"The Maelstrom"

It was raining particularly hard the day I ran into a childhood friend from the neighborhood.  I say friend in the sense that he wasn’t an enemy, but more or less a fellow victim of the times.  But time heals all wounds, as I am told, and where Eddy had been a gangly, ugly youth in grade school I had little trouble recognizing the strapping, ugly adult he had more recently become.

As I had said, it had been raining buckets that day.  It was lunch time and I was on my way back to the office from the diner on 16th and Lacrosse, a greasy little spoon in an ugly drawer that needs no further mention.  I was only a few blocks away when the darkened sky finally opened up on me.  I’ve always enjoyed watching heavy rains, and being in them whenever possible.  It rains a lot on the coast, and I’ve learned to love every cleansing drop.  But it was a bad day to stomp about in puddles and revel in pleasant memories, on account of a new pair of shoes I was breaking in.  They being leather and I being not so foolish as to ruin new leather shoes on a whim I took shelter in a bus stop that was handily nearby.

I sat on the bench, I suppose giddy as a schoolboy.  The water thundered off the clear bubble of a roof and pounded the pavement with that satisfyingly flat smack, like the sound of marbles dropped on concrete.  I was enjoying the hell out of it all, watching sheets of water crashing against the shelter’s dome and running down in rivers.  Impervious to everything except the cold damp air that is nearly always inescapable.  But God, I loved it.

And that’s when fate threw Edwin Archbuck inside the shelter with me.  He had a sopping wet rag of a newspaper above his head, which he threw against the wall and it made a nice wet flump against the plastic.  His makeshift umbrella didn’t work as well as he’d hoped and his light grey suit had turned to charcoal, the pink hues of his skin showed through his shirt, and I won’t even go into the state of his tie.  In short, it was an awful mess and his clothes hung from him like he was some sort of stocky towel rack.  Yet he was indefatigable.

“Jesus, it’s a mess out there!” he exclaimed with the breathless enthusiasm of one who has survived an ordeal.  It was then that I recognized the flattened nose and set-apart eyes of a boyhood chum I could not put a name to.  Fortunately he also recognized me at that moment, as a monster grin overtook his face.  “Jimmy!” he roared with some delight.  Not a lot, but some, latently made up for by the sheer volume of his greeting.  He paused for a moment, perhaps unsure whether or not his memory served him well.  The pause was short-lived as he confidently thrust a sopping meaty hand toward me.  “Jimmy!” he reiterated, “I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age!” 

Not quite remembering his name, I took his hand and responded in vague but pleasant tones.  We began to catch up.  His marriage, my divorce.  His dogs, my window box of tomatoes.  His gammy leg, my ulcers.  He managed mortgages at a nearby bank and - my own reminiscences notwithstanding - I found that he had gone to high school in Iowa, come back here for college, has no children, likes to golf, and myriad other wearying details that make up a life. 

As we talked, my thoughts drifted back to our childhood.  Our childhood; I thought back to the ass-kickings in the lot behind the abandoned grocery store, to the darkened alleys and the isolated places of our youths.  I remember being made a hell of a lot older than I should have been, a lot quicker than I’d have liked.  Dozens of such memories passed before my mind’s eye as we talked, every fiber of me wanting to know how he, Eddy whose name I could not at the time remember, how he dealt with the similar demons that must have haunted him.  But they must have!  I had to know, if only to know whether or not I was the fool for dwelling on the past, for malingering upon long-closed closets filled with dusty skeletons and velveteen ghosts.

Finally we came to a pause in the conversation, though the rain continued to thunder above our heads.  “So…” I began.  All hard topics begin with a drawn out so, in my experience.  “Do you ever think about it, back then and all?”  Perhaps he had, because suddenly Eddy’s countenance darkened.  The smile vanished and the brow tightened and Eddy could no longer look me in the eye.  I regretted this difficult turn in the conversation, but - as I said before - was driven forward by a need to know.

From within someplace deep in his personal crawlspace, a battered and fatigued reply escaped Eddy, “Time heals all wounds.”  Time heals all wounds, that dreadful shrug of the oppressed, the naïve psalm of the vanquisher.  Life continues forward, never ending like the rain above us.  The world breaks us or makes us stronger sort of a thing.  I felt for the wounds of a fellow traveler yet felt better that I was not alone on my road.

A short silence followed, no doubt spiked with a bit of bitter retrospection.  It wasn’t long, though, before Eddy’s grin returned in a sense.  The sense of it being that it was at least half what it was when he first saw me.  He was as transparent as he was brief.  It was nice to see me.  We must have lunch sometime.  I should take care.  We exchanged one last bit of eye contact before he turned to depart.  His eyes were the same as mine; I may as well have looked into a mirror.

“The rain is clearing, I think.”  He said it with such conviction that I might have agreed with him had I not known it to be a lie.  Such as it was, he ran off down the street into that interminable maelstrom that had descended upon us.  I remained on the bench and watched the rain crack against the roof and pour down the sides of a handily available bus shelter, enjoying the hell out of it all.  Knowing full well I would never see little Eddy, or little me, again.