Proud Flesh
Bill Spratch

Dear XXXXXXX

My dear

Son, now listen now.

Just watching the way the women sweat down here makes your heart feel stomped. The shapes of their flanks show damply and darkly through the thinnest cotton dresses. All this southern heat and heavy air. You should try and get down here sometime, here near the delta, this nexus of great moving waters. Between the horses and these women a man could nigh go apeshit, flanked by powerful and tangible renderings of utter beauty.

XXXXX Listen

Bear with me for I'm having awful trouble. The process of naming is arduous. Even now, after you've worn yours like another skin for some twenty-odd years, I find myself in the difficult position of being able to neither write nor say it. It's not because of the word. It's because of shame.

Son, they award me bonuses when an animal I've named wins. Some of them do anyway. It happened very recently in fact to the tune of quite a sum of jangling change, so I've been in the fiscal clear for the first time in a good long while. It was a side project I had taken on years ago. It was a longshot but that little colt had it in him. The tycoon owner said that the excited voice of the announcer hollering out that little colt's name over the bullhorn as he hoof-pounded himself toward victory was just about the most beautiful thing he ever heard. He related this to me with teary eyes. I was rewarded.

I intended no disrespect to the memory of your momma. I referred to those women only as a suggestion, perhaps a goad. They are not for me. But it might be a terrific idea for you to get on down here and lay eyes on these sweated-up darlings yourself is what I mean to say. You could find yourself a good one probably. We could visit together also. I like to believe that we might arrive at something like reconciliation, thriving as father and son again down here in this flank-rich environment.

How do I begin properly? How do we both begin anew?

Serotonin Glut Covenant New Kind of Candy

They were savage years of untendered promise, the years just before you were born. What I mean to say is that it's a wonder we weren't fractured sooner instead of later, your momma and me. I give thanks daily for the later, for you are the bounty that might not have arrived. Those bad bad years before we had you. Everything seemed set straight after your arrival. Your momma and me thought we had approached the vaunted seat of the catbird. We should've known better. Instead we lowered our guard and some terrible influence from those earlier years of heartache lingered and went unnoticed. The possibility of residual poisons never occurred to us. We were fools. We should have known. Instead we grew unwise in our newly gained happiness. The faculty for naming names had abandoned me in those bad years and I found no means of reclaiming it even after you were born. At the time it didn't seem to matter because you were with us. But before you, it bothered me-her too-so much that we drank and cussed and fought and came close to tearing one another's eyes out from all the anger and misery. I don't mean writer's block neither. I don't even believe in such a damn thing. It wasn't laziness. God himself knows my willingness and zeal when it comes to honest work. I rush in with both hands ready. The names had up and left me. The names became ghosts. I was abandoned. Whatever efficient transport I once had into that place where all names reside was suddenly beyond my ken. They would not be summoned, the names wouldn't. Even after your birth it was so.

You proved the toughest challenge. When you arrived I was plumb unready. I couldn't do it. I'm man enough to relate these things to you now. She wanted to call you after her daddy and I wanted call you after my own. I reckon she disliked my daddy about as much as I disliked hers. There was no accord to be had. None of the names suited me actually, by which I mean to say I did not think they suited you. To tell the truth I didn't want to call you after my daddy or hers or even after myself. I wanted to give you something new, but could not. She took the matter of naming you solely upon herself at that time, for I had failed you both. The bad years. The terrible septic lingering. I wanted to give you something new.

But it started before all that, before you and your naming. It started when I failed her by being unable to give a name to what it was between us, that aching space.

Your name XXXXX But Listen XXXXX

But I do, Son. I say it. Your name. Every day, quietly to myself.

I've been a free agent so to speak, working for the bigshot tycoon owners without attachment to any particular agency. I've done well for myself of late, saving and scraping, even winning a few good bets myself here and there.

I truly say it.

Witt Ludwig's Vitamin B

Tractatus Dance

They were trying times for me. After losing you and your momma, and after you and I both lost her for good, my world came completely unhinged except for one thing: The names returned. All this great loss that quickly piled itself on top of me seemed to also coincide with the fleet return of the names. That was when I did some of my best work: Sweetie's Baby and Apostasy After Vespers and Prodigal. That was when I named some of the historic beasts like Fickle Creation and Her Solace Unknown and Icarus Flies Right. Those years were good for naming, but that's about it. I was working from deeply personal places.

What's another word for

Except it isn't Icarus Flies Right. That's not the name you may have encountered in the media. Son, the only thing more debilitating and humiliating, etc. than actually losing the faculty for naming is when you happen to reclaim it and all your endeavors go unappreciated. There was a big falling out over that name, Icarus Flies Right. Me and my boss went to Fist City over it. I took my list of names and various alternatives to him and we had a big knock-down-drag-out. He, my boss, the Director of Creative Services of the outfit I was working for at the time, went over the list and made a few reasonable suggestions. I say reasonable, but still his suggestions irked me. That's what I mean about humiliation. The one thing you can do halfway right in the world and somebody's always got to tamper. Having some bumbling lurdan who lacks even the most fundamental facility with words dicker with my work irritates the hell out of me. He went to town with his red pen, crossing out this, suggesting that-here and there a stray check mark or star or happy face inscribed in the margin next to a name he particularly liked. No, I'm just pulling your leg about the happy face. There weren't any happy faces. Just going for a laugh. I remember your laugh. It was so easy to get you tickled when you were little. I remember that.

I say hers too. Your momma's. Quietly, quietly.

He marked a heavy red line through Right after the Icarus Flies part. He told me that Icarus Flies was punchier. It had more urgency and pizzazz. He told me that modifying the manner of flight got us bogged down somewhat in peripheral detail that was not germane. I told him of course Icarus flies. Everybody knows Icarus flies, or flew, or tried anyway. Icarus Flies as a name is sort of vague and lacks all magic or mystery, I told him. It lacks the essence of redemption. He wouldn't have it. He said fuck it. He said we ought to name the damn animal Noblesse Oblige like the client wanted in the first place. He publicly upbraided me right there in front of God and everybody and like to shit-canned me on the spot. But I digress and that was years ago. Like I said, I'm a free agent now with some winning names under my belt.

Do you believe like I do that a name can determine the prowess and other such admirable qualities, etc. of whatever is named?

I still refer to the horse as Icarus Flies Right rather than just the bland Icarus Flies.

Son, I admit now I've been going on and on and that I have a tendency toward high gloom. Enough of that. Not everything was bad before you came like I might have previously suggested. Of course it wasn't. One moment in particular comes to mind because hurricane season approaches now as it did during another time when your momma and me were held together by furious joy. A good gullywasher came up the other day and I got caught in it. I was out sipping sun tea in the yard. The wedge of lemon was bright for a while, then serious clouds hurried in. I had my typewriter in my lap and my good dictionary splayed on a plastic milk crate beside my lawnchair. That dictionary was my best one, thick and heavy, battered from use and travel. In it I could locate even the most recondite of words. The rain hit hard and sudden. I ran tearing into the house with my now-diluted tea aslosh in one hand, hefting the typewriter awkwardly in the other, and forfeited my dictionary to the weather in my haste. I flat-out forgot all about it until the next morning when I noticed it from the kitchen window knocked off the milk crate and bloated in the wet grass. I suppose I could have salvaged it, rummaged out the hairdryer and iron, peeled the thin Bible-paper pages one from the other. But I need to get an updated version anyway. Our list of approved words is increasing mightily.

Why I forgot is because my mind was held fast on another storm that caught me. I would definitely not say trapped, because I was with your momma under a store awning and the word trap could never apply to any situation in which I was next to her during the really good times. We had gone to town to celebrate our getting along. She wanted to take the train for the romance. From the station we walked downtown to have dinner. You may not know how I feel about umbrellas son but I will tell you I cannot abide them. They produce a profound fear in me. The bare nibs of their spindles like silvery keen bird claws that rake the eyes. I feel I am best served with my hands free. This way I can hold them cupped around my eyes like ready blinders and rush through the rainfall and more ably dodge the umbrellaed gentry. You understand it's not a phobia of the thing in my own hand I have so much as its mishandling in the hands of others during even the slightest sprinkle, especially shorter people. So there we were, caught because I was unyielding on the subject of keeping an umbrella ready. Her hair was wetted into flat drapes and planes here and tangled ropes there, like modern art. It was beautiful flowing down the sides of her face in the fog show of the street lamps. We moved down the street from awning to awning. Sometimes if we passed a bar we would stop in to dry a little and have a warming drink then return right back to our slow shuttle from one canvas refuge to the next. The streets flooded and cars moving past sent up sheets of water we were not always able to avoid. A five minute walk that took well over an hour. When we finally reached the place we were drenched and happy and more than a little drunk and more than a little in love. We were led dripping through the candlelight and shown our table. They presented us with leather binders with paper menus fastened inside, and when we held them up they made a wall of described food between us. It was the fancy kind of place that printed up new menus each day with the date on the top. Her menu became welted and the ink ran beneath the hair rain of her bowed head. Our waiter did not seem to mind. He was a tall handsome man with a black ponytail to his waist, a vision of politeness. I wish I could remember his name-it was an unusual one and struck me at the time. He delivered margaritas to our table in wide, deep goblets of bottle-green Mexican glass so heavy we had to drop our mouths to them, looking at one another over the thick rimed rims. Your momma brushed crystals of salt from my eyebrows and lashes. What was his name?

It had stopped raining when we finally left and the streets appeared freshly poured. The wet trees had just moments before heaved themselves up from their seeds in the earth. Everything that happened was happening for the first time. Our hearts had been recast from clean meat. We checked into our hotel. And then. Well you know, Son. We committed perhaps our last great act in a room that was not ours.

Don't

Don't come down here . Find your own way. I've led you astray enough already perhaps. Fly right.

Some of the old boys down here tell a story. The story they tell is of a lovely mare that changes shape in the dark of the wet mosquito nights. She becomes a radiant woman with milk-and-coffee skin, like those examples of beauty down here that I've perhaps inappropriately discussed. She goes drifting around the track, uncertain of her human gait, through the various outbuildings down to the bayou and the jutting knees of cypress. Those old boys probably need to lay off the hooch. Ha. Ha.

Triangle Butter Third Wanton Partygoer Better Broken Later

There are so many damn words, Son. There's such a tussle between precision and otherwise.

Pastern, fetlock, shank. Gaskin, stifle, withers.

XXXXXXSon.

Actually, Son. I believe it too. I admit. The one about the mare. I believe it is her. She arrives in my dreams, clomping then not.

I've made a purchase with the funds I've saved thanks to my new favorable fiscal situation. He's small and fierce, still a long ways from a full mouth although I felt the hard bump of a new tooth pushing through just the other day. I will run him eventually, but first comes the name to which I am constantly drawing nearer. Many nights I've sat and struggled, reaching for that name. Even as the world gets evermore wobbly, seemingly about to spin right off its goddamn axis, I will run him. I may not have my good dictionary but even so I'm getting closer and closer.

© 2002 by Bill Spratch