Long in the Tooth by David Turrill

I came in last week on a whim. I’ve recently discovered that it’s the best mode of transportation. I don’t like to be in the house where Wendy was. Of course being here isn’t much better. She once occupied this place too and the world is full of ghosts. Even that bass I just killed is haunting me. I lift my glass and hold it out toward the lake. Skoal! Jim Beam was a wise man. He knew better than Socrates or Dostoevsky or Hegel or Keats or Luther or any of them what we need. I produce a scornful smile, but only from the inside. Let my facial muscles atrophy for all I care.

My father’s ghost drifts on in as I try to ignore Wendy’s. In his life he was passionate about many things. Since Dad was an ordained pastor, God was chief among them of course, followed by my mother, us two boys, civil rights and baseball. Though I’ve prioritized them in my own mind, I’m really not sure about the order of those affections. My brother was named for the famous Negro League pitcher, Satchel Paige, which kind of lumped all that concupiscence together.

Over my mother’s fierce objections, he had me christened Tinker Balune. Of course he was thinking of the famous double-play combo...Tinker to Evers to Chance, but Mom knew that every schoolyard urchin would associate the name with J.M. Barrie’s fairy. She was, as usual, correct. I have often thought that if he had to name me for one of that trio, Dad would have done better to choose Chance, a more rugged name at least and one that insinuated more accurately the direction my life would take. Even Evers (though I liked it less) would have been, like Satchel, a restitutive palliative to the greater issue of dad’s Caucasian guilt. (The terrible experiments conducted on Evers’ Boys was a favorite example in Dad’s arsenal of stories of the various albatrosses that White America has hung about its red neck).

Despite this logic, I would remain Tinker Balune, and discover through first hand experience what it was like to be a tormented minority, although after a few years I ceased to give, if you’ll excuse, a tinker’s damn. I suppose it could have been worse.

I take another swig of Mr. Beam and close my eyes. My ghosts have no compunction about darkness or light. They come and go as they wish, so I can remember all of them, all the time, waking or sleeping makes no difference to them. They haunt at their own discretion. Wendy, especially, never rests.

‘Time heals all wounds’, Wendy’s sister, Kelly, told me at the funeral, but we are all Achilles and the cliché works more appropriately when reversed. My particular weakness was to love, and I have been trying, along with time, to kill it. I lost my mother, my brother, my father, my wife—all long before I should have. I blame God and Fate and myself, but I believe in none of those things anymore. They give meaning to existence and I’ve come to realize that there is none. Every egg produced by every female is an accident waiting to happen. It’s how we’re born and how we die.