NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Lou climbs down his ladder leaning over a butterfly bush against Diddlie’s roof and next to the chimney. He steps down slowly from the roof to the cement patio. I have driven over to pick him up for lunch, as previously agreed through a flood of text messages which had revised the time and place repeatedly over the last twenty-four hours. He has cleared Diddlie’s roof of last winter’s fallen leaves and twigs from a newly fallen branch. Swept them off the gentle grade onto a huge crumpled blue tarp spread on the lawn like stilled waters. He folds the tarp over the pile and weights it down with his rake and a spade.
“I’ll do the gutters after.”
He takes off his gloves and Australian straw hat with a brass kangaroo leaping through a dark sweat stain on the light brown leather band. Lou walks over and picks up his backpack to get a towel out. A northern mocking bird is furiously clucking at him as he wipes his head, but it doesn’t leave its perch next to the purple spread presented by the rose of Sharon trees. After he hangs the towel on a branch to dry, another mockingbird bird dives at him with its wings flashing their white markings in a dramatic display of offensive aerobatics. The bird settles on a redbud branch clucking at us only yards away. Lou leans over to talk through my open window.
“That bird has been after me all morning.”
“It’s too late for them to be nesting, Lou.”
“Naaah, they are just having some fun at my expense!”
“They are high on hibiscus.”
“You ever wash this thing?”
“No, it’s against my religion to wash the car.”
“No good for your paint.”
“Still don’t believe in it. If we get a clean rain, that will wash it off, besides this thing is made of fiberglass or something like that, which won’t rust.” Lou walks around the back running his finger across the back window leaving a wiggly line in the pollen, tree sap and soot dropped by aircraft landing and taking off up river. He holds up his hat as the bird makes a second approach. Lou knocks on the window opposite the driver’s side. I press the buttons to open the window and unlock the door. He tries the handle at the same time and the two actions cancel each other out.
“Let me in here. I need the cover Fred.”
He reaches in through the open window, unlocks the door and gets in.
“So I see Lou. I don’t have my air defense system up yet.”
“Fred, are we going to the H-bar?”
“Yes, unless you have somewhere else in mind. Is Diddlie coming, Lou?”
“She might meet us there. She’s out with … ah … I don’t know … She’s gone out though.”
“Good of you to clean off her roof, Lou.”
I backed the car out of Diddlie’s driveway and we coast down Oval Street past the Trip’s, or is it still the Trip’s?”
A fox runs in front of us with something dangling from its jaws. I break needlessly to let it cross the Wicket street intersection. It is mangy with a ragged tail, but fast, and agile enough to jump through a rail fence into a tangle of wisteria and holly on the other side.
“What’s that thing doing in the middle of the day?”
“Lou these are suburban foxes. They know most people are away during the day and home in the evening.”
“You think so?”
A lunch crowd fills the H-bar, but the receptionist assures me there are plenty of tables in the Quark Lounge.
“I don’t see her in this crowd Lou.”
“No, she is not here yet. Let’s go ahead. She’ll find us if she wants to.”
“It is darker than ever in here, Lou.”
“Might help if you take your sunglasses off.”
We settle opposite each other in a booth. Then Lou goes to wash up.
A gray haired man with wide hips and a white tea-shirt and khaki shorts walks past with a bandy gait. His pocket brushes the side of the table.
“Well, excuse me!”
“Diddlie, where did you come from?”
“Oh, out and about.”
She is wearing the same royal blue blazer as the first time I met her and there is a blaze of goldenrod on her lapel. She carries a small powder blue suede purse on a long thin red strap over her shoulder.
“That guy ought to be more careful!”
“Yes”
“So are you guys going to solve another of the world’s problems today?”
“I doubt it.”
“Fred, why do you get into these involved conversations? I mean what’s the point of sitting here talking about things you can’t do anything about?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like all that talk about Snowden.”
“All that talk about Snowden interested me because I heard other people’s views.”
“So what?”
“So actually talking about it is doing something.”
“Its not going to change anything.”
“It changes my mind. Isn’t that important?”
“You just live in your head.”
Diddlie is looking in her purse, moving her fingers deeper and deeper into it as if to try and find something tangled in the contents.
The restaurant seems to be emptying. The big gray haired man is standing by the table with his back to me facing the room, talking to a family as they get up at an adjacent table. Lou walks around them all to get back to his seat. “Where’s Diddlie, Lou?”
“I don’t know. Haven’t seen her yet. Have you?”
“Yes she was here a second ago.”
Lou gets up and looks around. The big guy has left and I can see the family from the adjacent table walking out through sunbeams coming in the bar through the big bay window. Lou rubs his face and scratches his thick black left eyebrow and sits down again.
“I woke up from a nightmare last night with a horrible realization.”
“Do you remember the dream itself?”
“No, nothing much. I was with my daughter before she shipped out.”
Lt. Waymarsh had been killed in Iraq on Nov. 25, 2010. The waiter is standing over us asking what we would like to drink. Lou doesn’t notice and goes on.
“There is no act of torture, carnage or sadism, I might dream about that hasn’t happened to some one … or may be happening right now.”
The waiter moves on having said something in a low voice I didn’t hear as I was listening to Lou.
“Where did that come from?”
“A nightmare, but a nightmare that’s probably happening to some one
while I am lying in a comfortable bed, or sitting here talking to you.”
I don’t want to discuss Iraq or the war. He will get even deeper into the grief he has been living with ever since Nov 2010.
“Are you getting enough sleep these days Lou?”
“Seem to be. You know I have been living under the illusion that the world was getting to be a better place since world war two.”
“There are now more people living in material comfort than any time in history. You might be right.”
“That comfort is coming at a very high price.”
“You mean environmentally?”
“That too, but I am thinking of the way our wealth has been made and continues to be made.”
“You’re thinking of economic exploitation perhaps?”
“That’s the way they say it on the left, but I am thinking about a bigger picture. I mean there’s more than one kind of capitalism. Why are we stuck with the kind of finance we have?”
The waiter is back and gives us each a paper place mat, glasses of ice water and asks if we have decided on our order. We haven’t, and he gives us more time in which we continue to talk.
“Much has changed through leveraged buy outs and the financial crash.”
“Yup, and technology has made a lot of that possible, and a lot of other things possible too.”
Lou pulls out his glasses to read the menu and puts it down again.
“I don’t need that thing. Always get a burger and fries with a side of string beans.”
“That’s right, with balsamic vinegar on them.”
“Yeah, if Mr. Hoffman still has that good stuff.”
The waiter came back again and took our orders showing his tattooed forearms below his short sleeves and gold piercings in his ears.
“Have you been away Lou?”
“No, just not been in here lately … I still don’t feel comfortable about the deal with Guderian.”
“When was that?”
“Remember, we walked up to Slips Lane with bel and met Steve coming out of Guderian’s?”
“Yes, when Lambert came racing out.”
“I don’t know what Steve was up there for but they approached me about going back to work with them.”
“You mean Steve and Guderain are in partnership?”
“No, but Steve does some consulting with them.”
“I had no idea!”
“No, well maybe I shouldn’t have said that. Any way keep that ‘entre nous’.
“Doesn’t sound like educational work Lou.”
“No, it is hush hush.”
“You mean security stuff?”
“Say no more Fred. It is all ‘close hold’ and it has a tight hold around here that’s for sure.”
“Lou, what are you talking about?”
“I am talking about something … about our country’s safety, I mean I may need a favor if you are up for it.”
“Be glad to help you out Lou.”
“Of course Fred, but I’ll tell you straight up, you are being used, and not just by me.”
“You mean right now I am being used?”
“Put it this way, once you get into contracting and subcontracting and sub sub contracting in the tech. business it is easy to loose track of what is really going on.”
“So alternative agendas creep in.”
“Hard to discern.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I’ve got a memory stick to plug in your PC for a second.
Then I’ll come back with another in about a week and plug that
in, and take it away. No one should ever know the difference.”
“But everything computers do is remembered in a sense.”
“That’s true Fred, but I’ll cover my tracks and yours.”
