Sketchook #4: Gummo
Leaves twist, brown, and then fall. Just another something bitter and strange under foot.
Black dirt ran through his fingers. He clenched his fist tight to keep as much as he could. He swallowed the earth and leaves. He never coughed.
Everyone called him Gummo. He chewed wheat and preached from a rocking chair not far from the town square. Some said Gummo was at ninety years old. Others swore he was one hundred and ninety. Either way, it was a known fact that Gummo ate dirt and drank rain. Not exclusively, of course. Gummo also drank whiskey. And coffee. And he ate any blessed thing Ms. Carmella sweetly dropped in his ancient lap.
Ours was a town full of myths. Gummo was just one of many. Aldon Fitzgerald would have been another if he hadn’t rushed off to New York City the day he turned eighteen. As such, he was a folk-hero at best. He’d never make it to mythical. Unless, of course, he murdered the man in The Long Black Coat or wrestled an angel or wrote that string of best-sellers he was always going on about.
But what where the chances of that?
Six regulars gathered every day at the corner of Mercy and Main to witness Gummo holding court. They listened to every word Gummo spat. He was their prophet. And Gummo used their faith as an excuse. Maybe he was just lonely. Or maybe he was really a messiah. Who can say? All that’s sure is that these men sat with Gummo every day and laughed and drank and played Checkers in the sun. They only played Chess when it rained.
Bucket plucked a banjo. Kenny stroked a mean fiddle. Marcus kept time on old coffee tins. Gummo blew harp. Goddamn, they made a racket. Sometimes the wives would suck lilac wine and sing along, but not often. Women liked to keep their distance. And the distance drove the men wild. Maybe that was the point.
Little Tommy Tilsdale, just ten years old at the time, was fascinated by Gummo and his congregation. Tommy was lanky and pale as the inside of a fresh apple. Gummo was the color of day old black coffee and wide and loud. One day as he was walking home from school, Tommy heard Gummo talking. The man had a voice like nails and paint thinner. But it wasn’t the voice that stopped Tommy on his way home from school that day. It was the words holding on for dear life as they rode that husky, violent, gravel voice.
“Nah, nah, nah, now listen here, I seen him! I see the Devil with my own eyes. The Devil real as you and me, muthafucka. He tried getting me to kill my-self in the winter of ‘65. Believe that! He wear a long-ass leather leather coat that’s black as you, Bucket. His teeth is sharp. And they all in rows like a shark. But you can’t tell when he smiles, only when he sings. And his eyes is red and yellow and they blur, twitching back and forth in his head like they vibrating. Just like you, Malcolm, The Devil eyes don’t sit still!”
Tommy got caught listening. The hollering and laughing cut instantly as soon as the gang saw the kid. Tommy gasped and ran away, clutching his school work to his tiny, trembling chest. The men surrounding Gummo laughed even harder at the sight of the poor kid shaking in the distance like a shock of white lightning in the afternoon.
Gummo couldn’t actually see Tommy that day. Gummo’s eyes started failing him decades before. But he could feel him, sense him. And the boy worried him. White folks running was a bad omen in our old town. Just ask Aldon Fitzgerald. Just ask anyone around back in ‘29, before the end of the world, and the coming of The Devil, and the sun.
