Passeggiata (complete 2016)

Coffee came and he took a sip and scrunched up his nose as his eyes popped open: "Dear God! Man, I do love Italy!"

The waiter stomped off -- hating anything and everything about Americans.

Goodwin looked as the coast came into view, and at the incredible blue water that still seemed so full of mystery.

He knew they were out there, waiting.

He just wasn't sure yet what he was going to say to them.

+++++

Elsie lay in the Springer's cockpit; she was curled tightly in a ball behind the wheel, warding off bitter winds that had come down from the mountains just above the harbor during the night. Cold air had settled uneasily on the water, and a light snow had just started falling when her ears perked up; she heard movement below and her little tail began thumping to the beat of waking life.

She jumped as something down below fell.

"Goddamn it all to hell! Shit! Who in their right mind would live on a goddamn boat!"

Elsie's head tilted to one side as she listened to the old man grumbling below. She jumped again when the companionway hatch slid open, but she smiled when she saw Paul Goodwin climbing up into the cockpit. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and a pipe in the other.

"Goddamn it! Snow! Fucking snow -- in Italy! Ain't life just grand!"

Elsie looked at the old man, at the ragged trails of foggy steam that wafted from his nose, then she looked away quietly, looked back into the water behind the boat.

"So. You're still here, eh?" Goodwin sat down beside Elsie and scratched her neck. The dog looked up and her smile reached through all the layers of this man. "Well, you don't mind if I have a smoke, do you girl?" Goodwin opened his tobacco pouch and got to it, pausing once to drink some coffee.

"Good morning!"

Goodwin turned to the voice, saw the English couple in the boat next to his son's. "You say so. Seems kinda cold to me. I keep seeing posters for 'Sunny Italy' in my mind, and somehow, this don't quite jibe with all that."

Malcolm Doncaster laughed. "Quite. Happens a couple of times a year. Mind you, the snow will be gone by noon, so don't let it bother you much."

"Oh, I'm used to snow alright. Was just hoping for a reprieve." Goodwin lit his pipe and puffed at it until satisfied he had it right. "So. You know my son? When did y'all meet up?"

"We met in Portofino. About a month ago. Our girl here seems to have adopted him."

Elsie looked at Doncaster, then at Goodwin.

"Who was that woman on the boat when I got here? Did I run her off?"

"Ah, Trudi Blixen; well, she's down below with Mary Ann right now. Yes, well, she's been staying on board since Tom -- uh, well, took ill."

"Crap! I didn't mean to. . ."

"Not a bother. She has a place in Portofino, was just staying here until Tom gets back on his feet. Seems, however, that our dog won't leave his boat, and she was just staying aboard to keep her company."

"Company?"

"Yes, well, it's complicated."

"Uh-huh. It's been my experience that things around here can get a little bit more than complicated. And in a hurry, too."

"Indeed so," chuckled Doncaster. "Yes, quite. And perhaps more than we know. So, how about some breakfast? Scones and jam?"

Goodwin took the pipe from his mouth and tapped it against the side of the hull; burnt tobacco settled on the water like old snow, then drifted down into the inky blackness and out of sight. "Don't mean to be rude, but I'm going to run up to the hospital straight away."

"How's Tom doing? I haven't seen him since he was down here."

"Well, you're welcome to tag along. I could use some company."

"Really? Splendid. I'll just go check with the Admiral."

The hair on the back of the dog's neck stood on end, and she began to let slip a low growl. Goodwin turned and looked at her, saw she was looking at the water and followed her gaze. A tremulous ripple -- dark gray and barely visible under the pewter stained water -- gave way to winter winds and disappeared into shapelessness. Goodwin had the impression he'd been watched for some time, and though he wanted to dismiss the idea as ludicrous he knew he couldn't.

They wouldn't dare just leave me be, he told himself as he looked for echoes in the ripples.

The dog turned and looked at Goodwin, and he felt her eyes on him now. He thought she seemed skittish, almost worried, before she hopped down the companionway and disappeared into Tom's cabin.

"What the Hades is going on here?" Goodwin muttered as he followed the pup below, suddenly remembering he hadn't brought any clothes for this unexpectedly cold weather.

"Maybe one of Tom's jackets will fit."

+++++

Tom Goodwin sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes with the tops of his knuckles; the lids felt crusty and his eyes burned, but even so he felt a little better this morning. Margherita was asleep in her chair by the window and Jon Santoni was hunched over a pile of lab reports chewing on a plastic ball point pen. The hospital room was beginning to feel like home, and Goodwin knew this was not an encouraging sign.

And then there was his father.

Seeing his dad for the first time yesterday since their blowout a year ago had filled him with a tenderness he simply hadn't expected. In the past year the old man had gone from spry to weather-worn and beaten; he seemed like a pale copy of the man he remembered and the sense of impending mortality was palpable about him. It left Tom feeling a little breathless and unsure of himself.

"I wonder how I must look to him these days?"

"You say something?" Santoni said.

"Hm-m? Oh, crap, I was just wondering how bad I look. Thinking about Dad, I guess."

"Oh? I'd say right now you two look to be brothers. In fact, I'd say he looks like your younger brother."

"Thanks a lot, Dickhead."

"You're welcome."

"Well, if I have to eat any more hospital lasagna you can wheel my ass right down to the morgue. Crap, I thought American hospital food was for shit, but y'all got bad food down to a science in this place!"

"Tom! Look out the window! You want good food, try that place right over there. They make a carbonara that will make you weep it's so good."

"Yeah? Fine. Eat spaghetti and cry. Great. What's your point?"

"The point, Tom," Margherita interjected, "is to get well enough to rejoin the world." She yawned and stretched and sat up in her chair.

"Exactly!" Santoni chimed in. "Look out that window, Tom. The world's still out there, waiting!"

"Geesh, guys! Does it look like I've given up or something?"

"I wasn't so sure a few days ago, Tom."

Goodwin looked at Santoni and frowned. "How did my dad look to you?"

"Like he could whip your ass. With one arm tied behind his back."

"Really? I thought he looked kinda rough around the edges."

"When I'm his age I hope I'm that rough."

"He's a pistol, alright."

"No, Tom, he's a fucking cannon. A force of nature. You know, that makes me wonder? Are you sure he's your father?"

"Fuck off," Goodwin laughed, then he turned to Margherita. "Did he say he would come back this morning?"

"Oh, si, yes, he said first thing. I think when he saw you he was most afraid, Tom. You slept for a long time, while he was here."

"I don't really remember talking that much. Just his eyes. How tired he looks. Old."

"Just point of view, Tom," Santoni said. "From over here you look as old as the Coliseum."

"You know, when I get out of this bed I'm gonna have to beat you senseless."

"That'll be the day."

Goodwin swung his feet from the bed and pushed himself up. He turned pale and started to sweat; Santoni came over and held Goodwin stand.

"Easy now. Deep breaths. Slow, deep breaths."

"Well," Goodwin said between gasps, "you're safe. At least this morning."

"Sure, sure," Santoni said as he slapped his friend on the back. "There is one thing we really need to do this morning, Tom. And I mean this."

"Yeah?"

"We need to get you into the shower. Fast. And maybe Margherita could find some cologne."

"Swell. Just swell. And here I thought it was you stinking up the place."

"Let me cover that line, first."

"You say so." He saw himself in the mirror, the man in there unrecognizable to him.

+++++

Maria Theresa, held an old woolen coat closely to her chest, walked along the quay with Vico, trying to ignore that pain of all her various incisions. She looked on wordlessly as the last of the night's light snow drifted down to waiting stone. She watched flakes hit and melt, thought of all her life's hopes and dreams. Were they so dissimilar? So proud in flight, so resilient in that moment of contact, and then? What was left -- nothing? Was there really only nothingness waiting after dissolution? Could our dreams survive to fall again on other snows?

She felt Vico's arm around her shoulder, felt his love, as strong now as it had ever been. Steadfast, almost eternal. Patient, like a good father's.

"I fear there is a reckoning coming, my old friend," she said to him at last.

"Yes. Unavoidable, too."

"Did you see Paul?"

"Yes. He seems as young as...well, yes, he is well."

"Ah. Do you still feel so young?" She looked at dark striated clouds scudding silently, quickly through the treetops on the hillside beyond the rooftops. Everything felt close inside this gray dawn; it was as if the village had drawn inward -- protectively -- around itself -- as if to avoid being caught in the rush just overhead. Even the stones they walked upon seemed to have withdrawn from the streaming current, and Maria Theresa looked at the sky and the snow and she felt the world had turned in on itself; now all that remained of life raced by inside ambivalent shades of gray.

"What do you want to do?" Vico asked.

"About?" She walked slowly now, quietly. She wanted to grab a cloud and hold on tight, fly away from all this history. She wanted to live again, to feel loved again -- to love again.

"About?" he asked, trying not to laugh. "Perhaps I should not have asked."

"Yes, perhaps." She stopped and looked out past the harbor to the cape, to the darkness of the sea, to that darkness that was always waiting these days. Were there answers to be found in such darkness? Or could she only find them here, among the men who had defined her life?

Or would the answers find her.

"Would you like me to take the boys into Genoa today?"

"No." Perhaps it would be best, she said to herself, to simply stop looking for answers. What if by trying all my life to look for life, I simply avoided the answers in front of my face; what if life had come looking, and I ignored her? And could it be that some experience was so ephemeral, touched so lightly, that even after flying among the clouds Paul had been left to wonder was that real? Or had he felt their union in the sea had simply been an illusion?

"Maria? May I take you to him?"

She turned and looked at her one true friend, into his blue-gray eyes and at the last strands of auburn in his wild silver hair. She put her hand on his face and felt his skin; the lines she had watched march across his face seemed as familiar to her as the trails on the hills outside the village. "You always loved me."

"Yes. Always."

"Then let him come to me. Or not, if that is his choice."

"And the boys? If he chooses not to come, what of them, and their need?"

She shrugged as if dismissing the impossible, then turned toward the black water and walked to its edge. She leaned over and looked down as silver echoes washed against the stone. There in dancing fragments she saw scattered bits of her reflection suspended above infinity, little shimmering echoes of time cast aside to drift for a while, before fading away into the morning.

She smiled at the image in her mind, of looking into the water at exactly the same spot along the quay -- perhaps sixty years ago, maybe more. She could see traces of that face now, down there hiding in snow dappled waters, then she watched as the memory drifted away silently, with the snow.

+++++

Paul Goodwin stood in the head looking at his reflection in the mirror while he knotted his old red bow tie, then he looked down at his hands. Age spots and yellow fingernails, white scars from a couple of skin cancers removed from the backs of his hands -- everything about these hands said they belonged to someone else -- that they couldn't belong to him. He felt his hands resting still on a succession of black Boeing yokes, still felt his steady grip on those 707s and 747s his hands guided for decades. So, whose hands are these?

"Getting old is the silliest thing in the world, girl, and don't let anyone tell you different." He heard the pup move, knew she was looking at him. He focused on finishing the knot before turning to meet her gaze. "You know, you remind me of Sarah. That's her on the wall over there." He pointed at the painting and looked at it again; he always looked at it now -- and it always tore him up.

He hadn't owned a dog since growing up on his parent's farm outside New London, but not so many years ago, in a fit of misty-eyed nostalgia, he'd came home with a little Springer pup, a male so patently clumsy, so patiently good natured, the only name he could think to call him was Ody, a true comic strip name if there ever was -- yet to him the name was short for Odysseus. Doris had immediately fallen in love with the beast and insisted on getting Ody a female companion and, dogs being dogs and somewhat less inclined to follow the more inane social conventions of other folks along the Connecticut shore, the two decided to pop out litter after litter of little brown and white puff-balls every other year.

Ody and Lady grew into a force of nature, they held the Goodwin's marriage together, gave both Doris and himself no small measure of joy and, in the end, more than a little purpose. With Tom on his own and retirement proving to be an unendurable bore, Goodwin threw himself into whelping boxes and one day finally built a real 'honest to pete' kennel. He started to train Lady and took her to a show once, but looked at all the stilted, pompous, preening, self-centered dogs and laughed. In the end, he took to the fields with them both and simply let them do as nature intended. Though the farm had fewer than two hundred acres, they roamed the woods ceaselessly -- together, and in time they became hunters and companions -- the best of friends.

Sarah had been the first pup from their first litter, and Tom had been home visiting when she popped out into the world. Lady had chewed the umbilical too close and the newborn had started to bleed out; Doris called and Tom came, looked things over for an instant, then disappeared as quickly as he'd come. He was back a moment later with hemostats and suture and stitched the wound shut, and from that moment on Sarah had been his. He had been the first to hold her, first to pick her up and feel her soft tongue on his nose, and it had been love at first bite. Two months later she was at her new home in Houston, if, Goodwin thought, that glittering glass and steel box could rightfully be called home, but Tom slipped into his physician's groove and time passed quickly. Sarah waited patiently for him, for their walks, for the time they call their own.

Ody found a rattlesnake one afternoon and Paul held him while the vet put him down. Goodwin held his friend so tightly as he passed, he cried so long and hard into the nights that followed that even Lady couldn't console him. Goodwin grew distant for a while; when winter came he started taking Lady for long walks again, but everything was different now. He rejoined the living but after that seemed to keep everyone at a distance. When Lady passed a few years later, Goodwin had insulated himself from his emotions so completely he didn't say a word when she didn't come for him at four in the morning to go outside.

Doris wanted to get another pair but he wouldn't have it. She consequently reacquainted herself with Jack Daniels and he found a rocking chair on the front porch to call his own. Each in their respective corner, they waited uneasily for the match to resume.

Then Tom moved to Boston, and Tom brought Sarah to the farm one day.

Now Goodwin looked down at Elsie and saw Sarah -- and Lady, too -- staring back at him. All that love and devotion. . . where did it go? It was, Goodwin saw, as if it had been passed intact from one being to the next, like genetic memory drifting on intercontinental breezes connecting yesterday and tomorrow. Are we the same, he wondered?

The hair on Elsie's neck stood on end and she bounded up the companionway steps and right down onto the snow covered swim platform; Goodwin followed her through the cockpit and leaned over the rail.

It was Two Scar, and he was motionless in the water as he looked up at Goodwin. Elsie pawed at the water and the dolphin eased closer to the transom; Goodwin climbed over the rail and down onto the platform, then knelt there looking into those black eyes, and soon he felt he was drifting through time. He could smell Hell's Belles on fire again, screams rippled through acrid smoke as bullets tore into the nose of the Liberator, and he could feel the storm roiled air as his parachute opened -- so briefly -- and he was falling again, falling down to the sea. Then adrift, drifting down through cool blue shadows, drifting down into that other world. And there he was, this savior of his, his old friend.

He reached down and rubbed the top of his snout, and the dolphin's body leaned slightly into the sea before spinning slowly, spinning in remembrance, as if in homage to other meetings in other nights. Then the dolphin stopped and looked into Goodwin's eyes again. There was sadness in his eye, and Goodwin was immediately filled with an awareness of time passing, of life moving away rapidly now -- from his grasp.

The small female, the little pup with the wounded eye, appeared beside Scar and looked at Goodwin before pushing the male aside. Goodwin leaned in as she lifted to meet him; he reached for her as she placed her nose on his shoulder and he whispered to her as she hovered. Two Scar circled slowly for a moment, then slid beneath the water and was gone; the little girl drifted back and looked at Goodwin almost longingly, as if there was more that needed to be said, but she too slipped beneath silvered ripples and was gone.

"It's alright, Lady," Goodwin said, still drifting on nether currents. "Everything's alright now." He scratched Elsie's head for a moment as waves of memory washed over long forgotten feelings, as union and reunions coalesced in dancing water. He reached down again, watched the reflection of his hand on the soft contours of the water and reached down to touch it.

And he saw his hand on Maria Theresa's face as he got closer to the water. He saw her soft smile waiting there -- just at the edge of memory. His hand dipped into the water and she disappeared.

+++++

Tom stood under the shower and let hot water beat down on his neck; he felt more than weak, and the dizziness he experienced was odd -- coldly insistent, not to be ignored , and all the while the bed seemed to call out to him. He leaned into the wall, his face on his forearm, and took a deep breath.

"Are you alright in there?" Santoni called from the room.

"No, I feel like shit," Goodwin said weakly.

"Well, at least you won't smell like it," Jon said as he came into the bathroom. "Wrist."

Goodwin stuck his arm out from behind the vinyl enclosure and felt his friend take his pulse. "Jon, I don't feel right."

"Yeah, you have fresh sheets now, so let's get you back in bed."

"How was the LFP?"

"Crappy."

"Uh, gee, think you could be a little more specific?"

"No."

"I think you ought to take a couple of pictures of my heart."

"What are you thinking."

"Endocarditis. Bacterial."