Ben Soul

by Richard George

comes,” she said. “And don’t complain if it doesn’t come. Take every day as it comes.”

  Ben drove home with Len’s ashes and his photograph. He went in and put Len on the coffee table. “Until I can get you to the columbarium, rest here,” he said. The silence bore in upon him like a great weight of ice. He went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. In the yard he noticed the gazanias had begun blooming. “Hello, daisies,” he said, and let his tears drop. When he was done with tears for that time, he held his breath and listened to the deafening hush.

  Down to the Sea

  Ben Finds San Danson

  Ben drove north, into the redwoods, to dissolve his gloom in their shadows. He had wearied of listening for footfalls that would not come. The whirring furnace fan and the wheezing refrigerator only accented the silence Len’s passing had left in his home and life. He sought release in driving the forest roads. By afternoon, the sun streaked the dark trees with watery gold. He took a twisting road over the mountains to the Coast Highway. He turned south on the Coast Highway, toward the home, even though he was uneasy driving where the cliffs plunged to the surf.

  Ben did not remember driving this bit of highway before. The Coast Highway cut inland across a point of land. The sun was setting in a golden and gray ocean. He had been driving longer than he realized. Night gathered purple shadows on the eastern hills. Three small mountains stood darkly against a white-gold sky on the west. Ben pulled off on a wide patch of gravel and shut off his engine. He got out and leaned against his car to watch the sunset sky.

  A ground squirrel ran up on a rock and stared at Ben with a glittering black eye. “Hello, Squirrel,” Ben said. The squirrel cocked its head to listen. Ben looked up at the sky. On the third hill, Ben saw a unicorn silhouetted against the sun. A line of llamas followed it westward, down the far side of the hill.

  “Some strange livestock around here,” Ben remarked to the squirrel. “I’ve never seen a unicorn before.” The squirrel chittered something unintelligible and leaped from the rock into the shadows. “I don’t believe in unicorns,” Ben said. “It must be some trick of the light.” The squirrel raced up on the rock again, chattered a brief phrase, and ran away. Ben watched the hill until the light faded, and then got in his car. He drove two miles more San Danson Station. He stopped for the night at the one motel.

  The desk clerk was a man in his late sixties or early seventies. Life had worn grooves in his face. His life had used him hard. The nameplate on the motel counter said his name was Harry Pitts. Ben could see, upside down, that Harry was studying Jeremiah. Harry said no more than necessary to check Ben into a room. He took Ben’s credit card and made an imprint, and gave him the key. “Number seven, Mr. Soul,” Harry said. “It’s down near the end.”

  Two other cars occupied slots in the motel lot. The adjacent café, the Café of the Four Rosas, was dark. Ben bought a stale sandwich and a coke from machines in front of the shuttered gas station and ate in his room. Then he went to sleep. No dreams troubled his sleep.

  He woke early the next morning and dressed. His face showed his sixty-two years in the cracked bathroom mirror. He had lines around his gray eyes and across his brow. He was not wrinkled, but time had etch-a-sketched his character on his face. He kept his dark brown hair, threaded with silver, cut short, partly to accommodate its thinness. He was glad the mirror was small. It didn’t show his thickened waist and sagging pectorals. Too much pasta over too many years had stayed with him.

  He quietly closed his room door, so as not to wake the lodgers in the other two occupied rooms. A closed sign decorated the door to the motel office. The adjoining Café of the Four Rosas and Wong’s Import Export Emporium, Post Office, and General Store also sported closed signs. San Danson Station did no business at dawn. A passing car’s tires rumbled on the Coast Highway outside the parking lot. First light slowly bled the night’s black from the green meadow along Martyr’s Creek. An arrow-shaped sign labeled “Beach” pointed down a bluff.

  The gravel path Ben took was rain-rutted at the sides. The pebbles glistened with fog. The path declined steeply down the twenty feet of bluff, so he set his feet down carefully. At sixty-two, he wasn’t as goat-footed as he once was. The gravel gave way to loose sand at the bottom. Nearer the surf, Ben found sea-hardened sand. He turned left and walked along the packed sand, glad his footprints marked his way. The bluff soon disappeared in the fog.

  Some minutes walking brought him to where the creek cut across the beach toward the cove. A chill breeze had sprung up to swirl the fog. The sky grew lighter as the fog thinned. The salt smell of the cove tingled on the wind. Ben decided to return to the Inn for hot tea. He always carried the makings in his luggage.

  He followed his own footprints in reverse, looking for the trail up the bluff. The breeze freshened, thinning the fog over the cove. The sun came through the fog’s filter. Ben could see now that the trail came down the bluff at a low point. The bluff rose as it went toward the ocean. A sudden wind shift cleared the fog from the beach like a giant mitten wiping away the raindrops on a windshield. Through a landward break, the rising sun’s white golden light danced on the cove like a school of silver fishes.

  The lifting fog revealed cliffs on the south side of the creek. They seemed to be flat on top. Instead of a beach, the cliff’s toes were broken rock and tide pools. A mountain rose on his side of the creek above the beach he was walking on. The fog still wrapped its top in gray. At its foot, on the ledge that topped the bluff, sunlight flared off the windows of several buildings set among twisted trees. Smoke curled up from chimneys.

  Two sentinel piles of black rock stood off shore just beyond the cove’s mouth. Surf curled against their foundations breaking the ocean swells into the cove’s wavelets. Ben, warmed in the sun, decided to walk the beach to its end, past the houses. His shoes squeezed water from the packed sand. Ben could see only broken rocks and tidal pools where the beach ended. From there the surf flailed at the foot of cliffs like those across the cove.

  Someone had built a stair of logs and packed sand at this end of the beach. It twisted in hairpin fashion up the bluff and onto the ledge. Ben climbed the stairway. He came out between two modest cottage built of brown shingles and logs. Smoke came from the landward chimney. A light in the other cabin silhouetted a man who was beginning to dress. The man was in good shape. Ben stood and watched him draw his boxer shorts up and wrap a short robe around him. Ben blushed at his voyeurism when watching the man stirred a mild sensation in his loins. The man turned out the light and disappeared into the cottage’s shadows.

  Ben walked as quietly as he could, not wishing to disturb anyone’s privacy. He came to a broader path that led back toward the Inn. It passed several rustic cottages set among trees obviously planted to protect them from wind.

  Ben was almost at the Inn, when he saw the “For Rent” sign on a cottage. He’d have missed it if the sun hadn’t lit it up for him. On a whim, he turned up the path that led to the porch between the high grass and coastal flowers to peer in the windows. The kitchen had a small stove, and an old sink along one wall. A refrigerator stood to one side with the door propped open. The next window to the left was frosted; Ben guessed the room was a bathroom.

  He pushed through the grass and flowers around the cottage to the left. Two windows on that side opened on two rooms. One had a bed, stripped to the mattress. The front of the cottage looked toward the cove. A small porch covered the front door. A picture window next to the front door allowed a clear view of the cove from the cottage parlor. Ben could make out a dusty couch and an empty bookcase. The floor was dusty, too. The chimney suggested a fireplace.

  The place charmed him. He imagined himself sitting in his favorite recliner with a mug of tea steaming beside him. He imagined the bookcase filled with his favorite volumes. He needed a place to contemplate his life without Len, a place Len had not been, a place
to begin again to be his own person. This cottage could be the place for him to renew himself. He looked for a telephone number, or address, to apply to rent the place. The rental sign simply said “For Rent.” He decided to return to the motel to ask about renting the cottage.

  The motel office was still not open. A hand-lettered sign on the door advised clients to go to the Café of the Four Rosas to check out. Ben walked over to the Café. He was ready for a hearty breakfast. The stale sandwich had not lasted. He took a booth by a window. Harry Pitts came out and said, “Good Morning,” then ducked back into what Ben took to be the kitchen. He reappeared with a menu and a coffee pot.

  “Regular or Decaf?” he asked.

  “Tea, if you have it,” Ben said. “I gave up coffee several years ago.”

  “Herbal?”

  “Black tea, Lipton’s if you have it.”

  “Lipton’s it is.” Harry took the coffee back in the kitchen and came back with a mug and a pot of hot water. The pot of hot water was ample; it had at least four cups in it. Ben silently blessed Harry when he saw that Harry had already put a teabag in the pot and poured water over it. It was already coloring nicely.

  “Our breakfast