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Kanaka

by ROBERT RUTHERFORD

The pale lime travel bottle she gave him rested on the round oak table beside the unmade bed, half-empty. His black garment bag lay unfolded on the corner of the comforter unzipped. Three wrinkled button-downs spilled out onto the needlework poinsettias and primroses like the muddy water overflowing the concrete walls of the canal that spun behind his house. His briefcase, latched shut and safely encoded 543, was upright on the floor.

It had been raining since Friday afternoon when he flashed his old dog-eared laminate driver’s license and boarding pass to the perky attendant at gate B39. Her dull gray eyes were less adept at spotting a fake ID than the bifocals of a middle-aged grocery clerk in one of those mid-western towns with no crime save skateboarding. She had smiled at him in his black suit and light blue tie, tossed her blonde encourale off her shoulder and grinned like a filly at the next queued-up businessman, and again at the old woman whose dentures were obvious, and again at the elated pubescent girl whose first time on a plane and with a man would, oddly, soon coincide.

He had walked down the elevated tunnel whistling, reached the end and saw that the platform wasn’t quite touching the Airbus A320. A dangerous chasm waited; but no matter, leaving the jetway he hopped the half-foot gap. In the air as the clement weather ended, the first drops drip-dripped off the curved fuselage onto the back of his neck and continued racing down.

Three days later as he unpacked the clouds still cascaded and the wind still gusted; some ladle still stirred the steaming reduction sauce outside. The branch of a birch tree, a sometime perch for the neighborhood blackbirds, drummed the snare of his window.
   Thunder. Startled, he jumped.

He knocked a dictionary to the ground, picked it up. Read.
    Softly, “I wish I was amphibious. I would swim in the water, breathe it in. Travel all those sinuous rivers and stopped-up by lakes I never look at from my window seat.”
    “What?” she sang from the shower.
    “Nothing. The peanuts they gave me were stale.”
    “Yes, I picked up the mail. It’s on your desk.”
    He laughed, “Anything interesting?”
    Casually, “No.”
    He grabbed the bottle and finished it, “Good, no time to read it anyway,” wondered how it survived so long.
Wondered what she looked like in the shower, almost knowing.
    He asked himself, “Is she soapy? Hair wet? Is it dry somehow? Clinging to her back and shoulders? Is she clean yet? Ever?”
    He wanted to crack the door and look at her, all of her, but didn’t; continued to unpack. The dop kit he left alone, the balled up socks and underwear he tossed to the hamper in the corner. They dirtied the air they displaced, the gadarene smell spreading gradually around the room.

She would take the shirts to be laundered tomorrow. The pink one she called salmon, her favorite dish, was newly tie-dyed with an ‘86 french merlot. The shirt would make the migratory swim back from Ling Weng Cleaners still marked with the hint of a stain so she would not go to them again, never trust their illiberal smiling logo. He wouldn’t notice that his whites eventually got whiter. The sheets blanched as well, and they desperately needed it.
    She would ask him about the stain, “Honey, how’d you get so clumsy?”
    He would play it down, “Nothing special, the old arm misfired.”

He had been checking his watch, ostensibly. Really checking out the waitress over the horizon of the swiss army’s encampment, forgetting it was attached to his wrist, to his hand, which was temporarily attached to the long stemmed glass and the aged opulent grape juice sloshing inside. The waitress was skinny. The girl in the shower, opining, would say too skinny and deride her for suspected anorexia, but he enjoyed the view and wasn’t so concerned with the time or the date or the phase of the moon, waxing, waning, full, or eclipsed. So lunar orbits cycled out of control, tidal wine overflowed its transparent silicate beach.
    The man he was eating dinner with had laughed uncharitably, “Little wet there, huh?”
    Too politely, patronizing, “You’ll have to excuse me.”
    “Have fun.”
    “Thanks for the sympathy, ass,” he thought. He went to the washroom to clean off, padded his chest with wads of white tissue paper.
    The man left waiting at the table reminded him of an amateur comedian he had known in college who married the girl with the best laugh. But he wasn’t nearly as funny.
    The man had ordered filet mignon so well done the chef spat on it (his years of years wasted on a built to order charcoal bomb). The meat kept him company during the delay. His vegetable medley was steamed and the potatoes were mashed, purple flakes of skin pockmarked the white dollop.

She stepped out of the bathroom in a throwaway terrycloth robe he had palmed from some extinct hotel chain. She sipped the last swallow of room-temperature latte from her mug leaving a ring of foam high on the ceramic.
    “If I could ever imagine sleeping on a cloud, it would be like this,” she said.
    “Really? You look bright-eyed, wide awake. You know, you’re even walking.”
    “No, I’m not, too clean, too light.”
    She was floating.
    “Well, come back here,” he demanded, “We’ll be late for dinner.”
    “Oh, sorry.”
    “Don’t be sorry, be quick.”
    “What should I wear?”
    “Everything.”
    He meant to say, “Anything.”
    Neither of them noticed the rain stop.
    “Get dressed, I’ll be downstairs as soon as I’ve finished putting away the rest of this shit.” He liked unpacking better than packing.
    He carried the dop kit into the bathroom where steam still polished the air. A face smiled at him from the mirror, reflected his work. Silently he took out his toothbrush/paste, deodorant, Bermudian cologne, comb, razor, shaving cream, orange prescription bottle, dropped them all in the top left drawer, his only, and closed it. Opened it immediately, also the bottle that had rolled to the back, swallowed two pills by craning his neck under the faucet’s bubbly stream.
    He flinched.
    “Too hot,” he thought, “This town is too hot.”
    An airplane flying overhead shook the countertop.
    “My stomach,” inhaling, bulging out his belly looking at its profile in the mirror. He adjusted the knob, cupped his hands under to gulp more water, slurping. He walked out of the bathroom, flicked his hands dry, left the door open but abraded against the change in air density and temperature, against the palpable gaseous wall lingering between the warm bathroom and the tepid bedroom.
    He stepped from tile to carpet to see her thigh disappear behind the closet door. She turned and giggled behind all the hanging clothes, smelled the mothballs that smelled like her mother, and coughed.
    “Ready yet?”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “Yes I am,” he mumbled.
    He went down the carpeted stairs, hurtled, leaped, plunged almost, steadied himself with his hand on the wood banister, nearly tripped as he skipped the last step. Filling time he covered a Milano from the cabinet with whipped cream from the fridge. Ate. Then held the red cylinder up to his mouth and bent the plastic top. The dessert sputtered out, more gass than foam. He spied the aluminum maple syrup container as he put away the cream, but thought better of it, turned the TV off just after he picked the remote up to flick it on.
    He leafed through her copy of Elle.
    “Better than People.”
    A few minutes later she came downstairs.
    “You look. Nice.”
    “I know.”
    “Let’s go.”
    “I’m already out the door.”
    “Really?”
    “Almost.”
    He opened the wooden front door for her.
    She noticed, “Look, it finally stopped raining.”
    The sun was setting to the west behind the effulgent hills. The same hills he had flown over for last weekend’s business dinner.

The hills they would soon climb languidly, looping up the road to the restaurant on an overlook and inside to their favorite table from which they could see his house and there they would laugh and drink too much strong merlot and overtip and wonder what made the key lime pie so damned good and rich and tasty if not for the key limes and general Florida citrus know-how. She would ask the waiter if the largest limes came from Key Largo. The waiter would say yes because he did not understand the question and wanted a larger tip. They would walk under the portico, the valet seeing them early and scrambling to fetch their ride. They would not talk on the drive down the hill but she would laugh at the sideways gravity of every tight corner, spurring in him something that he let out through the gas peddle.
    One corner, it too wet, the car too fast, would send them through the guardrail and over the hill and off into the air where they would pause then drop, parallel to a diving blackbird and man and woman would look at one another incredulously, terrified but calm, and look out at the bird and ask it what it was to fly and if it was worthwhile.

“It’s evening,” he said on the stoop looking at the clouds, “Do you know what evening means?”
   She laughed, “Of course. Why ask that question, question that?”
   “No, think about it for a second. Think about the word, it means something. It’s not just a time, not just some ending of every day that slides open to the beginning of every night. Evening means...” he paused, scratching his eyebrow.
    “It means the time. No, no. Forget time,” sputtering, “The place. Yes it’s a place. It is the terminator, stationary in space, rotating on the earth, the earth rotating. It is where day and night are evening, you know, actually becoming even, with the world turning both toward and away from that imperfect, fuzzy middle point. The point, the line when day turns into night, the line when color drowns and where everything is mostly black and white and all very gray, the point, I think, on which the world balances.”
    She looked at him.
    “Right?” he asked. It was imperative the she nod. He needed her to nod.
    “Beginning and end, yin and yang, everything and nothing. Eastern transcendentalism and western family values. All that sappy crap. Black and white. Right?”
    She looked away.
    He continued, mildly embarrassed, “Just a sunset, really, happens every damn day. Never mind.”
    She looked up into his eyes and winked.
    He grinned, formed the word deep in his gargling belly, murmured, “Even... ing.”
    “And where do we go from there? Night?” She demanded, “Darkness?”
    “You mean ‘from here.’ Where do we go ‘from here?’ And, the answer is...”
    She listened, fully absorbed.
    “The answer is... that... this whole relationship, you know, I still... just... just let’s go now. Get in the car.”
    “Even... ing,” she whispered once and then repeated.
    A flock of young blackbirds flew in from the hills in an asymmetrical V. The tip pointed toward the couple. The dark creatures landed on the telephone wire above the edge of the yard. Their collective weight bowed the line. It swayed as each tucked in its wings and chirped.
   One landed on the hood of the car.
   “Look,” she pointed.
   “I know,” he mouthed.
    They waited silently until the bird flew back to its brethren, walked to the car and got in.
    That one blackbird flew down, picked a stick off the ground but dropped it and flew after them as they drove up into those steady hills that would not dry.

Robert Rutherford is a writer living in Los Angeles.

drawing by Jill Baroff

"Birds" - We Are Serenades (mp3)

"I Spy" - Mikhael Paskalev (mp3)

drawing by Jill Baroff