The Man with the Purple Heart

     A pair of off-white Reeboks rest beneath an antique bench that he bought at a garage sale in the sixties. The tapestry which drapes over the bench is faded and smells of dust and pine needles. His wife made it for their first anniversary and it has rested there ever since their last together. Her ashes lie above the fireplace in the front room in a Grecian vase that his mother-in-law purchased for their wedding. Beside the vase, a crinkled paper drawing of three stick figures holding hands is framed with a wood that doesn’t match any surrounding furniture in the room. Floral printed couches encircle the fireplace, an ideal setting for a story teller complete with a wooden rocking chair in the corner. But the rocking chair does not face into the room; its back is turned away from the central living space and positioned towards the west window of the house.


     Bill Arkmeyer sits in that chair every evening around 7:00pm in the winter time and nine or ten o’clock in the summer. Each night he wears the blue bomber jacket they issued him in the air force. He never fails to watch the sun disappear behind the skyscrapers that didn’t used to be there ten years ago.  A knotted, wool blanket covers his lap and some nights the cat curls itself between his bony knees, falling asleep on its back. Bill remembers bringing Lily home from the hospital and sitting right there with her bundled in his lap looking up at him for the first time with those deep questioning eyes, the eyes everyone said were his. A few tears descend onto his cheeks as he struggles to remember the things she used to say and her favorite outfits.


     A plane makes its way across the sky, silhouetted against the deepening violet horizon. He sees the cockpit and imagines himself looking out across a grey sea; the temperature is below zero and his wingman is running low on fuel. The aircraft carrier is located almost one hundred and fifty miles away. He looks back at the lagging jet behind him, calling in on the radio for a status report. His wingman mumbles, talking rapidly. Panic. His heart pounds like some living thing dying to break free. Slowing his own aircraft, he responds over radio signaling the fellow pilot to follow his descent into the foreboding mist ahead.
              
     The winter sun is shy, abandoning the earth like some stranger at a holiday party, the same parties he, himself no longer attends. Bill’s eyes water and the salty drips fill the creases which line his lids, trickling down his face like a meandering stream into a delta of wrinkles. A few joints crack as he props his arms and lifts himself from the unsteady chair. The scene before him is now black, save the dim glow of a street lamp at the end of the block. The lamp beside him glares in the window and he folds the blanket, turning away from his solitary reflection. Standing before the fireplace he slips his hand into the breast of his jacket, where his gnarled fingers clench a small war medal. Around his neck hangs a gold chain and a locket, inside of which is a picture of two women: one with brown eyes, and one with dark blue ones. Closing his own dark blue eyes, Bill smiles and looks at the crinkled drawing again.