The Wooden Sea

Smith the cat met me downstairs. He’s a good guy who keeps to himself, disappears somewhere most of the day, and cruises the house at night. He accompanied me to the toilet, tail swishing back and forth. Before I married Magda and again had someone important to talk to after hours, Smith (the only survivor of my first marriage) heard lots of my stories. I was always grateful for that and let him know it.

While relieving myself, I thought of the women upstairs. Pauline naked at the mirror at two in the morning trying on a black eye identity. Black eyes and a new tattoo on her spine, roles that no more fit her than would a pair of size-thirteen men’s clogs. Her mother asleep down the hall, completely unaware of resurrected dogs or the fact her daughter had decided to take a walk in the dark woods on the outskirts of her life.

Ten fluid pounds lighter, I washed my hands. Drying them on a pink hand towel I thought with amusement and the greatest love that I live with pink. I hate pink. Never would I have imagined that gross color becoming part of my everyday. But Magda loved it, so pink lived all over our house and it broke my heart. I turned off the light in the toilet and started back toward the staircase.

“Since when do you wash your hands after pissing?” Street light washed across parts of the living room floor, lighting it that silvery blue of chrome and ghosts. To the right of the windows a person was sitting in my favorite chair. His legs were extended out into the light. I saw the cat’s tail flick back and forth—Smith was standing on whoever it was’s lap.

“Who are you? What are you doing in my house?” I entered the room and stood near the wall, the light switch there. I didn’t turn it on. I wanted to hear more before I needed to see.

“Look at your cat. Doesn’t that tell you anything?” Was his voice familiar? Yes. No. Should I have recognized it? Was that possible?

I looked at the cat standing on the guy’s lap. Contentedly too, by the fact it was unmoving and the slow twists of its tail. Smith did not like to be held. Smith did not like to be touched. Smith called the shots. If someone picked him up and tried petting him, he’d leap away or if held fast, hunker down and growl. I was the one exception. Because he knew I respected him and his ways, the cat let me pick him up. He usually stuck around a while—maybe even purring now and then.

But more than the cat it was the shoes that did it. Until I focused on the shoes I couldn’t, or perhaps didn’t want to, put all of the pieces together and recognize who was sitting in my chair with my cat on his lap. But the shoes lit by that sexy light said what I probably already knew.

When I was a kid, boys in our town wore only one kind of shoes—high-top sneakers. Black. The brand could be either Converse Chuck Taylors or PF Flyers, but nothing else. If you didn’t go with that flow, you were a no. Kids like to imagine themselves individualists, but no one outside of the military is as strict in their dress code as teenagers.

So when my father came back from a business trip to Dallas and handed me a pair of orange cowboy boots—orange–I had to fight myself not to laugh. Cowboy boots? Who did he think I was, the fucking Lone Ranger? I loved my old man, even in my mean days, but sometimes he had no clue. I took the boots into my room and tossed them into the black hole that was my closet. Adios, pardner.

But the next morning I went to the closet for a shirt and there they were, all bright and shiny and still orange. I looked at them. Then I looked at my terminally ratty black sneakers on the floor. Then I smiled, I picked up the boots, put them on, and walked out into a new day. I was the worst kid in town. The baddest. The few people in Crane’s View who didn’t hate me should have. If I felt like being Roy Rogers with giddyap footwear, not one of my peers in his right mind would challenge or make fun of me to my face because they knew I’d eat them alive. I wore those cowboy boots until there was nothing left of them and was sorry the day I had to throw them away.

The night light through the window fell in a wide stripe across orange cowboy boots. From where I stood they looked new. I ran my eyes up the boots to the leg, the body, and with a pause for my mind to catch its breath, I finally looked at his face. “Son of a bitch!”

“No, ape of my heart!”

It was me, seventeen years old.

“I’m dead, right? I died but didn’t know it. All this weird stuff that’s been happening is because I’m dead, right?”

“Nope.” He gently lifted Smith off his lap and placed him on the floor. As he moved forward, the light touched his shirt. My heart lurched because I remembered that shirt! Broad blue-and-black checks, I had stolen it from a store on Forty-fifth Street in the city. I put it on in the dressing room, pulled off all the sales tags, left my other shirt on a hanger, and walked out of the place.

“No, you’re not dead. You’re not dead and I’m not dead. I don’t know where the hell I’ve been, but fuck it—the kid’s back! Aren’t you glad to see the old ape?”

Ape of my heart. I hadn’t heard that phrase in years. Once my father came down to the police station to get me. When we were out on the street again he grabbed my neck and shook me. He was a small man and not strong, but when he was mad he scared the shit out of me. Maybe because I loved him so much but couldn’t stop disappointing him. Part of me desperately wanted him to be proud. Most of me stuck its ass in his face and, by my permanent bad behavior, said he could kiss either cheek. Why he continued to love me was a source of wonder.

“You’re a fucking ape, Fra

The word shocked me more than anything else did. My father seldom cursed and he never used that word. He was witty; he liked metaphors and wordplay—”Getting through to you, son, is like trying to pick up a pe

“I’m sorry, Dad. I’m really sorry.”

He still held my neck and jerked me close to his very red face. I could feel the heat of his anger. “You’re not sorry at all, ape. If you were sorry I’d have some hope. You’re young and smart but you’re a total loss. I never thought I would say that, Fra

That confrontation didn’t change my life but it stabbed me through and the wound bled a long time. Before that my armor had kept me bulletproof, even from my old man, but not anymore. Afterward I always thought of that phrase as marking the end of something in my life.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Here I am after all these years. A fuckin’ miracle in the making, but all you do is stand there with your thumb up your ass going duh.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Kiss me.” He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out Marlboros, that beloved red and white package of death. I had smoked them all my life and loved every single one. Magda wanted me to stop but I said no dice.

“You want one?”

I nodded and crossed the room for it. He shook the pack and a couple slid out. He handed me a dented Zippo lighter. Immediately recognizing it, I smiled. Engraved on the side was FRANNIE AND SUSAN—LOVE FOREVER. Susan Gi

“I forgot about this lighter. Do you know what happened to Susan?”

He lit his and took a jumbo drag. “No, and don’t tell me. Listen, we got to talk about all these things. You want to do it here or outside? It’s the same to me.” His voice was Joe Cool, but it was clear he preferred going out. I was wearing a sweat suit. I needed some shoes and a coat.