We Agreed to Meet Just Here
by Scott Blackwood
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If you had lived long on our street, and drunk late at our parties, you would know that before retiring and moving to Texas, Odie Dodd had been a government physician in Georgetown, Guyana. Squawking through the hole in his throat where his larynx had been before the cancer, Odie would have told how Jim Jones had asked him to the People's Temple to vaccinate the children. How malaria, cholera, bacterial meningitis slept in the jungle underbrush. How his truck had overheated along the rutted jungle road and he'd arrived a half-day late. How he was the first to find the bodies, though. Families. Limbs intertwined. Mothers sprawled over children as if sheltering them from some imminent hardship. Scattered on the dirt around them, Dixie cups that had held the grape punch and cyanide. And already, of course, the smell. The uninterrupted whine of insects. At the party, Odie's hand would flatten his silver comb-over, and he'd say, with his typical British understatement, that he hadn’t known where he was for a time. That he'd wandered outside the compound and crouched in the shade of the jungle, the insect whine growing louder. In his daze, he glanced up into the canopy and for a moment it seemed it would descend on him. His scalp prickled. He called out. The feeling, he would say, was as in a dream when you know a terrible thing is about to happen but you are helpless to prevent it. But of course the thing had already happened. And then, if Odie had sipped enough scotch, and his wife Ruth had not yet touched his elbow to leave, he would have pulled you aside and asked the question he always asked of us: why was he spared? Later it would occur to you, as it did to Dennis, that Odie had not been spared. And sometimes, when you are at the edge of sleep, witnessing calamities befall your children or your own can’t-find-the-brake veering into oncoming traffic, Odie’s fleshy hole appears.

From the first chapter of We Agreed to Meet Just Here by Scott Blackwood

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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