A Song on the Second

I have this song, this September second song.  And it’s about drinking and a man who chases his own death and I listen to it on this day, this September second, every year and one week later as well. This year, those are consecutive Tuesdays with the second marking the funeral, the ashes in the urn. I put this song on and I feel the funeral, the speed and the breadth of his life. And I have to think about the chaos that Niall’s frustration left on the hillside that September 2nd.

One of Sasha’s new sandals was on the ground.   Glass seemed to have been sprayed against the ground, like god had cracked the air above the accident with a hammer. His life, in pieces and shards was out there, baking in the desert heat.  There was a speaker cover, a CD deck, yards of plastic, some gum wrappers, one note in Niall’s handwriting and a wide path where there had just been wild Manzanita shrubs.  Oh yeah. And the headlight. It was so strange how it had detached from the car and come to rest aloft, 20 feet from the ground, in some tree illuminating nothing but pointing toward the curvy highway.  A week later, we could still smell the blood. That was him, his legacy, his leftovers.

We left other stuff.  People put up two rough wooden crosses painted sloppy white, one for Niall and one for the dead friend, Matt. Sasha walked with a broken body and a broken mind, but she lived, so she didn’t get a cross, but someone left a note. Another someone brought a picture of her and one of the deceased and left it sitting treacherously out there in the wind, pinned to a cross.  We left candles that faded in the sun and cards and poems and a silk screen tshirt that said “FRIENDS OF NIALL.”  We left beer bottles, a plastic rosary, cigarette butts and a baggie for other people’s pictures. We left a ceramic dish painted with a small snowman, like maybe Niall was missing his Irish Christmas.  And the sun bleached it all.

We populated the gravel and earth and stones with our grievances, our prayers and our wishes.  We walked among the wreckage and wondered if we could reconstruct it, take our friends back from the hillside that now owned them. We went in droves and pairs because Niall was everyone’s legend.  Everyone had a bit of his story, even while he was alive. He was a story, and he was a restless man, a distraction, a fiasco.

There was a 9 year old boy who was looking elsewhere when Niall actually died. A father and son had seen something of the wreck as they came up the hill—a car on its top, one headlight working and upside down—and stopped to see what happened.   Without another option, the father left his son with the dying Sasha and went to town.  I wonder about that boy, in pitch mountain darkness, the tender smell of destruction all around him.  I wonder if Niall knew a child could hear him die. I wonder if he was too drunk to hear the kid,  And I wonder if that kid took something from the wreck.  He would have earned it, of course, waiting with the barely living Sasha.  But maybe the night was enough for him. Maybe he left it all behind and just took the memory.

I took glass, a few small pieces of that peculiar car window glass.  I would drive out there, as drunk as he probably was that night, sit at that site and ask Niall to talk to me.  The wind answered and once, I watched a whole lightening storm cross the valley below and I was sure he was smiling at this.  And I took the pieces of glass and have brought them along with me for the 9 years between that week and this.  The shards of glass remain solid, flecked with dirt and who knows what, reminding me that everything has a duration.