Editor’s Note: I meant to memorialize yesterday- the one year anniversary of tripping on one of my elegant Persian rugs and crashing headlong into the wall at my little pied a terre at Big Pink. Recovery has been almost as interesting as the immediacy of the blow to the head. That was recent, compared to Marlow’s recollection of long-ago Fruitcake Seasons under Southern skies.

– Vic

“It’s fruitcake season.” announced one of the guys as we sat down for a hot, late summer, Monday jobsite lunch, when he opened his bag lunch to reveal slices of the holiday cake wrapped up in still freezer-fresh wax paper. Most of our lunches had been heated up close to unsavoriness by the relentless sun. It was bad enough to eat something subpar that you had made that day to eat no matter how humble; but dammit, what got our goats was not being able to sample something someone else had you really wanted to taste.

Amazingly, Luni had brought enough for each of us to have a sample. He was right, it was Christmastime in July.

These heavenly slices from our distant childhood memories came courtesy of his grandma, who always made more than enough late in the year in order to store some for later in the new year. They were made with locally grown, dried candied fruits and loads of southern nuts. They also still had the aroma of the whiskey she had soaked them with months before.

Luni and most of us migratories formed a loose family of people who were essentially homeless, just traveling around from job to job without any solid roots or any home, who made our way around working wherever we could. Sometimes we’d rent a trailer or several for those with wives and kids, and other times we’d sleep in the back seat of our cars, when the rentals were just too far away or too expensive or too long term to be worth it. I originally planned to work with them just for a short summer job but ended up wandering with them for most of a year across the south.

After work most days other than paydays, they’d drink a lotta beer, maybe do some riding around and for sure goofing around; so, I ended up drinking a lotta beer, doing some riding around and mostly goofing around. All of us came from families that taught us to do something in our lives that was honorable and honest, if you were gonna live in peace with yourself. For us in the construction trades, it was building new plants and factories atop pine tree-shorn, red clay dirt fields.

Most were rough and tough on the outside and grew up in places that had no movie houses. More than a few had only seen one or two black and white TV channels until they went to high school down in the valleys or flatlands. They grew up mostly by telling each other stories. From what I could see they’d rather hear stories that way. They could imagine them more.

When these guys talked, they just weren’t telling stories or theorizing like college boys did. No, they were openly bearing witness to their lives and their family’s lives. They felt what they talked about. It was apparent in their manner, their words, their emphases.

Sometimes they took over each other’s stories as if to provide another camera angle of the same scene. Stories could be told with multiple jumps from narrator to narrator, making this newcomer’s head spin. Each spoke for himself, certain that his angle was important enough to justify its telling.

The reality there was shared. It often contained the gruesome and the grisly — things not found in everyday life. Their purpose never seemed to be to shock. They were plainly sharing unfamiliar manners and customs — some might call them freakish. While many were no longer church going or believers, they were to a person haunted.

There was something in them as story tellers and listeners that demanded some redemptive act at the end of their tales. Someone who falls is allowed a chance to rise. Unless, they’re evil. So, goodness was rewarded, sin was punished, and evil was destroyed. Only when they were deeply troubled or inebriated did the opposite come out — evil triumphed, goodness penalized . . .

These stories at times captured and silenced the audience, since they scared us.

More than a few of them up until high school down in some distant-from-home town had never eaten in a restaurant, traveled more than five miles from home, read much of anything cover-to-cover except the Bible, wished someone harm or hurt someone on purpose. By the time I met them, they’d been off to Asian jungles, killed snakes and assorted commies with the tools of war, dipped snuff, drank and whored in various flesh pots of the world, told stories so flesh crawling and sphincter clenching they’d chill you in July, and, after too much shine on Fridays, talked out loud to themselves and fought with each other at least once, maybe twice, a month.

All could shoot expertly; most carried — at least in their cars and trucks.

None of us regretted how foolish we’d been in the past. Most of us had believed like we were taught that we’d have to be sick and dying before we saw the Lord. But after my time with them, I knew that the Lord has already shown Himself to them. So had the Devil. And it was those visions that haunted them most of all.

That things for them were like that, was too much sometimes. Not being able to fall asleep without those old memories rising up in their minds, just naturally lead to all that drinking, storytelling, fussing and fighting. All they wanted was to leave the conscious world just one night with only that day in their eyes and hearts. Sorta like letting those bad memories loose like a kite on a broken string.

But those things could not be unremembered. That is why, I suppose, they kept searching the skies each evening. Maybe it was the same for looking new jobs somewhere else – just as long as they were not here where they and their memories were. It was as if they expected to see their “lost” kite hurrying along above and just behind them.

Boozers, yes. Misfits, no. Alcoholics, some. Nocturnal types, mostly. Funnier, sadder, truer than sh*t? One and all. They’d pulled it and hauled it on the line in Asia. No one could look cross-eyed or sideways at them for that, but most civilians didn’t know of their service.

I listened to them, not just because moments like that were rare, when you got to hear about the things that mattered most. I knew some of my father’s generation never got their wars out of their heads. So, when my been-in-the-sh*t generation got to drinking, that’s when some would talk with southern summer night sweat all over them like they’d just stepped out from the water.

I listened; but, unlike them, I soon forgot.

My memories of these people had been consigned to oblivion, hidden away from me like some old friend in a casket buried in some small country cemetery. After they were left in that distant red earth grave, we parted ways but likely all of us continued celebrating our daily lives with beers or Evan and cokes. As time passed and the memories faded further, the E&C’s started to come with twice the Evan.

These memories came back to me recently like little old grainy color 8mm movies in their 50-foot long reels found in some back-closet corner. As they played out herky-jerky on the white walls of my soul, some scenes took my breath away or chilled me still with fear and cheer. They triggered others that came at me outta the blue like hungry, dog-killing coyotes.

Why had my mind’s memory batteries failed for so long? Unknown. For sure I wasn’t ready back then to completely close the casket on those times. Maybe none of us ever are with our long past fruitcake seasons in the land of red dust.

PS “Luni” was short for lunatic, which was what his grandfather called him; but, the lil guy couldn’t fully say it. He still showed signs of his nickname with his machine gun speech and errant body movements. He called them tics, but it more like an episodic, crystal meth drip to some of us. On the spectrum for sure, but a hard, hard worker who was surprisingly strong for his small size. A trigger puller while he was in the USA with Asian tattoo-parlor, skin art with mystical meanings, he claimed. All I can say now was that he had been decorated by someone who had been art school trained in aboriginal Australian dreamscape or abstract Japanese wood cuts. I recall his explanations of his tat myths as LSD/mescaline trippy.

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