“We’ve got to go over to Lynn’s this weekend,” Kim told me as we lay in bed watching TV. The lights were out and the traffic passed outside with its uneven ebb. Kim’s head rested on my chest as I stroked her tangled hair. The glow of another bad cable movie lighted her placid features, like a child’s before they drift into sleep. Her tiny, perfect hands scratched lightly across my chest and made the supple muscles of her naked back move smoothly.

“Saturday or Sunday?” I asked softly. Kim was moving back to Arkansas in four days time. Neither one of us wanted to talk about it. Maybe we thought the reality of her leaving wasn’t real unless we did talk about it. But every time I came home from work and there were more boxes packed, the reality was in them. Even going to Lynn’s was to pack up things she was taking with her.

“I don’t care,” Kim said lazily, “but I want to go to the beach one of those days, too.”

“Lets go to the beach on Saturday,” I said and pulled her up to me and kissed her again and ran my hand down to the swell of her hips and bathed in her embrace.

On Saturday the sun was up and hot by breakfast. Kim wanted an omelet before we got ready for the beach. I wanted a cigarette and a cold beer, which I got while I started Kim’s coffee and scrounged in the refrigerator for something to put in the eggs. She liked sausage and cheese, and I folded them into the omelet and poured salsa over the top.

Kim was still in bed smoking one of her skinny, designer cigarettes. I brought her the omelet and coffee with amaretto cream.

“Ooh, you made my coffee,” she said. “I was just about to get up.”

“Sure you were,” I answered, handing her the plate and putting the coffee on the nightstand. I turned on the TV and found my swim trunks in the chest-of-drawers and slipped them on.

“Don’t you want some?” Kim asked me with a full mouth.

“I’ll eat a bite of yours,” I said. I sat on the bed and flicked through the channels as she cut me a bite. “Is it any good?”

She nodded as I took the bite off her fork. When she was finished eating, she sipped her coffee for a while and finally got out of bed to find her suit.

She picked the blue t-back bikini. It was in one of the piles of clothes on the floor along with her cutoffs. She pulled those on, too, and found one of my tank tops in another pile. There was a kind of Bohemian elegance to the way Kim lived. I found myself straightening up after her until I began to understand the lazy rhythm of her lifestyle. It wasn’t long before I was living to the same rhythm. Looking good when looking good mattered. Wearing the same shirt for three days when it didn’t.

I found myself a t-shirt in the clothes on the floor and slid my feet into my flip-flops.

“Are you ready to go?” Kim asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Where’s the beach bag?”

“I don’t know,” Kim answered absently. I found it on a hook by the back door. Kim was right behind me, putting on her Birkenstocks.

“Let’s go,” she said.

My sunscreen was in the bag and her oil, and the radio was there. “Do you have towels?” I said. Kim shook her head and went to get them. “And I need more cigarettes,” I said to myself.

“Do you have your cigarettes?” I asked Kim when she came back with the towels.

“Goddamnit,” she spat out and threw the towels at me.

“Hey,” I called after her, “don’t forget your sunglasses.”

“Where are they?” she called back.

“On the bookshelf by the light switch,” I said. “Do you want to take the cooler?” I asked when Kim came into the kitchen again. I had already filled it with ice and set it by the back door.

Kim stopped dead in her tracks, thinking. A look of annoyance came over her face. “We don’t have any beer, do we?” she said.

“We can stop and get some on the way to the beach,” I said in my most patronizing tone.

Kim threw her hip out and stared at me. Then she pulled the freezer open to get ice. “Where’s the cooler?” she asked with a playful touch of venom in her voice.

“I’ve got it right here,” I answered, holding up the cooler and shaking it so she could hear the ice.

She stared at me again with her jaw out in reproach. I just grinned back, wagging my head and shaking the cooler. Kim slammed the freezer door and strolled towards me, a grin of her own curling out from behind her scowl. I grabbed her around the waist and pressed her to me, and together we took the gear out to the car.

I stopped at the Mobil station on the corner to get beer. “Get me a trash mag, too,” Kim told me. I bought the twelve-pack of Busch Light, and a copy of the Star for Kim and a pack of cigarettes for myself. Kim put eight of the beers into the cooler with the ice and we each opened one for the road. I took the freeway to Tierra Verde and paid the toll to cross the intercostal to Pass-A-Grille. We opened the last two beers that hadn’t fit in the cooler as we turned down the two-lane street towards our favorite beach. There was a little church across from the Gulf where we always parked. Kim carried the beach bag and the cooler, and I pulled the lounge chairs out of the trunk. We walked out to the beach and set up shop in our usual spot.

“Do you remember the first time we met out here?” Kim asked after we got comfortable.

“Yeah,” I said. “You were wearing that red bathing suit. I was glad I had on sunglasses so you couldn’t see how much I was staring at you. I just knew you were going to take one look at me in the light of day and start thinking of ways to get out of there.”

“No,” Kim answered with an honest smile, “I was the one staring.”

“Sure you were,” I said. “I was just glad you showed up. You stood me up the time before.”

Kim laughed with me then. She was used to my teasing. “Do you want to go out in the water with me?” she asked. “I’ve got to pee.”

“Sure, baby,” I said. “I’ve got to pee, too,” and we trudged through the sand, weaving among the senior citizen sunbathers, to the water.

It was late spring and the water was cold, so we held each other and swayed in the gentle surf.

“This is just like that first time,” Kim said, “the way we kissed out in the water. I think that’s when I fell in love with you.”

“You know what I remember?” I said. “I remember making love out in Lynn’s car before you left.”

“You can make love to me now,” she said, and reached her hand under the water. We made love slowly to the rhythm of the swells as the old people floated unsuspecting in the shallows.

Languidly we made our way back to the beach. “Will you put oil on my back?” Kim asked when we got back to our chairs, and then she grabbed me and whispered, “I can’t believe how unbelievable you are,” in my ear.

“I can’t believe you’re leaving me,” I whispered back. We both fell silent then. I rubbed the oil over her shoulders and up the backs of her legs while we lost ourselves in our own memories.

The next morning Kim woke up early and called Lynn. “She wants us to come over for lunch,” Kim told me as I lay in bed next to her, still more asleep than awake. I had drifted close to consciousness when she stretched over the bed to get the phone off the nightstand. She roused me again when she leaned across to put the phone back, and when she pulled the covers off me as she tumbled out of my side of the bed. I watched her, naked in the half-light of the morning, while she looked for a shirt on the floor. I found the remote swaddled in the covers at the foot of the bed and turned on the TV to fill the empty room as she headed down the hall to the kitchen. I fell asleep again to the drone of a Sunday morning news show and the gurgle of Kim’s coffee brewing in the automatic coffeemaker.

“You have to wake up, honey,” was the next thing I heard. Kim was sitting cross legged on the bed with a cup of coffee in her hand. She was still wearing the tank top she had retrieved from the floor, but her hair was wet from the shower and the tight ringlets dripped dark patches over her breasts.

“You have to wake up,” she repeated, “or we’ll be late.”

“We’re always late,” I mumbled back.

“You mean I’m always late,” Kim grinned.

“Yeah,” I said, sleep overtaking me again.

But Kim kept after me. “You’re the one that makes me late,” she said as she moved on the bed and straddled me. The cold, wet curls of her hair were nothing like the warmth of her soft lips as she nuzzled into my neck and whispered into my ear, “If you go back to sleep, I’ve got hot coffee in my hand.”

I pushed myself up on my elbows and looked at the clock I couldn’t see without my contacts. “What time is it?” I asked.

“Ten thirty,” Kim answered, still astride me.

“We’ve got plenty of time then,” I said. The TV was still on, but a movie had replaced the news. “What are you watching?” I asked as I fumbled on the nightstand for my glasses.

“I don’t know,” Kim answered. “I was watching you sleep.”

I pulled her down to me, this time expecting the delicious coolness of her hair. I added my lips to the warmth of hers, and made us late.

It took half an hour to cross the bridge into Tampa. Lynn lived north of the freeway, just past the Hillsborough River. We pulled up to her house a bit after noon. Some of Lynn’s cats met us on the steps up to the porch. There was Buster and BG and Smoke, the other three or four were either inside or still roaming around the neighborhood. I could never get an accurate count of the cats Lynn kept, with all the kittens being born and the strays that stayed, but I knew the regulars. The dogs were probably out back, except maybe Charlie the Shar-Pei Lynn let into the house more than the other three.

Lynn met us at the door. Her hands were covered in dirt, but she kissed Kim on the lips and me on the cheek as we came in.

“What have you been doing?” Kim asked.

“Burying Darby,” Lynn answered, looking up at Kim with swollen eyes. I knew the stricken look that came across Kim’s face, and with it the emotion spilled out and she grabbed Lynn for support.

“What happened?” Kim wept.

“He got hit by a car, I guess,” Lynn answered. “He was in the driveway.”

“Why didn’t you call me and tell me?” Kim implored. They were still standing in the doorway, and I stood off a bit and let them grieve. Lynn was crying again now with Kim. She was a tough little strip of a woman, close to forty and not even five feet tall, and it wasn’t usual to see her cry.

“I didn’t want to wait,” Lynn said, looking at the dirt on her hands. “I know how you get.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t wait and let me help you,” Kim snuffled. “Darby was my lover cat. Where did you bury him?”

“Under the orange tree out in the back,” Lynn said. She and Kim had pampered Darby more than most of the other cats. He had been a big orange tom with a long neck and face that looked like E.T. They said he sang instead of purred, but I never did really understand what they meant.

“I want to see where he is,” Kim said.

“I ain’t going out there again. It was a pain in the ass digging the hole,” Lynn said.

Kim gave Lynn a vicious look and said, “You aren’t going to show me?”

“There’s a pile of fresh dirt under the tree. How can you not find it?” Lynn shot back.

“Johnny will go with me then,” Kim said and stalked off toward the kitchen and back door.

I gave Lynn a look now, too, but not a vicious one. “I guess I better go with her or this will be a long day for both of us,” I said and Lynn smiled with me.

I caught up with Kim on the back steps. The dogs had stopped her there. All four were jockeying for her attention and Kim was petting them each in turn. When I came out the back, the dogs had someone else to elicit attention from and Kim broke through them and into the yard. I went after her without paying the dogs much mind.

We found the mound where Darby was buried near the trunk of the tree. The citrus smell was strong. Small shards of light filtered through the branches to the ground. Tears came again to Kim’s eyes and she leaned her head on my chest.

“Poor Darby,” she said softly. Then, “Everything’s getting so screwed up.” I knew just what she meant. I took her face between my hands and wiped the tears off her cheeks with my thumbs.

“It’ll be all right,” I told her.

“No it won’t,” Kim pouted. She looked at me, her eyes soft with emotion, and asked me for the thousandth time, “Why won’t you come with me?”

“I can’t, honey,” I said.

“You won’t,” Kim responded with anger. She pulled her face out of my hands and wiped her own tears away.

“Let’s go back inside,” I said in a defeated tone.

“No,” Kim answered, “you go ahead. I want to stay out here a little while.”

I didn’t say anything. I just waded through the dogs, back up the steps and into the house. There was no use saying anything else. We had said the same things over and over again since Kim decided she was moving back to Arkansas. What it boiled down to was that Kim wouldn’t be happy until she was back with her son. I wouldn’t be happy in Little Rock, Arkansas, even if Kim was there. And neither one of us could understand why the other one was leaving them. So we were both unhappy, until she left anyway, perhaps longer.

I found Lynn in the kitchen. “Do you want a beer?” she asked. I nodded and got one out of the refrigerator myself.

“You know, I don’t want her to go,” I said to Lynn, “but the way it’s been lately, I’m glad she’s going soon.”

“I know,” Lynn said while she poured herself a rum and coke. “What’s she been like?”

“Mostly she goes out drinking. When it’s just me and her, everything’s okay. Like almost normal. But it hasn’t been much just me and her the last couple of months,” I started, but there was more to it. “I never know what’s going on until she doesn’t show up from work when she’s supposed to. Then I get to look forward to her coming home drunk as shit at two in the morning. And she wants to know why I’m pissed off. I guess it doesn’t help that she works in a bar.”

“Believe me,” Lynn said, “it worries you more than it does her.”

Lynn knew. Kim had lived with her for two years or more before I met Kim. I came to realize it had been almost the same for Lynn when Kim moved out of her house and into mine.

“I just hope these last couple of months aren’t all I remember,” I said.

“You won’t remember the same things after she leaves,” Lynn told me.

The back door opened and Kim came back into the kitchen with Charlie. “Do you have any more beers?” she asked.

“Sure, honey,” Lynn said, and I got Kim a beer and opened it before I gave it to her.

“What did you make for lunch?” Kim asked after her first swig of beer. She seemed okay again.

“I didn’t make anything,” Lynn said with a bit of edge to her voice. “I’ve been taking care of something else.”

“Well let’s get the stuff out of the garage then,” Kim said nonchalantly. “Then we’ll get something to eat.”

We didn’t waste any time. I grabbed another beer and followed Kim and Lynn out to the garage.

“Okay, what goes?” I asked when I got there. There were boxes everywhere, and stuff piled on top of the boxes and on the ground. You couldn’t have gotten a car in there with a crowbar. In fact, there was hardly enough room for the three of us.

“All those go,” Kim said, pointing to a stack of boxes in the farthest corner. “They’re all full of clothes, all of Jake’s clothes I get him when he comes here. And all my Christmas stuff, where are those boxes, Lynn?”

“Up in the rafters,” Lynn pointed them out. The slat rafters were full of junk, too.

“Oh, and my bike,” Kim added. It was up in the rafters with the Christmas boxes.

“That’s a nice bike,” I commented. “Why didn’t you bring that over to the house?”

“It needs air in the tires,” Kim answered.

“Oh, yeah,” I said sarcastically, “I don’t see how we could have done anything about that.”

“Don’t you start, too,” Kim warned, but smiled.

“Yes, ma’am,” I saluted. “I’ll just go get the gate open and pull the car in. It’s going to be real fun getting those boxes out of the back corner.”

I moved the car up the driveway to the garage, let the back seat down and opened the hatchback. When I got through, the clothes boxes were already out of the back corner and stacked neatly in the garage door.

“We didn’t want you whining anymore,” Lynn explained.

“But you have to get the stuff out of the ceiling,” Kim laughed.

“Well, I’ll whine about that then,” I said. “Do you have a ladder, Lynn?” but she was already dragging it over to me.

Kim started loading the boxes into the car while I got the ones out of the rafters and handed them down to Lynn. The bike was the last thing down, but there wasn’t any room for it in the back of the car.

“We can tie it to the bumper, I guess,” Kim suggested.

“Or, we can put it in the front seat and strap you to the car,” I suggested back.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Kim answered.

“Yeah, if I’d known I would have brought the ropes off the bedpost,” I quipped.

“Well I wish you would have,” Lynn chimed in. “Those are probably the same ropes Kim took from my bedpost, and I don’t think I have anything else to tie it down with.”

“No big deal,” I said. “Let’s go order a pizza or something and worry about it later.”

After lunch we went back out to the garage and rummaged around. Lynn actually did find some nylon cord we could use to tie the bike down.

“There’s no telling what you’d find in here if you cleaned it out,” Kim said.

“Well, honey,” Lynn shot back, “if people would stop bringing their crap over here and leaving it.”

Kim threw out her hip and answered right back, “Like I’m the only one.”

“Not at all,” Lynn admitted, “not at all. There’s probably something in here from everybody I know.”

“Look, Johnny,” Kim pointed out, “there’s Christina’s car seat.”

“See what I mean,” Lynn said with a nod of vindication.

When we got home Kim called the U-Haul place to see if they were open on Sundays. I untied the bike and unloaded the boxes from the car and stacked everything in the back yard. The rest of Kim’s stuff was already piled up in boxes in the dining room, ready to be packed in the truck.

“Let’s go,” Kim said when got off the phone. “They’re open until six.”

We drove with the radio filling up the silence, each of us contemplating the final steps that were bringing us closer to Kim’s leaving. We went in together to the rental counter, without holding hands. It was another manifestation of the separation.

The U-Haul guy asked, “Do you need a trailer to pull your car?” He was a small little guy with a Popeye face. His words smacked out like he’d forgotten to put his teeth in.

“No,” Kim said. “I sold my car,” she explained needlessly.

The old man just looked at us blankly. He pulled the bill off a printer and explained it to us. Kim paid him and he limped around the counter with a funny walk, like he had a false leg. He led us through the stacks of boxes you could buy and pointed out which truck was ours.

“Make sure you keep it locked if you put anything in it,” he smacked as he handed me the keys. “We’re not responsible for anything you put in it.”

“Oh, I need to get a lock,” Kim said. “I’m glad you said that,” she said to the old guy.

I bought a cheap padlock from the display on the wall behind the counter. Kim waited for me and we went out to the truck.

“Here,” I said, handing her my keys. “You take the car and I’ll follow you in the truck.”

Kim took the keys and led the way. She stopped at the Mobil before we got home. I pulled into the back of the station with the truck and Kim walked over to me from the car.

“Do you have any money?” she asked through the window of the cab. “We don’t have much beer left at home,” she explained.

I took a twenty out of my wallet and watched her as she walked up to the store and then back to the car with a twelve-pack under her arm.

We spent the rest of the afternoon loading the truck. I started dismantling Jake’s swing set and putting it into the truck first. Then Kim helped me load her bed and dining set and wicker rocking chairs. We finished with the boxes in the house and all of Kim’s odds and ends, then the boxes from Lynn’s house and Kim’s bike. When we were through, the truck was packed full.

“All we have left is the washer and dryer,” Kim said. “I hope there’s room in there.”

“We’ll worry about that tomorrow,” I said, grabbing my shirt off the back fence and wiping the sweat off my face. “You can go over to Harry’s tomorrow and see if he’ll help us after I get home from work.”

“That reminds me. I still need to go get my last check from Ruby’s,” Kim said. “I’ll go do that tonight. Do you want to go with me?”

“Not right now,” I said. I wanted to relax.

“I need another beer anyway,” Kim said. She had been drinking while we moved. There were probably only three or fours beers left. “You haven’t been drinking with me today,” she said when we got into the house.

“I didn’t want to while we were working,” I said. “I’ll take one now, though.”

“Well, I’m going to go get my check,” Kim decided. “I’m not even going to take a shower first. I’m just going to change and go.”

“I’ll wait, too,” I said, sipping the cold beer and drying the sweat off the back of my neck with my shirt. “We can take a shower together when you get home.”

“I’ll be right back then,” Kim smiled. I followed her into the bedroom. “I’ll probably stay a little while and have a beer or something if Kristin or Terry or John are there,” she explained as she changed. I planted myself in front of the TV, on the bed. There was a playoff game on a little later. “But I’ll be home early,” she finished.

“Okay,” I agreed and she kissed me quickly. “I’ll be watching the basketball game,” I said to her back as she hurried out.

After she left I moved the truck out of the alley and into the street. The Rockets had the ball and the lead when I got back inside. They were trying to force the series with Seattle to a seventh game. They ended up winning by twelve. I took a shower at halftime when I knew Kim wasn’t coming home anytime soon. I didn’t even call to check up on her, and she didn’t call to tell me where she was. I switched to a movie after the game was over and drifted off to sleep around midnight with the TV still on.

Kim woke me up sometime later, crashing around in the bedroom, and she turned on the light.

“What are you doing?” I asked angrily.

“You took a shower,” Kim slurred.

“Turn off the light,” was my answer.

“Well I’m taking one, too, then,” she said with an exaggerated nod that made her hair fall into her face. I turned back over until I heard the shower start and Kim was gone and the light still on. I didn’t even bother to get up and turn it off. I tried to go back to sleep, but was really waiting for Kim to come back.

“Why didn’t you come in the shower with me?” Kim asked. Her slur hadn’t gotten any better. She was standing in the doorway to the bathroom, naked. Water still glistened on her body. Her eyes were vague and she squinted to focus on me.

“I already took a shower,” I told her like she was a child.

“Are you going to make love to me?” she said.

“Just come to bed,” I said, and finally she turned off the light.

She came through the dark to the bed and grabbed me with her wet hands. I grew to her touch, but I didn’t respond further.

“Don’t you want to make love to me?” she whispered in her best bedroom voice. I did want to make love to her, but this wasn’t Kim. This was the ghost of her that only came in the middle of the night to torment me. Not to love me.

“Let’s just go to sleep,” I said with sadness.

Her sultry bedroom voice turned to anger. “Are you mad at me?” she asked sharply.

“No, I’m not mad at you,” I lied. “I’m just tired. I’ve got to go to work in the morning.”

Her voice got quiet again, with emotion now, not with sex. “You don’t know how much I’m going to miss you,” she whispered. But I did know, and I wanted to be angry with her for the way she was showing it. Instead, I gave in to her. I loved her more than my anger. We made love wildly with her intoxication, but, for all its energy, the act was hollow. I knew she wouldn’t remember in the morning.

I woke her up before I left for work with a kiss on her forehead. She roused groggily, her eyes not quite focused.

“Don’t forget to see if Harry can help us move the washer and dryer tonight,” I told her flatly.

“You sound mad,” she mumbled.

“No, honey,” I said.

“Will you make love to me tonight?” she asked, her eyes finally focused on me in the doorway.

“We made love last night,” I reminded her.

“We did?” she mused, like she could only imagine how it had been. “I’m sorry. Call me today and tell me what I said.”

“Okay,” I agreed and left for work.

When I got home Kim was still in bed, an array of half-eaten bags of chips and dirty dishes strewn around her.

“Did you talk to Harry?” I asked her. I knew she wasn’t going to when I left in the morning.

“You didn’t call and remind me,” Kim whined. I also knew it would be my fault she hadn’t talked to Harry.

“Let me change, and I’ll go see if Harry can help,” I said and started pulling off my tie.

“You better get over here and give me a kiss first,” Kim said, sitting up in bed and putting her arms out for a hug.

“You haven’t made it to the bathroom to brush you teeth today either, have you?” I teased her after we kissed.

“Nope,” she said with a mischievous grin. “I’ll take a shower and brush my teeth while you get changed.”

When Kim got through in the bathroom, Harry was already helping me disconnect the dryer.

“I moved the truck into the alley,” I told her when I heard her come into the kitchen. “Would you get the bike and some of that other stuff out of there so we can get these in.”

“You better put some clothes on first, before you do,” Harry said. I looked up and Kim was wearing a bra and a pair of my boxer shorts. It was one of her C-cup bras. She wouldn’t wear the D-cups I had gone out and bought her. She said she wasn’t a D, but the bra she wore made it abundantly clear she was.

“Oops,” Kim giggled, but she didn’t turn to run out of the room. Instead, she calmly said, “I didn’t know you were going to be here,” to Harry.

“That all right, darling,” Harry said. “I’m just glad I’ve got you to remind me I ain’t too old yet.” Kim smiled and left to find a t-shirt.

“She didn’t seem to mind,” Harry said to me. “Me being here, I mean.”

“You got to like that,” I answered back.

Harry was a retired construction worker. He lived across the alley from us with his wife. She was about fifteen years younger than Harry and tended to tune him out when he started in on his tall tales about running numbers for the mob in Chicago when he was a kid or living on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma after he ran away from his parents. And when his wife quit listening, Harry came over to our house with his stories. I knew I was going to get one of his first wife stories now. He always told me about his first wife after he saw Kim in her bikini or one of her short skirts she wore as a waitress uniform.

“I remember when my first wife would run around naked in the house,” Harry started. “She didn’t know how to close a window either,” he continued as Kim came back into the kitchen. “Every kid in the neighborhood got a peep.”

“I don’t close the windows either, Harry,” Kim said as she squeezed past us in the laundry room. “But the only one who can see me is Kevin, next door. And Kevin would be more interested in seeing Johnny naked than me,” she explained before she closed the back door and went out to make room in the truck.

“She’s right about that,” Harry said to me. “I’ve known Kevin for a lot of years. His old man still ain’t used to him being a homosexual. Kevin takes a little getting used to anyway.”

I went on listening and Harry went on telling me about Kevin. I didn’t have to be too attentive; I just nodded my head occasionally. It was worth it. Harry had every tool known to man in his garage, and he knew how to use them. He’d help me get the washer and dryer in the truck without either one of us killing ourselves.

Just as we finished loading the washer and dryer in the space Kim had made for us in the truck, Harry’s wife came out to their back fence. “Come on home and eat,” she said through the chain link.

“Well, I got to help them finish,” Harry stalled.

“They’re tired of listening to you,” she answered him.

“Don’t worry about it, Harry,” I said. “We’ll load the rest of the stuff back up.”

“All right, I’m coming,” Harry grumbled to his wife and wheeled the dolly and tow straps down the truck ramp.

Kim and I found places for the last few boxes. There was only the bike left. Kim started to put it up in the truck, but I pulled it back from her and sat on it. The air squashed out of the tires from my weight.

“The tires are flat,” I said.

“What are you doing?” Kim asked with her hands on her hips. “Do you want to keep it?”

“No,” I explained. “It’s just the last thing left. If I pack it on the truck it means you’re really leaving.”

Kim’s posture changed in the twilight. I couldn’t see her face, but I could see into her heart. She didn’t really want to leave, and I didn’t really want her to go. But it didn’t make any difference. I got off the bike and rolled it up the ramp onto the truck. I pulled the back down and locked it. Then I started the truck and moved it into the street. Kim had gone silently inside.

When I came into the house, Kim was already in bed. We stayed there all night without even the TV on to distract us.

“Was I really wild last night?” Kim asked me in the darkness.

“You sure were you old drunk,” I teased her to let her know it didn’t matter. Because tonight we made love slow and tried to make it last beyond tomorrow.

The next morning I didn’t go to work until Kim was ready to leave. I kissed her as she got into the cab of the truck, and she started to cry.

“Be careful,” I said.

“I will,” she answered softly through her tears.

I closed the door and stood on the curb as she drove slowly away. She couldn’t see that I was crying, too.

© 2012 Wasted Space Publishing

---

The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest  Hemingway
Collier Books, 127 pages, $4.95

Book Review

Ernest Hemingway had a way of getting right at the heart of a story. His brutally American directness changed the voice of 20^th century fiction. And in “The Old Man and the Sea” the heart Hemingway targets is his own.

In the first sentence Hemingway lays out the story. “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” And in the following pages, Hemingway expresses his own view of life in the voice of the old fisherman, Santiago.

“He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride.”

“It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”

“Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

As Santiago speaks these words the bond is made between him and the writer. Santiago’s dreams of the lions coming out to the beach at dusk and his veneration of the great DiMaggio remind us, somehow, of Hemingway’s real-life adventure at the bull fights in Spain and hunting lions in the jungles of Africa. And we begin to feel that the old man’s quest is Hemingway’s also.

Hemingway had not written an important novel in more than a decade before “The Old Man and the Sea” was published in 1952. Perhaps he faced those years with Santiago’s same resolve. “Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.”

To write is certainly what Ernest Hemingway was born for. And in these few short pages is the crystallization of his work. In crisp sentences Hemingway gets to the heart of his story. To the heart of an old fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. In that heart there is no bitterness or thoughts of failure, because “My big fish must be somewhere.”

For the old man, though, the fish is too far out. Even as he lashes the great marling to the side of his boat, the prize is set upon by the sharks. But for Hemingway the act of courage is enough, even if the bare bones of the fish are all the evidence there is when Santiago returns from three days at sea.

I always think of Hemingway as an existentialist, of how he created his own idea of himself and lived by that idea. It is hard to equate existential reality with the rugged code of manhood he established for himself and lived by in his writing and his life. But when he felt he could no longer live by that self-imposed code Hemingway ceased to exist, committing suicide just seven years after receiving a writer’s greatest honor -  the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

At the end of “The Old Man and the Sea,” “The old man was dreaming about the lions.” I wonder what Papa was dreaming on that sunrise morning in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961?

---

I was dreaming of death. I dream of death every night. Every night since the doctor.

The doctor brought death to me. He brought it in an e-ray picture. He delivered it in a syringe full of blood. My blood. Dead blood. As dead as the hollow x-ray picture of me inside.

The doctor put the x-ray up on a clipboard with a light built into it mounted on the wall. He pointed with his pen to the tiny shadows. I could see the shadows clearly through the ribs in my chest in the x-ray picture. But I could not feel the shadows as I filled my lungs with air to prove the shadows were not there. But the shadows stayed there, tiny, between my ribs in the x-ray picture. And the doctor pointed to them with his pen and told me what they were.

They were death.

By myself now, I face death. I have faced death before, many times, and I have never been afraid of it.

But always that was the chance of death. In war. When the lion charges. With the sea the hurricane brings up over the barricades.

Never have I faced the certainty of death. Death coming without a chance to fight against it and win. Death that you cannot see coming; that is only tiny shadows on an x-ray picture.

How do you fight such a thing? The doctor told me how. He began with how the cancer conquered the cells of my lungs. He told me the armies of cells my blood raised, and that the armies of my blood could not win. He handed the syringe to me as if it were a map of an enemy’s battle plan, as if I could see the advance of the cancer’s offensive.

And in the face of the cancer’s onslaught, the doctor prescribed weakness. Retreat. Radiation. Like the Russians that fled before Napoleon and left nothing but their burning homes and the dead of winter. Perhaps, like Napoleon, the cancer would find nothing left to conquer.

Then the doctor gave me medicines in brown bottles for the pain that would come as the war was lost. Like the pain of all lost wars.

That was three days ago. Now, as in that small story of the fisherman, I must decide, like the old man, how to fight the sharks. And even if the radiation destroys the sharks that menace the oceans of my blood, I will return to the shore with only the empty carcass of my great fish.

Will I dream of the lions then, too, like the old man? Or will I still dream of death?

It is only my life, though, that I will lose. I have already lost much more that that. I have lost my manhood to age. Age does not always take that away, but it has for me. It has taken my courage. Within me now I am a coward. I will not let anyone see my cowardice, but it is there. Waiting.

I don’t know what has taken my writing, but it is gone also. Perhaps my cowardice has taken that as well.

What was that I was writing before the doctor? “If you cannot respect the way you handle your life then certainly respect your trade. You know about your trade at least. But it was a rather awful story really. By God it was.” It has always been that way. I have always known when the story was bad. Now all the stories are awful, and no one will say it but me.

There were good stories before, though. But they were many years ago now. I like the story of the American that fought in Spain with the guerrillas. He lost his war, too, but he kept his bravery. I would have kept my bravery if death had come to me so long ago.

He spoke to himself of his father’s cowardice, remember? Like I speak of mine. “He would be acutely embarrassed by the presence of his father. Anyone has a right to do it, he thought. But it isn’t a good thing to do. I understand it, but I do not approve of it. Lache was the word. But you do understand it? Sure, I understand it but. Yes, but you have to be awfully occupied with yourself to do something like that.”

I like that American that fought with the guerrillas. “Dying is only bad when it takes a long time and hurts so much that it humiliates you,” he said. “It would be all right to do it now. Really, I’m telling you that it would be all right.” I can kill death, or it kills me. It is the same thing.

Last night I dreamed of the lions. My rifle jammed and they took me. It was a noble death.

Better than this.

© 2010 Wasted Space Publishing