Writings » Ode of Herring Jack

Ode of Herring Jack

By Shitwincer at 2007-10-11 | Romance | Printable version

    "She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen," he said, weeping on the john in a truck stop Waffle house.  His name was Herring Jack, he had a warrant for his arrest, and broken heart full of forbidden love the size of a jelly jar reserved for a single person.
    "Are you gonna tell me a story?" said a tiny tin voice coming from either a small boy or a confused little girl using the urinal next to him.  His first choice was correct, as he managed to gather all his remaining strength and tilt his head to the right.  It is only then he realized was leaving one hell of a miss in the sink any southern belle condemned to clean house, he'd best lay off the moonshine awhile.

    "Sure, kid," he said in a crushed voice, "I'll tell ya the greatest love story a man could tell a child, one that'll make Ferngully look like a weak skin-flick."  Almost immediately the child's eyes lit up, like a broken gas lamp burning down an orphanage.
   
    He looked down at the picture taped to his chest, muzzled between the Vietnam jungle sprouting from his d-cup pectorals, a tattered photo from bass master sewn with lace to a stained doily.  It reminded him of his fruitful years in the river he dearly wished to return to.  In time, after he paid his dues for slander against twinkie the kid, he would hobble home like a soldier presumed lost or dead, hoping his bride would still be there.  How he wished to hear her purr like a hungry sea lion, with her skirt hiked up and bare-ass against the hammock, dreaming of white picket fences, ketchups fights, and swarming children.  Olde Jack was in love, indeed, a child's love that had ripened with age.

    "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away," he started, "There were two kindred spirits, dancing about cake frosting and ball-pits."  The child had now turned around to get the full affect, finishing his mellow yellow photon laser on Olde Jack's shins, but he didn't mind.  The smell of fresh urinal cake put him in the mood to share his great tale.  

    He told the boy of Bertha, his childhood sweetheart and there amazing days together.  Creek jumping, tire swings, patty-cake, and ring-around the rosy.  It got hot really fast, so rapid that a cool down was issued when all school kids contracting bubonic plague. When the hell does Pet Cemetery look remotely real in the first place, but here they were, disturbing Indian burial grounds with puppy love.  Regardless if blood poured from his basement walls, nothing could contain what he felt for sweet little Bertha. He spoke of the river where they spent their days: frolicking, splashing, cavorting, violating space between loins.  So hearty though they were young, happy as piglets in fresh horseshit, as his ma had always said.  Though she swam better then he with that big gapping mouth a tapping, they breached their social classes for one another, like a modern Romeo and Juliet. Much the opposite of that terrible Spanish guy who ruins everything, liquorish or something.  

    And the day she made her bedding in the shallows, he knew the words she wished to say but couldn't find.  How he loved to tap that scaly ass, like a man who knows good chili just by the smell.  The water hole was like a Vegas love suite after that day, festooned with their combined DNA, egg and sperm, hair and rusty hooks, hula-poppers and powerbait.  They engaged each other in ways only gods would know if they had odd genitalia and porked in the dusking hours.  Always looking with those batting satin bulging eyes, gold flecked and sparkling forever, a love all their own, regardless of species.  They were still man and woman, united by there similar fu-man-chus.  
   
    Then one day he arrived to find her missing, perhaps late from teaching Lamaze class up stream.  He waited all night, and night to day, and day to night, at least that's what his shark watch had said.  And like dollar store perfume sprayed into a stationary fan, or big league chew after 20 seconds of shelf life, she was gone.  It was that day he vowed to see her again, making excuses like maybe she had been hooked on a Jimmy Houston rattle-trap, or hit with a aristocrat golf ball.  Wait, cods are the one who swim upstream to die, right?  The questions would come and go as he grew older, but his affection would only grow more ornate, more poetic, more emblazoned to his everyday cause.  So he told Twinkie the kid to fuck off, and enlisted in the baked goods carrier service, wanting to be more then an Ozark's Jug-blower for her, more man then he had ever been.

    As he got into his stanza the day he finally left, he shed one big salty tear that knocked lose some corn from his cheek, the best symbol to demonstrate the growing hole in his soul.  One day he would return, and maybe, just maybe, Bertha would be getting vert out of white water rapids again. Just a chewin' on the fresh morning flies dancing about the surface, with that toothless smile.  Then and only then he would feel at home again...

    "She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen," he said again, with tears streaming down his face to match the drips ebbing from his varicose thunder hole.  
The child politely looked up, and then vomited fresh blueberry muffins and OJ into Jack's lap.  He blinked once, wiped his lips, and innocently said, "Don't ever touch my grandma again, you sick fish-fucker!"