a sixty eighth story...'catskill pastoral'

Tam and I went back there, I remember it well.  I was wearing this red India dress I had just bought from a seconds sale the previous day.  We were looking for Tam’s old motor, a Purple Impala.  Or perhaps it was a Plymouth.  Anyhow, there was leftover clutter everywhere.  Skeleton cars - a crushed Bonneville (Tam pointed out the makes), a Pontiac collided with a tree trunk; and behind a deserted Air Streamed Trailer, we found a Chevy in a green field tall with rye grass.

Tam loved the whole experience.  He made me climb into the driver’s cabin of a junked pick up, sit on the decaying leatherette, tufts of yellow kapok stuffing erupting from hot-boxed holes in the seat lining, a few mean looking springs come loose at my feet. ‘Honk the horn!’ he said, tried to take a photo, but I complained it wasn’t becoming for a lady (Ha!).  On the roof of the pick up someone had scrawled some graffiti – an anti-nuclear, anti-nicotine hippy slogan. 

Before we set off that morning Tam asked me to bring a picnic hamper – I mean, I ask you! – but I had no idea how, or what to fill it with.  We bought a big bag of chips and a few beers in the end, sat on a hollow log, took in the overgrown wrecking yard: it was like a hurricane had been through, and time had forgotten to clear up.  Our Beagle puppy, Kid, was with us, and while we sat, he went exploring.  We found him with his snout in an abandoned Mircowave oven, full of nails, nuts and bolts, and things. 

My enthusiasm was beginning to wane, but Tam was determined to find his old car (the Purple Imapala, the Plymouth?).  He would never listen to me when he was like this so I just stayed quiet, besides Kid needed the run around.  Following a few more ‘discoveries’ – including a load of chicken wire, and chicken bones; a pile of Tonka toys Tam joked about taking with us – we came upon a green, copper wreck, blighted with streaks of rust, the trunk popped open, windshield shattered, rosary beads and the sign of the cross hanging from the driver’s mirror.  Tam stopped, tensed up, put his hand on my forearm.  ‘This is it!’ he whispered.  It didn’t look purple to me.  And the number plate was chalked over, still I didn’t want to spoil his moment.

The grainy, sepia tinged Polaroid is somewhere upstairs in the attic to this day – Tam, lost in his automotive past, fiddling with the long since defunct instruments on the dashboard, taken by me through the cracked windshield.  I can’t look at it anymore, even though I think about it every night now Tam is gone, and I’m on my own.  I should destroy the damn thing, should have destroyed it years ago, but when Tam was alive it was a curiosity rather than something that haunted me (us?).  I should explain:  it’s not Tam you see.  Instead, it’s the spectral image of a man standing behind me, in long workman’s overalls, the gleam of his metal teeth catching the early afternoon sunlight, and most chilling of all, the screw driver in his left hand.