BALLAD OF
HARRY CRUGGS
The waiting began. The ticking internal clock. The merry
celebration of seconds. All wet, flushed
and clicking of windshield wipers, vetting out the stream of night. Purple mesh
of street lights, like the city was drunk, only you were. And not for the first
time either. Oh, Harry Cruggs had his moments. His friends and family (decidedly
different class of folk) called him Harr.
Out here he prowled like a crippled night cat encapsulated
by steel, glass and rubber, his back brace holding him up, his morphine patch
pushing him through fog banks of pain. Not sure what he was looking for. Yet
again.
Always the same really. His father Earl Cruggs was a fishing
lure craftsman, content to just while away at his craft, selling his wares out
of a small low-rent shop in Sweetville, Tennessee. But when he married Gladys,
who had better business sense, they managed to build up into a small southern
empire, a chain of stores called—Southern Sports Emporium. Then later, just
known as Southern Emporium. But Earl had the
‘thick blood’ bestowed upon him by his mother, Harr’s grandmother, and died of
a stroke at forty-nine. Harr had passed that age by a few, but he hadn’t
avoided the family’s curse of ‘thick blood’. Stroke and heart attack by forty-five,
partial paralysis and bouts of acute agoraphobia. Up until recently he had
managed several of his father’s chain of sporting goods stores, but the market
was tight and in gobble phase so he sold his majority share for a nice
nest egg cushion, and retired to pursue a life of leisure, such as it was with
his disabilities.
Tonight he was working on his suppression of fear. A skill
he felt most useful. What did Jan Von Don say? “Fast is good, but deceptive is
better.” Rectangles of buildings bulked in the distance, all directions,
shadows washed away ever second. Stacks of light mounting even further out,
sleepy downtown, then dead mountains with sporadic flashing light beyond that,
the occasional headlight switchbacking up or down. But his vision focused on
the sidewalk splashed with pallid light. Waiting for a figure, a player, some
actor, to emerge…
