“Shi*!”
I turned around. The guy next to me had pulled his phone out of his dufflebag and was staring at it with a frown.
“That can’t be good,” I said.
He looked at me and shook his head and put his phone back into the dufflebag which he put into his locker.
“No,” he said. “Nothing good ever comes from reading your email on the weekends.”
The groomsmen stood under blue skies with a Gulf breeze blowing. Their shoes were spotless and shiny. Thin black stripes ran up the legs of their dress pants. They wore slate-blue ties and creme-white shirts under black suit coats. The sun of the late afternoon lit their faces where they stood solemnly with their hands clasped formally in front of them.
The bridesmaids stood under blue skies with a Gulf breeze blowing. They were dressed in slate-blue dresses and held bouquets of creme-white roses. They stood on white flagstones instead of the green grass so that their heels might not sink into the turf. Their eyes and necklaces sparkled in the late afternoon sun. They had beaming smiles on their faces.
The musicians played. The bride walked down the aisle with her father holding her arm. The minister said a few words. They exchanged rings. And vows. And a sweeping kiss to the thrill of their friends and family who had assembled there under the blue skies in the Gulf breezes to listen, to watch, to smile, to cry, to cheer.
As the couple walked down the aisle together, the recessional played, a van pulled up at a stoplight in the distance, the driver laid on the horn leaning out the window watching.
And with that, a celebration began that went late into the night.
The listing said that the unit was empty. And the original asking price was very interesting, although later in the day price bumped up. Still, we were curious, so we went to take a look.
Unit 4 was at the end of the complex in the dark shade of some Live Oak trees. It was hard to see the number at night. When we did find it, there was no key in the lockbox.
Alex knocked on the door, but no one answered. He locked louder, and still nothing. So he turned the door knob, and the door opened. He’s a real estate agent, and he figured someone else was looking at the unit, too. So he stuck his head in slightly.
“Hello?” No answer.
“HELLO?” Still nothing.
So he slowly walked in. “Hello, hello! Is anyone here?” No one answered. So we went in and looked around.
It was a small place. One bedroom. One bathroom. A small kitchen. A tiny dining area where you might be able to fit a minuscule table and four chairs.
The floor was tiled. (No carpet is always a bonus, although this tile work was a bit odd.) And there was virtually no furniture or anything else. The listing said that the unit was empty, after all — yet it wasn’t. The lights were on, and there was clearly someone staying there: a small bed with a computer on it, four or five hangers with clothes in the bedroom closet, a few things in the living room. And a dog.
Let’s call her Madeline.
There in the middle of the tiny dining room, little Madeline stood quietly looking up at us. She was old, standing on thin, wobbly legs, her muzzle gray. She was clearly as confused as we were, and although her tail was tucked, she walked up slowly to greet us. Her eyes shined.
There she was, a small, old, fragile dog in this small, mostly empty condominium all by herself with no one home. There was a pad on the floor in a corner of the bedroom that was clearly for her, and there was some dog food and water in the kitchen. But otherwise she was alone in this place with the lights on, a computer on the bed, a few clothes in the closet, and with the front door unlocked.
“This is odd,” Alex said.
I picked Madeline up so that she wouldn’t feel spooked by us walking around. She didn’t complain. By this time, another real estate agent had arrived and was looking around, too. Madeline watched the others from my arms. I whispered that we were ok, that it was ok, that there was nothing to worry about. She leaned against my chest.
On the way back to the car, we passed an old woman in a white robe coming back slowly from the swimming pool. We turned and watched her walk into Unit 4.
I wonder what Madeline said.
Ten years ago we ran around the track, we ran up hills, we did sprints, and we ran long runs on the trails and up to Far West before sunrise in the summer. The coach was lousy. The workouts were fine, I suppose, and I trained harder than I ever had before (although as for that, I had one of my worst ever race times), but the coach was lousy, paying attention only to the elite runners and the women.
I don’t think this coach will be like that. As we stood there in the parking lot in the drizzle getting ready for our first training run, she had each of us introduce ourselves and tell the group how we’d celebrate finishing our next race. There were many wishes for beer and wine. There were several dreams of spa and massage. There was talk of pizza and cupcakes and big, juicy steaks. And of course, there was chocolate. My plan was for a “carb crawl”, suspending this low-carb diet and going on a binge. No, this coach won’t be like my last.
Some of the runners there already knew each other, and it’s clear that we all will by the time February rolls around. She is Jen. We are the Tonics. And this is obviously going to be a lot of fun.
There was a spider on the leaf. A tiny green one with huge green claw-like front legs. It sat motionless on a leaf as we watched. It sat motionless even as we approached. I pointed at it, but it did not move until I crossed some threshold just millimeters away from that tiny thing. With my finger descending out of the sky above its head with only a short air gap between us, the spider decided that it had had enough, and it dashed to the other side of the leaf.
There was a honey bee flying among the blossoms. They were long, orange-red, trumpet-shaped blossoms, and there were many of them around the spot where I stood watching. The bee would land on one flower and crawl to the open bell on the end, often causing the trumpet to flip one way or the other, yet the bee would hang on during that flip and peer into the blossom’s end. And after only a moment, it would fly directly to the next nearby blossom.
There was a bigger bee guarding that plant. It was a solitary bee that I know from the yard. It’s a territorial thing, sometimes chasing off Guinness when he barks at it, sometimes chasing off other bugs that come to close. But the honey bees didn’t bother it. It flew from blossom to blossom, hovering in the air beside each one much in the way of a Humming Bird.
Although the heat had been brutal for several months, there has always been something blooming out here, and there are many places for spiders and bees and beetles and flee-flies to call home. Sometimes in the slanting light of late day, if we are sitting in just the right place at just the right time, we can see silken threads blowing in the breeze or gnatty things buzzing above the bushes. And there are sometimes spiderwebs in the branches. And the Solitary Bees do sometimes climb into and out of the solitary bee hotel. But there should be more of them about. More silken threads. More beetles in the leaves. More bees on the flowers. Even though this is a good home for those who come, there are just not enough of them about.
So we stood in the backyard again today, watching the weather in the east. We watched the dark clouds part and drift to the north and south of us. We watched blue sky open overhead while thunder rolled somewhere in the west where it was undoubtedly raining hard.
In full sun, tantalizing raindrops fell from somewhere. Maybe it was that approaching cloud in the east. No, it was that one, the one which was now fleeing southward. The drops glistened in a golden light as they gusted with the wind.
The air was cooler now than it had been. But the soaking rain that looked as if it couldn’t miss us was doing just that. The black clouds that gave us such hope were gone.
And then, for a few minutes, as the clouds began to disperse and the sun came out, it rained hard. Not long, mind you, but hard enough to get you wet if you happened to be sitting there. Hard enough to fill the air with the smell of it if you happened to be sniffing the breeze.
Drips ran off the eves and into metal buckets sitting underneath. Drops fell thru the thirsty Oaks and onto the parched ground. It wasn’t enough. But it was something. I’m sure the melons and peppers and tomatoes will agree.
“Come look. You have to see this,” she said.
There was a band of green on the map. And then yellow. And then orange. And red. The color splotch marched across her computer screen from east to west. It was coming right at us.
“Hey, you took my place,” she later complained when I sat where she had been sitting in the backyard on a bench facing west.
I moved over, and she sat down too, picking up the big one in her lap. I leaned over and picked up the little one. And there was sat watching the storm.
The sky darkened. The clouds seethed and roiled. Bolts of lightning flashed, followed some seconds later by rolling thunder that made the big one bark while the little one sniffed the breeze.
The sky darkened more. The clouds lost their definition as the leading edge passed over us. There was a drop of rain and then another drop. But the sky was still bright in the west, and the lightning flashes were moving to the south of us. And now the sky was not so dark. And the rain drops stopped falling.
We had such hopes, the four of us sitting out there waiting for the rain that was certain to fall. Waiting for those black clouds with bright flashing and rolling booming. Waiting for the cool front and the rain-smelling air. We had such hopes.
And it passed us, leaving us sitting there, leaving our parched yard still thirsty, leaving our rain barrels not full.
He sat on the other side of the bookshelf. He had red hair and shining eyes. He was fit and tall and walked with confidence and certainty as he came and went.
There was a poster on the wall above his desk. It had an F-16 fighter in some kind of banking turn or attack dive or maybe a rocket-like climb with afterburners blazing. I can’t remember exactly as it was a long time ago. But I do recall this: across the top the poster read, Peace Through Superior Firepower.
It was the 80s. On movie screens, in the press, in Washington, D.C., in the jungles of Central America, everywhere there was evidence of the return of America. The Gipper fixed the malaise, didn’t he? And Rambo. And Oliver North. They gave us back our confidence, our resolve, our superior firepower.
And as it was then; so it is today in Syria. Cruise missiles, task groups anchored in the Mediterranean, surgical strikes. Certainly these are tools that we must bring to bear in the interest of peace. You know, like the peace of Iraq, like the peace of Afghanistan. Peace Through Superior Firepower.
“There you are,” she said.
I opened my eyes and turned my head. Like a dream, I saw her in the distance, her hair tousled from her eight mile run, her arms swinging confidently by her side as she took long strides toward me. There was a look of exasperation on her face.
“For heaven’s sake,” she said, “I never know where you’re going to be. I’ve been looking all over for you.”
Little did she know (and I did not volunteer this to her) that I was sitting there because I had dropped to the ground in that spot, unwilling to walk further, drenched in sweat, only interested in cooling down and resting while I waited for her Rogue Running group to return.
“I’ve been looking and looking,” she said.
All I could do was look up and wait for her to join me in that shady, breezy spot against that cool limestone wall, which she did in a moment, groaning in relief as she stretched.
“I fell down,” she said.
I looked at her knee that was scraped and her shoulder that was scuffed. Her drink bottle was gravelly, carrying pieces of the running trail that it had picked up when she hit the ground.
“Oh, I’m going to be stiff tomorrow,” she said.
And then she added how she had told her coach about the hole in the sloped trail that had made her fall and about how she had blood running down her leg and how she too was now officially bad ass. She smiled as she said this and as she described how the coach had high-fived her on her new status.
Fair and industrious look out. A new moniker has taken the stage: Bad Ass Trudy.
© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
