ALL THAT I DO NOT KNOW

I'm frequently surprised by a kick in the ass, just about the time I believe I know what is going on. Something in my condition, leading me to figure I know what happened in the past, I'm clever enough to collect data on what has happened to other people and somehow, I'll magically pull all of that together and know what is coming up in  my life. An 'instant on' pseudo-clairvoyant suitable for children's parties or to amaze friends sitting around waiting for the beer. So frequently though, I'm reminded that I don't know anything about life and surely don't have any idea what is coming next.

I become most aware of that with illness. Illness is the thing that I never find myself planning into a schedule or setting aside a bit of time just in case it happens to appear.  Rather than a soft little rap at the door, after pausing on  the front porch like a shadow, illness has a way of sweeping me up and tossing me away. There was nothing to be done but all the while I'm feeling like I should be doing something. That I should have been preparing or conscious or more careful. That's a good one. More careful? I have no idea what I might have done to spot this sooner. I traveled through the past couple of months bearing a collection of symptoms, waiting for some unifying theme to put it all together; make sense of it.

And here it is. Everything, after the tests and the probes and the teams of specialists. Here it all is. Now we know. At least they do, and I know that I think they know. There is nothing else for me to do but lay back and become something of a self-monitoring side of beef. They roll me, twist me, pinch me and poke as they feel the need. I report the important things like bowel movements and chest pains and the fact that my hair is falling out.

We wait. Therre is nothing, so far as I'm able to see that either I or the doctors can do to speed this up. I have a habit of picking random dates and setting them as milestones.  I think, "okay. so this might take me three weeks before I recover. Three weeks would make that, ummmm  Sunday. So I should be back out and normal by Monday. Tuuesday at the latest."

The problem with that is I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. I have no idea how I heal or do not. I have no clue about what this is I'm fighting or where I'm likely to be wrestling with it, next. I make these really big assumptions based on a modicum of information, only to be disappointed when it doesn't come through like I "planned:".

I didn't plan anything. I'm going to sit back and watch.

"Backward through my own days I see where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders. I have no mockings or arguments. I witness and wait."

                                                                 Walt Whitman,  LEAVES OF GRASS

FALLING, FAILING TO FIND (2009-11-23)

* * *

Doreen left the conversation right there, at the mention of the name. It was enough. Just hearing it was setting off full-length Hollywood movies in her mind. Old movies, where the rooms were about three thousand times nicer than most people would ever see and the characters stood in exactly the right spots for the lighting to find them, casting appropriate shadows and gently filling where there might otherwise be blemishes. That wasn't the real world, which suited Doreen just fine. There wasn't a whole lot of room in her memories for it, anyway. 

She was willing to launch into a long narrative, describing that true romance and the intricacies of a love that only knows the shadows. It was a story she was eminently qualified to tell. The years she'd spent living next door to the family of the man she loved, watching him park in their driveway and sneak through her backdoor, had been rich in a curious fashion. They were important but hard to share.

Just so, now. There was something you never knew about people. How they were going to react when hearing an intimate detail like that. Doreen had learned a long while back to be very cautious when she decided who might hear her "other woman" story. The reaction was something she could never really be sure of. 

She'd seen the same odd mix of reactions in other things, too. Her husband, for example, loved to tell people he'd declared bankruptcy. It was some sort of vindication, for him. His way of saying, "See? I told you they were out to screw me."  He would launch into his bankruptcy saga in the oddest times, like standing in line a the bank. One of his favorites. Or during dinner out with other couples. That might be another reason they didn't eat out a whole hell of a lot. He had this way about him. 

Things would be flowing along nicely then, completely out of left field, he'd pull up his tired "me and my bankruptcy" tale, like some sort of buddy story. You'd think he'd traveled across Europe with his close personal friend, the bankruptcy.

The thing was, and something he'd never realized, it seemed, was that it was her bankruptcy, too. If declaring bankruptcy in 1976 was a troublesome thing for a man to do, then it was more than a minefield for a woman to be walking through at the same time. She discovered that when she divorced him in 1980.

* * *

Noah was dozing off. This could have been a result of all the alcohol he'd been drinking that night before this unfortunate event had carried him to the Sacred Heart emergency room. There had been any number of mixed drinks in there besides the new twist he'd been adding by sipping absinthe. Absinthe is a liqueur that combines the body numbing effects of any good booze with the hypnagogic episodes of any above average psychedelic drug. It was, in a sense, the best of both worlds. He'd read it about it years ago, while studying the French revisionist writers and the soirees they were famous for holding. Their own raves, in fact, though they didn't have the benefit of modern electronics to make it all it might been. No strobes, no laser lights, no sound-activated led panels. Poor bastards.

He likened it to LSD, himself. Of course, he would because he'd taken so much of it during his teen-aged years and there was nothing now that prevented daily flashbacks but his own shortened attention span. He just didn't have the energy to stick with a single thought long enough to generate a new acid experience. It might have scared him, if he had. 

The last time he'd done acid intentionally, was at a New Year's Party in 1982. He'd been surrounded by a bunch of people all crazy about cocaine. Not just enthusiasts. These people were addicts and the party was an odd little affair with about 30 uptight people sitting around in a living room having short spurts of words exchanged that seemed to be conversations to all of them, while anxiously watching to see if one person slipped of to the bathroom and was gone for longer than was deemed necessary. An arbitrary measure, to be sure, since everybody was jacked up and though they didn't know it and there was no way in hell you were going to convince them of it, one or two more lines of blow were not going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference. 

It's the devil, to be sure. Ask anybody who has finally escaped its clutches. Or anybody in that room that night who hadn't gotten invited back to the bedroom to stare into a mirror laying on the desk with white powder in an neat little pile with small rails carved in distinct doses, contributed by how much you liked or were like in the house. 

Noah had been invited back. What's more, the lines laid out and offered to him where big fat blobs, more hills than meager doses. This was testimony to his charm and another symbol of the curse that his own charm had become to him. There was a lot of this in his life. A lot of people expecting him to like what they liked and being pressured to join in. 

He didn't like coke. He'd taken acid that night and knew that all the cocaine was going to do was irritate his nasal passages. He dreaded spending the rest of the night experiencing the sands of the New Mexican desert sprinkled all around inside his sinuses. It was something of an image he'd gotten in his head and, not being graced or cursed, whichever it was, with the shortened span of attention at the time, he was destined to be plagued with that picture most of the evening. It was troublesome.

What was more troublesome was sensing the distaste being directed at him by the host for his refusal to accept their gift. He had a movie of the week running in his head telling the story of a French trapper offending a Sioux chief by turning down his daughter. In the movie the trapper was tortured for days and finally killed by being skinned alive. That was the sort of thing Noah saw in his head when he did acid. Whether or not it ever happened didn't matter a whole hell of a lot. In the real world, or as real as the world might get in the house of a person selling contraband at the rate of one hundreds dollars for about the weight of paper clip, dealing with a crowd of people likely to leave their hungry naked children starving in a broken down car while they chased their dope.

Maybe it was better to see trappers getting skinned?

At least in that fantasy the surroundings were beautiful; the soft rolling hills of the Great Plains, everything covered in swaying buffalo grass grown so high a man on horseback could disappear in it. There was always the brilliant blue of the western sky. Not because there was that, so much. Just every movie he'd seen accented it. Come to think of it, a whole lot of Noah's world experience seemed influenced by these elements: acid and Hollywood. Was that an accident?

"Cary Grant!"

He jumped when he realized he was sitting amid a bunch of vampires with a blood lust, looking for a line of powder. Then, add the fact he'd spoken those words out loud.

"Damn it!"

Not an empathetic crowd, to be sure. There were four people playing cribbage who all stopped to look when he spoke. None of them moved or seemed willing to, even if they had to. They were transfixed, aligned in an order that would only be apparent to their vampire brothers and sisters. Others, Noah included, would only sense what the pattern was when they went against it. The urge to conform was tangible. A force field, almost. He was raising his hands, in part to separate the force field, allowing himself safe passage, but also in a defensive measure, protecting his face. 

The dealer appeared at the door, at that very moment. Partially to see what the hell the racket was. Yes. One person speaking two sentences could indeed be a racket here. Get use to addicts, who aren't willing to expend a single ounce of energy in any direction that wouldn't get or keep them high. Simple mathematics. The law of addiction, only understood in terms of demand. Constant demand. There couldn't be enough dope in the world to ever satisfy it.

Noah figured all of this out in the split second between the cribbage players returning their concentration to the pegs, and the door to the back bedroom opening completely. A pretty long stretch of time, considering.

And he recalled this now, in part as thanks to the wormwood. Funny thing, recalling a trip while tripping. A moment of infinite duplication. He'd seen such a thing before by standing two mirrors at right angles to one another. Staring at that was a little like falling into a mouse hole. Thinking about staring into a mouse hole was a little like peering at two mirrors. He was caught in some kind of vortex now and the only way was...

Well, shit! He didn't know. There wasn't an obvious route so he'd just be picking a course and proceeding as if. Not a bad analogy for his life strategy. Oddly enough, he didn't think of that, at the moment. It was the sort of thing he would've thought, or so he thought Wormwood was a wild little ride, you see. There wasn't going to be another chance.

What the hell was he doing there? Not here. There. In that house that night when the cocaine was skulking around in the corners, just enough to keep the noses of everybody present alert and waiting. They'd each gotten a taste, which was a big mistake. It was something the coke dealer should have and probably did know. Another problem with drugs and addiction. It doesn't necessarily have to make you stupid but it always does. Always.

The proof of that theorem was simple. Right at hand. When members of the state task force on cocaine kicked in the door and raced to round up the occupants of the house. They kicked in the front door and rushed in, flushing them out the back where a larger contingent of agents and officers waited, capturing them like cattle in catch pens.  They went in "heavy", parlance for fully armed with automatic weapons and body armor. They might have expected violence. 

What they got was Noah, out of his mind, perched in the middle of the living room, watching words come out of people's mouths.

"I see what you're saying," he said. 

"Ha Ha." 

They thought he was crazy. Another observation both nearer and further away than anything they could have guessed. 

FALLING, FAILING TO FIND (2009-11-18)

Doreen had always guessed that was the story, though she had never gotten to know his wife well enough to ask. The contact didn't seem prudent. There is always a certain intimacy between two people sleeping together that can't be concealed when they encounter each other in any other environment. What is it? The look that is more penetrating than would be comfortable between two complete strangers? Yeah. That could be it. Or part of it, at least. She hadn't taken the time to really look at it and develop a profile. It was enough knowing that it was. It existed.

When they were together it had been a certain sort of forbidden magic and when things were getting difficult for her, she'd find herself dreaming a little bit about how things might have been. Dangerous territory, to be sure. The facts were the facts and Doreen lived in the world. There wasn't any other way to cut into it. When the lights went off it was dark. When the checks got cashed the money was gone. These things were real and not to be argued with.

So too, her relationship with Walt, this thing they shared, came with its own limitations built right in. There had never been a whole lot of room to analyze or ponder. She guessed that wanting more from him would've had exactly the opposite effect and so she never allowed it. That is discipline, by god. That's the stuff that kept her alive when two husbands slowly dwindled away, finally disappearing in a cake walk of one to another. She was the constant. The music that kept the men in her life moving. 

If she'd been born in another time who knows what she would have accomplished? She had all the qualities she longed for but never quite found in a man; she was strong but more importantly she was resilient. It wasn't enough to be able to take one on the chin. Her life, like the lives of most women, required her to be able to keep walking forward after the blow had come. She didn't get to flinch. She couldn't fade, hoping that she'd be taken care of while she faltered, falling by the wayside.

There was no wayside. There was just her life and she'd lived it in a long straight line. Now, being older, she was inclined to spend more time looking back than she hand in the past.

"Makes sense," she thought, laughing to herself as she weighed the thought. There was so much more of her past to be taking a look at now. SO much more of it and so little waiting up ahead. As she moved across the room she caught site of herself in the big mirror over the dining table.

She didn't look too bad. The men her age were all falling apart, in various stages of disrepair or despair. Not her. She made a point of living her life as if there was still as much ahead, even though she knew perfectly well this was not the truth. Not having anybody around to compare the notes on aging made it easier. 

Abby, her friend's daughter, stopped by occasionally. She was a sweet kid and had a heart as big as the Lincoln sitting out in Doreen's garage. Funny comparison because, like the car, the girl had seen a bit of world. Working her job on the ambulance opened an interesting little window on a part of life most people never saw. There was no telling what she might run into in the course of a day. Doreen looked forward to her visits and the odd little stories or parts of stories she'd show up.

She was still standing in the middle of the room looking at her reflection. There was quite a bit to be pleased with, which might sound funny to somebody young and impatient. Let them think what they liked. It wasn't a problem for her and there was going to be a point where they were looking into their own mirrors. If they were lucky they'd find the same inventory of tings she'd managed to hold on to. Her hair, for one. It was still thick and full, something most of her friends had lost first. They had slowly gone to thin, straggled little scratchy patches, like grass on a hill without water. Not her though. She was still full-headed, though it was all a beautiful thick shiny silver. 

Black. Her hair had been black. Not brunette. She'd heard it called that quite a bit but the facts were otherwise. She knew her hair was black. It was something her men had always loved. 

"God almighty, woman!"

Walter had said that as she was climbing over him to get out of bed and fetch an ashtray. They'd been making love for most of the afternoon and she knew he'd be ready for a smoke. Even as heavily as he smoked, he wouldn't let her out of bed that day. His hands went back to tracing her soft curves and he punctuated each excursion with a kiss as his fingers explored. She loved the way he kissed. One of the best she'd ever known. Sure as hell better than her husband, who seemed to think you had to kiss to get something but there wasn't much point beyond that. He kissed the way he unlocked the front door - a quick, smooth stab and withdrawal. It was a function.

Walter approached it as an art.  Funny thing to think, when she'd always believed there wasn't a whole hell of romance anywhere in the man. Now, being older and wiser, she realized he was an individual; not subject to the way things looked on the movie screen or was supposed to be in the books. He had things he loved and relished, like kissing her skin and smelling her. Both romantic as hell and neither really detracting from the fact that he didn't appreciate his own wife or love the kids she's given him. 

Hey, nobody was perfect. She knew that even then. Now she was beginning to see how each person, no matter where they'd come from or where they were going, had an element they elevated to perfection. Or near perfection. 

Walter's just happened to be in bed. That was the one place where he was at home. A spot he might risk any number of perils to arrive at, then linger regardless of risk or reality. She had watched him, more than once, slid out from inside her, slip out of her bed and walk out the front door to go home and see his wife at the end of a day. The damnedest thing.

Men, huh?

@#

"you aren't going to believe this one. Lord!", Abigail said, launching into the story she'd come to tell Doreen. 

"Like a ridgepole pine, standing straight and tall!"

Doreen laughed when Abby said it, the sort of laugh that was as much delighted by being delighted at the topic as she was at the story itself. A man's penis was fair game, she thought. Especially an erect penis hard enough to take a man to the hospital. Who would pass a chance to see something like that? 

"He was old, Dor! Good lord but you'd never know it by what was going on down there between his legs." 

"Old enough to share with a friend," Doreen asked joking. Only sort of joking, really. There were thoughts running through her mind that belonged there as much as any other, even if the young people around her might be shocked and think she was too ancient for that. 

"You dirty girl," Abigail said. It was part of what she liked most about Doreen; one of the details of her personality that kept Abby stopping by to see her. A bonding on the real things, the gritty things that her mother never had time for. She was a little too nervous to think about sex herself, much less discuss it with her own daughter. She'd died without ever speaking frankly and honestly with Abby about the things on most women's minds. Sure as hell on hers, at least.

Which made visiting here so much more fun. There was nothing they'd covered so far that had proven off limits. No topic Doreen had given her reason to think she might want to stay away from. 

"Maybe we could fix a little get well package to take to him, honey? You think he might like a little something to help him recover?"

"Get over, you mean?" Abigail asked, already laughing when she said it. " I could. I've got his name and I know where to find him."

"Now whose being bad?", Doreen asked, without meaning it. There was a curiosity here that wouldn't be satisfied without hearing his name and gathering a few details. Of course, she'd never 

"You think we should go see him, do you? What would we want to fix for Noah Bunch?"

And everything sort of stopped there, dangling in the air for a moment before crashing to the floor. The look on Doreen's looked as if Abigail had just slapped her and there was no getting around noticing.

"Who?"

"Noah," Abby said.

"Bunch," Doreen said, finishing the sentence before Abby got a chance.

FALLING, FAILING TO FIND (2009-11-18)

CHAPTER SIX

It was late when Doreen woke up. Too late for a good talk show. Way too late to make a fresh pot of coffee. The sound of an ambulance passing by, the siren on, the flashing red lights popping into her room like a slot machine paying off. She tossed and turned for a short time, hoping she'd be able to get back to sleep. 

She remembered when coffee didn't affect her. It was an odd thought to have, after wishing she could get back to sleep. Still, it seemed funny to be so afraid of the caffeine and the power it had over her schedule, now. Damned juice. Why couldn't she have counted on that, all those years ago. Back when she was young enough for it to have made a difference. Those were the days, when her husband was out of town and she was waiting for her next door neighbor to make it out of his house.

Out of his house, and into hers. Where he belonged. Or she wished. But not really. It was the perfect relationship, made that way by the fact they couldn't be together. Shouldn't be together. There was the strength of that. Their love endured because it required so little maintenance. There was a bare minimum invested and the most fun. Simple mathematics really and didn't take a genius to figure it out. 

In fact, she knew that Walter Bunch was somewhat less than the perfect man. He had a few habits that would drive any woman crazy and might prove the death of the most devoted partnerships. For one thing, he didn't like children. Doreen didn't think that was necessarily a bad or a good thing. She did see how it might present problems since he had three with his wife. They had three, even though he denied it. 

"Rug rats." She spoke it into the darkness of the bedroom, but wasn't capable of packing all the intent and malice into it that he had. There was something in the way he uttered it that was dismissive and condemnation, all at the same time. 

Not that Walter didn't like being a father or wasn't comfortable with the responsibility being a parent saddled him with. He actively resented the kids for their existence. He hated them the way an Amazon explorer must begrudge the jungle parasites and the extra level of misery they add to an already arduous journey. 

"Monkeys." 

He actually called them that. At first she thought he was being cute and doing that little trick that men have of acting burdened when they were actually quite endeared to whomever they were talking about.

It wasn't so. Walter saw no value in them whatsoever and would frequently slip from talking about their lives to telling stories about the war. Stories that would start with strong, experienced words devolving quickly into a dark hole. A miserable spot nobody would want to go into with him. She had known this in more than one man and found the brooding oddly attractive. Like something she though she might, were she woman enough or partial saint, be able to love out of them. Comfort them from. 

She never had been able to. It was a moment of true maturity to accept that these veterans and the things they'd done were going to be forever a mark of age. A generational scar, of sorts. Something nobody ever thought to speak of, even though it rips holes right through the fabric of their very lives and never stood still long enough to be mended.

So, they were friends. She'd heard Abby call it "friends with benefits".  She liked the sound of that. It made it something comprehensible. Something you ought to be able to go buy a Hallmark card to commemorate. The sort of thing that would get its own day named in honor of. Beneficial Friends Day. It would fall in the calendar year shortly after Veteran's Day, and they wouldn't have parades because they'd be in the bedroom, or intent on making their way there. It was only fair since that was where the majority of the time they had together was spent. She spent more time in bed with Walter than she had with her husband. Either of them. 

Which made him a great Friend With Benefits. Funny, the very quality that made him lousy for a husband or mate. There was nothing that had ever let her wonder what it would be like to be married to him. Nothing in the world about herself or the combination of he and her together which led her to wonder how they might have been. She knew, if she were his wife, she'd never see him. Or see him in between lies, long enough to get things together for his next tryst. He must have been quite a sight rushing to get out the door. He could be charming but she guessed he used the threat of being stuck home, to terrorize her and the children as his trump card. 

Better to watch him pass out the door and know they were safe for a while. They could take their trips to Disneyland or spend hours building forts of blankets and boxes in the living room without worrying about "getting in Daddy's way". Thank goodness he wasn't home enough for that to be more of a problem.

FALLING, FAILING TO FIND (2009-11-17)

"He drinks a lot, does he?"

Valentina felt like she already had the answer she needed but was trying to initiate a conversation in hopes of gathering answers she hadn't laid her hand to, yet.

"That asshole? I've never seen him before?"

The bartender was busy cleaning the back bar and sacking up the cut fruit to be stowed in the cooler for another flurry of drunks, tomorrow. He could b e forgiven for not paying a whole hell of a lot of attention to the new girl. That was something that came along with new girls in the bar, even the pretty girls. There is a "done it all, seen it all" need to be unimpressed air to him. The hallmark of the experienced mixologist. There' s name you never hear anybody call themselves, except in jest.

"Not him. The owner."

"He isn't the owner," the bartender said. Familiar territory but he wasn't sure how much or how little she new about the lay of the land here. 

"The co-owner, then. Does he drink a lot" she asked?

Good girl. She was going to be a quick study and that pleased him. This wasn't a job for stupid people. They got ground up and spit out before they'd made more than a check or two. He'd seen it time and again and dumb girls were the worst of the lot. They presented all the hassles of a new employee you had to bring up to speed on the regular thing like drink prices or the beginning and end of happy hour.  Stupid barmaids added an entirely new burden to that by being so fucking stupid you had to count their tills and make change for them, and always when the bar was its busiest. He knew for a fact that the simple don't do well with pressure. He'd watch them crumble and fall apart, too many times. 

"We won't talk about that," he said. A judicious way of letting her know there was nothing more need to be said on the topic. Drink? Hell, yes! He did drink a lot but that wasn't the point. Not talking about it, now that right there was the point,  If she was a real quick person that would be the end of that, besides setting the tone for how they were going to communicate from here, going forward. He didn't have time for bullshit and braying. There was no point. No reason to talk about customers, it just made them appear almost human. No reason to discuss the foibles or failings of the staff or management. There wasn't room for it. This was a small playground and the same kids were almost always there. 

The bartender was being his own typical asshole self. He was so busying making sure she wasn't going to be a problem he missed the point entirely. This might have been his chance to run to the co-owners with tales of intrigue and seeking influence. he might have noticed she was continuing to ask what he was refusing, form teh outset, to answer. And no, it wasn't that he didn't understand the question. The fact is he wasn't going to answer. That wasn't going to be changing.

He might, if he'd been paying a bit more attention, had that same creepy feeling he had but didn't recognize when his pock was picked at the Mardi Gras. He would've felt her probing instead of concentrating on her style of presentation.

"why do you like him so much?"

"I'm just concerned," she said and she might be, too. There wasn't really any way of knowing for sure right now. That was the sort of thing that only time could tell. Words, and especially in a bar, come cheap. They don't mean a whole hell of a lot to anybody and certainly not to him. He was a pussyhound and a cocaine addict and the only bit of work standing between him and the medicine his disease was calling for was her. This new little girl who was doing a little bit too good a job cleaning up after her first Friday night.

"You can get out of here. Okay? You've had a tough night."

"Do you think we should go visit him? See how he's doing?"

She was fucking serious. Head over to ST Thomas along about 2:30 in the morning. 

"A little late for visiting hours." 

He was being kind now. The way he was thinking it had several obscenities and even a smirk thrown in for emphasis right at the end.

"I might go, anyway. Just make sure that he's okay."

"Fine. That would be real nice, I'm sure. I'm not going with you but you tell him I said "hey" when you see him. Okay?"

"I will."

That was almost the end but for one more piece of help he tried offering. 

"You know his name?"

"Oh, yes. I do." And by god, that was spot on, driving right to the heart of the matter but smart boy missed that, too. She was telling him that she knew one hell of a lot more than he'd known his first night. She was telling him to be careful. It might not be too long before he was treating her with kid gloves and doing his level best to keep her happy. 

She was telling him she wanted to fuck the boss. And if he'd known her even a little bit better than he did, that would've been telling him she would be. He'd know that much about her.

FALLING, FAILING TO FIND (2009-11-12)

 CHAPTER FIVE

Last call in the Crow's Nest was, Valentina supposed, pretty much like closing time in any bar, anywhere. There were regular features that could be counted on, regardless the night of the week or the size of the crowd earlier in the evening. Immutable laws that endured independent of the small details of one evening opposed to the next. It was a routine and, as such, there were steps to be followed; an ordered sequence of events that needed to happen. Glasses to be collected from table tops' already awash in spilled beer and puddled water from condensation on highball glasses, long after the ice had rolled over, prepared to rejoin the ocean. The musky bar linen would have to be collected in the cloth hamper back behind the bar, where it would steep and stink until the driver stopped in to collect it, midday tomorrow. 

Just so, and with all the same surprise and charm, the guy trying to put his hand on Valentina's butt while she cleaned the mess up around his elbows was a fixture.  He would be slurring the same stupid lines, cute or disgusting to varying degrees, promising the standard pleasures and respect that only a drunk can feel for a person they haven't had yet.  It might not always be the same guy sitting here tonight but it would always be someone. It always was. 

She was young but her experience already predicted it, preparing her for him. 

"You're beautiful, you know. You make me think...,", the drunk said, stumbling for what it was she might make him think about.

"We've got to close. Drink up, please."

"...of an angel! A pretty little angel."

"An angel, huh?", she asked.

The drunk nodded, awkwardly pleased at his progress. 

"Yup! A tiny angel," he continued, "with a tight little butt."

The bartender started around the end of the bar, prepared to grab him up by his collar and pitch him out the front door but Valentina stopped him, shaking her head and lifting a hand to stay him. 

"Wrong thing..." she was saying when he interrupted her.

"I'm not just...I know what you're going to say, I hear it all the time, but I am not just saying this because I'm drunk."

He put so much emphasis on the final word it sounded more a social position than a physical condition. He might have been telling somebody he wasn't just patting them down because he was a DEA agent, or reassuring them he'd be able to help them with their auto accident because he was a doctor.

"No need to worry about your child's education...I'm a drunk." 

See?

It sounded exactly that silly to her. Hell! It would sound just as wild-assed and off the wall to him if he wasn't -- well, drunk. 

"You're not? The only way you can prove that to me is by going home, now. You come back tomorrow when you haven't been drinking and tell me I'm an angel with a cute butt. Alright?"

And yes,by god, that was fine with him. It made sense. Besides giving him a way out of this situation without losing face, it provided an opportunity for the future. Something to think about on the drive home. Get ready for. 

"I'm gonna. Okay? I'm just gonna do that, right now." he said, rising unsteadily. Valentina put a hand on his elbow, half supporting him so he didn't fall and partially propelling him toward the door. When she is moving a drunk, momentum is everything. The entire secret of success. Without it, she had nothing. 

Out the door. He stopped and was turning as she pushed it heavy door closed and twisted the deadbolt. Through the oak she heard him say, "I will see you when I get in, tomorrow night. Count on it, angel. I'll be back."

He wouldn't.

FALLING, FAILING TO FIND (2009-11-10)

Walter didn't arrive at that spot easily. There was a great deal of soul searching, accompanied by a trip to the family physician for a complete physical before he was convinced this was the only possible outcome. When he found out there was nothing wrong with the boys bladder or other parts 'down there', that left a few possibilities. Just none that were something he would be able to deal with. Something he couldn't explain away or leave to his mother to handle, as he had most of the child rearing that had taken place in the Bunch household. He checked in shortly after finishing a couples shots and a beer at the lounge.

"The office," he'd say, followed by a laugh that could never be confused with anything joyous or cute. It was a "stupid bitch" sort of thing that punctuated any and every example of him getting it over on the old lady. Something to be expected, more than proud of. It was what a man, a real man, did. It came easily to Walter. he'd never really struggled with it. There were some things a guy has to do in life that are going to give him pause; those kinds of situations where he has to weigh his options before finally deciding which way he's going to go. Walter had faced that when it came to dealing with prisoners rolling through the Ardennes, Christmas Day, 1944. There was something for a real man to try getting his hands on, frozen solid and hungry as hell from a couple of days but nothing but bullets and army canvas to eat. They were pushing the SS, back.

"Tough bastards. Oh hell yeah, the toughest I've ever seen," he would add to any story told about his service during the war, whether or not anybody was listening. It didn't matter. They were that tough. People needed to know, even today, by god.

This decision, the thing with wee-wee boy, that was a whole lot simpler than the other. He hesitated for the time it took the boy's mother to pick him up and hug him close, telling him it wasn't a big deal.

"Just watch, baby. No one will remember. Really! I promise," she said. Another one them, mo matter how nice it was, she'd never be able to honor or keep things. It was a bald face lie and not the sort of shit she should be filling the lad's head with but no stopping. Not now. Not ever. She'd been doing it since he Noah had discovered the teat. Wasn't likely to stop now. What difference did it make?

What difference, indeed. They had this kid now with all the guts and smarts of a crippled raccoon on the highway. The damage was already done. Wasn't no way he had what it took to protect himself. Wasn't likely to ever get up or get on with his life. Like the coon, he was most likely going to die limping and lame just a few feet away from where he'd been set loose.

Walter beat him to the punch and wrote the little bastard off before the weakness slipped through the little kid's pores and onto Walt's own skin. Couldn't have that. He shivered.

It got to be something of a joke, a little something he saved up to use on the women he was putting the blocks to on the side. What was it about women? Didn't matter who they were he got pretty much the same reaction which woman he told his little "offspring" joke to. It was like they were secretly united in a pact designed to bend men into tight circles they could keep handy and using like napkin rings on the table when they entertained.

Even Doreen. She'd been spreading her legs for him almost three years, acting like a friend of a family and a good neighbor the whole time. She was naked, still sweating and wet down there because of him when he pulled the joke on her.

"Didn't your boy start school?"

"Who," he asked.

"Your boy," Doreen said.

"Oh. Oh goodness no. That. That isn't my boy. don't even be confused. My boy died. My boy died in a horrible snowstorm while we were on the way to the hospital. That thing running around the house now is just an experiment."

She was waiting for it, not believing him but letting him take this wherever it was he needed to go with it. No comment. No reaction.

"That's right. A little bit of science there. A miracle, for sure. She picked up the afterbirth and insisted on keeping it warm. Lo and behold."

He would usually punctuate that with his arms spread, palms turned to the sky. It was something he'd seen somewhere and it fitted the dramatic mood he was going for with the story. It was only funny with all of the hijinks.

But the women never laughed. he worked on the line for a good six years before giving up on it with the ladies. They were a little bit like the stone heads in pictures from Easter Island. Nobody had figured them out, yet. One thing was for sure, nothing in the world was going to make them laugh.

Ah, what the hell? She was a fun twist, taken in the right spirit and there wasn't nothing he was hoping to put together with her that hadn't already been put together a whole lot of times before. He was getting a little bit tired of her, anyway. It was just about time to get back out there and find another woman. At least, one more.

It didn't snow here. If it did, he'd have been struck by the way the season had changed, sneaking him right back up to Christmas and the mood that he always got into with that. There didn't seem to be any way around it. Always dark, always heavy and always coming at him just like this. Ambush, the way the Gerry's had done it at the Bulge. No warning but a person familiar with history probably could predicted it.

Not just the push of the German army into the forest around Bastogne, late in December of 1944. His mood, too. It was becoming something of a tradition. The kids and he were the only people in the whole god damned house surprised by it when it came. She knew. She knew and had been doing anything she could possibly do in preparation.

There were a whole lot of little day trips to Disneyland or weekends up to stay with her Momma in Bakersfield.

"So they can see the kids. They're growing so fast." She always gave an excuse like that but didn't need to. He wasn't aware of what his own mood was preparing to do and didn't really give a good god damned whether or not they were home when he got out of work and was finished with the bar. It was all just about the same for Walt.

He'd killed them. Not something he'd told anybody. Not the sort of thing you do tell anybody, right? There are a few things, random deeds and unexpected acts, in every man's life. These were things you never would've guessed he was capable of, much less that he had done. He made jokes about chasing skirts, joked about not liking the kids a whole hell of a lot. This was one area however, not open for discussion. Something he wasn't going to capture with a Brownie and mount under little tabs on a black page in a photo album.

Walter didn't need to. His memory was perfect. Unshakable. He couldn't, no matter how much time passed, forget that his get had leaked a gallon in his own pants, so this was something he wasn't going to forget.

He'd walked those four young Krauts, in their big gray wool overcoats and their proud silver SS insignia, shaped like lightening bolts, down into a little dell. He liked that word.

"Dell"

He'd looked it up a couple of times to be sure he was using it right. He was. This spot, a small wooded hollow, where he pulled them up short, just as they started climbing up the other side, slipping in the snow like they were going to be just fine as soon as they made the road up on the ridge, and he'd let loose. It was a perfect training film action, with measured three-round shots, spreading out like angry hornets and clipping the four kids, stinging like hell.

That was where the hornets analogy ended. It would take one hell of a wasp to damn near cut a grown German soldier into shredded little pieces, their front sides bursting like champagne bottles of guts trying to get the hell away from the bullets that were making little round dents on the other side where they entered.

He spent a little bit of time every year trying to guess what might have happened if he hadn't done it.

"Hell! Who knows?"

He didn't. He wasn't a fortune teller. He couldn't say with any certainty that holding them until they could be passed back into the rear would've accomplished anything. He couldn't say that his being ready to advance when the fog lifted and the American fighters started sweeping overhead, doing to great big Panzer tanks what he'd done to a couple soft bodies in gray wool.

It didn't really matter. It was done. And he never said a word about it. Not even in casual conversation.