prettiest manners, or you were apt to get clouted.
“Well, I was in there,” Grandpa resumed, his eyes far off, studying a cloud that looked like a soldier blowing on a bugle moving swiftly across the spring sky, “to get some medicine for your Gramma’s arthritis. We’d had rain for a week and it was hurting her like all get-out. And all at once I seen a new store display. Would have been hard to miss. Took up most of one whole aisle, it did. There were masks and cutout decorations of black cats and witches on brooms and things like that, and there were those cardboard punkins they used to sell. They came in a bag with an elastic inside. The idea was, the kid would punch the punkin out of the cardboard and then give his mom an afternoon of peace coloring it in and maybe playing the games on the back. When it was done you hung it on your door, or, if the kids family was too poor to buy him a store mask or to dumb to make him a costume out of what was around the house, why, you could staple the elastic onto the thing and the kid would wear it. Used to be a lot of kids walking around with paper bags in their hands and those punkin masks from Davis’ Drug on their faces come Halloween night, Clivey! And, of course, he had his candy out. Was always that penny candy counter up there by the soda fountain, you know the one I mean-
Clivey smiled. He knew, all right.
“-but this was different. This was penny candy by the job lot. All that truck like wax bottles an candy corn and root-beer barrels and licorice whips.
“And I thought that old man Davis-there really was a fella named Davis who ran the place back then, it was his father that opened it up back around 1910 – had slipped a cog or two. Holy hell, I’m thinkin to myself, Frank Davis has got his trick-or-treat out before the goddam summer’s even over. It crossed my mind to go up to the prescription counter where he was n tell him just that, and then a part of me says, Whoa up a second, George – you’re the one who’s slipped a cog or two. And that wasn’t so far wrong, Clivey, because it wasn’t still summer, and I knew it just as well as I know we’re standin here. See, that’s what I want you to understand – that I knew better.
“Wasn’t I already on the lookout for apple pickers from around town, and hadn’t I already put in an order for five hundred handbills to get put up over the border in Canada? And didn’t I already have my eye on this fella named Tim Warburton who’d come down from Schenectady lookin for work? He had a way about him, looked honest, and I thought he’d make a good foreman come pickin time. Hadn’t I been meaning to ask him the very next day, and didn’t he know I was gonna ask because he’d let on he’d be getting his hair cut at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time? I thought to myself, Suds n body, George, ain’t you a little young to be going senile? Yeah, old Frank’s got his Halloween candy out a little early, but summer? That’s gone and by, me fine bucko.
“I knew that just fine, but for a second, Clivey – or maybe it was a whole row of seconds – it seemed like summer, or like it had to be summer, because it was just being summer. Get what I mean? It didn’t take me long to get September set down straight again in my head, but until I did I felt…you know, I felt…” He frowned, then reluctantly brought out a word he knew but would not have used in conversation with another farmer, lest he be accused (if only in the other fellow’s mind) of being high-flown. “I felt dismayed. And that’s how it was the first time.”
He looked at the boy, who only looked back at him, not even nodding, so deep in concentration was he. Grandpa nodded for both of them and knocked another roll of ash off his cigarette with the side of his thumb. The boy believed Grandpa was so lost in thought that the wind was smoking practically all of this one for him.
“I was like steppin up to the bathroom mirror meanin to do no more n shave and seein that first gray hair in your head. You get that, Clivey?”
“Yes”
“Okay. And after that first time, it started to happen with all the holidays. You’d think they was puttin the stuff out to early, and sometimes you’d even say so to someone, although you’d always stayed careful to make it sound like the shopkeepers were greedy. That something was wrong with them, not you. You get that?“
“Yes.”
“Because,” Grandpa said, “A greedy shopkeeper was something a man could understand – and something some men even admired, although I was never one of them. So-and-so keeps himself a sharp practice,” they’d say, as if sharp practice, like that butcher fella Radwick that used to always stick his thumb on the scales when he could get away with it, like that was just a honey of a way to be. I never felt that way, but I could understand it. Saying something that made you sound like you had gone funny in the head, though….that was a different kettle of beans. So you’d just say something like ‘By God, they’ll have the tinsel and the angel’s hair out before the hay’s in the barn next year,’ and whoever you said it to would say that it was nothing but the Gospel truth, and when I hunker right down and study her, Clivey, I know they are putting all those things out pretty near the same time every year.”
“Then something else happened to me. This might have been five years later, might have been seven. I think I must have been right round fifty, one side or the other. Anyhow, I got called on jury duty. Damn pain in the ass, but I went. The bailiff sweared me up, asked me if I’d do my duty so help me God, just as if I hadn’t spent all my life doin my duty about one thing n another so help me God. Then he got out his pen and asked me for my address, and I gave it to him neat as you’d like. Then he asked me how old I was, and I opened my mouth all primed to say thirty-seven.”
Grandpa threw back his head and laughed at the cloud that looked like a soldier. That cloud, the bugle part now grown as long as a trombone, had gotten itself halfway across the horizon to the other.
“Why did you want to say that, Grandpa?” Clive thought he had followed everything up to this pretty well but here was a thicket.
“I wanted to say it because it was the first thing to come into my mind! Hell! Anyhow, I knew it was wrong and so I stopped for a second. I don’t think that bailiff or anyone else in the courtroom noticed – seemed like most of em was either asleep or on the doze – and, even if they’d been as wide awake as that fella who just got Widow Brown’s broomstick rammed up his buttsky, I don’t know as anyone would’ve made anything of it. Wasn’t no more than how, sometimes, a man trying to hit a tricky pitch will kinda take a double pump before he swings. But, shit! Askin a man how damn old he is ain’t like throwin no spitball. I felt like an ijit. Seemed like for that one second I didn’t know how old I was if I wasn’t thirty-seven. Seemed like for a second there I could have been seven or seventeen or seventy-seven. Then I got it and said fourty-eight or fifty-one or whatever-the-frig. But to lose track of your age, even for a second…shoo!“
I wanted so badly to interrupt again, several times in fact, but here on this spot I can’t really help myself. Or mayhap it’s that I don’t want to help myself. What I notice (and I’m thinking that you’ve prolly noticed it, too) is that the misplacement of age-remembering happens all the time. Often enough for me to remember, anyways. But, I’m also aware, it didn’t start happening until, oh, I was twelve, perhaps thirteen. And I’m thinking because before that, I was keeping careful track; I’d wanted so badly to enter the double digits, you see, and every year brought me closer to that elusive goal. Seems like after I won that, though, that the remembering of my age rolled downhill from there. Call it Calendar-Day Syndrome, maybe. I also notice (hard not to, really) that emotional pain-time draws time out as well. Not usually so long as physical pain-time, but often damn close, not counting the pain-time where there is no time to keep track of. And then there’s the ‘time flies when you’re havin fun!’. When I read this, I was disheartened to not get those itty tidbits acknowledged in said short story. But I suppose, broad mindedly, that King did a decently descriptive job all the same.
Grandpa dropped his cigarette, brought his heel down upon it, and began the ritual of first murderalizing it and then burying it.
“But that’s just the beginning, Clivey me son,” And, although he spoke only in the Irish varnicular he sometimes affected, the boy thought, I wish I was your son. Yours instead of his. “After a bit, it lets go of first, hits second, and before you know it, time has got itself into high gear and you’re cruising, the way folks do on the turnpike these days, goin so fast their cars blowin the leaves right off n the trees in the fall.”
“What do you mean?”
“Way the seasons change is the worst,” the old man said moodily, as if he hadn’t heard the boy. “Different seasons stop bein different seasons. Seems like Mother has no more n go the boots and mittens and scarves down from the attic before it’s mud season, and you’d think a man be glad to see mud season gone – shit, I always was – but you ain’t s’glad t’see it go when it seems like the mud’s gone before you done pushed the tractor out of the first jellypot it got stuck in. Then it seemed you no more’n clapped your first summer straw on for the first band concert of the year when the poplars start showing their chemises.”
Grandpa looked at him then, an eyebrow raised ironically as if expecting the boy to ask for an explanation, but Clive smiled, delighted by this – he knew what a chemise was, all right, because it was sometimes all that his mother wore until five in the afternoon or so, at least when his father was out on the road, selling appliances and kitchen ware and a little insurance when he could. When his father went out on the road his mother got down to some serious drinking, and that was drinking sometimes to serious to allow her to get dressed until the sun was getting ready to go down. Then sometimes she went out, leaving him in Patty’s care while she went to visit a sick friend. Once he said to Patty, “Ma’s friends get sick more when Dad’s on the road, D’ja notice?” And Patty laughed until tears ran down her face and she said Oh yes, she had noticed, she most certainly had.
What Grandpa said reminded him of how, once the days finally began to slope down toward school again, the poplars changed somehow. When the wind blew, their undersides turned up the exact color of his mother’s prettiest chemise, a silver color which was as surprisingly sad as it was lovely: a color that signified the end of what you had believed must be forever.
“Then,” Grandpa continued, “you start to lose track of things in your own mind. Not to much – it ain’t like bein senile like old man Hayden down the road, thank God – but it’s still a suckardly thing, the way you lose track. It ain’t like forgettin things; that’d be one thing. No, you remember ‘em but you get em in all the wrong places. Like how I was so sure I broke my arm just after our boy Billy got killed in that road accident of ‘58. That was a suckardly thing, too. That’s one I could task that Reverand Chadband with. Billy, he was followin a gravel truck, doin no more than twenty mile an hour, when a chunk of stone no bigger’n the dial of that pocket watch I gave you fell off the back of that truck, hit the road, bounced up, and smashed the windshield of our Ford. Glass went in Billy’s eyes and the doc said he would have been blinded in one of em or maybe both even if he’d lived – but he didn’t live, he went off the road and hit a ‘lectric pole. It fell down atop the car and he got fried just the same as any mad dog killer that ever rode old sparky at Sing Sing. And him the worst thing he ever did in his life maybe playing sick to keep from hoeing beans when we still had a garden.”
“But I was saying how sure I was I broke my goddam arm after – I swore up and down I could remember goin to his funeral with that arm still in a sling! Sarah had to show me the family bible first and the insurance papers on my arm second before I could believe she had it the right way around; it had been two whole months before, and by the time we buried Billy away, the sling was off. She called me an old fool and I felt like putting one up the side of her head I was s’mad, but I was mad because I was embarrassed, and at least I had the sense to know that and leave her alone. She was only mad because she don’t like to think about Bill. He was the apple of her eye, he was.”
“Boy!” Clive said.
“It ain’t goin soft; it’s more like when you go down to New York City and there are these fellas on the street corners with nutshells and a beebee under one of em, and they bet you can’t tell which nutshell the beebee’s under, and you’re sure you can, but they shuffle em so goddam fast they fool you every time. You just lose track. You can’t seem to help it.”
He sighed, looking around, as if to remember where exactly it was that they were. His face had a momentary look of utter helplessness that disgusted the boy as much as it frightened him. He didn’t want to feel that way, couldn’t help it. It was as if Grandpa had pulled open a bandage to show the boy a sore which was a symptom of something awful. Something like leprosy.
“Seems like spring started last week,” Grandpa said, “but the blossoms’ll be gone tomorrow if the wind keeps up its head, and damn if it don’t look like it’s gonna. A man can’t keep his train of thought when things go as fast as that. A man can’t say, Whoa up a minute or two, old hoss, while I get my bearins! There’s no one to say it to. It’s like bein in a cart that’s got no driver, if you take my drift. So what do you make of it, Clivey?
“Well,” the boy said, “you’re right about one thing, Grandpa – it sounds like an ijit of some kind must have made up the whole thing.”
A break here, again, because really, while the excerpt is large, I didn’t copy the whole story, copyright infringement and all. So I figure, a goodly chunk of the beginning is missing, and a clip from near the end (which is where you’re conveniently at) and then the direct end was ’snip-snip-snipped’ and dropped down little Timmy’s well. I ~did~ try to limit myself to things directly concerning My-Pretty-Pony-Time, so the clipped-out parts aren’t too much of a loss, here. I hope. Minus, of course, the end, because I feel it’s rude to type the direct end of any story. Spoils it for people. So while the excerpt almost gives closure, if you squint a bit and tilt your head… it doesn’t, not -quite-. Because there is a rather interesting ‘nother page, page and ahalf left, and I’m sorry to leave it out.
“…All I ever set out to say was that old or young, fast time or slow time, you can walk a straight line if you remember that pony. Because when you count and say ‘my pretty pony’ between each number, time can’t be nothing but time. You do that, I’m telling you you got the sucker stabled. You can’t count all the time – that ain’t God’s plan. I’ll go down the primrose path with that oily-faced pissant Chadband that far, anyway. But you got to remember that you don’t own time; it’s time that owns you. It goes along outside you at the same speed every second of every day. It don’t care a pisshole in the snow for you, but that don’t matter if you got a pretty pony. If you got a pretty pony, Clivey, you got the bastard right where its dingle dangles and never mind all the Alden Osgoods in the world.”
He bent toward Clive Banning.
“Do you understand that?”
“No, sir.”
“I know you don’t. Will you remember it?”
“Yes, sir.”
-Edited for punctuation and spelling errors & clarity.
