Turbo’s Very Life
And Other Stories
Carroll Dale Short
NewSouth Books
Montgomery
Also by Carroll Dale Short
Fiction
Nonfiction
I Left My Heart in Shanghi, Alabama
A Migration of Clowns: Poems and Essays
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2005 by Carroll Dale Short. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN: 978-1-58838-187-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-090-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2005015219
eBook conversion by Sam Robards
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.
“Emmett” first appeared in Appalachian Journal
“Pitching” first appeared in Birmingham Magazine
“Fesser and the Car Tags” first appeared in Oktoberfest
“The Fish” first appeared in Black Warrior Review
“The Mine at Saragossa” first appeared in Redbook
“Paint” first appeared in Aspen Anthology
“The Old Way” first appeared in South Carolina Review
“Orion” first appeared in Canopic Jar
“The Porch Swing” first appeared in Aura
“Argus and the Elemental Things” first appeared in Roanoke Review
“Turbo’s Very Life” first appeared in Aura
For
Darrah Jackson Short,
granddaughter and storyteller extraordinaire,
with much love
Contents
Argus and the Elemental Things
Here’s how you find him. You go the Horse Creek road and, minding the trees on your left, see where one is low and humped and so twisted that by the moon’s light a dark dwarf stands there—solitary, hopeless, but spun silver with worm webs and proud of asking alms from no one. Go past it. Go on by.
And not by moonlight, come to think of it. Go in daytime, the first time you ever go, to tell better where the slag stops (past the twisted tree by half a mile) and the slate-rock trail slopes off toward the river. A black man at the crossing there, who lives back in the sweetgum grove, has bees. If you lose the way, find him and ask. He is deaf, and sells honey.
On the trail, then: Go down it until all you see is kudzu, green as snakeskin, up and over all of everything, knit as a rug. Though the river is still a ways down, you can smell it there. Walk until the trail dies out in vines, and look for this: A square in the growth, four raised ridges like a fence vined over. Legend says it’s where they penned the Wiley boy (son of Old Fayette who was left with all girls when Fate Junior died) the summer he was dog-bit and taken mad. They say it kept him in the open air but put him safe away from the ones he tried to kill. That may be just a tale. Some say Wing Stevens raised hogs there, was all.
But look for the fence, grown up. A footpath goes beside it. Take it then, downhill through the vines, to the place a clay cistern stands which no one claims. Water careens from high up its rim in drops as big as diamonds, and it trickles across the trail and keeps the dirt slick there. Step on across.
The walking is better
