I knew it was over when she bought that Subaru Outback, and a kayak. She’d leave me, and she’d say she always knew, and we’d fight over the dog. I found her packing in the apartment with her friend Aggie, and our dog was nervously jangling his collar from room to room, knowing that this wasn’t a good thing.
He came right to me and kind of sat on my feet, like he always did when one of us—that’s Marley and me—would be yelling over what pissed us off at the moment, or when a siren shrieked by and I stood near the window to look out to see if there was a fire or an accident or just some cop rushing from or to somewhere. He did it some other times, too, when I might be sitting, just staring out a window, but mostly when there was a racket, an agitation of sorts, like there was right now.
We never should have moved to the city from Jenkinsville. She never would have met Aggie and we wouldn’t have fought over stupid things like the cost of parking spots for my truck and boat trailer, or the best place to buy a pizza. In Jenkinsville I could park my truck and boat on the street and no one cared. Everyone did it. And there was only one pizza joint in town.
And there was no Aggie, as far as I knew.
But there have been a lot of things, a lot of Aggies I suppose, that I never saw coming. This Aggie, the girl, is just the latest. Like me signing up, wanting to go to Afghanistan because I read that an NFL player I liked—Pat Tillman—stopped playing football and became an Army Ranger. Just like that. If he could leave something he loved for honor, for country, well so could I. By the time I finished my training at Ft. Irwin, in California, my hero was dead. Didn’t see it coming. My mom’s dad served in Korea, but he never talked about it, other than saying he moved south because he didn’t want to see snow anymore. He near froze to death, my mom told me, when she still remembered things. I think there was more going on, because he had only two fingers on his right hand so never threw a baseball or football with me when I asked. “Ask your daddy,” he’d say. And then he’d open another beer and sit alone, watching birds or just staring.
I think I found Marley to save me, to keep me from just staring. Enough about me, though.
We left Jenkinsville because Marley wanted to take some courses at a community college and the closest one was pretty far away. So we moved to the city, which made some sense because that’s where I worked. At least that’s where my office was. I haven’t told you yet, but I’m a surveyor now, having done some mapping and surveying in the marines, mostly for construction projects but also for military targets. I’m better at this than I was as a bartender. Too many distractions on both sides of the bar in that profession.
I now work wherever they need me, especially when there is a need for someone who understands ambulatory boundaries—that’s what we surveyors call the shifting land near rivers and lakes and such. I guess the sea, too, but we’re a long way from the ocean, but there are rivers and lakes everywhere around here. Which is the reason I bought the boat, I explained to Marley. I really bought it so I could go fishing with my friends, many who didn’t have their own, or at least not one like my new camo Tracker Grizzly. My friends were mostly in the building trades, working when they could, fishing and hunting when they wanted. I was steady, which is what Marley found attractive about me. At least that’s what she said, or what she thought, when we met three years ago.
We talked about having a family and we were pretty excited when she thought she was pregnant. She wasn’t, but we talked about getting married anyway, not wanting anyone to think that having a baby was the only reason we’d marry, you know, if she did actually get pregnant. We don’t have any other family, just some cousins who live far away who don’t really know us. And my mother, who is in one of those storage units they call a senior facility. She hasn’t recognized me since I got back from Afghanistan, a year before I met Marley at the butcher counter in a Publix in Lakeland. I thought being near my mother was my duty, like when I enlisted. But like I said, she didn’t know me anymore, and after meeting Marley I started thinking about myself more.
In the Publix that day I was in a long line, five or six spots ahead of her, but kept turning to look. She was wearing a white baby-doll tank top with some cut-off jean shorts that were just peeking below her shirt, or blouse, or whatever they call them. I later bragged to my friends, for what Derek called “more cheese than meat,” how I handed my butcher-line number to this woman I had been staring at and said, “Now you give me your number . . . your phone number.” The old lady in front of her high fived me, and said to her, “Do it honey—he’s a keeper.”
Two weeks later we were on our way northward. Marley quit her job at American Eagle at the mall and I said goodbye to my mom at the New Life Share Home and my boss at Molly McHugh’s. Not in that order, though. I finished my early shift around four, and sat with a couple regulars just to have one last drink there, which turned into more than one. By the time I got to my Mom’s room I was pretty wobbly. I hugged her, and she asked “Who are you?” I was drunk and she might as well have been. I hugged her again and that was the last time I saw her.
I was on the road the next morning with Marley behind the wheel of my ten-year-old Ford Escape, a car that I would soon trade in for a used Silverado pick-up. She was driving because I was a bit hung over. Marley wouldn’t like that I bought that truck, especially after we got the mutt, some kind of short-haired hound that I named Lucifer because of his of reddish fur and crazy eyes.
Marley called him Luci, for short she said. I should have seen it as a warning.
This is getting a bit confusing, because I struggle with getting the facts out in order, my teachers always told me. Anyway, we moved to Jenkinsville because I knew someone, once, who lived there and he said the fishing was good and the people are nice. We served together in the Hemland River Valley in Afghanistan, where he was injured pretty bad in a fall from a scaffold, when he was on his cell phone. People who saw it thought he had been shot by a sniper, but it turned out he just tripped on a toolbelt. I lost contact with him, and when we moved to Jenkinsville no one we ever talked to remembered him. But he was right—the fishing is good and the people are nice. I bought the truck after we settled in to a nice little house on the edge of town. Oh, and we did get married at the Justice of the Peace, Justice Marlin Randall being the one who pronounced—his word, not mine—us husband and wife.
I met a lot of my new friends in the Tipsy Toddler Tavern, where Marley and I would go for drinks a few times a week, like we were on a date. We’d fish on weekends and eventually Marley would stay home and take care of Luci, as I said she called our dog. I think she resented my new friends and new boat. She didn’t like to fish but she liked the water, she said. But after sitting in the boat for hours a day—with me and Derek, or me and Landon, or me and Clyde—she stopped coming fishing with us. What I think bothered her about me and the boys is that we never talked much, about anything. The four of us were all veterans, you see, but we never talked about what we had done, or what we had seen. We sought each other out, likely, because we didn’t want to talk about anything we had experienced. That bothered Marley. She thought being with them might help me escape my blue days, which she called them.
One morning, when she still went fishing with me, Landon wrestled a lunker through some long weeds. When he dragged it up alongside the boat, it was wrapped in hydrilla. I dropped my rod, sat back in the seat, and wept. Landon cut the bass loose and put his arm on my shoulder. Marley just stared. No one said a word. I recovered, and we stayed out for a while more. Landon had heard my story, sitting in his pick-up truck one morning. Marley hadn’t, so I think she felt left out. I tried to explain it later, but it wasn’t going anywhere good. I’m not sure she really wanted to know.
Four years earlier, I was sitting on an MRAP, roadside, just laughing with my new best friends, watching some farmer walk up the road carrying a hundred-pound stack of grass and hay on his back. It was another dusty dry day and things were pretty quiet. We waved and he smiled. And when he was even with us, and Donny Eathan, from Buffalo New York, was about to pass the guy a bottle of water . . . the bundle and the man exploded, throwing me off the back of the truck and killing Donny Eathan from Buffalo, and Jamal whose last name and town I never learned. I had a few scrapes from the fall, and that was all. Donny and Jamal were scraps. I went into a trance and was home a month later, when I proved to everyone I couldn’t function. My sergeant used to yell at us “Take in-ISHITIVE! You are IN control!”
I wasn’t, until that day in Piggly Wiggly. And I found Marley.
And after my breakdown in the boat, she took up reading books. Novels and histories and biographies.
Nothing like a small town to change a woman, I guess.
But then we moved to the city, renting a little two-bedroom on the third floor of an old textile warehouse, with a nice view of the street below and a traffic light. We could walk to restaurants and bars, and even to the Publix and Piggly Wiggly. I found a spot on a parking ramp for my boat, but it cost a lot and just sat there, looking lost and lonely. I wasn’t fishing much anymore and I was spending more time on the road, staying in crumby motels with road crews from other places. I felt as lonely as my boat. And we never revisited that day when Landon was my only comfort.
Marley didn’t seem to mind our new direction, though, and liked her college courses. She took some classes on food—I’m sorry, on nutrition she called it—and pretty soon we were shopping at markets and delis and places with names like Clean Fare, and Health Juice. I didn’t mind, though, because there were a lot of young people to look at, not like in Lakeland, especially a lot of young women who looked like they could run marathons or sing in bluegrass bands.
Anyway, in one of those places Marley met Aggie and they went out for some dirty chai. I guess that’s a kind of tea that healthy people drink. And they started to spend more time together.
She had been driving her tan Subaru for about a month, and the kayak stayed strapped to its roof rack the entire time, except when she and Aggie took that four-day swamp-to-sea paddle trip. Then they strapped their boats together on Aggie’s Suburu and drove off. When they got back Marley showed me some pictures, mostly of Aggie in her kayak, paddling or flicking water. She looked pretty happy, and just pretty, I have to say. There was a nice picture of a dolphin, too, right in front of Marley’s bow. And a gator sunning itself on the bank. But mostly just pictures of Aggie.
After their adventure, I kind of settled into my blue days, so I wasn’t surprised when Marley wanted to talk. My eyes were wet, and my hands shaking, as she told me about all my flaws, about my unwillingness, and my inability to share. I sort of thought those two flaws were related, but arguing semantics wouldn’t help. Frankly her words were being drowned out by Sarge’s about taking in-ISHITIVE! As Marley explained me . . . to me and to Aggie who stood silently behind the couch . . . I thought about calling Landon, who told me he got help when he needed it. That kept me calm.
“You can keep Luci,” she told me. I didn’t see that coming. And that was it, they were out the door, carrying everything she wanted. Luci looked up at me, and then we went to the window, looked down to the street, and watched them step out onto the sidewalk.
They looked like two high school girls getting into a car on the way to the beach. From up here they looked happy, a couple of kids who truly believe in something new every day.
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