Southern Legitimacy Statement: As far south of Kansas you can get before you get to Texas in the southwest corner of the state of Oklahoma there is a town with an Air Force Base and ten miles south of that Air Force Base is an eighty acre sandy place where my grandfather grew watermelons and black – eyed peas and as far south of my grandfather’s farm you can get before you get to Highway 19 is the place that created Kimberly Shaw who continuously resides a little south of sanity.
Booch
On your funeral slideshow there was a picture of you, Wes, and Rocky eating sandwiches while you rested your saddle-worn asses on a bench during that 4H Pony Express trip you guys took in 1990.
You were half smiling, half chewing like you knew someone was trying to take a picture and you just weren’t going to let them.
I’m certain I was somewhere pouting because I felt like you boys were always having more fun than me.
I focused so hard on trying not to sob uncontrollably in the back pew that I imagined Clint in the picture too. The boys of my childhood, I thought, and there are only one and a half of them left.
Clint’s memorial service was held in the same funeral home eleven years before yours and we buried him in the same cemetery as you after he died in a field beside a county road next to his overturned truck just like you.
Wes tried to take himself out with a .22 in twenty- twenty- two. He is doing fine now (maybe I dramatized the one and a half a little bit, maybe “fine” is not the correct terminology to describe my brother’s life either), but if the decision would have been his, he would have checked out of here before you.
The pieced together story of your death goes like this:
Your girlfriend was causing shit at the bar Friday night and you were speeding her and yourself away from town early Saturday morning when the law got after you.
Because of your rebellious nature and mechanically inclined mind, the governor of your vehicle was missing and you were able to kick your speed up to 140 miles per hour while engaging in your favorite post childhood game of chase and outrunning the law for like the hundredth time in your life.
After you hid your vehicle behind Buddy’s house you hid yourself inside Buddy’s house, pissing off the outmaneuvered cops, who eventually found your vehicle, skipped the formalities of a warrant and discovered three of the guns a felon like you is not supposed to have.
On those three guns they found the homemade silencers you spent two years in the pen for the last time you went, but still could not resist decorating your guns with, not because you hurt people, but because you generally enjoyed the freedom to do illegal shit.
A federal warrant for your arrest was issued early Sunday.
You could not wrap your mind around the thought of going back to the pen, so Sunday afternoon you got drunk and told some of your friends and your mom you loved them, and before anyone could stop you, you slipped away and drove two miles west.
You cut your wheels on purpose or ran off the road and overcorrected, no one really knows, but everyone has their own ideas about why you were ejected from your truck and experienced your last outrageous story no one gets to hear you tell out of that crooked grin or get irritated at you about because you are delaying the plot with way too many irrelevant details.
As I sat in a funeral home surrounded by a host of your friends who attended the enormous parties you hosted twenty years ago in fields of bermuda grass with your flat bed trailer band stands and wet tshirt contests, I decided you never felt the impact.
I decided Clint slid up on two wheels on one of those red and white Honda 200X three wheelers y’all drove before you were teenagers and caught you midair, told you time to get the hell out of here, and away on a wheelie you two went, the blond curls you wore long in the back flying in the wind.
You spent a week getting acclimated to that other realm and then y’all came back eight days later to sit up on that hexagon -shaped skylight at the funeral home to watch us gather to remember you. And while you two were having a good time kicking your feet, talking shit, and laughing, I was crying and asking myself why we have to keep coming back here to say goodbye
again
and again
and again.
I closed my eyes to counter the tears and there you were in my mind doing that little weight shift wiggle and grin, packing your lip with Copenhagen, twinkling those ornery blue eyes, and asking: “Awe hell Kim, tain’t that bad is it?”
Dear Booch,
I am mad at you for:
- living and dying the way you did.
I want to ask your forgiveness for:
- the time I tried to sling you off the tailgate of my blue long bed GMC because I was trying desperately to get the attention of the older, blonde haired, blue eyed cowboy I didn’t know.
- the time I forgot you had a trailer hitched to your truck and thought it would be funny to take off, hammering it into reverse and jackknifing your driver’s side.
I want to say thank you for:
- teaching me how to sneak liquor in on those FFA trips;
- the multitude of forgotten unforgettable parties you had;
- the times you drove me around and let me talk when I was too drunk to drive or talk;
- never taking advantage of me no matter what shape I showed up in;
- checking on me when I was a new mom and didn’t have a clue what I was doing;
- explaining, as you drifted in and out of consciousness on my couch from whatever hell you had put your body through, that by the time we hit this age, we all got something to deal with;
- that innate ability you had to just let people be people.
I want to let you know that:
- I miss your voice although I rarely talked to you.
Love, Kim
