Cold War Canoe Club by Jeffery Hess

Author:Jeffery Hess
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Down & Out Books

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After gathering her purse and keys, Kate backed the car out of the detached garage and drove south through columns of palm trees flanking flat roads. Heat vapors, suspended by the thick wetness in the air, shimmered in the sun, made the road fuzzy in the distance. She’d moved here with Darwin in March, but her blood hadn’t thinned enough to be comfortable inside or out.

Darwin’s ship, the U.S.S. McCreight, was homeported in Port Tampa, though there was no official Navy base there. Instead, all the shopping and administrative details like ID cards and banking had to be done at MacDill Air Force Base.

She drove toward the base, not for a doctor’s appointment or with intentions of shopping for groceries, or getting her hair done or running any other sundry errands. The only people she knew were either schoolteachers or officers’ wives. All of her family and friends remained in Connecticut. Everything she knew was up there, back home, including the house she’d been born in and had lived in all through college, where Darwin had courted her.

Kate turned off Dale Mabry Highway just as the base’s entrance came into view. She drove east down an unfamiliar street and passed rows of cinderblock duplexes and apartment buildings. Two streets over, she found an intersection with a stoplight and turned into a parking lot outside a strip mall. With no idea what she was going to do, this was as good as any place to start.

The odor of gasoline exhaust hung heavy in the air. She tried the grocery store first, but it didn’t feel right—too many men around. Some were employees and others were retiree husbands. She walked next door to the beauty salon, but the smell of chemicals hit her so strongly she had to back out of the place with her hand over her mouth to hold down the sick. Outside, she took a few deep breaths. She thought about having a cigarette but decided her stomach wasn’t up to it at the moment.

Instead, she walked to the end of the strip mall and into a laundromat, where the smell of soap and wet lint hung thick in the lifeless air. A woman stood at each end, attending to their business. A couple of old washing machines sloshed water and it seemed so inviting that she wanted to reach her hands in and cleanse herself. The notion formed a lump in her throat and she turned to leave, but hesitated to take a step toward the door because the sound of a pair of tennis shoes thudding against the spinning drum and the glass of a dryer door caught her ear. Over and over they pounded, as if they demanded release from their confines and the heat.

Kate settled her hand on her belly and walked up to the woman near the far wall. She had curlers in her hair and folded towels with a cigarette between her lips. Kate’s hands shook at her sides as she stopped and reached out to balance herself on one of the dormant washing machines.

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