GOT TO BE THE GOING
Guest Editorial by G.W. Cox

When you were singing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, on a 500-mile jaunt to a cottage up country thick with mosquitoes and the sweet, saliva-drying stink of woods and its girdling humus, it seemed forever to that land of A&Ws. You waited though, past all those Dairy Queens, Burma Shaves, spuming toilets at gas station pit stops until you could wear the white moustache of the Guinness of root beer on tap.

In the back seat Bart and Lisa duel. "Are we there yet?" "Are we there yet?"

Under the one-lane bridge over the channel between Little Grand and Big Grand, you hook a foot-long bass. On the bank the hook falls from the bass's mouth and you hook a finger under a gill, then the hook hooks your foot.

You have to get that fish to the stringer at the dock, because it can't die before the cleaning shed ritual when it will be decapitated and gutted.

When you hop up to the hot tarry road, a couple stops their Rambler, blocking you. There's a fish in one hand, a pole in the other, the line to the hook biting for a better foothold. They ask, "Where did you get that fish?"

After you tell them, they ask, "On what?"

You wobble, blink tears and look toward the cottage and say, "On the hook that's stuck in my foot."

You wish the couple away, head for the white and green cottage. The grass, still dewy, cools the massive insult to your sole. You pop your eyes heavenward. Are you there yet?

Harry Chapin sings, "It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good."

Later, much later, it's not the going or the getting but the leaving. It's leaving the chain nine miles long. It's leaving that woman with the tall hair. It's fleeing the one in the leopard skin suit and the granite fridge. It's the leaving of the seduction and the seduction of leaving.

The old coot in the white suit and ribbon tie clears his throat with a gurgle that makes you forget breakfast. "When you are traveling, you are pure energy. You are two-dimensional, suspended on a line between two points."

In J.G. Ballard's unidentified space station, astronauts land on a planetoid, an empty, small terminal. It's described to be an airport. But as they explore, each concourse leads to another concourse. The space station has to be larger than what they observed on landing, concourse unrolling to another concourse. Its dimensions are infinite. This never-ending terminal may be what the astronauts think is heaven. Tell them it's not the getting there that's good.

"Heaven is what you think it is, where you want to go," the old coot says, huffing through his pipe. His jowls shake. "So if you think you're going to hell, that's where you'll go." He coughs up gravel, or chuckles. Are we there yet?

Do you really want to be there now, that final there? It might be the end.

© G.W. Cox 2005

Late of the fourth estate, Jerry Cox now submits and is accepted or rejected—the story of his life, an ongoing fiction not to be missed or messed with.

NOTE 2024:

Congratulations to 2004 Fiction Contest winners: Rusty Barnes, Richard Madelin and Kathy Fish published in this issue. Many thanks to judges Tom Saunders and GSG staff members Bob Arter, Gabriel Orgrease and Jonathan Redhorse.

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