01-May-2006
The following story was originally published in 1975 in The Cimarron Review. It was awarded a Pushcart Prize and, in the early nineties, was read on National Public Radio by the actor, Robert Earl Jones (father of James Earl Jones). Recently, cartoonist Brendan Herrick republished it in comic book format – a unique experiment and, to me, a highly successful one. Apparently, however, some readers of the comic were curious as to just what the story was in its original form. Thus, I include it below. Readers interested in buying a copy of the comic can find information for doing that on this month’s Home page.
Afrikaan Bottles
Henry Blackchick started to cross the highway but he couldn’t so he stopped. Darn dumb. He looked one way and then the other. The tar band was clear, white stripe white and regular. Again he tried to move across it and again could not. Was it the press of air, the tingling in his feet? Blackchick could not move and knew not why.
During the first day (it would drag on) Blackchick was undiscouraged because of his own curiosity. The weather was good to him as well, neither hot nor cold and no sun. Blackchick hated the sun. Eventually, he spoke aloud, saying:
“I want but one quart of beer. The store is right there. Let me cross, please.”
Who was to hear those words he was not sure, but he thought he’d handled it
right.
For twelve hours he stood there and whenever there were no machines on the road he would try to cross and could not. In the evening the storeowner closed his store and came to his edge of the highway and spoke to Blackchick.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked.
Blackchick told him. Then the man remarked how long a day it must have been for him.
“I was going to drink it and watch television,” Henry said. “I was going to relax and enjoy myself for a change. I’m out of work. Life has been difficult.”
The storeowner agreed about the difficulties of life and finally said that if Blackchick would throw the money across the road he would go and get him his quart of beer.
They tried several things. First, the storeowner, whose name Henry thought was CashBrand, wrapped the bottle in a towel and tried to roll it across to Blackchick. The bottle, however, reached the centerline and rolled back. Several times he rolled it, harder and harder each time, and each time it rolled back.
Then, in a stroke of cleverness, he stopped a car. It was a friend of his, he said. Through the window he passed the bottle and Blackchick reached out to the driver’s window to receive the beer. The man, however, found that his window was jammed and when he tried to open his door that was stuck, too. So he gave the beer back to CashBrand and drove off to his regular service station to have the door and window repaired.
By this time CashBrand was, frankly, angered, and he took from his pocket a small knife with a bottle opener on it. With the bottle open, he stuck his thumb to the top and shook the bottle as hard as he could until it was all foamy and pressured inside. He aimed for Blackchick and released his thumb. The beer arced all golden and beautiful, like a pee in the sunset, but a wind came up just then and met the foamy arc and drove it back to CashBrand. Not a drop had touched Henry Blackchick.
The night was not as pleasant for Blackchick as he had hoped it would be. He returned to his apartment, which was in a large complex adjacent to the highway, told his wife, Regina, about his day, then collapsed into his chair without turning on his television, without smoking or reading his newspaper or even drinking the one can of beer remaining in the refrigerator. One can he did not want.
In the morning he was standing on the highway even before CashBrand arrived. He watched the early morning diesel trucks pumping by, noted how they seemed to run in packs like big tin dogs and thought their stench pleasant. Henry had always liked the smell of fuels. The roaring of the trucks thoroughly woke him and by eight o’clock when CashBrand drove in he was in good spirits, regardless of the rain which had begun falling and the general rawness of the day.
Somberly, CashBrand walked to the edge of the highway and looked at Blackchick. “I don’t think ingenuity is the answer,” said Blackchick.
“Devices?”
“Yeah, that’s not it.”
“It’s all we got. We got to try.”
“I suppose.”
“This ever happened before?”
“Once.”
Until that moment Henry had not even connected the two events. But it was a time Regina had sent him to the store for some cigarettes. He had gone downtown because it was always quiet and pleasant there now, and was on the corner across from the tobacco shop – when everything had suddenly seemed quite unredeemably funny, humorous, a very wholesome kind of humorous. Buildings standing before a man, such dainty concrete paths at his feet. Yes, dainty! Clay blocks festooned with ribbons, clay sound he did not need to hear. The traffic light had changed again and again and from time to time – he stood for over an hour – someone he knew would come up to him, say hello, and he would answer, not confused at all, quite coherent, they would talk for a moment and whoever it was would go on. But he could not cross the street, and he thought it was really greatly terribly funny. A man trapped by his own forces and like a surgeon reaching into a gut he could point inward and identify all of his problems but that didn’t seem to make any difference. He stood and stood until finally he simply turned and walked back to his car. When he got home he found that Regina had gone across to CashBrand’s herself and had gotten her own cigarettes.
He could point to a snapped linkage between will and deed; now and then a man didn’t have the heart to do what he set his mind to do because that was all too neat. Again, the pointing did no good, but it killed the worry, like saying to yourself I’ve got a problem and it’s damn serious but I always prevail over my own weaknesses. I always do. Yet, who was prevailing over whom here? CashBrand’s face had received the spray of beer. It had been that other, nameless, man who’d paid for his spirit with a broken car. More and more, Blackchick began to feel like a mere bystander in a situation where people were trying their hardest to help him and ended by getting so bound into their own frustrations that his problem became theirs. They entered with sympathy and left with anger, no longer caring about him and about the quart of beer he wanted because times were difficult and he wanted only to sit by his television and be nothing at all for a short time, just a man who was enjoying something privately and not hurting anyone.
At noon that day Regina joined him and surveyed the litter of the morning’s attempts. There were more towels. There was a complicated stick-and-wire apparatus that had not even begun to work. There was an automobile tire. That had almost done it. CashBrand had taped the bottle inside and had rolled it in Blackchick’s direction. On the first try it had collapsed in a circling roll on the centerline. A trucker stopped then and brought the tire back to CashBrand, even though both of them were trying frantically to tell him to give it to Blackchick. He had just not understood and seemed rather angry. On the second try the tire made it to Blackchick but at the centerline, where it all seemed to be happening, the tape loosened and the bottle fell out, somewhat remarkably not breaking.
“You know, I feel awful about this,” Henry said. Regina said nothing.
She was his wife so she sympathized, stood beside him, a woman taller than he with angle-iron bones and gray eyes, a woman of strong intelligence and no ambition, who made it a point to know what Blackchick wanted and yet who’d always stood just far enough out of his way to be unable to help at, say, crucial moments. She was no heroine, at least not until now.
By the third day some of the regular truckers had begun to notice Henry Blackchick, enjoyed the sight of Regina Blackchick too, dressed in shorts and halter and sandals as the rain passed and the weather warmed. They stood – sentinels, thought Henry – they seemed not to move at all while all about them the car lots, hamburger shacks, and pizza parlors spun with activity.
By the end of the third day Blackchick was nearly paralyzed, his long forehead a badlands of wrinkled concentration. School buses passed by regularly and the students waved at them, and some threw things, wads of paper with the red marks of error, apple cores scarred by the dents of loose baby teeth. Neither Blackchick nor Regina smiled; neither of them returned the waves and shouts.
On the morning of the fourth day Blackchick lost his odd resolve and asked Regina to try. There was no reply, no hesitation. She was, it seemed, quite ready to help him this time.
Once inside the store she nodded in agreement as CashBrand said: “That’s some man you’ve got there. A will like that moves mountains. Fifty cents with the tax, please.”
“My husband paid you four days ago,” she said.
CashBrand seemed honestly sincere as he apologized, and even walked her back to the edge of the highway, muttering his sympathies and his understandings over her husband’s dilemma.
“He’s not alone, Mrs. Blackchick,” he said. “But a lot are keeping it to themselves and keeping it in private places. I admire your husband for bringing it out.”
As they returned to the highway a long pack of the diesels crossed in front of them, their roar threatening to erase not only words but even vision. Regina’s eyes filled and the parking lot suddenly seemed cratered and dangerous, the man beside her a vain creature mumbling things he did not know, assuming a knowledge about her husband he had no right to assume.
This pack of trucks seemed truly endless and Regina wondered if there was not an accident somewhere down the road. They slowed to a crawl and CashBrand went on and on. The bottle cradled in her arm was leaking its coolness through the paper sack. It would be warm by the time she got it to Henry.
She stepped out onto the highway, leaving CashBrand behind. Edging toward the centerline, she looked up to the cabs of the trucks, urging, almost pleading for a break in the bumper-to-bumper chain while she dashed through with the beer still cool and refreshing for her husband. It was the least she could do for him these days, she thought.
“Henry!” she yelled, stooping over and trying to see his legs through the trucks. She couldn’t spot him. Looking up again, she shouted to one of the truckers but his window was closed for his air conditioning and he could not hear.
CashBrand screamed as she grabbed the tail of one of the trucks, held his breath as he watched her dancing across the bumper of the next truck; nearly ground his fingers into his palms when she fell beneath the wheels of the machine.
Bending over, he could see her lying on the shoulder of the road, legs twisted all wrong yet both hands grasped around the upright bottle. CashBrand stayed bending over as he waited for Henry Blackchick to come running frantically to his injured wife, a woman maybe dead who’d maybe died trying to do a good thing for her husband.
He remained stooped for a long time looking for Henry, and when the line of trucks finally passed and he could cross over and take the silly-looking bag of beer from the woman’s hands he was not surprised that Henry Blackchick was nowhere to be seen.
G. K. Wuori © 1975, 2006
Illustration © 2006 by Murphy Beach Studios
