Cheroot

It was the Fall of 1936 and I was running a fever. When considered, that year, most drew on the Olympics and Hitler's embarrassment at the hands of a champion born outside his cheesecloth world, but for me it was the weeks I spent as the marrow between couch cushions with their uncomfortably thick buttons and a stack of North Country quilts. Facing me were a tin bucket, a few inches of creek water in its bottom, sat on the floor by my head like a tombstone waiting to be chiseled, and a boxy radio a-tilt from the far wall so that I might hear it better. Those days before television, and a shrug it was as I sweat all the time. I couldn't have seen for it running in my eyes, had I had the strength to open them. Folk wisdom, sweat it out.

The pulp serials and backwoods comedy mixed with the stray conversations, I recall fresh blood at the bottom of a Badlands canyon marking the spot where wolves ran a head of Buster's sheep, to produce the gibberish I saw in my head when awake and asleep. A hoarse scream, turn the damn thing off!, but they left me with it when they went into the fields. Wild West tinhorns on the Chisholm Trail, starlets strolling the strobe-light gauntlet at the new premiere, Lefty Grove retiring Jimmie Foxx on three straight pitches, cigarette ads, secretaries in love, our fightin' forces. A penny-candy swirl sticking my eyeballs shut, not my ears. I could sweat on the couch or out in those spiny fields. But I had to escape that speaker box. News programs, that's why I healed.