glimpse of perfection, a brief calm before the gale descended and the tides surged against the seawall. At that instant, they had all the days of the world before them. Their lives were unblemished canvas, and they could paint just about whatever they wished. Later in his life, Palmer would sometimes awaken in the cool silence of the night and see in his mind’s eye those two young boys as they reclined like sultans upon the hood of the Camaro. They were parked on the dirt road in the Mission Hill graveyard, as care- free as newborns, guzzling beer as they boldly sculpted their tomorrows and shared these plans with each other and with the neighbor- ing dead. If he only knew the spell that would save them, Palmer would chant the syllables and throw the bones. He would rip the seams of the universe and reach across the indiffer- ent years, and his invisible hand would snatch the keys from the ignition switch and hurl the keychain so far that it would be out there still, rusting slowly away, an aging artifact from an unwelcome reality. He would gently settle those young men into a slumber among the headstones, out of harm’s way until the morning sun was born in the east and the


world was once again safe. But sadly, the pair was well and truly beyond his power to pro- tect. Sleight of hand could not compete with the wiles of destiny. He only ever had one slim chance to save them, anyway, and when he climbed into the Camaro on that out- landish night, he had let the opportunity slip through his fingers like dry sand on a windy day. And now Palmer’s remembrances of what


happened after he and Rodney left the bone- yard are preserved like freeze frames from a particular hell. They play over and over for him like a looped tape, but they are jumpy, like the footage from an old eight-millimeter film that has missed a cog on the projector’s drive gear. The pictures are grainy and indis- tinct. The soundtrack is tinny and its volume irregular, as if someone is turning the sound up and down at random. It hisses and crack- les like the vintage seventy-eight rpm records that Palmer’s grandmother used to play.


www.mupress.org


Reprinted by permission of Mercer University Press, Sweetwater Blues, 2014.


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