The Down Hill Slide - Chapter 2

     You know what's weird. Gravity? Just think about how little the average person knows about that kind of stuff. Most people don't even notice when they drop a glass or something that hits the ground. Them scientists say that Isaac Newton was born in the middle of the 17th century or there abouts, and if that apple tree story really took place, it had to have happened pretty close to the beginning of the 18th century. So, that means that us humans have been sitting under apple trees getting hit in the head by falling apples for tens of thousands of years at least with out ever noticing that anything funny was going on before Newton came along and laid claim to the notion. There were probably a few Greeks and Egyptians who had a clue, but they didn't have radio back then, so I guess it didn't matter, at least up until that German feller invented the printing press, I guess most people simply assumed that stuff just falls down whenever you let it go.

      One day, my family and my Uncle Wilbur's family went up into the snow to find a Christmas tree. My dad just couldn't accept paying a dollar for a tree when we could get one for free. I guess that some kind of sense. While we were there, we saw these people paying this guy money to let them climb up his hill and slide down on an inner tube or on a sled.

       My Uncle Wilbur blurted out, "Damn, look at all them folks paying for that guy to let them climb up that hill."

     My dad answered with sarcastic grin, "Nobody pays to climb a hill, Brother. They paying for that down hill slide." I remember that day because that saying became one of his favorites, that term 'the down hill slide'. He used it to explain just about ever thing and in a lot of different ways. For example, he used it to describe laziness and cutting corners and often would say, "Beware of that downhill slide, son. Anything worth doing involves a climb." When my cousin Wilcox, Wilbur's boy, lost everything he owned because of his hardheaded nature, Pa said, "Stubbornness often precedes that downhill slide."

      When I went through all his things years after he died, I found an old, battered looking brown leather-bound notebook. Pa had been keeping track of all those things he had ever said like that. He had gotten the notebook on his tenth birthday and written hundreds of sayings over the years. The very first one was "Don't count your chickens before you eat them, makes more sense to count them after they're gone."

      They did get better over the years.  When I opened the book and looked to see what it said on the last page, I was surprised to discover that Pete had written something it in. It was something my dad had said right before he died. It simply stated, "My whole life's been a downhill slide, how could it have been otherwise, my mom was standing when she had me."  I remembered that there was the story that Pa's mama was standing up with her back against the wall when he came out the chute.. I don't know the particulars, or even if someone or the other had just made that up to explain my father's strange character traits. I guess it made some sense in an oddball sort of way, and Grandma Maggie was sure stubborn enough to do something like that just to prove she could.

    I kept the notebook on a table in my bedroom, and whenever I started missing Pa, I'd open it up and read a couple of his sayings. My favorite was. "Why did the chicken cross the road? It ran out of other options." When I told Pete I kept it there to remind me of Pa, he asked me how come I didn't have any pictures or things of Ma's. I thought it about for a couple of seconds before answering. "Don't need nothing to remind me of Ma, she's with me every day." He started to raise his finger and say something smart back, but then it hit him what it meant, and he stopped mid-word and nodded.

    This the kind of stuff you think about when you wake up in the middle of the night because your dead wife came to you in a dream and wouldn't talk to you. It's also the same thinking that you would use to distract yourself from thinking about your real problem which was what were you going to do about a cheap little hoodlum named Giancarlo Robbia who, for some reason or another, hated the very fact that I was even alive.

        I couldn't sleep, so I put on a jacket and went and poured myself a small glass of orange juice and went and sat outside on the small porch in the front of my two bed-room bungalow. I don't why I rented a two bedroom apartment, I guess maybe because I knew that Pete was so wild and unsettled he'd would probably need a place to stay at some point. I set the other bedroom up as an office with an old desk I'd found in a thrift store along with a reading chair and a couple of book cases. My little library was small, but it was loaded up with some powerful thinking. I had read a lot of Mark Twain's stuff and a lot of Dickens. It had some Thoreau and Emerson too, Dad's volume of Leaves of Grass that Grandma had given him for his 16th birthday, Nay favorite was this book by a Canadian name Maurice Bucke, and I even kept Mama's two volumes of Browning's poems that she kept on the fireplace mantle.

       Even though my mind was restless, I couldn't help but notice what a lovely night it was. A large full moon seemed to float on a pillow of clouds surrounded by a halo. For a moment, I started up in thinking how foolish we humans are, as we could witness this natural beauty nightly and speculate on how the moon follows the earth and reflects the light from the hidden sun, and how the angles change and shadows encroach only to be driven back. There's a whole lot of stuff to sort through in thinking about what it all means. The greatest thing about it though, is that we have the eyes to witness this display and thoughts to process it, the heart to appreciate it all the way down to our bones and words to describe it to generations yet unborn. But most of us, one way or the other, have to turn our focus on to the stupidity of people like Giancarlo Robbia. I would much rather sit there and lull myself into sleep looking at the moon, but I knew it wasn't going to happen on this night.

      Giancarlo was two-bit hood who liked to pretend he was real hot stuff. He reeked of cheapness and small minded thinking; he seemed proud of his ignorance and exuded stupidity and greed. He wore these shiny double-breasted suits which he thought made him look like Bugsy Siegle, but were actually cheap knock-offs produced in a run-down factory building in Chinatown by an old, Chinese tailor named Wong Lee. Old man Lee liked to play cards and told us that Giancarlo had once threatened that unless Lee gave him the suits at half price he would burn down the factory building. He didn't understand that Old Man Lee was already hand-making top quality suits for some real deal people. Lee pretended to go along with the deal, but one night Giancarlo got dragged out of a casino, thrown in back of Packard and woke up, naked, and trussed like a pig ready for slaughter in an orange grove out in Topanga valley.

     All those cheap suits he wore did was make everybody aware that he was not the tough guy he pretended to be. He was strictly small-time and was contented to be twisting the arms of old ladies who ran boarding houses, and working men who were just trying to make a living pumping gas, fixing motors cars, or selling groceries. A nickel and dimer's what my daddy would have called him. Rumor had it that he wasn't even Italian and that his real name was Juan Carlos Roberts, and mom was Mexican seamstress, and his daddy was an Arkansas sneak thief named Squeaky Roberts.

      That didn't mean that he wasn't dangerous. Wannabe gangsters were generally stupid and would do rash things that a real hood would never do. He always strutted around with these two big apes who seem to share a single eye-brow, mouth breathing Neanderthals who carried walnuts in their pockets so that they could crush two of them at a time with their barehands in an effort to look tough. I had avoided their wrath a few times by merely pointing and saying, "Hey, look at that woman over there. She ain't wearing any clothes!" They would turn and look and it was at least a minute before they turned back around, and by that time, I was long, gone. One time I did it, and there weren't even any people in the direction that they turned, just a big, concrete wall. Still, took them a minute or two before they realized there wasn't any naked lady there.

     I knew that made them doubly dangerous because they would do what Giancarlos paid them to do, but, when it came to hurting me, they would come at me, screaming, "There never were no naked lady, Errol! You lied to us." The way I figured it though, was I could always do it again, and Giancarlos would actually have to be there to tell them not to look, and in that case, dealing with him would cancel out any threat they posed.

    I went back to thinking about my Pop. My main goal in life was simple. I just wanted to do it better than my pa. It wasn't going to be all that simple either. My dad had a lot of faults. He'd these spells of depression and would do impulsive things like drink and gamble all of our money away. He'd come home drunk, and when my Mom would meet him at the door full of anger, he'd invariably break down sobbing, begging for forgiveness, and she would always forgive him. Ma's greatness weakness was her unending love for my  daddy.

     But judging Pa was a lot more complicated than that. At heart, he was a really good person and a highly intelligent one at that. He just wasn't cutout to be a farmer. He was crucified by the one truth he could never understand. Pa could build a house from scratch though, wire it up, pour the concrete, frame the windows, paint it inside and out, roof it, all of it. He could take a car apart and put it back together in better shape than it was before he started messing with it. I'll never understand why he just didn't do those things, and why he felt so strongly about making that farm work. When I asked Mama, she'd tell it was because the farm had been in our family for over a hundred years and his daddy, my grandpa Thomas, considered it his legacy and therefore it was Pa's duty to pass it down to his son's, and his son's duty to pass it down to theirs. It was tragic, how it all played out, but damn, I was glad Pa didn't put that weight on his boy's, and Ma never shared in that view at all' she tolerated because it Pa's burden, and she was wife.


     He came home one night and burst in the door looking all crazy. Mama had gone over to Grandpa's house to help to deliver her sister's baby. Petey jumped up from the table where we were playing cards, and cried, "What's the matter, Papa? What's wrong?"

     Daddy didn't answer, he just walked slowly over to where Peter was standing, put his hands on Pete's shoulders and looked at him all weird and then looked all around the room before uttering, "Where's Mama, Pete?"

        Pete told him, then Papa came over to where my little sister Sissie and I were sitting, put his hand softly on top of her blonde head, picked up one of her braids and lifted it up slowly before letting it go, he grimly smiled at me for a second then started walking back toward the door. Sissie was scared and started crying, and Pete ran to him tried to grab hold of him, but Papa just gently shoved him away. Pete was off balanced and fell. Papa went out and closed the door behind him. I helped Pete up, and we all ran outside, calling for Papa to wait. Me and Sissie stood on the porch, she clinging to my arm as she cried.

           Pa  went to the shed attached to the barn and went inside, he lit the lantern and I could see the small window light up. He was looking for something and noisily rummaging around, I could see Pete creep up and try look into the window, but the light abruptly vanished, in the darkness, and I could hear Pa come out and start walking towards the woods behind the field where we pastured our cows. Pete was running toward him and calling, "Daddy! Don't go, Daddy! Wait! Mama be home shortly!"

         I could barely hear Papa's reply, "Go home, Pete. Take care of Errol and Sissy. Tell Mama, I be home shortly. Tell her I'm sorry."

       Daddy disappeared and Pete came walking back out of the darkness. He was twelve years old, but  in the dim light, he looked like an old man.