jamie doom

He was moving along quickly in the thick, dripping forest, and all the sounds were his. His breaths were rhythmic and wrenching, and his feet were pounding to the quick, scant beats of his heart. All the sounds were his, and now he was remembering.

Gnats were tickling his neck and sticking to the hair matted against his ears. His skin was shiny and slick from sweat and from the rain drenched oak leaves, mountain laurel and ferns that slapped his legs, torso, and arms, from time to time, mixing the moisture. So, arms raised, elbows out, he slid through the green while thinking about a white-haired lady with blue, blue eyes. He hadn’t seen her in three years. He and his memories were free to wander in the woods. So they did.

Some time ago he had waited tables at one of the busiest restaurants in Nashville. It was the type of place country music stars went to be seen. The runner didn’t know much about country music. Big hair and rhinestone shirts always made him smile. So the tips were pretty good, and he was pretty good at serving people. Out of all the people he served, she was the one he remembered the most. He was twenty-three, and she was seventy-something; but it was immediately evident, that by some cosmic mistake or oversight, she had been born too early, or he had been born too late.

Each day she came to his table alone to speak and to think. Her eyes became younger while she told him of jazz and travel and books and art. They argued and agreed while she sipped wine and pretended to eat. They drew quick conclusions from a world that moved quickly, but clearly, around them. Then she would often leave suddenly, having to get back to the hospital where her second husband was fighting cancer.

She always came before he became busy with the other customers, and when she left a million possibilities and images were swirling around her barely touched sandwich. Our young runner loved talking with the bright-eyed lady. He loved her life, and he clung to her stories and made them his stories. She introduced him to Coltrane, Pollock, and Hemmingway. They converged on ideas and thoughts with an inspired desperation. Sentences were finished in unison. Suddenly what he read, and what he thought and what he did…mattered.

She told him Camus said a man who has lived one day on the earth has enough memories to sustain his brain for an eternity in prison. The runner thought of Camus now while he ran and what had ever become of the old lady, and her eyes, and her dying beloved. What did she remember? What did she see when her eyes weren’t looking at anything?

He came to a clearing. The trees that rimmed the clearing seemed larger than all the others, and he noticed that it wasn’t raining above the trees only under them. He stopped for a moment to tie his shoes and noticed two squirrels chasing each other around the circle of poplars ringing him. The racing squirrels jostled a small branch from a skinny poplar loose, and it landed beside his just-tied shoe. He sighed before getting back to his run. There was more. Like most of his memories, this one was tainted.

The last day he was to be working in that distant town, she came holding the arm of her husband to say goodbye. They sat at his table, smiling proudly and watching him work. And they communed, the runner and the husband, like two men in love with the same things.

And when she excused herself to the bathroom, the runner stood talking to the husband. When each was sixty-four years old they’d met at a jazz club in Chicago. And now despite cancer, despite age, he was whole. He was alive with her. Before the white- haired lady returned from the restroom, old, weak fingers shoved a fifty-dollar bill deep into a young, sweaty hand.

“Thanks for taking care of her, while I’ve been in the hospital.”

That day she had written her address and phone number on a napkin. He had made promises to call and to write. They had hugged, and he and the old man had clasped hands again while looking deep into each other’s eyes.

The runner balled his fist. His fingers were steaming and the sweat poured from his hair into his eyes, making them sting. Spider webs kept sticking to eyelashes as he ran.

He had bragged that day, to his restaurant friends, about getting money from the old man. He had even lied to those friends about the amount, saying it was a hundred dollars. And he had never contacted the lady and her husband. And these beautiful strangers that he loved had believed him to be an honest young man: an honest, nodding young man who had listened to the way the world had sounded and had understood.

And now he ran through woods alone, and his calves burned and the only sounds were his. It was still raining under that lush canopy–raining silently with each gentle breeze.