Oh Susanna

The first flakes of snow fell today. The sky turned dark pewter gray, the valley was a refrigerator and by late afternoon tufts of whiteness floated down and began accumulating in the grassy areas. It will all be white by morning.

The pain is as sodden, heavy, dark and unstoppable as the slow moving storm front slowly swallowing autumn. Oh Susanna, oh don't you cry for me.

My mind goes back to that Saturday in May, a stunningly blue sky sunny wonderful day. Not that I noticed. I was sitting in my backyard with a popsicle in my mouth. The blue steel 9 millimeter kind, hammer cocked, finger on trigger, tasting the cold oily metal and wondering if that would be my last conscious sensation on this damned planet. I squeezed the trigger.

Well, of course, I'm here writing this, so no bullets in it. I stashed the gun under my chaise lounge cushion, pulled out my keys, got in my old pickup and headed down to the sports store to buy some.

In the parking lot I met Susanna for the first time.

"Hey asshole!" she yelled at me, "thanks for taking my fucking parking space!"

I do shit like that. Without even knowing I'm doing it. Like, it was never my intention to piss off my wife, but I did and now she's my ex. It was never my intention to fuck up my career, but I did and now I'm scraping by. It was never my intention to fuck up my life, but I did and now I wanted to end it.

"I didn't mean to!" I called back to her. Her car was behind mine there in the crowded mall parking lot. It was Memorial Day weekend. No way she could have heard what I said.

"What?!" she yelled, clearly annoyed, the reaction I elicit in females most days.

I got out of my car, left the door open and walked back to her.

"I'm sorry, ma'am," I said, "if you would like, I'll pull out and you can have this space. It's no big deal to me."

"Are you in a hurry?" she asked. "Do you have something important you have to do?"

Fuckin' A. "Blow out the back of my head," I mumbled.

"What?" she said.

"No, I don't."

She looked me over. I'm 46, in pretty good shape but I'm ordinary; you wouldn't pick me out of a line up for anything. I'm about as regular looking a guy as walks the earth.

I looked her over. She was pretty much my counterpart in looks, average in just about every way, except a mess of black unruly hair, but wearing no make up, unremarkable clothes, maybe in her late thirties.

"You're judgment call was right on," I said.

"How do you mean?"

"I'm an asshole. Been an asshole all my life. I even had, I'm pretty sure, an asshole for a wife."

She smiled. Oh my fucking god, she smiled. I made a woman smile. But she took my parking spot. I pulled my old pickup out and she pulled in, got out and waved her thanks as I drove away to find another.

She happened to be in front of me in the checkout line at the sporting goods store. She was buying a folding chair, one of those kinds you take to the lake. I, of course, had a box of nine millimeter bullets.

"Going shooting, are you?" she asked, being unable to totally ignore me since I was standing right behind her.

"Sort of," I replied, "Going to the lake?"

"The Ranch River," she said, "up near the county line."

"Nice," I nodded, "Well, enjoy yourself."

"Thanks." She turned around and stood there waiting in line. After about thirty seconds she turned back to me. "Want to go?" she asked, in that sort of way that leaves a person a lot of room to back out.

"Um," I mumbled pathetically, "with you?"

She ignored my lameness. "I'm, um, going to go to the swimming hole up there. Lots of people around, no pressure. It's just too nice a day to sit inside."

"Ok," I said, surprising myself more than her. "Thanks. Thanks for asking me." She had literally saved my life. Later she told me the sincerity of my gratitude was a clue.

"Sure," she said, softly, sort of questioningly, "I'm glad you can come along."

"I'm Cort."

"I'm Susanna."

We stopped for a six pack and some snacks, ice and a cheap styro cooler.

The water was cool, the air hot, the day long. Susanna chose not to bring her chair, just sat next to me on a big towel on the river shore. Kids splashed and squealed, birds chirped, and the beer was the best I'd ever tasted in my entire life. Each breath I took was one I had never expected to be taking.

I so realize now that Susanna had the perfect looks, the perfect body, the perfect personality, despite it not fitting the standard definition of perfect. If she had been a pretty girl, with fabulous legs and perky tits and fluffy blonde hair, I'd never have discovered the woman inside. And, I have come to realize, the woman inside would have been deeply affected, deeply flawed, by having a perfect body and porn doll looks.

Susanna, in all her just plain Suz' looks, was real. And therefore, what we had was real.

Right out of nowhere, apropos of nothing, she said it: "I'm not going to live long," then she drank her beer, stared out at the river.

A breeze came up just then and lifted a strand of black hair that had dropped into her eyes. The wind washed over me and cooled some of the sweat that lined my brow. I gave her a hard look. She said nothing, just continued to stare out at the day.

I waited for a follow up, but none was coming.

"How long?" I finally asked.

"Before the first snow, I'll be gone."

"Do you feel like talking about it?"

"I have a cancer."

What do you do with that? For some reason, I thought about my gun at that moment, waiting for me back in my backyard. How fucking pathetically absurd: taking my own life when hers was being taken from her by fate.

Later she would tell me that she somehow suspected, intuited, from my general demeanor, what those bullets were meant for. But that was Susanna. The amazingly insightful and stunningly beautiful woman inside.

My mind was racing, trying to come up with something to say, something to move the conversation along.

"You got today. And you got me," I said, and again, I surprised myself.

Susanna turned and looked at me then, the first time I saw how those two brown eyes were scalpel sharp and could cut me, with surgical precision, to the quick. Then she surprised me.

"I've never been bad," she said, her voice soft and low. "I've never done anything nasty."

I felt that last word in my balls, a tingly, rising feeling. And in that moment, I realized that life starts when you realize that you have nothing left to lose.

"Put your tongue in my mouth," I whispered. And I leaned in to kiss her. She did. A deep, tongue lashing, soulful kiss that spoke of long, hot nights and endless naked mornings and sweat and semen and cum and two people melting into each other.

There was a young couple on the beach in front of us, smoking some weed. I stood up, grabbed two beers and swapped them for a joint. I returned to Susanna, grabbed the towel and her hand and we went for a walk up river. I found a little place tucked back in the reeds away from the crowd and I lit the hooter. She sucked in the smoke and coughed it back out at first but within a few minutes both of us were laying back blissfully watching swallows dance in the wind above us.

The sun tickled our skin, the grass fondled our feet, the river was singing a song of pure joy, and I began to really appreciate, intensely, each and every breath I was alive to take. I began to cry, pure happy tears, that I was not dead. I kissed Susanna softly.

"Oh don't you cry for me," she said with that smile I would come to love, the smile that warmed the cockles of my heart and made everything alright for awhile.

"Okay," I sobbed, "I wont."

Her skin was so soft, her lips so sweet, her breasts swelled and arched up to meet my mouth, her legs wrestled mine, her pussy, her cunt, tasted like very stuff of life.

Both of us were crying as my cock found its way inside her wetness, tears rolling off my cheek onto her neck and breasts and face as I slowly fucked my way back up into the light, out of the darkness and into the light. She wept with me, crying softly as we slid against and into each other, two lost souls rising, rising into the air and soaring over the river like two birds gliding on the wind, being the day and letting the day be us.

Susanna sold her car for the cash we needed to move up to an old house on River Ranch Road. It was a beat up old place too far from town to be practical and took some cleaning to get it livable but the river was a stone's throw away. And I could play my guitar and sing as loud as I wanted. I taught her the Asshole Song.

And I've got a feeling, you'll be an asshole the rest of your life.

And I was talking to your mother, just the other night,

I told her I thought you were an asshole,

She said "yes, I think you're right".

And all your friends are assholes,

Cause you've known them your whole life,

And somebody told me, you've got an asshole for a wife.

We lived off her plastic and I made a little money with my pickup and tools, enough to buy some weed now and then, and beers. We swam every day it was hot, which was pretty much every day. We fucked away the nights and much of every morning, every nasty which way we could. For a time there it seemed like the summer might last forever, or like that we could stop the world and live forever in a single day.

But on September 21, the Equinox, she woke me that morning in terrible pain.

"I think it's coming on time," she said in a strained whisper, "to be moving on, Cort."

The plan was always for her to take an overdose of pills and end it before it got too bad. Well, it got way too bad before she ever got the will to take the pills.

But last night she saw those dark, heavy clouds sitting like a wet gray quilt rolling up the far horizon. And the cold had already moved in to where the floor in front of the fireplace was the only place she could lay to keep warm.

I called the Sheriff's office this morning and the ambulance came up through the drifting snow to take her body away.

"Don't you cry for me," was the last thing she said.

Life is only truly lived in the knowledge that you'll lose it, in the time when time itself is too short, in the love that surely must one day end, in the pain that comes from having lived fully, in the deep and abiding appreciation of each breath you take.

I had a dream the other night

When everything was still

I thought I saw Susanna

A-coming down the hill.

Oh Susanna.

I'm broke again, living day to day, scraping by. It's lonely and some days are really bad. But I'm alive. I'm alive.