Devon Ford - The Fall

“So,” Louise said, snapping his attention back to the present and out of his pit of self-absorbed misery as he followed her to a vacant booth to sit, “where y’all from exactly?”

“England,” said Cal, not looking directly at her as he took a sip of the coffee, which was too hot to drink. Fighting the urge to react to his burning mouth he swallowed it, intensifying the pain and fighting his body not to show it in front of the woman who seemed not to think he was a waste of good air. She looked at him, her face saying, well that much was obvious, and he added a little more information to his answer.

“South of London,” he said, trying to make his very boring hometown sound more interesting, “but I get into the city as much as I can.” He had no idea why he added the last comment, a complete lie as he hated travelling into London and avoided it whenever he could. He supposed he was trying to make himself sound more metropolitan and interesting to her, and failing. Louise regarded him with another smile, head titled ever so slightly over as though she were gauging his responses.

“Should’ve come to the Empire State at dusk,” she said, flipping the subject as though small talk was boring to her. “I’ve heard the views are much better when the sun’s going down.”

Cal struggled to find an appropriate response, anything which would make him sound smooth and mysterious, something James Bond would say. As the seconds ticked by and he realized he was just ignoring her, he clutched to the one part of her sentence he had picked up on.

“You’ve not been here before then?” he asked, his voice an octave higher than he thought it would be.

“Sweetie,” she said sarcastically, tilting her head forwards as though she were looking over the rim of imaginary glasses, “does it sound like I’m one of them New Yorker types?”

Her calling him sweetie made the blood rush to his cheeks, and the resulting blush couldn’t be hidden. It also served to, somehow, relax him and make him drop the façade of trying to sound like, and be, someone he wasn’t. Cal laughed, as she had intended him to do, although with a little more nervous intensity than she expected.

“No,” he said, “it doesn’t. Are you from the South then?”

“Honey, you’re in the northeast corner of the States,” she said, “almost errythang is either south or west of here.”

Another pet name, and a deeper blush from Cal.

“Your accent,” he said, giving up, “where is it from?”

“Now you ask the right question!” she said, smiling. “I was born and raised in West Virginia.”

“Ah,” Cal said, taking a polite nibble of salted pretzel and a sip of coffee. Silence hung for a few seconds.

“Y’all have no idea where that is, do you?” she asked mockingly.

“Not a clue!” Cal answered, laughing with her.

“Well, Cal from England—south of London, what do you say we ditch the coffee and get ourselves a real drink?”

And, for the second time in an hour, Cal heard the best suggestion he’d heard in a long time.

“T-minus twelve hours,” the colonel rumbled to himself as he stood, hands on hips and feet squared apart as he scanned the news channels for any sign of things not going to plan.

“What are you looking for, Glenn?” asked Suzanne, safe in the knowledge he would allow her use of his first name as they were alone in the command center.

“Nothing. Anything,” he answered enigmatically. “Any arrests for treason, any mention of the National Guard being stood down or under investigation. The president announcing a U-turn on defense cuts and standing down from office. Anything really,” he said, explaining his fears as much as he would admit having any to anyone.

“Glenn,” Suzanne began, but changed her approach when he turned to her looking all business again. “Sir,” she said, “if I may?”

“Say what you want to say, Suzanne,” the colonel replied almost testily, annoyed at himself for showing a crack in the armor.

“Sir, everything is in place. The pieces are on the board and they are set.” She swallowed, drawing herself up and placing a hand on his shoulder, intuitively knowing that he was nervous. “You need to trust, Colonel. You need to trust your men, trust your lieutenants, trust me . Sir, with all due respect, will you just take a damned load off and try to relax for five minutes?”

Colonel Glenn Butler, unaccustomed to being spoken to by anyone like that, least of all a woman who wasn’t his mother, smiled.

“Trust other people to do their duty? I’ve been trusting men to follow their orders and die for their country for forty years; trust isn’t my issue here, but relax?” He paused, either unsure of how to say what he meant or unwilling to say it. “Relaxing is not something I know how to do,” he finished.

“Well, sir, if I may,” she said pulling open the door and inviting him outside. “Perhaps now is a good time to take a walk. Maybe you’ll start there.”

“Yes, ma’am. Try anything once,” said Butler, doing as he was told and taking a walk.

Cal returned from the bathroom to find that Louise had bought them another round. She was approaching her limit, a limit she knew well from too many mornings spent feeling ill and remembering the previous night one awful memory at a time.

She regarded herself as a free spirit; too easily bored to settle down and still so much of the world she needed to see. Everything amused her, even Cal giggling every time she said errythang , and she had enjoyed the city so far. Especially the weirdly hypnotic band playing South American music they saw in the subway on the way there, who had attracted a huge crowd and were selling their CDs right there. She had marveled at the panpipes and found herself almost entranced into staying and listening, as though they had cast some sort of spell over the commuters.

Not all of the city was to her liking though. She found many of the people to be brash and, like city dwellers all over the country, very few of them had time for someone from out of town unless they were getting paid to talk to them. The city was as far away from her upbringing as she could get, even though the distance wasn’t that great—under six hundred miles—which to Cal was huge but then again, she doubted if he had grasped the size of the country he was in.

She doubted if anyone in the bar had ever been horseback riding, or deer hunting. She pitied these urban types, as she called them, whereas others from her hometown, which was little more than a speck on the map nestled between Highway 77 and the Ohio river, envied them.

“Where are you staying?” Cal asked her, far more relaxed and talkative now that three beers and four tequilas had loosened his awkwardness.

“Oh, some dive,” Louise responded with a wave of her hand, throwing back her drink and grimacing before her face cracked back into a smile. “There’s a shared bathroom!”

“Hang on,” said Cal, “there’s not even a toilet in the room?”

She laughed, and repeated the unfamiliar and very British word back to him. Her pronunciation of the word toilet made Cal erupt into more laughter.

“What I say now?” Louise said with mock indignation. “You keep laughin’ about how I talk, when you should hear yourself!”

“I’m sorry,” Cal said, spluttering, “I just have no idea how you managed to put an ‘R’ in the word toilet!”

“It’s true though!” Louise went on, enjoying herself. “I took one look at that sink and I said to myself, ‘Darlin’, you don’t want to use that sink with how far away the toilet is’ if you catch my meanin’?”