Issue 22 - 1992

Coe Review • Issue 22
the same word, only spelled backwards. Little Elvis wrote on his
ownself with an ink pen and Daddy laughed like a wild man when
he seen it. You couldn’t read what was wrote but Little Elvis swore
up and down it said Mountain Dew. It wasn’t even letters, more like
worm tracks on the river bank.
Daddy’s feet stunk bad, too. He said it was from wearing
shoes all the time in La Grange, even in the shower and bed. Little
Elvis started wearing his shoes to bed only Granny said it got the
sheets muddied up and Daddy took her side because there wasn’t no
mud in the joint. He said they had boys like girls in prison, too. Little
Elvis wanted to know if their feet stunk, and Daddy laughed. He said
we’d know we were grown up men when our feet had a good solid
stink to them. Little Elvis wanted Daddy’s socks so he could hurry it
up. Daddy said that was bad luck and we’d have to find another way.
Little Elvis wanted bad to be a man and I started thinking on
all the things that’s got a smell to them. Grasshopper piss for one.
Polecats and rotten eggs. Road kill, too, but I didn’t feel like fooling
with dead stuff. A boy that used to live down here did, and the state
took him for cutting them animals up. He made his sister show me
her thing once if I’d give him a bat my Daddy killed that got in the
house. After seeing her poon, I wanted that bat back. I just know he
cut it up.
The only other stinking thing I could think of was the toilet
shack which Granny called the White House. She planted
honeysuckle around it to cut the smell but it drew mud-daubers big
as tree frogs. Me and Little Elvis went to the woods mostly. He used
poison vine to wipe with once and never did wipe again after.
A month ago, I had to go bad and it was night time, with the
moon not even white on the river. I sneaked out to a pine where the
dead brown needles below was soft and would cover the smell up.
Daddy was off fox-hunting and everybody else in the world was
asleep but me and it felt fine, just fine, being in the woods alone at
dark. Then the hunting dogs got on my trail and started howling. I
had to climb that pine, getting stickered by needles every branch.
Dogs were barking below me, trying to claw their way up the trunk.
They ain’t a dog in all creation that climbs trees. That’s why trees are
here, Daddy said, to give varmints somewhere to get away to.
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