Tales From the Front Introduction: Contemporary journalism dictates that writers should use the present tense at every possible occasion. Theoretically this gives the reader the impression that they are in the center arena of matters, regardless of how long ago the incident took place. In public speech, most people use the past tense to refer to the same incident. "Hell, it happened yesterday, didn't it? I remember seein' it just as clear as a bell..." I plead guilty to having paid obeisance to those totems of stylization which supposedly make me a more viable writer, including writing everything in present tense. Note, I did not say **BETTER** writer. I always take umbrage at being considered a contemporary "anything" with which I happen to personally disagree. I guess that makes me a little less viable as a writer, but I sleep better at nights. In this episode of Tales From the Front I have committed the writer's moral sin of losing sight of objectivity, another icon of literary success for which I no longer particularly care. This falling from grace somehow goes along with the original concept of this series, that being to discover, explore and interpret the experience of life for others. Somehow my experience of writing and life have changed, and with them, my perspective. Shadows on the Lawn The last time I saw Corrina, she was driving out of the drive, dodging potholes with waist-deep snow on either side. She had left Bill for good, and was heading for Oregon to stay with her mom for a while, taking the kids, the furniture and damned near everything else with her. Had I been wiser, I would have left as quickly as she turned onto the highway, without another look back, but I guess I was never made that way. The crackerjack house in which she and Bill had lived since their marriage nine months earlier, sat forlornly amidst the bitter Montana winter. Its windows, like blank eyes peering out into the fading light of the late afternoon, were now devoid of curtains; even they were gone. In one window, looking out at me, I could see Felix the cat, peering out at the madness and the cold. Inside, sitting in the corner with tears streaming down his face, Bill sat waiting to talk with me. "Can I do anything to help?" I asked, as I put another piece of wood in the woodstove. The heat was welcome, as the temperature outside was already well below zero, and helping Corrina put the car-top carrier on her car had taken all the feeling from my hands and face. "Oh, Christ," he said softly. "There isn't a lot that you can do. You've already done enough to help. I just have to get my shit together and get the hell outta here. That's all." It was only that morning had I got a call from Corrina just as I was leaving to go to Frenchtown to check on the promise of a job at the mill. "I'm leaving Bill right now." her voice, came wavering out of the phone at me. "I'm tired of his attitude. He can't get and hold a job and I'll be damned if I will go on welfare." She paused, as if to collect her thoughts. "I just called my mother and she will take me and my kids in until I can find another place to stay." "But...you guys just got married not too long ago..." I stammered, remembering altogether too well that I had been the best man at their wedding. "Besides, you know Montana. Nobody can get and keep a job here in the winter when the mills shut down. Even I am looking for a job." "This is different!" she snapped angrily at me, and I immediately harkened back to a time when her pretty deep-sea green eyes had changed on me late one afternoon. She, Bill and I had gone to a party where she'd had too much to drink and became ugly and brittle. "You don't have anyone but yourself to worry about. Bill's got a family to support now, and since he can't support us, I'll go somewhere else!" "But you can't just dispose of a relationship like that...I mean...after all Bill went through to adopt your kids...and then you guys bought that house..." "The hell I can't. I called my mom's attorney and he is filing the papers as we speak. Besides, what good is the house if it's in foreclosure? Huh?" In the background I could hear her daughter Aimee, crying as Corinna continued. "But, that isn't what I called for, dammit. I can't seem to get the damned car top carrier on the car straight, and Bill is sitting in the living room blubbering his eyes out. Can you come over and give me a hand, or do I have to call somebody from town?" "I'll be right over." Several hours and many bruised knuckles later, with Corrina safely on her way, I stood quietly, watching Bill, crouched in the corner, like a cornered lynx I had once seen in the high country. He studied his hands, outstretched in front of himself, occasionally looking outside the window, then back to his hands. Over and over, much like the lynx carefully examining his pursuers while he lay dying. I could see him carefully studying the options, as their numbers grew smaller and smaller, and I winced. "What are you going to do now? How much longer can you stay here, in this house?" With a dismal groan, Bill rose to his feet and walked over to join me by the woodstove. "I promised the guy from the bank that I would have my stuff out of here by tomorrow. Technically speaking, they could have thrown me out today, but they are trying to be nice about it all." "Where are you going to live then?" "My brother lives down in Enumclaw, Washington, and I am going to drive over there tomorrow, I guess. He said he'll put in a good word for me where he works, so maybe I can get a job. But I don't know what the hell the use is..." and with that he broke down once more, and hurriedly turned away, tears streaming down his face. I stayed with Bill that night, there in the empty house full of his shattered memories and dreams. We ate a sumptuous meal of Tidee-Boy's Greasy Golden Broast-R Fried Chicken and Tator Tots washed down with copious amounts of Colorado Carriage Pop Shoppe Soda I bought from the convenience store, and then crowned gastric suicide off with the last big pieces of a slab cake that Corrina had made several days before. Outside, true to my instincts, the temperature meandered somewhere down below the end of thermometer in a unsubtle sort of way. I went out and plugged both our truck block heaters in about midnight, before we both curled up in sleeping bags on the floor next to the wood stove to sleep. The morning dawn arrived bitter and mean with cold, and cast its vicious bloodshot gray eye over the landscape. This was a kind of frigid cold that beats on the windows, rips up the water pipes, wrenches and pounds and pries with icy little fingerlets until it finds its way into the house by any means. Little wonder when I tried to unzip the sleeping bag I could see my breath steam. I regretted the fact that I had not thought to stoke the woodstove really well before retiring . I read the thermometer out in back of the house and wasn't the least bit surprised that the temperature was down around forty degrees below zero. However, this house had survived worse, I was certain, and the wood stove was more than up to the task at hand. Within a half an hour, we had heat, and wearing our coats, we stood before the stove eating leftover chicken and soggy tator tots, with the cat expectantly standing by for the leftovers. "It got down there last night, didn't it?" Bill, shivering a bit. "Damn straight. I just looked out back a while ago and it's still hovering around 40 below." "Jesus, man. Do you think your truck'll start?" "I plugged both of them in last night when I came back from getting the chicken and pop. Mine always starts if I plug it in." "Ouch!" Bill yelled, as the cat came suddenly rushing up his pants leg, with her claws dug in. "Damn cat stole a piece of chicken right out of my hand." We both laughed as the cat, having been successful at her mercenary move, huddled in the opposite corner of the room, growling to herself as she finished off the piece of chicken that Bill had been about to eat. "Hey," Bill commented slyly as he got another piece of chicken, "Do you know anybody who wants a cat?" and nodded in the cat's direction. "I know one that's homeless, as of today. That cat was Corrina's pride and joy, but her mom **hates** cats, I learned. It'd make someone a good mousetrap." When we could no longer forestall the inevitable, we went outside, gasping as the cold raked its claws over our exposed flesh. True to its form, my old beaten truck started on the second time around. Bill's truck, a with a bit more recalcitrance, finally gasped to life, and we hurried back into the warmth of the house while both trucks began warming up. Bill avoided any further mention of Corrina, as I helped him carry his toolboxes over by the front door where what few personal possessions he had were already packed and sitting. We finished off the last of the soda from the previous night, and together hefted the heavy tool chest between us, on out the door and put it into the bed of his truck. We shook hands solemnly, quickly, and then as suddenly, as quickly as we met nearly 5 years before, he was gone, his truck creaking and groaning as it made the turn onto the highway. That was the last time I saw Bill, although I spoke to Carrina briefly at his funeral nine days later. According to the police report, Bill drove about thirty miles down the road, pulled his truck off into a rest area that was closed for the winter. He took his time. He smoked several of the little cheroots that Corrina always used to bitch about. He walked back into the trees a ways from the truck and took a leak, and kept the truck runningto stay warm. He sat and composed a long love poem to the daughter he never could never have fathered, but whom he had dearly loved. That was one of our secrets, his and mine. He made me swear, made me promise that I would never tell Corinna that he was infertile. He wrote a second letter to Corrina, a very lovely and cheerful note that spoke of how much he loved her, and how she pleased him so. Then he calmly put a .45 calibre slug through his brain to end the pain. After the funeral I met Corrina at a restaurant in Missoula. She and I sat there drinking gin and sodas until we both were all teary-eyed and half-wasted, and when she suddenly blurted out, "Did you tell Bill?" I hadn't mentioned a word of our secret, hers and mine, to Bill. That secret, a confession made to me hours ahead of their wedding day, was was still safe, despite the consequences. Yet, when I finally put her into a cab for the flight back to Oregon, standing there in the cold, with snow beginning to tumble from the sky, I couldn't help but tell her that it probably wouldn't have made much difference if I had told him that she too, was infertile. All Bill really wanted was a family of his own, or that all she really wanted was a secure place to live, but in a society filled with disposable romances, both ended up losing more in the wash than they came dressed to bear. The bitter cold and the snow of Montana hide many terrors of the heart, as do they in Eastern Washington. A boy child in me still has the rest of his life to consider the fears and tears of standing watch by door, waiting at the window, looking for the shadow on the lawn of someone who is no longer there. The man-child in me knows that I too, have faced the choice between the cold winter rains of heartache and the secret place past the veil. It is a lonely, cold and barren place.