The Last Day in the Park

Last Day in the Park
He slumped on the bench and he thought.  His thoughts were jumbled and jangled and disjointed, but what he had.  He watched the sky and  clouds, the wind and shadows.  He watched cars and pedestrians and  people in the park, and he remembered.  He remembered childhood and beatings and loneliness and fear of a drunk-again father.  He remembered a marriage and a wife and the noise when he came back to her drunk.  He remembered the times and the troubles and the drink, but he didn’t remember yesterday.
         He knew he had woke in the park because he hadn’t roused himself and here he was.  He didn’t know if he had slept the night here or part of the day.  He knew the day was hot.  He didn’t mind the heat.  He didn’t have to do anything but find a drink.  He did mind the stench of liquor and piss and sweat.  His odor strengthened in the heat.  But after he had a drink he wouldn’t mind that either.  He sat and he watched and he thought.
         The bench was concrete molded in slow curves and bolted to the ground.  A high evergreen screen shielded its back and sides.  It stood off a path going nowhere, removed from activity and shaded by oaks.  He stayed on the bench as the need grew.  The needs came, first for a drink, then to go to the toilet, then, again, the drink, all leading to the same end.  Finding a drink was inevitable.  The only question, would he go to the toilet or sit until he pissed himself.  And he sat and thought, and the need grew, and his chin sank to his chest.
         He eased his head up, and slid open his eyes.  He had to go.  Using the park bench as a crutch, he inched to standing.  His legs shook, his hands trembled as he shambled away.
Along the path, he leaned against a building-- the toilet.  He went in and found the urinals.  He stood, his head and arm against the cool block wall.  The grime of his hair and sleeve smudged the new paint.  He had faded out when a stream splashed into the urinal.  He stood, waiting for more.  His head fell forward and banged the wall.  He needed a drink.
On the sidewalk, shrubs, and fence, and brick buildings brushed his shoulder as he kept far from the street.  Lurching, then gathering his focus to walk erect for a few yards, he kept his eyes down and his hands clutched in his pockets.  He paused at each corner, not checking traffic, but gathering himself to cross with no supports.  These were side streets full of cheap-drink bars and Chinese groceries.  Traffic was local and thin; those in a hurry didn’t come this way.  He walked five blocks and turned into the drive of a liquor store.
         He approached the drive-through window and glanced through the glass until he saw the man inside staring at him.  When the clerk pushed the button, he asked for a bottle of whiskey, and a big bottle of beer.  The man looked at him, his arms crossed.  He dug in his pocket and pulled out a nest of bills.  He straightened out a one, another one, and a twenty.  He flattened the twenty against the glass before dropping it into the drawer.
         Now that he was here, the need was bad.  He watched through the glass as the clerk collected his order.  His tongue peeked through his dry lips as he waited.  Two bottles in paper sacks came out.  He fumbled the bags into his arms and walked around the corner to the alley.  Beside the dumpster he leaned against the building and slid his back down the brick until his haunches hit his heels.  He slid the paper down the bottle of beer and twisted off the cap.  His hands didn’t shake at all.  He took a long pull at the sixty-four ounces of beer, then another.  He let his eyes close.
         He couldn’t stay here long.  They wouldn’t let him.  In a minute or an hour the man would come out and say “Move on”, or cops would come and maybe arrest him or maybe take away his bottles.  He took another drink of beer.  It was cold.  The man inside wasn’t so bad; he gave him a cold beer, not a warm one.  He was hot, he pressed the cold beer bottle to his forehead and ran it down one check and back up the other and then he drank.  Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he squinted out at the glaring street, tipped the bottle up and drank and drank and drained the beer.  He stood, cradled the whiskey in his arms like a child, and shambled back to the park.
         The park had become busy, more people, more kids, more games, more noise.  Two people shared his bench, turned toward each other in the shadows whispering into each other’s eyes.  He wandered on looking for the quiet he couldn’t find in himself.  The playground equipment was full of little kids.  Their mothers scrutinized his passing.  As he moved past, they turned to each other and nodded.  Yes, another danger nullified by our vigilance.  Good job, girls.  The softball field set apart in a back corner of the grounds and was empty.  He scuttled into the tiger-stripped shade under the bleachers.  It was quiet here.  He sat, leaning against a post, opened the whiskey and drank.  He capped the bottle and leaned back.
         The dark mountains of his beginnings had surrounded a similar field, one hazed with time and dust.  He stepped to home plate in the bright sunshine of remembered youth and knocked the dirt from his cleats with a hardwood bat.  His County High School uniform bound his tall frame at the shoulders.  He plucked up the short sleeves and raised his bat and his eyes to the mound.  The pitch seemed to come in slow motion.  He could have counted the stitches as it rotated.  Man, did he hit that ball.  He lost it in the sun before starting to run for first. The pretty brunette who would marry him in two years jumped up and down in the stands as he ran down the baseline, his one golden moment in a gray childhood.

He convulsed awake his stomach clinching like he was being stabbed.  He snatched at the bottle beside him and struggled off the cap.  The tremor in his hands sloshed whiskey onto his lap.  Both hands hurried the bottle to his mouth.  He drank, the bottle clicking off chipped teeth.  He clinched the bottle between his legs and dropped his head to his chest.  The sweet poison glowed in his middle.  When the shaking eased he drank again, then recapped the bottle and melted back against the pole. 
         The elementary school occupied a patch of ground between mountain ridges on the outskirts of the camp.  Four rooms, each with two grades, sat on block piers in the mid-day sun.  Lunch was a square of cornbread and a fried potato cake, both left over from last night’s supper, and a jar of sweet milk, all nestled snuggly in the top compartment of his lunch bucket.  It was a miner’s bucket just like the one his father carried into the mines every afternoon for the second shift.  The boy’s was dented and the lid didn’t sit tight, but his Mom tied it on with twine every morning after packing his lunch in the top and filling the bottom with cool water.
He ate outside, sitting on the ground at the edge of the schoolyard with his friends.  He was a quiet boy, listening to the others joke and horse around and joining in occasionally.  His sister ate with the other girls at the picnic table beside the schoolhouse.  His younger brother was eating his cornbread on the teeter-totter.  He looked for them every few minutes.  He didn’t worry for them, only liked to know they were there. Soon the older boys would sneak off to smoke and, on a day such, as this might not come back at all.
It was a good time.  A time before a rock fall crushed his father’s leg and started his drinking, before the anger and the yelling, before his own drinking and his own problems, a good time.
He stirred and twisted.  The post dug into his back.  He smelled the cornbread in his sleep.  He lay over on his side, his knees drawn up, his head nestled in the crook of his elbow and his other arm cradling the bottle to his chest.
His first house, their first house was a mining camp house identical to the one where his mother and father and little brother still lived.  The bigger of the two bedrooms held their bed and wooden boxes held their cloths.  He lay on the bed waiting.  His wife came to him in a new, white cotton nightgown.  She had left the top buttons open and she looked fine.  She had come to him before, but not as his wife.  He had asked for her hand the day he was hired at the mine.  It had taken time to rent the house and buy some furnishings, a bed, a table and a couple of chairs.  Finally tonight, Friday night, after his last shift of the week, they had stood before the preacher with their families and now she could come to him as his wife.  For two days and three nights they lay together planning their life and loving one another.  None of their plans included whiskey. 

His eyes opened.  He pressed his body up, and leaning his back against the pole he drank.  He didn’t need to drink; it was what he did.  You woke and if you had a drink, you took it.  He took his second and closed the bottle, now over half empty.  He looked out into a day nearly done and heard music, not the hard music of the kids but soft music to make your eyes close and to take you away.
String music always brought Margaret to mind.  He guessed she still listened to it on the radio.  She had when he had bought her the radio for their first Christmas and she had the last time he had been home.  Remembering made him sad, and then mad.  He took another drink, and lay over on his side to listen.

He sat on the ground behind his wife, an old quilt under them.  His legs were drawn up, and she sat between them, a cushion under her, legs crossed in front and they both held their hands around her round, swollen belly.  She leaned back against him and sighed her contentment.  The first stars came out in a cloudless summer sky.  The four musicians from the State College played sweetly on their instruments accompanied by crickets and a bullfrog from over by the lake.  He had not wanted to drive over, and the forty-five mile drive home would be late and sleepy, but he could sit here with his woman and their unborn child in his arms for a couple of hours and she had wanted to come and she was happy.  She leaned her head back onto his chest, nestling in under his chin.  He breathed in the clean smell of her hair and let the string music carry him away.

He popped open his eyes.  The music still played, but noise from the street was closer.  The music drew him.  He pulled himself up the pole to his feet.  Staggering from post to post, he scuffled out of the ballpark.  He lurched across the grass, back toward the center of the park. 
The band played in a small pavilion surrounded by a couple of hundred people.  Some had brought lawn chairs, but most sat on blankets as he and his wife had done years ago.  The bench, where he had started the day sat far back, shaded from the streetlights by trees.  He sat and listened and drank.  When the bottle was empty, He lay over on his side.

Margaret and their newborn child were the only color in the stark white of the hospital room.  She looked up and smiled at him, and pulled the blanket from the face of their daughter for him to see.  He bent over, kissed his wife’s damp hair, and cupped his baby’s head in the palm of his head.  He was full of love and full of himself.  As his wife and child drifted toward sleep, he decided to have a drink to celebrate.  And maybe another.  And then another. 

A. P. News:  Police discovered a dead body in Shiloh Park this morning.  The man, found lying on a park bench, apparently died last night of alcohol poisoning.  An autopsy has not been completed but preliminary tests indicate a blood alcohol level four times the legal limit.
            “Enough to induce death in even a healthy person,” the medical examiner said.
Several hundred people attended a free concert in the park last night, but his demise seems to have gone unnoticed until spotted by a patrol officer on rounds this morning.