Collateral Damage

by James Bird



  The Rhythm of the Stone

  Collateral Damage

  by

  James H. Bird

  Squeezing the Grape

  I talked to Michael Darnay a couple of days after it happened. He remained in the hospital. I did not know him then, I do now. Many people do. He feels awful. He is having nightmares and reading bad stories about him in the newspaper and about the people he killed and everybody that got hurt. Some real bad. They say he was running with a bad crowd, that’s what the news told us. He was not. They found him in a field half out of his mind after the whole thing went down. He still has headaches. His best friend Anthony was there too and he feels responsible. It was his idea. He tried to keep Michael from running into the field after it happened but he couldn’t. He still has a cast. Anthony does not like the stories in the newspapers either. The articles informed us he was a gang banger. He is not. The last time I spoke with Anthony he had plans for leaving Colorado once he heals. I want to tell their story and mine, I was there. Let me tell you how I met Michael and Anthony and why I worked hard to defend them. I’m not a lawyer or anything but I did have time for a side project. I’m also going to tell you how I fell in love. It happened on the same day I ran into Michael and Anthony. Funny how things work out.

  It was a lousy time for me, working against deadlines set by a fool. I was squeezing the grape and did not like any of it. The mangers wanted the writing done fast. It is hard to do your best when you know the end is coming. It is the job of a freelance writer to do your best or business will dry up. The attitude changes though, lots of things change. Contractors are like company pets, I became part of the family but now I have to leave. It is like looking at your goldfish, belly up in dirty water. I am not bitter. It is how it works. When you bought the goldfish you knew that one day it would become belly up. My year spent in Boulder will be over by the end of the holiday season. Now this on top of everything else. It made me sad. I get sad when I have to say goodbye. There are many sad people during the holidays. This dreadful year, there will be more. This is why I was feeling lousy I had to back to work looking for work. It’s harder now. People are scared to do anything with strangers.

  I was greeted by cool autumn wind when I left the office. The signs of the holiday sales and Halloween celebrations seem contrived now after the world changed. I use to like the fall, gusty and warm in the sun when the leaves dance in the wind. The merchants try to cheer us but there is no cheer. This year feels different, just going through the motions. Wounds will do that. I crossed the red-bricked pedestrian mall littered with swirling leaves of gold, red, purple and brown. Shops, bars, cafes lined each side of the mall with unkempt planters of flowers now scraggly twigs and bare trees in a neat line down the middle. The Trees stripped down by the wind. Stop and start gusts, the kind that makes you walk like a drunkard after that last unfortunate drink. A storm was coming down the mountain.

  A mounted officer rode by on a chestnut stallion it muscles twitched when walking. The cop wore a black cowboy hat and eyed everyone. The police were everywhere now. Not in a menacing way more like the ever present guards of a sacred tomb. It was four o'clock, I had time before the 5:15 bus to Denver. I plodded along hunched against the gusts, hands in my pocket, my shoulder case bouncing against my hip, toward the Irish pub a block from the station. I walked past the nice bookstores. I took a moment to critique at my reflection in the windows. Dark side of forty still in good shape, six two in shoes and all of my brown hair. It fluttered in the wind. I tucked my ear to my shoulder and continued. I shifted my attention and noticed the window was packed with new releases. The titles were the usual stories but outdated, written in a different time before the world changed. Not many will care much about self-help, or dieting and sugar free cookies or a dreamy fantasy. The newspapers and books will be about a world of reality and fantasy, a surreal world. They will be about a mixture of the unfathomable and real horror. Themes of patriotism and bravery and failed policy. The stories about boots on the ground, bombs and our angry new president from Texas. This is what the people want now.

  The Irish pub was not crowded. My ears and nose stung from the chill. I ordered a beer and a whiskey from the bartender and sat up front between the fireplace and the big window. I had this corner to myself. Irish music whispered through the house sound system. The sun shined low through the picture window. Outside, a small maple shook off its golden leaves as a retriever would after a swim in a lake. The blue gray Flatiron Mountains jutted up and over Boulder, framed by the big window, the storm rolling down like a slow avalanche. I wanted to climb them. From high in the air, on a clear day, Boulder looks like an accumulation of rubble that slipped down these mountains. Heaped up in neat geometric mounds, its streets runoffs for great streams of snowmelt. I like it here.

  I settled on a high stool, retrieved my newspaper from my shoulder case. I positioned the pages to the sunlight and leaned on my elbow on the tall table with uneven legs. The stories were more of the same grim news of that awful day nearly a month ago. It was on everyone’s mind. The digging, constant digging, with machines now. Human touch was futile, even the dogs gave up. Now war.

  After a while, a young waitress appeared. I had seen her many times.

  “Another then, sir?” she said with a crooked fleshy grin. The stool/waitress height ratio made it such that we could see eye-to-eye.

  “Yes please, Jamison, and the bill, I have a bus to catch”, peering over my reading glasses, fumbling with my wallet while eyeing the status of my mug. Everyone is nice to each other these days. At least there’s that.

  “Awful isn’t it,” she said looking at my paper. She had a slight UK accent. I wondered where the pub management finds these people in Boulder. The bartender has an accent, as did most of the wait staff. Dressed in white shirt, dark slacks, black shoes and white apron gave the place a European air; the whole place was thick with things Irish. There are days I stay until the last bus but not today. I wanted to write tonight. I like to write when I am in a crummy mood.

  “It’s horrible. Never thought that day would come,” I told her in a sad voice.

  “Just the Jamieson's then?” she replied.

  “Yes ma’am. I don’t want to fight a full bladder during the forty-five minute ride to Denver. I don’t want an indecency rap if I have to piss in the parking lot.”

  I like the workers here, students mostly, I hope they do not have visa problems because all this. Two of the cafes where I eat lunch have lost people. They were just working and now they are gone.

  Denver Express

  Shortly after five, I left a tip and trudged to the station. Warm from the whiskey. I had no jacket and the temperature was dropping noticeably. I cursed myself for not bringing a coat. The depot was not crowded. Three busses parked at 45-degree angels, engines idling with a growling snore, smoke wafted up and hung under the roof. The DENVER EXPRESS was in the middle, my bus. The LONGMONT and DENVER LOCAL were getting ready to load. These two left five minutes before the EXPRESS. My bus catches them since they make more stops. A cop walked by, his eyes searching, thumbs hooked in the front of his belt. His gun ominously displayed. The city replaced the slack-jawed unarmed rent-a-cop with a tough member of The Force a few weeks before. The police were everywhere now. It reminded me of Europe after 1972 Munich. Police armed with automatic rifles. I had to carry ID with me everywhere. I wonder if the same will happen in the States. There will be changes.

  I ambled over and sat on the short wall at the far end of the station. I lit a cigarillo and leaned against the stairwell outer wall. At my feet, leaves and wrappers eddied in the breeze. From this vantage, I have gauged the progress on the building going up across the road for a week. The workers were tearing
it down all the way up to rebuild. They’re doing that now in New York and Arlington where General Lee used to ride his horse.

  The people began to queue up to the busses. Passengers with a slow shuffle, resigned expressions, lost in a momentary dream, blank stares at vague distances. The LONGMONT riders were dressed in standard workday attire. Coats, jackets and sensible shoes found in any suburban discount store. Their queue was straight, neat and orderly. The DENVER LOCAL crowd had that urban bohemianism young, pouty and bored. Baggy pants, dyed T-shirts, pierced facial parts and colorful body illustrations here and there. A few with hockey sweatshirts; must be a game tonight. The LOCAL crowd slouched to their seats. In my mind, I wrote ten-second stories on a few members of each group as they boarded. I speculated to what ends they will meet at the termination of their ride. What measures of dignity they muster to lean on when studying their residue of the day. Wondering, also, at a glance, what ten-second story someone would pin on me.

  “First and final call for the DENVER EXPRESS, now boarding at gate two”. That redundant announcement annoys me. I joined the clump that was forming around the EXPRESS door. Bonnie Carton, a colleague trotted up to me as passengers beginning to board with her bicycle.

  “Hi there, could ya' watch this a sec?” she said, parking her bike at my feet. She usually rides her bike after work and does not take this bus.

  “Sure. Do you want me to put it on the rack?”

  “Oh no. Thank you anyway,” Bonnie said.

  She turned and scooted off toward the depot. Bonnie is a pleasant looking sandy blonde-haired woman mid-thirties with thin build, demurring manner, easy laugh, and always smiling with her blue eyes. She was fresh-faced with milky skin pink cheeks and lightly freckled like the bottom of a bowl of cereal. Bonnie is of the type that offers no clues about their life out of the office. She wore no rings or jewelry, displayed no pictures on her desk or mementos of excursions, no conversations of exotic vacations with a lover. I imagine her living alone with a cat. Maybe she was a lipstick lesbian or asexual. I guarded her bike while she went off to pee. I like Bonnie she is easy to work with when I had writing assignments sponsored by the marketing department. When the weather was bad she drove her jeep from Denver. I hardly ever saw her outside of the office except for this day.

  Two very tiny and old Mexican women nervously fingering their purses for fare, were the first to board, taking seats on the front row. A man that I describe as a Quasimodo’s stunt double followed them. Bonnie, back now, secured her bike in the rack on the front of the bus and got in line. I supposed she felt comfortable loading the bike herself. I let her in front of me.

  “Not riding today?” I asked her. I wanted to start a simple chat thinking she may want my company on the ride downhill to Denver.

  “No, last minute plans,” Bonnie said this with no hint of what these plans might be I shrugged and began to board. Last minute date I figured and let the thought drop for the betterment of my ego. I was running out of time to break the ice with her. I don’t know if she knew I was leaving. I didn’t want to run the risk of been crushed by a nonplussed response to the news. I watched her bounce up the steps her fanny pack wiggling. I thought whoever was sleeping with Bonnie was a lucky man or woman.

  A couple sat near the front, he was thin, straight and narrow frame with bushy salt-n-pepper hair and thick mustache, sunken eye sockets and transparent skin. Bony wrists jutted out from an undersized black pea coat. He looked as though he slept in a coffin. There was no difference in width between his shoulders and his waist. He sat and angled against the window. She was much shorter but well-proportioned mousy brown hair and gray-blue eyes. Her face was cheerful, round and open with dimpled chin and plump checks the color of zinfandel blush wine. She wore a nametag that I could not make out. She slid into the seat beside him and immediately began fumbling through a very large purse plopped on her lap. They could have been peasants from the Russian Ukraine.

  Several more climbed in front of me. Bonnie sat about four or five rows from the front. I followed a short, roundish, redheaded man with a goatee. He rides this line often, sometimes carrying a guitar. I thought, for the zillionth time, to ask him about that someday. A handful of others climbed aboard. I took note of no one else as I waddled down the aisle shoulder pack bouncing rhythmically from seat to seat. I took my seat on the back bench so I could stretch out my long frame, which does not fit the dimensions of public transportation.

  Loaded, we lurched through the streets of Boulder, the sun a golden strobe flashing through the branches, the driver negotiating the traffic. She is a good driver. We traveled Canyon west to Broadway, skirting the university campus lined with college-town cafes, restaurants and shops. Then east on Table Mesa Drive across town past old brick homes in various stages of disrepair. The street torn apart by a summer-long widening project, we snaked through barriers, cones and groups of orange-vested workers with their huge Jurassic machines. Along the way, we picked up a few students near campus and an edge-of-town park-n-ride. Fifteen or twenty passengers now. This is why I liked the 5:15; it is not a popular ride, most of the students and pros have gone home, the bar crowd still whooping it up in town.

  We cruised onto the turnpike to Denver, gained momentum, the great motor settling into a harmonic confluence of high whine and low rumble. We passed rolling brown fields of scrub trees and bushes and the occasional gathering of bovine nosing the ground. The hills resembled undulating waves swelling against the Flatirons—like a seawall. The dwindling open space fending off encroachment, farms falling victim to developer's blade like some diseased organ. I watched the mountains peel away toward the west and I settled down for the forty-five minute journey. The turnpike traffic, though compacted, was moving at a good clip. I watch the traffic pass us. A prison bus pulled alongside and for a few miles we rode together. I could see the occupant’s faces, hard and angry through the bars. Each wore white jumpsuits; the guards wore blue. They are a microcosm of a different realm. The captured army of the underworld. I made up mental stories about them like the people on the loading platform. I wonder what they were thinking; did some want to fight or did they care. Locked up in nervous country with cops on every corner. I imagine they regret their crimes that got them a ticket on that bus. They are men without a country. They are deviants of social control that standard norms set by the political state and those outside the state. The passengers on that bus are an early warning system that something is terribly wrong. Biologically they are no different. The deviants on that bus have a different reference group to draw support. It is in this reference group where they form a sense of self.

  The bohemian crowd were unlikely to volunteer, the prisoners cannot volunteer. Many of Longmont group are reservist or guard, weekend warriors now looking at a fulltime gig in a foreign land or here if things get worse. That has happened before at Kent State and Mississippi when the guard killed citizens illegally. A case of reference groups demonstrating their sense of social norms that ran afoul of the political state and its control.

  I could write for a Pentagon contractor as my way of serving. A thought I had been toying with recently. I had jobs with the government in the past and still had contacts. They had survived the attacks. Not now though, the Pentagon needs guns, the pens have run out of ink.

  The road became a smooth rolling band of concrete, the sun settling low just over the tops of the Flatirons. Lumpy clouds with gray bellies hovered over the horizon. The sun set sunset will be colorful. It may rain tonight always a good time to write when it rains. I was thick with weariness. I leaned back, breathed out the accumulation of the day in a long slow hiss.

  I tried to read but gave in, closing my eyes, burrowing deeper into that place in my mind where images and words roam. Rocking to the drone and parlay of highway and diesel engine. Shadowy flashes and reverse images painted pictures in a kaleidoscopic dance inviting a dream to chase away the involuntary twitch of tired body. I was going to meet Michael and Anthony so
on.