Jerry Porter

Part One

Jerry Porter had the biggest hands Wallace had ever seen. They were great neighborhoods of flesh and bone, large enough it almost seemed, to be considered geographic regions. A pair of tin snips in one of his massive hands looked more like a pair of tweezers. Those huge hands hung at the end of four-foot long arms, and were apparently the ballast that pulled the tall man's shoulders downward toward the center of the earth. From the waist up he looked like a slumped fireplug. Couple that with his laser-straight, lifeless, shoulder length hair, and you would have an odd looking man. But he was not just odd looking; and Jerry appropriately surrounded himself with a foolhardy coterie of complementing odd people, people like Jim, and Meatball, and Hunt, and Wallace.

Jerry's last name is used here without fear of recrimination. The law says a dead person cannot be libeled; and although Wallace never received word of his death, to think Jerry still alive would be foolish. If still living he would be in his early eighties today; and it is true, as you will read, that in life he had been as tough -- he was actually bullet proof -- as he was lucky. Still, it would baffle even the Creator, were He to receive word that Jerry Porter yet lives. No one can be that tough and lucky. Can he?

Jerry ran his siding subcontractor operation from inside a big van, big like the Snap-On tool merchants use. It was usually in good running condition, and most of the time there were four tires on the dual-wheel rear axle; but there was that one harrowing trip across the Huey Long bridge in New Orleans. When it still spanned the river, that bridge was a passage so narrow that truck drivers would see their side mirrors demolished by those of the trucks coming at them in the opposite direction. And a breakdown on that bridge would be a disaster. On that night Jerry and Jim had driven from Jackson, MS, to New Orleans for the singular purpose of fetching a special load of steel siding. Amidst bumper to bumper traffic at forty-five miles an hour, one of the four rear tires blew out, just as the big van passed the point of no return. There could be no reversing course on the Huey Long bridge.

There was no spare tire onboard, and there was a good reason for the blowout. What was inside the truck were too many tons of steel siding crammed into a vehicle built for a lot less. And suddenly all that weight had a lot less support for any hopeful dash across the span, high above the river. But as good luck led or followed Jerry Porter everywhere, that night it saw him safely across the Father of Waters.

The step van was a capacious enough truck for saw-horses and ladders and scaffold planks and saws and hammers and drills, and boxes and boxes of steel or aluminum or vinyl siding, whatever the next job called for. And in amongst all that stuff Jerry’s ragtag crew would nestle themselves in as best they could, to nurse hangovers and attempt to sleep on the way to the next job. They were itinerants, and much of their traveling was done at night. Jerry paid five dollars an hour, and on some days his men were grossly overpaid. For Wallace the low pay made it hard to get ahead, especially with the outrageous prices of whisky and Marlboros and honey buns.

While on the road a near perpetual joint of inferior grade marijuana would go round and round inside the van, and Jerry, who did most of the driving and who did not smoke tobacco, would on occasion take one or two hits, but no more. It was never impairment that bothered Jerry Porter, as his active consumption of copious amounts of Budweiser attested. No, his sparse cannabis consumption was only in deference to his physical condition, the innards of which contained but a single lung. Jerry had been born with two lungs, but that was a condition he would one day violently alter.

He was the sole proprietor of a siding installation company that was really just a gang of scofflaws, a cadre of drunkards and dope heads who were anointed with the misfortunate freedom to go forth and ruin their lives as best they could; and in the effort they were assiduous.

Somehow, under the leadership of the man with big hands, houses and barns across Mississippi would receive makeovers in the way of new siding and replacement windows. The crew nailed on siding from Picayune to Aberdeen, Pontotoc to Lucedale; they camped on riverbanks and caught catfish by the light of burning tires. And they worked like hell and drank with a vengeance. But let us return to the solitary lung.

After being discharged from the U.S.Navy in the mid-60's, Jerry had meandered his way into a chasm of depression, an unbearable state of emotional affliction, the remedy for which he ultimately concluded could only come with death. Introspection does, after all, have its limits; and Jerry had made his decision. Being a little knock-kneed, his feet always pointed straight ahead, and it was in that direction that on a sunny, summer afternoon he entered a south Mississippi pine thicket just beyond the home where he resided unhappily with his aged parents. There in the thicket he sat down to die.

Having come up in a more patriotic era, Jerry was well versed in the pledge of allegiance to the flag, and with his schoolmates he would daily and dutifully place his right hand over his left breast, and recite the now almost forgotten covenant. This explains why Jerry Porter had no left lung. On the day he chose to die he went into the woods and took a seat in the crisp, brown needles, with his back against a pine tree. There he placed the muzzle of his shotgun against that same left breast, and with his free orangutan arm he stretched out and pushed the trigger. The resulting explosion sent the fluffy, spongy remnants of his lung spraying out into the soundless expanse of the scraggly trees and the lime-green bramble in which he sat. Stunned, but immediately realizing he was not dead, and, having been struck not only by a fast moving cluster of little lead balls, but a moment of clarity as well, Jerry had a change of heart, if not lung. He forthrightly decided that, gloomy as life may have been before, he was willing to give it another go.

Many a bridge jumper has arrived at that very sentiment, usually about halfway to the water; but unlike the bloody man poised against a tree, the jumpers always find it impossible to reverse their flight and get back up on the bridge. Sensing the need to act quickly, he adroitly stuffed his jacket into the now semi-empty cavern of his torso, thereby stemming a gush of blood that seemed over-eager to get free of the constraints of its mangled veins and arteries. He then arose and, leaving his not-so-trusty firearm behind, Jerry staggered back to the humble abode of his mortified mother and father. An ambulance was summoned that would provide him an uneventful trip to a hospital, somewhere beyond the Loblolly pines and the ticks and his wet, red carpet of dead pine needles. The reason Jerry would later give for surviving the gunshot was, in his own mush-mumbling cadence, "You know, we always said the pledge with our hand over our heart like this," he gestured. "I never knew my heart was in the middle."