Drive - A Memoir 24th Installment
The
next one to hit the slightly cooler water would be little sister
Vicki. Edith would run everybody out to the back room and add more
hot water. Then Linda, the oldest, would take her turn which seemed
to take forever. Then Russ or sometimes I would get to jump in next,
soap up, rinse off and dive into a towel all in a less than 2
minutes. The remaining hapless bather would be grimacing because the
water was nearly cold and so dull you couldn't see a red apple on the
bottom through six inches of milky water.
Subsequently,
when the new house under construction was almost built, Russ and I
would run from the old shack we lived in over to the basement of the
new house stampede down the stairs to a makeshift shower. It was
amazing to have warm water spraying out of a pipe onto our heads. It
wasn't a finished shower but the guy helping with the house plumbing
had put some valves on the pipes and interconnected them with a
shower head. There were no walls, just a floor drain, but it was
deliciously new to us. The lights hadn't been installed, so we hung
an old iron lamp from a truss brace and used a pull chain to turn it
on and off. Once, when Russell had shut off the shower dripping wet,
he padded over to the light, reached up and grabbed the chain.
Zzzziit! The light shorted, and then blacked out and Russ was being
electrocuted. I swear to this day that Russ was giving off a tiny bit
of light and I could see his skeleton; then total blackness as the
fuse blew.
I
remember telling him I didn't know whether to laugh or fall apart if
he were dead. However, departed men don't groan, so I was able to
find him in the dark and get a grip on his slippery wet body to help
him up. I told him that I saw his skeleton just like in the comic
books, and I thought it was awesome. He didn't think it was humorous…
in fact he moaned, “I could’ve been killed.”
Chapter
4
The
yell for us to “get up” on the first school morning came early
for us, and I was dragging tail having stayed up late the night
before. I rolled over and my mind and body zoned out in an instant
like a baby.
“Let’s
roll,” Russ said with a kick delivered to my back side.
“I
know,” and I did know.
The
one time I didn’t get up on the first call and went back to sleep,
I woke up to the Old Man, yanking off my blanket, glaring at me, with
the razor strap poised and ready to strike. I’d enough time to roll
up in a ball before I received a couple of very painful stripes with
the leather strap. Vernon never told any of us kids twice
500 more words tomorrow
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Comments