BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 78

JULY 2012

DAVID AND KALI

I appreciate the deck. Greatly. It's amazing what you can get done if people think it will benefit them. We just installed a small plaque stating the craftsman who built it and keep his cards available. It provides me a good place for morning coffee in the sun, evening beverages in the shade. And it's out of the wind for the most part.

But it does face the road, so unless I want to run from passersby, I get to be part of the scenery, a target of the gawking. It's a rare enough occurrence, though. One I can live with.

I hear the motorcycle distinctly as it clears the last hump on the oiled road, though I knew something was coming a minute earlier—the noise rising from another crest in the road further north, before disappearing in the trough prior to the final rise. Once the cycle hits the cattle guard at the pavement's end it's too late for me to depart without looking foolish. I sip my coffee and wait it out.

If I were fascinated by motorcycles I would know the make before it got to me, but machines have always bypassed my interest. I understand the cycle aficionado's love of detail, though, that curious trailing down a unique rabbit hole—sports statistics were my obsession as a youth, but machines, be they snowmobiles, tractors or vehicles, never piqued my interest.

It slides into the parking lot directly in front of me. Helmet, leathers, gloves, make the rider unidentifiable. He gets off, pulls the gloves, unzips the jacket, and once off the cycle doffs his helmet.

He is a she. The hair gets a shake and two hands go through it, then she flips her head back. Though the face has changed just as mine has, twisted by the decades, I recognize it.

Kali.

She instantly apologizes for the weight gain, I shrug, gesture to take note of my own. She scoffs, considering my change trivial compared to hers.

Typically, when a person is surprised, the strongest emotion steps forward before the brain can exercise censorship, but this in an atypical moment. A lot of thoughts and sensations pass through my mind, stay and leave, mix and isolate, too fast for any particular one to win favor.

Long time no see, she says. Her voice is still birdlike so I assume she hasn't been a smoker. Mormonism may have had something to do with that. She steps up onto the deck.

Am I outraged? Angry? Glad to see her? Sorrowful? Spin the wheel, pick one. Certainly it's spinning me.

She takes a seat, uninvited, across from me at the redwood table. You do recognize me, don't you? she asks.

Apparently there will be a time gap in communications when space travel comes to be, between say, Mars and Earth. A similar one occurs here. Yes, I do, I finally say. I assume my voice is drained of feeling, since that's my intent.

But I cannot assess how I'm being seen, the usual way of adjusting one's responses. What I get, from her demeanor, is that yesterday was up on the Butte, 1980 something, and nothing has changed between us since that time. The way we adjudge that gap differs, apparently, and I don't really want to negotiate its meaning—any response at all is an engagement, an admission of relationship, of dependency. This is a wound I've no desire to open—I remember the recovery too well, moreso than the original damage which I likely have repressed.

Politeness seems an option, says Grace Johannson's voice channeling through me. But only for a moment, for I am no more interested in having Kali interpret an offer of a cup of coffee as an invitation to stay than I am having missionaries in. My eyes go to the motorcycle. Honda Goldwing. It means nothing to me.

Not quite a Kawasaki 80, she says.

No, I say. I hadn't even known that's what she rode up the Butte. I hadn't paid that close of attention.

My frozen terseness remains. I am baffled. If I spoke, I would be flustered. I would be lying, whatever I said. No words have yet been invented to contain what's in my head. She looks at me weirdly, cocking her head, and just talks. As was her way, I remember. A lulling New Age drone, comforting to me at one time but no doubt annoying to others.

She is taking care of her mother in Blackfoot, who has dementia. Her father is dead and her brothers are far enough away, in both distance and interest, that the task has fallen to her—after all, she's a woman, a Mormon woman I would remind her, it's her job. Her husband is a bigwig engineer at Boeing in Seattle and has to stay for work, not that he's interested in joining her in the enterprise. This she says with light sarcasm.

I listen, but barely, pick up instead the lilt of her voice, the movement of words, cadence, while my attention drifts to the field of activity—non-activity, to be more specific—surrounding us. It's quiet, as usual, the vista hangs at a distance, the sky is vast and cloudless, and then there's this: Kali, pouring cement into a gaping hole; Kali, trying to bulldoze a leak like the crazy operator just before the Teton Dam broke; Kali spraying a garden hose on a warehouse fire. The images make me laugh.

And I am unable to quit.

She stops babbling. Now she is perplexed, maybe unsure if she should be offended or start laughing, too. I must seem like a madman.

Her momentary show of vulnerability elicits not the nurturing instinct I might otherwise imagine having but an inclination to strike. Then, I feel defiled when I recognize that internal evil, my sense of self tainted by the revelation I have a glaring, distasteful flaw.

You shouldn't have come, I say, my laughter quelled, a fire doused. My tone is spiteful.

My words land. She looks stricken. Freezes. She gets up slowly, uncertainly, perhaps expecting an apology or reversal of sentiment. I can smell the past, taste the past, hear the past, see it—like deja vu, prescience, dreams, it seeps through the cracks, the present unable to maintain itself, an ill-fitting set of blinds letting the light in at the edges, a poorly set door allowing wind through at the jamb.

She turns. Her mouth opens halfway and then closes again. A fish out of water, desperately gulping. She wants to fashion a statement, maybe wants it to be perfect, maybe finds herself unable to convey what she wishes to say. Good, I think, join the crowd. A sense of smugness comes to me, as if I have achieved revenge, extracted a portion of the debt I am owed. I enjoy it for the shortest slice of time, shame of having that reaction soon overwhelming it.

She pulls a card from her pocket and sets it on the table. My number, she says.

I nod, concurring.

She gears up and leaves, never looking back at me. I watch her leave and when the motorcycle engine's noise disappears I breathe out, it seems, for the first time in minutes, though I know it couldn't be that long since I took a breath. My ears are ringing. I hear a tapping noise, look around but cannot find its source, until I realize my hands are shaking, my thumb banging wildly against the table top.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston