Aqua Vitae

AQUA VITAE

Jeff Senatra

EMPTY HANDS ETC. PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Jeff Senatra

All Rights Reserved

Cover design and interior illustrations by the author

In memory and honor of the unborn.

Night dissolves. Dawn’s wings huge and silver heave and stretch, unfurl in slow motion and rise like temple walls invisibly constructing themselves into heaven. And out of the going darkness solid form redefines vaguely in the soft pearlescence displacing black shadow and void, and we see it, nosed against a thick trunk of a pine, ’69 Buick Skylark the color of sharkskin emerges like an underexposed print developing in a wavy bath of chemicals. Skin tone of the car matches precisely that of the waking light. Cool moist mountain air has unrolled pussy willow velvet across the black vinyl top of the Buick and inside along the windows so that the glass is opaque with condensation. A hand reaches up and wipes a hole in the passenger side window. Out of the three in the car only one is awake, and for the first time through the hole of this clearing this one can make out his surroundings.

Last night’s darkness, drizzle and thin mountain fog hid the site when they arrived. All that was visible was what the headlights illuminated—blue sign beside the road that read CAMPING and narrow pebbled pathway leading from the sign to an open spot beneath a broad pine tree that rose up and was lost in the fog. He wipes at the windshield now and receives a vision of the skeletal ladder climbing upward beneath the skirt of this pine.

A mosquito clings high to the glass at the inside top of his window. Through the splay legs, bowed and fine like sparse eyelashes, he sees its tiny belly is dark and plump. One of them has been violated. If he smashed it a tiny portion of his family’s precious blood would streak crimson lacquer across the glass.

He looks over his shoulder into the backseat focusing hard a moment through the shadowy light and sleepy glue haze of just waking till he is satisfied with what he sees, then turns to Nanna asleep behind the wheel. Took over somewhere outside of Denver early yesterday afternoon in a miserable August shower. All day it’d rained a heavy humid mist and the sky roiled with magnificent gray clouds that were, to him, like a tight massive field of portly shallow graves. He’d asked her to take over for a while so he could study that sky without worrying about sailing the car off into a gorge.

Those clouds had been hanging ominously over them throughout the morning, ever since leaving their motel; he hadn’t been able to take his eyes from them. Hunched over the steering wheel he watched the sagging sky suspiciously, as though if he relaxed his vigil the clouds would set into motion whatever wrong plot they must be brewing. He had to face them without the distraction of driving.

Dammit Cotton, Nanna’d said glancing over at him from the driver’s seat, a halfsmile peeking through the soft and sumptuous drapery of her lips. Something can’t just be what it is, can it.

Cotton sat silently beside her staring up through the windshield.

With that one glance Nanna knew what was going on inside Cotton, she knows how his mind works—searches for answers long before any established question can even present itself; always divining some deeper invisible significance out of the visible upon which to brood. She knows this all too well about Cotton and in fact loves it in him. The man knows things. She’s said this to her girl friends time and again. She’s had to tell them because they’d never know otherwise. Cotton very rarely talks freely around any soul, even Nanna; though he certainly expresses more while with Nanna than anyone else. She loves this in him, however sometimes it gets tiresome for her, the brooding, the intensity with which Cotton observes and ruminates—the heaviness. The smile Nanna held on her lips reflected what she knew of an all too familiar trait, but it held something else, too. Poised there intertwined with familiarity was an obvious undercurrent of biting impatience churning, floating to the surface in thick bilious flotsam chunks of sarcasm, the kind that sometimes surfaces between two otherwise very compatible people too long together in a confined space. Travel can be salutary and good for many things, can rejuvenate in various ways, but one thing it is particularly good for is drawing hidden blackheads to the surface that are normally rarely if ever seen. Familiarity turns away from the comfort it usually provides and sprouts a dark leathery cape of ulcerous and leering subversion. Traveling can do this easily to any couple, lovers, friends, it can do it better than almost anything else, and what was erupting here was nothing more than this.

Those can’t just be clouds up there can they, Nanna said turning that specious smile on him, letting it Mona Lisa right through. And then swinging her eyes back to the road she went, the smile starting to go now, she went ohHO no. And then the smile for sure slithered all the way off and she quickly followed up with oh no you haf’ta try to make em into something more than that don’tcha. DON’Tcha? Dammit! Why can’t those clouds just look the way they do without you getting all spooky about it Cotton? Not everything has’ta have a hidden meaning. And Cotton said I’m not getting spooky baby. Jesus, he said, I’m not. I just said they looked like that and I didn’t want to drive under them anymore because here I am going along thinking they look that way…I just didn’t want to influence the situation, is all. Well you scare me with that kind of talk sometimes Cotton so cut it out! They’re just clouds OK? They’re just clouds.

They went quiet for a long while after that, Cotton meditating through the windshield wipers on the sky, and whatever thoughts that might’ve come into his head he kept to himself. And as for Nanna, well, while they quietly drove along through the scenic albeit dismal visions of the Rocky Mountain landscape she began to feel a little apologetic for having snapped at Cotton, though no words of apology were about to come forth. She really meant it when she’d said cut it out.

Driving along thinking this over, though, her mind splicing into the realization of Cotton riding beside her for a change, she began remembering just how long it’d been since she was in the driver’s seat on the highway with Cotton as her passenger. Since…well let’s see, since that time when they first started dating what? three years ago, when she drove her dad’s old Ford pickup downstate to her mom’s house to get her old dresser, the antique walnut dresser she grew up using, and bring it back up with her to her new apartment, Nanna driving herself and Cotton in her own car to her father’s house in yet another town where they exchanged vehicles, her dad giving strict instructions that only she