Please Don't Go (6 page)

In response to Zephyr’s question, the fireplace went cold. The flame evaporated into a dark void, a Stygian cloud of black ash swirling and then settling on top of sizzling logs, as though they had been doused with a bucket of water. The assassinated fire had resulted in an almost immediate drop in the ambient temperature of the room. Zephyr felt chills streaming through his skin, over his bones, and into the very fibers of his cellular existence. It felt as though Death himself had entered the room, but was too shy of a demon to speak up and make himself known.

Zephyr estimated that the room temperature had fallen by a stiff ten or fifteen degrees. “What
was
that?” he repeated with a tremble, his eyes growing wide at Rattup, studying the man’s grinning phantom face, hidden in the new darkness that consumed the den, for answers. Charles placed the ruined water pitcher next to his empty lunch plate, wiping his hands on a dirty rag that he retrieved from his breast pocket.

“
She gets that way when I speak on the subject of love and courtship. She can be a terrible brand of...” he stated, moving his bold eyes about the room, as if searching for the proper words in his squared oak rafters, “Unstable?”

5.

“
Unstable?” Jackie questioned Zephyr, touching his face with her gentle hand, concerned that he could have been injured by the exploding glass. “
Who
is unstable?”

“
She
. She can be unstable. That was all he said to me.
She
. Next thing I knew, he was practically shoving me out the door. He said we would talk next week when I came by again with his next delivery. Said that I shouldn’t bother to argue with him on the matter, that he had urgent business that needed attending—those were his exact words. Didn’t seem all that busy when I got there. He was smoke screening the shit out of me,” Zephyr replied, dropping himself into the nestling arms of their ratty couch, Jackie sidling in next to him. She ran her hands through his shaggy hair, examining his scalp with her fingertips, scanning his face with her eyes in some overly nurturing attempt to declare him free of injury. “Stop it,” he insisted. “You’re acting like my mother did when I fell after she took off the training wheels.”

“
Sorry. You know how I am,” she said, faking a grin that was quite obviously masking her nervous-nellie instincts. “So he has a ghost? Is that what you’re driving at?”

“
Honestly, I don’t know what to think,” Zephyr stated in truth. “And the fireplace. I didn’t tell you about the fireplace yet. Right after the lemonade jug went nuclear, the damn fire went out. This wasn’t the kind of fire that just goes out on its own, it was roaring like a bonfire. It even had me sweating in the short time I was there, and you know how I like the heat turned all the way up to broil.” Karen rolled her eyes—didn’t
she
know it. Zephyr, since moving to Maine, had been nothing short of a sniveling baby about the frigid temperatures, cowering in blanket-laden corners when summer came to a close. Karen had made it a habit to monitor the thermostat over their first winter together, since her boy-toy had zero perspective when it came to proper indoor temperatures in the state of Maine.

“
Maybe it was wind. A good gust of wind hits the top of your chimney at just the right angle and POOF,” she replied, making a POOF noise with her lips. “The weather’s pretty violent this time of year, right after the snow melts and mud season hits. Nothing but flying cows and tipped over garbage cans, if you can even find them... if they haven’t blown halfway through town.” It was true, especially in “mud season,” which was a local term that irritated Zephyr, and so Jackie used it with regularity. It didn’t bother him as much as other Mainer terms, like “dooryard”, but it was up there on the unwritten list.

Zephyr furrowed his brow. “It was perfectly still out there, even way out on Holyoke Road, where there’s all those tall trees to block the wind. I could have sworn I even heard the birds chirping. No wind. No way. Something very forceful put that fire out, and it was done on purpose, I’m sure of it. That old man has a very aggressive ghost in his house.” He scolded himself for using the G-word. It made him feel so very ridiculous, to condone the metaphysical in any way, even as a rampant liberal. Such ludicrous jumps in thought did not fit him and he soon wondered what Jackie thought of him.

“
Aggressive?”

“
Just something I could feel on my way out. It was
saying
something to Rattup. I’m sure of it. Sending a message. And Rattup’s face changed real fast after the lemonade thing. He couldn’t get me out of there fast enough. I’m not sure I can even go back, because something didn’t want me there,” Zephyr reasoned, rubbing his temple. He leaned forward, retrieving from the coffee table the short story compilation. Charles Rattup had shoved the volume into his hands right before he had likewise shoved “Zipper” from his front door, waving him away with a reddened face, beckoning, “
Come again, will you? Just not today!
Things to do! I suddenly realized all these tedious tasks are calling out to me.”

Jackie was laughing at him.

“
What?” Zephyr snapped. “Do I sound ridiculous?”

“
Yes,” she said. “Yes, you do. You’ve been evicted by a ghost that hates fires. And lemonade. Sometimes that imagination of yours makes you sound like one of those frat row potheads. You need to keep your eye on that, or you’ll end up in a padded room.”

“
Stop it,” he insisted, flipping through his borrowed acquisition upon his lap, hunting for Rattup’s story.

“
I’m just having fun with you, sweets,” she leaned on his shoulder, kissing his cheek gently, leaving behind a sticky residue of lip gloss which he hastily wiped away. “Whatcha got there?” she asked of his book.

“
Oh, I forgot to tell you. He’s a writer. I had one of his stories assigned to me in one of my lit classes, but I never got around to it. Silly me, right?” he explained. He flipped to the page that his strange new friend’s tale started from, pointing to the header of page six hundred and seventy two, as proof. In big bold letters, it read
Breakfast in Galway
. And beneath that, in a cursive script, “By Charles Rattup”.

“
Paint me impressed,” Jackie replied, mouthing some of the opening words aloud, “
Her illustrious red hair was as magically baffling as a collapsing star I had once read about in a scientific journal. She was just the type of girl I had looked for throughout my Irish pilgrimage. A beauty, but a poisonous mushroom all the same. How I could have usurped such accurate information in that one initial idle glance, I would never know. Maybe she transmitted herself. Maybe I never had a choice in my falling in love with her. The seaside port of Galway had never smelled so fragrant in all its history
.”

“
I have to work on that Tolstoy paper for Friday, but I think I might read this first,” said Zephyr.

“
Little bit flowery for your tastes. No?” she queried him, in reference to the story that he had promised Rattup he would consume and discuss during their next visit. Though he wanted to read the gamut of stories in the volume, his work and school schedule would only permit a limited amount of quality personal reading in the time until his next visit, if that ever occurred at all. He could always mail the book back to Rattup, were he to sever their short relationship at its root.

“
It doesn’t seem so bad. Might be more of a chick story, but I can deal with it for conversational sake. If it’s in this book then it’s gotta be good, right?” he asked of his girlfriend, studying the black locks of hair that dangled in front of her face. He imagined that most women had names for such hairstyles. The Jennifer Aniston. Or The Angelina Jolie. He wondered who hers was envisioned after, but then decided that she was not that type of girl. At least her hair was not red, like the woman in Charles’ story. Red hair was a real turn off, and he felt as though he was not the only one of his contemporaries who felt that way. Karen, the gum-snapping bitch from Richter’s, had red hair.

“
Whatever you say, cowboy. But if you don’t like it...” she stated, tossing her hair to one side, smiling at him with her translucent laser beams of hazel-colored truth.

“
Yeah?”

“
Don’t tell him. You writers can be so damn sensitive.” She chuckled to herself and Zephyr joined her. Because it was so very true.

6.

Breakfast in Galway

by Charles Rattup

Galway, Ireland. It was the spring of 1974. I was looking for love, and I found it when I had given up all hope. It was wonderful and horrid, all at the same time. Here is the story that I have recounted inside of my skull on so many occasions, often keeping myself wide awake as though addled by vicious stimulants. Mistakes made. Bridges crossed. The blistered paths that I failed to predict. The devastation I caused in my throes of passion. It all came humming back to life whenever I thought of her.

Her illustrious red hair was as magically baffling as a collapsing star I had once read about in a scientific journal. She was just the type of girl I had looked for throughout my Irish pilgrimage. A beauty, but a poisonous mushroom all the same. How I could have usurped such accurate information in that one initial idle glance, I would never know. Maybe she transmitted herself. Maybe I never had a choice in my falling in love with her. The seaside port of Galway had never smelled so fragrant in all its history.

Before I could recall my better senses, I approached her with my satchel slung over my shoulder, whistling a gibberish tune to mask my nerves. “Excuse me,” I asked of the red-headed Siren, “But would you mind if I joined you?” I scanned her chilly eyes, with hopes of finding a morsel of compassion. I found none, but could not remove myself from her snarling jowls. Her face looked to me as I would imagine a Jack-O-Lantern, sunken eyes and a wide grin, something hidden in the curl of her soft lips—just ready to smile but never quite coming to fruition upon her face. She had that streak of something unmistakably special in her very proximity, emanating like a visible aura. She was a seed of hope in the veritable blanket of misery that had kept my journey, thus far, bundled to the hilt. One more try. Just one more try, and I would swear away all women from my remaining days in Ireland. “If that’s okay,” I added, already succumbing to my defeat, inching my scared little feet away, staring at the cobblestone streets of downtown Galway. If I ran at full speed, I could be down to the wharf in less then three minutes, smoking a stale cigarette and wallowing in my fruitless ventures.

“
Please,” she said, much to my bewilderment. Based upon her taut facial expressions, I would have surely chalked up her verdict to the demise of my supposed bravery. I had never been so skittish with girls than that spring jaunt through Ireland. I had approached a woman at the airport in Shannon. She had laughed me away, fighting with all her senses to prevent a seizure from her uncontrollable choking reaction. And at the Cliffs of Moher, I had struck up a wafting conversation with a likewise breath of fresh Irish air, dense and sweet. For some reason, I targeted the native Irish women without hesitation, as there was some exotic elixir nestled inside of that taboo notion. The woman on the Cliffs had reciprocated the conversation, and we chatted idly for more than fifteen minutes. At that point in time, a young blonde man with a more masculine frame than myself had approached and greeted us with a low wave. He swept in, kissing the woman on the cheek, as if to imply an unspoken ownership. I had been halted in my intentions, once again.

In this third attempt at some female companionship (was I becoming a vile predator in my approaches?), I had received a mixed reaction. A scowl, coupled by the words, “Please. Sit.” And so I sat. I called for the waiter to bring me a lager. The woman with the red hair did the same. “You are an American,” she said, not so much a question, but more of a statement. I replied that yes, I was indeed an American, and an American abroad at that. “Where in America?” she asked, her Irish brogue titillating my knee-jerk lust for her. I was a self-admitted sap for accents of any sort, and most particularly of the formerly Gaelic Irish and the British.

“
Well, that’s an interesting question. New England, for the most part, but not exclusively. Boston. Georgia. Maine. Florida. I’ve lived just about everywhere on the east coast, so I guess you could say I’m sort of a free-floating spirit,” I declared, possibly in trying to make myself sound more intriguing than I was in reality. I had not embellished, but if one carefully picked the information dispelled, then a certain picture could be painted that was otherwise not altogether true. “And might I ask your name?”

“
Aleesha. You are very forward. Most women would be turned away from such aggressive behavior, but I find it sort of endearing.”

I nodded, as she was correct in her perception of me. I had indeed taken to tactfully aggressive actions with women in the more recent history of my troubled love life. I had come to a conscious decision that there was no better way to sift through the lemons than to look at any and every lemon in my proximity with a scrutinizing eye. I would attempt a bomber run at all women who caught my fevered gaze, and without any definable restriction. There was no harm in loss, besides my diminishing emotional well-being and self-deprecation. If one was sexually defeated on a more regular basis, then defeat itself became easier to manage at its very essence- a sort of desensitization. “Aleesha,” I repeated her name, the sound of it feeling heavy upon my lips. I could not help but smile when I said it a second time, “Aleesha. It is beautiful. An aesthetic name for a breath-taking lady, if I may continue to be so forward.” I gave her a wink, though it felt heavy-handed of me.