The Sound of Speed

My friends have brought me to see something strange on the riverbank. There’s a houseboat left partially sunk in the water, half of the hull sticking up into the air at a weird diagonal angle, the titanic of white trash. On the riverbank there’s a driveway leading out to the disaster and someone has spray-painted a note to the residents on it. The messy fluorescent green letters say, “JIM, WE STOPPED BY BUT YOU WEREN’T HERE. SEE YOU LATER. –BILL BILL.” I’d like to meet this Bill Bill, ask him just what the fuck it was that happened here.
My friends and I follow a broken boardwalk through what looks like a tacky wedding chapel arch, and then board the hull of the boat. It’s hard to stand up on the steep weird angle of the deck, but we manage to hold onto the rails and the structure. All around the boat there’s rot and pollution and astounding filth. The water looks like toxic sludge with mutant algae on the surface. There are lots of beer cans and household items floating in the muck. I peer inside the boat and see the room that must have been the living room. The air is bad and there’s a refrigerator floating in the middle of the room. I wonder if there might still be some drinkable beer in there. John tells me there was a big painting of Elvis inside, but it’s seems to have been looted by abnormally hip rednecks. All the windows and mirrors are broken. Spiders and spider-webs everywhere. Not an inch of the boat is free of these fucking creatures. There must be hundreds of thousands of them crawling in every nook and cranny. This is the last spider buffet before winter I tell you. It’s going to get cold real soon, and there will be fewer and fewer bugs in the muggy river air for these nasty little fuckers to feast on.
John looks down into a shaft on deck and says, “I think I found the problem. There are bricks in here.”
“Fuck the bricks, man” I say, “What about these god damned spiders! They must have killed all those aboard and eaten a hole in the cabin walls. Maybe we ought to burn the wreck and fry the fucking lot of them. Extermination. I’m talking Dresden tactics. Just siphon some gas from your tank and I’ll toss my cigarette in. Fuck these fucking spiders. Fuck them all. Enemies of mankind.”
Brandi says, “I can’t believe you, of all people, are scared of spiders.”
“Are you yanking my dick or something? Spiders are the most deeply ingrained fear in the human psyche. It’s us against them. God made it that way. Spiders are the enemy!”
The light changes while the three of us perch the deck together. Even the Arkansas River looks good in the evening sun’s brilliance. It makes the scene on this tilted houseboat seem beautiful and surreal. Way up ahead of the bend I can see the Pinnacle Mountain, a pile of rocks I used to like climbing around on years ago.
We leave. Amusingly enough, I notice a sign pointing to the wrecked boat that says “OPEN HOUSE.” It’s an open house alright. We take Brandi’s picture in front of the sign with the boat in the background. The evening sun flares a weirdly serious light on the absurdity of the scene. The road back up from the river turns takes a sharp turn past some woods where I see several dozen little white crosses stuck in the ground. I say, “What are those crosses, some backwoods abortion protest?”
John, who must have missed it, says he thinks it’s probably a memorial to someone who died in a car wreck.
I say, “Well there must have been lots of wrecks right there. I bet they were all drunk drivers leaving that houseboat at four in the morning.”
John says he bets a wild party sank the boat. I concede that this is more likely true than my spider theory.
In the back seat of a car, sitting on top of a pile of loose pages ripped from books, I look out and see the molten gold of the sun setting behind blurred trees that race by. We’re headed toward Little Rock. In the front seat my friends have turned up the music, something French and very intense. It sounds good, one of those compositions that awakens emotion, but doesn’t let you know just what the emotion is about. I doubt I could understand these lyrics even if I did speak French. They blend into the heavy electric roar of the song, juts another instrument. This is the sound of a life in motion, goodbyes and memories soaring into the sky forever. The song tells me tomorrow will be another lifetime and we know it’s going to be charmed.
These are the last hours of my sojourn in the south. It’s good that all the sad weirdness of it ended on a happy note. I get the impression that I’m on the brink of something new and wonderful.

Little Rock
11/02/09