Tonight, the man with one working arm is telling the story about outrunning the Staties one winter on the backroads near Cochranton. He\u2019s standing up outside watching the shift change. He calls me over as I\u2019m walking to punch in and now I know I will be punching in late. It is autumn and the ground is covered in great red and yellow maple leaves. The man is dressed in blue sweats that are preciously held up by a string, and a Camo hoodie two sizes too big since he lost all that weight. He says, \u201cI was just thinking of the time I was drunk returning from the bar and there was the checkpoint.\u201d He drove a jacked-up Chevy then with giant tires, the kind of thing you might see wrecking over cars in the mud of a Monster Truck rally. He jammed on the breaks, skidded, turned, and went down a dirt road. Sure enough those Staties hit their sirens, and they were off. He says, \u201cno way they could make it down those roads I thought. It was winter with a foot of snow in those woods, on those roads and trails, but they kept following me, so I turned down a trail I\u2019d only dirt biked on and that got them. They must have been driving four by fours. What the fuck? I mean they were right behind me but no way I was going back to County. They got close once but I was spittin up big plumes of mud on them. I think they finally couldn\u2019t see shit. So I make it out of the trail and catch route 27 and head to my Indian buddy Jake\u2019s house. He still lived with his folks, but the house was on a hill, and they had built an addition on the back that was all his. I didn\u2019t want to wake his father up. His father was a full-blooded Indian, the crazy beat your ass kind of Indian. I park in the back and think I can ride out the night with Jake in case they are still looking for me. I\u2019m fucked up on straight Four Roses, but I still got some sense. Jake always left the back door open, and I walked right into his room and wake him. It\u2019s like five in the morning. Jake slept with the lights on. Funny since he had that Indian thing where he could see in the dark or know you were coming. He was awake when I walked in. He says, Damn dude why is you here so early. Are we going hunting? I told him, I just out-runned the cops. He says, then why the fuck did you end up here? Jake was freakin because he had at least ten of these giant weed plants. But I handed him the bottle and said, I left them in the woods, good buddy. And he tipped the bottle back and drank it all down straight.\u201d The man\u2019s story is done. I\u2019ve heard this story many times with variation, but I listen with excitement as if it was the first time, every time. It is part my job to do that, part because I\u2019ve learned that often what this man needs is just for someone to listen about his life before his aneurism and then a stroke twisted his body. Left him with a contorted side of his face, and one arm stuck to his side he can do little more than hang a hanger on, his pants always falling off his ass till I get him a belt (have you ever tried to put a belt on with one arm?) and convince him to let me put it on.\u00a0 He hates being helped but sometimes lets me for the company and over the years he\u2019s given up a begrudging trust. And so, he talks and talks. His mind can still find all these stories. The fact he wants to tell them tells me he wants to keep on breathing. He hasn\u2019t given up yet. And when he sits outside on the bench and smokes, I see him staring off at the autumn sky, his right arm reaching out as if he is still gripping the wheel, turning fast down a back road, big wheels kicking up a hurricane of mud. It really is like a movie. And I see him nodding his head, and I say, \u201cD, what you grinning about over there?\u201d And he turns to me and says, \u201cCome here, sit down. Did I ever tell you about the time I outran the Staties? Or about when me and my Indian buddy Jake were hunting in the trees to wait for bucks and looked up to find a bear?\u201d \u00a0And as D speaks, I think how tonight everything could be part of a story\u2014D and I, the words he says. The cool autumn wind. The waning moon halved and white as a shell the sky puts to its ear and listens.<\/p>\n
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The fact he wants to tell these stories tells me he wants to keep on breathing. He hasn\u2019t given up yet. And when he sits outside on the bench and smokes, I see him staring off at the sky, his right arm gripping the wheel, turning down a back road, big wheels kicking up a hurricane of mud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":23952,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3529],"tags":[702,4616,4615,102,3229,4617],"class_list":["post-23078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-nonfiction","tag-alcohol","tag-cargiving","tag-disability","tag-drugs","tag-redemption","tag-storytelling","writer-sean-thomas-dougherty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23078"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23953,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23078\/revisions\/23953"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}