Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale by Chuck Kinder Page A

little bungalow with that beautiful
woman talking on the phone to her new loverboy was lost to him.
Even distant sirens sounded like sad echoes from a whole life Jim
could imagine someday only faintly remembering.
    Jim had watched his first
wife talk on the phone and laugh as he hadn’t seen her laugh in
ages. Judy looked so happy Jim couldn’t help but be happy for her.
From inside the mouth of one of the tunnels through the miniature
mountains, stuck back deep enough so that the trains wouldn’t bump
against it as they rolled by, Jim fished out the sample jar with
its tiny tear of sperm. He tossed it from hand to hand, as he might
have a baseball, and then held it up in the dim light, tilting it
this way and that, watching the tiny tear glisten as it slid
about. Jim let himself imagine tiny eyes, a tiny mouth, teeth like
tiny tombstones.
    The next time one of the
little electric trains swung out of a tunnel onto the straight
stretch of track near him, Jim placed the jar in an empty boxcar
and watched it ride around. Presently Jim heard the screen door
bang and Judy’s footsteps come across the brick driveway. Then she
was a shadow in the doorway of the garage. Jim could smell her
perfume. I’ll be back in a little bit, honey, Judy said quietly,
and Jim said okeydokey. Jim watched his wife walk to her vehicle in
the soft glow from the kitchen lights through the windows. Judy had
combed her hair and pulled it back behind her ears with little
silver barrettes. She had changed into a short
red-and-white-checked sundress. Jim noticed that Judy had a litde
lift to her step. Jim watched as Judy studied her face in the
rearview mirror for a moment, before she pulled her station wagon
on out across the narrow wooden bridge to go do it with her new
boyfriend, Melvin.
     
    In the hot darkness of the
garage Jim had bawled for a while. Then he had plucked the plastic
jar from the boxcar when it swung near him. He closed his runny
eyes, and with a startling vividness he pictured his pretty first
wife naked in her new boyfriend’s arms. Whereupon Jim had started
bawling again. He started jerking off, too. And this time Jim had
no trouble filling that sperm sample jar halfway to its brim in
about a half-dozen furious whacks.
     
    Holding to the shadows, Jim
had walked out onto the little bridge over Matadero Creek. Years
later, when he would attempt to resurrect those moments in his
memory, Jim would recall thinking, Is this my real life? Is this
it? Jim had stood in the shadows in the center of the bridge
blubbering some more and hating himself for it, and finally he quit
it. He listened to the shallow water flowing below. He listened to
the frogs and the faint sounds of £1 Camino Real traffic and
laughter from a yard up the street. He watched as street light
coming through the leaves of the trees along the creek bank was
gathered and released on the shining, tremulous current.
     
    In the darkness two hundred
yards ahead, Matadero Creek disappeared into the entrance of a
tunnel that ran under El Camino Real and most of Palo Alto, to
empty finally into the waters of the East Bay, a perilous passage,
full of rats starved insane, rabid fish, snakes glowing in the
dark, crawdads that dined on the living and the dead: a passage
full of danger at every turn, spiritual fatigue, failures of will,
a daily ton of turds floating to the Bay, along with Jim’s jar of
secret sons.
     
    Even in the enveloping
darkness Jim could see the tiny sparkle of the splash when he had
tossed it, that plastic jar with his name on its label containing
his so-called seed, and he had watched that tiny arc of lost,
secret sons float in the creek’s shallow, shimmering current out
of his life for good.
     

 
     
     
    The Wife in the
Story

    1
    Although it was against the
terms of the fellowship, Ralph Crawford had retained his part-time
teaching position at Berkeley while he was a Stegner Writing Fellow
at Stanford (and this on top of illegally collecting