Carl Melcher… into the great alone
His best dreams were the ones about young women. They were interested in him and took his arm as they walked and talked. They wore colorful dresses of smooth fabric that slid over their skin; they were slim and lithe, not big and tattooed like so many 21st century American women. Sometimes they slowly morphed into older women over the course of the dream, their hair turning grey or cropped short like cancer victims, but they were always petite with warm skin and serious, attractive faces that looked at him with respect and love. There was no sex, but there was a hint of it to come. These women wanted to be with him, and when he woke to find them gone, he was always disappointed and a little sad for a while.
He washed his eyes, his face. He combed his hair, noticing and worrying about how thin it was becoming. He went into the kitchen and ran the water for the coffee machine. As he put the coffee into the filter basket, Ziggy the dog and Suzanne the cat were close at his feet and he was careful not to tread on them. The house was cold and he knelt before the pot-bellied stove and balled-up some newspaper for fire-starter. He made a mound of it, then laid a couple of pine cones and two logs over top. He lit the paper, closed the door and stood. Ziggy looked at him expectantly. Like him, the dog was old now.
“Okay, Ziggy. You and Suzanne are next.” He went into the shed, the two animals close behind. He filled Suzanne’s bowl with kibble and she jumped up onto the drier and put her head in the bowl as she ate, her back arching up to be caressed. Siamese were interesting cats, he thought. He gave Ziggy his kibble and went back into the kitchen, getting out his coffee cup and saucer. He turned on his laptop, logged on, and clicked on the streaming site for the talk radio show. The traffic report was on. It was from the San Francisco Bay Area where he used to live and work before he retired. He listened with interest and some schadenfreude to the managed chaos that getting to work in the Bay Area had become. He had done it for 35 years and sometimes when he listened to all the problems it sounded like he had gotten out in the nick of time. His congratulatory back-patting at this was suddenly and guiltily tempered by the knowledge that his son, an almost-grown man now, had to contend with it every day.
He added sugar and creamer to his coffee, sat down at the table and wondered what the hell he was going to do all day.
I lived in a California town called Chilton, high up in the Sierras. The population was 2,000, equally divided between young families, many of them on government assistance, and retired couples living on fixed incomes, with just a hand-full of loners like me.
Situated smack dab in the middle of a National Forest, it was a beautiful place, but I wasn’t happy here. Don’t get me wrong; Ansel Adams would have loved living here, so would a lot of others. And I did, in the beginning, but not anymore.
Main Street was a mile and a half long, with two gas stations, a small supermarket, a bank, a laundromat, a tire shop, a bar, two motels, three thrift shops (the owners called them antique stores), three churches, a real estate office, two gasoline stations, a library (only open twenty hours a week), a hardware store, a Chinese restaurant (bad), a Mexican restaurant (bad also), and a diner-style restaurant (awful).
In the summer the place was bustling with tourists -- happy families of campers in town for hamburgers and ice cream, fishermen buying their beer and bait in the supermarket, middle aged and elderly walkers with green eye shades and ski poles, photographers and bird watchers setting their tripods up on the sides of the road by the lake, young millennial hikers, scruffy and dirty-looking like homeless people-- after being on the trail for weeks at a time -- come down to town to pick up their mail and use the laundromat. For the locals there were invites to neighbor’s barbecues, a flea market, yard sales, church picnics, that sort of thing. But when winter settled in (there were no nearby ski resorts), most of the businesses closed and the people on the street dwindled down to a few. And at night… nobody, nothing.
Now that I was again divorced and alone, I did my best to keep busy. I did a little writing (I’d had a few books published over the course of my lifetime, but none of them really went anywhere). When I tired of that and wanted some distraction, there was cable TV or internet chat on Facebook, and videos; I saw it all -- fire fights and bombings in the Middle East, young men doing BMX death-defying stunts, ISIS deviltry, young antifa toughs, wearing bandanas to hide their identity, throwing metal barriers into plate glass doors, street fighting. If you wanted real rather than vicarious and virtual, you could wander the aisles of the Dollar General, or join one of the many church groups, or go to the AA or Overeaters Anonymous meetings. I was never much of a joiner, however, and so I just went out alone and did a lot of walking.
There were about ten of us in town that regularly walked during the winter months: the two most down-and-out, slovenly drunks in town, Henry and Manuel (they were roommates), two older couples who fast-walked together, two retarded adult men who lived with a kindly Christian family, me and my dog, Ziggy, and Danni, the beautiful, but retarded, girl-child who spent a lot of time sitting on her bicycle, wearing her Disney Aladdin helmet, calling out to passers-by for attention. A sweet little thing, 12 or 13, with long scalloped blonde hair, already filling out with little breasts and hips. She always wanted to pet Ziggy or take him for a walk, or to come to your house. I felt sorry for her, but as an older man, I kept a safe distance. I couldn’t imagine how much her parents must have worried about her.
I’d lived in Chilton with my second wife, Divina, for about eighteen months and then we’d split up. I had thought we had it all and would go the distance, you know, till death do us part. After all, we were both older folks. I was sixty-five, she fifty-five, and we lived a quiet life in a nice clean house in a safe, quiet town. Yeah… I know what you’re thinking.
I don’t blame Divina entirely. It takes two to make a marriage soar, and two to rip its delicate diaphanous wings off. Now our love was gone, disappeared forever like Hillary’s emails. Sometimes looking back, I think she expected me to rein her in, to get physical with her like she got with me a couple times. Maybe it was cultural; I don’t know, but I definitely got the feeling when we got into it a couple of occasions that she expected a physical response from me, a push or a slap. But I would never get physical with a woman, didn’t have the stomach for it. I figured that when things sank to that level it was time to move on. And in California, if a man hit his woman, even if she’d hit him first, he’d quickly find himself in deep legal trouble.
I was the one who made the marriage happen. I found Divina on-line, in Spain, pursued her, married her. It was based on my loneliness and on attraction -- that Mona Lisa smile, and her tiny girlish figure. When we finally met… on skype… I felt like it was just right, almost perfect. She was Filipino. It’s funny; I had started out on the regular sites, like Match. But somewhere along the way I got switched onto this other site -- Asian Cutie, something like that. I don’t remember how that happened anymore. I just remember all of a sudden there were all these young, pretty, and aggressive women, all of them pleading to chat with me. I caught on pretty quick. There are only a few reasons a sexy nineteen year old chick would be interested in a sixty-five year-old American man. I had fun teasing them at first, but no way was I going to fall into the ‘drooling geezer/hot young chick’ fantasy. After a while I was ready to drop it all when Divina gave me a ‘flirt.’ Her smile caught my eye right away, warm, stoic, etched with a serious, but tired look, as if she’d seen it all and knew every game people played, and was ready for the real thing. So was I.
I sat on the couch reading, Ziggy snoring at my feet, Suzanne reclining Sphynx-like behind me on the high back of the couch. I was alone a lot now. No, that’s not a pity play, just a fact, my new norm, and my choice as well. The fan on the propane stove came on with a hush, pushing hot air into the room. Ziggy raised his head inquisitively, then lay it down again. The room was cozy, the flames rippling orange light onto the carpet. It was almost eleven at night; I had another hour and then I had to be at work, graveyard shift. Outside the cold was oppressive, 15 degrees. Going out was like jumping into a pool of chilled water. The night before it had gotten down to five. I made a thermos of coffee, put it in my brief case and went out, locking the door.
I pulled up to the guard shack at the sawmill ten minutes later for my shift as a security guard. Up here in Chilton there weren’t a lot of jobs available in the winter. Machinists and welders at the mill, speedy-mart clerk, security guard at the mill, substitute teacher at the high school if you were degreed. I was, and I’d worked there the semester before, but hadn’t liked it. The kids weren’t dangerous, like the thugs in the big cities, but they were brats just the same, and I quickly tired of putting up with their attitudes and bullshit. So now I sat in a guard shack instead, making a patrol every hour or so, climbing steel catwalks around and over huge pieces of machinery that could grind a man to hamburger in seconds -- abraders that ripped the bark off of sequoia trees, huge band saws, planers. Occasionally I touched the buttons affixed to walls and doors with a computerized wand that recorded that I’d been there, and I looked for signs of fire, or pipes ruptured by the freezing cold.
I didn’t want to work. I was retired, but the spousal support I was paying to Divina every month, and the money I was sending to help my son through tech college, was more than was coming in every month from my SSI. And there were the occasional co-payments for medical bills, dental cleanings; the glasses I’d just gotten had set me back seven hundred bucks with the exam. My savings account was slowly dwindling and I just couldn’t let that happen.
Things had been very different just a year and a half earlier. I’d had about a hundred thousand in my savings and 401k, and owned my own house. I still owned the house, but the hundred thou was down to just twenty now. Getting out of my marriage had been expensive, but I still think I did the right thing. My lawyer said it could have been much worse. If I had waited too long I could have ended up losing my house.