Catching the words Incredible Hulk and Metamorphosis before I learned Incarnation and Immaculate Conception, you’d have known Hardy Boys mysteries and Father Knows Best weren’t my ball of wax. Stan Lee had nothing on me. The authors of the Scriptures knew aliens. They called them angels, archangels, cherubim, and their offspring with the daughters of men, Nephilim. They came from all quadrants, inner and outer, of the galaxy. They whispered every language, reading the mind at a moment’s thought.
Can you see me too? I’ll tell you. Today I wonder when I should forgive them. Perhaps I wouldn’t have to if I never held them liable. To think of a story as this is to write alone, speak alone, and create new friendships until they are exhausted. Fixations eat me when I’m not masturbating. Well, that’s not the truth.
In 1966, I hauled stereos and sewing machines from Marietta, Ohio down Interstate 77 in wonder whether the hairy Mothman would touch down near Point Pleasant, West Virginia again. Seven serious friends and one sober preacher heard screeches from the leather beast when it called them. The Ford Econoline van’s AM radio distortion was enough to switch it off on it greetings of a howl. Ahead I saw someone in black, coming from a flash and red fire, and all there was—a smile from this thing, it didn’t talk like a man, it was so gentle, so tender. He sounded like a Brother of the Lord telling me, no fear. No pain. Does that comfort me? I suppose it did. I thought a simple hand out to him, and he took it, he spoke his name, my name is Indrid Cold. Be not afraid, I go before you always. He knew I left Golden Virginia tobacco in the door. My mother’s cancer killed her when I was four. I looked into the sky. The voice came gently, at a wind’s whisper — your mother’s — breast. Are you happy with me? he asked, the smile never passing from his lips. The heat from the air around his fingers singed my eyes, a blistering solo on a banjo, a fluttering dance around a naked light bulb under new moon.
The sky above, one star his he said, showing me with boney reach his finger poking blazes above us where it was archangels who leave their tread. We climbed atop a rest area pavilion, traveled to the nearest sun to ours, Proxima Centauri, to ground me 4.24 light years away, and stood. He asked me was I ready for the next stop in my mind? Choose it. I gaped into the field of perfect pinholes glad that I was the only one. Indrid Cold whisked me where thought bent. Clouds reflected on a pocky, rained river that surrounded us: jellyfish, manta and eel, he smiled you, how do you feel?
This being the story of so-called cryptids in 1960s West Virginia, what are cryptids but animals or beings disputed, and poorly documented? Appalachia has a few. Mothman, Tommyknockers, Indrid Cold. Today, I think of the perennial game of telephone at summer camps. Counselor supposes a sentence, passes to a child, inherited down to the last one, where: I cast my nighted color off becomes Fred said he wears colored nighties to bed, hee-hee hee-hee-hee. Because, we have the world wide web’s echo chamber to bounce balls around the room T.V. bingo style, any combination of storytelling is possible. What is important to me? I economize, and a stronger pictures emerges, distilled, like corn whiskey. When seeing her out my front door, I tell my daughter to watch for the glimmers, pockets in the frost bearing more warmth than stars, because I’ve seen an angel carried on devil’s wings on these roads, taken me to a home, a more delicate peace, and this is my choice to remember. The images we want to hold before us hold the depth and clarity that define us, and all decisions from there are thus made. Why do you want to remain in a self imposed prison of designs made for you?
“What do you do for a living sir?” the ten-year-old redheaded girl asked, bicycle casually parked as if floating off hooks on the brick pillar in front off the drugstore.
“I work at the slaughterhouse. I make bologna and parcel pig’s feet,” he smiled peeling back his cheeks further than usual.
She was curious.
“Why do you like to work in slaughterhouse?”
He paused considering her age, spoke anyway, “I like the lights when they leave the animal.”
“Why are you smiling at me?”
Overhead, black hawk helicopting angels land on jungle field—lights, holocaust red and steady near the front wheels—the eyes. Wind whispers a secret to the girl.
“Do not be afraid. Many children will lose all freedom beginning this day, in this town. No one will play freely. Mothers will call them in before the sun begins to set. The minds of your generation, the children of your generation will turn from play and conversation to devices and whirling beeping noises. Legend of Zelda. Pac-Man Fever. Nintendo Switch. Dungeons & Dragons. People will show pictures of what they had for dinner and cut people apart with computers. Do not be afraid. You are coming to safety with me.”
To bury myself in spite and spit, letting that boyhood bully have his way. Tim covers my face in his oozing schnoozle. Carhartt work boot plants hate between my ribs. I cough against gobs of him. Screaming impossible. Mouth tightly closed. He drains into my nose at a snail’s creep, then a rush into my throat. I taste him, finally yelling out to God. There is no one in this group of wanton kids to stop him. Nothing happens. Tim kicks me in the side. I can’t remember what I did. This was the story of my life. The visitor told me this would happen again, someone else in my place. Screams just as piercing. Only I would cry.
The house we lived in stood on a tiny knoll surrounded by unkempt alley ways, a neighboring magnolia, my Jacob’s ladder, and in time my father built a Ham Radio tower eighty feet into the air behind the utility shack. Into the attached garage, he escaped with the equipment. Next door, he condoned the business carried out in his absence. It was a lonely time. I sought many hours awake alone, time awake with others too much to bear, and always with a book in an attic next to a frigid AC unit running all year long. Frank Herbert, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, The Films of Bela Lugosi — you get the picture.
Shortly before dawn I come down for water, carpeted stairs creak, afraid of every one step — my mother could come running and louder than me, shouting I would wake my father, even a child knew that was insane — and at four steps, all four feet failed me I fell.
A voice caught me flying, arresting gravity in his grip.
“You are looking for someone to see you and hold you — you don’t want to die, you just don’t want to live like this anymore, right?”
I didn’t know how to feel about he said, the man in the black fire. He wasn’t speaking. I heard him behind burning eyebrows.
“There is only one way. Treat yourself as a person who deserves the love you want. Don’t wait to be a better boy before you take this chance. Let go. Let be. And someday leave your son alone, he will yell for help as you do. Don’t rub eggshells and coffee grounds on that crop to make yourself a bigger man, to make you seem stronger. Leave him to see your faults as perfectly as he does. Let things be. Do not be afraid.”
I am in my bed with a twinkling water, with that the smoke fire absorb into his person, and he folds in on himself into winking light. Gone.
What’s more important? Having a bottom line, an answer to all and everything, or your life? The Hebrews called this question, our stargazing away from the center, a primal curse, something we might call up as the debate of the chicken and the egg. The boy left his mother in a state, unable to weather her foolishness at the steps on the stairs. They were pretty things, weren’t they? Screaming invalid and a thirteen year old doctor. The boy hungered for true bread. True, it was the day of the Lord’s death, and time for prayer.
Today no one came. The boy thought, they’ve all pulled a Simon Peter and denied him all over again. Without footsteps, without sound, a flutter and a hollow.
He can’t say who he was. This one never met a stranger. This one handles black machinery, feathered and dusty, a clawed red-eyed embrace, and this man comes in a grey striped suit something interested, saying, “Be still and know I am your friend.”
The child is safe, yet freezes unsure, “What’s that book in your hand? Can I have it?”
The book Ulysses, by James Joyce, he took, flipped to its tattered first page, read Introibo ad altare Dei, “I will go up to the altar of the Lord,” underlined in lemon green highlights that turned purple under the focused beams of the winged moth cascade on the Good Friday altar of St. Raphael Archangel tumbledown shack chapel—Raphael the healer.
“It’s yours. When I’m finished.”
The boy sat smiling next to his friend, closing his eyes. Indrid Cold read his mind. The visitor left, the ragamuffin book disappeared, the child scampered to the vestibule through the rudimentary nave of the West Virginia Catholic backwoods shack, past the font.
The kid knew where the priest kept the muscatel.
He drank very slowly, and from then, began by indirections to find a new home out.
Manny Grimaldi is a writer and editor living far to the west of Appalachia in Derby City, Louisville. He edits Yearling, a Poetry Journal for Working Writers, and has a forthcoming book with Whiskey City Press in the coming year. Publications include Crossroads Literary, Disturb the Universe, and Moss Puppy magazines, Pegasus journal for Kentucky State Poetry Society, Jerry Jazz Magazine, and Club Plum.
.png)
