Buddy Through The Woods
After a dinner of a cheeseburger, potato salad and corn niblets his mother brought to his room, Buddy sits on the front steps below what would have been a door if his father had gotten around to it in the last 25 years. Buddy twists the seal on the cap of his last miniature bottle of Fireball and downs half of it.
It’s just before dusk gives it up when he won’t be able to see through his binoculars to the white, side door of Richie and Tammy’s long red barn. It’s time for her nightly ritual, checking on the horses and the goats, who have settled into their sheds up against the barn. Sometimes when it’s really hot, she comes out wearing shorty pajamas and Buddy turns the binoculars away to give her privacy.
Buddy scans to the small, brown-paper parcel he left for her in front of the door. He slides the binoculars across the side yard to the house and sees her coming down the steps in jeans and a T-shirt. For a second, the yellow light over the door showers her with a full body halo. She strides - always striding - down the path from the house, ponytail bouncing. She crouches at the barn door, picks up the package and stands up, her hips easing wondrously back into place. She shields her eyes from the night-light over the door and looks in Buddy’s direction. She can’t see him now but waves anyway and tucks his package under her arm to unlock the barn door. It sticks and she shoves it open with her shoulder, dropping the package. She picks it up and straightens up. Buddy smiles. She reaches inside the door and turns on a light, unveiling hooks draped with bridles, their silver bits dangling, glinting.
Buddy shakes down the rest of the whiskey and cinnamon concoction, gets up from the stoop and walks to the back of the house. He takes two steps up to the sagging porch where five cats - a black and white one on three legs - gobble dark brown pellets from two green, plastic bowls.
He spins numbers on the combination lock to his room. Against the far wall from his bed, he sits on the black, leather front seat he took from a wrecked limo in return for a day’s work, gutting cars at Cosmello’s junk yard just down Main Street from the boarded-up Trail Diner, which each year loses more of its nostalgia on its way to being an eyesore.
Buddy leans back and re-reads the opening chapter of the paperback book she’d given him. He’d searched and found that it was written a long time ago by John D. MacDonald, who wrote 21 novels featuring big, raw-boned, square-jawed, amateur detective, Travis McGee, who lives on a houseboat in a Fort Lauderdale marina, packed with party boats, strewn with women in bikinis. Would Tammy like to be in Florida, wearing a bikini? That would be something to see.
Buddy told Tammy about reading the book she gave him and she splashed him with that smile that always warmed him all over, like a Fireball for breakfast. She said she’d read just the one McGee book - “Nightmare in Pink.” Buddy mailed away for the rest of the series, each book a color in its title. Every two weeks Buddy leaves Tammy a new one and she gives it back with underlined parts she really liked. He's read those parts a zillion times.
“You remind me of Travis McGee. “He was a magnet for women, too,” She said, grinning that day she handed the book back to him, her eyes sparkling. For him.
Most nights before drifting off to sleep, Buddy plays back those words. “You remind me ….”
