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STILL
“CNN,” THE VOICE on the phone said. “Quick.” “Who is this?” I asked. “It’s your mother.” CNN was broadcasting a live car chase. Helicopter shot from above. A cluster of black-and-white cruisers slowly following a blue pickup through freeway traffic. The sound was off on my set, but I could hear the commentator’s distant voice coming from my parents’ television. There was a bit of an echo. “Hello?” my mother asked. “Still there?” “Where else would I be?” “It’s California,” my father said on another extension. “We were there just last year.” “He hijacked the truck,” my mother said, “and went on a rampage. He was shooting at people and running stop signs and everything.” “I didn’t see any of that,” my father said. “It happened earlier,” she said. “The announcer told me while you were in the bathroom.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, I figure he’s one of those typical California types. You know the kind I mean.” “A vegetarian?” I asked. “An actor?” “A druggie,” she said, lowering her voice. “And after he hijacked the truck —” “Wait,” I said. “Did he hijack the truck or steal it?” “What’s the difference?” she asked. “Is there someone in it with him?” “No. He forced them out at gunpoint.” “That’s theft then,” I said. “Not hijacking. Hijacking would be if he’d taken them along, if he had hostages.” “Really?” “I’m pretty sure.” “I had no idea,” my mother said. “Where was I for all this?” my father muttered. The pickup tried to pass on the shoulder and hit the guardrail, bouncing off and into a white van. Both vehicles stopped for a moment, and the police cruisers slowed. Then the pickup rolled forward again. It drove past one off-ramp after another, hesitating slightly at each one, as if looking for something. “What I want to know,” my mother said, “is where he’s going.” There was a long pause, then she added, “So, how are you?” “Oh, you know,” I said. “The same.” “Good, good,” she said. “We’re fine, too.” There were another few seconds of dead air, during which the truck finally took an off-ramp into a run-down neighbourhood, and then she asked, “How’s work?” “All right,” I said, even though it had been weeks since I worked. “That’s good,” she said. “Because these days …” “Yes,” I said. She hummed a little while the truck drove through the parking lot of a boarded-up Kmart. My father belched softly and sighed. “Crazy from the heat,” he said. “Any new ladies in your life?” my mother suddenly asked. “No,” I said. “There’s no one.” “Well, you never know how it’ll happen,” she said. “Look at your father and me. We met by accident. Isn’t that right, hon?” “Mm-hm.” “I already know the story,” I said. The pickup turned down an alley between warehouses. Zoom out. More cruisers approaching the alley’s opposite end. No place to turn around again. “He called to talk to his cousin,” my mother went on, as if she hadn’t heard me. “Only she was in the shower. We’d just been sunbathing in the backyard, you see, and we had lotion all over us. I showered later, when I got home. But first I answered the phone, and your father thought I was his cousin. He started talking like he knew me, and he was just so nice and funny that I went along with it. Well, we all had a good laugh about it when he found out, but we’d gotten on so that he asked me out for a date. I said yes, of course, and the next thing I knew, I was walking down the aisle with him. And now here we are. Isn’t that right?” “This is definitely where we are,” my father agreed. Police cruisers blocked both ends of the alley now. The pickup stopped in the middle. “Things will work out,” my mother said. “I’m not really looking for anything right now,” I said. “Still,” she said. Zoom in. A man in jeans and a white T-shirt jumped out of the pickup. He had a pistol in his hand. He started running for one of the warehouses, and then a little pink cloud puffed from his head. He fell to the ground. Nothing moved but the camera. “That’s gotta hurt,” my father said. “I don’t know what things are coming to when this can happen here,” my mother sighed. “It’s happening in California,” I pointed out. “Still,” she said. “Well, I should probably go,” I said. “Have to get up for work in the morning.” “Wait! Your father hasn’t told you his news yet.” “News?” I asked. Black-clad officers approached the fallen man slowly, guns leveled, like they expected him to rise at any moment. My father cleared his throat. “You remember my back problems?” he asked. “My crushed verticals?” “Do you mean your vertebrae?” I asked. Three of them were fused together in his lower back, the result of twenty years driving a truck. He hadn’t been able to walk straight in years, let alone work. The doctors had given up on him. “Yeah,” he said, “they’re gone.” “What, the vertebrae?” “No, the problems.” “What do you mean, gone?” I asked. “How could that happen?” “You know that preacher we like to watch on the television?” he asked. “Yes,” I said slowly. One of the cops nudged the man with a foot, flipping him over. He stared up at the helicopter, his face a blur from the distance. “We were watching him the other day,” my father said, “when he told everyone he’d been touched by God just before the show started.” “Well, not really God,” my mother interrupted. “He said it was an angel whispering in his ear.” “They work for God,” my father said. “That’s the same thing in my book.” “Your back,” I pleaded. “Right. He said that God told him there’d be a trucker watching that day, one with back problems. He told me to touch the television set. Said he’d heal me if I confessed my sins and believed. So I went and kneeled in front of our television and put my arms around it. And I, ah, I talked about a few different things. But the most important thing is that I was healed. I believed, son.” I had this vision then, of thousands of unemployed truckers across North America — the world, even — kneeling on their shaggy carpets, hugging their television sets, confessing their sins, while their wives looked on and wept. “And my back problems are gone now,” my father finished. “Not so much as an itch left.” “Healed by television,” I said. “Television and God,” he said. “Well.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Isn’t that something?” my mother asked. “I really have to go now.” One cop handcuffed the body, and then another cop threw a blanket over it. “I was there,” my mother said. “I saw it all.”
© Peter Darbyshire
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