1944 (heels as hammers)

I walk by store fronts. I do not recognize my reflection. I do not know that lady dressed in wool, a brownish-green jacket with matching hat. I see her. And it is as if she is looking at me from the other side of the glass, from a world separated by time. And she stares, neither smiling nor frowning. Quiet as Tuesday night, sitting in a tent, drinking whiskey, spilling whiskey, rubbing the smell into my cheeks, mixing it with my tears, wanting the burning in my throat to consume my bottomless pain, to consume my flesh like acid, to take me to him. I wonder if that lady knows what I know. I wonder how she copes. I wonder if she'll join me for coffee, if she will listen, listen so intently that she absorbs the anguish from my words. Just once I wish she'd speak. Just once I'd like to hear what she has to say. Just once I'd like to be her.

The streets are almost empty now. A young boy selling newspapers on the corner. A shopkeeper sweeping, his white apron looking pregnant. And a few other ladies walking leisurely in twos, always in twos like doves, always chatting and pointing, sharing opinions, making judgments, looking animated. And smiling. With ease. They smile without effort. Something the lady in the window never does.

The morning sheds its warm light and the birds seem to retire to wherever they go past morning. Shadows take on an edge and there is the echo. Footsteps. Petit heels on inlaid brick. Always following, just out of sight. The heels of a woman. I know this because I know the heels of a man, moving with direction, stamping the ground with purpose. Like the sound of a hammer. The sound of something being done, for who questions a hammer. Who questions a man walking like he knows where he is going. This diffident echo was not that. It was not the squawk of a crow, or the crow of a rooster, but more a wallflower of a tweet, something heard but not seen.

He had walked like that. Feet, heels as hammers. His arms full of limpness. His eyes lost in the pain of a child who doesn't understand. A child forced into adult action, forced to suffer adult pain. And he wore his blood like indian rouge, like two brothers playing in the backyard, which surely they must have done not long before. And he wore it as if to say what his lips could not. Those heels hanging. Muddy. And those heels pounding. How would they know of that. With their smiles and pointing and laughing as if laughs were free and smiles were easy. They don't hear the heels. They don't know the echo, the sound of heels like hammers, the sound of heels hanging limp. They don't hear them at all.

But I do.

__________

She orders coffee. And a café au lait. One to breathe. One to drink, drown her throat, warm her belly. He had smelled of many things, of fresh turned earth, of wood and tobacco, perhaps the courage of whiskey, but he had tasted of coffee. His coal black eyes as if filled with a dark brew, her reflection, the cream, twirling in his eyes, rising and falling, as the coffee from a pot, pouring into her, into her whiteness, her vessel, her porcelain features and in the pouring, and in the filling, of her holding him within, the warmth, those coffee black eyes, two, as the two cups on her table. One to drink. The other to remember.

__________

The lady in the window. A twin sister. Separated at birth? Advancing in years, maturing somehow where she had not. Ahead of her perhaps, in life. Too far to call, voices lost in the wind. Maybe this was her way, to appear in a reflection, to say I am here if only . . .

If only. She never could get pass if only. Never could finish the sentence. What did that mean? If only what? If only she had not loved? If only she were not so foolish to think of love in a moment, in the time less than two dawns? Who arbitrated love, right from wrong, casting judgment from what bench? Upon what right? These smilers. These laughers. Always so happy. Snug as bugs in the cocoon of safe lives. A phone call away from their knees.

More coffee he says. I shake my head. Perhaps a fresh cup, he offers . . .

__________

Mary, she says. Mary he is calling for you. Do you know him? Did I know him . . .

She hears it now, those words, the way they were said, four words, whipping the air. The tongue cracking as lightning. Mary, she says again. Mary. And she reaches for her arm as it had been reached for, as she had been grab and shaken, to those four words. A fresh cup arrives.

Down the way, in her small town, is a war museum, next to the library. It smells of the past. Not as it was, but how it is now, past. The air is filled with . . . what is it, an air of distance, of a certain contradiction, a falseness in the way that hail stored in the freezer is false, in the way that a jacket from one's youth fits not the same frame in age. Still, the pull is there. An invisible string drawing her in where sight becomes scent and scent the night, wrapped in metal, the chimes of morphine as sweet as any injection. She knows the old docent. He smiles. Never asking any questions. Watching from behind the counter, his eyes glassing over as if his lids could no longer contain the weight of this place or, perhaps, the weight of her visits, always in green, always on Tuesdays, always alone.