Renalt

My best friend was born in the yellow grass below a cattle guard

In 1972

Behind the Standard Hotel on the outskirts of Kansas City

Under the warm breath of a throaty jack-ass braying his arrival late into the night

We once sat together drinking imports in a crowded Glasgow pub

Watching the American girls drowning in their sexuality

Like babes in a bathtub to the ruddy broad-shouldered local women with freckles and impudence

A Jack The Ripper mist settling over the cobble stone outside

The world slippery and reflective

Surrounded by the thickly twisted tongues of a roguish pagan country

He told me that night of his desire to rob the Golden Day Bank & Trust

And he asked me to help him

He once spent three years in a slum near Gwanju, South Korea

His father was a missionary who hung a metal cross above their tenement door

The little shark-eyed South Korean girls wouldn’t look at him because he heard their orgasms

The coast was exactly twenty-three miles from his fourth floor tenement window

He could taste the salt some nights

Although he started using words like “thirty-eight kilometers” instead

With wet lips dipped in soju he once guessed his father’s cock was about fifteen centimeters long

But I suspect those Korean girls would know better than he would

He stole a taxi from an impound yard near the train tracks before anyone was up

He was parked at the bank when the first employee pulled into the parking lot

We once travelled the length of the Pacific Union trans-continental railroad together 

We robbed hobos

They robbed us

I spent the night in the emergency room in Tucson waiting for them to stitch his arm up

If there is any rule in a knife fight, it is that everyone gets cut

We slept in the high weeds and waited for the whistle

We slept on rocks under trestles in pockets where the rain water wasn’t falling

We slept with a black prostitute in Jackson who kept calling herself Mother Teresa 

Who kept demanding we owed her thirty dollars more for things we did that “weren’t on the menu”

He killed her in the back of that den and we slipped like snakes into the Pearl River

He told a judge in Bogalusa that he wasn’t scared of sixty days in jail

They caught him pulling the tires off of a county sheriff’s squad car

I told him I would meet him on the coast

I didn’t see him again for eleven years

He put every employee on their knees in the conference lounge

Letting them wander willy-nilly into the empty lobby like distracted raccoons into a rattle trap

After two rolls of duct tape he walked back to the front door and hung the closed sign over the entrance

Then he selected Pamela from the group

He has a tattoo of a laughing skull with a lion’s mane on his shoulder

Carved into his skin by the mangled hands of a crippled artist in Madrid’s Atocha district

Where in 1977 eight attorneys were gunned down in their office

He says Death is the king of the jungle

He says Death cannot help but laugh at our attempts to outrun it

He says he is not afraid to die

He whispers words in Spanish at the café where we drink coffee and watch girls

¿Sabía usted que he matado a cuatro personas en mi vida?

Only in whispers do we speak truths anymore

It was Pam who went with him to the vault

It was Pam who interviewed him two weeks earlier for a teller position

His resume a bundled grouping of lies fed to him through quick searches of internet facts

She had been trained to detect manipulative questions and be wary of revealing answers

But not trained well enough I suppose

He knew she could open the vault

He knew a lot

It was Pam who died with him when the police came through the windows 

I’m not ashamed of who I am

My best friend and I rode motorcycles through the desert once

We ate mushrooms and danced in the arroyo shadows

There are stars in the desert sky invisible to the rest of the world

He told me his life felt smaller than a grain of sand

Flying as fast as a rocket

We bathed in rivers

We slept on mattresses left on the sides of roads

He thought he probably would not be able to help killing someone again

I was supposed to wait in the taxi

I called the police instead

Pamela died

My best friend died

I am left sitting alone at the edge of darkness 

And although the chasm is perhaps endlessly deep

On some nights I can still hear his voice below

5.2013
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