Old HW waited by the back window, watching the neighbor’s swing set rock empty in the wind. He could feel the lack of it in his back pocket and even though it had only been a day and a half since she told him he had a problem—a day and a half since she caught him—it felt much longer than that. Weeks, months. “Addiction,” she’d said. “No more computer, no more phone.” So he sat dejected and tight. It was as if his stomach were an ugly maw and its teeth now scraped and ground, or it was as if the world, previously so flat in the background, had been suddenly animated. Life beat, loud and incriminating. Eyes. More than this it was the physical itch to reach for it. To pull it out and dull everything again. He was too old to battle such temptation. So he sat unmoving, doing nothing at all, for that was all he felt able to do. Sit and think about it but not be able to.
She came up from behind him, smelling like the scones she was baking. Flour, lemon. A hand on his shoulder and he turned and smiled. She told him that Sara would be there soon.
“I don’t know why,” he said.
“She’s driving up just to see you. Ask her about college life, her classes.”
“You’re right.”
“Want me to pack you anything? Are y’all going to have a picnic?”
He shook his head. It made him nervous that he didn’t know exactly what to expect and as he heard the sounds of her slippers shuffle back into the kitchen he looked up to the bare sky.
Sara was inside not fifteen minutes later. “Wear some good shoes, Grandpa,” she said.
“These are the best I have.”
Dot from the kitchen. “Have fun, you two.”
Walking from his front porch to the passenger door he patted his pocket for it more than once and for that he was embarrassed. Hope she didn’t tell Sara too much, he thought. She doesn’t need those details any more than Dot did. And as he thought this he became a bit angry at them both. The vices he chose to sink into were his business. To strip him of that choice was to strip him of his manhood. He considered asking Sara to turn around, bring him home, and then telling Dot that he had always treated her right, been a good husband, and that if she wouldn’t allow him this one freedom he wasn’t sure he could be that good husband any longer. Then he thought about their love and the pettiness of this rage and decided to try enjoying the afternoon. There’ll be time for sneaking, he thought. But it’s best now to wait out whatever punishments ensue. It won’t bring any more hurt in the future. She won’t know again and it’ll be alright because it’s the knowing that’s the problem.
“Want to listen to music, Grandpa?”
“Sure, kiddo,” said Old HW. “What do you have?” He had been eyeballing her phone there in the cupholder and Sara didn’t gesture at it like he’d expected, didn’t pick it up and unleash it, but rather just pointed at the glove box and Old HW opened it and pulled out a CD book. He snorted.
“They’re sentimental,” said Sara. “Pick any one you’d like”
He picked something strange on purpose, something with a bright picture on the front that he hoped would delight his granddaughter in a small way, and for the next half-hour they listened and drove while he thought about the woman that wasn’t Dot and the money he’d thrown away on the games and the constant stream of talkers who he craved to see again. Her young skin and curves on the screen and his name in her mouth and the ease. The world had been in his hand. But that wasn’t even the half of it because often in his life the world had been too much for him. In there he could snap away in an instant, be fluid. Mute the inner striving which had possessed him for the first five decades of his life.
They were almost there.
Sara said: “Grandma mentioned you’ve been having some trouble.”
Old HW just said he was fine, that he was looking forward to this time together. “I can’t even remember the last time I went out into the hills,” he said. “It’s been quite a while.”
“I’ve struggled with it too. The internet.”
“You come out here a lot?”
“All the time. It’s good for you to be out here.”
His own father had once said that the late hours of the night are designated for two things: greatness and depravity. Many men confuse their candle-burning action for one when really it is the other. So it had been that night when she walked in on him. Phone in hand and the computer screen’s light cast on his face in a cold revealing. His shoulders were hunched, sin in hands. “Oh lord, Jesus,” she screamed. The eyes that met his own were not those of his long-loving wife. Like gambling, like sex, he knew, the fall is often as thrilling as the peak, and so as blood rushed and the kind of panic he had not felt since younger years filled him electric, she turned and fled. Hell was coming. What he only learned later was that that had only been the climax of many weeks of her noticing. Afternoons and evenings, he sat reclined, bewitched. She said she had long noticed change in him, wicked change manifested like sickness. “Enough is enough.” That it was time to quit it. “Cold turkey, HW.” For him, all that time had been as simple and pleasant as dreaming.
Now as his granddaughter found a spot to park in the dusty lot, unease reassured itself in his bones. That itch, churning. And a quarter mile into the trail Sara wandered off into the shrubs and came back with a large stick, snapped off its ugly, uneven twigs and handed it over to Old HW. “Here,” she said. “That’ll help ground you.” As they walked she explained how the stick was good for him because its soul was easily recognizable. “Right now all that is is a walking stick. It has one job and you understand that job perfectly and by the time we go up and down the mountain you’ll have formed a relationship with that stick. You might even grow attached to it. Love it in some simple way, and that’s a good thing, Grandpa.”
Old HW didn’t understand a word of what his granddaughter said, but he liked how the stick fit in his hand and made each step more sure so he kept it as they traversed slightly-sloped switchbacks and forded thin streams, the wind abating behind pines and the air thinning like it does up there. A mile in they stopped because he was tired. He sat on a rock and reached for it in his backpocket and swore at himself, and Sara looked at him and frowned and knelt beside him. Placed her hand on his knee.
“It gets you because it doesn’t have just one job. Or if it does, that job is to make chaos, erase us in it.” Her voice was very serious when she said this and she looked at him and laughed at herself. “I know I sound stupid. And I don’t understand these things perfectly, but I have an intuition and ever since I’ve followed that intuition it’s been a lot better.”
He patted her shoulder, taking chilled and labored breaths. After a minute of silence, a moment of birdsong, they continued.
It was another mile to the end of their walk and where it ended a thin slot in the cliff face emerged from behind the trees and Sara told him to stop and look back. He did. From that vantage he could see trees for miles where they climbed up the mountains and further gave way to snowlines. “Would you look at that,” he said. “Now that’s something.” He went for it and realized that for the last half hour he had not reached back there once.
“More so than the walking stick, nature itself has spirit,” she said. “Every tree, every river, every mountain. I don’t think theirs is as great as our own, but it’s close. And we feel that when we’re out here. It’s as if at every twist and turn there is another friend or mirror and we can nod to them and acknowledge their existence as we also acknowledge our own. It heals.”
He nodded along, thinking about the confidence of young people, but he understood this more so than what she had said before. Man has known this for as long as there has been man, he thought. Writers and painters and artists know this. That’s why beside God and our own form, nature is artists’ most common muse. He did not say this because to say such things was not his way.
They took slow deliberate steps over the rocks, water trickling through cracks, its sound so crisp he could taste it.
“You’ll think you died and went to heaven,” she said, and laughed.
When the passage widened again, Old HW found himself at the bank of a pond encircled by cliff-face. There moss and lichen grew and etched on those blue and green stones were boot tracks and as he traced them the wind blew a tree needle into the water, its ripple bounding from edge to edge. “It’s wonderful,” he said.
“Isn’t it?” She was smiling, proud looking. “We can sit over here. I brought some snacks.”
They went to the north side of the pond where a boulder teetered on the edge of the water and she climbed atop it and then helped him do the same and then they sat, cautiously, and she pulled from her bag nuts and cheese and apples which she carved into slivers with the edge of her knife and thumb.
He’d never tasted fruit so good, so cold. “This is real nice, Sara,” he said.
She grinned, ate some cheese.
He took a breath. The stick in his lap. The brittle air. The sound of wind where it did not reach them. Still desiring the ceaseless talkers, the women, the promises of information and money and dullness. But his perspective better situated. He leaned over the edge and peered down into the still water and there he could see the reflections of clouds and debris stirring at the bottom; he saw his own face staring back at him, blurred and rippled like a memory, and in that spirit he identified something inimitable, a complexity he’d never be wise to.
Connor O’Mara is a writer from northern Colorado. He often writes about tragedy, complexity, and those small American personalities alive in the mountain west. His fiction has been featured in Voices, the Rubbertop Review, and theInlandia Institute’s online journal. Connor now resides in San Francisco.