WORK IN PROGRESS

I was sitting on the picnic table Rob had built out of logs from the woods, waiting.  No telling when he'd get home.  I had a job to do though, and for now the job was waiting.

Rob's house was one of those in the deep woods of this Tennessee county.  You would never know it was there unless you just happened to drive for miles down the wrong road and kept to it, against y our better judgment, even as the pavement turned to gravel and then straight-up to dirt; turn a corner and there it was, a two-story shit-box really.  Must be four, five generations of no-account hillbilly mother-fuckers exercising drunken whims with no concern for bearing walls or even the slightest bit of architectural aesthetics built into its rambling footprint.  The ancestral manor stood, tall and ugly mossy-roof'd and under a brown layer of decrepit shingle, in a circle of dust carved out of the pines around it, strewn with car parts and kids toys.  It was a cliche, that was the only way to describe it.  There were buckets and baseball bats, lawn mowers and plastic furniture, toy cars and toilet seats; and of course a blustery and bloated hound dog, with a low-hanging ball sack that rocked and floated a bare inch above the dirt, and with a bark more like a coughing exhale who lumbered at me but gave in in an instant to a friendly tousle of his jowly head.

Rob's shit brown Chevy clouded up the driveway and he stopped just short of a defunct sculptured angel fountain and strode in one motion out of the car on a vector perpendicular to my perch on the table toward a garden hose spiderly hung on the side of the house.  The car door bounced on its hinge and made a perfectly timed arc ending with just enough force to extinguish the cars interior light, the door closing with a satisfying thrump.  Rob was dressed in a cheap and tightly fitting blue "suit" with wide pant cuffs that slid easily off around his boots as he dropped pants and drawers in a one practiced motion, pulling his shirt off over his head and tossing the clothes aside and standing, waist-down naked now, wearing only the wife-beater.  , He yanked the hose's faucet two-turns counter-clockwise, the hose sputtered and gasped enough to make the dog open its eyes and list its head slightly, his ears twitching, but soon drooping back down into the dust.

Rob gave the impression of being entirely aware of my presence, where I sat off to one side of his yard, as he grabbed the hose and began filling with water a wide-mouthed black bucket he had yanked out from under a bush.  He didn't acknowledge me but he knew I was here.  I was added close to the top of his mental to-do list, you could see it flickering there under his eyebrows, perhaps it was something about having his junk hanging out though to whatever slight breeze might've been stirring the trees on this July afternoon that made him a little shy.  Who knows?  He filled the bucket to the rim and tossed the hose aside.  The water continued to flow and river through the dust with the slant of the yard toward the dog.  Rob straddled the bucket and then dropped his ass into it the bucket water sloshing over the rim as he displaced it, and sat, his long hairless legs angling up out of the bucket and then down to his mid-calf Tony Lama's in the dirt on either side of the bucket's base.

"Got a cigarette?  No?  Be a pal and grab mine.  Should be on the front seat."

He knew I quit.  I stood, gave him a disbelieving stare and crossed to the car.  I grabbed the Pall Malls through the open passenger side window and turned back to Rob.  I flipped one out and stuck it into his mouth.  I pulled out my own lighter (I quit smoking but I'll never give up my lighter) and snapped a flame for him.

"Mercy buckets."

"De nada."  I held out my hands indicating his position, my face, I believe quizzical.

"Swamp butt.  Hot as a mother-fucker in town.  Courthouse AC's for shit."