Jacqueline Keren
The Waders
Even 25 years on, Wade didn’t mind that the Gulf War had landed him at the cabin on the lake in the worn out Adirondack mountains. No more village life, or neighbors “accidentally” digging up Gloria’s lilies in broad daylight while their cats turned her flower beds into a litter box. No more communal life headaches. Gloria had adapted quickly, learning to ride a dented fishing boat to work in town. But without a fuel truck to drive, he’d needed another means to make a living. He’d always had a green thumb, and the soil around the lake was rich, so he planted the obvious. His marijuana plants were always flush and skunky by harvest. After the first frost, when the hairs turned brown, he hung them in the shop to dry. Then they were ready to clip: tweezing away the dried leaves curled around the densely packed flowers. Clipping was hard for him, for after a time, his hands would cramp as if they were locked around a wheel and he was grinding over a battered highway. He did not love the Gulf War for that.
Now, the weed was ready. The day was warm for October, the wind gentle enough to work outside. He stood at the dock as a lone pontoon boat hummed around an island. A heron standing in a bay, shoulders hunched, squawked as the boat puttered near, then rose, its wings whooping as it passed overhead before settling in the thin branches high in a dead tree.
He emptied a paper bag of buds into a salad bowl, an indica-sativa cross suited to the north, dusty blue and dense and sticky. Blue Dream, his signature variety, a high that inspired while you melted into the couch. His was a small operation. He grew enough to carry them through winter, and sold through middlemen, hard-up friends to whom he gave a steep, wholesale discount. With no one coming to the cabin for their ounce or dime bag or forty dollar hit, he needn’t fear pontoon boats in his waters, and they survived on what he made, for Gloria was a whiz at making do, and he was Mr. Fixit, a must for living off the grid, even when his hands gave him hell, which lately they did more often. He hadn’t told Gloria, but he’d been to a doctor. A tunnel was closing around the nerves in his wrist and arm, the result of gripping a steering wheel the way the herons gripped the finger-bone branches. That he’d given up driving twenty years ago mattered little; his hands remembered.
Even as he kneeled on the grass to tuck a paper plate under the leg of a picnic table, steadying it on the uneven ground, his nerves whined before settling into a familiar undercurrent. He soldiered on, and when he looked up the pontoon boat had turned and was driving toward their dock. The law? Even in the off season, they were plentiful. He waited for the voice from the bullhorn—busted!—when he recognized Bump at the wheel beneath the green Bimini, his hand held high. Beside him, Wade’s sister, Patty, waved a signal flag, her message, predictably, scrambled. They lived in town, not far as the crow flies, but the effort of the boat ride kept visitors away. He lifted a hand in greeting. “What brings you here?” he called as the boat thumped against the dock.
Patty jumped out, took the line Bump threw and pulled the boat in. “We wanted to take one last ride before putting the boat up for the winter.”
Bump, compact as a bullet, leapt lightly to the dock. Wade and Bump had served together through Desert Shield and Desert Storm with the seventh transportation group, delivering supplies to the forward operating bases: petroleum, equipment, MREs. Early on, Bump had introduced Wade to his sister, Gloria, and he to Patty, and now they were brothers-in-law and Patty his sister-in-law, a situation that even now struck him as vaguely taboo. Two sets of siblings, married into the same family.
He gave them a hand tying up, then the two men gripped opposite ends of a cooler and carried it to the picnic table. Gloria, the wind blowing through her red curls, emerged from the cabin, carrying a box of alcohol wipes and a first aid kit. “Look at you,” she said.
Patty opened her arms. “Look at us.” Rather than hugging, the women touched elbows and made the sound of an electric bug zapper—zztt—a greeting begun at the Doublemint wedding in Puerto Rico, at the home of Bump and Gloria’s grandmother, the four of them arm in arm. In the tying of knots, the women had bonded as tightly to each other as to their spouses, and from the spark of their elbows, for he was sure he saw it, ran a current of experience and understanding. He trusted Gloria to share only what was essential, but Patty spilled volumes about young Wade, his history flowing like electricity from the breaker box to the outlets. His head ached with the nakedness of it, but his heart thrilled at the current between the women.
“I could use some help while you’re here,” Wade said.
Bump plucked a branch from the pile, eyed the fat finger of Blue Dream and twirled it. The resin-covered flowers caught the sun. “Christ-on-a-stick,” he said. “All this?”
Wade, inhaling the smell of raw reefer, touched a bloom, the resin sticky. He rubbed his fingers together. This was going to be messy, but customers were clamoring, last year’s supply toked out. “There’s more in the shop.”
Bump thumped Wade’s back. “It could be worse,” Bump said, words that had carried them through the worst of it as they’d driven toward Kuwait City after the air campaign and the ground assault. Along the route, blasted tanks, resting at odd angles as if drifting off, spilled blistered bodies. The mother of all poundings. Even before they reached the oil fields, he saw the fires screaming fury, torrents of smoke smothering the sun.
Living in the north, he was used to long winters of gray sky turning him inward, but the clouds always broke, and the snow melted. In Kuwait, the oil wells had burned for weeks, black clouds stifling the sun. On the ground, spewing oil collected in a thick, sheeny lake. As the days wore on, the oil lakes took on an alluring rigidity. He could walk on one, a voice whispered through the smoke clouding his brain. He kept a watchful distance while reading letters from Gloria of fishing trips to escape the wily neighbors, the water a serene film, the baby asleep in a basket, like Moses in the reeds. After a few days, a thin layer of dust camouflaged the oozy lakes of oil. The cormorants and grebes, even the insects, fooled by the tantalizing surface, plunged in. On the shore, the waders preened their greasy feathers until they bled. He was afraid to sleep. If he let his guard down, he, too, would dive into the fool’s gold of solid ground hiding a gummy trap. A modern day La Brea Pits. Yet sleep was powerful. One night an explosion woke him from a dream. The boom roused him from the deep where he dreamt of lying with Gloria, his body curled up in hers, his face in her hair. He could almost feel her. The scent of vivaporu. What did she dream about when he was away? He darted outside into a light rain that burned his skin as an A-10 flew overhead. Smoke smothered the stars, and without them as a reference point, he didn’t know where he was. A shadow cut across the sky, followed by the noise of a screaming engine. A shower of tracers cut across the sky, searching out the enemy.
Gloria rummaged through the first aid kit. “I’ve got just the thing,” she said, unearthing three pairs of medical scissors.
Wade rested his chin in his hand. “Where did they come from?”
“You’re always saying we need backups to live off the grid.”
“One or two is backup.” Three was a gnawing worry.
Patty clapped her hands together. “Three is good. Let’s get to it.”
They sat. The big buds, more flower than leaves, went quickly while the runts were a surgical process, the dried leaves packed tightly into the flowers. He clipped, a slight twinge in his wrist, nothing to get twisted over. At times he welcomed it, for his hands stored all his memories, dark and light: driving through the desert and the mountains, the deck he had built and the picnic table, stroking Gloria’s hair, cradling their son.
As he finished a bud, he tossed it into the salad bowl.
Bump set a beer before him. “What are you doing this winter? I could use some help with the house.”
“What’s on the agenda?”
“Kitchen cabinets,” Patty said.
“Wade has time,” Gloria said, the sun setting her hair on fire. Even with encroaching grays, her hair was vibrant and distracting. At the wedding he’d discovered where the red came from when he met the Irish side of the family with their painful Boston accents. She was right. Besides nursing the clones until spring, winters were quiet. The cabin, once a hunting camp, needed maintenance but nothing so urgently now. On winter days, he spent hours sitting before the woodstove, his hands idle.
“You could use more solar panels,” Bump said. “We can take a look in the spring.”
“At last,” Gloria said. “We can make coffee and toast at the same time.”
“Deal,” Wade said as he freed his hand and shook it out under the table. Resin, sticky as sap, gummed up the scissor blades and spotted his fingers. If he’d let the plants dry longer, he wouldn’t have this problem. He had a way of getting ahead of himself, but his sellers needed him and help was here. He grasped the handles once more, and as he brought the blades together, a pain shot through his arm and into his neck, leaving a throb behind at his elbow. He drove on. Gloria, a scattering of freckles across her nose, lay her hand upon his, her palm not buzzy with electricity but warm as bathwater. Then her hand was gone, and there was only the memory of her touch. He ran his fingers through his beard before snipping once more.
Gloria brushed his cheek. “Now you’ve got sap on your face.” She retrieved the vivaporu, from the first aid kit, the menthol rub a cure all, and smeared it on his hand.
Bump lit a big fatty. “What you need is a blue dream.”
The sun sat low, the moon a pale crescent in the denim sky. Wade closed his eyes as he toked and his body dissolved and his brain hummed like a well-tuned motor spewing blue exhaust. An apple thudded to the ground and rolled down the sloping lawn. On delivery runs in the desert, they’d smoke so much reefer, they’d sing over the grinding motor to the rhythm of the wheels on the rutted road, a beat that kept them cool and sharp, and because he was slipping into a blue dream, he sang again, “To market, to market, to buy a fat pig.”
Bump finished the jingle. “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.”
They clinked beers. Patty tossed a clean bud into the salad bowl. “Brothers-in-arms,” she said as she turned to Wade. “At least you came home with a friend.”
“Not much else,” Wade said.
“Don’t you wonder what your life would be like if you hadn’t enlisted?”
Wade toked, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs, before cleaning the blades and threading his fingers through the handles. “Nope.”
“You’d be living in an old Victorian house with electricity to spare.”
“We’re off the grid, not in the stone age.”
“Someone should have stopped you.”
“Dad didn’t warn me off.” Wade’s father, a Korean War vet, only said he’d spent more time waiting than fighting.
“He wasn’t much for talk,” Patty said. “Of course you didn’t listen to me.”
He remembered Patty sitting with his parents at his high school graduation, while an army recruiter, meandering among the graduates, delivered an airtight case: The country had closed the book on Vietnam, the wall had come down, and who the hell wanted to go to war? “It sounded like a good deal,” Wade said. “Two years, then the reserves, a life of benefits, even college.”
“College?” Patty asked.
“All right, maybe not.” But listening to the man’s smooth song and dance, the studs and joists of his future had snapped into place. The Gulf War came out of the blue. Even as he’d crossed the globe, he’d expected a reprieve. The pervasive heat of Saudi Arabia crushed any hope of the war not happening.
Patty pointed the scissors at him. “You were always gullible.”
“Receptive,” Gloria said.
“I should have stopped you,” Patty said.
Gloria leaned against him. “I liked that you weren’t army material.”
Patty scratched her forehead with a blade. “I bet they saw the war coming.”
As he closed his eyes, his blue dream darkened to navy then black. “That’s all they see,” he said. The brass couldn’t see the young man who’d wanted, like his father, to deliver propane all day before coming home to his giddy children. Once, long ago, he’d pictured a herd of them galloping through a rambling house. He rubbed his wrist.
Bump rested his hand on his back. “You should see a doctor before it gets worse.”
The mountains were lit up in red and gold, colors so warm he would fly into them if he could. Bump had power to spare, but Wade, an old battery, couldn’t store it for long. “I saw a doctor.”
“A real doctor,” Gloria said. “Not our retired pediatrician.”
He scratched his neck. The jackass had ratted him out.
“You’re a vet,” she said. “Vets go to the VA for help.”
“That’s a three hour drive.” He could maneuver through the shoals of the river, but the traffic around Albany was a minefield. “Besides, I belong to the club.”
Gloria closed her eyes. “Not drinking help. Medical help.”
Wade smoothed the greasy rub over his hands before dusting his hands in the dirt beneath the table.
Bump, beside him, had grown uncomfortably compact. “You could ease up a little.”
“This is my livelihood.”
“There’s disability.”
“That’s not for me.” He could take care of his family. He wouldn’t milk the system.
“Think of it as a backup,” Bump said. “Save the money for emergencies. Or buy another battery for the solar, enough for a toaster. Invest in a sawmill. Build a new grow room.”
Gloria said, “You deserve it.”
He spread his hands, stretched his fingers, clenched his fists. He didn’t deserve a dime extra for doing the job he’d been paid to do. Or for being foolish enough to enlist. He’d been a driver, and that’s all he was. Not some grunt who saw some real shit.
“What are you going to do when grass is legal?” Patty asked.
“Seeds,” he said. People would fork out a lot for quality.
Gloria said, “Just go. Talk to someone. You say we need backups. Apply for backup.”
He frowned. “Like backup scissors?”
“It’s not easy getting disability,” Patty said. “You’ll have to make a case for it.”
“What case?” Wade said.
“A sad case,” Bump said. “Tell them how you live.”
Gloria frowned. “What’s wrong with the way we live? It’s a beautiful life.”
Wade reached for her hand. They’d made it beautiful.
Bump pressed his palms to his eyes. “They won’t understand,” he said. “Look, you have no central heat and hardly any electricity, crappy Internet, and your job, your real job,” he said, glancing at his sister, “barely pays enough to buy the basics. You run out in your skivvies on cold winter nights to shit in your outhouse and your ass sticks to the frozen toilet seat.”
“That’s not true,” Gloria said. “We keep the seat inside by the woodstove.”
“Hear, hear,” Wade said. Some nights, the woodstove burned so warm they had to crack the windows. He pressed the toasty toilet seat to his chest as he carried it outside. Silence poured off the trees as he took a dump. Through the quarter moon cut in the door, he watched a twist of smoke from the chimney, the silence so profound that not even the greasy clouds rising from burning fuel silos could interrupt the reverie of a good shit. It wasn’t just a good life; it was, after the war and after his job and after he hollered at the neighbors for digging up Gloria’s flowers and bellowed at the baby, the only life he could live.
“You don’t want to move back to town, do you?” Bump asked.
He balled his fist, his nails biting his palm, scattering his blue dream into the night.
Gloria said, “We’re not moving back to town.” She wiped the stray hair from her face, and as she locked her hair in a barrette, her elbow brushed Patty’s. The sudden zztt stripped him bare. He stabbed the scissors into the table. Smoke blew through his head. His wrist was on fire. “Shit!”
They gazed at him as he did the birds in the dead trees. They clung to the thin branches through rain and wind until they returned one spring to find the trees downed. The pontoon’s rub rail thumped the dock, a hollow drumbeat. They clipped. Gloria nodded at the rake, the handle, thick and cool, needing only a little pressure to do its job. He swept, his hands numb around the aluminum tubing as he gathered the sticks and leaves into a pile. The clouds blew away and his head cooled. Bump hummed a jingle from a long ago commercial about exercise and being wise as they clipped the plants clean. Soon Bump was on his feet, wiggling his hips. “Move it and you’ll feel better!” He took the rake from Wade and danced with it. A guffaw bubbled up from deep in Wade’s gut, demanding so much air, he had to chase after it, a wonderful kind of choking.
*
A few days later, they rode into town. Gloria hunched deep into her coat as the winter cold cut across their bow. He pulled up to the boat launch without the chaos of summer people maneuvering their boats in and out of the water. He hadn’t visited civilization since August. He was pleased to see their former neighbor’s flowerbeds, lush with the lilies they had stolen, dying back in autumn. They collected the car from the gas station across the street. He dropped by the laundromat while Gloria visited a hair salon. While the clothes dried, he nursed a beer at the VFW. A young man swinging a stiff leg swept the floor and pocketed the spare change he brushed from beneath the stools.
The bartender unloaded the dishwasher. “Where’s Gloria?” he asked.
“Getting her hair done.”
“Not the whole torch?”
“Just a trim.”
The man sweeping, a boy really, a thin trail of whiskers for sideburns, moved stiffly, using his upper body to raise his leg, before pausing to rest his chin on the broom’s handle, then leaned against the bar, rubbing a spot on his hip, the warp visible through the worn out fabric.
Wade straightened his spine. “What’s up with your leg?” he asked.
“Runs in the family, something with the hips, like German shepherds. I thought it had skipped a generation, but a year into my tour, I could barely walk. I might need a replacement, or I could get the leg amputated and never work again.”
“Don’t you want to be able to take care of your family?”
“The military industrial complex will take care of us.”
He was still prattling when Wade covered his face with his hands. The boy’s limb swam in the oily darkness. He wanted to take the broom, force the young man to stand up straight. Pain could eat away at you unless you struck a deal with it. He saw his father, clutching a can of Old Milwaukee, flicking a dead lighter, a tic, his mother said, he’d come home with, yet he’d worked all his life. He rubbed his temples. “Maybe so,” Wade said.
“Just a thought I had.”
“Keep thinking,” he said as the boy returned to his slow sweeping. What sandbox had he fought in? He wasn’t much older than Wade’s son, who worked for a company making solar panels, yet somehow an old man. Had a recruiter cornered the boy at graduation? The arguments were different, he expected, for now the recruits were eager to be heroes.
He hoped the boy had found a friend or carried a talisman, as Wade had with Gloria’s red hair, fluttering ahead of him, a red shadow on the dusty windshield, and the memory of her smell when he pressed up against her.
Wade, peering into his glass, took one last swig, swallowing his reflection. His beer empty, he headed to the restroom before leaving. At the restroom door, he paused to read a posted message, shaky letters scrawled on a napkin. “It broke.” His eyes glazed over. An exclamation? It broke! Or a warning? Beware the thing that broke. And who was the note from?
His palm rested on the metal push plate. The boy was gone, and the bartender had disappeared. The oily, burning smoke blew in and the day darkened as on days when he couldn’t find the right bit for the drill, or the Phillips-head screwdriver, only a flathead. He closed his eyes until it faded.
His hand sweated. Push, he urged and at last his hand obeyed. The door flapped behind him. The toilet was most likely broken, so he opted for the urinal. Relief washed over him as the warm stream poured out, and he gazed out a dusty window into the backyard. The wind blew through an apple tree stripped of its leaves, the yellow fruit hanging on against a steely sky. He washed his hands, rinsed and washed again, picking at the dirt embedded beneath his nails, before reaching for a paper towel from the dispenser. When the mindless piece of machinery resisted, he yanked. The paper flew out, swinging his body out of balance. When he grabbed the sink to break the fall, his wrist screamed. His head collided with the sink. Down, down, down. He sank into an oily silence.
When he woke up, he was lying on the bathroom floor, the lame boy and the bartender and Gloria gazing down as if he were a naked body on a slab.
“What happened?” Gloria asked.
“I had a fight with the sink.”
“You shouldn’t let the sink beat you like that,” the bartender said.
Wade frowned. “How long have I been out?”
“A few minutes give or take.”
A hole in the timeline. Dead air. His head throbbed.
They supported him as he struggled to sit, his head spinning. He felt nothing when Gloria and the bartender made contact with his body. He was a dead battery; no power upon contact. He shook them off as he climbed to his feet and touched the throbbing knot on his forehead, saw blood on his fingers. He pressed a wad of paper towels to his head. In the mirror, he faced a soldier on the long march home, his wound patched with the materials at hand. Gloria stepped out from behind him, her face the explosive red of her hair, but her voice was tired. “Now will you go?”
The boy said, “Amputate. No more worries.”
Gloria scowled. She took Wade’s hand, her touch as substantial as smoke and vapors. If only they created static, the electric current of his memories passing through without dimming her, the light he followed.
“You should see a doctor,” the bartender said.
Wade touched his forehead. “So my wife tells me.”
*
Wade was on the Northway, headed south to Albany. He’d swapped the summer tires for winter, bartering with the mechanic, who’d rushed to balance them. The car shook as he approached sixty-five as if it might explode. The car he trusted, but his head? A sharp pain ran from his temple to his crown as if a fissure were opening. He squinted at the mirror then away. Better not to know.
The traffic was light, and he arrived a few minutes early to the appointment. He stood in the parking lot to gather himself. He checked himself in the side view mirror. His black eye had faded to green. He looked ill but not beaten. A plastic bag ruffled in a bare tree. Did it fight to free itself or to cling to the branch? He scratched his beard where he was wearing away a bald spot. It was only a bag. Was that how Gloria saw him?
The receptionist gave him a sheaf of papers on a clipboard and pointed to a chair in an alcove where several men scribbled. One, ashen faced, steely haired, gazed into the filtered air as if waiting for the particles of dust to resolve into a coded message. The TV hanging in the corner was dark. The men had a familiar tightened spring air about them; they toggled between two modes of being, anticipation and action.
Wade sat next to the gazer, his face haggard. Vietnam. The man glanced at him then down at a wicker basket on the coffee table, a ladybug circling its rim. As the bug completed a revolution, the man settled a straw against the basket, and the bug scrabbled to the table then up the man’s creased finger. Wade quelled an impulse to grab his wrist as the man set it on the rim again. Too late. The bug set off, itty-bitty anxious steps along the rugged wicker. Wade flicked it into the room as he sang, “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home.”
The man snapped to attention as if he’d been switched on. He picked up the rhyme, his voice a gentle sing-song. “Your house is on fire, your children alone.”
“What are you here for?” Wade asked.
“I can’t sleep no more.”
“Sounds bad.” Or was it? No oily visions seeping out of his head.
“I should never have retired.”
A bubble swelled in Wade’s chest before sinking to an elusive bottom.
“They gave me something and told me to walk, tire myself out, but the pills,” he drifted off. “I’m slipping away.” He swiped his hand down his body as if to remind himself of his corporeal presence then fingered the placket of his coat. Wade concentrated on his forms.
After a few minutes, Wade was led away to a woman, young, a veteran of a war without end, another thing for which he was grateful to the Gulf War, a conclusion that had held for a time. She wore a sergeant’s stripes pin, and her hair, pulled back in a bun, drew out the gray eyes boring into him. He shuddered as he stepped into her office. How could he fool this woman who had stripped him bare before they started?
“What’s going on?” she asked.
He glared at the offending hand. “I have pain,” he said, cradling his wrist. “I can live with that up to a point.”
Her eyes weighed on him, the bandage on his forehead. “Is it beyond that point?”
He tapped his foot. “So I’m told.”
“Any numbness?”
“My hand would make a good pin cushion.”
She put her hand in his. “Squeeze.”
Her skin was cool, dry. The ground, not the live wire. His wrist tingled but his hand obeyed.
“You still have a lot of strength,” she said.
“I keep busy.”
“How are you feeling otherwise?”
When he said nothing, she waited.
Finally, he said, “Sometimes a curtain comes down.”
“How do you mean?”
He’d missed the mark. The problem was the curtain lifted and the oil in his head gushed out. He scratched his whiskered neck. Gloria had told him to shave before his appointment—he should be tidy even to make a sad case—but it was impossible to keep up with the stubble. A three hour ride was just long enough for it to fight its way out again. Yet the words refused to surface. He settled for sad. He tapped his temple. “Headaches.”
“Gulf War syndrome,” she said. “There’s some real evidence for it now. We have doctors who specialize in it. We can set you up with one. How are you faring financially? Are you able to work?”
“I do odd jobs.”
She glanced at his file again. “You live in Port Geoffrey?”
“We live outside of town, in the sticks, an old hunting cabin on Arnold Pond,” he said, laying it on as Bump and Gloria and Patty had coached him, their quarters rudimentary, shabby.
“Do you have electricity?”
Her questions came quickly. She’d met others like him, the wraiths in the waiting room. Men and women who chased butterfly words, but the spigot always tightened. They’d had no red beacon to guide them through the darkness. No thumping road to keep them sharp. This would be easy if he played his part. “Some.”
“And running water?”
He wasn’t some yahoo who couldn’t take care of himself. “An artesian well,” he blurted. He tapped his foot. He was treading into back-to-the-land territory when he wanted to sound like a redneck.
She glanced at his foot before denting her cheek with her pen. “Explain.”
He pressed on his knee to tame his foot. Keep it simple. Keep it sad. “The water bubbles up from the ground. Gravity brings it down to the house.”
“In a pipe?”
“In a pipe.”
The woman eyed him, a thin furrow between her eyebrows. “And your wife is happy with your living situation?”
Situation? The cabin on the lake was their beautiful creation. A spider might surprise Gloria in the outhouse, but her upset was short lived. Town was a situation. He’d blamed his weary hands for moving to the lake, but it was the idle moments, delivering propane, that wore him down: an endless stoplight on an empty road, or a muddy driveway that swallowed the truck, in the absence of the drumbeat of the tires, coyotes filling the forest with their anxious cries while he waited for a tow. Lullabies and quiet dinners. In the smoky silence, he was alone with his naked self. No one could find him through that fog. That was a situation. One weekend they rode out to the cabin and never left. He scribbled his boss a cryptic note when he quit. This sucks. Chopping wood, caulking windows, odd jobs around the cabin became Wade’s livelihood. In the doing of things, the man he’d been before the conflict returned, a kind of muscle memory of his better self that he could draw from when the noose around his nerves tightened.
“She doesn’t complain.”
“Women never do.”
The young woman set her fingers on the keyboard, waited, then typed furiously, archiving his complaints, packing them away like long underwear in summer.
“Where did you serve?” he asked.
“Iraq.”
“What a cluster fuck.” He rubbed his stubble. “Pardon my language.”
“I’ve heard worse.” She smoothed a hand over her hair. “I enlisted out of college,” she continued. “I wanted to serve my country. It’s never that simple though, is it? Your hands get dirty no matter what you do.”
“You were just a soldier.”
“Agreed. But now I know better.” She pushed back from her desk and grabbed a sheaf of paper from the printer. “Still, I made friends. We talk, check in.” She turned her gray eyes on him. “You?”
“One.” Two if he counted Gloria, three with Patty.
“One is all you need.” She handed him a stack of forms. “Fill these out. When you’re done, tell the receptionist and she’ll bring you back here.”
More paper. He gathered it in his arms. It was a fight he could win.
*
In the parking lot, two women laughed. He leaned against the car, the metal warm, in his hands paperwork and helpful pamphlets. The checks would come quickly, the woman said. A good chunk of money to start. He’d buy a new outboard for the boat so Gloria wouldn’t have to wrestle with the old one. In his new grow room, he’d pollinate the flowers, harvest the seeds.
As the women waved farewell, their hands touched. A spark flashed, brief and brilliant. He rubbed his stubble. Someone had to ground the current or hell would break loose. The wind ruffled the pamphlets he clutched to his chest, paper wings.
“I’m interested in stories of people who survive difficult situations without falling into despair, who find inner reserves where they thought there were none.” —Jacqueline Keren
Jacqueline Keren’s short fiction has appeared in the Santa Monica Review, Calyx Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals. She works for a hospital coordinating a health screening program for uninsured women. She is working on a collection of linked stories, The Coast of the Adirondacks.