I.
He read about the story of a ping-pong ball
floating from his childhood haunt along
the Labe River, starting from the country’s
highest waterfall, with nothing but a happy
wolf emoticon; the thrower hitch-hiked home
to Nymburk and waited with some buddies
at the riverbank, camping countless days
until—hurrah!—the ping-pong ball passed by.
“That’s the ticket,” the old man said to no one
in his two-room flat, gifted by the brewery he’d
labored at, many moons and tacit howls ago.
He walked around the cobbled town to find
his measure of the same experiment, if not
a ping-pong ball or any scrawl of an emoticon;
an ‘Antik’ store had barrels in the back—relics
from the brewery’s storied past—and, deaf
to queries how he’d use it, the man paid twice
the quoted price, asking if they’d lacquer it a bit.
“Ready in the morning,” lending time to think.
That done, he hooked a trailer to his Trabant
and let them help him lift the barrel up and in.
One joked he’d start a brewery, another laughed
as the old man lowered eyes beneath his cap.
He’d tossed some pillows in the trunk, a bag
of apples, half-a-pack of cigarettes, a tepid
canister of tea to ride the shotgun seat, like no
one else had warmed before—well, no one in the
past ten years, when the last of brewers in his
pension class had asked his help to pass away:
“Just drive me to Macocha Gorge,” a silent
hundred miles from Nymburk and its reach.
That was not our hero’s inspiration for today.
II.
He thought about his childhood as he drove,
shifting when the hills necessitated curves,
pulling off the road to urinate, then have
a smoke while checking bungee cords; all
the rusted corners of the trailer seemed to say:
“Don’t know what we’re doing, but it’s good
to be outside again,” as opposed to gathering
dust in the darkness of a cinderblock garage.
That was also gifted by the brewery, as long
as he’d have nothing tracing him to Charter 77.
He shook that notion from his head, a time
for all intents and purposes was dead, if
always hovering above the circumstance of
guys like him: compliant, shy, mostly thin,
devoid of family one way or another—“to each
his own” a phrase he all-too-often muttered,
sometimes at the pub when banter turned
its eye on him, fencing in his mug, as if a mate.
“That right there,” he’d hear them contemplate,
“speaks volumes”, an unassuming, get-me-to-
the-finish-line: this shift, this downtime
with the boys, this daily grind, this lack of
anyone to talk to, or rather, anything to say…
He dove back into why that ping-pong story
made his day—not the barrel plan, per se,
but what it meant to float from one source
to another, like a baby salmon in the eddies
wondering what salt tastes like, with zero
premonition that the fresh would lure it back;
the plastic ball itself would never care, but the
tosser was the reason he was driving there.
III.
That the day was Tuesday, in October, meant
the traffic up the mountain was a smattering
of spirits taking cover underneath the tree line.
He had the marshy apex largely to himself,
his childhood self as well; he parked the Trabant
near an open bunker, faithful all these years,
and walked the solemn ground imagining his
grandma’s tears when the grandpa he had
never met went off to fight against the Munich
Pact, “rest assured I’m coming back,” and maybe
eighty years would pass before a promise kept.
That would be the best act on this Lear-like
stage, even if no witnesses were there to see.
He shambled now in what he planned to do,
the barrel, like a Saint Bernard, waiting patiently
to be unleashed; he took a penknife to an apple
and chewed the next few minutes through,
wishing this would be the way the world could
tuck into a ping-pong ball and let the volley
carry on, equal to the fate of one who claims a
win and one who has to lose, satisfying rules.
“That’s the difference between play, as kids
grow up and feel a need to gamble life away.”
The wind was both behind that thought
and pushing it along, not to let it linger, not to
orchestrate the day with any untoward force.
IV.
He’d always seen with perfect sight, if cataracts
were niggling at the edges of his age; this
morning’s fog had lifted, though mists atop
the mountain could make a soul appear to cry.
No one was around, however, to cover up or
compare—“you also came for the view? What?
This barrel is… just here for the company”—
or some such artifice, rehearsed to no avail.
That walk-through served to frame the rest
of day (or days, as unasked angels might allow).
He pried the barrel’s lid and put the pillows in,
then the bag of apples; he left the cigarettes
on the Trabant seat but opened up the glove
compartment for a talisman from 1953: an owl
of lindenwood, hollowed out to make a whistle
if lips were pursed just so, given by his grandma
in case his wanders blurred the journey home.
That’d happened once or twice in passing
years, if no one heard or could respond in kind,
not that people were unkind, only disengaged.
He tucked it with the pillows and rolled on to
the task at hand; the depth above the waterfall
was just enough to keep the bark afloat, and
added weight might bottom out the scheme;
still, he closed the lid and tensed to blindly see.
Indeed, the barrel found the gap of gravity
and plunged just like that ping-pong ball. Then,
the man drove back to Nymburk to await its fate.
“That’s the way this year should end,” he said.
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