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Sky Blue
Two large white creatures
are standing on an iceberg. One of them says, “I don’t know – I’m up, I’m down,
I’m up again. My doctor says I’m a bipolar bear.”
That was the one he told Tacoma, when the meds and the
cautious lifestyle started getting to her. Now, it was the first thing he
thought of when he woke up, every morning.
“Shawn! Hey Shawn!”
That and the guys yelling outside. Their friend’s
intercom didn’t work, so they shouted four stories’ worth, at all times of day
or night, until their friend dropped his keys out the window.
“Shawn! Yo buddy!”
And fate would have it that they shared a name. Shawn
peered through the blinds, in case he had to identify them in a police lineup.
A set of keys whipped past the Washington flag, just missing George’s nose. But
Shawn never saw them land, because there was life at the Kickstand Cafe.
The Kickstand had been under construction for months, its
windows covered by butcher paper. A sign on the door announced the grand
opening, but every two weeks the date was pushed back.
Lord knows, Shawn needed a reprieve. The Christian cafe
was pulling out the big guns. First they went to 24 hours, seven days a week.
They they brought in a crowd of beautiful young women from a Russian Orthodox
church. They would sit around in tight dresses and leather jackets, chatting in
their native tongue. Shawn started drinking iced mochas.
But now, the butcher paper was gone, and there were fresh
lattes a mere hundred feet from his window! He was so excited, he forgot to
shave. He stood at the entrance, running a hand over his stubble as he sized up
the decor.
The interior had walls of scrubbed raw sienna, like a
trendy Italian restaurant. The left and right windows offered blonde-wood
counters fixed by exposed chromium bolts. The front counter cruised by like a
small art-deco boat, wearing a crescent of silvery faux-marble. The back wall
was capped by a crown of steel plate, spars of copper jutting upward like
sun-rays.
Standing behind a man in a tall white cowboy hat, Shawn
caught a glimpse of the counter girl, who was terribly typecast: several
earrings, hoop over one eyebrow, and a stripe of sky-blue hair. The cowboy took
his cappuccino and scooted left. Shawn’s pupils grew several sizes.
“Wendy?”
He returned when she got off
work, and drove them to the end of Ruston Way. He walked her to his favorite
bench, looking over the water to Vashon Island. He liked to sit here in the
evening and imagine that the Puget Sound was his own cozy neighborhood, the
houselights of the island coming on one at a time like evening stars. On sunny
afternoons, you could look to the east, where a trick of depth perception made
it look like the high-rise apartments were just across the street from Mt.
Rainier.
Today, Tahoma was hiding her head under a blanket of
smoky overcast. Wendy held her jacket collar to her neck, releasing a shy smile
that seemed to make all the piercings disappear.
“God, Shawn. All those years of you trying to corrupt me.
I should have let you! I was very well-trained, you know. My mom and all that
shit about buying the cow. Did it ever occur to her that the cow likes being milked?”
All this sudden hedonism was hitting Shawn right in the
funny bone. He envisioned a Holstein in a pink negligee and burst out laughing.
“What?” said Wendy.
“Hard to explain,” said Shawn, catching his breath. “Cows
are naturally funny. Ducks, too. So how the hell did you end up a hundred feet
from my apartment?”
“My cool cousin Laurel. She was working for an
alternative weekly in Olympia and got tired of the slave wages, decided to open
a cafe with her boyfriend. She came for a visit last month, about the same time
I was picking all those meaningless fights with my parents. It’s hell being a
preacher’s daughter, especially when you realize you don’t believe a fucking
word of it. I figured if I was going to publicly go to hell, I should at least
leave the county. Probably broke my parents’ hearts, but they have no idea how
lucky they are.”
“So basically,” said Shawn. “You wore my poor agnostic
prick to the nub, and all the while you were a closet heathen yourself?”
“I was trying so hard to believe, but the constant
contradictions finally got to me. Hell, just look at the trial. Any idiot knows
that the Romans would off a political dissident at the drop of a hat. They
certainly wouldn’t put it to a vote of whatever Jews happened to be in court
that day! But wouldn’t Paul and his copywriters be brilliant marketeers if they
managed to blame the crucifixion, seventy years after the fact, on the very group
that was most staunchly boycotting their new product? And simultaneously
exonerate the Romans, who turned out to be their most lucrative target
audience?”
“You, young lady, are Jimmy Swaggart’s worst nightmare.”
“So what about you? Are you doing okay out here?”
“Yeah. I’m playing in a blues band that is actually
planning a tour...”
“Wow!”
“I have a nice day job painting a house that never ends
and... well... I’ve got a nice apartment.”
“Wait,” she said. “Go back. Fill in that empty space
where you were going to mention the girl.”
Shawn laughed. “God, you’re good. Okay. Her name was
Tacoma. Flaming bumper-sticker Christian girl.”
“Jesus! Did you not learn your lesson?”
“No. And it wouldn’t matter if I did. Might as well tell
a meteor not to give in to the Earth’s gravity.”
She gazed at him with a wide grin.
“What?”
“Poetry,” she said. “You loved her, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“So why all the past tense?”
Shawn wrapped a knee with his fingers.
“Tough question. But I’ve got a theory. I think a successful
relationship needs a few months when everything’s easy. That way, when you run
into the bad spots, later on, you can reach back to that period as a kind of
touchstone. Two months after we met, Tacoma went nuts.”
“But every woman’s entitled to an occas...”
“No-no,” said Shawn. "I mean that literally. She had an
episode, she was taken to a mental health clinic, and diagnosed with bipolar
syndrome. Her mom’s got it, too. The weird thing was, it only served to
intensify my feelings. I wanted to battle the beast right alongside her.
“A few weeks later, when she was beginning to adjust, I
told her I loved her. I said it whenever I saw her, simply because it was true,
and I enjoyed saying it. I don’t think she believed me. I still haven’t figured
it out, but I’m betting it goes back to her childhood. She was pretty much
tossed around like a beach ball. It’s amazing she turned out as well as she
did. But I think she associates the phrase ‘I love you’ with ‘I’ll be leaving
you now.’”
“So, do you think she loved you?”
“She managed to say it a few times. But I knew,
regardless. Just about everything she did...”
Wendy gazed out toward Vashon, where a container ship was
making its way to the Tacoma port. She worried that she was prying, but she
couldn’t stop.
“Tell me how it ended.”
“A friend of mine hooked us up with a yacht race in
Bremerton. Not a speed race. They cover up all the clocks and try to hit
certain spots at certain times, using only speed, wind and current. Tacoma and
I were serving as monitors. They’d pass a certain landmark and yell out ‘Mark!”
and we would write down the time. In return, we got a free lunch, free drinks
and a trip on some rich guy’s yacht.”
“Sign me up!” said Wendy.
“I don’t know if they’d go for the blue hair.”
“I’ll wear a hat.”
“So where was I?”
“Puget Sound.”
“Right. So there we are, chugging past Blake Island...
Seattle skyline.. brilliant May morning, chill wind ruffling our hair. We
should be having the time of our lives, but instead we’re just miserable.
Tacoma has had it with me loving her so much, and I’m tired of beating my head
against a wall. Later, I’m driving us home, past that little bay at Port
Orchard, and I look at Tacoma snoozing in the passenger seat, and I realize...
we’re all done. She woke up when we turned onto Sixth Street, and we conducted
our final negotiations on the way to her house. I haven’t seen her in two
months.”
Wendy felt bad that she had taken Shawn down this path,
and decided to make up for it.
“So. Would you like to go somewhere and fuck?”
That did make him feel better. At least, the thought of
it.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you give me one of those Tonight
Show kisses?”
Wendy straddled him on the bench, settling against his
lap with a familiar belly-dancer twist, and delivered a fat showbiz smooch.
When she came up for air, she could read her failure at a glance.
“Wow. Bummer.”
She sprawled on the bench, one hand still hooked around
his neck.
“My lead guitarist is kinda cute.”
“Oh, thanks a lot!”
Photo by MJV
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