part0013

Through grainy eyes, the spidery red digits of the alarm clock on the cottage nightstand read six thirty-five PM. It was now apparent that killing the whole six-pack earlier in the day had probably been a bridge too far. He should’ve at least had the presence of mind to set the alarm. Either way, Walton was already five minutes late.

After setting the world record for brushing his teeth (now was definitely not the time for bad hygiene), Walton grabbed his keys and flip-flops and dashed toward the rental car, barely pausing to lock the door. There was a threat at work, and he was growing feral from an intrinsic need to eliminate it.

He turned the key awkwardly. The new cast made everything a bit more difficult. When the engine came alive he put the spurs to her. He had been thinking and drinking all afternoon over a way to save the situation, wearing a hole in his brain and heart as he’d sat overlooking the most picturesque setting in the history of Canadian Cottage Country; the very sort of place they would’ve went canoeing. He saw Amy everywhere he looked, and when he blinked, she was somehow even etched on the inside of his eyelids.

Since those first weekends together, their lives had evolved from touching to overlapping. Amy’s initial skittishness about the blossoming anomaly between them had faded each day. In the beginning, Walton had figured Amy had developed her flirting skills as a mechanism to draw people in and make them feel safe while she maintained control and kept her real feelings close to her vest. This had led him to wonder whether her feelings toward him were real or not, but he had resolved to step out on faith and tread the path that advised, “A spirited filly needs a steady hand.”

The strategy had paid off. Amy had begun to talk about the possibility of taking him up on his offer to go traveling with him and had offered suggestions about the places they could go. A small poster from the movie they had seen together appeared on her bedroom wall. She would occasionally drop anecdotes about things like how for a long time she’d carried around in her bag the first letter he’d sent her, and though it had taken her a while to get to where she felt like she could write him back, he’d been with her. She’d written in an email that when she’d gone to bed after their first weekend together, the sheets had smelled like him but it had felt empty. She’d gone on to write that her icy heart was melting, but followed with the warning for him to proceed at his own risk. According to her, “The pheromones don’t lie…It’s like someone’s pulling the strings.” They had begun to make their own history. Walton and Amy had plunged into the depths of something that had carried them off. He’d racked up the frequent flyer miles accordingly.

While sharing the buzz from a few Hoegaardens one evening, Amy had confessed a concern that long-distance relationships often weren’t “real,” and that in a perfect world he would have an apartment on the west side of Toronto, and she would have a toothbrush there, and she’d be able to stay over five nights out of the week and wake up in his arms and then have to haul ass just to be late for work because she didn’t want to leave his bed.

Walton had stifled the initial irritation at hearing the vocabulary of pop-psychology directed toward their bond, then felt the twinge of the conflicting impulses of wanting to run from being the object of her affection, while wanting to draw her closer to the center of his world. As soon as she finished, he had words waiting, and let them fly with a stone-cold voice. “What if I told you that was possible?”

Amy reached out across their table to hold his un-splinted hand. She leaned forward with an expression, that to be the recipient of it, made Walton almost want to die, just so that he could find relief from the excruciating joy he felt to behold it. But that was just the start. “If you could pull that off,” she’d said, “I don’t know; it would probably make me believe in God.”

As soon as his plane was dirt-side, Walton had gone about his business like a man possessed. He’d gathered his Army paperwork, his resume, and college transcript, and made a nuisance of himself to the highest-ranking senator from Oklahoma he could find. He told the senator about the prospect he faced of wasting a year in Med-Hold and proposed a plan to make better use of his skills and time by transferring to the U.S. Embassy at Toronto. Walton wrapped himself in as much poise and determination that he could summon in order to seem like the very sort of young go-getter a senator would want to invest in. He went door-to-door borrowing cups of those qualities. He imagined having more, and then used that too.

At the end of his dynamic spiel, the senator said he thought that what Walton wanted was a great idea and that he wanted to help him any way he could, and that while he was kind of busy, he wanted to make this happen for him. Walton, the senator, and his senior aides then began discussing the strategy to make it real. While walking around the Senate Building after the meeting, he’d nursed a prayer for Amy to know that he was bound and determined to make his way to her and he’d do it by any means, and that if the good senator made this happen, he'd win the everlasting loyalty of a dyed-in-the-wool, thoroughbred son of a bitch who'd cut throats for him, whether Walton agreed with his politics or not.

When he emailed this to Amy, she’d replied (with a few choice French words he’d had to look up) declaring that she was “crazy in love” with him. That she had tied the word Love to him, and had been the first to mention it, had been a kick in the guts. He wasn’t used to being so valued by women, and to see Amy reciprocate the wild yet certain feelings that raged in him, made him nigh shit up his back. She’d written that her heart was in her throat and that she’d go about her duties with him on her mind, like Franz or Simon from The Unbearable Lightness of Being (one of the top books in the Amy Dauphin required reading list). She, the Dreamer, would take Walton with her everywhere.

While Walton had gone about his regimen of Occupational Therapy and surgeries, and fighting and scheming his way through red tape, Amy had taken charge of her life as well, and sent it into a (somewhat) different direction from the strip club.

Shortly after they had begun keeping regular company, or at least, as much as two people can who live in different countries, Amy volunteered down at the Liberal Party headquarters and let slip the dogs of war. She was a dynamo at the office and had channeled her never-ending enthusiasm and energy into it with a will.

Amy’s loyalty to her long-held political views, and her affection for Walton (who was a fire-breathing reactionary/neo-agrarian by modern standards), had created a contradictory set of mental circumstances. However, she was ideologically flexible and had risen to the challenge. She had somehow managed to fight for her Liberal-assed Canadian ideals while simultaneously championing the U.S., all the while making it seem like the most sensible platform conceivable.

One day someone at the office had been bitching about America and the diminutive blonde had let the bastard have it with both barrels, metaphorically speaking. When she told Walton about it over the phone she’d growled with all the command authority worthy of any NCO, “Don’t fuck with my Oklahoman, man! I’ll fuckin’ kill ya, man!”

Amy and the Liberals had put up a fight, but that year they were weighed in the scales and found wanting. She deftly changed gears and had taken a job as a sous chef at another summer camp, and though Walton hated that she’d be farther away from him for a few months, he had seen her going all Canadian Pastoral at her father’s bucolic bon vivant residence and knew that she thrived in such surroundings. As cityfied as she seemed, she belonged in place where she could see the stars. It would do her a world of good.

The camp made her work ridiculous hours, but she’d still called every night in spite of him telling her she didn’t have to, and she’d talked until she absolutely had to go in order to steal a few hours of sleep. On the rare occasion when he missed one of her calls, Walton had to try not to obsessively listen to her happy ADHD messages on the voice mail any more than four or five times. He did his best to be supportive of her, cheering her on when she spoke of her triumphs and new friends, and plotting with her on the assholes who stressed her out.

But the demon in him had not been idle. With nothing to do but heal and think during the daytime isolation of his parents’ house on Leave, it had continued to scan the horizon for threats. It painted each guy she talked about into a potential lover, and every girl became the new friend who would convince her to run away back to the adventurous life of being a wild thing again. (“I hadn’t planned on it. It just happened ,” he kept expecting to hear her say some night.) The vain hope of being the guy who out-boyfriended all those who’d come before, returned, along with its old friend that underlay them all; the fear that his homely-assed self wasn’t good enough to compete with her menagerie of ex-lovers or her secret wants and dreams.

In their last late night pillow talk phone call before he left for a weekend get-together with old Army buddies in New York City, Walton had put his foot in his mouth. He’d been feeling poetic. His days didn’t begin until he heard her voice, and he didn’t want to do anything but pine over her and wait for her to call, and he told her this with a laugh in his voice and a smile. Amy had answered him with gentle enthusiasm, replying that he’d just have to use a little Patience and urged him to sing the Guns ‘n Roses song along with her.

As she began whistling the familiar intro, he had felt a whim that he should say something to up the ante to further show the depth of his conviction. Girls went on forevermore with the jibba-jabba about guys not being affectionate or attentive enough, and he didn’t want to lose Amy to neglect. He had said warmly into the phone, “No Amy, that’s how I feel and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it.” The idiot had even smiled as he spoke the words.

A week of silence followed.

Brooding ensued on a promethean scale as he’d wondered what he’d done wrong. After he’d returned from the reunion in New York, the hours had crawled by as he obsessively watched the phone and his imagination made him its bitch. He had heard the old adage about hell having no fury as that of a woman scorned, and he had wished she would’ve thrown heaps of it his way just to let him know where he had mis-stepped. Anything would be better than her silence.

Her goddamned silence.

The anguish ate him alive. He’d driven all around his hometown in his truck listening to Willie Nelson, George Jones, and old torch songs. He couldn’t sleep, and at night he’d climb up his dad’s ladder one-handed and sat on the roof by himself, fit-to-be-tied. His brother Joseph, who had just graduated Junior High, would often come up and sit with him and listen like the solid gold wing-man that he was, or just share silence. Sometimes he would bring up a soda and try to cheer Walton up as though he were an amateur bartender. Other times, his mom would come out, look up, and ask if everything was okay. He’d tell her he was fine and she’d go back in shaking her head and muttering under her breath in a tone he’d doubted she used on the girls she taught in Sunday School.

His brain had tried to grind through the problem. There was a solution somewhere and he just wasn’t seeing it. How had he gotten lost, and how the hell did he get back on azimuth?

He’d thought about how he’d always been the sort that women had deemed fangless and kept around in the Just Friends category. In his youth, in the name of trying to be sensitive to the feelings of girls he’d liked and “listening…really listening” to them, he had permitted himself to be subjected to the indignity of having to hear all about how some douchebag was doing them wrong. (As if he’d really wanted to hear about the guys who were railing the ever-loving shit out of those girls he’d secretly liked.) At the time, he’d wondered why a guy would be an asshole to his girl and why she would tolerate it.

He now knew better. He’d been deceived by a twisted culture that passed out shit and called it gold. It had poisoned his young mind with feel-good modern lies over hard ancient truths.

He’d once read somewhere that culture was “a series of survival strategies handed down from one generation to another.” Looking back on a lifetime spent at the feet of movies, TV, and magazines, and how their narratives had often conflicted with the teachings of his family, the Church, and common sense, yet had always remained a step ahead of the game, ultimately shaping the dominant attitudes of the society in which he lived, he realized it had done him no favors. Pop-culture was psychological warfare, and the anomie it celebrated was the means by which the First World ate its young. Or rather, sacrificed its children to its gods. It was a theology of seduction; of pretty people selling things, and survival didn’t figure into it. The intelligentsia had turned on their own people and set them up for failure. Thanks to the bullshit, The West had lost its ability to mate effectively.

As he’d gone from a child to a young man, Walton had been taught by the usual suspects that as a male, and like all other men before him, he was inherently evil, stupid, greedy, and oppressive. However, for him there was a chance for salvation. If he deferred to any who made a claim on him, and if he accommodated their wishes to standard, whether it was fighting a war, buying a product, voting for a politician, or mouthing the right words, then he could atone for the sins of his forbearers. If he gave, then he would receive. If he was “nice,” then he would be loved and respected.

The truth was that nature was merciless. If there was a Devil, then his fingerprints were on the whole damned thing. Humanity was no exception. The old ways; traditional norms and morals, they codified and enforced survival-oriented behavior. They fostered discipline. Whatever strategies and practices a people picked up that were contra-survival were foolish, and ultimately doomed to failure the groups who espoused them, while those who held strong to the fundamentals survived and out-bred their competitors. The end.

The world never had, or ever would have, a place for “Nice Guys.” Men were the part of the species charged with carving humanity’s survival out of an unforgiving world, and those who overcame the struggles life put in front of them did so by making it a habit of being tough. Sergeant Bronson had once alluded to this truth. While talking over unit politics one day, he had said of a soldier, “He’s a weasly motherfucker anyways. Ain’t no bitch gonna give him the time of day. Deep down, every woman wants a man that’ll protect her, and that ain’t him.”

Women, above all else, loved winners. The more a man acted from a position of strength in his dealings with them, regardless of their bitching, the more they secretly fed off it. Women wanted to submit—they yearned to surrender—whether they admitted it to themselves or not, but only to a man who was stronger and more powerful than they were. A woman’s vanity would not permit her to be bound to a pussy. Feminism was wrong as two boys fucking.

A “sophisticated” young floozie at a bar had once broken it down for Walton, though he’d refused to believe it. She had told him that “girls love a challenge. The guy who’s always there for a girl, promptly returns a girl’s calls, does whatever she asks of him; that guy, she’ll cheat on. She’ll want to go after the cocky guy who won’t put up with her bullshit and maybe she can’t trust completely around her girlfriends.”

Walton had never hit a woman, but when the girl had told him that, he’d wanted to slap the bitch so hard her teeth rattled and had hoped she’d contract a hellfire and brimstone social disease. He had seen her as a card-carrying member of the Cunt Conspiracy. She was a living affront to every good woman he’d ever known. The idea of having to play the role of the popped-collared dick-head from an Eighties movie in that sort of a game, just so he could be wanted by a woman, made him want to vomit, and that most girls knowingly behaved like cunts made him contemplate a life of celibacy or renouncing his citizenship and moving back to Bosnia. Then again, maybe he could just remain in The West and save himself for the fucking of whores.

Sitting on the roof, it had occurred to Walton that the girl had been right after all. He’d figured he must’ve been too nice and “overly available” or some shit. He’d shown weakness and now Amy was running The Vegetarian Escape Gambit he’d always feared she would pull. Maybe if he’d have cheated on her with the fetching bit-tittied brunette girl shopping at the bookstore in DC who had been all too eager to give her card, unsolicited, to a wounded soldier and had asked him to call, perhaps then Amy would’ve stayed interested.

He’d mused with a sneer that if he’d kept the girl’s card instead of throwing it away, went out with her, and had sex with her—the weird sex; like a Louisiana Tilt-A-Whirl, or a Mississippi Slip-‘n-Slide, or if he’d really wanted to go for broke, performed “The Prestige”—then told Amy about it, hellfire, it’d probably make her want to get engaged. Fucking bitches and their head games. He’d once told Amy while he was holding her that she had cold feet, and she had replied in her jaunty manner with a kiss, “cold feet, warm heart.”

What a crock of shit.

When the flashes of bitterness and anger toward her came, he’d choked them down guiltily with shame for not being understanding enough. He was jumping to conclusions, he’d told himself. Maybe he was being a moron and there was something Feminine at work that he wasn’t seeing but was expected to know. He’d remembered the glimpses he’d caught of the quiet struggle in her heart and had thought he should give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she’d been dealing with some of the deep-down things that bothered her and she’d needed time to process them. She had sometimes gotten blue and went silent before when she couldn’t bring herself to talk, and maybe that was what was happening now. Or maybe things had gotten too close for her and she had gotten scared and wanted to run.

Either way, if Amy had thought she could just turn heel on him as if he were some kind of goddamned…vegetarian without having to look him in the face, then she’d be very much mistaken. Walton had refused to be dealt with so flippantly. He’d decided to go Encyclopedia Brown on her ass and get to the bottom of things. He had helped hunt down terrorists, surely he could find a Canadian girl and suss out what the deal was. He’d kick this door open one way or another, Rhett Butler style. He’d kept the airline reservation from when he had made it weeks prior and flew up to the camp the day they had planned. What was to be a lovers’ reunion had taken on the bitter taste of a confrontation.

As the rental car flew down the rural road shadowed by immense trees en route to the camp to pick Amy up after her shift, Walton could feel her in his arms as she had been earlier that morning. She had imploded, and the words she had whispered still rang in his ears.

She’d said she had done things in the past that she wasn’t proud of and that she felt like she was “damaged goods.” Walton had told her not to say such things about herself. That all that mattered was now. He’d thought about the influences that had encouraged her to follow a path filled with traumatic consequences. He’d wanted to track down the people behind those ideas and fucking destroy them.

They had groped for the cause of the breaking between them, and Amy’s guard had been down enough to show Walton something he hadn’t expected.

“I was so mad at you,” she had breathed into his chest. “After all that talk about you not wanting to put me in a cage, when our conversation ended last Friday, you seemed like such a hypocrite to me. It was like, I’m under all this pressure and having to work these crazy hours, and on top of that you were making me responsible for your happiness, and it wasn’t fair of you to put that kind of weight on me. I wanted to break-up with you and never see you again. But I didn’t want to do it over the phone. I didn’t know what to do.

“But when I saw you when you came looking for me in the kitchen, I remembered all the good times we’d had…”

As he’d held her, Walton had felt hurt and confused. He couldn’t tell if it was cowardice, contempt, or that she just didn’t give a rat’s ass after all, but he couldn’t understand how a girl could so casually leave the man whom she claimed to be in love with without even telling him to his face, let alone trying to mend things or fight it out. Amy had given two years of her youth to The Vegetarian, and he’d cheated on her, yet Walton’s unforgiveable sin was telling her that he’d pined for her? In spite of his rooftop conclusions, the reality of it all still seemed utterly ridiculous. That a woman could change so fast and so thoroughly for such bullshit made Walton suspect that modern women were at heart just a bunch overgrown little girls who had traded in one set of Ken dolls for another. They lived in their own little world playing by rules that made sense only to themselves.

(He couldn’t imagine his grandmothers or his mom and aunts having pulled shit like that when they’d been young. When those squaws had been on the warpath, they’d let their men know all about it. The women he’d grown up around may have come after their husbands with a cast-iron skillet, or said some cutting remark designed to make a man mad enough to punch a hole through a wall, but they didn’t run from a problem. Walton’s male relatives were notoriously ornery, and most had spent their first thirty years as hell-raisers; he imagined that a lot of times they’d had it coming. Other times, the girls might have just wanted to pick a scrap to mix things up a little. At any rate, the men had given as good as they got, often launching preemptive strikes of their own. They sometimes saw fighting as an important, if not fun, dynamic of their marriages. Walton’s dad had often told him, “You’ve gotta keep a woman goin’, Son,” and his parents had been married almost thirty years. His dad’s cousin had gone even further, saying that sometimes when his wife was out of line, a man had to “rattle that log-chain, Thomas Paul.” There had been raised voices growing up, but there had been a lot of fun as well. And love. In fact, his grandmother was still pissed at his grandfather for having died of Leukemia almost twenty years ago. The way his Maw-Maw saw it, they hadn’t finished growing old yet. Walton thought the whole fighting/making-up thing might be why he had a ton of aunts, uncles, and cousins.)

And yet, there were some things that he couldn’t blame Amy for. Though he’d tried hard not to be, at some point he had become an emotional parasite. It was bad enough that he had to live with his own personal conflicts, but now he was forcing her to help carry them. This wasn’t what he’d wanted, and if he didn’t get his shit wired tight, toot sweet , he was going to fuck around and lose her forever.

He supposed he should be a bit more careful once they ironed this out, but he refused to apologize for wanting her so desperately. He was determined to defy, in his own private way, the spirit of his age which knew nothing but to bend knee to the easy, the disposable, and the new.

Life , and all its wonder, was cheaply valued in the global marketplace. A human being was seen as nothing more than a brief collection of atoms, and since the soul was not a currently quantifiable phenomenon, it was deemed not to exist, and could therefore neither be judged nor cherished. One person reaching out for another in the dark was relative to a lab experiment, and all of the passion, beauty, and magic fighting to make itself manifest were merely abstractions born of chemical reactions, eviscerated of all mystery.

Relationships in modern mating were just another form of consumerism; the sexual equivalent of musical chairs in which the winners sold out into limp marriages just to become breeders or to lock someone down before they became too unattractive. The pursuit of pleasure was held in higher esteem than the cultivation of love.

Love. He remembered a class in college where the professor had been discussing the nuances in the meanings of words found in Ancient Greek and Hebrew. Words like “love.” The professor had put down his chalk, and after saying, “Let’s chase a rabbit,” he had embarked upon an account of loving his wife.

“The day we were married…boy, I thought we were in love ,” The professor had said intensely as he’d stared at the Old Testament class. “NOBODY had ever loved a woman the way I loved her!” He then drew down on them hard. “We just celebrated our Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary. Back then, we didn’t know what love was.”

For all its damned “liberation,” sexual and otherwise, the era was woefully deficient in heart . Secret admirers were now stalkers. Romeo and Gatsby’s asses would’ve gotten restraining orders. Cyrano De Bergerac would’ve been diagnosed with some chickenshit, two-bit, tin-horn disorder and put on Prozac. Guys like Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash would’ve been ignored. Motown would have never been invented.

But there was hope! He had heard it faintly in her voice earlier that morning despite her coldness the night before. It flickered too weakly to even talk about it around the volatile energy that Walton knew surrounded them, but it was there.

This misunderstanding was nothing. They’d go back down by the lake and talk. He’d charm the hell out of her yet and make her laugh with a grin and a wink at this silly-ass bump in the road, and when it passed, they’d be the stronger for it. He’d be all Burt Reynolds ‘n shit, like ten motherfuckers. Amy had reminded him of the value of lightheartedness and he’d call upon that now to sweep her off her feet. He was going to square this situation away and not a damned thing would stop him. With both hands on the wheel, he drove the speeding car like a burning round fired downrange.

When he woke, he noticed the car was stopped at a downward angle and that there was blood, glass, and twisted metal everywhere. His thoughts were wadded in cotton. A woman in a Round Brown stood in the ditch with his car and pressed a plastic object to his lips as he sat restrained by his seat belt. She told him something about his having passed the Breathalyzer Test and that from the skid marks on the road he had been going at least sixty-five mph when he had come to the sharp unmarked turn. Walton couldn’t have cared less because he now knew that he was officially SOL (Shit Out of Luck). He wished he was dead. Now there was no way that Amy wouldn’t think he was crazier than a shithouse rat.

Though Walton possessed a vague sense of thankfulness that no one else had been hurt, his thoughts dwelled on her. He didn’t want to see her, not like this, but he didn’t want her to be waiting on him or thinking he’d turned passive-aggressive and had stood her up out of revenge. He asked the officer to tell Amy that he wouldn’t be able to pick her up from work after all.

He came to again on a gurney with so many tubes sticking out of his body that he almost felt like he was back at Walter Reed, and if his thoughts were fuzzy before, they were now slippery and viewed from the bottom of a dirty pond.

He was surprised when Amy came in to the emergency room, and he immediately began drowning in a sea mixed with joy at seeing her, and the bottomless humiliation at her seeing him. However, watching her through his fractured eye-sockets, he couldn’t have been more proud of the way she handled the sight of him. His face was mangled from the glass and crushing impact of the steering wheel, with drying blood matting his non-regulation hair and beard, and the ends of his front teeth shattered off at tiny angles, but you couldn’t tell it from looking at her. He just knew she was gone.

She told him how brave he was, and that he wasn’t a pussy at all as he joked about how much he winced as they sewed up the gashes in his face. She reassured him that doctors these days could do amazing things and that he’d probably barely even have a scar when they were through with him, which would be in no time. She held his hand. When he asked her to climb in next to him so he could hold her before they took him away, she even did that as well, despite the slurring drugged-out tone of his voice.

Regardless of the Morphine’s best efforts, she filled up his mind as she laid next to him for the last time. He hated that he couldn’t smell her through the nose that had been driven up into an Orc-like angle. No smell in all of the world had the effect on Walton that Amy’s natural scent did. He had once asked her when she’d emerged in a towel fresh from the shower what perfume she wore and she had told him that she never did on account of her being allergic to them. He figured that made sense. At her core, Amy was a child of nature, and her body knew that her own fragrance was all she’d ever need.

When the time came to transfer him, though, she got up. As she walked to the door, Walton wanted to call her name like in a movie. He wanted to get up and grab her shoulders and spin her around and tell her that it was just a body and that he wasn’t this thing he appeared to be. He wanted to show her that beneath the madness going on around them, the substance of their connection was right there below the surface waiting for them to reach out and hold on to it and keep it alive. He wanted to fix things.