Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale by Chuck Kinder

after night, Jim would sit
out in the kitchen smoking dope and drinking alone, long after Judy
had wandered off to bed and his drunken lout buddies had staggered
out the door, and in the soft light of the brass wall lamps he
would simply gaze around the room, at the thin, vertical redwood
boards of the walls that seemed to glow from some inner source of
light, and the low, dark ceiling of redwood boards so warm and rich
with golden light and shadow. The bungalow’s redwood walls were
dark with age and the ceilings of the rooms curved gendy toward
the walls like the inner hull of a boat, which is what the whole
house resembled vaguely, a boat, an old sailing vessel of some
kind, as though after all those years upon the high seas the old
salt could live only in a place that at least resembled something
you could sail away in. Jim would look at the grains in the old
boards and imagine giant redwoods aging in sunlight and fog a
thousand years ago. He would follow a thin, dark, curving grain
with his fingertips down a board slick as bone and think of those
cross-section cuts of ancient redwoods in California state parks,
their dark rings tagged with time and events, the Battle of
Hastings, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the birth of
Christ, the end of love as we know it.
     
    In return for yard work, the
old salt had permitted several generations of neighborhood boys to
construct and maintain elaborate electric-train sets out in the
redwood-shingled garage by the creek (the old salt had ridden a
bike everywhere he went, or a bus, and never owned a car), where
around walls shaped into miniature mountains wove at least a dozen
tracks, circling through forests of tiny trees, through dozens of
tunnels, along a running stream with a working waterfall and a
little lake, and through two tiny towns with working lights. In
return for secret places in the garage where Jim could hide his
drugs where Judy would never think to search, he bought the current
generation of neighborhood boys beer and slipped them
joints.
     
    Early on the night Jim’s
first wife forsook him, he had gone out to the garage and pulled
the switch that set the tiny towns ablaze. He took a fat joint
hidden in a bright red caboose and fired it up. He put a couple of
the electric trains in motion, aimed in opposite directions on
different tracks, and he sat there in the dim light smoking and
watching the little trains as they rolled around and around as
though they were going someplace in particular. From the open
garage doors Jim could see Judy through a kitchen window at her
ironing board. As Judy leaned slightly forward, her soft brown
hair fell over her face and Jim could see the lovely curve of her
neck. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse, and
    Jim watched the firm muscle
in her brown upper arm flex as she ironed. Once when Judy had
raised her arm as she brushed back her hair, Jim could glimpse the
delicate whiter flesh of a shaved underarm. When the phone in the
kitchen rang, Judy rushed to it. Judging from the brightness of her
smile, it was the call she had been waiting for. Judy sat down at
the kitchen table to talk. At one point Judy threw her head back
laughing, and Jim could see her teeth shine.
     
    The air was sweet that
evening with the aromas of the flowering bushes along the creek
bank and of bread baking somewhere and of both clean and old oil on
the cement garage floor. The lights of the tiny towns had looked
somehow so sad to Jim, and fragile and beautiful, and the tiny
trains made him remember lying in bed as a boy and being rocked
gendy by the faint rumble of an endless freight or coal train
passing through the little coal town at night, headed someplace
special and new and infinitely distant in the mysterious, adult
dark. Jim could hear the flow of the shallow water in Matadero
Creek, and the croaks of frogs, and crickets, and from beyond the
trees the faint sounds of El Camino Real traffic, and he knew that
his life there in that beloved