Joan Groves: The Last Island

She did not understand. She imagined that I had gone to the South Pacific for fun in the sun and the surf.

“You do not understand, miss. I cannot go home because I have no home.”

I knew that this fine lady was unable to understand that a person could be without a home. I was so very sure that this lady was from a fine, upright, and loving home.

“No... home?” She was unsure if she had asked a question, made a declarative statement, or if she had embarrassed me. There was no way that this fine lady could embarrass me.

“I have no home. Rather, I should say that I have no family house. The places of my past, houses or apartments, are gone. You know, ashes to ashes or, in the case of my life, bricks to land-fills.”

In her eyes you could see her fine home now and realize that all her fine homes were still upon the face of the earth.

She wanted to say something sincere and gracious but sometimes silence is the best voice and this fine lady was silent before me.

I wanted to give her some comfort, for I could see that she had fallen into despair. Me, I was going to give comfort. Me, all I could do was appreciate the ironic spin of circumstance.

“Do you wish me to tell you a story? It is a cheerful story but a sad story also.” I asked but with a warning.

She answered with her eyes and then with her mouth, “Yes.”

I knew where to begin.

I looked down to the surface of the sea—it was thirty-five thousand feet below me and that is where my story began. From the surface to the Deep, it was thirty-five thousand feet—and that is where my story ends. My story was a vertical line. Some life stories are lines of time. Some life stories are lines on a map. My story is an axis line from a wave crest to the abysmal bottom.

The plane engines resounded with checked power and hummed magnificently but as I began, the engines sounded no more.

“This is a very true story.” I told her this so she would be cued into belief. “You must understand that everything I am going to tell you is true for if you do not believe each word then my soul is perjured. Will you believe each word? The truth of it all is greater than the greatest imagined sea tale. If you cannot believe in such greatness, I will cease now and we will live nicely in our pasts and separate in peace and my soul will not be perjured.”

Her eyes, part of the silent human soul, were saying yes. but the tongue was speechless for a moment. Then her eyes screamed yes and her tongue followed in a fine voice.

“Yes, I will believe each word and understand the greatness of your story.”

I recalled it so finely, the first days of my manhood in Cleveland, Ohio. It was a bitter winter with feet of snow.

“The river is not going to catch on fire today,” Steve Pearson told me.

Steve was an English teacher. I was a science teacher. Steve was from Cleveland and I was not from Cleveland but we had ended up in the same graduate teaching program at the same university; we had ended up at the same junior high school; and now we had ended up at the same lunch table eating the same lunch food.

“The hawk is out today.” Steve said and looked out at the storm.

Yes, the hawk was flying. I never was much of a bird watcher but this hawk was unavoidable in my sight line.

“One day, one day soon, I’m gonna be on my island. Cleveland and winter will be so long gone that they will not even be a memory,” I said.

I looked onto 55th Street and fantasized that the snow was white sand.

Steve shook his head. “You and your dream island. You see old man Vargas over there? In forty years we will be him.”

I looked over at old man Vargas. Mr. Vargas could have passed for a petrified tree root except that tree roots do not chain-smoke Lucky Strike cigarettes.

“Not me—this time next year it will just be you and old man Vargas.”

“You will be back, and you and I will be buying old man Vargas’ lunch,” Steve replied.

Vargas was a gambler but it was more like Vargas went to the track and threw his money away. He got me and Steve to buy his lunch with the promise of repayment but he never paid his debts.

“Hey, kid, buy me that chicken sandwich. I will pay you back,” said to me.

“Mr. Vargas, I only have ten dollars to last to Friday and today is Tuesday.”

I answered because I was standing in line, waiting for a hot cup of black coffee that would be presented to me, cool and brown.

“Tell them extra mayo and no lettuce,” he ordered me.

“Mr. Vargas...”

I pleaded as I purchased the sandwich for him.

“This ain’t nothing like the winter of ’51 in Korea,” another voice interrupted. Jackson, the security guard, always had a war story from Korea. The war had lasted three years but from Jackson’s telling, the war was one of those hundred-year wars. “Saw men’s feet freeze—freeze, I tell you. None of this frostbite simple new war stuff. I tell you, freeze solid, like ice cubes. Black feets all over da place. Some frozen in boots. Only one way to get dem out, had to take a rifle butt and whack dem so hard dat dem toes and feets broke like glass I tell you. Den we just poured the broken pieces out and picked dem up. Saved a big toe now and again but not much more. Yeah, dis ain’t no Korea. Shoot, wish I was back in Korea, good times den.”

Jackson went down the hall. I purchased the chicken sandwich and carried it to old man Vargas. Steve kinda smiled as if he had won his argument and then began to grade some assignments.

I looked onto the beach that for everyone else in Cleveland was 55th Street. Looking out the window, I knew that Steve would one day sit in old man Vargas’ chair but I was damned if I was going to be with him.

Feet of snow, bitter low temperature, seven dollars to last till Friday. As I thought about it and the remaining four periods of the day—yes, `51 Korea did look good.

I had once asked DeFrancisco why he had all the good classes. He was the department chairperson.

“Because, I make up the schedules, kid,” he would reply.

His answer comforted me because it was the truth but it would not save me from the wrath of fifty criminal girls who did not want to learn about voltage on a miserable Friday in a miserable hundred-year-old science room with miserable fifty-year-old science books.

DeFrancisco had told me that if I stayed around long enough, one day I would make up the schedules—and then I could have the good classes. That was never a promise for I would not accept the terms.

With each passing vehicle, the beach became more and more like 55th Street.

The temperature was becoming ever more bitter cold, now. The sun had never risen and now it was painfully cold and misery was falling from the sky and onto the building and finally into me.

There I was on the doorstep, frozen and covered in the melancholy of the day.

Miss Sharon came out the door.“What are you doing sitting here?”

“I have had the worst day of my life.”

“It’s Friday, go home.”

“My car won’t start. I have seven dollars. Can’t pay for a tow, taxi, or even a bus ride. If I leave, the car will not be here tomorrow. And it’s a fifty-block walk to my apartment at night through a snowstorm in Cleveland, Ohio.” I was one breath away from weeping. “Today, I have had the worst teaching day since humans learned to walk erect.”

Miss Sharon looked down upon me and then sat down beside me. The snow had piled up on me and now was starting to collect upon her.

Her final wisdom, “At least you got the worst day of your life over with.”

Miss Sharon was kind enough to drive me forty-eight blocks. I walked two blocks to my miserable apartment and hoped my miserable car would still be in that miserable frozen lot in the morning.