Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

“Wow,” Audrey said.

“What should we do?” the other girl said.

“I don’t know,” he said. After a moment he looked up and saw that both of them were staring at him. “What?”

“He was really weird,” Audrey said.

“What do you mean?”

“He was stumbling around telling Auds how much he loved her,” the other said.

Audrey did not respond.

“You OK?” Keith said.

“Yeah,” Audrey said.

“Then he went outside and sat down and fell asleep or passed out or whatever,” the other girl said.

Keith stood there looking at them both. A woman crossed in front of him, dragging two children by their hands and eyeing him with suspicion. She reached the door and released one of the children’s hands long enough to open it and then disappeared inside the coffeeshop.

“What are you gonna do?” Audrey said.

Keith looked at her and then looked back at Peter again. “What am I going to do?”

“You know what to do, right?” the other said. “I mean, you’re an astronaut and everything.”

He looked at her, at the confused sense of fear in her eyes and at the man slumped in the wire chair. Then he said, “Do you know his phone number or anything?”

The other barista was smiling, likely excited that something separate from her regular work routine was happening. “No number,” she said.

“He lives near me somewhere,” Keith said.

“Maybe I should call the police? That seems like a good idea,” the other girl said.

“No,” Audrey said. “Don’t do that.”

“Why not?” the other said. “We can’t just leave him here. This is a place of business.”

Audrey took a step toward Keith, her hands gently wringing her apron strings. “David’s not answering either,” she said. “He’s the manager. He’s supposed to deal with this kind of thing. What am I supposed to do?”

“Everything will be fine,” Keith said. “Calm down.” He knew that he should tell her to call the police and have them pick Peter up and take him home, but he did not. Instead he looked at the man asleep in the wire chair. He thought momentarily of his migraines: those he had suffered on the space station during the mission and those after his return to Earth. Then he leaned in and placed his hand on Peter’s shoulder and shook him gently. “Hey, Peter,” he said. “Wake up, Peter. Wake up.”

“Wow, he’s really out,” Audrey said. She leaned forward to look at him. She might have appeared older when she was behind the counter in her apron and was responding to orders and firing up the espresso machine — perhaps that was what Peter saw — but now she looked like what she was: maybe eighteen or nineteen years old. Only a girl. Beautiful, but only a girl.

“Yeah, he’s out all right,” Keith said.

“Wow,” she said.

“He’s, like, superloaded,” the other girl said.

Peter had gestured in the general direction of his home when Keith had seen him in the cul-de-sac the night he dropped the television, but there was no way to know which house was his. He thought it must have been on Riverside, the street that Keith’s cul-de-sac emptied onto, but beyond that all the houses were the same.

“OK,” Keith said. “We need to get his address from his driver’s license. I’m going to try to roll him forward and you’re going to see if you can get his wallet.”

“I’m not touching him,” the other girl said.

Audrey did not look at him, keeping her eyes focused on Peter’s lumbering shape in the chair, his mouth open and a few gray teeth visible. “All right,” she said.

Keith leaned in and slipped his arms under Peter’s and shifted him forward. Peter’s head lay gently on his shoulder. Apart from a slight shift in his breathing, Peter made no sound. It was as if they were involved in some lovers’ embrace, these two men, so tender that one had fallen asleep in the arms of the other.

“What if he throws up on you?” the other girl said.

“That’s not going to happen.”

“How do you know?”

“I need you to step back and be quiet,” Keith said.

Then Audrey: “A little more. I can’t quite get it.”

He shifted Peter’s body forward as far as he could, cradling most of the man’s weight against his chest and shoulder.

“Got it!” Audrey said, her voice an excited giggle.

Keith grunted and shifted Peter’s bulk into the chair again, his own stomach lurching from the effort, the hangover a rotten tumbling inside of him. He knew at some point he would need to get the man into his car. Unless he could get him at least partially awake he did not think he and these tiny girls could manage it.

He held Peter’s sweating head in his hands for a moment and let it drop slowly back to a resting position. Audrey was smiling and handed him the wallet. It was nearly empty — no credit cards or business cards or much of anything else — but his driver’s license was there. Petruso Kovalenko, 3444 Riverside Street.

“Hi, George,” Audrey said.

One of the regulars had come in from the parking lot: a gray man with a blue “U.S. Navy Retired” cap perched upon his head and a bent wooden cane gripped in one gnarled fist. “Young lady,” the man said. “What’s the situation?”

“Ask him,” Audrey said.

The man had extended his hand. “George Campbell, U.S. Navy retired,” he said.

“Keith Corcoran.” He took the man’s hand and they shook.

“You’re the astronaut,” Campbell said, his eyes flicking to Keith’s polo and back to his face again.

“Yes,” he said.

“USAF?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s this guy’s story?”

“Long night.”

“I can see that. What’s the plan then?”

“Plan is to get him home.”

“How are we gonna do that?”

“Still working on it.” He looked up at Campbell. The old man’s eyes were wide, his cane held in his grip more like a weapon than a walking aid.

The woman who had entered Starbucks earlier with her children now poked her head out of the door. “Excuse me,” she said.

“Just one moment,” the second barista said.

“How much longer?” the woman said.

“One moment, ma’am,” Audrey said.

The other barista rolled her eyes and the woman disappeared back through the door.

“Go inside,” Keith said.

The second barista looked at him as if to confirm the order was meant for her and then exhaled loudly. “I don’t see why I have to,” she said.

Keith continued to look at her and a moment later she turned and did as he had asked.

It was quiet then, the three of them surrounding Peter on the sidewalk in the ever-increasing heat of the morning. “I’m going to need to bring my car closer,” Keith said and both Audrey and George Campbell nodded in unison.

He stepped out to the parking lot and slid behind the wheel of the rental car. Through the windshield the three of them were a comical group: George Campbell and Audrey looking expectant under the green awning and flanking the slumbering Ukrainian as if unlikely bodyguards. He put the car in reverse and backed up to the sidewalk so that the passenger door opened directly in front of Peter’s slumbering form. Then he exited the car again and returned to stand beside the inert body.

“Think you can give me a hand with this?” Keith said.

“I may be old but I’m not crippled,” Campbell said. “What say I lift some and you pull?”

“He’s heavy,” Keith said.

“I have no doubt of that,” Campbell said. He moved behind Peter’s chair and hooked the cane handle around an adjacent chair and slung his hands under Peter’s arms. “It didn’t occur to me this morning that by oh-eight-hundred I’d have my hands shoved into another man’s armpits,” Campbell said.