Sunday Discount at the Texas Car Wash
The wonder of the spinning brushes,
the dripping strips of rag, the puddles
bigger than any she’s stomped in
makes our four-year old daughter giddy.
The television by the cashier plays Olympic
beach volleyball, sand trucked into the stadium
because there are no beaches in London,
I suppose, the players tan and hard
and hardly dressed, women in bikinis
that make me want to watch but I look
away because my daughter is eyeing
the bloody images on the racks of Christian t-shirts,
My God is Tougher than Nails reads one,
My Lifeguard Walks on Water declares another.
Now it’s white-water rafting on the screen,
a man-made river winding its ragged
way in a different English stadium, so much
rough water it’s staggering and the little kayak
paddled by the frail human seems doomed.
Two white women in plastic chairs are chatting
about Gallagher, yes, the comic, and how
funny he was and where is he now and could
she find him on Netflix and she’d get her daughter
to do that, find him, he was so funny, so messy,
his exploding cantaloupe and watermelons.
The bill is two dollars less than I expected,
a Sunday discount, and I watch
the brown skinned men and women
dry my car, spritz it with cleaner and scent,
and wonder where God really is in all of this:
the shore on the gymnasium floor, the white ball
in the air, the women’s stoney thighs,
the spray of the water behind the oversized
windows by the rack of hanging deodorizers,
the gleam of the automobile paint, black and white
and silver and blue, the wasted juicy chunks
of perfectly good fruit, the red envelopes
with the DVDs enclosed, the common miracle
of delivered mail, bills and love letters alike,
our daughter’s tinkling laughter as she balances
on the short cement wall that separates
the paltry garden of meager green bushes
and pinkish mulch from the parking lot,
the smiling young man in the water-logged shirt
who asks me to tell him if he did a good job
and tells me to come again as I sit in the dustless,
dirtless, de-bird-shitted car, another miracle,
and tell him he did a great job and hand him
what tip I had calculated, the singles my wife
and I had scrounged up, our lives so cashless now,
not out of poverty but out of reliance on plastic,
the magic card we swipe and, whoosh, like a genie,
whatever we want is granted and already seems ours.
John A. McDermott is a native of Madison, Wisconsin. He now lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, with his wife and daughter. His poems have recently appeared in Prime Number and Valparaiso Poetry Review.
Read more of McDermott’s work here.
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