Day in Red

                I remember his face and his hair. I remember how he moved. There was something unknowingly wise about it, yet he always felt like he wasn’t hip enough. He used to ask Chris advice on how to dress, what he should wear that night. He complained that no one had told him his hair was cut too much like a kid’s. He just wasn’t hip, but I always kind of liked that.
         Darren thought he wasn’t in the know about things like music’s cutting edge and fashion. He didn’t know a lot about how people worked and he didn’t know himself. But he knew something.
         Maybe it was his photographic memory or that he was good at math. Maybe it was that he could write a story.
         Maybe it was the time he noticed the red sunset that sent red light through the red autumn trees that covered everything and changed everything; the car we were in, the pace of our breathing, shadows and sounds, and the story Darren’s girlfriend-in-tow was telling. I can’t even remember what she was saying, and no one else probably could either. But I’m sure we’d all remember that red.
         Mary the girlfriend might remember it as something that took away from her story. She didn’t want to admit that it was better. Chris and I knew it was great. There would never be anything like it again. We loved Darren for pointing it out, daring to exclaim about it and risk Mary’s angry look. The wonder just came out of him naturally. He couldn’t help knowing it was more important than later arguments or worrying about money or will we screw later or won’t we. He knew it was more important than us, than all of us, and it was important to share it, to stop what we were doing and saying and look together and know we were looking at it. Hell, we should have stopped the car and gotten out in all that red but Mary was there looking all antagonized and Chris and I didn’t say anything. We just looked and looked at the blazing scene and didn’t ask Mary what she’d been talking about at all because it would only have ruined the communion that I know had happened between the three of us again. In that small moment I knew it was still only the three of us and Mary was just an afterthought, a reminder of the blindness of my leaving for West Coast dreams, as if that could be home. Today the sky and the trees in its light told me differently. Now Mary was trying to chatter the warm light away, just because she wouldn’t sink into the moment with us. Darren didn’t mean to, but his listening to the light-scape instead of her had transformed her into some kind of foreign thing. She didn’t belong. Then I realized where she stood with him, where I sood with him and where this entire rolling plains and countryside of red trees and golden fields stood with all of us.
         She had him in Waverly and she had him in bed but I had him in that sunset, in those trees, on those sloping country roads. To her it was just the roads outside town where that one kid had gotten hit and she kept on wanting Darren to slow down. But it’s too hard to move slow when you’re out in all that open and the road just keeps going to nowhere in particular while the hills take you up and the dips make your stomach fly all excited and happy, no restlessness now. You’re doing what needs to be done: moving together, in all that red light.