Love & Darts

the gall of him; even uttering this line in my presence is unbearable. I hear myself say, “I suppose so, honey.”

  And then once he passes out, I leave for work. I don’t count the hash marks. When I drive toward work I just feel them pulling me in, closer, closer, closer, to that little hut.

  I read a note that my boss has left for me in an envelope. It says that I should not park my car in the driveway of the sales model. Someone has likely complained. Though why I cannot imagine. My car is parked there from ten thirty at night until five in the morning. Who could possibly care whether there is a car parked at the model during that time period?

  I’m not sure whether I should move my car.

  Where should I park?

  I decide to leave it for tonight and will call my boss tomorrow to find out where I should park.

  I clock in and start my shift.

  Hours do not help.

  What helps are seconds.

  I know that time is passing if I think about the seconds.

  I’m counting them when I hear the sound of familiar footsteps.

  There is one woman who comes to my booth almost every night. She wears her robe and slippers. She comes with a thermos and a radio and a deck of cards. Her husband is having an affair and her children never obey their curfew. She sits with me in my booth and we have a great time. She watches others pull through the gate. She writes down the time and then we play cards until she passes out in a heap on the cement floor. She has an air mattress that she stows in my booth cubby. Rarely does she bother to inflate it. When she does it fills up the entire booth. She sits on it like a chair with part on the floor and part going up the wall where the door is. It is hysterical. She always brings her stainless steel thermos. Sometimes she just brings coffee but more often it is filled with white Godiva liqueur, Kahlua, and three cups of vodka over ice. She calls her thermos the Stealth Bomber.

  We laugh a lot about the thermos.

  I have never known her name. Her address is 12488 Peregrine Falcon Lane. Her husband is William F. Fessner. She told me once that she kept her maiden name. But she never told me what it was. Interesting. I worry sometimes that I will read in the paper that a certain woman has committed suicide. It will be her and I will never know from her name.

  But we both like the brilliant red leaves on the Virginia creeper around the little gatehouse. We love how unbelievably bright red they are before that first frost, that driving October rain, that mess they become in the street once they fall away.

  MI FANTASMA QUERIDA

  With clenched pain in my chest and numbness radiating down my left arm I woke in my bed an hour ago and thought, “So it will be a heart attack.” If the morning sun were to rise over any other patch of water, then I would be there. But it does not. It rises here and rears back ready for the day. It is an uncommon thing. Swollen light waits, dormant, just below the surface. But it’s my time. I’m eighty-seven. The sun leans into her work. She does not relent and with a submitting grace steps forth into the deepest part of a purple sky. Why call an ambulance or go to any hospital? The sun, like a queen-child of kings and godless men alike, moves across a well-worn sky-path with confidence. When the night takes her, there is rapture.

  I wanted to call my daughter. But what kind of call would that be? Plus, I didn’t want to wake her. I’m in New Jersey and she’s in Denver. There’s a time difference and she only gets a few hours of sleep as it is because of the baby. So when the pain eased enough to sit up, pull on a shirt, and stand, I just muttered a prayer to St. Teresa of Avila for my daughter. Nada te turbe. Nada te espante. Todo se pasa. Dios no se muda. La paciencia todo lo alcanza. My mother said that prayer so often to me as a child. And she told me stories from Saint Teresa’s Interior Castle. Stories I told my daughter. Quien a Dios tiene nada le falta. Solo Dios basta. So that done now I just move from my bed, grab the door to support my weight, ease myself through three rooms and out onto my sagging little porch.

  In agony I bend over and pick up my little fishing pot with the knife, a couple hooks, some drop weights, and a spool of line. I bang the pot between my rocking chair and the window so my ghost will sense it is time to go fishing. She is deaf but senses something. The vibrations maybe? My scent? I don’t know. But I want her with me so we can go down to the beach, down to my little rowboat, to face what is meant for me.

  Sabby, this large white dog, bursts through the underbrush between the houses before I even call her twice. She is always excited to go fishing with me. I doubt I called her loud enough. I’m sure she just heard the screen door scrape the sagging porch roof and came bounding to me because of that. But she sees me, sits, tilts her head, then seems to know before I can tell her anything about what will happen. I stand sweating on the porch with the huge dog still staring at me.

  The neighbor lady used to get mad that I take her dog fishing. She didn’t think a purebred show dog should be out on the water in some old man’s boat, especially not some old brown man’s boat. But the dog always wanted to go with me. I suppose because we’re both Argentinian. After a few months the owner eased up, said Sabby’s fishing with me would be fine as long as I never took her out past the sandbar, in case she ever needed to swim back. My neighbor is a nervous woman and seemed to want me to know how precious a thing I carried. So she stood there next to me on the beach one morning—looking at the ocean, not me—and explained all the trouble of getting this special dog. On the papers, her name is Fantasma de la Sabiduría, the dam was Sombra de una Duda, the sire was Triturador de la Nube. My busy self-important neighbor doesn’t know I call her Sabby. It is fitting. But often I call her Mi Fantasma Querida, my beloved ghost. I wrote a poem for her.

  My beloved ghost, whose yesterdays are the eyes of God.

  My beloved ghost, whose tomorrows will be left over

  and nothing more.

  Even when the next change will be so lasting

  I agree with the wind that says, “Ever change.”

  Usually I say it in Spanish. It sounds better.

  Sabby does not have her ears clipped but severity remains in the readied shoulders and down deep between her eyes.

  The pain comes back.

  I can barely stand and think of just sitting for a moment in the chair. I know I’ll never get up, though. So I stand, lean against the wall of my little cottage until the big, white dog stands up and comes toward me. Months ago I trained her to carry my fishing pot in her mouth by its handle. So she grabs it from me. Her profound patience stills my mind. She never once looks away from my eyes.

  When the pain eases again we move to the stairs and take them one by one together. She lets me lean on her shoulders as we cross the beach to the boat and thank God for the high tide. I only have to push the boat a few feet to get it into the water. But. I can’t lift the anchor from the sand. I consider for a moment and then decide. I cut the anchor rope with my fishing knife. It is still a lot of exertion but not as much as lifting the deadweight of that anchor in the sand.

  I push the boat off and climb in. Sabby jumps from the beach into the boat and sits patiently on the floorboards as I fit the oars into the oarlocks. The sounds are familiar to me but she hears nothing.

  I used to be a fisherman. But I’ve been retired long enough that the longing for the smell of diesel fumes over saltwater is gone. I don’t miss the plastic crates of fish submerged in the holding tank. Nothing as recent as those years matters. What I remember is standing on the rocks near my childhood home fishing with my dad and brother.

  My brother died in 1973 right before my father forced me to come to the States. My brother had gotten himself involved in all that political tumult. There was a mob of protesters moving down a side street and he ended up crushed between a trash barrel and a wall. I never got all riled up like he used to, never got involved in the insurrection, but my dad still didn’t think it was safe for me there at home. Though why he thought I’d be better off living in his aunt’s basement in New Jersey I have no idea.

/>   But. He was elderly then himself. Wanted me to get out of La Boca.

  I miss those black rocks where waves slide back down into the sea like a hundred snakes. That’s where I stood and fished for corvina with my brother and dad. And I remember my mother taking both of us, my brother and me, on the bus thirty kilometers inland along the Rio Negro to Viedma for my first communion. I’d never seen anything so beautiful as the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mercy.

  This is pain like I have not known. But I’ll be with my mother, my brother, and my dad soon. In no time.

  Heather grows along the bulkhead. Someone—Nuestra Señora de la Merced, maybe, but definitely someone unknown to any of us along this stretch of beach—planted it here during the 1940s and it abounds in the spray of the surf. Like the ruff of a little boy’s hair the heather swirls and tosses in the wind that comes down through two tall rocks at the horizon. That whipping breeze hugs the cliffs and the sandy beach. And we smell the seasons before their time.

  I only have a rowboat now. The Reprieve, I call it. There was once a fishing boat and then a charter fishing boat, but they are both gone. One was stripped down and rebuilt for a radio station to broadcast advertisements to the throngs along the bayside beaches. The other I burned here near the heather. But this little dory does just fine.

  The rowing