Charlie went down to the market later that afternoon. Outside the rain kept coming. Cold, gray, hard driving rain from the north. Winter rain. Charlie stood outside the market with his groceries, tried to remember what he knew he had forgotten, gave up and ran to the car. On the way out of the lot he remembered.
Prescriptions.
There was no one at the the drive up. He pulled into the lane and up to the window. Charlie sat there, looking at the rain. Not letting up he thought, gonna be a long winter. “Layla”, Clapton and Duane Allman, screaming riffs looking for the quiet inside the passion, was on the box,slipping into his mind, coloring an already gunmetal day. Across the the hills rose up in the mist. The driving rain and the mist coated the hillside of ancient cedar, made it a far off place, he thought, like the mists of Avalon, or the hobbit place or maybe the coast of forever. He thought of Sometimes a Great Notion and how the NorthWest Coast in the winter felt like a place where hard living met the end of things and everyone bunkered in to wait it out ’til the spring. There was anger inside it and loss, everything broken and drifting, but for all of that there was survival too, a hold out, hold on at all costs, never give a goddam inch way to go.
He remembered another driving rain, another hard rain in the big trees, remembered how the ferry rolled and the waves slopped up on the car deck. There was no horizon, just rain and wash and diesel roar. The end of the road, he thought, at the end of the world.
They were going to visit some place he had never been, a cabin on an island where an old school friend of Marlene’s, his wife, had taken up residence. He had met the woman before and liked her swagger, the length of her legs, the dirty innuendo in every sentence. Thought things might get crazy, you know threesome crazy… never had done that, but there was always a first time.
Charlie didn’t remember how it went that first night. They drank and drank, cheap stuff, raw, bad for everything stuff. Smoked some weed, did some lines, got wasted into the deep night. The rain didn’t seem to let up at all that night.
When he came out of the room the next morning the firebox was cold, the wood pile low. He put on a heavy wool jacket he found on a hook, grabbed his handmade wool hat, went out into the rain. He had noticed on the drive in that a little ways down the road there was a small side lot where there was some wood to be bucked and quartered. The lot was covered by dead-fall cedar, three maybe four big tree pieces, enough to keep the place warm for a couple of months. He thought, Hell, I’m a guest everywhere I go, got to pay my way.
He didn’t know it then or for several more years but that was the beginning of an ending. He cut the wood for hours, borrowed a pickup and hauled it back to the cabin. He and Marlene and the others got into it again and by the time they surfaced a few days later, all that had been right with the two of them had gone wrong, liberation had broken their bond, never to be repaired. The skies cleared briefly on the ferry ride home but their house, as if in a mirror image with island they had just left, was winter cold, they were out of wood and out of whiskey and very shortly thereafter they were out of time.
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