“Then why try so hard to go back? Just to run faster to stay ahead, is that it?”
I was going to launch into my usual explanation of stagnating in a small town versus the excitement of working out of the biggest city in the state, in a newspaper office that was the hub of the news media in the region, but with her looking at me and the quiet stillness of the night air, well, I just shrugged.
“Tell you the truth, Chief, I don’t rightly know.”
She nodded. “You know, this is a nice place. If you give it a chance. You ever think of that?”
I didn’t reply, and we sat there for a few more minutes, and then we both put our empty ice cream mugs on the floor of the deck. I looked at her and she looked at me, and I spotted her hand, softly resting on the armrest of the lawn chair. I reached over and grasped it, and in a very confused few seconds, she ended up in my lap.
Long, long minutes later, we both came up for air, my lips tingling and my skin so sensitive I swear I could feel the rise in temperature around us.
Both of my hands were around the back of her neck, and I gently pulled her down towards me. “Not to sound too forward or anything, but is there a chance I might pay you back for dinner with breakfast anytime soon?”
“Mmm,” she said. “How does tomorrow sound?”
Which is what I did that morning, and for many mornings after that. Along the way Rita and Monty and myself actually started talking to each other again, as if nothing had ever happened between us. It felt fine, though I found I did miss those Tuesday-morning phone calls, which had immediately stopped. Over the summer and through the fall, I did a lot more stories for the Granite Times, but none that would have been as exciting as the PW camp story.
I suppose I could have brooded over that, but I was too busy during those months, working in my apartment, unpacking all of those boxes, putting things away, sometimes with Connie’s help.
I finally felt good. Like I belonged. Like I had made the right call.
Copyright © 2006 Brendan DuBois
Ice Cube Trey
by Terry Lerdall-Fitterer
Copyright © 2006 Terry Lerdall-Fitterer
Whither Columbus
by Gary Alexander
A native of Washington state, Gary Alexander has the kind of imagination that takes him all over the world. Having spent a year in Viet Nam, he decided to invent a Pacific rim country for a series of novels featuring a police superintendent, the inimitable Bamsan Kiet. Like this new story set at a conference in Spain, the Kiet books are full of humor.
I had a hunch that the Christopher Columbus Symposium wasn’t getting off to a real nifty start when one Ph.D. splashed a glass of perfectly good wine in the face of another Ph.D.
“Did you see that?” I asked Darla.
She shrugged, as ho-hum blasé as everybody else at this cocktail party. They’d also seen the two eggheads square off, voices rising, then tsk-tsked after the wine toss and went back to their gossip. This was normal college-professor behavior? Jeez, you’d think we were at a hockey game.
Where we were was the banquet room of our Madrid hotel. This get-together was the kickoff of the symposium. Yours truly and my Darla and a dozen others are gonna hop an ultra-high-speed train to Seville in the morning, to investigate whether ol’ Chris’s bones actually are at their big cathedral. The rest of the symposiumites are joining us down there.
Get this. Darla and the gang are attending on grants. Free cash money. Yeah, no kidding. They’re being paid to hang out for a week, then go home and write long-winded papers saying, well, uh, er, maybe they’re his bones, maybe they ain’t.
“Do you have a problem with that?” she’d asked me.
Since I was able to tag along on cut-rate airfare, and my grub and booze was on the house, my answer had been a resounding, “Hell no, I don’t. Research has gotta go forward in order to make the world a sweller place.”
Darla said, “A confrontation at some level between Chandler Bryce and Riley Neil was inevitable. Bryce is adamant that Columbus’s bones are at the Catedral de Sevilla and Neil is equally convinced they aren’t. They’re fanatical on the issue and there isn’t an ounce of compromise in either man.”
Riley Neil and Chandler Bryce, wine slinger and wine slingee. Two overeducated pointy-heads with last names for first names and first names for last names. That’s some heavyweight baggage to begin with. They were in their forties and had wire-rim glasses. They wore beards and those pants with the pockets up and down the sides. They could’ve been twins, except that the guy who tossed the wine was thin and short. The one with red stains was pear-shaped and a head taller. He’d gone stomping off out of the room, while the smaller guy took his empty glass to the bar for a refill, a little smirk on his face.
“Which one’s been shooting off his mouth that he has these rare — whatchamacallit — documentationals?” I asked.
“Riley Neil. He claims to have conclusive proof that Columbus’s bones are no longer in the Seville cathedral. He’s going to present his evidence at the symposium. He claims that Francisco Franco, Spain’s dictator, gave the bones to Benito Mussolini during World War Two. Christopher Columbus was Genoese. He was born in Genoa in 1451. Mussolini wanted his bones home. Franco was rewarding Il Duce for his support in the Spanish Civil War and for fending off Hitler’s efforts to make Franco side with the Axis in World War Two.