by Tom Molloy
“Don’t give up.”
“I ain’t gonna.”
“You deserve someone nice, you’ll find him.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Cross your heart?”
“Cross my heart.”
Because neither of us wanted to cry in front of the other, we parted with a final glance and a small wave. In the darkness of the streets the cold sucked away her scent from my hands and as I walked it sucked away the taste and smell of the city itself, a sure sign that it was time to go.
With the instruments slung over my shoulder, I slipped the walkman around my neck, passing rapidly through the empty twisting winter streets, then under the steel girders of the elevated highway that lay straight north. I did not take that road but opted instead for Route 1A, an older route that hugged the coastline. This was a road that allowed the traveller to view the passing scenes within cozy, dimly-lit kitchens, to observe the knick-knacks on ice-tinged windowsills. As I walked I slid a tape into the machine listening to a band called The Police telling me that:
“There’s a black hat caught in a high tree top
There’s a flag pole rag and the wind won’t stop”
On a curb near the city limit I watched the moon climb the frozen sky, bleeding its color into the air until it stood white, high, and sharply focused, adding its approval to the cold.
In the first car that stopped were two men going to the dog track in Revere. Talking of the ninth race, the driver’s chin almost rested on the steering wheel as he promised, “They ain’t foolin’ this fool tonight.”
The next ride was to downtown Salem where black witches adorned the copper flashing of ancient houses. Then came a tipsy fisherman who ran a bait shop in Newburyport, and who hated blue-fish, Jews, homosexuals, and the New York Yankees.
I stood in Newburyport for two hours, watching the couples in their foreign cars pass by, until a young man wearing a plaid hunting jacket, a beer in his hands, stopped. He was going to Nashua, New Hampshire, and he said. “I’m stoned, man, like you know, I can’t hack it, and I’m really stoned, ya know?”
Unblinking, gripping the wheel as though he saw a road full of spiders, he brought us to Portsmouth, letting me off at the big traffic circle with a parting, “Sorry man, but I’m really wicked stoned.”
I watched his car swing left and zoom off toward the hinterland of the Granite State.
For another hour I stood in the cold then went to a nearby Howard Johnson’s for tea with lemon, and toast layered with cinnamon. I had a second cup of tea watching the waitresses in a wordless war, not meeting one another’s gaze, slamming dishes, and ripping off receipts from their pads with tearing rage.
It was very late now and the next ride was from a trucker going to Bar Harbor for a shipment of lobster. He would rush through the night to make the turn-around in time for the next business day in Boston.
He dropped me off in Kennebunk where the stars in the eastern sky were losing part of their luminescence to a growing light there. The river was higher now, which made it seem less swift, and the cold was probing my clothes as were the thin branches of the genuflecting birch trees. A small animal scurried along the ground, quite brown and vulnerable in the snow as an owl sounded not far away.
As I walked I held the strap of the instruments and the walkman in one hand. They skimmed close to the crusted snow. The coming light began to define individual trees in such a subtle way that it seemed as though the ground itself was the source of the illumination.
A small brook, a familiar thicket, a stone wall, and the house came into view. One window held the pallid elongated moon, and the smoke from the woodstove rose and rose.
When I let myself in I was seized by a shiver, and it came again with even more force as I unlaced my boots in the kitchen. The boy was asleep, one arm over the blankets, and in the next room she lay beneath the greens and the reds of her afghan. She did not hear me undress at the foot of the bed. She did not stir as I stood for long minutes. The cold air mixed with the deep want as I watched her, finally knowing by the changed rhythm of her breathing that she was awake.
At length she rolled over, swallowing and drawing breaths deeper and deeper as I came to her, kissing her feet, her calves, the sides and backs of her knees, the deep softness of her thighs, her stomach, sides, breasts, her neck and her lips.
Outside, the light now seemed in retreat, and there was the sureness of the four walls, the deep softness of the mattress, and the musk and breathing of the woman. There was the hard unyielding want of my body and the cool air above us.
Then there was again the calling musk of her body, the salty depth of her mouth. There was this woman in my arms like the warm promise of life itself. There were all the other places and then the room, and then there was only the moist deep certainty of the woman.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank the following people for their friendship and their support of my writing efforts: Jack Zambella, John Volk, Bill Harrington, Jim Gearing, Tim Heider, Toni Johnson, Leni Greason, Frank McCarthy, Dennis Campbell, Jack Warner, Martha Birnbaum, the Molloys, the Doucettes, the O’Briens, the Morrells, and the late Jack Lynch, soldier and scholar.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1990 by Tom Molloy
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3362-6
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