Wake Up Dead
I’m fixing to wake up dead (part 5)
My mother’s older and only sister, Aunt Fannie Cunningham, had taken me in after my parents were killed in a tornado when I was still a little baby. I couldn’t remember them, but my aunt spent a lot of time telling me about them and what became of them.
I must have heard the story a thousand times about what had happened while she had been gone to Starving Marvin’s to purchase some refreshments. It was always after the second or third glass of libations when she would say, “I come driving back into that trailer park and it looked like all hell had busted loose. You listening to me, Sonny Boy?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I would answer while I was watching the Andy Griffith Show on TV.
“That was some sort of big wind. It blowed yo momma, yo daddy, and 12 other people straight to hell. But you know where it blowed you, Sonny Boy?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I would say while Sheriff Andy was attempting to negotiate the settlement of an argument between his deputy and Goober.
“Where did it blow you, Sonny Boy?”
“It blowed me up into a pecan tree, Aunt Fannie.”
“That’s exactly what it did. That’s where I found you, screaming your little lungs out, wedged between two limbs up in a pecan tree. Lot’s of folks said it was maybe some kind of a miracle.
Heck, it was definitely a miracle. Sonny Boy, would you go in the kitchen to the fridge and bring your Aunt Fannie a handful of ice cubes from the freezer? My drink’s done melted down.”
I had good intentions of fulfilling my aunt’s request, but I got all engrossed in a TV commercial praising the attributes of a new breakfast cereal. My aunt interrupted my thoughts when she said, “Sonny Boy, you gonna get me that ice, or do I have to get it myself?”
My Aunt Fannie had collected some insurance money and we had left what she called “That tornado-torn state of Alabama,” and moved to Hapeville, Georgia, on the south side of Atlanta, where we lived until I was about 10 years old. She timed everything very accurately. When she died there was just enough money left to pay for her final arrangements.
The authorities found my only living relative. It was my Uncle Virgil Prescott. When the funeral was over he and I drove over to the little frame house where my aunt and I had lived, and he helped me pack my meager belongings into two cardboard boxes. Then we loaded them up on the back of his pickup, and a short while later I was living in a trailer again.
Now, as I regained consciousness and focused my eyes, I fuzzily suspected that once again, I was in a trailer somewhere. I just didn’t know where. It all came rushing back—the plane crash, my decision to play dead, and then my last memory of falling down in a ditch after which everything went totally black.
It was semi-dark, but I could make out the small window over my head with limp, dingy curtains ordaining it. I felt all around myself and discovered I was in a bed, a small one, but it was a bed. It smelled sour and musty and there was a thin, knotty pillow with no cover on it underneath my head.
There was the undeniable odor of burning grease coming from somewhere as I sat up and began to look around the room. I reached out and touched the wall next to the bed and felt the texture of smooth and cold plastic, and confirmed that I was indeed inside a trailer. Almost immediately I heard a sound coming from my left. I cocked my ear, concentrated, and determined it was the sound of heavy footsteps approaching.
The door to the small bedroom was open, and a moment later the footsteps took shape in the form of a human being. In the dim shadows all I could make out was that there was a large man standing looking down at me. I couldn’t make out his facial features yet, but I could definitely smell him. It was the scent of bacon grease combined with staleness along with a hint of alcohol and tobacco.
His voice was hoarse and scratchy when he said, “Hey, boy, you need to be fixing to wake up.”