I was with Curtis at High on Rose
on a stormy afternoon.
We were on maybe our fourth pitcher,
maybe our fifth.
“Holy shit!” Curtis said,
pointing out the window.
“That car just fell through the road!”
“You’re drunk,” I said.
“Yes, but that car still fell through the road.”
I swiveled and saw a small foreign number
with its left front tire
swallowed by the street.
“Well, shit,” I said.
Of course we went outside.
Maybe we went to help, maybe to gawk,
but there we were.
A woman sat behind the wheel.
She might have been thirty,
a little chubby, a lot pissed.
“My fucking car fell through the road,”
she said.
“That’s what I told my friend,”
Curtis answered.
“He didn’t believe me.”
“Well, let’s fix this.” I said,
embarrassed at being a nonbeliever.
We made the chubby woman
get out of the car.
She wore jeans and a white cotton shirt
that quickly became transparent
with the rain. Nothing underneath.
That didn’t bother her
and it didn’t bother us.
Curtis and I crouched down
and put our backs into it.
In no time at all, the car was free.
The chubby woman in the transparent shirt
said “Thanks” and drove away.
“That was a hell of a thing,” Curtis said.
“A hell of a thing,” I echoed.
We went back inside
and finished our fourth pitcher,
or maybe our fifth.
Then I guess we had one more.
Some days are for peaceful drinking
and some days are for cars
falling through the road
in front in the bar.
This was that first kind of day
until it became the second.
The hole is long since filled
and Curtis is recently dead.
That’s the whole story, but I wonder
sometimes if the woman told it
over the years, and if she did,
what she had to say about us,
her wet shirt,
and the providence of chance.
Maybe we became heroes
to people we never knew,
our story, a legend.
Maybe we were just
a couple of drunks
Jeff Weddle is the Alabama Beat Poet Laureate (2024-2026). His latest book is Letter to Xhevdet Bajraj (Uncollected Press, 2025). His work has appeared in Albanian and Spanish translation
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