by Brendan O’Brien
Snowflakes swarm like inebriated gnats as I turn up Vleet Street and trudge north. People on this block have refused to remove the accumulating precipitation and with each step the snow works its way inside my jeans and numbs my ankles.
I stop in front of Starbucks, exhale on the steamed-up window and wipe a circle with my sleeve. Inside people in big sweaters ride low in overstuffed chairs, a suburban and white-collared version of the Hell’s Angels. They are struggling with Sudoku puzzles. Reading newspapers. Fiddling with laptops.
All week it has been the kind of cold that hurts your bones, the type of chilliness Columbians in cowboy hats had in mind when planting the first cocoa beans.
Starbucks is the place.
Bells on the back of the door jingle when I enter. It is warm and smells of fresh cookies and coffee beans. I approach the counter and a pretty girl named Janeese asks if she can help me. She is about my daughter’s age and her skin is glazed an artificial and sexy brown.
“I’d like a black coffee,” I say. Janeese looks at me like I’ve asked for a cheeseburger. Maybe a chainsaw.
“Is that all?”
“Yes,” I say.
Janeese pours my coffee and I sense that my request, a pedestrian and pitiful black coffee, has once again reminded her that afternoons spent making coffee, even if that coffee is an exotic cousin such as the infamous Caramel Macchiato, does not really qualify as an artistic pursuit.
I take a seat at a tiny table near the front window. Outside the snow swirls and an old man in a wheelchair sits on the street corner beneath a yellow traffic light. He is wearing a John Deere hat appropriate for a summer day working the cornfields or milking cattle. His chin is resting against his chest and people with wonderfully working extremities hustle past pretending not to notice him.
Although the sidewalk in front of Starbucks has been shoveled, a thin layer of snow is again starting to glaze the concrete. I imagine Janeese, colorful scarf and woven mittens, tossing snow over her shoulder only to have it blow back into her bronzed face. I tell myself I’ll order a Carmel Macchiato before I leave even though I know I won’t have time. I’ll be on the run by then.
Outside the man in the wheelchair is attempting to roll his way up the block but his wheels are slick and instead he only spins, like a child’s damaged remote control car, in awkward half-circles. Still, he smiles, an impressive line of drool snagged up in the whiskers of his chin like a fishing line in the fingers of an elm.
I shift position in my chair. I am not used to concealing a gun in the waistband of my pants and doing so is quite uncomfortable. The barrel is cold from my walk and I can feel the sting of steel through the thin cotton of my underwear.
I take a sip of coffee. Across from me a young man scribbles furiously in a spiral notebook perhaps perfecting notes for a first novel. Black curls shoot out from under his backwards Detroit Tigers cap. I wonder if he knows who Al Kaline is and I decide that he probably does not. He is not old enough to remember Al Kaline. He is still young. His furnace still fueled by the fire of dreams.
The look my wife had on her face inferred that she did not even remember the gun was in the house. I found this odd even for her. She is not normal and I have grown to hate her very much. Most days she displays all the emotion of a dinner plate. This is unsettling for a college professor. College professors are supposed to try yoga and take unicycle-riding lessons and rescue strange pets diagnosed with incurable diseases. There was a time when my wife would have saved a ferret with leukemia. Those times are gone, however, erased like unwanted scenes from the early edition of this writer’s new novel.
The reason I purchased the pistol was this: on a Saturday afternoon ten years ago our house was broken into. My wife was stitching our daughter’s Halloween costume, Peppermint Patty from Peanuts, when an intruder slipped inside the house and placed a gloved palm across her open mouth. He held a serrated knife to her throat and whispered in her right ear. In the police report my wife talked about the exotic and rich smell of the leather, and later, as we drove home from the police station, she mentioned to me how she had ran the tip of her tongue across his gloved fingers.
“It was a tad salty,” she said.
I thought that this was a strange thing to do.
This afternoon, after entering the house and hearing my wife and her lover, I took out the gun for the first time in ten years. I take another sip of coffee and remember the time I followed her to a motel. That was five years ago. I think this was the first affair but that is far from certain. I sat in the car smoking cigarettes watching brilliant displays of light explode from the room’s tiny television. They’d left it on, I imagined, to muffle the traitorous moans of impressively agile lovemaking. When she emerged from the room I watched as she walked hand-in-hand with her lover. He maintained a nice-enough goatee and had hair thicker than mine but was otherwise unimpressive in every discernible way.
They lingered a little longer than necessary smiling and smelling the air the way people do when feeling alive again for the first time. I cracked the car window hoping to get a whiff of whatever it was they found so fantastic, but all I could smell was the stale stink of Marlboros.
On the way home I stopped at Wal-Mart and bought a shampoo formulated to enhance follicle growth. At dinner that night I mentioned it might be nice if we took a drive that weekend. Told her I even found a little motel where we could book a reservation. And when I said the name of the place she concentrated more than necessary on her chewing, as if the perfectly sautéed steak was nothing but gristle.
This afternoon I unwrapped the baby-blue blanket that cradled the lockbox and took a seat on carpeting that suddenly struck me as dingy. I removed the gun, holding it carefully, like a baby bird or a Faberge egg. The dimpled Micarta handle felt nice pressed against the meaty part of my palm. I squeezed it tight and the bumps left an impression on my hand similar to the embarrassing crease lines you get on your face when falling asleep somewhere you shouldn’t. Sitting in the hallway, listening to my wife, I explored the long black barrel with the tips of my fingers. I put the steel inside my mouth and felt its coolness, like a Popsicle, on my lips and tongue. On the other side of the bedroom door my wife moved her hips like a gypsy.
When she finally emerged, sweaty and satisfied, her dangling and beautiful breasts hiding beneath lingerie I could not even conceive in dreams, she looked at me, her eyes wide as summertime windows. With a clenched fist she pulled the lace of her lingerie tight against her skin, a child with no intention to share.
“What is that?” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Through the cracked bedroom door I could see someone half her age pulling on pants. The young man, all abdominals and shoulders, ran his fingers through dark curls before picking up his Tigers cap and putting it on with the brim facing to the back.
I got up from the dingy carpet then, slowly, same as I do now from my wooden chair.
Outside Starbucks the man in the wheelchair is starting to shiver. His lap is covered with a plaid blanket thin as flower petals. Across his back is a shiny and poorly-lined jacket, the type taverns give away to softball teams in the summertime. As strangers pass, he struggles to lift his arm. Struggles to get someone’s attention. He is all alone. Through the coffee shop window I watch as he moves his lips, his innocent requests pluming from his whiskery mouth before freezing in mid-air and sprinkling onto the salty sidewalk below.
