Love & Darts (9781937316075) (22 page)

After a long silence, the old man
said, “Guess I didn’t know about me hating my wife and my wife
hating me while she was alive. Guess I thought all that antagonism,
all that animosity, all that manipulation and the rest was love.
How could I have known different? All those years should’ve meant
something, right?”

“You didn’t love your wife?” Marie
folded her hands in her lap smoothing the finger of the glove over
her wedding ring.

“Not like I love Elaine. Not like
that.”

The tradition was to implement a
pattern that was a kind of suffering self-loathing to which any
good person gets humbly indoctrinated. The tradition was to keep
doing what you had always known how to do, to give up certain hopes
for the someone whose role model said to love you. So what if you’d
sacrificed almost everything on a little cross around your neck
pulled side to side for years on end?

Marie turned to the old man. “What
would you have done different?” She wasn’t really asking to
know.

“Nothing.”

Dan said, “Nothing?” Dan looked back to be sure
Squally was still there and not too cold. The dog was asleep.

The old man countered, “Good as
any, better than some.” He realized how late it was getting. “It’s
pretty dark to be picking Christmas trees now.” But the old man
wasn’t sentimental. He wasn’t a traditionalist. To him it was
neither here nor there. He was a businessman. He motioned toward
the darkness. “Well, you saw this place. Rows upon rows upon rows.
And they’re all the same anyway. Hell, we even spend the whole
spring pruning so they’re every one the damned same, exactly the
same. I’ll give you one of the precut Scotch pines half-price. No
needles in the carpet this year, Marie.  There’s a six-foot
beauty up there if Elaine hasn’t sold it. It’s plenty
fresh.”

Marie nodded, holding back tears. The tradition,
Dan’s tradition which kept the old man’s heat on, was to walk into
the unknown if familiar rows and pick your own tree, cut it down,
carry it out any way you knew how, and call it yours until it died,
until it was time, until it was time to let it go.

Throughout the evening the symmetric snowdrifts
against the barbed wire fence changed from white to pink to
lavender to purple-shadowed hillocks to blue to black and then back
to white in the headlight beams.

The truck started up and Dan
finally remembered how to drive in the country. He handled the old
tank with surety. Marie watched him shifting gears between her
legs. Squally must have woken up as they bounced and lurched over
the frozen ruts.

I

Me? You know how some women have those really nice
sitting rooms? With the Ethan Allen furniture and the Andersen
windows that open in, so that theoretically you can clean them
easily on a regular basis? You know how you can hear that Windex
squeaking in blue alcoholic circles which dissipate, right? You
know how some women vacuum their stairs? Those soft almond stairs,
with stripes like lawns, right? Well, I'm not really like that.
I've got a plywood sitting room, with no furniture, where long-lost
friends come and do gymnastics. I’ve got mirrors which finally
breathe light after years’ dark storage box. I’ve got shine and
mercury filling up this column-spine.

II

Who I'd like to meet? Dear Lord, no more immovable
glaciers and, please God, no more rocky white waters, jagged,
choked, and swirling. Any other emotional undercurrent? I can
handle it. So hit me with your best shot. Part of me wants to
overcome this addicted-to-the-thrill-ride part of my intimate life.
I’ve read the self-help books. I know it's pathologic and divisive.
But it’s not like it’s my problem. We’re a generation of gimme
sociopaths playing dress-up and get-it-on. It’s a cycle of
heartbreak, a norm of constant devolution, and I understand that it
breeds all sorts of instability that you can’t call home. It’s
consummate evidence of an insidious disrespect for others. I have
learned that nothing comes of it—that people can get hurt, that
nothing lasting exists in constant resonance. I've learned a lot.
But you know what? I'll tell you what. I love believing in the
aquifer. I love rivulets trickling into silent secluded streams
through limestone beds. I love quick-moving rivers
plunge-dive-bombing on a sunny day. I love the immensity of oceans.
I love sublimation, evaporation, condensation, and
I-think-it’s-gonna-rain-soon thunderstorms. And honey—lovesick
tenderized, meat cleaver runaway, undoing body surfer boy—I love
those mighty waves. So, whatever I've learned, I'll see you curling
bored in the pipe.

III

Do I want what? Who knows? Maybe.
(Pass the gun, Mr. Walken. Let's go one more round of Russian
roulette in these booby-trapped, mud-obscured Vietnamese waters.
I'm up for it. Are you?) I suppose the main problem is that I don't
want my children to have me for a mother. This creates a secondary
problem wherein the only real logical choice is becoming someone
other than myself, in order to have children, so that I can be
their mother, successfully. Somehow logic gets lost. There's no way
out of this bamboo trap. Not having children does not solve the
syllogism. It should. But it doesn't.
(Faith enters stage left dressed in some sort of
transparency.)
That’s the kind of
logic that doesn’t last but finds a pocket in you somewhere to
burrow down into, as if safe. That’s the kind of momentary panic
where you find yourself breathing in and out, real slow, real even,
staving off something quiet. 

IV

How? Isn’t that sort of rude? I don't understand why
so many people insist on discussing such things. Are there
waves in the aquifer? As if it's anyone's business. Why do you
ask? It seems there must not be. Can’t be any kind of motion at all
down there—memories are like that. Probably blind color-blanched
fishes corroborate with stalactites and the drips. Silent. Still.
Refusing to thrash, to be heard. Probably something calcifies and
the surfers get bored waiting for conditions to change. Well, if
you must know: Introvertigo; Extrovertigo. I come and I go. How do
you do it? On Wednesday mornings with the light pouring in through
slatted blinds? Isn’t that sort of trite? I do it. I do it fine
with tree frogs starting to sing when the shower-timers go off in
their cages at 4:00 a.m. in some old boyfriend’s memorable trailer.
Probably waves that do get started panic underground, sealing, and
escape any way they can. Introvert, I go. Extrovert, I go.

V

Regardless: No, I’m not doing anything this weekend.
What do you want to do?

On Impulse Series
Titles:
The
War is Language: 101 Short Works
2000 Deciduous Trees: Memories
of a Zine

Love & Darts

How to Cherish the Grief-Stricken

*

We each have an impulse to
share our experience. These four collections of short works explore
storytelling from catharsis to craft. Over the course of this
series Nath Jones’s writing style develops from the raw,
associative, tyrannic rambles of cathartic non-fiction, flash
fiction, and rant in
The War is
Language
and our digital domains, to the
delightful rough-hewn vignettes of
2000
Deciduous Trees
, into the compact
characterizations of the fictionalized tellings in
Love & Darts
, and
finally toward
How to Cherish the
Grief-Stricken
’s fully-crafted short
stories that use literary devices and narrative elements to reveal
a world well-rendered.

Nath Jones received an MFA
in creative writing from Northwestern University where she was a
nominee for the Best New American Voices 2010. Her publishing
credits include
PANK
Magazine
,
There Are No Rules
,
The Battered Suitcase
, and
Sailing
World
. Her current e-book
series,
On
Impulse
, explores the spectrum of
narrative from catharsis to craft. She lives and writes in
Chicago.

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