Diane Bonavist ~ writer

My day began with two “tender mercies of the Lord,” as our scripture calls those unexpected visitations of grace. First, the coyotes. They came along the shoreline at daybreak, when the sky was like the head on a blackberry ice-cream soda, sniffed around the gazebo in front of the big salt box house, then loped off toward the laurel thicket.

Coyotes roam over most of Cape Cod. I read about them at the local library, in the days before I caught a look at myself in the glass display case near Reference and knew I looked too reddened, too weathered. I’d seen that observation in the librarian’s eyes, too. Homeless. Except I’m not exactly; I’m a squatter. And like a junkie who thinks as long as he isn’t shooting up, he isn’t addicted, I think as long as I’m not living in a shelter, I’m not a homeless veteran. When I’m feeling bigheaded I can almost convince myself that I’m at least twice-removed from being a cliché because I’m squatting on a boat.

All up and down the tidal river the summer homes are closed for the winter, their moorings empty, their big boats put in dry-dock. I’ve seen them in the marinas near town, shrink-wrapped in sheets of white laminate. They lie cradled like hapless diapered babies made to come out of the water. 

This place makes me want to weep with thanks that the world can contain such material abundance, and sorrow that it traps us, and distress that it is not mine. My life is anti-abundance, though not without blessings. First the coyotes, then an answered prayer, to communicate with God again. The form of that communication has come to me in the form[LH1]of a spiral notebook I found, where I can record my thoughts the way I used to. They had been like another form of worship for me, my daily journals, addressed, mostly, to the Lord.

The spiral notebook was in one of the boat lockers, all but unused, the first two pages filled with rows of big neat numbers printed with a purple crayon, like a kid had been keeping a game score. 

If I don’t see my daughters soon, I’m going to cut out my heart with my Buck knife. Why is their mother keeping them from me for something I didn’t even do? 

​

In April, when I first told my wife about the other woman, the one I did not have an affair with, but had intended to, she asked me to leave. I moved into a motel and visited the kids about three times a week. In June, she told me in a phone conversation that she was sending them to camp for eight weeks, and I wouldn’t be seeing them until September. Aren’t there visiting days? I asked. When she didn’t reply, I let it drop.

I had been laid off from my job about two weeks prior to that conversation. Unemployment checks had just begun. Since I couldn’t see my kids, and had no job, I figured, “Why not take the summer off?” So, I filled my military three-day pack and rolled up my sleeping bag—it’s good for up to ten degrees Fahrenheit. I’d brought it to the motel when my wife threw me out, because it sometimes helped to sleep in it when I had insomnia. 

To start my adventure, I put the rest of my clothes in a box, got a bus to the post office—my wife had custody of our one car—and mailed the box home. Carrying just my pack and roll, I hitched a ride at the pancake house right down the street from the motel where I’d been staying. A guy was taking a load of seafood over the mountains in a big refrigerated trailer. It wasn’t until we came down on the other side that I realized I had been feeling cordoned-off by the mighty Cascades, these months in Seattle. When I reached Spokane, another trucker took me south. I didn’t know where I was going, but people kept asking, so I started saying Nebraska, because I thought it would be good to go back to my hometown. There were certain feelings I wanted to try to conjure about the place where I had lived for the first seventeen years of my life. I hadn’t been back since my mother’s funeral, ten years before. 

Except for some elderly people in my family’s old neighborhood, I didn’t see anyone I knew during my stopover in Nebraska. My father had died five years before my mom. God rest his soul, he used to beat the crud out of my brother and me, and we honestly seldom knew why. At least he never tried to have sex with us. Some of the things I’ve heard from guys in the service do not bear repeating. 

My father worked the graveyard shift at the sugar beet cracking[LH2]plant. We could see it from our house. All lit up at night, it had a strange beauty, like a Martian castle. His chosen deity was football, and his hobby was fishing. My mother’s deity was God, and her hobby was keeping the faith. While the Mormon faith never took with my brother, she said it was like I was born believing.

The real desire that had pushed me to Nebraska was the requirement to feel rooted, because the woman who had put a bad patch on my marriage had accused all Americans, and therefore me, of being “rootless trees.” 

“I don’t understand. How can you leave your ancestors’ burial ground behind?” She said it with incredulity, not criticism. “You allow strangers to tend your parents and grandparents’ graves?” It clearly stunned her.

In my mind, I wanted to show her that I wasn’t a rootless tree. When I went to the graveyard, I found it had been built up since mom’s funeral, and I couldn’t find my parents’ plot, so the woman proved herself correct—I am a rootless tree.

I’ve lost count of all the rides I got between the west coast and the east coast, but I know that four of the people who picked me up, including the last one who took me to Cape Cod, had a dog in their vehicle. The last one was an old Lab, lying on her side across the back seat, gray muzzle snagged back in a toothy smirk. Flashes of my own dog struck through my head like swords.

“You a soldier?” The guy asked as I got into the car. “I saw your pack.” He looked down at the stuff at my feet.

My pack was tan, brown, and black—the camouflage colors of a desert war. I had been hitchhiking on a feeder road, where people could slide past slowly and check me out before they got on the highway. 

“My ex-wife was military,” the driver said as we got under way. “So I notice these things.”

He looked to be in his mid-forties, a Boston realtor, he said, who sometimes got listings on Cape Cod, where I was heading because I’d seen it on a map and the name appealed to me. The guy talked about the real estate market, the population ebb and flow, the ratio of year-round residents to seasonal. I listened, and began thinking about all those empty houses, and wondered if I could borrow one for a little while.

“You interested in boats?” the driver asked, as we went over a bridge that separated Cape Cod from the mainland. Down below, an empty oil barge chugged ahead of a blue tugboat.

“I don’t know much about boats,” I told the driver. The first real boat I’d ever been on, aside from rowboats and once a canoe, was on a harbor cruise in Seattle. That old girl was a big, double-decker with a hundred-plus people on board, and very large engines. My kids had a ball. Afterward, we strolled around the marina. My youngest was just learning how to read, and she sounded out the names painted on the sterns of the sailboats and motorboats that filled most of the slips. She and her sister found many of the names hilarious, though some of them were wordplay that they couldn’t possibly have understood. That was one of the happiest days I had since coming home from the Balkans. 

“My ex lives on a boat, down in Florida,” the driver said. “She was in the Navy. Couldn’t get used to living on land after she retired.”

I hadn’t been paying good attention until then. That’s when I got the dazzling idea that instead of squatting in an empty vacation house, maybe I could live on a boat.

Since the realtor thought I was a soldier, he drove me to the military reservation and I didn’t bother to correct him. He dropped me on a road near the back entrance, out of the sight line of the sentries. I barely had time to get my bearings when a kid stopped and asked me where I was headed. I told him the beach. After a few miles he left me at something called a rotary, which was a small, grassy traffic circle where two routes and two roads intersected. He said to bear east to reach the water. 

The area was suburban and, luckily, became almost rural when I got off the main road and headed for the cover of woods. Since I was looking to squat on a boat, seeing a street sign that said “Little River Boat Ramp” seemed ordained, and I turned down its entrance. The paved road went for about a half mile, then sloped sharply into the waters of a narrow tidal river. On both banks were large white houses with long sweeping lawns. And at the end of each lawn was a dock, and every dock was empty. There wasn’t an anchored boat in sight. Not even a canoe lay in the dead winter weeds. Unfortunately, in my ignorance of the sea, I had not imagined dry dock, so my idea of living on a boat seemed busted. 

I walked around the edge of the tidal river to where the river emptied into a marsh. I slogged through the marsh and came to a place hidden by cattails and milkweed, and there was a boat, half aground, tied to a short narrow dock by a few lines, the boat’s stern riding in about a foot of water. 

​

I have earned both medal and metal, although that does not make me the hero of my life. I was wounded in our desert conflict in the early nineties, while leading a small scouting mission of armored vehicles. We came under fire, and my driver spooked and accelerated hard. All of a sudden the ground beneath us dropped away. I was in command, standing aft in the Bradley as it soared through the air. I flew up, like a cork on a Champagne bottle, into the steel ceiling, and came down hard when the vehicle landed on all fours in the deep packed sand. I ended up with metal pins in the back of my neck, and a medal for my chest, which no soldier ever cares about. After two surgeries, the docs recommended medical discharge. I came home feeling like I had lost my lodestar. 

I probably shouldn’t have gone to the Balkans so soon after the medical discharge. I took a position with an independent contractor who had been hired by the Bosnian government, after their war, to train the new military. The salary was three times my military pay. I taught at the simulation center, guiding tactical war games with software programs and multimedia aids. I was back in my element. 

I soon found out that the recruits I had been employed to teach were not your average, green enlisted men and women. These were former students, engineers, shopkeepers—people who had just fought for their lives, and their country, street by street. During the war, they had become the tactical commanders of their neighborhood brigades; and every one of them had stories. 

I heard about the sixteen-year-old girl who successfully took away an RPG from the Serbs on her first raid. But when she fired it, the force blew her apart. There were lighter accounts too, like the man who had collected a fleet of tanks, all stolen, one by one, from the enemy. I tried to capture all these stories on tape. I talked and talked to these courageous people, both in the Sim center, and in the cafes, drinking endless cokes to their coffees and wine. I even learned to take a cigarette once in awhile, because people were always offering them, and it felt kinder to take the thing and not smoke it, just light it, and play with it in the ash tray.

Despite the aftereffects of the war, Sarajevo was still beautiful. Roses bloomed everywhere. I had been preparing for the Balkans since I was a freshman in high school, and had first become besotted with their passionate, fractured history. I had built a romance around the place for years, yet finally being there surpassed my every fantasy.

Sometimes, in my dreams these days, people are speaking in Bosnian, and I understand. But when I’m awake, I can’t remember the words, and can’t translate them if I do. It spooks me because I studied the language back in college. That was quite a while ago, but between that, and all I picked up over there, I should remember more.

After I came home from Bosnia, my moods swung like a pregnant woman. I eventually went to a shrink at the VA, and he said it was PTSD, Soldier’s Heart they called it back in the Civil War. 

“But I’ve been home from the Gulf for two years,” I told the doctor. He said it didn’t matter, that going to Bosnia so soon after the Gulf had temporarily cauterized my emotional wounds, and now the trauma would emerge, full-blown. When I asked if the cause of my moods swings could be from PB, the antidote to nerve gas that the military had given us, he said no, but what else could he say, and really, did it matter? You take the antidote or you die from poison gas. 

Back from Bosnia, I got a job as a project manager at one of the big health insurance companies in Seattle, with a one-hundred-and-twenty-mile-a-day commute. It was a consultant job, which just means temp. I had claustrophobia every morning, trying to adjust to being in a cubicle. I was bored and underutilized at work and spent most of the day obsessing over the battle stories people had told me in Bosnia. I tried to write them down, but couldn’t focus. I finally recorded them on a cheap little boom box my wife bought for me, back when she was still sympathetic to the PTSD, even though I had never tried to explain it to her. 

I had always felt that it was part of being a soldier, bearing the burdens, the memories. I would never tell her how every explosion, every death, every near miss, wounds your psyche with a dull pain that never truly knows cessation. Like a fire underground in a mine, it burns through you, glowing coals that supply no warmth. It damages you, and it makes you hard with a sorrowful judiciousness. An appalling knowledge of your own accepted parameters for brutality. 

I accidentally told my wife about the other woman, because I cracked up a little bit after I shot my dog. I had to put down my beloved spaniel after some guy in a utility van, turning around at our dead-end, hit her as she dashed from under the juniper to chase his truck—a habit I had never been able to break her of. The driver didn’t feel a thing. Took off, unaware of what he had done.

I watched it from the living room window. Saw her fly up, come down with a terrible thud, twirl on her side in a circle, unable to rise, her paws throwing up gravel, as she fought to raise her smashed haunches. I ran to her, knelt and stroked her spotted muzzle, told her in a soft voice what a good girl she was. Her eyes flashed back and forth, like the pendulum on a clock; clearly she had spinal injuries. I asked my wife to stay with the dog while I got the thirty ought six. Thank God the kids had already left for school and that we had no nearby neighbors. 

It was like my dog understood. I could read it in the sorrowful tremble of her amber-colored eyes. I shot her right in the side of the head. But the poor creature jerked, and it took a second bullet. I can still hear her plaintiff, startled yelp. 

It was the end of a little bit of me, shooting my dog, firing that rifle. I hadn’t even been hunting since I came back from Bosnia, having lost the stomach for guns and death. 

​

I have grown to love this river marsh where I now live. At high tide, silver waters flood the blades of winter grass; but there is no ferocity to this flood. It’s like a deep, calm bath. Instead of marsh, the words “water meadow” seem amore gently fitting description. 

Evergreens and birches rim the marsh and all but hide the boat where I live. There is no one around, except an occasional fisherman or some guys in the trades making another improvement to one of the empty manor homes. Still, I’m cautious. I don’t approach the boat from the front drive of the house. I come around the edge of the marsh. Although there are patches of thin ice on the pond, it has not frozen. I’m guessing the tide and currents fight the freezing molecules. I didn’t have time to investigate this topic before my self-exile from the library, but I did learn about my boat. The top level is a tuna tower. It’s been smashed by a hunk of a tree that was hit by lightning. About three feet in circumference, the piece of split tree crashed through the tuna tower and the drive area below.

The boat has a good-sized stateroom, and the lockers are full of blankets and linens. Unfortunately, the shower and kitchen appliances—even the toilet—cannot be used. They run on electricity, and the engine and generator have been removed from the boat. But there is a triple-burner propane cook-stove in the galley that throws off decent heat, and a battery-run lantern. So, I ration the light and heat, and with the carpeting and blankets, it’s pretty snug in here. 

In a place hidden by laurel bushes, I dug a latrine with a shovel I found in the garage. The windows were unlocked, so it was an easy snag. I dug the latrine well beyond the fifteen-meter regulation from the water table. Altogether, the accommodations aren’t bad. Of course, I don’t tell my wife I’m squatting. When I call, and she asks me where I’m staying, I tell her with service buddies or at a Y. 

The boat has a medicine chest and a large emergency kit, but the aspirin bottles in both places were almost empty when I came aboard. There is only one aspirin left, and I forgot to get some today when I withdrew what I allow myself from the VA deposit. 

My family is fine financially, and my wife doesn’t even need my check, because she has the store her parents left her. But I told her to put all my checks in the girls’ college fund, so I just take out a little each week. I had to take more than my usual thirty bucks this time because I needed propane. 

It was tough getting the full propane tank back here. I ended up hitching a lift with some guy in a van who said he worked for a flooring company. I said that I was helping someone doing odd jobs in the area. I don’t know why I opened my mouth and volunteered that lie. I forgot that this was a small town where everybody probably knew each other. He asked me the guy’s name. Tony something, I said. Later, as he was pulling over to drop me off, a cop car came by, lights flashing, going in the other direction. Then another cruiser flew past. I felt the leap of guilty aggravation that authority stirs in my vitals. 

“That’s a lot of police,” I remarked. “Something big must be going on.” 

“Nah. Doesn’t have to be big,” the guy said. “The cops in this town just like to swarm.” 

As soon as his car was out of sight, I headed for the cover of woods. 

When I first came here, I was on the watch for folks day and night, but I’ve discovered that this place is a vacant planet in winter. I don’t know why I’ve stayed here so long. I don’t want to live anywhere but Seattle with all my girls.

I talk to my daughters once a week. My wife said calling more often upsets them. Sometimes, she doesn’t even come on, if she’s busy with a customer. I call them at the store where they go after school, to do their homework until my wife closes. My eldest is eight. She wants to know if I’m going to the desert again. Will I bring her a camouflage shirt? My other daughter is six. The last time we spoke, she asked if I’d be home for Christmas, and when I didn’t answer quickly, she began to cry. My wife took the phone and gave me hell for upsetting my daughter. Then she told me the bishop from our ward had been to the house again and asked when I was going to stop traveling and come back home. He suggested it was my wife’s fault that I had run off, implied she hadn’t been meeting my needs. 

My wife and I got married when we were barely twenty. We had been together two years. Both virgins. I’m sure she wanted a big church wedding, but I couldn’t wait. I had reached the point where I had to have sex. I swore to her that someday we would have a lavish reception, renew our vows at our twentieth anniversary, or something like that.

I have always been true to my wife, although I lusted after others and struggled against it. The woman in Bosnia, with whom I did not have sex, just took the breath right out of me. She had a heart-shaped face, like a lot of people in her country, and arched, teasing eyebrows. A wit that stopped just short of cutting, and then turned provocative. She was a soldier, so she wore the uniform trousers: dark pants that showed off her big heart-shaped ass. Man, I loved when she took her jacket off and I could see it. I’ve always been a legs and ass man, and I wanted her badly. And I was so lonely for my wife, for human touch. 

But I never did make love to my hourglass-shaped soldier. And still my wife can’t forgive me, because I made the mistake of telling her that I wanted the other woman. I told her the whole story, how the woman and I had made plans for me to come to her place in the suburbs of Sarajevo. How an unexpected security curfew locked down the city, and kept me from meeting her as we had planned. So God intervened for me in the end. I had considered it a close call, realized that the woman could have gotten pregnant. I could have lost my wife and kids. 

My wife said she hadn’t been to chapel since the bishop came to the house. She didn’t even know if she believed anymore. I told her I still believed, but I didn’t tell her that I’d lost the desire to engage with God. 

My religion forbids alcohol, coffee, adult movies, tobacco, drugs, and sex out of wedlock. The prophet said we should keep ourselves apart. My scripture assures me that, if I live a righteous life within the fold, when I die I will attain a new and luminous body, and I will make great pleasure with many women. In this, it resembles another polygamous, prophet-guided religion that believes the afterlife will be a sexual harvest. 

​

I have a number-seven-out-of-ten headache tonight. That means it will take seven aspirin to get it under control. Sometimes, my thoughts feel as if they don’t reside in my head, but in my heart. And my heart is a hamster running in a wheel, inside a cage, trying to invent perpetual motion. 

“Again.”

This confused me, to a scary degree. 

“I wasn’t home last Christmas?” I sputtered. “Was I in Bosnia last year?” 

“No. That was the year before. Last year you were ’traveling,’ like you are now.”

“Of course I was.” I spoke loudly to try to hide the terror in my voice, but she knew me too well. 

“Just come home,” she said. 

My chest unzipped. My heart began to glow like a campfire.

“That’s the first time you’ve said that,” I told her.

“Nope. Not true. I’ve told you to come home lots of times. Don’t you remember?” 

“No,” I confessed. “I think I lost a year.”

“Come home and help me lose some pounds before the Christmas concert. Just come home.”

“Am I dreaming?”

“Maybe.”

​