Into The Void Before Sundown

The first time I met Len, he had just arrived at our elementary school, a transplant from California, which made him interesting and exotic to someone from Pig’s Knuckle Junction like myself.  He was taller than me, Nordic blonde, and bore a resemblance to Glen Campbell. Len had a great line of patter and that flat, explosively-bitten-off accent that Californians flaunt. We became fast buddies and palled around together from the get-go.

We both loved tetherball, which was the rage in the elementary schoolyards during that age. We would race to the poles when the recess bell rang and play furiously until time to return to class. Len had been in town about a month when a big boy tried to claim the tetherball pole we’d arrived at first. Len slugged him, and  just like that, everybotty was kung fu fightin’. The bigger guy won the dustup, but Len gave a good account of himself. I remember watching him on his back in the mud, pinned and almost helpless, but still punching upwards and making each shot count. And I remember thinking, “If I came home with the back of a nice dress shirt muddied up like that, Mother would skin me alive.”

When we graduated to junior high, Len and I continued as friends, which was impressive, since a different grade and different age and different campus can often be the triple whammy against boyhood friendships. There was a vast and swampy barrens behind our school, and a group of us used to go back there on recess or at lunch and talk, engage in basic teenage grabassery, or sneak a cigarette. A big water pipe, about three feet in diameter, ran through the barrens, suspended about five or six feet above the scummy, water moccasinish water in the bottom. One day, Len and a couple of other balance-confident boys decided to tightrope walk it from one end to the other. Wise lad that I was, I watched from the banks of the fetid pond. Just about dead center, Len began pinwheeling his arms, having lost his balance (or perhaps having been nudged by one of the other two daredevils). An eternity of gyrations and facial contortions did him no good, and he slipped off the pipe and into the Black Lagoon, feet first. Only his head was visible above the oil slick-like water. One of my other good friends, a stumpy and sad but good-natured little weenienerd named Sidney stood at the edge of the water, hands on knees, peering down at Len, and asking in a scholar’s probing voice, over and over, “Are you touching bottom, Len? Huh? Are you touching bottom?” As I recall, Len beat the snot out of Sidney once he’d climbed out and more or less dried off. Good times.

Len and I used to go over to a local BBQ joint after school about once a month and feast on barbecued pork sandwiches and NuGrapes. He always insisted on paying for my food. The place was called Arthur’s Bar-B-Q, a dismal little shack over by the lake that was always horrendously busy. The parking lot was layered with strips of cast-off roofing shingles. There were about a dozen stools inside at the counter, but most people either got carhop service (flash your lights and one of Arthur’s leggy daughters would priss out and take your order) or take out.  Few people wanted to eat inside in the cloud of Lucky Strike smoke, billowing from the lungs of the regular waitress, she of the honey badger personality. My aunt used to take me there occasionally in her car, but I never enjoyed those outings as much as I did when it was me and Len and four or five others, sitting under the weeping willow tree at the edge of the parking lot, watching the chickens in the yard next door, making fun of our unreasonable teachers,  and chewing on those soft buns piled with that tangy, sauced meat. Arthur’s Bar-B-Q closed many years ago, but the building and the sign still stand like memorials to an age that, like all past ages, will never return. The building and the sign cast shadows on the shingle-strip parking lot, and the whispers and giggles of boys still ring there, like bells in a temple.

When we reached high school, Len and I still buddied around a fair amount, but we gradually drifted into our own worlds, mine involving Sears knockoffs of Fender Stratocasters and his centering on overhead cams and Cragar rims and jacking up the back of his Nova. There was no falling out, no feud, no tension. We simply did the standard boy buddy bifurcation, and we’d wave at each other when we saw each other, hey, howya doin’, and he went to work for a relative in a body shop, and I went to work for Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children, and that was that.

And this afternoon, when my sister’s text message arrived, it was the first time I’d thought of Len in many years. According to his wife, Len had been depressed for some time, and he took his pistol while no one was at home, and Len sent himself into the void, a place where my boyhood voice will never be able to reach him, and from which his scarred and experienced  California accent will never again drift to me. He left a note for his wife and children, telling them “Goodbye. The pain became too much. I loved you all. Be good humans…”

The news hit me much harder than I would have anticipated. I suppose it’s that mystery of death being combined with distant-but-important memories of childhood, wrapped in the ever-increasing awareness of my own diminishing time in this world. It was difficult to do my work in the afternoon, and I had a severe case of the stares for much of the remainder of my work day.

Not too long ago, I would have written about prayers for Len’s soul, or about concerns for his state of grace or lack thereof. I would have used words like “tragedy” and “waste.” But this evening, with the hummingbirds still whirring through the air outside and the rising breeze cooling the end-of-summer earth, with my prayer books up on the shelf and my rosary in a tidy pile on the desk over there and the dogs sleeping at my feet, I am not compelled to use those words. I will instead express gratitude for the brief but sunny friendship I had with Len during the stretch of time in whose shadows I so often felt lonely and vulnerable. And I will close this post with a poetic tribute, written when I was a NuGrape-drinking boy by one of my favorite poets, the late Edward Dixon Garner of North Carolina.

Rest in peace, Len, and travel well to the new land to which you’ve set out. You were a good human. And I sure did enjoy our times together.

~ S. K. Orr

Sundown

Sundown arrives and softly through the hills,
Swiftly and silently the darkness sweeps.
The fields are taken, and the valley fills
With night and the strange shadows that it keeps.
A light is on far down the valley now,
And on the hill above it to the right
Another one appears, a team to plow
Furrows for dreams to rise from in the night.
Looking once more, but not finding the sought,
I close the door, and to my study turning,
I find a deeper darkness in the thought
Of lights that were, but are no longer burning
For all the lost and lonely — for all men
Who look for lights that will not shine again.

by Edward Dixon Garner

copyright 1964, The Poetry Council of North Carolina, Ashville, NC