Bitter Blues
A Short Story
I was walking down the street alongside the railroad track. It was a hot day in Tennessee. Sun was cooking the asphalt, was cooking the tracks. With no coverage on my head, no shadow next to me my feet carried my heavy body, crying so loud about the weight that it began to cause pain in my body. Sweat was already running down my forehead, my cheeks. Just waiting for the fulfillment of my empty promise to stop somewhere for a break. A railroad man to my right called me brother. “Do you need help,” he asked, “because you look terrible.” But I denied his help. Nobody could help. No stranger, no brother. If anybody would care what my story was, it was too late. Oh Lord, life was painful and left me behind. The pain I felt left me with the feeling of my guts pressed together, my throat like I was swallowing a baseball. I felt nothing happening in my mind. I felt blue. And tired. Definitely.
My life was fine. In Memphis, I started a career as a salesman for office supplies, driving around with a Chevy, offering pens and all this equipment you needed to run a business. What a life. I got an apartment, married a woman, used to handle the daily racism you face when being an African-American in the South in the 1960s. My wife was a nice lady, daughter of late harvest hands. We had children, a tiny but good apartment. I had a decent income.
But then fate hit me. Like a bolt suddenly I lost everything. My job, my car. My kids, now teenagers, warned me when coming home, that their mom got drunk. I stood in the kitchen and she was yelling with a bottle of bourbon in her hand a cigarette in the other. She called me a loser, a poor little negro unable to feed his family. Was she right? I don’t know. Maybe. I have been looking for a job for weeks. Soaring gas prices, high inflation, a bad economy, in general, made life hard, not just for the black community. And I tried to get a job but was hardly successful. I came home empty-handed, head down, hiding shame from my kids who still hoped to go to college.
One day I came home… it was the day that changed my life forever. I opened the door, thanking God my landlord didn’t throw us out of our apartment, and I heard my wife. I thought she was sobbing. The closer I got to the dining room, the kids were out I guessed, sobbing sounded and more and more strange. When I opened the door to the kitchen I saw my wife… with her arms around a man who had his head around her neck and his back to me. When I saw this I felt like the time has ended for me and the world opened its gorge under my feet. Arrows hit me in my heart. The man who fucked your wife was a repo man. She saw me and showed her evil smile. I didn’t move, even when she moaned that she needed a real man. I left home forever, leaving empty promises about good life and family behind, living on the street.
I am fifty-six today. I lost all my teeth but one, sleeping between garbage bins and broken inventory. Living day by day with the memory of being a failed man since I left my family two decades ago. Nobody ever searched for me nor did I search for my wife, my kids. Today, I will turn fifty-six, seven months, twenty-three days old. I will not get one day older. I lied to my feet. This journey will not end today for them. It will end for me. And I will give up living, lying on the fierce asphalt. Sorry, my feet, but these are the empty promises life is made of.
