Love & Darts

neighbor’s kid, this cute little girl, to use the flag box in front of the post office. It was a week ago. My wife wouldn’t have allowed it. But. She was with our three cats at the vet.

  I don’t think she’ll leave me. She’s mentioned it twice in the past eight months. But. Hopefully she’s not serious. I think she just wants me to get a job. I want to get a job, too. Her staying or leaving really won’t change how fast that happens.

  I was a chemist. Sort of. Ran gels in a lab until the grant money disappeared. The other two lab techs got spots in the department. They’re involved. They do all the stuff you’re supposed to do to keep jobs: play the musical chairs, put in five bucks for birthday cakes, talk to the professors and researchers about hockey. I’ve never been good at that stuff.

  There’s a thing, you know. Some kind of guy thing. I don’t have it. I’m not queer. Been married for almost twelve years. Just never figured it was worth spending a lot of energy pissing all over each other, jockeying for power or whatever like guys are supposed to do. But sometimes it gets me.

  I was talking with my sister last night. We were having a theoretical kind of debate. She said she hates being passive, resents it. I don’t know what she’s talking about. Except that I hate having to be some kind of hero on a stupid old-time white horse. Like it’s my responsibility to stop all the robbers on trains. That’s not my business. Why don’t they just not rob anybody. Problem solved. Plus, no one’s ridden horses in a hundred and twenty years. But. People don’t care. They still think I’m supposed to save the day. There’s no way I’d rescue the pucker-lipped damsel in distress tied to the tracks, punch out some bad guy, run along the roof jumping from one passenger car to the next while a picturesque steam engine blows whistle shrieks into the desert sky.

  I don’t know. All I know is I saw my neighbor’s kid, a little girl about three years old with gold hair that’ll no doubt end up losing its curls and shine, outside. She was dancing in a flag. The storm had been terrible. During the worst of it the flag, a pretty large one maybe four-by-six feet, blew off its pole near the cemetery. It got caught in the rose trellis behind my house. When I first saw her running like a bull through a toreador’s cape the sky was still purple. July is like that. The sun on one side gleaming. Dark clouds on the opposite horizon grudgingly moving on.

  God, she was having fun.

  Okay. Now this little girl next door lives under a strange mix of incoherent rules and inefficient supervision. I don’t really look out for her. My wife and this little girl’s mother are archenemies. I don’t remember why. I tried to block it out while it was happening. Conflict’s not my thing. But. My wife is basically right. The mom’s kind of a nut. So it’s not like I’m babysitting. But. I just kind of make sure this little girl’s okay out there—not in the street when cars go by if she’s running around out front and not falling down into the ravine if she’s spinning in circles out back. I don’t even think her mom would notice if she ran into the street or fell in the ravine, you know? But I do know that if I instructed her kid even once that woman would come out of nowhere to hunt me down. I can just see her with her big rack flopping everywhere saying I was way out of line and keep my mouth out of her family business. I don’t need that shit. I just think it’s stupid to let a kid run wild everywhere. Especially when she’s in my yard half the time.

  So. I stay away from the mother but me and this little girl became some kind of companions after I lost my job. Nothing dirty. I don’t have any weird thing for little girls. But. I make sure she doesn’t succumb to an accidental death without anyone noticing. It’s good. She gives me hope. Well, hope for a second before I remember no one else much cares. So. I’ve been known to turn the sprinklers on. To leave new beach balls on the lawn. Most days this summer I’ve watched her race across my yard. And I won’t apologize for it.

  Anyway a week ago after the storm that wet flag tangled in the trellis surged. And while the wind whipped the red, white, and blue material the little girl raced under it and around the roses, burst straight into the stripes as the wind switched directions and snapped the flag back. She laughed and screamed one or two of those really self-confident little-girl yelps. I had to smile. The sun shone through the colors and highlighted her damp gold hair as the dark clouds receded slowly taking the big winds with them.

  Humidity returned. The sky’s contrast drained to hazy gray. Her glorious flapping toy dropped to a deadweight curtain, so suddenly tragic—trapped—after just being so brilliant and bold. As if the little girl knew I’d be watching from the window she whirled on me and demanded help with an intense brown-eyed stare.

  She’s looked at me like that once or twice in the past. I’ve always stayed inside to avoid that mouth on the woman next door. But last week I felt as sorry for the little girl as she did for that hung-up flag.

  I thought of a lawsuit, of the neighbors worrying unnecessarily about an adult man and their little girl, but no matter how whacked-out her mother can be, the moment mattered more.

  I ambled across the yard, kneeled down next to that cute little girl, and awaited my instructions.

  “We have to help it.” She started to cry and hugged me.

  Women. Can’t hardly please any of them.

  For I don’t know how many years my wife went on and on about how she wanted a rose trellis. I don’t know what kind of grand scale she felt would be worthy. But she was always pointing out pictures from landscaping books from the library. What was I supposed to do? She’s the one who files the tax return. But I did what I could and finally installed one as a surprise on our anniversary.

  Shouldn’t have bothered. She was immediately disappointed with it. Said the color was wrong. Said it was too rickety. Said the weight of the branches would crush it. Said there was no point growing roses anyway. Threw herself on the bed in a fit of rage because she was too old to start training roses over an arbor in the backyard at this point. But I’d spent a good four hundred dollars on the thing. And paid a guy seventy-five more to dig a few holes, pour some cement, and figure out how to get it propped up. We might not ever live anywhere like that Amalienborg Palace she always talks about going to see but we’re not even close to too old for anything. So I started the climbing roses myself.

  I wasn’t thinking about any of that last week. I was just looking at this little girl with her lip all pouty not knowing how to help the flag. My father’s voice became mine. “Well, sweetie, look.” I pointed to a corner of the flag which had settled on the wet grass. “Don’t let it touch the ground. Flags are never to touch the ground.”

  She leapt to her duty and stood with her little arms extended far above her head; the flag wrapped wet around them.

  “I’ll get the ladder, and we’ll get it down,” I said.

  It’s not quick, you know. But my roses climbed that trellis just fine. You just tie the branches to it as they grow. That’s it. And the color of the thing doesn’t matter at all. During the summer you can hardly see an inch of it anymore. And it’s not gonna collapse either. Stood up in a storm that tore a flag right off its pole, didn’t it?

  I came back with the ladder but forgot my gloves. For twenty minutes I wrestled with the rose branches’ long, fat thorns. Ensnared material was everywhere because the wind had changed directions so many times. But when I felt like shirking my duty even long enough to just go get the gloves—let alone a big pair of scissors that really would have expedited the process—I’d see that little girl’s frame with arms still extended earnestly, with full trust about my words that the flag should never touch the ground. So I worked on. My wet skin burned from the scratches. I looked down at her. “This might take a while. Won’t your mother wonder where you are?” She was reverent and stayed silent, her head under the makeshift tent. She reached higher. I saw her little fingers adjust their grip.

  I shook my head. “Okay. If you say so.”

  But damn I wanted those gloves and that pair of scissors.

  Finally I extracted the thing a
nd held it. Together we stood near the trellis and the ladder holding the heavy wet flag off the ground.

  She started to get tired, whined just slightly, “What now?”

  How should I know? Folding the flag while taps played on a beat-up old trumpet couldn’t be arranged quickly enough to give an exhausted three-year-old a ritual tribute.

  My arms were poked full of thorn holes and burning. I rubbed my hairy forearm with a couple wide fingers. Whistled low, forcing air through my teeth, buying time.

  She kicked at mosquitoes.

  I said, “Well, now we take it to the flag box!”

  “The flag box?”

  “Yeah. They have one in front of the post office. It’s where you put old flags.”

  I put the ladder back and let her pick a special flag container from all the stuff in my shed. We didn’t ask for permission to go or really even think of it in the moment. Her mom would have said no for little reason.

  I drove carefully but let her ride in the front seat. I think it was a first for her. All these child safety laws with the car seats, you know. But. It was important that she sit right next to me as an equal. The flag lay between us in a wooden apple crate.

  She kept one hand on it.

  We rode through wet streets in silence. When we got to the post