Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

I quit my sessions with Arden. I was hopeless. I was a bad seed. He hardly had time for me anyway. The business was branching out, new outlets in half a dozen locations, everybody wanted to be a tree. I occasionally watched him on television Sunday morning, cushioned on a big satin pillow, flanked by rubber plants, holding a cabbage, and chatting with a New Jersey sprout king. He looked great.

Huey’s brother recovered from his heart valve infection but died later somewhere out on the street, electrocuted by one of those charged drug terminals no one knows enough about to approach safely. Huey left her job at the welfare office. She was tired of feeling like the witch in the candy house. We spent a lot of time going to old movies.

I was counting the days to harvest time.

One late afternoon the telephone, which had been quiet for weeks, rattled to life. I picked up the receiver to hear a click followed by a dial tone. I hung up, it rang again. Click. Hum. And a third time. Guess who?

I finished my chores, washed the fertilizer from my hands, pulled on a jacket, and went out. Eugene was in the corridor, pacing, alone. He stopped, glared at me through swollen eyes. Someone had left the front door to the building ajar and while Eugene loaded a washer in the basement Chandu slipped out for a closer look at a world he had experienced only from a fourth-floor window. The world greeted him in the form of a hit-and-run Coke truck. We were all responsible. “Fuck the Eskimos!” Eugene shouted at me.

“Fine,” I said, descending the stairs. “That’s fine.”

Outside I automatically checked the sky, an old man’s reflexes already settling in, weather? I can remember weather. A low gray lid was being closed over the city. The wind, gusting hard and raw, pressed into me, tearing my eyes. Up ahead the skyline appeared etched in metal, all the buildings sharply filed, a clawful of arrows.

It was a long chilly walk, too long complained the leg.

I found Trips, saltshaker in one hand, half-eaten apple in the other, making faces through the glazed window at the sullen diners packed inside Cleo’s Chuckwagon.

“C’mon,” he said, grabbing my arm. “Let’s move.” He had on his Delta look.

“Where we going?”

“To the zoo.”

“Slow it down, huh. You know I can’t handle this pace.”

“To look at the fucking animals.”

We went ten quick blocks in breathless silence, cutting down alleys dripping with black water, zigzagging across the barren park, the drained pond. The night came on, cold and early. The first snowflakes stung my face like tossed sand. The leg was giving me a twinge now on every step. I hoped this adventure would be stupid and dangerous enough to be worth the trouble.

The streets got quieter, the lights farther apart.

Suddenly Trips pulled me through a prickly hedge.

“Jesus Christ!” I grumbled. “I think my cheek’s bleeding. So’s my hand.”

“Shut up.”

We squatted down on a rectangle of hard dirt, the token front yard of the immense apartment house behind us. “Look,” Trips whispered. I peered between the thorns. Across the street beyond a row of parked cars and bare stunted trees stood another smaller building. It was one we had spied on once through binoculars from the rooftop at our backs. Sergeant Anstin’s residence. All the windows were dark.

“Now what?”

“Wait.”

“It smells like dog piss in here.”

“Breathe through your mouth.”

“I need something to sit on.”

“Here.” He pulled a rolled-up newspaper from his back pocket.

“What is it?”

“ Wall Street Journal .”

“Wonderful.”

The snow started pouring down like confetti. I took half the paper and made a tent of stock quotations to cover my head. The inevitable joint was produced and shared quietly, an occasional pedestrian passing us on the other side of the hedge not more than an arm’s length away. Under me the ground turned damp and soft. Trips sat hunched forward, chin on his knees, and stared intently out into the empty street, tendrils of smoke curling between tensed lips. Slowly all the scenery was going to white. Up in the stormy sky a red antenna high atop an insurance tower blinked steadily on and off.

“I’m freezing,” I said. “What are we waiting for?”

Trips nudged my arm. “Hi-de-ho,” he whispered.

A man with a dog on a leash rounded the corner. Trips parted the bush for a clearer look. The man climbed the steps, fished a key from his pocket, and led the dog through the door.

“Fucking cocksuck.”

A light went on in a second story window.

“Shit-eating lifer slime.”

I remembered a night in the bunker at the end of the runway overlooking the POL dump, four in the morning, drifting off on tropical currents of spilled jet fuel and jungle decay when someone suddenly stood up beside me on the other side of the bunker wall. I tumbled screaming off the sandbags, rifle clattering to the ground. I scurried about on all fours like a frantic bug, trying to find the rifle in the dark. A hand seized the collar of my shirt and hauled me to my feet. “I just slit your white throat, specialist,” growled Sergeant Anstin’s voice. My legs were shaking. “I just jammed a frag grenade up your nose.” He tugged on the hair above my ear. “Get a haircut.”

The light in the window went out.

“Yeah, that’s right, Jack,” muttered Trips. “Try to hide.”

“He’s gone to bed.”

“We’ll see.”

The cold ground had been seeping steadily into the leg. I began massaging my thigh. “It’s tightening up,” I said. “I can’t sit out here much longer.”

“We ain’t going to.” He pulled up a pant leg and from inside his boot produced a handful of oddly bent, pencil-length pieces of metal. “Lock-picking tools,” he explained. “Official issue.”

“What do you have in mind for tonight, anyway?”

“Nothing special, my man, a casual meeting, an exchange of pleasantries, a reunion of the guys.”

“I’m not breaking into that apartment.”

“Now come on, Grif, how you gonna be?”

“We’re not about to do the colonel’s plane again, are we?”

Trips laughed. “You thought I had something to do with that?”

“Who else?”

“Noll, you fool, The Mutant Man. What do I know about planes and hydraulic lines? I wanted to set up a Claymore under his bed.”

“Noll?” I couldn’t even remember his face.

“Yeah, Noll. Look.”

Across the street the door opened. A man, dogless, exited, tested the door handle, descended the steps, and turned quickly right, moving uptown. From the rear he did exhibit that characteristic E-7 strut.

“Hit it,” said Trips.

We came through the hedge right on top of a couple out for a leisurely evening stroll. The woman screamed. The man’s hands began to go up. “Boo,” whispered Trips, shouldering past.

The cone of a street lamp halfway down the block illuminated a fury of flakes and the top of our sergeant’s balding skull.

We cut across the street, squeezing between illegally parked cars, leaving handprints in the snow on trunks and hoods. By the time we reached the corner, Sarge had disappeared into lights and laughter, a forest of people. Fun Night in Fat City.

“There.” Trips pointed.

A bald head bobbed across a distant intersection. Visibility was diminishing by the minute.

Trips ran interference through the crowd. I hobbled along behind, cursing my leg, cursing the Sarge. We soon lost him again. Half the town was on the streets frolicking in a winter wonderland. Before the floodlit entrance to a mausoleum of a hotel milled a dense mob of plastic-hatted, name-tagged conventioneers. Trips cleared a path. “Hey, what the…” “Do you mind?” HI I’M ROGER “This is my wife, buddy.” “Fuck you in the ear.” “Did you see that?” Above us flags whipped in the wind like rotor blades.