by Jones, Nath
Marie looked back into the bed of the truck to check on Squally. The happy mutt gave a cinnamon wag while watching the fence posts zip by under the dark blue broken clouds.
“Don’t ask me why I did any of it.” The man in coveralls rubbed the inside of the windshield with his sleeve and turned on the defrost blowers. “After I retired I had a charter-fishing boat business in Florida.
“But even in a subdivided paradise my wife hated me and made my life a living hell for as long as she walked this earth. No American Dream for me, Marie. Not for me. Even though I edged my sidewalks clean and pretty in three damn states.”
The oak trees held onto dry brown leaves. They all stared into the darkening woods. Dan downshifted and the truck stopped at the property line.
The old man cracked the window again. “I guess I could have divorced her somewhere along the line. Or she could have divorced me. Or something. But that’s not what we did. We stuck it out. Did the best we could.”
Marie said, “Sounds like you did great.”
The old man laughed. “Some old milk slogan used to say, ‘Good as any, better than some.’ That was us. Good as any, better than some.”
Marie was worried. “So you’re all alone now? You’re way out here by yourself?”
“No, no, no, sweetie. I moved up here with my girlfriend. Buying this place was her idea.”
Dan sort of snorted. “Girlfriend?”
“Sure. In Florida, after my wife died, I’d get real bored. Go down to the marina and tinker around on that damned charter boat and end up at that little bar they had there. Me and the other geezers all afternoon. Talking about mangled manatees. What to do about oil leaking into the channel. Whether to charge fathers for little puking kids losing rods overboard—shit like that.”
Marie reminded him. “But what about this girlfriend?”
“Elaine? She never lost a rod. She wears a fishing belt. She’s no fool.”
“I mean, how’d you meet her?”
“Oh, she ran a bait shop on the landing and sold beer and candy and cigarettes, too. She ran the deliveries to the bar in a motorboat. Somehow, I got to helping her unload that motorboat on her runs.” The old man sat up straight.
The light was gone. The day was over.
After a long silence, the old man said, “Guess I didn’t know about me hating my wife and my wife hating me while she was alive. Guess I thought all that antagonism, all that animosity, all that manipulation and the rest was love. How could I have known different? All those years should’ve meant something, right?”
“You didn’t love your wife?” Marie folded her hands in her lap smoothing the finger of the glove over her wedding ring.
“Not like I love Elaine. Not like that.”
The tradition was to implement a pattern that was a kind of suffering self-loathing to which any good person gets humbly indoctrinated. The tradition was to keep doing what you had always known how to do, to give up certain hopes for the someone whose role model said to love you. So what if you’d sacrificed almost everything on a little cross around your neck pulled side to side for years on end?
Marie turned to the old man. “What would you have done different?” She wasn’t really asking to know.
“Nothing.”
Dan said, “Nothing?” Dan looked back to be sure Squally was still there and not too cold. The dog was asleep.
The old man countered, “Good as any, better than some.” He realized how late it was getting. “It’s pretty dark to be picking Christmas trees now.” But the old man wasn’t sentimental. He wasn’t a traditionalist. To him it was neither here nor there. He was a businessman. He motioned toward the darkness. “Well, you saw this place. Rows upon rows upon rows. And they’re all the same anyway. Hell, we even spend the whole spring pruning so they’re every one the damned same, exactly the same. I’ll give you one of the precut Scotch pines half-price. No needles in the carpet this year, Marie. There’s a six-foot beauty up there if Elaine hasn’t sold it. It’s plenty fresh.”
Marie nodded, holding back tears. The tradition, Dan’s tradition which kept the old man’s heat on, was to walk into the unknown if familiar rows and pick your own tree, cut it down, carry it out any way you knew how, and call it yours until it died, until it was time, until it was time to let it go.
Throughout the evening the symmetric snowdrifts against the barbed wire fence changed from white to pink to lavender to purple-shadowed hillocks to blue to black and then back to white in the headlight beams.
The truck started up and Dan finally remembered how to drive in the country. He handled the old tank with surety. Marie watched him shifting gears between her legs. Squally must have woken up as they bounced and lurched over the frozen ruts.
LIMBIC RESONANCE: RESPONSES TO A MATCH.COM QUESTIONNAIRE
I
Me? You know how some women have those really nice sitting rooms? With the Ethan Allen furniture and the Andersen windows that open in, so that theoretically you can clean them easily on a regular basis? You know how you can hear that Windex squeaking in blue alcoholic circles which dissipate, right? You know how some women vacuum their stairs? Those soft almond stairs, with stripes like lawns, right? Well, I'm not really like that. I've got a plywood sitting room, with no furniture, where long-lost friends come and do gymnastics. I’ve got mirrors which finally breathe light after years’ dark storage box. I’ve got shine and mercury filling up this column-spine.
II
Who I'd like to meet? Dear Lord, no more immovable glaciers and, please God, no more rocky white waters, jagged, choked, and swirling. Any other emotional undercurrent? I can handle it. So hit me with your best shot. Part of me wants to overcome this addicted-to-the-thrill-ride part of my intimate life. I’ve read the self-help books. I know it's pathologic and divisive. But it’s not like it’s my problem. We’re a generation of gimme sociopaths playing dress-up and get-it-on. It’s a cycle of heartbreak, a norm of constant devolution, and I understand that it breeds all sorts of instability that you can’t call home. It’s consummate evidence of an insidious disrespect for others. I have learned that nothing comes of it—that people can get hurt, that nothing lasting exists in constant resonance. I've learned a lot. But you know what? I'll tell you what. I love believing in the aquifer. I love rivulets trickling into silent secluded streams through limestone beds. I love quick-moving rivers plunge-dive-bombing on a sunny day. I love the immensity of oceans. I love sublimation, evaporation, condensation, and I-think-it’s-gonna-rain-soon thunderstorms. And honey—lovesick tenderized, meat cleaver runaway, undoing body surfer boy—I love those mighty waves. So, whatever I've learned, I'll see you curling bored in the pipe.
III
Do I want what? Who knows? Maybe. (Pass the gun, Mr. Walken. Let's go one more round of Russian roulette in these booby-trapped, mud-obscured Vietnamese waters. I'm up for it. Are you?) I suppose the main problem is that I don't want my children to have me for a mother. This creates a secondary problem wherein the only real logical choice is becoming someone other than myself, in order to have children, so that I can be their mother, successfully. Somehow logic gets lost. There's no way out of this bamboo trap. Not having children does not solve the syllogism. It should. But it doesn't. (Faith enters stage left dressed in some sort of transparency.) That’s the kind of logic that doesn’t last but finds a pocket in you somewhere to burrow down into, as if safe. That’s the kind of momentary panic where you find yourself breathing in and out, real slow, real even, staving off something quiet.
IV
How? Isn’t that sort of rude? I don't understand why so many people insist on discussing such things. Are there waves in the aquifer? As if it's anyone's business. Why do you ask? It seems there must not be. Can’t be any kind of motion at all down there—memories are like that. Probably blind color-blanched fishes corroborate with stalactites and the drips. Silent. Still. Refusing to thrash, to be heard. Probably something calcifies and the surfers get bored waiting f
or conditions to change. Well, if you must know: Introvertigo; Extrovertigo. I come and I go. How do you do it? On Wednesday mornings with the light pouring in through slatted blinds? Isn’t that sort of trite? I do it. I do it fine with tree frogs starting to sing when the shower-timers go off in their cages at 4:00 a.m. in some old boyfriend’s memorable trailer. Probably waves that do get started panic underground, sealing, and escape any way they can. Introvert, I go. Extrovert, I go.
V
Regardless: No, I’m not doing anything this weekend. What do you want to do?
ABOUT THE ON IMPULSE EBOOK SERIES
On Impulse Series Titles:
The War is Language: 101 Short Works
2000 Deciduous Trees: Memories of a Zine
Love & Darts
How to Cherish the Grief-Stricken
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About the On Impulse eBook Series:
We each have an impulse to share our experience. These four collections of short works explore storytelling from catharsis to craft. Over the course of this series Nath Jones’s writing style develops from the raw, associative, tyrannic rambles of cathartic non-fiction, flash fiction, and rant in The War is Language and our digital domains, to the delightful rough-hewn vignettes of 2000 Deciduous Trees, into the compact characterizations of the fictionalized tellings in Love & Darts, and finally toward How to Cherish the Grief-Stricken’s fully-crafted short stories that use literary devices and narrative elements to reveal a world well-rendered.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nath Jones received an MFA in creative writing from Northwestern University where she was a nominee for the Best New American Voices 2010. Her publishing credits include PANK Magazine, There Are No Rules, The Battered Suitcase, and Sailing World. Her current e-book series, On Impulse, explores the spectrum of narrative from catharsis to craft. She lives and writes in Chicago.
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