Paper Tigers

These days I’m nothing more than a paper tiger inside. I wear an earring. My hair is long. I don’t smoke, drink, or watch TV. I got a dog and a growth starting up on the side of my head but that’s about it. Some nights I roll over and hear the coyotes yipping in the hills. The windows freeze over. The thermostat ticks on and off. It gives me the feeling of distance. It gives me the feeling of being far away. Oh, it’s not a bad life out here in PA. Mornings I take my coffee and walk Sally out through the game trails. She sticks her nose all low to the ground like a shark’s and tugs me right along. My feet barely keep up. My lungs run off some place. I’ve thought about renaming her Tugboat the way she tugs and tugs but it’s always been Sally and I figure it ought to stay that way. At one point in time she’d have made a good bird dog but I’ve let her all go. She’s gone fat at the heels. When she sleeps, snores move through the room like childish shapes.

Afternoons are full of make believe. Somedays I walk out naked in the yard and let the sun sing down on my pecker. Over near the water pump the earth stays cool and I lie down thinking about how good things were before she left. Once upon a time this was a place of love and sex and noise. We were going to grow fruit trees and have children. At night we’d sit out under cold stars thinking up names for them. Grace, Ben, and Ann were heavy favorites. Couldn’t tell you why.

I’ve got a neighbor, his is the next acreage over from mine. Charlie. That’s his name. He’s been here almost thirty years. He’s also a hoarder—I’m not a hoarder—he collects things. In his pasture stands an old marquee billboard that he changes the words to frequently. Today it’s GASOLINE HORSIES, tomorrow it’s TEXAS 71. So on and so on.

Last week I went over to his place like I do from time to time. I went over there by car and Charlie was up on his roof hitting golf balls into the woods. He looked like Florida up there, his old bronzed body shirtless and tattooed against the sun. I’m not sure he knew it was me pulling up. He’s seen my pretty car a million times. But started pinging them at me anyway. Luckily he never made contact. I said next time he best try a 7-iron. He said shit and damn.

Then he climbed down a ladder and shook my hand. His eyes are full of cataract, which makes him seem indifferent to things, despairing, as if he’s ready to die. Of course it’s not true. He’s not your average old song. He’s been to Vietnam, India, even Greenland. Airforce. He takes life singing. Come in, he said, I have some brown water tea for us. So I followed him up the porch and through the door. Inside, even after all these years, it still smells of home cooking and babies. Pictures of memories hang on the walls. When Charlie caught me looking he said lucky for him, he doesn’t believe in nostalgia. Bullshit, I said. It’s true, he said. The only thing I believe in is fun in the air. Then we sat down for brown water tea.

We sipped slow and watched the world burn up outside. Some sort of tree fire had started out in the woods. Whitetail made for the old highway. Birds swam in the cheatgrass. Blackbirds and robins. I felt sorry for myself. I wondered where she was, what she was doing. Six months ago a letter came in the mail. Love from Montana. The return address was to a place called Roundup. I imagine rodeo clowns and old-time religion. I imagine her breathing easy beside some rail-thin cowpoke. It makes me sick.

The world really was burning up outside. I don’t exaggerate. A glow could be seen deep in those oaks. A tree fire with black smoke pumping from the crowns. It was almost beautiful, and reckless and smooth.

When the pasture caught fire Charlie pushed out a curious grunt. Take out everything else, he said, this looks just like Quang Tri. I asked him what he meant. He said monkeys and firebombs, whores and little men with machine guns. Once I saw the puma rip a kids face off. He kept shouting for his mother. He was American. Maybe an American deserved it, I said. Charlie shook his head. Nobody deserves that, he said.

Down in the valley, down near the old highway, small men in yellow suits piled out from a fire engine. They carried shovels and axes. Some had ropes. They were ants on a hill: tiny, helpless things you could smear away with just an eye blink. The TV was likely calling for evacuations, but we stayed put at the table. Coated with wax, it was coarse and malleable. I picked at with my fingernail and thought about how she used to get on me for my toenails, how she said they turned her stomach the way they scraped her calves and left marks. For a while she thought it was funny. Her heart was so good and perfect. We’d sing to each other’s ears in the dark. Fall asleep and dream nice dreams of cool water and gunsmoke. But eventually something died. All the heart fell out. Happens to everyone, I promise, it’s just a matter of when. I stopped saying anything. She stopped saying anything. And instead started reading books about sad quiet things. Books about deep places full of bright white snow. Books about horses catching sunlight when they can. Then the bedside lamp goes off. Goodnight, she says. Goodnight, I say. I turn and turn.

Charlie told me to quit that. He meant my picking. Quit why? I said. This house is soon going up in flames, I said. Everything is in ruin, I said. Likely so are we, I said. But Charlie shook his head. Then he got up and left me in the kitchen. He went outside to the pump shed and found a shovel. It was a nice shovel, full of weight and worn at the handle. I could tell by the way he carried it. With dignity and stride.

From the kitchen window I watched him. He found a soft spot near the marquee and started digging trench. It was hopeless and completely all wrong. I wanted to yell at him to stop, that it was too late, too late, but instead I went out there and watched him struggle with the dense earth. Everything was loud. Everything was burning. The heat in the air was doing something terrible to my head. From nowhere boyhood memories surfaced. An airplane screamed across a brilliant winter sky. A butterfly net scooped minnows from a creek. But I couldn’t place when or where or why. Our childhoods are lost.

Don’t just stand there. Grab a shovel. Grab a rope. Tell me that you love me. Take me to the movies, cover me up with your sweet wet words. It’s my birthday, baby, buy me something nice. This is not a dream. Our house, it’s the only one that survived. Sally was right where I left her, chained under the porch and licking her paws. This is not a dream. I’m sitting out here now, on the porch, with my earring, with my long hair. People say I’m a miracle. I don’t even know what that means. Before we bought it this house was nothing but a lump on a hill. The floors were caved with rot. There were dead animals in the attic. Even the realtor said we were better off somewhere else but Missy Baby kept floating around the place as if she kept bumping into old friends nobody but her could see. We quit our jobs, moved everything over from the city. First few days we didn’t do anything but drive around in the car. She’d put her finger somewhere on the map and I’d take her there while she read aloud the area’s history. I was so gone off happiness it scared me.

Rightly so. I know better than to think about these sorts of things but sometimes I can’t help it. Say you can and you’re a liar. Thoughts run wild, creep and crawl and find their way like the blue racers do under the house. I blast them dead with a .22 but they keep coming back. I hate a snake. Always have.

So now I’m out here waiting for her while the sky does its pretty pinks and blues. I see her making the bend in the road, bumping up the driveway in a sportscar painted red. Sometimes she lays me right there on the lawn, other times we go inside and fry up a good mess of bacon and eggs. She says sorry for leaving. I say no problem, hey we’re having breakfast for dinner.

Things like that. Little things like that.

And Sally, she’s right here with me. I pet her with my bare feet. She wiggles up against me. I run these nails through her coat. She thumps that tail. And doesn’t seem to mind a one.