walls are props

Most good songs are written under the influence of whiskey. Great songs make you feel like you need a drink. The best songs make you feel like you are already drowning.

Small towns are usually not filled to the brim with art and culture, but sometimes a backwater gets treated to a great talent before it is recognized. At the county fair this year, there was a young woman with a guitar who sounded like wounded pride and homesickness. During her first few songs, the crowd was scattered about on folding chairs while most of the fairgoers drifted by on the dirt path of the midway. During her third song, she slowly plucked a sad chord and suddenly cried out a wordless chorus that turned heads out by the ring toss and silenced the carnival barkers. Soon, the stage was surrounded by an audience rapt with attention, and there was no room to sit.

On the way home, four people crossed the fence around the pit and were never seen again. Two were lovesick teenage girls. The third was an old man who used to sit at the counter of the town diner drinking coffee at all hours and never saying much. The fourth was a boy visiting home from college where he was studying economics. Apparently, he filled his spare time by writing volumes of poetry that he never showed to anyone. His parents discovered the journals while cleaning out his dorm and immediately found a publisher who declared the poems to be the works of an undiscovered genius.

I woke up in a hospital three days after the fair was over with tubes coming out of my arms and the red welt of a dodgeball across the right side of my face. By this time, I had been married three years, and I could not explain to myself or to my wife what had driven me to drink so much or caused the mark to return after so many years.

On the morning of September 3, we woke up to find the school, St. Paul Lutheran Church, and the United States Post Office had all disappeared along with three homes, a shed, and a doghouse. The dog was wandering along the edge of the hole that had appeared in their place, whining and pacing back and forth along the rim. The Chief of Police took the dog home. It never barked again, but made a constant high-pitched whine whenever it slept.

It was no ordinary sinkhole. Rather than a rim overlooking the devastation below, the exposed earth sloped back gradually so that no matter how far you leaned over the hole, you could never see the bottom. In this way three teenagers were lost in the first week. Two were older boys, a senior and a junior at the now-missing high school, and the third was a tomboy named Lindsey Crane who used to aim dodgeballs at the other players’ faces in violation of all playground rules. By the time we were freshmen at the high school, I had been hit by three dodgeballs and spoken to her only once, but I never quite recovered from the heartbreak.

School had only been in session for two weeks, and for a time it seemed that a miracle had delivered summer back to us. While the school district made arrangements with surrounding schools to absorb the students, we were given a week to do as we pleased. For most of us, that meant staring wide-eyed at the black dirt falling away from 4th St. There was an oak nearby that might have been older than our town, but no matter how high we climbed, there was no way to see the bottom. Thankfully, no one fell from the tree. When we were all sent to new schools, we went like moths being saved from a stadium light.

The curious children were replaced by dark vans and trucks with satellite dishes pointed in all directions. A helicopter flew overhead, but the only thing it saw was more darkness. A team of mountaineers descended on ropes tethered to the trucks around the hole, but they ran out of rope before they saw anything but dirt and rocks and roots. Now, they were keeping the children away, and a part of us was glad.

In December, the trucks were gone. At first, we were afraid the hole had gotten bigger and swallowed them up, but our parents informed us that they had simply given up for a while. It was just that after all the rocks we threw in, after all the mountaineers came back up, after the remote-controlled helicopters with tiny cameras crashed, after all that — still, nobody knew why the hole was there or how deep it went. Every few years, a kid goes missing, and we always blame the hole, but we can never be sure. Maybe they ran away. We just can’t be sure.

When the October night is full of stars
And the full moon floats huge and bright in the east-
You are that pretty at very least

But you are as mean as a PE teacher
That old ex-Marine full of shrapnel and bile
I charge headlong toward each silver smile

The unexpected drop
of cool summer rain
on parched desert lips

your breath takes me away
like Elijah in the wind
never to be found