Between Then and Now

It's dark on the porch, but as usual I can see him as soon as I step out of the house. He's always standing in the southeastern corner, his back to the wall, trying to stay out of the wind. He's dressed as I am: winter coat over pajamas, bare feet in winter boots with the laces untied, woolen cap pulled down over ears still wet from the shower. He's staring out into the street, watching the tiny, jagged snowflakes blowing around. There isn't anything to do on the porch but smoke and look out at the street. He's out here because his mother, my mother, our mother won't let him smoke in the house. I'm out here because my wife won't let me smoke in that same house.

The porch is really just an alcove, only four feet by ten, smaller than a monk's cell. Just a sheltered place to hang the flag on the fourth of July, a platform for jack o'lanterns at Halloween. We're only a few feet apart, and when I light my cigarette he turns and looks at me. He wears a beard because he wants to look older. I shaved my beard when it turned gray, when it made me look too old. We smile at each other, and then we both look back out into the street. It's a quiet street, with very little traffic, especially late on a snowy night like this. There is only the hiss of the snow, the crackle and clack of stiff branches moving in the wind. There's a big old pin oak and a white birch out in the yard, and the oak taps the birch and the birch taps the roof of the house as if they're passing on secrets. Tap-tap-tap, scritch-scritch-scritch, tap-tap-tap. On a pole next to the porch steps there is a gas carriage lamp, unlit, and on the top of the lamp there is a small brass eagle, wings outspread. Out of habit I reach out to rub the eagle's head.

I started this ritual with the eagle the day my mother and I moved into this house, when I was eleven years old. The carriage lamp has never worked, and generations of mud daubers have built their nests inside its glass globe, but the eagle's head has been polished by my thumb for so long that it glints back dimly at the street light in the middle of the block.

We both smoke for a minute, and when I've gathered my courage I say to him, "Don't worry, you'll make it back there." As I know he will, he looks at me and says, "Make it back where?"

"Make it back to Thailand," I say. "You'll go back in April." As he always does, he grins and asks, "Will she be waiting?"

I look out at the snow, where the street light creates a dome of white gauze that ends in total blackness at either end of the street. We're standing in a giant souvenir suburban America snow-globe that somebody keeps shaking. I want to lie to him, but I don't, because he thinks he's prepared himself. He knows that he'll be gone for a year, he thinks he knows the worst that might happen, and he thinks he's strong enough to take it if it does. He'll find out that he's not strong enough to take it, but right now he thinks he is.

"No, she won't be waiting," I always say. "She's already met a guy, a professional soccer player from Milan. He's in Thailand because he hurt his knee and has to sit out a season. Right now, as you're standing here, she's falling in love with him because he drives a chopper and wears a black leather jacket."

He snorts. He shrugs. He takes a drag off his cigarette because he thinks it will make him look unconcerned. "Come on," he says, "a leather jacket in the tropics?"

"I said he's Italian. And he doesn't wear a shirt under it."

He's looking out into the street again, at the dark houses and shrouded fences. The Styrofoam shells that Mr. Price put over his rose bushes in October, five bushes that march across an otherwise flat and featureless lawn, each have a mound of snow on top; they look like a caravan of camels lost in the desert. The naked concrete cherub holding an umbrella over Mrs. Gay's bird bath is standing in ice up to his dimpled knees

Two doors down the street Mrs. Teggatz calls her dog. "Miiiiiiii-tzeeeeeee!" The snow muffles her voice and makes her sound like she's a lot farther away than she is. Mitzy is a sheepdog and she loves the snow; Mitzy never wants to come back inside. Where he is, or rather when he is, Mrs. Teggatz is calling a Dachshund named Lucky. Lucky hated the cold and always did his business as quickly as he could, but he was old and nearly blind that winter; when the snow made everything smell the same he could never find the way back to the door

We listen to the screen door slap shut on Mrs. Teggatz’s house, and then he says "She writes me every week. There's nothing in her letters about any Italian guy."

"There won't be." Part of me has something very important to say to him, and part of me hates this conversation. "Right up until the week before you go back, you'll still be getting those letters. Then you'll go back, and she just won't be there. Asians are very unsentimental, but their sense of social debt is unshakable. For them an obligation transcends law, love, even death. That's why they keep photographs of their ancestors in the dining room. You're sending her money every month. In her language she says she's eating your rice. She owes you those letters. But once you come back she'll owe you more than letters, and she won't be willing to give you more. So she'll just stop eating your rice. Between the last letter and the day you arrive she'll pack her things out of the house, scrub the place top to bottom, wash and iron all the clothes you left behind, and leave her set of keys with the lady who runs the noodle shop across the street."

He's toughing it out, wearing a smug little smile like he always does. The truth is, I'm not the first to tell him that she'll disappoint him. All his friends told him that before he left, and he didn't believe them just like he's not believing me now. Even after the lady at the noodle shop hands him those keys, he still won't believe it. He'll stay in that house, on that street, where everybody looks at him with pity, like he's a cripple, or maybe a madman. He'll continue to eat his breakfast in that noodle shop for months, hoping she'll walk in one morning and ask for her keys.

"So you're saying I shouldn't go back?" Now he's trying to change the subject, and he gives me the chance, I think, to make my point. The cold is burning through the pants of my flannel pajamas already, aggravating what my doctor has decided is new arthritis in my knees, but I light another cigarette. I smoke a lot more than he does.

"No, you have to go back," I say. "It will be the most important time of your life. You'll stop trading restaurant reviews for free meals, and you'll start to take your writing, or at least your journalism, more seriously. Eventually you'll publish everywhere from the Christian Science Monitor to Hustler. You’ll have a weekly column in a major Bangkok newspaper and you’ll be famous in a very small market. You'll make good money at it, good enough to live in a big house with a maid and a gardener. You'll travel all over Asia, first class every time and somebody else will always pay for the ticket. You'll have lunch with Tiger Woods and dinner with the Crown Prince of Denmark in the same day."

"Who's Tiger Woods?"

"Somebody who'll be famous soon, trust me. My point is that all the hard work you’re doing now, holding down three shitty jobs, scrimping and saving, explaining to everybody why you've moved back home with your mother for a year, it'll all be worth it."

We've each got one hand wrapped around a cigarette and one hand jammed in a pocket, and we're bobbing up and down like hunchbacks on a see-saw. My breath comes out in solid gray plumes that pass right through him; his pass through me. Our coats are the same coat, a black pea-coat from the Army-Navy store, but his is warmer; he bought it just two months ago and it still has its lining. The lining in mine was eaten by moths during the six years it hung in the basement of this house.

"I never should have left," he says, throwing the butt of his cigarette out into the snow and immediately lighting another. He's been smoking on this porch since he was fifteen years old. He smoked here in high school, in the year he dropped out of college, the year he abandoned his stage career in Chicago, the year he gave up his film career in New York. Here he is again, in the year he left Thailand, smoking on the porch. And here I am now, smoking with him. Every spring that I live in this house the grass around the porch is littered with hundreds of cigarette butts, and every spring the robins and jays and cardinals come here to pick up the cotton filters to line their nests. Before the grass is long enough to mow, all the butts are gone.

"You had to leave," I say to him, as I've already said to him a million times. "It wasn't your fault that Iraq invaded Kuwait. It wasn't your fault the only way a European tourist can fly to Thailand is through Riyadh. Without guests the hotels had to send their waiters and room maids and pool boys back to the rice paddies they came from, and then there was no point in paying a foreigner to teach them English. The shooting war only lasted 100 days, but it will be ten months before the Allied Command lets any commercial traffic go through Riyadh. There won’t be a tourist in the Kingdom for a year, and with no tourists, there was no work for you. Not even restaurant reviews."

He doesn't believe me, he never believes me. This is what he thinks about when he’s on the porch: that if he had just made a few more phone calls, peddled his syllabus and lesson plans to one more hotel, he could have found a way to stay. He is the only child of a single parent; he was raised to be self-reliant, and ambitious. The Gulf War was the first event in his adult life outside of his personal control. In six months, on a muggy hazy morning when he's still groggy with jet lag, a woman named Elder Sister Frog will reach over her boiling noodle pot to hand him a Hello Kitty key chain. That will be the second uncontrollable event in his life, and there are more to come. I want to convince him that he doesn't have to blame himself for these things.

"It's okay," I say to him. "You'll go back and you'll do things you can't even imagine right now. Listen to me. You'll camp on the beach of an uninhabited island the size of Manhattan, and in the morning you'll find tiger tracks in the sand outside your tent. You'll eat bugs and snakes and dogs and monkeys; you'll eat Perigord truffles and beluga caviar and you'll drink three-hundred-dollar bottles of wine." He seems interested, at least he isn't sneering at me, like he does at his mother when she tries to tell him something.

"You'll go bungee jumping and parasailing and scuba diving. You'll learn how to curse and flirt and tell jokes in Thai, and how to chant the Buddha's dharma in Pali. You'll ride an elephant into the Golden Triangle, and there you'll smoke opium with the matriarch of a hill tribe whose dress will be decorated with hundred-year-old Chinese coins. The grandson of a Kuomintang general will point a pistol at your head, and a Burmese soldier will try to trade two hand grenades for five packs of your American cigarettes. You'll make a lot of good friends in the next few years. You'll have to write obituaries for three of the best of them."

He is interested, I can tell he is. On this cold November night, a few weeks after his thirty-fourth birthday, he'd give his right arm for an afternoon spent drinking beer on the beach. In this town, where he knows every street and alley but has no desire to go anywhere, from this porch on this night a place where the people speak different languages, eat different foods, worship different gods, seems to him like heaven. He looks out at all that snow flying around, at the juniper bushes bent under the weight of it, at the barren trees looming over the house and the street light with its fuzzy halo, at all the things that don't look like anything in Thailand. He's looking at the snow but he's seeing the crescent of a beach, the sweep of jungle and the impossibly high limestone cliffs behind. I can tell he's interested, but not convinced. I decide to appeal to his ego.

"You want women? You'll have lots. More than six million tourists visit Thailand every year, and your face will be on billboards looming over Bangkok streets. You’ll be single, rich, and famous. You'll have one-night-stands with an Australian Olympic swimming coach, an anorexic Japanese preschool teacher, a Peace Corps volunteer from Texas, the Reuters Moscow correspondent and a former Miss Manila. You'll spend a week with a Canadian graduate student in a tree house sixty feet up in the rain forest canopy. You'll proofread her dissertation on the endangered primates of Asia, and she'll teach you how to whoop like a gibbon."

"One night you'll be sleeping on the deck of a 20-million-dollar yacht anchored in the Mergui archipelago, Orion standing on his head on the tip of the mast. At midnight the yacht's mistress, a thirty-year-old Swissair stewardess, will come up on deck and crawl under your blanket. Her hands and mouth will be all over you, but then, at just the wrong moment, she'll stand up and say, 'Come, we go now to my cabin.' You'll say, 'But your husband is in the cabin, isn't he?' 'Of course,' she'll say, 'e is waiting for us. My 'usband, 'e like to watch.' You'll tell her that you don't like to be watched, and you'll ask her to crawl back under your blanket. She'll put her tiny diamond-studded fists on her naked hips and glare at you, immediately and utterly in a rage. 'I am not a slut!' she'll say, "I only fock ozzer men to please my 'usband!' She'll stomp below deck and leave you alone under the moon and stars. For the rest of the trip her husband, a sixty-year-old senior executive with the Ovaltine company, will refuse to speak to you."

He's listening. He's not convinced, but he's listening. I'm rocking from foot to foot, back and forth, trying to keep warm. There's enough room to pace a few steps, but my knees feel like they're wrapped in barbed wire.

"Believe me, you really don't want to tie yourself down to one woman at this point in your life. There's too much out there you haven't experienced yet. If she was waiting for you, you'd be happy for a year or two, but then you'd begin to see what you were missing, and you'd begin to hate her."

I've gone too far. He gives me the snort again. He gives me his bored look. He knows there's no way he would ever hate her. "Listen to me," I say, clutching at a last straw. "One year you'll fly to Jakarta to be the Master of Ceremonies at a deep sea fishing tournament, the honored guest of the Salamat Kalimantan Marine Diesel Engine Company. You’ll be writing a column for a fishing magazine and everybody in Indonesia loves to fish. They'll put you up in a luxury condominium on the nineteenth floor of the Bank of Indonesia Building. When you step off the private elevator you'll find a Muslim woman kneeling in the marble foyer, everything but her hands and face covered in yard and yards of pastel silk. After she pours you a glass of orange juice and draws you a bath she'll show you that all of that silk falls off with a shrug, and underneath it she is wearing absolutely nothing at all.”

I’m not sure how closely he’s listening, but it doesn’t matter; I’m telling the story for myself as much as for him.

“In the bathtub you'll try to ask her name, going through the old 'Me Tarzan, You Jane' hand signals that pass for introductions in every bar and brothel in Asia. She'll teach you the only word of Indonesian you'll ever learn, and all weekend, in the bathtub, in bed, whenever you're not down at the marina presenting the trophies for Biggest Billfish, that's what you'll call her. On the plane back to Thailand you'll tell this story to a Sikh gem merchant seated next to you, and when you tell him the woman's name, his eyebrows will jump up to bump his turban. 'My dear friend,' he'll say, 'That is the word for furniture. A girl like that would never expect a man in your position to be the least bit interested in her name. Oh my goodness no. She thought you were asking for her status, don't you see, her position in the organization.' At this point the Sikh's lunch will arrive, delivered by a flight attendant covered everywhere except her face and hands by yards and yards of pastel silk. The Sikh will smack his lips and carefully tuck his beard into his shirt collar. 'She wasn't telling you her name,' he'll say, 'Oh my goodness, no. She was telling you that she comes with the room. Just like the satellite TV or the little mint on your pillow.' Around a mouthful of saffron rice and curried lentils he'll laugh at you. He'll begin to laugh so loud that everybody else in Business Class turns to look at him. 'By Golly, I must say, this is really funny. All weekend you were calling her Furniture. Come here, Furniture! Furniture, where are my shoes? Oh, Furniture! Faster! Faster! I'm coming, Furniture, I'm coming! Oh-ho-ho, you Americans. You really are too much, I must say.'"

A meteor shower is shaken out of the birch tree, is swept up by the wind before it hits the ground and climbs into the branches of the pin oak where it dissipates like frozen smoke. He's been quiet a long time, and I look closely to see if I'm getting through to him at all, but bringing up women was a mistake. It's always a mistake. He doesn't want women, he wants one, specific, woman. He always asks, "What about her? What happens to her?"

I want to kick his ass, but I can't touch him, so instead I hiss at him through clenched teeth. "Forget about her, Stupid. Have you been listening to me? You don't need her." I lower my voice, afraid I'll wake my children, who are sleeping five feet away. The boy and girl sleep together in a single bed, Asia style, protected from the cold by a wall of brick and sea-foam-green aluminum siding, Iowa style. I put my face in his and I whisper, "The Italian's knee heals and he goes home, okay? He promises to take her with him, then he leaves a day early, while she's upcountry saying good-bye to her parents. You'll hear through the grapevine that she's heartbroken, and you think that maybe this is your chance, but almost immediately she marries a British journalist, a guy from the Observer named Taylar. Nobody knows anything about him, except that he wrote a book about the Falklands War. By the time you hear about it, he's already taken her to live in Hong Kong, and after that you get to see her just one more time, when she's nine months pregnant.”

He's not looking at me, but he's listening. I know he's listening.

"It'll be the year of His Majesty the King's Golden Jubilee. Rama the Ninth will wear a crown longer than any other monarch in the world; heads of state from a hundred countries will come to Bangkok to pay their respects, and for a week the Kingdom will be lousy with journalists. You'll see her at a big party at the Foreign Correspondent's Club. You'll wait all night to get next to the Asia desk editor for the Washington Post, you'll give him ten minutes of your best schmooze and just when you're about to hand him your card, you'll see her at the BBC table. She'll be leaning on her husband's shoulder, but she'll be the only one at the table not completely engrossed in whatever it is he's saying. She'll be looking drowsy and happy, not paying attention to her husband's monologue, just looking around the room with her chin in one hand and the other hand absently rubbing her big stomach. Her eyes will sweep over you and not register anything, not pleasure, not dismay, nothing at all. If she recognizes you she's not showing it; she's eating his rice now and she owes him that much. When you catch your breath the guy from the Post has been buttonholed by somebody else and you're standing there like a jerk, holding your business card out to a waiter with a tray of drinks.”

Even if he wasn't listening, even if he wasn't even there on the porch with me, I couldn't stop now. Once I get started on this story, I have to finish it. Maybe part of me thinks that if I tell it enough times, one day it will end differently.

"The next year the British give Hong Kong back to the Chinese, and a friend calls you up, an editor you know who does the in-flight magazine for Cathay Pacific, and this friend says, 'Say, you know that Taylar chap you asked me about? Well, I hear that the Commies are making the wire services use Chinese correspondents now, so he's gone back to Blighty. Heard he got a big advance to write a two-volume biography of Chairman Mao. He got about fifty-thousand U.K, what I heard. Arts visa from the commissars, unlimited access to the mainland, and he's already done an interview with the old man's bastard son in Paris. Taylar's bloody well set up now, that's for sure. We'll see him on the chat shows in a couple of years, after Hollywood buys the rights. Sorry I never could put you two in touch, old son. Say, did you ever see his wife? She's Thai, used to be catwalk model, I guess, quite a looker anyway. I caught an eyeful at the Handover; she was giving a curtsey to Bonnie Prince Charlie in an embassy reception line. Lucky bastard, Taylar."

We're standing there, shoulder to shoulder on the edge of the porch, looking out at the abyss. We're not bobbing or rocking any more. Neither of us is smoking; we have our hands buried in our pockets and we're both shaking with the cold. When I speak my teeth chatter and my breath comes in short little gasps. "You'll never see her again, all right? You'll never know if she has more kids, if she stays with the Brit; you'll never see what she looks like when she's sixty. You'll never see her eating with chopsticks in front of the TV again, never again catch her standing on a chair, checking our her own butt in the mirror over her make-up table. You'll never watch her waking up, never watch her sleep again. All right? You hear me? Never again, so just get over it."

And I've hurt him, as I intended, as I always do. And as I always do, I immediately try to make him feel better.

"It's okay, though. Listen to me. Please. One day, a few months after you hear that she's married the Brit, you get hired to write some brochure copy for a big resort. You spend the day touring the property with the public relations manager, she buys you dinner that night and six weeks later, on the fourth day of the first lunar month in the year of the Monkey, you're married. You'll spend ten thousand dollars on your wedding, and two hundred people will attend the reception. The two of you have a couple of kids and they turn out beautiful. Nothing you've ever done has been noble enough to make you worthy of these kids. Your son will be dark and thin and grave, with a mandarin's eyes and a Cossak's nose. He'll look like a tiny Mr. Spock. Your daughter will be elfin and temperamental, quick to laugh and quick to cry, with miles of mahogany hair and a face like a china teapot. She'll be born to play Puck and Ariel and Peter Pan. Those two kids will fill up our life so that you don't have time for anything else, not for women or travel or even writing. But you won't mind, because they're better than all that. The kids are worth it. You can look at those kids and know for sure that your life hasn't been completely wasted. There's nothing else in your life, nothing else you've ever done, that you makes you feel that way. You'll see. You'll bring them back to Iowa and you'll get on with your life. Forget about her, man, please forget about her. It's been eight years."

Now he looks at me. He looks at me and he looks through me and he hates me. He doesn't care about the Swissair stewardess or Tiger Woods. He doesn't care about kids; nobody who doesn't have kids cares about kids. He hears a fat man in a shabby coat telling him what's good for him and he hates me. He looks in my face and he wants to hurt me, too. "For you," he says. "Eight years for you. Six months ago she was sleeping in my bed. Six months ago she was sitting across from me at the breakfast table, she was stepping out of my bathroom in a wet sarong, she was on the back of my motorcycle with her arms around my chest. Six months ago I held her while she cried because a cobra killed the kitten I gave her for her birthday. Right now, right here in all this fucking cold and snow, I can remember what her mouth tastes like. I can feel her breath on my face, I can smell her skin. It's been eight years for you. You forget about her, then come back and talk to me."

He turns to go in the house, and I've failed again. I move off the porch and onto the steps so he can get by, and my boots make a crisp sound in the snow. I can tell from the noise that this is a dry snow, light as air, and it will be easy to shovel tomorrow if it stays this cold through the night. I know all about snow. I grew up in snow. I grew up in this snow, on this street. This snow that's blowing in my face is the same snow I shoveled as a child, as a teenager, as a young man standing on this porch dreaming about a girl in a kingdom by the sea.

He is behind me, with his hand on the doorknob, when he asks, "Do you love her?"

The first time he asked me this it surprised me. It no longer does. For him, love is everything. He'll give up the country of his birth for the woman he loves. I keep my eyes on the School Crossing sign across the street, where the stick figures of a little boy and a little girl are blurred under a scum of glittering snow. Without turning around, even though I know the answer, I ask the dark street, "Who?"

"Your wife. Do you love her?"

I always want to lie to him here, too, but I don't. "That's not important," I say, with the hard snow peppering my chest and shoulders like buckshot. "I have an obligation. She didn't have to agree to raise her kids on the other side of the planet from everything she knows, from her family, her friends, from temple bells and buffaloes. She left behind a private office and a secretary and an expense account; now she clips coupons for ten cents off a tube of toothpaste at Wal-Mart. This is a woman who never washed a dish or scrubbed a toilet in her life, not until she came here. Before I brought her to Iowa she had never seen a tree that wasn't green. Imagine how bleak the view from this porch is for her. She didn't have to come here, but she did it for me, because I asked her to. Because I begged her to. Because I wanted to raise the kids here, in this house, on this street. She didn't have to do it, but she did, and now I owe her. I'm eating her rice now."

I haven't turned around, but I know he's sneering at me. For him, love is everything. He would never give up a country and a career just because he inherited a big old house across the street from an elementary school. He would never settle for a boring job with a good dental plan, for cars with seatbelts, for police officers who actually protect people, for a bathroom faucet that produces water you can drink. He's has not yet had a friend tell him about walking down a Bangkok sidewalk with his Eurasian teenage daughter when a truckload of construction workers drove by shouting "whore!" He only knows one kind of love. I disgust him, and he turns his back on me and goes inside without another word.

I come up onto the porch drying my face with my hand. I'm shivering, my toes and fingers and ears are numb, but I can't go inside yet. I'm not done yet. With wet fingers I fumble in my pocket for another cigarette, my third since I came outside. I'll have to brush my teeth and change my pajamas or my wife will complain when I come to bed, she may even demand that I take another shower, but I need this cigarette. Nicotine is all I have left in common with the man who just went inside my house, and I want so much to be like him, to be young and strong and confident of love. I move into the southeastern corner of the porch, trying to get out of the wind, and facing the wall I cup the lighter in both hands.

Yellow flame, trembling red fingers, the glint of light off my wedding ring and out of the corner of my left eye I see somebody else come out onto the porch. He's thin, he’s old, and all his hair is gray. In his left hand he carries some kind of luggage, sometimes a backpack, sometimes a duffel bag, sometimes a small leather suitcase. Whatever it is, there isn't much in it, just some clothes and a few photos of his kids. He's traveling light, the way I traveled my first couple of years in Asia. He's not on the porch to smoke; he quit years ago. He moves to the steps and reaches for the top of the carriage lamp, but instead of polishing the brass eagle, he unscrews it from the top of the globe, detaches it from the lamp for the first time since the house was built, and holds it in his hand.

Where I am it's cold and dark and almost silent; where he is it's the afternoon of a glorious fall Saturday. He can hear the crowd at a football game in the stadium half a mile away. The street is more beautiful at this time of year than at any other. The red, orange and yellow trees that line the street are incandescent in the low sunlight; it's like the neighborhood is being consumed by a forest fire. He enjoys the view for a moment, and I look at him in profile. I'm more familiar with the front of his face, but there's no mistaking him: the nose, the glasses. He looks sure of himself, he looks like a man who's paid his dues. He looks like a man I could respect, but what's more important he looks like a man that the young man in the new winter coat could respect.

After a moment he steps off the bottom step and crosses the front yard to the street. He walks with stiff, arthritic knees, just like his mother did. There's a For Sale sign in the yard with a Sold sticker over it. The grass is still green, and the round, golden leaves from the birch are scattered over the grass like a king's ransom. Those leaves should be raked, and the grass really should be mowed once more before the first frost, but he's not going to mow it. He's already drained the gas and oil from the mower and hung it on the wall of the garage for the new owners. He's never going to mow that grass again.

Parked in the street is a turquoise 1965 Ford pick-up truck with yellow New Mexico license plates, always the same truck, a truck I saw once in a magazine. He throws his luggage in the window and goes around to the driver's side and gets in. I want to go with him, I want to sit beside him and ask him questions, hear his voice. I want to follow him out to the road, get in the truck and ride with him a short way, just to wherever his first stop will be, but I don't take a step off the porch. I have to earn that ride.

All this time he hasn't looked at me, he hasn't spoken. He doesn't see me, maybe he doesn't even remember me, for sure he wouldn't talk to me if he did. He has no patience with self pity. He's got much more important things on his mind: road maps, and books he's always wanted to read. He may not see me, but I can see him clearly, see him just like it was yesterday, as the old man starts the truck and lets it idle for a moment.

The snow is coming back now, sneaking up on the edges of the lawn; my snow is sifting down out of his blue sky. Day-lilies and Echinacea poke their flowers up out of the growing drifts, and by the time the drifts are knee-high the green stalks are brown and the flowers fallen away. Slender branches dropped by the birch tree stick up out of the snow like skeletons floating up out of a flooded cemetery. The snow is dusting the hood of the truck as the old man places the brass eagle on the dashboard, facing the windshield. That eagle will finally get to see something beyond this street. Snow sifts off the eaves of my house, hiding the street for a moment behind a white veil, reminding me that I didn't clean the gutters this autumn and there will be hell to pay next spring. It's dark again now, the wind blows some of the snow up on the porch, and tiny pin-pricks of fire burn and die on my face. The old man puts the truck in gear and drives away, without looking back, leaving me on the porch for another twenty years, somewhere between the relentless snow and the warm, sleeping house.

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.

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