Cinnamon Girl

by Lawrence Kessenich

  “Hey, you stoned freak,” called Kolvacik, “what are staring at? Get your ass in here.”

  Not feeling inclined to plunge, I waded in, walking toward Kolvacik. The pond was spring-fed, so the water was cool enough to be refreshing. The bottom was squishy mud and leaves.

  “What a pussy,” he said. “I’m not waiting for you.”

  He turned and plunged underwater toward the middle of the pond. I kept advancing, watching the brown water rise over my thighs and genitals. The color was strange—so unlike the greenish-clear water of lakes I was used to—that I wasn’t entirely comfortable in it. It seemed dirty. Yet it didn’t feel dirty on my body.

  Kolvacik came up in the middle and turned back to me, treading water. He saw me staring down at the water.

  “Don’t get freaked out by it,” he said. “The color comes from the tannin in dead leaves. Get out here.”

  Finally, I took the plunge, diving underwater. It was like swimming through miso soup. I swam in the general direction of Kolvacik, but I didn’t see his white body until I was almost upon him. I pulled up short and lifted my head out of the water, inches from his face.

  “Whoa, there, Moby Dick,” he said. “Don’t ram the good ship Lollipop—if you know what I mean.”

  “You can’t see shit under there,” I said.

  “That’s funny,” he replied. “It looked exactly like shit to me.”

  “Gee, thanks. I really needed you to introduce that image into my head. Now it feels like we’re swimming in a cesspool.”

  “Nah, it’s clean. Just nature’s way of spreading things around. Your skin will feel nice and soft when you get out. I came here with this chick once and we fucked on the bank afterward. She kept saying how soft my skin was. Her skin was so soft I was speechless.”

  “Don’t get any ideas about doing that to me,” I said, smiling.

  “You wish! But I’d take that blonde over there, huh?”

  The blonde in question had just cocked her knee and her randy boyfriend was running his hand up between her legs. It didn’t seem to bother either of them that they were in public.

  “I’m glad we’re underwater,” said Kolvacik, “or she’d know I was interested in her, too.”

  “Maybe we should join them,” I said.

  “In your dreams,” said Kolvacik. “Besides, I couldn’t go through with it, could you?”

  I looked over at the two of them going at it and felt my blood heating up.

  “I do believe I could,” I said.

  “Then we’d better get you out of here. I didn’t come out here to watch you have an orgy. Let’s go get something to eat. I’m starved.”

  “We just got here! Let me swim around awhile. The water feels great.”

  We swam back and forth across the pond for a while, then got out. Luckily, the blonde and her boyfriend had gone off into the woods, fondling one another as they walked. Apparently they’d decided they needed privacy for the consummation, if nothing else. We pulled on our jeans, sans underwear, and left our shirts and shoes off. The path through out the woods felt cool beneath our bare feet. Kolvacik pulled a slightly bent joint out of his t-shirt pocket as we walked, handed it to me, and lit it for me. In the fresh country air, the marijuana tasted especially sweet. I felt happy—happier than I really was inside. The dope did a good job of masking my internal state, which was exactly what I wanted it to do. When I thought of Claire at all, it was as if she were already thousands of miles away.

  We went to a small-town diner near the pond. We ate huge burgers smothered in fried onions, big steak fries with the skin still on them, and tall chocolate malts. Afterward, I felt as if I was going to explode. Kolvacik lit up a roach as we sat in the car—” To settle our stomachs,” he said. And, to my surprise, it did settle my stomach as we drove toward Holy Hill, our next destination.

  Holy Hill was the highest hill for a long way north of Milwaukee and had a huge Catholic Church on top of it, from whose towers one could see fifty miles back to downtown Milwaukee. We climbed the hundreds of steps to the top of the tower with much less effort than I thought it would take. With the dope in my lungs and all the calories from lunch to burn, I felt as if I was being lifted up them. The view from the top was breathtaking, miles and miles of rich Wisconsin farmland bearing its fruit, acres and acres of forest, the edge of Lake Michigan visible to the east. I felt as if I could launch myself from the tower and fly. But, fortunately, I didn’t try. One poor, stoned freak had tried it, the summer before, and had found out very quickly it was an illusion.

  We blew the rest of the day cruising up and down the shore of Lake Michigan, getting out to run on the beach, eating supper at Kopp’s Drive-In, where I used to hang out in high school, having a beer at a tiny East Side bar that had classical music on the juke box. I got back to the house well after dark. I was relieved to see all the lights were out. I was exhausted, and all I wanted to do was crawl into bed. Kolvacik had made me share one more small roach with him—” It’ll help you get to sleep,” he said, then he took off for home.

  When I walked in the front door, the silence of the house revealed the rushing in my ears from the dope and the constant noise of the Triumph. As I walked past the archway that led into the living room, I saw a figure on the sofa out of the corner of my eye before I realized it was speaking. It was Claire. I turned to her. She was wearing a long t-shirt.

  “What?” I said. “My ears are ringing.”

  “You didn’t go to work, did you?” she said.

  “Oh, shit! I forgot to call in!”

  “Well, you won’t have to go in tomorrow, either. They fired you.”

  It took a long moment for this information to seep into my stoned consciousness. And, when it did, I have to admit that I felt relieved, instead of upset.

  “It wasn’t much of a job, anyway,” I said.

  “Where are you going to live when we have to leave here?” asked Claire.

  “What do you care?”

  Claire looked right into my eyes. I turned away.

  “I still care for you, John. You’re still important to me.”

  Grief welled up in me, but my addled brain refused to deal with it. I felt a headache developing.

  “Yeah, well …” I muttered, “don’t bother. You’ll have enough on your mind dealing with flying cockroaches.”

  Claire shivered, then smiled

  “Don’t remind me of those,” she said.

  I smiled back. Suddenly, she looked good enough to eat.

  “Let’s make love,” I said. “For old times sake.”

  Her face turned serious again. “I can’t, John. I want to, but I can’t.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “I’ve decided to try with Tony again. I can’t just pretend I haven’t made that decision.”

  I went to the couch and sat down beside her, drawn to her like an insect to a light bulb. She had apparently taken a bubble bath. The sweet, clean smell of her body aroused me instantly.

  “You’ll be with Tony in Hawaii. There’s no reason you can’t be with me until then.”

  “Except that I don’t want to be.”

  Anger welled up in me. I took her face in my hands and kissed her hard. She pulled away and slapped me on the side of the head, catching my ear as well as my cheek. My ear started ringing and the sound seemed to reverberate through my head. By the time I recovered, she was standing in the archway, across the room from me.

  “You just made it a whole lot easier for me to leave,” she said.

  “Fuck you!” I replied. “You used to like it when I was spontaneous.”

  “That wasn’t spontaneous. That was selfish. Besides, I just told you things have changed. Don’t pretend you didn’t know what I meant.”

  “Oh, fuck all of you. Fuck you, fuck Tony, fuck Jonah. Fuck your cozy little nuclear family. It’s nuclear all right—it’s a fucking nuclear bomb. Go blow yourselves up in Hawaii. I don’t give a flying fuck.”

  Claire tur
ned on her heels and went upstairs. “Good riddance” was all I could think. I wanted a joint. I wondered if Tony had left any dope behind. Fat chance. I waited for Claire to get into her room and close the door, then I went up to the attic to check out his room. It seemed like a very long walk. My body was exhausted from the dope and food and constant motion I’d indulged in all day.

  There wasn’t much left in Tony’s room. It had never been anything but wallboard and a couple pieces of furniture, anyway, so I wasn’t too surprised. There wasn’t even a dresser to look into. I got down on my knees and looked under his rollaway bed. There was small, green, glass ashtray beside one of the legs and—bingo!—it contained half-a-dozen roaches of various sizes and a box of small wooden matches.

  I pulled the ashtray out, sat down, leaned back against the bed, and lit up one of the roaches. It tasted sweet and good. As I sat smoking, I felt an affinity for Tony in his exile to that room. I wondered what he’d thought about everything going on down below him. Had he thought about it much or felt detached from it, the way I did sitting there smoking his dope? The room felt far away from everything and everyone. I decided on the spot I would stay there for the duration of my life in that house. It felt like a way station on the road out. After smoking a couple of roaches, I managed to pull myself up off the hard floor and onto Tony’s bed. I fell into sleep like a rock falling down a well.

  Without work to interfere, and with little sense of what I wanted to do with myself, I fell back into the habit of hanging out with Kolvacik. We got stoned every morning and stayed stoned until we went to bed. Half the time I woke up stoned. Sometimes we were out all day, enjoying the sun, going on excursions in the Triumph. Other times, we just sat around the house—his or mine—smoking dope, talking, reading aloud to one another, watching B movies on television. It was an aimless and painless existence. I became so detached from Claire and Jonah that the day of their leaving came upon me totally unprepared.

  It was the first day of August, and I woke up half stoned. I trudged down the stairs in my cut-offs to go to the bathroom and heard Claire moving around her room in some kind of purposeful pattern that roused my curiosity. I went to her door and saw two suitcases open on the bed and a trunk open at the foot of the bed.

  “Going on a trip?” I asked.

  She turned to looked at me, a wad of underpants in her hand, unsure, I could tell, if I was being a smart-ass or if I was so far gone that I’d forgotten she and Jonah were leaving that day. Apparently, my face made it clear that it was the latter.

  “I told you over and over again we were leaving today,” she said, “but it never got through that haze of marijuana smoke you live in, did it? Jonah asked me the other day if you were gone. I told him, no, of course not, you weren’t gone, that we still saw you around here, sometimes. He looked at me as if I didn’t understand the question and said, ‘I know.’ Then he repeated, ‘Is John gone?’ He knows you’re not here, John—even when you are here.”

  “You mean, this is it? Today? You and Jonah are leaving?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  Then she seemed to soften.

  “I’m sorry,” she added.

  I had no idea what to say. I didn’t even know what I felt. My nerve endings were anesthetized. I felt as if I were standing in front of a giant wall of rock, something so high and wide I had no idea how to get around it. I didn’t have the strength to climb it.

  “Can I ask you a favor?” said Claire.

  I nodded.

  “Will you go with us to the airport? Katie’s driving us, but I’d like you to come along.”

  I said I would.

  “And one more thing. Will you not smoke any dope before then? I want to say goodbye to the man I was in love with, not to some zombie I don’t know anymore.”

  That stung. But it helped me to say yes. I wasn’t sure I could make it through the goodbye not being stoned, but now I’d have to, if I wanted to say goodbye at all. It scared me but also relieved me. I was sick of being stoned.

  “What time are we leaving?” I said.

  Claire smiled, understanding I had agreed to her terms.

  “One o’clock. Come here and hug me, now.”

  She opened her arms to me. I went to her and let her wrap them around me. She nestled her face in my neck.

  “You’ll be okay,” she whispered. “We’ll both be okay.”

  I wasn’t so sure. I felt as if I should explode with grief in her arms, but all that happened was that my eyes filled with tears. I felt Claire’s tears on my neck and shivered, but she held on tight.

  “Am I crazy to do this?” she asked.

  “You’re asking the wrong man,” I said, sniffing, “but let me put it this way: if I could have you committed to keep you from going through with it, I’d do it.”

  We stood holding one another for a long time.

  “You’re never coming back,” I said, suddenly knowing in the pit of my heart that it was true.

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “I do.”

  With his usual impeccable sense of timing, Jonah walked into the room.

  “Mommy John hug?” he said.

  “Yes, sweetheart,” said Claire, “Mommy John hug. And now we’re going to kiss.”

  She turned her face up to mine. I slid my arms around her and pulled her tight against me. God, how I loved that body! We looked deep into one another’s eyes, then kissed for a long time. Then Jonah was tugging at my pants leg.

  “Mommy go airplane,” he insisted. “Jonah go airplane. John stay home.”

  Reluctantly, Claire and I let go of one another. As she pulled her body away from mine, I felt as if the places where she had pressed against me— my lips, my chest, my pelvis—were indelibly imprinted with impressions of her body. I wanted to feel those impressions forever. But within moments they were gone.

  Katie arrived at eleven-thirty. I loaded the suitcases and the trunk into her car. By noon, we were on our way. I sat in front with Claire, but instead of taking the last opportunity to be close, both of us sat primly beside one another, treating the inch of air space between us on the seat as if it were a glass wall. The airport seemed unreal, as airports often did to me. The idea that people were going to step onto giant metal contraptions and fly away—in some cases, very far away—was never quite believable. I said goodbye to Claire and Jonah almost perfunctorily, as if I would be seeing them the next morning. Perhaps, at some level, I was hoping that pretending it was so would make it so.

  Katie and I hardly spoke on the way back to the East Side. Her children were unusually subdued, too. When she dropped me off, she asked if I wanted to come over to her house for supper, but I could tell she didn’t want me take her up on it. She was just trying to say that she understood how I felt and wished she could help me out.

  But she couldn’t. Nobody could. Kolvacik showed up with a fistful of joints, just sure I’d be ready to smoke my brains out, but I wasn’t interested. Not that day. He left, disgusted, and I went up to bed in broad daylight. I chose Claire’s bed, which still had her bedclothes on it. I stripped and lay down across it naked, smelling her on the sheets and on the pillow. I held her pillow and tried to pretend it was her, but it was a pitiful substitute. I crushed the pillow to me and started crying. I cried myself to sleep.

  I moped around for most of the next day, too, feeling sorry for myself. But by the evening I felt lonely and wanted desperately to escape my thoughts about Claire. I called Kolvacik, who did a hurt dance about the day before for a few minutes before agreeing to come over. I reminded him to bring his dope—not that he would have gone anywhere without it.

  We got stoned that night and pretty much stayed stoned for the next week and a half. Kolvacik lived at the house. It was easier than going home to face Mina, I guess. He ended up sleeping in Tony’s room, while I continued to torture myself by sleeping in Claire’s bed. Some nights, as I lay there stoned, I could imagine her beside me so clearly that I could smell her
.

  I got more and more depressed as the days passed—with agonizing slowness, it seemed. I should have been doing other things—such as deciding where I wanted to live when the lease was up and how I was going to get the furniture into storage, as I’d promised Claire I would—not to mention how I was going to make a living. But all I did was smoke dope and listen to music and eat. Kolvacik had told me I could stay with him until I found a place, and I could always round up a bunch of friends to help move furniture.

  Three days before I was supposed to vacate the house, I fell asleep in my underpants on the bed with the windows wide open. I awoke just before dawn. A car whooshed by in the dark. The air had turned unseasonably cool. I shivered and pulled up the sheet. I longed for the warmth of Claire’s body, for the comfort of her love, for Jonah’s matter-of-fact affection. Lacking that, I suddenly yearned for my own family, for the house I grew up in, for the only other place I’d ever felt unconditionally loved. I coughed from the chill I’d caught. Then, my brain still tranquilized by dope, I quickly fell back to sleep.

  15

  THE COUGH AND CHILL I FELT DURING THE NIGHT turned out to be harbingers of much worse. I awoke the next morning with a mild fever, which I welcomed as an excuse to stay in bed and do nothing. I got out only long enough to put on some light pajamas, eat a piece of dry toast, and drink some orange juice. When Kolvacik got up and saw I was sick, he went off to find someone else to play with.

  I slept all day and into the night, and woke feeling even hotter. There was no thermometer, so I couldn’t put my theory to the test, but I guessed my fever was over a hundred. I went to the bathroom, where I drank a lot of water, but food held no appeal. Besides, I had no desire to walk all the way downstairs to the kitchen and back up again. It seemed miles away.

  By the next morning, the morning of the day I was supposed to vacate the house, I wasn’t sure I would be able to make it to the kitchen, even if I wanted to. This, time, when I got up and went to the bathroom, no more than twenty-five feet away, and returned to my bed, I felt as if I’d run around the block. It seemed impossible that so little physical exertion could lead to exhaustion, but I fell back into bed like someone who hadn’t slept for days. I knew I was in trouble, then. What if I really couldn’t get down the stairs to the phone and call somebody? Would I have to lie there like a deserted old man and cry out for someone on the street to come and help me? Would anyone come if I did, or would they dismiss me as a ranting lunatic?