Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

All the Catholics that Earl ever talked to were crawlers.
Mother explained, when I asked her, that a crawler was a man on
his knees on his way down south to a pilgrimage church that he
had to pass through Placedo to get to, a Mexican mostly, making
his way to a black ash Madonna that was rumored to sew up your
wounds, if you dropped a drop of the blood from your knees on
the hem of her skirt, a hand-embroidered robe that was stiff as a
board from how much blood there was on it.
Earl took a bucket of water and sprinkled the crawler to cool
him, walked by his side for a bit of the way, asking questions if the
crawler spoke English, crossing himself if he didn't.
Mother said that was a sight. Earl Bodel and a crawler with a
two-by-four cross tied onto his back. She said it looked frcm a
distance like Earl was out walking his dog so if you'd been driving
that interstate road we were on, and you'd come across Earl and a
crawler, you probably would have taken your foot off the pedal,
taken your sunglasses off and turned your head around to see what
the hell what you'd seen really was.
Earl doing his best to get back on his feet was the roadhouse
locked and pads tied onto his knees, not for a crawl but for an all
night burning of candles he told us were blessed by a Monterrey
Padre and sent through the mails, candles with saints painted on
them, bone-thin Sebastions that were run through with arrows,
and a brown-skinned Mary with rhinestone tears glued onto her
cheeks that had streamed one evening, had rolled, Earl swore, in a
copious way, down the pale white beeswax stain of her skin, a sign,
according to Earl, that God wanted Earl's back open. Right away.
To make people happy.
Next day, Earl took a loan out and opened for business.
Mother said a sign like that must have had a little something
to do with the Tomo Tequila, but Eugene said whatever lifted Earl
Bodel from the dumps was okay by him since the lights turned out
when you pulled up in front meant no place to go and no one to
go there with but those with a surname the same as your own.
Nights when Earl's wasn't open, our family had to drive back
home and make a party out of just who we were, my mother Leda
Marie and my father Eugene, me, and Aunt Martha and Lona.
It wasn't much of a party. My father, pitching a ball to
himself in the dark, said a "Brother-in-law argund the place
wouldn't cause any pain—some fellow a fellow could talk to while
Mother was talking with Martha and Lona, whispering in a swing
on the porch so a husband felt lonely and a daughter had to sit
very close if she wanted to hear all the gossip.
You had to scrounge for your gossip in Placedo Junction.
Small things happened. Mother said awful was better than
nothing at all. Third-hand got you through an evening, something
someone in some other town you'd never even been to was said
to have done.
The rest of Placedo had Lona to gossip about.
Martha said, "What would they do without Lona?"
Mother said not even half of those circulating stories had a
basis in fact.
Lona was Baby to Mother and Martha. But Eugene said Lona
wasn't getting any younger.
"Come forty or fifty," he said, "that face, on its way between
lovely and gone, won't look quite as good in the flame of a Zippo.
Over the hill means out of the picture, means no one can see you.
Over the hill means you better find yourself some man to hold
onto, a good man, not one of those roughnecks you like to laugh
in the low light of Earl's with."
Lona said good was a hard thing to find in Placedo.
Eugene had a damned fine idea where to look, he told her. If
she cared to.
"I'll bet he means Earl's," Mother said. "But behind, not in
front of the bar."
Lona just laughed. "Leg to leg on a stool at that bar," she said,
"is a small-time thrill that takes a woman's mind off how lonely
her life would have been without someplace like it. But who'd
•want to live there? Earl's is a roadhouse you go to that you can
come back from. Not stay in. If a woman married Earl, she'd
know every inch of Earl's ceiling. Then where would she go to
forget it?"
Eugene said Earl Bodel needed someone to help get his spirits
back up, and word had it that a woman he knew named Lona was