The Last Flight of Poxl West by Daniel Torday Page A

I now understand one does not generally find in a bluegrass song. Their clients had provided them with rawhide boots embroidered with colored leather, and shirts with studs and peaked shoulders. They looked the part. If he wears the uniform long enough, even the most peaceable man may grow to be a soldier.
    I tried not to think about where Françoise had gotten those clothes each time I saw her play, but on the Saturday-night gig after my father’s letter, for the first time it began to eat at me. My father’s letter had begun to place some new thought in my mind: I imagined him at work the day I found my mother with her painter, going about his business while my mother went about hers. Was I so different now here in Rotterdam? Well, I knew about Françoise’s profession in a way my father didn’t know of my mother’s surreptitious actions. But was that only rationalization? There was a visa to London. I was staying here with a woman who received all these things in exchange for—what?
    Françoise’s and Greta’s voices blended beautifully. There was something to the act of harmonizing itself that smacked of precision: two voices doing two different things, diverging so they might come together as one, greater than either alone.
    Françoise looked as happy as she ever had that night. Fifty Dutchmen were in the crowd. Who had come to listen, to see them, knowing them in the many ways a man can know a woman? Who’d simply stopped on the street upon hearing two Dutchwomen singing American gospel songs? I will never know. Françoise’s fingers traveled deftly up her instrument, pulling out double stops and picking loose melodies over Greta’s guitar playing. When they finished, Françoise showed me her mandolin case, which was piled full with guilders she’d received as tips, and she was too happy then for me even to think of starting a serious conversation about the future.
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    I suppose there are men who when they are in love know to call it love, who know its shape, its demands. Who are able to tell when its wings have begun to rust. You will not find my name anywhere on that manifest. My understanding of my concerns was somehow more immediate in those days. Since the afternoon I’d fled my mother’s house I had only one direction and that direction was forward. To stop and survey, to stop and understand how I was feeling, would have been fatal. Perhaps it was this myopia that caused the most catastrophic decisions during that period of my life. Perhaps that’s too easy.
    When I think of it now, I can say that I do know what happiness looked like then. On Saturdays when we did not need to work, afternoons before she was to play gigs with Greta, Françoise and I would borrow bicycles from my boss and ride east out of Rotterdam, the direction opposite from the harbor. Not ten miles out of the city was an area where upon the horizon the green and brown of flat grasses gave way to brilliant swatches of color: tulip fields. Françoise would strap her mandolin in its case to her back, and I would strap a guitar to mine, and after ditching our bikes we would secret ourselves back amid acre upon acre of those definitively Dutch flowers. No farmer would disturb us on those weekend mornings, and after we made love, Françoise would teach me to make new chords on the guitar. She was a mandolin player primarily, but now I saw she knew how to play guitar as well as Greta. She would hold the instrument in her intelligent hands and show me three new voicings of G chords that sounded more open and fuller than the basic version I’d first learned. One morning in early spring, the first of a spate of warm days after winter’s chill, I asked her to show me another new voicing of a G7, with the diminished seventh in the bass of the chord. But for some reason, she began to fumble with it.
    â€œIt’s odd,” Françoise said,