Tellico

  

            My dreams are troubled by death and dying at Tellico Lake.   I dream of Jill Moscone’s spirit hovering above the waters and of the bones of my ancestors that the waters cover.  I dream about the contaminated fish.  The lake has lived up to its name.  The Cherokee call it the Lake of Tears.    

             

            Roger Beaumont brought me his newspaper.  “Hey, Danny, you need to see this piece on Jill Moscone,” he said, slapping the paper on the counter in front of me.  The Messenger is one of those weeklies that is so thin on real news, a fiddling contest makes the front page.  It’s big on advice from the agricultural extension agents, and wedding photos and fillers that remind readers to Go to church Sunday or Read a book!!   Roger was surprised I didn’t subscribe.  “It’s how I keep up with everybody from high school,” he said.  Like I The Loudon County Messenger ran a piece about Jill Moscone last week.   Fifteen years ago the seventeenth of May, Jill Moscone parked her red Mazda RX-7 in a weedy spot overlooking Tellico Lake, put a gun to her heart, and pulled the trigger.  You would think people might have let it go by now.   I was about to graduate from high school.  Jill Moscone would have finished her junior year if she had lived one more week.  give a shit about anybody from high school.  I drove away from Lenoir City after graduation and didn’t look back.  I didn’t come back until last year, except once, to bury my uncle. 

            “Remember Susan Pope, Dale’s little sister?”  Roger dug in his wallet for his credit card to pay for gas and a couple of six packs of Bud Light.  “She married Lonnie B. Childress, the all-state quarterback.  Remember Lonnie B.?  He was a couple of years ahead of us.  Susan works for the paper now.  She did the retrospective on Jill Moscone.”   Roger is the kind of guy who can use a word like retrospective with a straight face.

            “Susan and Jill were friends,” he said. 

            I was pretty sure they weren’t friends, but I didn’t offer an opinion.

            Roger started coming in the Texaco-Mart a few months ago.  It’s the Texaco-Mart at the Soddy-Daisy Exit.  I work evenings.  I live right down the road in a Red Carpet Inn that’s been converted to efficiency apartments.  Mine is an easy life, as it goes.  I can’t say it’s exciting, but excitement is not always what it’s cracked up to be.  I have traveled all across the country.  Leo, my uncle, always said my spirit was as restless as the air before a rainstorm.  I have been to Spokane, to the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast, up to Bar Harbor, Maine.  Coming back to East Tennessee seemed like a good thing to settle me down.   Though everything has changed in this part of the country, it’s still the land of my ancestors.  I find some comfort in that.  I have no ambitions to see the rest of the world, and the Texaco-Mart is as good as any place to work. 

            Roger lives south of here, somewhere off of I-75.  I picture a big-ass house that backs up to a golf course, similar to Tellico Village.  Roger is a lawyer for TVA.  A couple of nights a week he stops in for gas and beer on his way home from Chattanooga.  He’s always recalling high school days like we’re old pals, like we were best buddies then, which is a big joke.  In those days Roger Beaumont wouldn’t have bothered to piss on me if I was on fire.

            In high school Roger was one of those soft-bellied, sloop-shouldered guys with thick glasses who dates girls that want to be librarians.   Somewhere along the way he starts working out with weights, ditches the glasses for contact lenses, and marries Old Money from Knoxville.   I saw his wife in the car once when he stopped for gas on a weekend.  You can’t pay for gas at the pumps here.  We’re not that high-tech.  So Roger was inside paying.  He made a point of telling me he and his wife – name of Bree - were on their way to a big party her parents were throwing up in Knoxville.  Lots of movers and shakers would be there.  Reminded me how he used to lick Mr. Moscone’s boots.  All I could see of Bree in the car was shoulder-length blonde hair.  She sure didn’t look like a librarian.  Seems Old Roger has done all right for himself. 

            I didn’t know what to make of it when Roger said I should read the piece on Jill Moscone.  Later, I couldn’t find anything in the article that I needed to know.  Ex-sheriff McGinnis recalled the case, saying he never had any evidence of foul play, but people had to blame somebody for Jill Moscone’s death, so they directed their blame at him in the next election.  He laid out the facts again.  There was a suicide note in Jill’s neat, back-slanted handwriting.  Only one set of fingerprints was found on the weapon.  Then there was the clincher, the motive for suicide.  The ex-sheriff had no trouble believing that a nice girl like Jill Moscone would be desperate in her situation.

            Mrs. Moscone, who was interviewed by phone from Long Island, insisted she never had a clue that her daughter was pregnant until they heard from the autopsy.  She didn’t know of any boyfriend.  The note gave no explanations, just apologies for the pain she was causing her parents by taking her own life.  Mrs. Moscone still believes there was more to the case than a simple suicide.  “Not that you can ever call suicide simple,” she was quoted as saying.  “It’s very, very complicated.”   Mr. Moscone lives in Phoenix now.   Not long after they left Lenoir City, they divorced.   The article made a big deal out of the fact that the Smith and Wesson 358 was part of Mr. Moscone’s gun collection.  Mrs. Moscone never approved of guns.  She believes their daughter might be alive today if she hadn’t had such easy access to a handgun.  It does not seem odd to me that a mother would cling to that idea.

            Roger was still yammering about the article when I gave his Visa a swipe and pushed the credit card slip toward him.  He signed with a big scrawl.  “People still can’t figure who knocked her up,” he said, leaning forward, squinting at me, like he was trying to look though me.  “Y’know, Danny - ” he gave a laugh that was a half-snort – “I always thought it might be you.”

            I met his narrow eyes with a steely look of my own.  “Maybe it was you.”

            He scooped up his Visa and chuckled deep in his throat, like he was amused.  I don’t know what he found amusing about our conversation.  “So the mystery lover remains a mystery,” he said, as if he thought he’d made some profound statement, and he picked up his beer and left.

            The Moscones were from Long Island.  Mr. Moscone was a vice-president for a big real estate company.  After the dam was built and the reservoir filled, TVA sold off twenty-two thousand acres of prime lakefront property to developers.   Lots were going for as much as sixty thousand dollars, Leo said.  That was when Mr. Moscone came down to handle the project for his company.   There were plans for golf courses and even a yacht club.  You’d expect people like the Moscones to settle in a yuppie section of Knoxville, where they could rub noses with other new-money transplants from the Northeast and California, but they didn’t.   They came to Lenoir City and bought an old house that was once in Daniel Boone’s family.  Mrs. Moscone was some kind of history buff.  She set out to make the house a showplace.   Business was mushrooming for Mr. Moscone.   They didn’t notice their daughter was miserable.   Even now, from what I get out of the Messenger piece, Mrs. Moscone doesn’t realize her daughter was miserable from the start.

            Court battles over Tellico had been going on for years when Mr. Moscone moved his family to East Tennessee, but Jill had never heard of the Tellico Dam until she came to Lenoir City.  She had never heard of the snail darter.  Environmentalists fought to protect the three-inch fish that thrived in the Little Tennessee River.  The Cherokee fought to protect the ancient Cherokee burial grounds located in the valley of the Little Tennessee River.  More than three hundred families had been forced to sell their land when TVA claimed the valley.  Not all the families were Cherokee, but enough to weaken any fight with the government.  “Indians have always been fair game,” Leo said.  “Look at our history.  One broken promise after another.”

            My uncle Leo was always proud of his Cherokee blood, no matter that it was watered down through the generations.  The Dawsons are a mix of Cherokee, Scotch-Irish, and Celtic.  The farm that we lost to TVA had been in the Dawson family for a hundred years.

            Leo had the strong square jaw of the Cherokee and straight, raven-black hair that he wore in braids.  My mother’s skin was lighter, her bone structure more delicate, more like my Scotch-Irish grandmother, but her eyes were dark like Leo’s.  In photographs of her as a girl, her eyes were bright with fire.  That fire had gone out by the time I was born.  I am a Williams.  My eyes are blue-gray, after my father, but my face is shaped like Leo’s and my hair is also black.   I never wore braids.   I never saw that braids would get me anywhere.   My skin is the color of weak tea with a drop of milk in it.   Red man, white man, I can go either way, I can’t go either way.   

            “Your father was the biggest WASP I ever knew,” Leo told me.  “He never forgave himself for marrying into Cherokee blood.”  My uncle had to tell me everything I know because I was only six years old when my mother washed down a bottle of sleeping pills with a quart of vodka.  Leo even had to tell me about my father, who took off when I was two months old.   “If James Williams ever shows his face to me again, I will put a bullet between his eyes,” Leo said in a dry, level voice.  I am content not knowing all the stories about my parents.

            By the time I met Jill Moscone, Leo and I lived in a shitty rental house on LeConte Street and he had lost all hope.  For Leo, a high point was the first of the month when his government check arrived in the mail.  He had even lost interest in hanging out at Pete One-Eye’s Bar & Grill, where Pete used to call me to come after my uncle and I’d drag him home, stinking drunk.   Finally, he was satisfied to drink and pass out at home.   That was how I found him the night Jill Moscone died.

            A troop of Boy Scouts was hiking around Tellico Lake on Saturday morning.   Some of the boys spotted the red Mazda RX-7 and charged toward it, even though the scoutmaster called to them to wait up.  One of the kids, now twenty-six years old, was interviewed for the Messenger article.   He was the first to peer in the car.  He had to see a shrink for a long time. 

            By that afternoon the sheriff was asking anyone who had seen Jill Moscone on Friday night to come forward.  “Possible suicide,” they were calling it, but the big question was Why?  I was cleaning up in the kitchen, washing bad-smelling dishes from several days past, when I heard McGinnis on the local radio station.  Leo came padding in barefooted, droopy-eyed.  He’d been drinking ever since he woke up about eleven o’clock.  He opened the refrigerator and snapped another beer from its plastic ring.

            “Moscone.  Moscone,” he said, scratching his head with a ragged fingernail.  “Didn’t you work for those people last summer?”   

            “We did some landscaping at their place,” I said. 

            “Same thing.”

            “No, not the same thing.”  We’d had this conversation last summer.  Leo was morally opposed to any connection with the developer of Tellico Village.  I had needed the money and saw no reason to take a big moral stand when I was sent out to do landscaping at the Moscone place.

            “You know the girl?” he asked.

            “We were at the same school.  It’s not a big school.”

            Leo popped the top and took a long thirsty drink from the can.   I looked into the sudsy dishwater, felt him staring at my back.  

            “You didn’t mess with her did you?” he said. 

            I jammed a plate in the dish drainer.   “What do you mean by that, Leo?”  He grunted.   I turned around, glared at him.  “They’re saying it was suicide.”  

            “Nothing wrong with my hearing.   I asked did you ever mess with her.  Didn’t a girl name of Jill call here for you?”

            I went back to my work, rubbing at dried oatmeal on a pan, the last of the dirty dishes.   “You got a good memory, Leo.  I might’ve had a call from her while I was working out at her place.   I don’t know.”

            His hot eyes kept boring into my back as I sprayed the dishes in the drainer.   “Maybe last summer, maybe another time, too, not so long ago,” he said.

            “You drink too much, Leo,” I said.  “You could keep things straight if you didn’t drink so much.”

            He came up behind me.  I could smell his unwashed body and beer on his breath.  His thick hand clapped my shoulder.  He said, “You’re a good boy, Danny.   You can have some kind of life if you don’t mess up.”            

            It’s all we ever said about Jill Moscone.   I graduated and left town before the end of the month.   I took Leo’s old Chevy pickup.  I didn’t feel bad taking it because he was hardly ever sober and shouldn’t be driving.  The day I drove away from LeConte Street was the last time I saw my uncle alive.  

            I couldn’t shake the dreams for a long time.  There is one dream that is not about the lake.  I’m riding in a white Redding pick-up, with the summer wind in my face, heading out to the Moscone place to put in their landscaping.  This is more like a documentary running through my mind than a dream.  Jamal is driving, telling dirty jokes and laughing he-he-he, jerking at the steering wheel because he’s veering into the gravel.   I’m laughing, too.  Jamal was a real comedian when he cut loose.  It may be the only time in my life I laughed big enough to show all my teeth.  My senior year is ahead of me but a good chunk of summer is left, and I have money to spend.   I’m thinking about Jill in her cutoffs and NYU tee shirt, with her hair pulled up on top of her head like Pebbles Flintstone.  In this dream I am not afraid. 

            The white trucks had the landscape contractor’s name on the door:  Redding’s Lawn and Garden.  Each morning I reported to the garden center, brick-box house with a long greenhouse attached, surrounded by an acre of shrubs and trees.  Sprinklers sprayed a fine mist over the bedding plants, begonias and impatiens and pansies.  Stacks of fertilizer and mulch and potting soil and rows of clay pots lined the entrance to the garden center.   The overpowering smell was not of the flowers, but of wet, rotting earth.  I liked it.  The smell seeped into my dreams.

            A big, jolly woman named Trudy managed the garden center.  I answered to her husband, R.J., who was smaller than Trudy, a lightweight with a paunch.   Mornings, R.J. sent out the trucks.  I would ride with Buster or Jamal.   Buster was a skinny old man who didn’t mind watching me haul and spread mulch, dig holes, and carry dogwood saplings from the truck while he hung on the door of the cab, chain-smoking cigarettes he rolled by hand.  Jamal was a stout man with shiny-black skin and flashes of gold in his teeth, a full ten years older than me, husband and father, a full-time employee at Reddings, like Buster.  Unlike Buster, though, Jamal shared the work equally with me.  Jamal and I did the Moscone job, with some direction from R.J.   It’s strange that I never dreamed about any of the other landscaping projects that summer, just the Moscone job.  Digging and sweating and loving the smell of the soil, heaving bags of mulch from the truck, catching a glimpse of Jill hanging around the edges of our work, much as she hung around the edges of things at school.  Not knowing what to make of her, not knowing what to make of my heart thrumming, but sure that something was about to happen.   I wake up then to what is real, the stab of truth, the wash of sorrow that it’s all a dream, all over, all gone.  

            Mrs. Moscone favored rhododendrons.  We delivered a truck full of the pink variety and used them to line the long cobblestone walk.  The first day she was in our faces.  Not bossy, she was polite, but everything had to be perfect.  In the Moscones’ world there was no margin of error.

            “Aren’t the holes too close together?   Won’t the bushes be crowded when they grow?”   No matter that R.J. told us thirty-six inches center to center.  Mrs. Moscone wore a green gardener’s apron over khaki pants and a striped knit shirt, with clean, white canvas shoes.   Her long pink nails and lipstick matched the stripes in her shirt.   “Shouldn’t you smooth out the soil?” she wanted to know, hovering like a painted hen.  I told her we built up the dirt a little around the plants so it would hold water.   Jamal gave me a sharp look.  I was supposed to mumble, “Yes ma’am” and do what she said.  Mrs. Moscone considered, tilted her head, then drew her lips into a pink razor slash and nodded.   “Go on with it then.”  She hovered less each day.  She spent more time at the tennis courts or the golf course, or she was dashing off to a luncheon engagement, dressed fit to meet the President.

            Jill hung back, darted glances at us from behind the pages of a paperback or from the Mazda RX-7, vrooming out of the driveway.   One day her car won’t start.  I say to Jamal maybe I can start it for her, but he tells me no, mind my own business, keep working.  We’re setting out monkey grass around the patio.  She looks fresh-scrubbed, hair flying loose, designer jeans and a tight top that shows she’s well-endowed.  Jill is not beautiful but her body has the well-tended look of the wealthy.  She slams the car door, slams the kitchen door.  No one else is home.  Mrs. Moscone is on the golf links.  I tell Jamal I should offer to help.  He says it’s none of our business.

            Twenty minutes later Roger Beaumont drives up in a Kelly green van with Tellico Village painted in white on the side.   Roger has a summer job with Mr. Moscone.  He steps down from the van, pushes his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, glances at the red Mazda and then at Jamal and me.   “I’m supposed to drive Jill somewhere,” he says to us, maybe just to me.   We had Honors English together.   It’s not the first time I have heard the smug note in his voice.  

            Jill comes out, flipping her hair, asking Roger, “Can you start my car?”

            Now it’s clear there is a glitch in communication.  Jill wants to drive herself to the mall.  She’s called her father to send out a mechanic and he’s sent a driver.  Roger is no mechanic.  He apologizes for the mix-up.  I can see there’s nothing between him and Jill, though he probably wanted me to think so.  He offers to drop her at the mall, come back for her, whatever.  He’s embarrassed but not rattled.  It’s not hard to believe he will be a lawyer someday.  Jill scrunches her face and shakes her head.  Probably she’s mad at her father but she’s not very nice to Old Roger.

            I stand up and wipe my hands on my jeans.  “You want me to take a look under the hood?” I say.  “If it’s something simple, maybe I can fix it.”

            Jamal is scowling at me.  Roger is scowling at me.  Jill lights up.

            Turns out it’s as simple as you can get, a loose battery cable.  I don’t mention all the times I’ve had to get Leo’s truck running.  Even with the sleek little Mazda, I feel at home with my head under the hood.  Just poke around, that’s what I’ve learned to do. 

            The engine’s purring.  Jill flashes me a grateful smile from the driver’s seat.

            “Good job, Red Man,” Roger says.   “You learn that in Auto Shop?”

            “I never took Auto Shop,” I say. 

            Roger raises his eyebrows, like I’m the only Indian that ever got through high school without taking Auto Shop.  “Guess it’s just in the blood.”

            Walk away, I tell myself.   Just walk.   I used to fight like a tiger and nobody put me down without getting a bloody nose for it, but Leo taught me I couldn’t win.  I might beat up the guy, but I couldn’t win.  I call on my will-power and walk away.  Roger is laughing.  I don’t look back, so I can’t tell what Jill is thinking.

            But she calls me that night.  She says, “Roger is an asshole, you know.”  I tell her I know it, and we start talking about ourselves, and the next thing I know we’re meeting at Tellico Lake every chance we get.

           

            Before that summer the only thing I knew about Jill Moscone was that she was a stuck-up Yankee rich bitch.   Maybe somebody said it or maybe I formed an opinion on my own, just seeing her around school.  By the end of the summer I knew she wasn’t like that.  We talked about things I’d never talked about with anybody.  In some ways we were a lot alike.  The difference was, I didn’t give a shit about being in anybody’s clique but it was killing her to be an outsider.   In a dreamy voice, she told about her old high school and her friends back there.  She remembered how it felt to belong.  I gave a snort and told her my family had been in East Tennessee for over a hundred years, and I still didn’t belong.  I was trying to be funny, but her face melted into a dark, sorrowful look.  She made a remark about loneliness.  Later, I wished I could remember exactly what she said.  Something philosophical, but it was clear she was talking about herself, about the big hole in her own spirit.   I wasn’t lonely anymore, but she was.

            Jill believed she couldn’t break in because people connected her - indirectly - with the Tellico controversy.   The truth was, most of the kids at Lenoir City High School had not been removed from their farms.   Some of the locals actually benefited in the long run from the land development, which created jobs and boosted the economy in the area.   I didn’t get into that with Jill.   I didn’t tell her my gut feeling.   People looked at her and saw what I’d seen. Her clipped Long Island accent made her sound bitchy.  Southern ears were used to slow, sing-songy voices.  Moscone sounded like somebody from The Godfather.   Sometimes your heritage is against you and it has nothing to do with the person you are.  You know it but others don’t, and you just have to live with that.  I should have said it before we got in so deep with each other.   Why did it matter so much, anyway, what the white-breads thought?   What did it matter what anyone else in the world thought of us if we had each other?

            Tellico Lake was where we always met.  Jill and I knew all the secluded spots around the lake.  I drove Leo’s pick-up and left it some distance from where Jill parked.   We took no chances that we’d be discovered.  In the beginning the secrecy was exciting, but it grew tiresome.  Jill persuaded me that her parents would send her back to Long Island if they had a clue what we were doing.  She was barely seventeen.  “You don’t know how they are,” she said, with a crumpled face that was part sadness, part fear.   She was right, I didn’t know anything about up-tight parents.  I didn’t know much about parents.  Leo was no threat to us.  He was drunk by nine o’clock.  I knew that in a small town secrets are hard to keep.  If anyone at school found out about us, everyone in town would know by that evening.   I went along with the cloak-and-dagger bit because I couldn’t imagine my life without her in it now.  I told her I loved her, and she said it back.

            I could believe that Mr. Moscone would whisk her away to a boarding school if he was provoked.  Twice I had met the man during the week I worked at their place.  “Move that vehicle!” he said to Jamal, and Jamal hurried to move the Redding pick-up.  Mr. Moscone had an entourage scurrying along beside him, all wearing suits except Roger Beaumont, who wore a green golf shirt and khakis.   Sunlight glinted off the diamond setting in Mr. Moscone’s gold cuff links.  His name was Robert.  Bob Moscone.  I had to work at not thinking Don Corleone.  

            I never considered anything beyond the old story, rich girl and poor boy, the cruel parents that keep them apart.  Ours was an old story all right, but another one.

            I took her clenched fists and kissed the tight fingers when she told me.  We were sitting on the hood of her car, the first warm breeze of spring sailing across Tellico Lake.  I said in a quiet, reasonable voice, “We can get married.”  She told me it was a sweet thing to say, but she didn’t give an answer.   She was worried about her parents.   I said we could go away.  In five weeks I would graduate, and we could go anywhere she wanted to go.  She shook her head as if she couldn’t bear the idea.  “Whatever you want,” I told her.   I reached for her but she drew away.  For a minute we sat there in silence.  My throat was tight, my mouth dry.  This might be the most important moment of my life and I didn’t know what to say.  Tears streaked her face.  Her hair was pulled up in a ponytail but loose strands stuck to her damp cheeks. 

            “Don’t act like it’s the end of the world,” I said.

            She stared at me, her eyes wide and wet and panicky, and said, “It is the end of the world, Danny.  Don’t you see it?”  And then the words came gushing, mixed with sobs.  Didn’t I want to go to college? and her parents would hate her, hate her, hate her! and what kind of job was I thinking I could get without a college education?  “What are you thinking?” she cried, hitting at me with useless fists.  I grabbed her wrists and said it back to her, “What are you thinking?  You think I’ll never be somebody?  I’ll always be broke?  All of that can change.  I’ll change, I will.”  And then I felt the fight go out of her and she turned into a limp dishrag.  I folded my arms around her while she cried against my chest, and the words slipped out with the sobs:  “You can’t change your blood.”  Her hands covered her face and she was sorry, sorry, so sorry, but there it was.  She choked back her sobs, trying to say she didn’t mean it, didn’t mean it, but there it was.  The wind had picked up.  It whipped across Tellico Lake and  rustled through the new leaves around us.

           

            In the weeks to come we act like victims of war, defeated, scared, grasping for any thread of hope until we are sure it’s hopeless, and in the end all we can do is cling to each other.  Every night we meet at Tellico Lake.   We fall into each other’s arms and hold on, hold on, and then we stare into the lake as if an answer might appear on the dark ripples from the long-dead Cherokee or the fish struggling for life in water that each year measures lower in oxygen and minerals.   The Lake of Tears offers no promise.  Mrs. Moscone has made plans for her and Jill to spend the summer in Long Island.   Jill doesn’t resist the idea.  She says it will be better to “fix things” somewhere away from here.  The days are ticking off toward the end of school and we know what is inevitable.   We know what is insurmountable.  Not, in the end, her parents’ disapproval or an unwanted pregnancy or the disparity of rich and poor.   Being in love only makes everything worse.  What is going to come of us?  What can we do?  Nothing.  It’s the end of the world.  And that’s when Jill comes up with the answer.

            Roger Beaumont has been back in the Texaco-Mart twice since he left me the newspaper article.  Once I had a line waiting to pay so he didn’t mention it.  The next time he couldn’t wait to ask, “Did you read the piece about Jill Moscone?”

            “I looked it over.”  His expression was skeptical.  I said, “I’ve been sick.”

            “You don’t look well,” he said.  “You sure don’t.”  He tossed his Visa on the counter, and his expression changed.   He was studying me, but not for the state of my health.   “That story really stirred up memories.  Memories and questions.  People still wonder what the truth is,” he said.  We finished the transaction and he put his hands on the two six-packs but did not pick them up.   “You got any theories, Danny?”

I considered it, and then I told him,  “I think they’ve got all the facts they’re ever going to get.”  I pushed the credit card slip over to him, and as he signed I said,  “Don’t you think it’s sad about the fish dying in Tellico Lake?”

           

            I’m dreaming again.  Thanks to the retrospective on Jill Moscone, the dreams are back like an avalanche.  One keeps coming back.  It’s our last night together, but Jill says we can be together forever.   I have fortified myself with enough beer so I think it’s possible.   Leo says alcohol is the best anesthetic.  Jill is as calm as the lake, showing me the shiny blue-black gun.  She holds it up to the moonlight, turns it so it picks up a glint of moonbeam.  My heart speeds up.   I am feeling breathless.  I am so sorry for everything, I say, but she tells me no, don’t be sorry, we’ll be together now, and she cradles the gun to her breast with both hands.  Gently, like a baby.  I am not expecting the pop.  It’s just a pop.  Her eyes fix on mine for one last instant and then glaze over but do not close.   I start to cry.  I am hyperventilating.   I know it’s my turn and in a heartbeat we can be together.   The gun has slipped between us.  I start to pick it up.  In my dream, that’s where it goes haywire.  In my dream, I do.

pgallaher@copyright 2018

Published in Zone 3

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