I spotted him like you might a bird through the top of a windshield; a man perched like a shooting gallery duck on the rail of an overpass. He looked like an easy target, or at least easier to hit than my car doing eighty, if you stop to think about the weight of a man, that specific correlation between velocity and mass. Measure that weight of probability, and if he’d aimed right, tried harder, thought longer, even practiced on a grassy verge before he’d jumped…
The last acts of a desperate relationship: we discuss house projects. We live in a dump—that’s how Owen has characterized this rented row house he’s lived in for eighteen months, me eleven. If our refuge is a dump, then we cannot feel warm and protected. At least, I can’t.
But I never got very far each week before the telephone would ring, and Fred McKenna—a slightly stooped man with sad eyes—would leave the practice room, his own trumpet in hand, to answer it. Or a customer would come in, ringing the little bell attached to the front door, and Fred (as we called him) would go out to attend to business, leaving the door to the practice room wide open so I was quite conspicuous in there, feeling naked with my trumpet across my lap, like someone caught in the outhouse.
A swollen grab-bag of bouncers, gangsters, hustlers, lady-boys, deadbeat English teachers and boozebag soldiers; the kind of moral shitshow that could’ve only come about as a response to the proximity and behavior of American military. Anything that could satisfy lust, greed or pride was bombarded at you from all directions in all kinds of scintillating, bargain-basement arrangements.
One cold winter afternoon not too long after, I asked the ex-marine at my job about it. I barely said the word. War. It is still hard to believe that we are in one, have been in one most of my life. Man we didn’t do shit in Afghanistan, he said, leaning on my desk. We were in one firefight, exactly one. The rest of the time was just standing around on bases. He sucked his teeth dismissively.
So much blood. If you’d attended medical school, like so many of your Ivy League friends, you’d know that the head bleeds profusely. You’d understand that this unstoppable liquid staining your blue fleece jacket and soaking your fingers as they pull and press together the edges of your wound isn’t necessarily catastrophic. But for now, you are ignorant. Something from a long-ago first-aid class tells you that you should sit, or maybe even lie down on the chilly ground, to keep the blood from pumping down as well as out from your head.