Sometimes I can find the place fishing. It was easy to find it at the bottom of a bottle. Fishing doesn't make you wake up sad and paranoid and anxious. So, I stick to fishing, but it doesn't work as well as whiskey.
Fishing doesn't have the same power, but it doesn't leave me broken.
It sometimes seems like life is a test. Are you able to find the dark places you need? If not, you will be a failure. And no one likes a failure.
Sleep is nice if you can't remember your dreams. Sometimes, I get that break. Sometimes, I don't.
At the end of the day, we are only the safety we feel. We are the subconscious cocoon we create for ourselves. If you don't have one, make one. Try to avoid whiskey. It pays dividends you don't want.
Trust me.
"Sleep is nice if you can't remember your dreams."
ReplyDeleteThis exactly. And going back further, it's also nice when you can find it in the first place.
"It pays dividends you don't want."
So many things do. Nice piece, brother. Made me think. Which is what good writing does.
He came stumbling into the cabin with an armload of dry cordwood and dropped it clattering by the stove. Once he’d gone back to the porch and stomped the snow off his boots and shook out his coat, he came back to the stove and stacked the quartered birchwood neatly beside it and opened the stove and fed it a log.
ReplyDeleteShe sat silent in a rocker, not rocking, and watched him warm his hands. She tried but she could no longer read him, and he no longer looked at her. Silent fury and indifference and even shamed assent can seem like kin on some men's faces.
They stayed that way until the snow ceased falling and the clouds cleared like a true sign of some brighter yet short-lived day. Like a tide withdrawing before the towering wave. Like a dying man briefly lucid before the warrant of a promised end.
If an inanimate thing can be literal, the hourglass she cradled and prepared to upend was that.
“Give me an hour?” she said.
“Till?”
“Until you come after me.”
He finally squinted at her in the cold gloom of the cabin. She saw something behind his eyes, but it was fleeting. His quick glance at the corner where a double shotgun was propped betrayed one route of his thinking, but only one.
She knew she could try to blame the rotgut whiskey for her transgression the other night, but she also knew that was a falsehood. She’d wanted to lie with John Joe Grady, her good man’s only good friend. Her predation had been both hot and calculated, an urgent necessity. She knew if the circumstances could ever be rerun, she would not hesitate to do the same. It was something must have been in their stars, their bones. Their blood.
Outside, an ice-blue day was dying, the far white mountains golden-tipped and draped like pale giants by a work shirt sky. A robin’s egg dome.
“I don’t rightly know what you are,” he said to her.
“Who or what?”
“What. Deer or wolf. I caint tell.”
“You surely can. One don’t exist without the other.”
With that she tipped the heavy hourglass and placed it on the table and unlatched the cabin door. She wouldn’t append the insult of sentiment.
All was silent as she stood for only a moment, breathing the clarity of the heartbreak air into shifting lungs, learning a new truth: this was no longer home and she was no longer beholden. The static blue of evening was slowly fragmenting and softening with sundown, a solo wolf in the hills shaming the locomotive yowl of freight trains in the valley for solitude.
He might be foolish enough to follow, but she didn’t think so, and it didn’t matter.
She stepped fluently into the emerging dark and at long last resumed her unfeigned form.
David! Way to build tension. Love it.
Delete"She stepped fluently into the emerging dark and at long last resumed her unfeigned form."
But I'm dying to know if she was a deer or a wolf...
This is most likely the start of something huge I'm sort-of-terrified to engage with:
ReplyDeleteIt’s 1972 and we’re on a field trip and the kids on the bus are chanting “WE WANT NIXON” over and over until the teacher makes them stop. I don’t understand this. My parents think the guy is evil incarnate. So do the people in the Unitarian Fellowship, where we are driven every Sunday to learn about decision-making and the ways of other cultures. Mad Magazine makes fun of him. He is “Tricky Dick” in my house, talked about in hushed tones with tight mouths and furrowed brows when the subject of the draft and my teenaged brother comes up. So I assume everyone feels the same way we do. So I’m stunned when I hear this from the other kids, but faced with the opposition, where I am already bullied, and here, outnumbered in a small, enclosed place, I keep quiet.
With an aching stomach I accompany my mother to the gymnasium of my school, where there are big signs that say “POLLING PLACE.” I wait for her while she goes into the booth and pulls a lever to close a curtain. I can only see her little white sneakers (she calls them tennis shoes) and the slim lower legs of her Capri pants. We say nothing on the walk home. She starts dinner and I set the table.
I am equally stunned when Nixon wins in a landslide. I feel like the world is collapsing. Like the war—which has been going on my entire life—will never end, and there will never be peace, even though I wear my peace signs and my POW bracelet all the time, even though I stick up my two fingers whenever my father points his camera at us. He puts away his George McGovern buttons but I can see them any time I want in the top drawer of his dresser but he doesn’t know I look in there. He has a brown leather wallet and other political buttons. My favorite is “I Like Mike” which was for a local election, and my brother is named Mike so he has a bunch in there.
I try not to watch the news on TV, but there it is, Walter Cronkite reporting how many soldiers died that day. It makes my stomach hurt. There are older boys from the Unitarian Fellowship who’d received draft notices and they don’t know what to do. They talk about something called “conscientious objectors.” I worry for them. That they’ll get arrested and forced to go fight in the war. Or go to Canada where they don’t know anyone and we’ll never see them again.
My older brother will be fifteen later that month, but who knows how long the war will go on. I have headaches and I can’t sleep and I always need to know where he is even though he teases me all the time and I get mad at him.
I don’t want him to go to Vietnam, though. I want all our POWs to come home. My mother’s cousin comes to visit, he was in Vietnam and is missing part of his hand but he didn’t talk about it and nobody asked and I wasn’t brave enough to and maybe people would think that if I did I was rude or bringing up bad memories like I saw in the movies and on TV.
I have headaches and stomach aches and my mother brings me to a strange man’s house. There, I play with toys while he talks to me and then my mother and asks questions I don’t know the answers to and don’t want to say why. I feel like I’m getting punished for something I didn’t do.
I’m glad at least that I walk to school and only have to be on the bus for field trips and never have to hear kids cheer for Nixon again because he can’t run for president anymore. At least I have that. And my POW bracelet. And an "I LIKE MIKE" button I stole from Dad's dresser drawer. There are a lot in there; he'll never know.
I'd say definitely expand on this. I get the trepidation, though.
DeleteLaurie. "I have headaches and stomach aches..." I feel that way about the upcoming election.
Delete"Try to avoid whiskey. It pays dividends you don't want."
ReplyDeleteI tried & failed. The whiskey just worked too damn good and to Hell with the dividends.