Part One - Either - Fiction
Chapter One – In Butter and
on French Bread
1
I
was born in butter, balled in a second child rush in 1975 New Orleans as Ethan Karl Baker. My parents, Timothy and Sara soaked in a
Sunday late afternoon disbursement nine pound roly-poly tax deduction. The doctor was a greyhound-breed of man. He was sleek and distinctive, indiscernible
between his aggravation and joy of such everyday miracles. Consultations and preparations for a tennis
match and cloud watching were postponed for a nine hour sequel labor and a
negotiation for a cesarean procedure room.
Sara
was having none. Timothy was a yellow
light, half-go defaulted and worried, but definitive in the end. He objected to the objectives of proper
medical advice, as profitable as it may have been to the equation. Sara was not going to miss the tail-end of
this parade outside the jurisdiction of her own volition and thresholds of
physical pain.
I
came out silent with a crumpled maw.
This invited immediate panic amongst the close knit audience for an
interminable pod of seconds until a siren call erupted. My reticent lips quivered into a stutter of
epileptic proportions. My head was
purple with a fuzzy lion mane aura moist and balanced. The professional first hands to hold me set
me free-range on the upper gullet of my mother.
My limbs shimmied like a trained police canine slinking with bent elbow
under barbed wire impediments to the breast.
The movements were not for feeding, but for the differential in
temperature. My contributions to my
transport were irrelevant as my motion was propelled by other hands. I was determined to try. This environment seemed frigid. What was, was not going to be anymore. Better to keep solo-quiet. All these faces could be dangerous.
The
hound man’s nursing assistant handed Timothy steel sheers. My father saw the umbilical chord like his
entry to a department store ribbon cutting ceremony. Numerically dispensed weeks of flaccid male
pregnancy were surrendered to this graduation.
My dad could finally be tangible.
His movements were entirely masculine and proper again. This was a productive and necessary
encounter. Absent his intervention, his
son Ethan would be forever cuffed to his mother. This would inevitably be difficult when
passing customs security screeners and when riding public transit. The scissors descended and eliminated these
inescapable awkward moments.
2
Sara’s
blood started to run. The flood cracked like
a government constructed levee. Buzzers
went off on the attendees faces. The
greyhound barked orders. I was grasped
and swarmed into a hive via a heated carrier-cart. Dad’s heart was bifurcated. He was abdicated from culpability by Sara,
“Go with him.”
One
slant wife, the other son; the wheels rolled the hallway. I witnessed the wonder of concealed
incandescent tube-lighting. Sheathed
gloves prodded and inspected for an eleventh metatarsal, a tertiary testicular
bean for the bag, and the proper inflation time on my wind-sacks. All seemed standard and workable and in the
expected quantity. Triage is triage when
entering such perfidious battle zones.
After a rushed assessment of purple to flush skin tone, I was left to
warm in a parking lot of infants. Coos and screeches harmonized into apathetic
silence. The sensory overload of
American health care quelled the cherubic arias.
Timothy
soaked in my scale summation. He left
his finger extended in a mini-wave to an organism that was no longer cellular
matter, but a social security number waiting for registry. First English lessons began. His little ox progeny curved a stare into a
roving distance of windows and ceiling.
Blurry faces discerned a cautious optimism about my newfound predicament. Dad’s face was scratchy like a pin cushion,
impinged with an alien nature. The lab
room was full of monitors, sanitary safeguards, and the quiet. My father idled in a crinkled blue work-shirt
and his scruff-sand paper beard.
3
After
an interminable and splendid pair of hours, the door of the nursery swept
ajar. A nurse sold Timothy into the
hallway. I was tethered to a
shopping-bin warmer cart.
The
nurse informed Mr. Baker, that the doctor stemmed the bleeding. These types of occurrences were routine. Well, not in Timothy’s twenty-four
years. The debate of what constitutes a
daily anomaly was quickly evaporated in Timothy’s gratitude for not having to
deliberate alternatives.
Sara
must be breathing, whole and capable of responding to an interview or at least
letting go the drink of her day into her husband’s cup of hands. Maybe Timothy could listen like a Roosevelt fireside chat as a flickering sponge of
concern. My father could convey in
structured silence that the specifics of this sequence had not gone
unregistered to get to the output.
My
father was not going to let a single drop of his wife’s sentiment seep through
the wrinkled folds of his palms. My
father would be there for her. This was
his job. What else was he going to do without
a uterus?
Timothy
and the nurse hustled to find Sara sleeping.
My mother lay silent, monitored in green-pad digits and written-line
chart quips evaluating the internal recuperation. Timothy grazed his hand through his thinning
jet hair and exhaled progressively deeper.
The turnstile nurse said, “It is better she sleep when she can. The doctor will be available later. We can discuss the medications.” “Whatever you think is best.”
Timothy
paced to the bedside, raised his unpolished fingers to his wife’s wrist like a
recovered treasure. He embraced her hand
like a coin that he had spent hours searching for, presumed consumed in the
belly of the family dog, but there unyielding swollen to the point of recollecting
Sara’s wedding ring.
Sara
stored the ring in her nightstand after some number of thirty-something weeks
to avoid the pressure on her skin during the pregnancy. Timothy fixated on the alabaster space
encircling the digit, smiled and maybe a tear collected in the duct, but it
managed to avoid descent. My father bit
his bottom lip into a concave linear presentation to his exhausted
audience. He bent to knee. In the sphere-of-silence he uttered a prayer
with gracious words in uncertain progression with cognizance of the tasks at
hand.
4
My
father pre-mapped the layout of the room as he entered. Timothy pulled up a yellow and orange
seventies-style arm-rested chair. The
light through the window dimmed past twilight.
The cattle drive of evening traffic reds and whites flashed in code to
fifth-story onlookers. Timothy knew Sara
was sleeping.
My
father remembered his too-recent time in the army, on the tail-end of Vietnam. The scenes spun: the fall of Saigon in seventy-five, the guerilla nature, a
seventy-three pull out, human cost, friend’s forearms, spaghetti bodies, and
the cacophony of choppers. It was dirty
and cumbersome, peasants revolting, counterinsurgency, scarlet hamlets,
chemical defoliation birth defects, banned Buddhist flags, Hmong tribesman,
phantom Tonkin torpedoes, Kent State targeted students, one-year, ten-Tets, the
dangerous illusion of victory, détente, the silent majority, and Timothy’s
seventy-one entrance.
My
father was a late comer. He claimed to
never kill a target, but men died.
Babies were blown up and limbs redistributed in operation-linebacker
number two. War lingered in seasons from
rain to dry. In the end, doesn’t it all
come back to oil and contracts? Philco
was the precursor to Halliburton. The
fuel of the movements on the highway out the window and the blinking lights.
The trek to Saigon moved on frequent
winds. One hundred and sixteen years
tied up in Timothy’s three.
The
commotion raced on the twilight road proving points. I bound in the nursery blissfully
ignorant. Sara was dreaming. Timothy hoped she was in a reverie of blessed
things better than these anchors of blood and hobbled machinery. Foreign civilian ways became domesticated. Timothy was on the finish line. The starting line straddled between was and
is.
Timothy
remembered coming home with the remaining men, the plane coming down. The bureaucratic exit was like checking out
of a hotel, but collection agencies kept sending bills for damage done to the
room months after departure. A South
East Asian hideaway could one day be in Kigali
or Kabul or Fallujah or Darfur. These jungles and deserts were lottery
numbers. Timothy was here for his Ethan
now. One day his Ethan could trade a
pocket of kudzu for a sandbox. My father
wanted to soak the moment in or at least try to keep his neighbor’s cat from
pissing in the novelty. When my father
came back hand waves were the hardest to reintroduce. Simple civility was a brash concept. Parish lines and family visits, the
redefinition of mandatory and sacrifice had different lights up on the tree
that Christmas.
5
Departing
and re-entry, Timothy remembered the revolving door. He was grateful to see the new wallpaper for
his first born. Conceived in
seventy-one, some cycle before take off, my father found out in a letter over
in the fertile rice patty. My brother
was makeshift progeny, planned in the Catholic way. The couple called him Tim, not junior not
T.J., just Tim.
Sara
picked the moniker. My mother did not
want to have to let go of the sound in case she had to quit saying the name
around the house. The name was like a
page from a genetic-masochist playbook left on the nightstand. It was insurance for some light reading
before bedtime for the next fifty years.
The flipside of the down was a lagniappe token of heritage in case
baseball gloves or stick-shift lessons were never part of the equation. At least the boy would have something. So Tim got a palindrome catchers mitt as a
conditional consolation prize.
Being
there for the birth today was a virgin-run, a big deal in the grand checklist
of life. Tim was with Timothy’s mother
Jennifer circling the cedar floors of a shotgun home in Uptown New
Orleans. A four-year-old waiting to count
the sands in the hourglass of termed out labor.
Peeking an eye at his freshly baked sibling was not part of sterile
modern American birthing. Tim liked to
stay over at grandma’s house in his Cookie Monster sleeping bag and eat K&B
ice cream. Grandmother Jenifer read Tim
stories. Grandpa Kurt, also known as
King Baker or Sir, made his rounds.
6
Mr.
Kurt Lee Baker was a master mason, a man of callused hands, the kind an
audience member could stab repeatedly with a moderately-sized dinner knife and
would not be surprised if the blade bent back into a rubbery flexing retreat. Kurt was a veteran of World War Two, complete
with a D-Day pinball sling out a Higgins’ stern, a true New Orleanian. He presumed himself an expert on pragmatic
topics like construction materials, the-way-things-ought-to-be, gender roles
and all things Republican.
Basically
Lyndon Johnson was a pussy and if Nixon would have needed a third linebacker
Kurt’s ass would have been out there.
Kurt could have strangled some gook mother fuckers and would pantomime
the whole thing if you let him. Usually
when doing so, he had a highball with whiskey in one hand. So most of the asphyxiation had to take place
with a single thumb and four fingers, but from the texture of the palm one got
the idea Kurt could have completed the feat if given the opportunity.
The
Baker home was his castle. Kurt meticulously
monitored the grounds. If a trespasser
had the nerve to perambulate through his grass, rather than use the brick
walkway Kurt laid, he might shoot the transgressor on the spot, or at least put
the fool to work at some inane, but “character building” task if the miscreant
happened to be his son. In actuality if
the dolt were anybody else, Kurt would not tell the lawn-smasher shit. Kurt would put on a spurious ingratiating
smile and offer his new friend a beer.
Kurt
liked to cook in his work-pauses when other men were over, never when Timothy
and his brother Ryan were growing up.
Kids were a dominion and responsibility of Mrs. Baker. When Kurt’s buddies came by to drink or
listen to the game on the radio or pretend to ass-hump Mrs. Johnson’s co-ed
daughter from over the fence, the grill was lit. Mammal muscle was charred. Meat without a minute risk of un-obliterated
bacteria remaining from the napalm-death flame-chamber was served.
7
Jennifer
ran relay trips to the market on cue to get the seventeen different Kurt
mandates. Typically these sundries
included cigarettes, incendiary devices, liquor, popcorn, and chocolate-covered
orbs. The cocoa confections were a
“little-somethin’-for-yourself” to the Mrs., but typically ended their nugget
existence gorged in midnight raids, by an unknown big fingerprinted assailant.
Jennifer
was a union teacher, which irritated her husband. Participation brought certain economic and
abstaining-from-child-rearing benefits to Kurt.
Kurt chose to sweep that flaw under the rug when it negated some aspect
of his political ranting.
Jennifer
was docile, not very social or adept at injecting her own antidotes into jovial
occasions. Jennifer was neither
gregarious nor fixated on obtaining a verdict from anyone on any matter outside
her betrothed arbiter. Jennifer managed
to get by on occasional needlework and walks around the block as avenues of
personal expression. She enjoyed
Scrabble on the rare occasion she could find someone to play.
Outside
of balancing Kurt and the kids, Jennifer attended to the needs of her own
parents. My grandmother kept pace with
their medical care and lent an attentive ear.
She was health conscious and did not really care for chocolate. My grandmother was allergic to mint, but
would always run errands to bring her mother ice cream.
Her
father was a seaplane pilot running trips down in the Gulf
of Mexico. He was retired
and had lost most of his hearing to his wife’s constant nagging. There was nothing on this earth that was
going to make that man leave that woman.
Jennifer would watch him sit there and take it. My great grandfather placated the hen.
8
Kurt
was not a man of planning. He woke up,
decided what the fuck to do and everybody did it. Growing up, it was kids dressed for Catholic
school, in uniforms pressed, wife with breakfast ready with a smile and lunch
made for Kurt to take. The kitchen better
be spotless and the meat and potatoes on the table when Kurt came home. The routine was not asked for, it was
understood.
If
Kurt wanted something else the juggling act started. It usually involved the whiskey or the
smokes. Kurt would find fault in Ryan or
Jennifer and explode so he had an excuse to run off to a bar. The remaining triad would eat dinner quietly
and clean every crumb so that when the ringmaster returned Kurt did not have to
answer or ask.
The
man worked hard from the genetic knuckle up in the way that nepotism is
challenging and a surefire way to identify the optimum candidate. Kurt could build with mortar, bricks, cement,
wood, or nails. He was a versatile
commander of blunt objects, like a rhinoceros with a tool belt. Kurt ran his own masonry company that he took
over from his father. Kurt’s father tried
to screw Kurt out of the business. Kurt
threatened the old man with quitting to get the patriarch to sign the
papers.
One
Monday Kurt changed the name since Kurt did all the work. Kurt threw the dinosaur Mr. Archibald Baker a
bone every few months until he croaked.
The paradoxical part is for as much shit as Archibald gave his son, Kurt
would never say a bad thing about Archibald in front of anyone else. Kurt defended the cantankerous senile
bastard. If Jennifer or God forbid Ryan
said anything about Archibald, it was a belt for one and probably not too much
different for the other.
Kurt’s
lens was often through remanufactured glass.
Kurt was not selfish in the diplomatic sense outside the moat
surrounding 1422 Oak Street. Kurt was rotary man of the year in 1964,
determined for that damn eradication of polio and lounging around with the
other fine men of purpose and great distinguishing characteristics of Uptown
Orleans. Kurt had a gavel leadership award,
“service above self,” up in the living room that never moved. The trophy was like a testament to his
jurisdiction. It warranted polishing and
the extermination of the precept of a spider from ever contemplating collecting
a web. Those little bastards were
monitored. No insurgents in this unit.
Every
year Kurt was head of the beer booth at the carnival fundraiser for St.
Stephens Catholic School. The rotary
club volunteered. In maintaining
Catholic tradition, alcohol was served.
Kurt did not drink. The
ticket-taker extraordinaire chatted up the lawn-care aficionados in an annual
caucus. Kurt was on stage. He was a stamped impression of reliability with
lined up cups frothing-to-go. Kurt’s
self-run public relations unit bricked a circular walkway, one he would recycle
for years.
9
Timothy
was treated well. He was the kind of kid
that took his vitamins, self-corrected, a bit over aware. The boy was rarely rude or antagonistic, but
low in the tank on empathy, hunkered down.
The boy was contemplative, succinct and pensive while implementing a
young age of reason and a little-Houdini type ability to disappear when the
knives were being thrown at the older magician’s assistant.
Timothy
had one erupting moment of teenage angst in his parent’s purview. Timothy printed in black spray-paint, “It’s
All Bull Shit,” on his bedroom wall one Monday in his senior year of high
school. Dad never explained too much
why, only that when Kurt got home he paid for it and had to paint over his
insurrection. Sometimes I wonder if my
dad just wanted to put some crimson in the bull’s eyes before the monochrome
set.
Ryan
was older, the-brunt-of-it, the reason Kurt and Jennifer got married after Kurt
returned from the war in the autumn of 1945.
His entry into the world was perfunctory. A military token, kept in his father’s pocket
like a scar from an ambush. Good
soldiers follow orders, the chain of command with sight unseen. Kurt rarely looked at Ryan in the present.
Ryan
was a rearview mirror sort of child, a reversing glass reflecting the path not
taken, all the more glaring because Kurt was infinitely close to what he was
not as he starred into what Ryan was.
Sometimes the most appropriate definition of an emotion is in its
antonym.
Ryan
was energetic, rambunctious, and resembled a caged gibbon. The boy was bottled; the kind that did not
say a word when the belt came out and took solace in the admiration of the
other inanimate objects in the room as to how well he could take the strop.
Ryan
had laborious dissertations funneling a flood of rage to restore equilibrium on
the local neighborhood kids in the days that followed. One goober resorted to bringing his lunch
money in his sock so Ryan could not detect the loot. Ryan ended up with a new pair of sneakers
hidden under his bed like a trophy and a mace-sock full of change.
Ryan
took up football and started at middle linebacker in junior-varsity and varsity
his senior year. Kurt made four games
total in the career of Ryan Baker. All
but one Ryan played like shit. The last
of Ryan’s senior year, Ryan dislocated his elbow, while headhunting for
Kurt. Ryan did not leave the game just
tolerated and fixated on busting brick faces below each mask. Crumble young man crumble.
After
the last game Ryan’s father took the family out for burgers and fries. Kurt stared at Ryan’s shoulder above his
newly-adorned sling. Kurt gripped his
right palm inside his left thumb like on a pistol trigger. Kurt’s first instinct was to hold the fingers
in stasis to avoid the intimate contact.
There was a danger in that potential tactical transformation for
taciturn to tender. Kurt fired his hand
over and popped Ryan on the shoulder. In
the tremor Kurt said, “Good job out there son.”
Ryan
holds those five words like bullets in a chamber. Different days the words are for different
targets. One to blow up his demons, one
to shoot his shackles, one to save Rapunzel, one for the passing crows, and
sometimes Uncle Ryan keeps them just to fire the fuck back at his dad.
10
Kurt
was raised in the house of Archibald with three siblings and rotating boarders
in the first half of the twentieth century.
The depression was tough. Packrats
were pragmatic. Mom was a hoarder,
before hoarders were called hoarders.
She failed to efficiently disseminate her amassed resources. Clutter was a constant. Counter tops and corners were like layered
wedding cakes full of superfluous and mandatory ingredients. The agglomeration marked the union of events
and people in time. This was the kind of
litter one made sure to save a commemorative chunk for the freezer to thaw
years from the baking.
Unread
mailings, newspapers, Collier’s magazines, receipts, lists, schoolwork, twine,
advertisements of the early 1930’s, and leftovers not making the rank to be
retained as icebox worthy were strewn.
Cockroaches were intermixed in the flotsam like pirates riding on
driftwood in a treasured ocean. The
buggers became commonplace like family pets.
The skittering legs teetered in scavenger mode.
Kurt
was the oldest. At fourteen he was
scouring the kitchen for a semblance of actual dinner to filch. In the clutched mass of household goods, Mrs.
Archibald Baker would often neglect obtaining sufficient rations for the
brigands. The children resorted to
pilfering food when resources were available.
The children stowed rations under some heap cataloged for future
use. One such reserve in the stockpile
was a box of oats.
After
coming up empty on one expedition, Kurt shoveled out the box and shook the
oat-chest free. The sound of the
contents bore an irregular sifting, as if there was an interruption in the tide
of alabaster flecks. Kurt held the box
to his right ear and listened intently under the purview of his sisters. The aberration of auditory stimulus was
second-guessed with a visual inspection with Kurt’s eyeball imitating a
plumber’s snake drain-camera. His eye
was pressed to the exit hole of the food source as if the cubic contents would
not be shrouded in shadow. After a
thorough olfactory perusal and all five senses were utilized, the mystery was
unceremoniously dismissed.
Kurt
set the box on the living room floor.
The brood exploded. Cockroaches
marched like cloned troopers evacuating the Titanic. Charcoal thoraxes scurried six-legged cutters
in a scattered swarm trickling over the hand-powered washer, nylon stockings,
and assorted homemade birthday cards.
The girls froze. Their brother
went into action.
Kurt
mechanized into an automaton of stomping and smashing. Stacks of essential debris toppled as the
whirling dervish committed insecticide in a manner befitting a Kansas tornado until
every one of the buggers was detonated into yellow mush.
The
siblings stood in awe of the massacre.
The girls were immobilized during the melee, but quickly extricated
themselves once the circus ended. Kurt
still fixates on staring into the gun barrel of that box, knowing he had no
idea what lied beneath.
Kurt
was trying to clean the smears when Archibald came home and saw the living area
torn asunder. The splatter of fresh
carcasses encircled Kurt. Archibald went
equally ape-shit. The belt came
off. The room shook like a snow-globe of
letters, fur, and abdomens. Kurt took
it. He stood station, on-post. The younger girls were independently
innocent. They were off braiding each
other’s hair or some other feminine ritual according to the usual suspect. No mom to be seen, a house was full of mess
and a man-in-charge.
11
Fast-forward,
Timothy creaked back in the harvest-golden yellow and pumpkin hospital chair
and let out a sigh. Timothy paused from
reflections and the prognostications of what his Ethan was going to be and who
his Tim really was. My father rubbed his
thumb over my mother’s index finger like a number-two pencil eraser. Maybe B would be a better answer than A.
Children
are separate, each their own. Genes are
an incalculable computation of iterated variables. Helix ladders are displayed in a quotient of
reactions, mannerisms, tendencies, athletic competencies, and propensity to
endure personal anguish over idiosyncratic environmental stimuli. The rungs exhaust one and invigorate the
other. All we offer the child is a name
for our own concoction of inherited benefits and detriments.
Parenting
is a segregated mind-field for each. The
coordinates of buried booby-traps and bounty often walk a father in
contradicting paths. How we get there
and who we are with can be all the difference between glory, perseverance and
utter failure.
12
Timothy
met Sara at Tulane
University. Sara was an English major in her freshman
year in 1967. Timothy was a history
major with a hint towards pre-law for a stateside furlough. Arts and science perpendicular, the two were
mapped in the confluence of the spring semester of 1968. Sara was from out of state, escaping
someplace else to explore the Big Easy.
She was in the Sophie
Newcomb College
on campus, living in an all-female dormitory near St. Charles Avenue. Timothy was a Paul Tulane man on a military
grant.
The
campus was full of ancient oaks and adjacent to the streetcar line, which could
be used to explore the French Quarter and other non-scholastic endeavors. Sara was involved in theater and played
Ophelia in her sophomore season in Hamlet.
Timothy was in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. He was using the corps to fund his
measured-in- hundreds tuition and occupy his time drilling to be or not be in Vietnam. Sara’s father had money from a lawsuit when
he sued his neighbor’s home owner’s insurance over an accident that he set
aside for such an occasion.
On
top of her other assignments, Sara enjoyed reading the dictionary to apprehend
new words. She was a lover of
words. If Sara could wrap her mouth
around a virgin polysyllabic verb she would imbibe it down in euphoria. It released my mother’s inner vulnerabilities
to break new ground with a pre-documented socially-contracted tool to express a
novel idea amongst her consciousness.
Sara
kept a journal. When flipping the sheets
of a new author she would denote the excavated treasures in a gold rush to her
notebook to stake her claim. Some of her
favorite words were simple, but elegant and meaningful: conundrum, love,
principled, luminous, undulation, vagabond, and rebirth.
Sara
met Timothy outside the rear of Gibson Hall exiting into the concourse to head
to the library. Timothy was leaving
Statistics. He dropped his text on the
second step when Sara was headed for Introductory Philosophy. Sara flew over in a perceptive manner
befitting a courier pigeon and rectified the mishap with a peck on the young
rogue’s shoulder.
Timothy
was struck. Sara had long blonde hair;
the kind cheerleaders detangle and address copious amounts of attention to
glisten in the basking eyes of a crowd. The locks appeared to quaff without
considerable effort, cloud-like, pristine in a bastion beholden to a realm away
from his Louisiana
mire. She was the kind of woman
Timothy’s mother would have told him was beautiful. Such unrequested suggestions might add the
seed to alter his behavior, to act weird in some oedipal complex of
command.
Timothy’s
words slipped out like spies soaked-in espionage, blended-in plain-language
untraceable, generic and steaming with extrapolated calculations underneath,
“Hey, I know you.” “You dropped your book,” Sara replied in a knit camisole, a
yellow blouse, denim jeans and a pair of white sneakers. She smelled of yellow flowering jasmine like
a proliferating vine with the aroma of spring.
The two stepped aside from the path of students marching to class
hills. The green leaves applauded. Happenstance altered towards permanence.
“I
saw you in the play. The language, the
Shakespeare, it’s hard to follow sometimes, but I think I get the gist of
it. The guy killed your dad, but you,
you were amazing, pretty, pretty, amazing.” Sara was unaccustomed to such
indulgences. She was always an
uncertain-sort of girl. The kind boys
would look at and make assumptions that she had more people to occupy her time
than she had, but inside Sara was riddled with self-conjecture and doubt. Sara sought advice on a regular basis and
rarely had a reliable font. Her mother
had become distant, half-way off the deep end.
Her dad had his moments, but loquacious he was not.
Timothy’s
compliment left Sara ajar like a petal that hinted to blossom, before the
aggregated others could slip concave over the stamen and its sequestered anther
pierced that subtle light into its bosom to begin that beautiful-ache of a
beginning. However like most girls given
a compliment, her first instinct was to run.
“That
was me. I wanted to play Gertrude, but
ended up with Ophelia. I did not think I was ready. I do not really get Shakespeare either, but
I’m studying. I write a lot. My professors call it purple prose. They say it is hard to follow. ”
Timothy
smiled wider underneath his more reasonable and pragmatic grin on the canvas
between his cheek bones, “Can I take you out some time? I promise not to poison you.”
“I
don’t know. I’ve got this project on Nietzsche.”
“The
lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
“I’ll
think about it. I am in Newcomb dorm,
name is Sara Barnes.”
“Timothy
Baker. I’ll find you. Thanks for the book.”
13
Timothy
spent four days until the following Monday before readdressing the
situation. He was meandering that
undulating line between coy disinterest to magnetize Sara’s attention and
letting her dare know how he felt. Women
never seemed to give Timothy a straight shot.
He tended to fumble his words when being direct. The ones that liked him best heard from him
the least.
Timothy
had been on the tip of that great lesson to rarely pull and paradoxically push
to allow the female to come out of her bud to him. But Timothy never really believed in the
physics. He would falter in the rare
occasions he got far enough into the playoffs to have a meaningful
outcome. But in the potential bee sting
of his newfound Ophelia, Timothy would do his best to assail those castle walls
valiantly and with a measure of southern charm despite whatever may be hiding
behind the curtains.
Sara
was focused on her studies, reading about Emerson, E.E. Cummings, and
Voltaire. She worked diligently to
banish the great evil of boredom. In her
free moments Sara sat on a bench outside the music building to read and listen
to the eloquent sounds dancing in through the open windows into the quad. Sara tried to accomplish being herself in
this intellectual world constantly trying to mold her into something else. She wanted to believe what she could do and
say was valuable, worth listening to, worthy of someone’s trust. With that Sara could risk her own curiosity
and stumble into her own spirit.
Cummings seemed to concur and Emerson declined objections.
Sara’s
life was changing not in the subtle way of millimeter measurements that a
parent pencil-marks on doorframes. This
was like Darwin
in leaps of evolution, transitions of a self.
This was the cataclysm of braving that stark plank of truly learning how
to think for ones self. She slurped the texts
around her like soup bowls of a broader palate to partake in saffron stigmas
emerging from their crocus. The words
were elegant and rare unimagined in this American oat-mush.
14
Timothy
came calling after his microeconomics course.
Sara was up in her room listening to Sergeant Peppers and secretly lamenting
Otis Redding getting on planes. Although
it was finally ok to talk about such colorful spectrums, Sara still felt a bit
awkward when she did.
Timothy
came to the front docking bay of a desk and processed a cordial and
non-threatening summons through the pipelined chain of command to request the
pleasure of the young Ms. Barnes’ company.
Sara came down in a daisy motif sundress.
“Do
you want to get out of here?”
“I’m
studying.”
“So,
you want to get out of here?”
Sara
was not use to the pliability of expected routines. She was taught that when one deviates and
goes off without prior notice or forethought the probability of extinguishing
one productive path for the sake of another was most entirely certain to reward
you with uncertain results.
The
glint in Timothy’s blue eyes hung on the countertop of Sara’s consideration
like a set of keys to a parent’s car.
Ready for the taking, permission being moot, there was a roustabout at
the ready to set sail. Sara let
ambiguity prevail.
Sara
asked if she needed to bring anything.
“Just
you.”
15
Sara
whisked her sandals out the door turned a glance towards the twilight sky over
the music building. Before Sara could
ask where they were going, Timothy held out three playing cards face up pressed
between his thumb and index finger.
“Pick
a card.”
There
was an ace, a deuce and a jack, all spades.
Sara was not sure what to make of the mad-hatter display, but her
Alice-face pinched her dress above each knee, and asked inside, “What ever does
this mean?”
“I
am a democratic man. I thought you
should have the right to vote. I have
three evenings planned and depending on what card you choose that is what we’ll
do.”
Sara’s
sense of wonder and doubt swirled like a dreamsicle, part pondering the safety
of the vanilla and titillated at the orange, the raspberry, a little bit
scared, but excited by the chocolate.
Which would she pick? Did it
matter? But it had to; the choice has to
matter, even if it didn’t seem like a choice.
Timothy could have one itinerary.
Independent of the selection, the same evening may unfold. How would Sara know? In the choice there was
trust. Sara chose the jack.
“Excellent,
Jackson will be
elated.”
“Who?”
“Jackson he’s my finance
professor’s bulldog. We’re going to be
taking him for a walk. Professor Hopkins
doesn’t have time in the evenings in spring to take Jackson out as much as he would like because
he sits out by the third baseline for the baseball games. I made the mistake of losing to him at the
Zeta’s poker night last month. So I sort
of have to walk Jackson
at least twice a week to avoid other travesties of higher education.”
The
two set off down Broadway and picked up Jackson
for a stroll through Audubon
Park. The night was temperate for the Crescent City.
It was not summer yet, which would mean the air would have felt more
like inside Jackson’s
mouth rather than the gentle-nudged less humid air of May.
Spring
brought out the best in the city. There
were no hurricanes. Festivals
played. Mardi Gras was over, but the
city was out on her porch steps waving and watching to be watched in the pace
of a sway that could only be explained that if you slowed downed enough to
notice, most people act like they know you even if they do not, want you to be
happy even if you are not, and offer a drink even if you are already
drunk.
The
park was pillared by mythic Southern oaks.
Moss hung like banners for this old-city America. They were right off the river sprawling
upwards in witness to the city’s sedentary pace. On hot days the branches became oasis
shade. On nights like tonight the
shadows from the gray-lamp moon hid their gargantuan nature into a cloak of
sequestered peace. The city, the
university, the trees lined a set of castle walls to where a girl could let her
hair flow, lose a shoe, and prance in the grass.
Jackson was on leash, tongue hanging, enthralled in passing
insects and wary of the anthills.
Timothy and Sara began to talk effortlessly. The times, the horsehair swirls of oral history
were beginning to brush the canvas. The
crimson, the royal blue, the stark charcoal black, the effervescent green, the
embattled whites and wave-like yellows streaked across the page-turn of each
step. The pawns of the conversation
tiptoed. Rooks rushed. The revolution around the oval of the park’s
path circled back towards campus.
Sara
perked a healthy interest at Timothy’s antidotes. She enjoyed the insights of Timothy’s advice
when requested. Sara found a new
confidant in Timothy’s silent ear.
Timothy felt the sense to keep watch over Sara’s shoulder in case a
malevolent stranger chance approach and his emerging subconscious find the need
to protect her.
After
a two-hour walk the student’s returned the professor’s dog. Timothy made the point not to stare too long
into Sara’s green eyes. He could tell
the view was going to be problematic.
16
On
the amble back, Ferret Street
was empty except for their eight-footed pace.
Sara relayed a time in upper elementary.
A cattle traffic jam shutdown carpool.
The divergent verdant streets of New
Orleans retorted.
A Ford Mustang bolted through the corner stop sign. Timothy pulled Sara back onto the curb. He gripped her in his arms. His chin pinned her shoulder. Timothy imagined if he had the power he would
lasso the car, pluck the tires from the rims and chuck the rubber rings into
the Mississippi. He would ask the bandito-bandoleer driver to
offer the little-lady an apology.
Sara
felt the lightning-chill of being alive stretch through her spine. She aroused like a convex feline with dilated
pupils vibrant and virile. Timothy
grasped her shoulders and twirled Sara face-to-face. He kissed her with an ebullient passion. Adrenaline-fueled blood pumped. The mechanics of their coronary processes
escalated like an engine approaching a limit warranting a throttle
adjustment.
In
the vibration a calming tone set. The
kiss clung like a swimmer trying to hold his breath for that last possible
second. Then they both breathed. Eyes focused.
Timothy’s smile liberated to its full diameter for a moment. Then it slipped back into its pocket-pouch of
military discipline, sheathed and ready.
Timothy
walked Sara back to her dormitory, thanked her for the evening and applauded
her sense of humor over some of Jackson
more rudimentary and masculine practices.
Sara asked, “What were the other cards for?”
“I’ll
guess you are going to have to let me take you out again, if you want to find
out.” “Deal.”
17
Timothy
had drill practice in the morning. His
uniform made Timothy a pariah on one end of campus and a fortunate reminder to
a son’s freewill on the other.
Hereditary economics of socialized learning, hybrid-logic and madness
coursed through Timothy’s college veins.
Death was sounding a Viet-Cong gong on every television. Psychedelic-guitar-solo births were tripping
off transient-doppelganger versions of Timothy to Canada,
to Mexico and to South East Asia in droves into the grove by mandate and
by choice. The selection sat there in a
scholarship envelope, a stayed execution that was ticking in his shaved head,
1968 and a senior year a skip away.
It
was not the idea of death that weighed on his thoughts. It was committing to being alive or stating
he had a choice in the matter. It was to
actively integrate the hope that his return mattered beyond the army having to
pay for a pine box rather than a jump-seat on a potential return flight. Timothy was training in officer-to-be
practices to ensure other random beetle drones all needing love who kept aiming
high on purpose did not get killed. That
might seem noble and practical, but in the end what could Timothy really
control?
Trying
to control war would mean there was a sense of order to conflict. God had a
role in madness. Saying phrase A instead
of phrase B or leaning harder to the right instead of the left would uncover
the steely resolve to persevere through Dante’s field trip. Logic was inapplicable. The only choice Timothy had was to do. Not to try, just to do. Live in the immediate.
Timothy
studied history. He focused on America and Africa
and their interrelationships. Each had
empirical flaws. One stole other
nation’s children and dispersed the natives for a blood code of breeding
Africans imprisoned at birth in a tyranny of money worship. Trail-of-tears buffalo skins and buffalo
soldiers shipped. Covered American
tattoos and stitches, chaos and choices were sodomites.
18
Timothy’s
marks and his average were average.
Excluding the nadir of his failed calculus experiment, Timothy’s path seemed
clear, except for Sara. She sat out
there in his midnight confessions like that ball-of-hurt down the road. She was the sweetest friend out the
thicket. He could play the second spade
and pretend.
For
a week after the dog walk, Timothy wrapped up in traditional pursuits to
prevent imprinting himself as a yippy Pomeranian instead of a wolf-like
Mastiff. Timothy had the ache.
Sara
contemplated Timothy’s return in her gender-constrained communication
penitentiary. She could discuss it with
her roommate. She could script out
stanzas in her notebooks espousing a pontificated apocalypse or the revelation
of his ace in the hole. As long as Sara
had this uterus she was tethered mute.
Sara was passing the sad mood drifting another Saturday night to Sam
Cooke songs, when her roommate said, “Somebody’s waiting down stairs for you.”
Timothy
stood six-one, gunnery grin, aiming on-scope to the step of the stair. His blue eyes blazed on-target contacting the
apex in Sara’s smile. The wax of Sara’s
cheek lightened the room. The reflection
beamed a luminous stretch with each descending pace towards him. The grunion sat on the beach. Her California
high tide was ecstatically waning externally into his pocketknife smile. The self-made man had to reign it back in or
he would blow it.
“Good
to see you. ”
“I
was wondering when you were coming by,” Sara responded.
“Well
what will it be?”
Timothy
held out the two remaining playing cards like damnation and paradise.
Sara
took the ace, slapped it down on the countertop of the check-in desk and said,
“Let’s see what you got.”
19
Timothy
took her by the hand and headed for fraternity row on Broadway. The Dekes had a party, smoked out and
glamorous. There was minimal degradation
to honest woman uttering clamored breathes of, “No.” Most of the upstairs sex was consensual and
bared the woman’s liberation stamp of approval, at least the kind spelled out
in Greek letters. Short and emotional,
this was the kind of female populace that would imagine something magic like
democracy to include in mature discourses on love making. Broadway was a colored spectrum of college
life. The cliques and the gatherings
held the New Orleans and not New Orleans of it all.
Sara
was on the edge of her pace. She was a
believer in the dreams that girls had desires to ride rattlesnake speedways
chasing mirages of men. If only the
consequences could be promised to them in certainty the way society would be if
women could hand out rings. Timothy was
not an initiated man. That much Sara
knew. He had other clubs, but did have
brothers from other regiments. Edmund
was one of them.
Edmund
greeted Timothy and Sara at the door of the Deke house with a shoulder bump
one-armed hug and a slap on the back.
Edmund said, “Glad you could make it, you said you weren’t sure if you
were going to be able to come.”
“Well
that was up to this one. This is
Sara. Be nice,” Captain to be Baker
replied.
The
entryway was cluttered with bodies dancing to purple haze Hendrix with little
wing room for the couple to pass into the amalgamated mass. Edmund directed them to the lounge of the
red-lettered frat house, where he and a select group were playing a
transcendent-toke game.
Timothy
pulled out Sara’s chair, was handed two beers and sat.
Edmund
announced, “We have a fresh fish this evening, Miss Sara to join us in another
round of Psychedelic Hypothetical’s. So
please give her a round of applause.”
The
crowd hooted between puffs of homemade smoke in leaned-back clapping as Edmund
continued. “The way this game is played
is we go around the table. Each person
has to come up with a hypothetical question.
Roll this six-sided die. Ask the
person that number to the right. That
lucky bastard gets to toke from this bad-boy.”
Edmund held up an especially impressive blunt. “That motherfucker has to breathe in, count
to six and try an answer the question to the table’s approval.”
The
scalawag crew of intellectual neophytes and want-to-be Ginsberg’s were already
three miles down the road of this game.
It was Mr. Mark Dirnt’s turn.
Mark rolled the die with a two, which set the stage for Timothy’s
entrance into the discourse.
Mark
smirked out an inch of a cough and said, “If you had to compete with an Olympic
athlete in his sport, but that dude has an explosive case of diarrhea which
event would you be so piss poor at that you would still lose even if you tried
your best?” Timothy being presented with
Buddha’s great path to enlightenment, breathed fire, slithered a squirm in his
chair and felt like a goat in his response.
Timothy
was a modest athlete surely he was devoid of talent in many organized athletic
pursuits. Images of Greek discus
throwers chucking stone in their underwear while crapping bounded. Runners pulling-up-trou mid-stride; surely he
could beat them. Gymnastics might be
impossible, but the tumbling and pommel horse had to be hindered by the stomach
spasms. Was diarrhea truly the great
equalizer?
Sara
sipped her drink and giggled. Timothy
pondered the frat house humor, “I pick swimming. I can swim ok, but I am not that fast. I tend to occasionally suck in water, but the
guy would be throwing smokescreens from the next lane over. That would be it. He would cloud my ass before I could get
going. I don’t even think I could finish.” The crowd laughed. One of the sophomores in the audience belted
out, “That does make sense.”
So
next it was Edmund’s turn. He rolled a
three, to Sara. Sara stared down the
smoke and radioed in on Mr. Ed. “If you
could ask God or Jesus or whoever you believe in, one request or question to
share with the rest of the Earth, but you would gain five pounds that you could
never lose for the rest of your life for each word in the sentence, what would
ask him?” Sara thought of her family, the
bodies in Vietnam,
diseases like polio, the circus, looked down at her waist line and said, “Why?”
Ed
belted out, “Just like a woman, more concerned with how she looks then helping
a brother out. How about food for
everybody, peace, fucking pot in every front lawn like centipede blades? You want some question that doesn’t even have
an answer?” Timothy piped in, “I don’t
know man that is pretty deep, why?
Wouldn’t you want to know why?
Why are we here? What is all this
shit? Maybe people would just quit
working if they knew why. Sit on their
asses and stare at the sky meditating on the why all day. I like why.”
Timothy raised up his hand in a slow motion high five to Sara. The two interlaced fingers at the zenith and
made puckered demure smiles.
Sara
diminished the seriousness of the roundtable, but she did like how Timothy
stuck up for her. It made her feel
close. Next it was Timothy’s turn. Timothy rolled a four. It was back to Edmund. “Do you think America would do better at winning
wars to overthrow regimes by dropping food, medical supplies and propaganda
letters from planes rather than bombs to help build a consensus for
insurgency?”
Edmund
exhaled, “So whoa, we buy food instead of megatons. We keep spreading that word with bread and
bandages. We wouldn’t even need to send
our kids over there man.” The sophomore
chimed in, “Yeah until the rebels own government shoots down your fucking plane
before it gets there, steals your food, and heals their wounds before
butchering the poor bastards. I’m all
for this peace and love stuff for us man.
We don’t need to be there, but those bastards are going to get
steamrolled without guns of their own chief.”
“We
can dream,” Timothy added. After a few
more questions the room was getting cloudy.
Timothy wanted to spend some better sequestered time with Sara. “Thanks for the good times. Sara and I have to get rolling.” Timothy took Sara’s hand to the streaky-lit
street.
“That
was pretty intense, funny, but intense. Your friend Edmund is a trip.”
“Yeah
he’s a cool guy. I roomed with him my
freshman year. He’s from North Carolina. His dad was always trying to psychoanalyze
him. Edmund comes up with some far out
stuff.”
Both
their heads were hazy. The two found a
green patch in the courtyard outside the dorm to lie down in the grass. Every other random passer could stare. It did not matter.
Timothy
and Sara peered up at the city-stars and wandered a conversation about nerdy
things they did as kids: what things looked like when they squinted, what the
lives of ants must be like. The night
bustled. Eschewing being lady-like Sara
kissed Timothy a slip second before he kissed her.
Sara
pulled the bottom of his nape towards her with their torsos parallel. Their legs never wrapped to Pandora the
passage into unwholesome public behavior of fully uncouth parameters of their
parent’s generation, but the inclination to do so swarmed.
It
was sometime around midnight when they collected their hems. Timothy walked Sara to the dorm door. He wished her goodnight when she said “Can’t
wait for the deuce.”
20
Monday
morning brought Timothy’s Middle Eastern history and culture class at ten
a.m. Professor Dylan Fuzizi was a
life-long walking-emphysema Petri dish.
The man sounded like an animated ashtray, as if the depository of
tobacco smut remnants could sprout legs and arms and scrape out a guttural
scratching post of a voice.
His
lectures were trials of endurance, mini-marathons of Arabian baksheesh and
barefoot problems of the past. Even
though the messenger converted student earlobes into dartboards, Timothy
appreciated the illumination of divergent vantage points other than mainstream
American. Timothy enjoyed the class
whether it was a display of the sole of a foot or the ignominy of disrupting
paternal-powered hierarchies. Negotiations
started with a good faith in bullshit to demonstrate respect for a
counterpart. Dogma had nothing to do
with Jesus. These were vast lessons of
the world worthy of contemplation, even from the mouth of a hookah-pipe
left-handed orator.
Sara
was in an American history course studying Abraham Lincoln. Sara admired Lincoln in the sense that one can admire a
historical figure for what he said and presented as himself in the days before
television or internet presidents. One
is left to ponder how Abe was with his children, in the bedroom and in the
private silence of conversations with his wife.
Did he worry like less mortal men?
Did he tip his haberdasher?
Some
of Sara’s favorite quotes from the martyr were, “You cannot strengthen the weak
by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the
wage payer. You cannot help the poor by
destroying the rich. You cannot help men
permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for
themselves. Important principles may,
and must, be inflexible.” Sara was a
strong believer in self-determination.
At any moment the world could change.
Sara felt it better to live by her own volition than wait for assistance
or be told no. Sara was going to take
charge with her ballot as the peaceful successor to any bullet life shot her
way.
Sara
elected to hunt over to Timothy’s class which was letting out. Sara spotted Timothy from a non-conspicuous
distance with his buzz-cut black follicles flaring talking to a classmate. Sara walked up with her history textbook
between her hands crossed in an x over her breasts. Her eyes glared up like fish hooks. Timothy dismissed his previous discourse with
haste to talk to Sara.
“I
didn’t expect to see you here,” Timothy exclaimed.
“Well
I want the card.”
“Now?”
“Yeah,
now. I am calling dibs on that deuce.
Pull it out your wallet and let’s go.”
“How
do you know it is in my wallet?”
“Because
I know you. You are a prepared man, including
random collegiate ambushes.”
Sara
inherently knew Timothy was a man like her father, who kept his wallet as an
efficiently packed footlocker of necessities.
This included folded bills, notes and receipts of utmost importance
stripped down to the minimum. This
included promises of time to keep for young women they were falling in love
with as tiny reminders to maintain their cool under fire. The aforementioned deuce fell into that
category.
“So
whip it out and let’s go cowboy.”
“You
are quite the confidant vixen today, aren’t you? And right you are.”
Timothy
pulled out the card like glow-in-the-dark body paint illuminating the traces of
where his fingers had been to a pitch black room. The wrinkled card shown out a numeric
representation of a pair slapped into Sara’s hand.
21
Timothy
and Sara grabbed their unlocked bicycles parked by the Student Union.
“So,
New Orleans is
growing on you? You’ve spent some time
down there?”
“Yeah,
I’ve been around a little bit. The
feeling of the streets is just so different.”
“Well,
put your books in my backpack, grab that bike.
”
Timothy
and Sara peddled down Ferret towards the river bend. When they passed Broadway to the smaller
streets, they rode side by side. The duo
made passing comments on the architecture.
The sequestered lawns were tinier than most suburban areas. The blades were tucked back behind wrought
iron gates or nothing. The partial and
complete nudity of New Orleans American grass made a stark contrast. The houses had been there longer than any
structured patch from where Sara grew up, but infants by European standards.
The
pair ended up at a corner grocery on Adams
Street. It
was a homely looking commercial establishment plumb in the middle of a string
of residential houses. Zoning laws in New Orleans were more of a
rough guideline. Enforced rules were
highly dependent on who you knew and if you did right by the neighbors and the
district councilman’s campaign war chest.
Like most places in New Orleans,
the best food purveyors were hole-in-the-wall joints that your-mama-and-them
know about. You should not judge based
on the paint on the walls, the sparkle of the signage, or the commercial
predictability of the word chain. Most
of them came in single family names of an immigrant or a slave like Dooky
Chase’s, Arneaux’s, Dunbar’s, Manale’s, and in this case Deanie’s.
Customers
were met by a long delicatessen counter backed by a chalkboard menu. Ceiling fan’s turned on a rotating wheel belt
on the ceiling of checkered tiles. Sara
was surprised at the intricacies of the interior decorating to what appeared as
nothing more than a convenience store from the outside. There was a line of experienced loyal patrons
conversing with each other waiting to place orders.
These
were neighborhood folk, not scrawny-necked college kids, but people on breaks
from working, from doing, from productive pursuits, but smiling at the
prospects of familiar French-bread treasures.
A middle-aged Italian man, with a prominent Navy tattoo leaned over the
counter to take an order.
Sara
relinquished her take-charge attitude for the solace of her Boudreaux Beau’s
native expertise. “Deuce Louie’s,
dressed to go.” The ticket scripting Sicilian called out the request to the
busybody crew of sandwich slicers. Timothy and Sara stepped to the side for the
next man in line. Timothy paid for the
order.
“What’s
a Louie, I don’t see that on the menu?”
“Well,
it’s not, but it is. It’s named after
the owner’s son, who’s named after that trumpet player up on the wall. But it’s just kind of a tradition of people
knowing to order it here.”
A
ding sounded from the top of a glass-windowed case holding Chisesi ham,
hogshead cheeses, and iced Gulf seafood.
A black lady in a pressed white apron held two paper wrapped torpedo
tubes belting out, “Deuce Louie’s dressed.
Thank ya darling.”
Timothy
gripped the namesakes and pulled out his water bottle and made a request to the
counter lady, “Dorthea, would you be so kind to fill this up with water for
me?”
“Sho
baby.”
Sara
subtlety repressed the urge to outwardly admire Timothy’s confidence navigating
the local establishment with such an affable accord. She simply smiled, offered to hold the bag of
goodies and thanked Timothy for his contributions while glancing up at the
photograph of Mr. Armstrong.
22
Once
outside the riders headed towards the levee to a grassy patch next to a bench overlooking
the Mississippi River. Timothy unpacked the food from his backpack
and prepared a mini-picnic in the noon spring sun. The levee was one of the few consistent spots
in the city to capture the kiss of a breeze.
Ships,
steamboats, and barges lumbered in a mosaic drift. Hulls shined in the reflective solar rays
from foreign and domestic ports. They
carried grain, petroleum, humans, and consumer goods to and from Middle America.
The river was a pacemaker on the heart of the country, keeping the
rhythm and the blood flowing. The delta
was the mouth spitting sediment the North no longer wanted into the Gulf. Yankees coxed a Nile gravity to slurp up oil
and fruits from Louisiana to Brazil to Spain
and Asia.
Traffic was guided by the river pilots; local men in a fraternity of
families with a stranglehold on the cushy and integral jobs of avoiding the
shallow water pitfalls of this “better know it like the back of your hand”
mudslide.
As
the river-show swayed, Timothy offered Sara a napkin and the bicycle canteen as
he un-wrapped the first of the white parchment cylinders. The Louis was a marvelous local creation of
simple, but elegant means. The po-boy
was harnessed in Lidenheimer French Bread with bunches of boiled shrimp dressed
in a remoulade sauce, topped with fried green Creole tomatoes. What would otherwise seem rich was common
fare down at the end of the river. The
Gulf splurged the city with shrimp and oysters harvested by local denizens like
the grocer’s Yugoslavian uncle.
The
bread was baked en masse and consumed like no Catholic city outside of Paris. The tomatoes grew like weeds in the fertile
delta soil. Remoulade was basically just
ketchup, egg, horseradish, mustard and spices, but mixed with the skill of
somebody’s mama who learned from her mama.
The land provided for the people.
They may have been poor, imperfect, and struggled, but they ate well.
Timothy
handed over the first to Sara and unsheathed his own. They spent the early afternoon munching and
sharing. The couple talked about their
families and where they would visit if they could go anywhere. Timothy and Sara pointed out social foibles. They ended up pressed side to side holding
hands with their forearms crossing their abdomens sitting watching the
cloudless sky. The pair fell in love in
the subtle silence, without warning or notification. There were no streaming messages, just a
presence like a uterine wall attachment not there and then there. It was difficult to know the moment, but
certainly present upon inspection.
Sara
and Timothy rode the bikes back in a peaceful want of more and patience to
be. The couple spent the next year and a
half learning, loving and being. There
were many lunch dates, musical excursions, French Quarter sojourns, kisses and
embraces of privacy. The slight breeze
buttoned in the grass by the bench next to the Mississippi
River set the seal.
23
Timothy
graduated in the spring of 1969, and proposed with the ring hidden in a box of
playing cards after asking Sara to play one night after a seafood pasta
dinner. After Sara’s graduation the
couple married in a church off of St.
Charles Avenue with a planned second-line to the
round table club next to Audubon
Park in a January
wedding. It was beautiful and full of
fervor for those who could attend. The
day was plagued by a twice-a-century snow fall, which kept guests from crossing
the river including the band. The joy
was palpable; love and warmth were abundant despite the lack of snow tires in
southeast Louisiana.
They had become one.
Timothy
shipped off to Fort Hood and to Vietnam three weeks later. He never made it to law school. Tim was conceived in the send off. Letters were later mailed. Risks of a non-return were elevated.
Timothy’s
mind snapped back to the present. The
window, the chair, his wife, his newborn Ethan in the waiting warmer, years of
thought dashed in seconds of now.
He
had to get moving. Things needed
doing. The night was elongated like
taffy muscle, stretched and tested. The
humorous intersection of exhaustion and joy precluded desperation for the
creation of striated tissue. Timothy
focused on being functional: conversing with in-laws and on-pin
newly-ordained-again paternal grandparents.
There were cousins and uncles and payphone alerts passed out in Morris
code for the newly named. Timothy no
longer smoked. There were no cigars,
just a flurry mixture of hope and trepidation scurrying across the sanitized
professional medical air. There was work
to do.
Continue to Chapter 2
Continue to Chapter 2
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