I’ve managed to escape the factory for two whole days and I’m intent on wiling the hours away in as lazy a manner as I can muster, sitting beside my wife on the front porch, watching the world pass by. For this brief moment, I experience the closest sensation to contentment the universe allows a dumb Polack who dabbles in poetry the way a retarded child stabbing a butterknife into a wall outlet dabbles with electrical engineering. There’s a Wallace Stevens collection spread open on my lap, but I can’t stand to read the shit. Instead, I enjoy the way the wind sways the tree branches, setting the sun dappled leaves to dance. Life is good. I’m okay, I think.
“Ah, goddammit. Motherfucker!”
The sudden outburst startles my wife. She bobbles, almost drops her phone, at the very least disrupting her Candy Crush game. You’d figure, ten years into this marriage, she’d be inured to my fits of profanity, yet here we are.
“What the hell’s gotten into you?”
She looks for perhaps a wasp sting, something to account for my reaction. I point at the bruised smudge darkening the sky beyond Brindlee Mountain to the west. Storm clouds are beginning to gather.
“Jesus, please God, no.”
On cue, my wife’s eighty-year-old stepfather opens the door and steps onto the porch. Despite the seasonably warm weather, he wears sweatpants, a Michigan National Championship shirt and a thick brown flannel. His belly has a good three second head start on him.
“Looks like it’s going to rain,” Milt pronounces.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” I mutter.
“News says it’s going to be a real gullywasher, but I bet it won’t come close to touching the rain, the way it came down in Vietnam. Son, let me tell you, you don’t know rain…”
Every time. Every goddam time. A light summer drizzle or an early morning downpour, a late winter snowfall, a fucking tornado, or me running the shower a bit too vehemently, inspires this motherfucker to pop his head in to remind me this ain’t shit compared to the deluges he experienced in ‘Nam.
His need to denigrate everyone else’s perception of rain in favor of his memory of Indochina monsoons extends to the poor bastards who attend his church. They dread the Bible studies involving Noah. Milt will be the first to tell you that ark-building sumbitch wouldn’t have known what to do with himself during Vietnam’s rainy season.
“The rain came down sideways,” Milt crowed. “It rained so hard, the rain bounced off the ground and hit you in the face. You’d swear it was raining from every direction.”
My wife smiles thinly. Her disdain for her stepfather’s need to hype central Asia’s rainfall competes with her desire to see me struggle not to tell Milt to shut the fuck up already.
I spilt coffee one time and as the liquid gold dripped off the kitchen counter and puddled on the linoleum, Milt had to hop off his recliner to tell me how even the rain felt weaponized in Vietnam, stabbing your bare skin like tiny stilettos.
He stands there, grinning so wide his dentures threaten to launch out of his yap. I just feel anger radiating from inside me. Even his fat belly distended over the top of his sweatpants pisses me off. The same fat belly he lugged around as a member of upper management at the Chrysler plant, his halcyon days when the people in his orbit were afraid to check him when he got a little too loose with his meteorological details. He retired back in 2000 at the age of fifty-five and he likes to remind me of that fact almost as much as he likes to reminisce about central Asia’s rain.
It’s hard to even look at him. There’s a stitched ridge puckering above his left eye where the doctor had to remove some more skin cancer. He likes to tell me I need to wear a hat when I mow the surrounding four acres of anthills and grass, but I remind him that the Polish Hammer is too badass to accommodate skin cancer, that it’s usually the limp-wristed fat bellies who are horrifically short in the pants who usually fall prey to skin cancer.
I have to go easy on Milt though it’s not in my nature to offer quarter to anyone who annoys me. He kinda came with the house when my wife and I moved in. Some would even say he owns it. This house we live in was the home Milt and my wife’s mother built for their retirement years. Before her mother passed, my wife promised her she’d look after Milt in his doddering old age, and somehow, I got roped into the deal.
My wife wants me to think about all the money we’re saving by not having to buy a house. I’ll never save a dime so long as I’m still paying the bills for a twenty-two-year-old jackass incapable of rising above the occasional part-time pizza work, but I don’t bring that up very often. My wife still believes that money is going into my retirement fund.
There’s something about not being the man of the house that wears on a man’s soul. Being beholden to another man who basically owns the roof over the bed in which you masturbate is a humbling proposition.
The family has a term for getting boxed in a corner and having to listen to Milt’s inane conversation. They call it “you’ve been Milted.” They laugh about it because it only happens at the occasional family gathering. I get Milted every time I fucking turn around. I write about this now because it’s been raining here in Northern Alabama for the last three weeks straight and I’m about to lose my fucking mind.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
