July 2019 – Picking Up Roots

A Muse

The gun held to his head was his own. The desperate face in the mirror also belonged to him. The hand holding the gun was his as well. It hadn’t been a good day. Again.

He’d tried again to put it all into words, to make her understand how much he needed her. Again he’d failed, and she stayed away. Was she afraid of him

Sweat beaded his pale forehead as it had as he strained to communicate with her in the half-light of dawn. It was now mid-day and he wondered if the panicked, frantic look in the eyes staring back at him from the mirror had been there this morning? Maybe that’s why she stayed away.

She would come and go. Flitting in on a breeze, carrying newfound energy, hope and inspiration and then disappearing just as fast on the next wind.

He never knew she was gone until the morning after she left. Her departure always sent him reeling to the point where he had to call out of work the first day she was gone he was so sick with anxiety.

After she left he would get up early, hoping to find her waiting for him at the table. Each day eroded his hope until it was replaced by doubt, fear, and worry that she would never return.

When he could smell the desperation on himself, she would reappear, and, if he was lucky, stay for two days before riding back out on the wind.

But now he couldn’t take it anymore. The hunger that gnawed at his insides, causing the desperate stink, was too much. The years had worn him too thin, so he had gone for his gun for once feeling certain about his direction.

Convinced she’d deserted him and prepared to face down his failure his finger closed in on the trigger. His hand trembled and his body shook. He was desperate to be free of her whimsy.

But still he wondered if she might come back. He paused. A bead of sweat descended between his eyes, which crossed as they watched it descend to the tip of his nose.

He watched as the bead dangled on the tip, a wavering bubble. Without sensing it, he lowered the gun to his side.

The plop of the bead of sweat landing on the countertop broke the silence. The sound of the gun going off, destroying the mirror, shattered it. He snapped back into focus.

He couldn’t remember who had made the quote about introducing a gun into a story and if you did so, it had to go off. Well, his had gone off, maybe that was progress.

He looked at himself in the shards of remaining mirror and shrugged at the broken image. He put the gun under the sink and went downstairs to see if she had returned.

Catch

He waited for the explosion of familiar pain to shoot from his elbow down to his fingertips causing them to tingle. The ball arched through the shadows back through the sun and into his glove with the satisfying thwack of leather on leather. He made the familiar transfer from glove to throwing hand, brought his arm back and sent the ball on a tight line back to the target and waited for the pain. Still, it did not come.

It had been four years, maybe five, since he had picked up a ball or put on his glove. He’d dreamed of throwing, dreamed of playing, but hadn’t ever found a partner, or the courage to find a league of some sort.

He loved the game, would have played it any form; softball, wiffle ball, stick ball, it wouldn’t have mattered, he took so much joy from playing.

He’d never been good, but that didn’t matter now. The motion felt natural. It felt right. It felt like a piece of him that had been missing. It wasn’t a behavior or an action he needed to relearn. Every time the ball hit his glove, it was in his hand in an instant, his fingers, crossing the red laces, arm back, body moving forward, fingertips giving the leather a last push as the ball spun towards its recipient.

They moved back, testing their older bodies, pushing arms that had lain dormant for years. They smiled at one another, at the easy camaraderie, at the familiar ebb and flow as the ball made its way through the air. Everything disappeared around them and it was just the sound of leather on leather.

When they came together they spoke of the pain.

“It doesn’t feel bad at all,” he’d said.

“Wait until tomorrow,” he answered.

Going West

The sun was a burnt orange hint on the horizon as the crows screeched from the trees. To the east the mountain loomed an imposing black. I walked hands in pockets dodging white stains of excrement from the birds, wondering when the harbingers of ill times would shit on me.

It was cold; the type of cold that bit through the layers and found its home deep within the bones. I relished it and despised myself for needing it.

I knew she hated it. She pretended to tolerate it, but I knew. She would tell everyone I had dragged her over here against her will with promises of mild temperatures and no snow, but the reality was she was desperate to join me. She needed me and the security I could provide.

Put another way, she needed my money. She wasn’t broke by any stretch of the imagination, but when I’d met her in the bar in Boise, she’d been on her last legs. Down to the last couple of free drinks her smile would buy and three days short of the start of the month and the next allowance payment from home.

I should have known better then – I do now – but I was raw in the moment. I was coming off the death of my dreams: it was the end of a ten-year marriage, and a fifteen-year career, both ended by a fifty-something with an axe to grind and great legs. I was empty and looking for something I couldn’t put my finger on until she smiled at me.

She had emerald eyes that looked right through you, but caught enough to hold your attention, even as hers drifted. Her smile brought you in and had you feeling like you were all she needed, despite her wandering eyes. She was a dream.

I told her I was easing my way west, looking to end up in Alaska. She said that sounded nice and I should tell her over a drink, so I bought her a drink and told her.

That was on Monday. I saw her at the bar Tuesday and Wednesday, but she was dancing with other partners. I felt the old jealous rage rise up in me.

She came to me on Thursday. Her allowance had come through and she’d paid off most of the debts her smile couldn’t cover, and was after another drink, wanted to hear more about my trip west.

I bought her a drink and I told her, and by the time I was on the train Monday morning, heading west to Oregon, she was sitting next to me, staring out the window taking it all in.

Every rotation of the train’s wheels brought each of us further west than we’d ever been. We loved it, ate it up, as we told each other more about what we were hoping to find. Her youth energized me. I don’t know what I did for her. We were both young enough to mistake this lust for love.

I’d like to say we were able to ride the wings of lust, or love, for a year or two, but we lasted three months before an unseasonable snow rolled through Portland in mid-December. This was on the heels of the coldest November in the last 50 years.

The bloom fell off the rose then and she couldn’t keep her mouth shut about how I’d lied to her about what it was going to be like. She couldn’t help but nag at me about it. I see that now, that she couldn’t help it.

It got to be like the sound of these damn crows: a piercing screech, echoing about my head as it echoed about the buildings. It hurt, and I had to stop it.

You know what does warm me: that all these big cities have dirty rivers running through them where you can dump stuff you don’t want. So it goes with dreams.