Randall Wheatley

Lyrics

Eight years after my cannibal conversion to Christ in an empty lot by the Econo-Mart my Father is buying a 66 Plymouth Belvedere and he’s paying with the seventeen dollars and some cents from my bible even though the man says he can have it for free.
And in the driveway back home he is stuffing an assortment of clothes and appliances into the auto but not before removing the back seat and setting it on fire.
And Jenny toasted many marshmallows until the black smoke burned the back of her neck and oh she cried like Jimmie Swaggert on a Sunday till I put ranch dressing on the hurt and she rolled in the grass till she looked like salad.
And next day Dad drove off and parked that unsightly sedan right behind the Red Kettle.




And I used to go there with Vada and tell the waitress, “Make me a number two,” and Vada would laugh like a carpenter ant and say, “Who’s gonna clean it?” And don’t go there now because they won’t make you a number two or any other number cause it’s all boarded up.
And over in his no back seat car Dad lays top half and head in the trunk and bottom butt and legs in the front for three months and to communicate you’ve got to open the trunk and talk you looking down and him looking up and he’s got a little tv and a cat and a flashlight and someone said he cut a hole in the floor to do his business and that’s gonna hurt the re-sale.
And every time I inquire, “When you coming home?”
He says, “When they glue me together.”
And someone must’ve got the Elmers because that same night the day before Good Friday he drives two blocks and reverse accelerates at a substantial speed not too straight and slams that Plymouth through the dining side of the Dairy Queen and dies.


Not from the collision but rather the impeccable application of Newton’s first law manifest in Dad’s sudden stop trunk pop short flight cranial bop against the freezer of frozen treats.
And that was good Thursday.