The Next Valley Over by Charles Gaines

Author:Charles Gaines
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781510717923
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2017-06-26T04:30:00+00:00

FISHING FOR GRACE WITH THE BLACK DOG IN THE LAND OF PONCE DE LEÓN

SO THERE I WAS, FETCHED UP IN KEY WEST AFTER FIFTEEN straight days of fishing, sunburned, a blister on my casting hand, and the black dog still on my trail. The black dog had been following me around for months. Maybe you’ve been there: where if you didn’t have bad luck you wouldn’t have any luck at all; where your life looks to you like the workbench in a small engine repair shop; where you’re angling hard for answers, not missing a cast, but your fly got snapped off in a willow tree an hour before and you don’t know it yet. A lot of people in Key West on any given day have been there too, some of them for so long it’s made them a little silly in the head. But this guy didn’t look like one of those.

I was turning in to a coffee-and-bagel place on Simonton Street when I first noticed him walking down a side street a couple of blocks away, wearing shorts, a backpack, and a straw hat, and carrying a staff ornamented with buckskin. He looked jaunty and purposeful, and something made me want to see him up close, but he was headed away from the restaurant, so I went on in and broke my fast.

When I came out a half hour later, the man fell into step beside me on the sidewalk as if he had been waiting for me, and we immediately began to talk as naturally as if we were resuming a conversation we had carried on for years. I saw that he wore a handsome necklace of claws with a leather packet in the center. He was of medium height and build, tidy and animated.

Did he live here, I asked him. No. Where? Everywhere, he said. He had come here from Boulder. He came and went according to God’s will, and God told him where to go with signs. He had just that morning been given a sign to go on to Albany, New York, which meant that whatever it was he was here in Key West to do was nearly done. He spoke very well, with a strange but pleasant accent that was perhaps Middle Eastern. In the five-block walk in the hot sun down Simonton Street to the green gate of my hotel, he said a lot without seeming to hurry, and it was clear he was talking directly to me.

He had been homeless for seventeen years, he told me, and that was as he wanted it, since it was only through dispossession that we own and keep our power. What? I thought—I, who had recently somehow misplaced my own, such as it is, couldn’t find it anywhere, and had prayed for clues the very night before in my hotel room at the bottom of the continent—“You have to do what to keep your power?”

“Give things up, number one, and recognize that everything is fine.

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