＃９ ９

     Lt. Varnum, preferring these days to think of himself as a dawning ornithologist—“Lt.” synonymous with his infirmity, “Varnum” a knotted wood of shame—becomes something of a fixture at the mudflats. He is bellydown in the torn crab nets only halfway out to the sandbar drop-off, where dogs and their ultrablonde moms scamper in their own way, the nylon pressing a cruel trussed-chook lattice into his stomach that will last til his return. Viewed from the pier, and bathed in sunrise arterial red with wildfire particulate, there stretches a bulging fractal of cumulonimbus down from space and through the intertidal at this time pockmarked with bottomless reflection, Lt. Varnum prone and comical at the mirror axis. His lower half is all camouflage, valor, and his top a gauzy lightning blue thing—referring to it as a shirt forgives a crime—thunderstruck with dragons.
     Bum left knee out of the picture, being laid flat, none guess at Varnum’s infirmity; he rests on crossed arms rigid enough to convey something of upwards dog to the pilates-wise, a stiff marksman thoracic spine that once waited in reeds with only an ironsight and gum for company. Once, emphasis, Lt. Varnum better known among his troop as the Squire—a chickenshit piñata of a rifleman who’d lost it under assault, refused his head even an inch passage above the trench walls let alone the l.o.s. to aim and fire, and so spent the battle doling out ammunition from the false safety of a ceilinged section of the trench. Varnum’s little soup kitchen of death and hot cowardice . . . all far away now, his buddies decomposing across the flexed Pacific in fact in the very direction, to within a degree, that the Lt. points now through his matinal lecanoscopy, an unknowing compass to his own regret.
     Of this ritual, the Lt. permits few interruptions. Not standoffishly—a pup’s head tilt curiosity must be reciprocated as a matter of law—but his focus is strong and seems stronger still for the apparent mundanity of his selection. No gaze given to the periwinkles rearranging their tidepool furniture. Nor the barnacles huddled like bored penitents on their basalt cathedrals. There are gulls here, Varnum likes them, wells up with empathy at their wobbly legs, but they are swooping hardyheads further out today and keeping away from a mastiff determined to make their acquaintance. The Lt.’s universe is but a metre cone before him, the nexus of two competing wavelet fronts that crash together in constructive interference—all he’s ever been good for, too. Such liquid cymbals too delicate to foam as they collide, primarily sploshing over and into themselves like bathwater, but at the very cusp of their meeting a drop or two spray upwards to hang in the daybreak like blood, and it is these drops the Lt. is searching for.
     His eyes lie to him. He knows that much. The spittle cannot float above the tide any longer than a blink and before he can even lock onto the drops they are merged again with the clear below. But what he imagines he sees, through wet-stuck hair and above the crab net nylon aching into his ribs with dull accusations, is the whole sea and sky and earth rolled tightly in on themselves, kneading through each other, for each other with a kind of taut milkiness that resolves into ghosts of the Lt.’s troop. Mikey and Baz and Roo all there, tumbling, bedsheets in a dryer, nothing to say now that time has had its word. They are returned to the great—the aether bard that sung them heroes—incommunicable except through the Lt.’s droplet bijous that accept only thoughts of rest. Rest, sayeth the Squire. There is no reply.
     As the droplets leave their zenith, they offer to Varnum one final transmission—a Galilean seance of a sort. The mudflats have blurred all out and Lt. Varnum’s eyes refocus to them, readjust but overcompensate telescopically in doing so, his vision firing between the gulls and across the ocean, the Pacific, that monster, that bowed and roiling dark with its arrogance of tales too large for any shoreline to possess, of which the Lt. once was made to travel, seasick constantly encased in heavy iron, Baz whispering Christianities from his bunk and Roo sick with him, hard-acting as he were, late twenties kids unready for the dragging air of the mountains, the sting nettle, the strapburn from their packs that bled by noon, to say nothing of the fight and the directionlessness of it all, the random vectors at which death would reach you, popcorned metal in your leg or gut tweezed out by muzzle flash, lanterns pointless, any virtue of added light tamped down by risk and weight, hell, Mikey shot by cigarette glow alone and his jaw ploughed right off despite the small calibre. He’d hated Varnum, hated him the whole way through as if knowing the Lt. would come to deserve it, but still the Lt. holds Mikey's totally-gone cheek as he goes too, the cigarette burning out on wet fern and the gape later to be packed in with rayon—a burial gesture more than anything, what else was there to do?, and Varnum’s field of vision shoots through all this at a million miles until at last there is a glimpse of a humble stone sepulchre somewhere he never knew and god willing will not return, an unmarked one, the way it should be, til the next set of wavelets come crying in and the Lt’s. view reclouds.