Kingdom
Come
by Ron Gibson, Jr.
Rita was summer.
She wasn’t sunny, bright, or anything nostalgic
like that. It just so happens my girlfriends began
and ended with the seasons. It wasn’t something
I planned. In the end it always just worked out that
way. It was as if I were repeating an ancient, internal
cycle inherited from some farmer ancestor, except
I substituted girls for crops. So, as you can imagine,
I’ve been cited for being an irresponsible male
with a fuck-‘em-and-leave-‘em attitude.
People just don’t understand; when my body said
plant rhubarb, I accidentally planted Rita.
She would call me up late after work,
if her parents went out to the casino on the Indian
reservation to get drunk and lose money, and ask me
over. More times than not, no matter how tired I was,
I would oblige. You could say it was the farmer’s
constitution toward hard work in me, but I suppose
you wouldn’t.
Rita lived in a trailer park called
The Pines. It was a scuzzy little piece of oil-contaminated
land on the edge of town, next to the railroad tracks.
The owner planted a six foot hedge made up of artificial
Christmas trees in the front of the trailer park to
keep the allusion of pines and to hide the eyesore
from bystanders. It fit in perfectly with the overall
theme of cheap and shitty.
Every time I made the turn from the
street, driving past the false façade, the
trailer park would open before me like a piece of
rotting fruit. My headlights would sweep across assorted
garbage, rusted car carcasses, half-starved cats and
dogs; my shocks taking a beating from rolling up and
down two foot potholes and mud puddles, until my beams
caught on The King.
Nobody knew his real name, age, or anything
about him. All anyone knew was that The King looked
like he was ready to pop with gout. He would seemingly
sit all day and night on his rain-warped front porch,
that sagged under his weight, silently watching everybody
come and go.
When I would reach Rita’s trailer;
her silhouette standing in the doorway like a sexy
photographic negative, I couldn’t shake the thought
of The King’s dark pig eyes shrinking under my
headlights back into his pie face. It was like he
had an omnipresence over the entire trailer park,
even though he would never leave his one spot. Sometimes
it took hours of watching tv or Rita practicing her
striptease to upbeat Madonna tunes – (she planned
on stripping at Déjà Vu when she turned
eighteen) – before I was able to relax, forget
The King, and perform the nightly deeds.
When I would leave, I would be sure
to always honk and flip off The King just because
of the mental disturbance his presence caused me.
But he never budged or said a bad word in response.
He just silently watched me go, as if to say, "I’ll
be here when you come back. I’m The King. Get
used to it."
But I never did get used to it. Every
time Rita’s parents got another paycheck to handover
to the Indians and I was summoned over, those dark
eyes were there to greet me. Rita began to think I
had another girl or was suffering from the beginning
stages of some sexual dysfunction. But there was no
other girl; summer wasn’t due to end for another
month. And normally my libido was like an attack dog;
it raged on command.
The next month crawled along like it
would never end. Rita only called me over twice, but
those two times were tedious as funerals. She sat
me down to read excerpts from her diary about how
she hated her parents, the trailer park, life, and
basically me for not treating her right or desiring
her enough. Typical teenage ramblings. She cried long
enough to where The King left my brain, again, and
I fucked her back to her false sense of happiness.
The days were growing shorter and you
could feel the change beginning to take root in the
air. The sunset was cresting over the horizon, down
into the valley, like a final napalm wave, when Rita
called. I knew it would be the last time I would see
her, but I never let on.
I pulled into The Pines expecting The
King to once again rain on my parade, but he was nowhere
to be seen. Only his bent, metal chair sat empty like
a monument.
Without the disturbance of The King,
Rita didn’t know what had gotten into me. She
acted as if my revived libido was the confirmation
of her self-worth; that she was an empty shell until
I fulfilled her. I wanted to say, "You’ll
always be empty and alone, just like me and everyone
else forever on," but I didn’t have the
heart.
We laid there, sharing dying moments,
when we noticed red lights strobing against her curtained
window. She peeked out, blanket wrapped around her,
and said that there was a fire engine and an ambulance
outside.
We both got dressed and joined the rest
of the trailer park residents. They all had come out
of their foil-covered-windowed trailers, reeking of
meth and ganja, and stood around the flashing lights
in the night.
Besides the fire engine’s motor
continually sighing, the crowd mumbled and whispered
amongst itself like a secretive, incestuous family
reunion. It wasn’t until Rita inquired that we
were let in on the gossip.
Apparently The King died on the toilet,
reading the National Enquirer. The fire engine had
to use the jaws of life to pry open the corner of
the trailer and it supposedly took ten men to strap
his dead body to two stretchers, side by side.
Even as the ambulance lumbered away,
backend bottoming out, sparking on concrete, everyone
stood motionless. It didn’t seem to be a sadness,
more than the shock of losing what was familiar that
had kept them gathered outside. The King was dead,
and I could feel fall seeping into the night, calling
me back to plant another seed in another field for
another season. I whispered a shoddy excuse to Rita,
that her parents may soon return from the casino,
and left her standing there.
During my last look back in the rearview
mirror at the gathered residents of The Pines, I knew
I wasn’t the only one that wondered if the EMT’s
wiped The King’s ass before they hauled him away.
We weren’t to blame; we were all just human.
