So you're twenty-something and marriage minded, eh? Maybe you want to read up on the freight train you just hopped. This short story comes from the website www.Nuts4Grooms.com (reprinted by permission) if you'd like more information and a few more laughs . . . --Sly

Bad Breeding

Sunlight burns through my eyes and into my brain as if spilling through the uncurtained upstairs windows of a vacant house. Hot, steamy, the mugginess of a Florida noon swelling toward the three o'clock downpour still long off, yet my head wants sunset, a pillow, a bed, aspirin, a cool glass of ice water and this ordeal rescheduled for another day, another life. Flecks of vomit cling to my shoes, but she won't notice, nor will he, unless they get down on their hands and knees and look real close, which I don't think they will.

The Navy jet taxis away, leaving me on the melting tarmac mashing my Air Force uniform hat onto my head and hunching over against the boiling exhaust, at least a mile west of the passenger terminal, a half mile east of the cargo terminal. My head pounds. I walk.

A mechanic lurching across the ramp on a tractor takes pity on me and I climb aboard with my soft-sided, collapsing inward military issue B-4 bag loaded with laundry, half clean, half dirty and well rumpled after the trip around the world from Japan to murderous, steaming, meet-the-future-in-laws-all-by yourself Florida.

You already know they don't like you. You already suspect you won't like them. That vein in the left side of my neck throbs and I feel more flushed than I should. That's last night working still, me and Rob at the Navy Officer's Club, acting like we're twenty-one again. Only we're really twenty-four, he's married and I'm soon to be.

So what's with the drinking beer all day at the pool and pissing silently in it so as not to miss a word from the empty-headed manicurist and her redheaded friend with bad teeth but big boobs draped poolside while Laura worked then came home to fix some spaghetti so we'd have a hearty base coat upon which to build a good beer buzz at the Club later?

Scarf and barf, just like college, me and Rob and Laura and whomever I was dating only now mine trails nine thousand miles behind, with a commercial ticket, not hoboing on military jets, hitching rides in cockpits and cargo bays. And now Rob and I are out flirting with permanence, with forever, yet we're oblivious as dumb cattle crammed into a slatted metal truck making small talk on the way to a meat packing plant. Say, where you from? Nice ride, eh?

What if another cow said, "Hey, at the end of this ride, we'll be herded into long chutes, rank and file till we're jammed up against a rail were a man clubs us on the head which is lucky because the guy a step behind him walks with a roaring chainsaw to slit our flabby throats and we bleed to death standing up because we can't move?"

A finger of sunlight works its way into my left eye and digs around in my head, then presses on the nerve again that pounds like a conga drum. War with last night rages, my body fighting back, a rally. My stomach is the high ground and was hard won: I did my puking before dawn. On all fours, onto a garbage can lid, internal bleeding apparent. Rob, this is not funny. God! Laura, get the keys! We'll rush to the emergency room; wait. Wasn't that marinara sauce with dinner? Thank god.

The tractor bounces, I squint, the cobalt bowl above glowers, clouds gathering at the edges, a storm recruiting, building a case. Sweat trickles down my back, overcomes the waistband of my underpants, then finds my buttcrack. This is going to feel bad once I find air conditioning.

Out of a tangle of scrubby green, a squatty, sunbleached terminal rises and sprawls, shabby, as the tractor jounces and whines, closer, larger, ugly, but what do you know about it? You can't see through the sun sheen, the heat shimmers, the noise, your longing, her memory, your need. But even if you could, would you change course? Hell no; you're barely even looking.

And definitely late. But I'd said the West Terminal. That's the cargo side, where the Navy jet had dropped off its Air Force passenger. Yet they had waited at the East Terminal, the commercial airline side, and then gone home. Because they didn't know about the military, didn't want to, much less about the wing nut their daughter had dragged home.

Or in my case, sent ahead to meet them. I dropped more coins into a pay phone, dialed again. Connections, explanations, sweatbeads rolling down my back and I worried that perhaps I shouldn't have tried to squeeze another day out of that uniform shirt. Too many people watching to sniff an armpit though, so I had to go on faith.

I milled around at the curb, getting in the skycaps' way, leaning out to peer into windshields, hoping for a Cadillac, or a Buick, Chrysler; something big or affluent, a harbinger of things to come.

The air when not creased with the roar of a jet engine or the idling thrum of a car at the curb coursed with the static of bugs that rose to a wail, wavered, then died to rise slowly again in a faithful wave. Doors slammed; greetings and farewells of varying pitch and timbre; embraces. Bags dragged, checked and portered, handshakes, backslaps, more hugs and nods and where the hell were they? Why did the journey of ten thousand miles come down to a sticky dead standstill of a wait?

Palmetto bugs like shiny brown nutshells scurried, stopped, then scurried again and dared you to look stupid trying to step on them. But what would be the use, knowing you were outnumbered? I rested against a pole, one eye on my bag, the other on a blonde in pink clacking by in heels so purposefully through the automatic doors, into the terminal and my God, what did you have to do to merit one of her? Who did she just leave behind, and who would she meet on the other end?

I turned back to the curb and and studied the arrival lane. In a moment, another woman, different, the opposite of the other, walked toward me. I glanced but didn't allow my gaze to light, I tracked her though didn't look, which didn't matter. Portly, older than I wanted her to be, she seemed to have drawn a bead on me and though I silently prayed she'd pass me by, I knew she wouldn't.

She looked me up and down, then cocked her head. "Well."
Too soft, bridled, cultivated, restrained and ultimately, I knew, disappointed, that tone was and there was no mistaking it. I shared the feeling.

"Well," she repeated, squinting against the sun. "You must be him."

Drugstore perfume? I couldn't place it, but couldn't ignore it, or her. I squinted back, my eyes narrowed at the light, my hardening fate and the growing feeling I had become expert at subduing that picked at my brain and declared this would never be right. I reached out my hand.

Now she could size me up in person, whereas before she could ignore me by default. To her daughter's letter announcing our engagement--nothing. For two goddam months, during which her daughter had alternating panic, depression and stifled rage, which did nothing for our sex life. Maybe that was the point.

"Glad to meet you," I mumbled, or words to that effect. Glad to see the face with the voice on tape. The modulated voice not synchronized in tone or emphasis with the words spoken, as if to say: help, I have a gun to my head and I don't mean a word of this, you bastard. An old Ford Falcon slid to the curb, then the engine died but the old man kept his fingers wrapped around the wheel. Get in.

He too seemed older than I'd figured, with whispy sunbleached gray combed carefully in what must have been his hairstyle in the fifties, though now long strands had to reach up from the sides to lay almost transparently across the top like a worn out door mat.

He seemed kind, at first glance. From what I could see in the rearview mirror, his face was plain, narrow with a pinched nose, neither smiling nor unsmiling thin lips, mild, yet with eyes that appeared to look from behind a mask of something I couldn't quite put my finger on. His voice, too, unmistakable in the high pitch that fairly chirped from her cassette deck about virtually nothing.

And he drove too slowly, I decided, surveying the pancaked dense green that slid by. Cedars rose from the scrabbly vegetation in clumps, the center trees tallest, having dropped their seeds to be surrounded by newer, shorter growth that raced to catch up, to shove the mossy dome higher, looking for all the world like a rising hill, but you had to know there was nothing underneath.

"Well," she purred, "Uniforms just aren't what the used to be."
I surveyed mine involuntarily, then fought the urge. Nametag, lieutenant bars, shirt buttoned; hell, what did you expect? A blouse and tie? It's ninety-five friggin' degrees and humid enough to make a swami sweat.

He chuckled with way too much precision for an offhanded gesture, then added, "Well, it's the flyboy outfit type thing."
'Type thing?' 'Outfit?' There in the Reagan Years of military salvation against the Evil Empire, I'm in "An Outfit?" A "Flyboy?"
"Well," she offered again too mildly, "when Daddy went to war," meaning him and as I found out later, meaning after he was drafted during the Korean War and served eighteen months as an Army private at some fort near Baltimore, "the uniforms looked much sharper."

I glanced at the chromed handle on her door, then at the back of her head of chopped, dyed hair, swivelling as she pattered in such a controlled tone. Jerk the handle, left foot over the seat--don't think she's belted in--shove down hard like stuffing leaves in a trash bag; she's gone. Catch the bulbous rag-doll flail in the side-view mirror, flopping down the sun-bleached asphalt, rolling to a stop, silent. Ah, roadkill.

He nodded, grinned, she breathed commentary and the pattern slowly emerged: she danced around him, commenting, with him by inference, wielding truth. Though he said next to nothing, she still held up her half of the pattern making his docile silence and his precise, moderate smile all the more worrisome to me. Was was under that? Hidden well, but something. A wedge of sea birds arced back toward the airport and I envied them.

A good half mile before the intersection, the blinker came on and though I couldn't see them, I knew the brake lights were on too as he drove with the brakes grabbing even as he pressed on the gas pedal. I sighed.

The back of his head above the thin, tonsured, close-cropped gray and curving up toward the bald pate was a world globe. Not blue, though, not the color of ninety-percent of the earth's surface. Rather, covered with a tight yellow-brown sea, flecked with freckles and spots and mottled shades of pigmentation in the deepest parts. A burned patch resembled the Marianas Trench near neighboring Guam. The west coast of California arced up and to the right beyond the grand expanse of the Pacific I'd crossed days ago, blotched with liver spots and tiny hairs, and near his collar, way south, a scar appropriately marked the islands of Okinawa--The Rock--upon which I'd met, courted and apparently trothed his only daughter.

I still wasn't exactly sure how that had happened, but the image of a barrelling freight train came to mind, a runaway steam locomotive that was unstoppable or at least if it did, would instantly explode into a million molten steel fragments, seething boiler first. So it seemed easier, or at least less messy, to just hang on for dear life. What an idiot.

Okinawa, too, had seemed like a god-forsaken coral scar on the South China Sea, steamier by a longshot than even dank Florida, but driving to the gas chamber, no, in the gas chamber, windows rolled up tight and her cologne gagging me I actually longed to return to the scar right then. Again the car slowed.

Blinker, brakes. A honk from behind, then a sedan rushed past in the no-passing zone, anxious, probably, to drive more than twenty-five miles per hour blocks away from the next stop sign.
A tiny spider lowered itself busily from the faded head liner, lighting undetected on the brown globe near the Wake Island freckle chain. He worked his way silently east, pausing, choosing his course and pushing on, just like me, with no knowledge of what lay ahead in North America. God how I wanted to swat him with my folded up cloth cap. The brass lieutenant's bar would probably leave a welt.

Smaller neighborhoods unfolded with each turn we took. A few unpaved sand side streets actually branched off here and there, taking my upper middle class in-law hopes with them as the odometer crawled on.
Just taking shortcuts, maybe?
"Here we are," Father-in-law-to-be announced in an upbeat tone, guiding the vehicle onto a narrower road just beyond a low cinderblock wall announcing "Ridgecrest" in crumbling letters.

No, not just taking shortcuts. But okay; I can deal with it. I'm not so material and in fact I'm just a lowly Lieutenant myself so why should I act disappointed, even if I do feel that way? But for god's sake, the guy's an electrical engineer. What does it take to live in an affluent neighborhood?

With her arm resting on the seatback, Mother-in-law-to-be idly stroked the Pacific basin from Guam to Hawaii with bony fingers and nail polish that needed renewal, lingering over the tiny hairs between Midway and Inowitok. A lot of atomic testing went on down there, accounting I guessed for the scorched look. I envisioned him doing yardwork in a goofy hat that of course couldn't shelter that brain stem area from the merciless solar radiation. The spider froze before her thumb, then lowered himself to the floor and vanished. I envied him that.

"Yes," she echoed. "Here we are."

They'd both been against it from the start, the whole idea of her going nine-thousand miles away to teach school at a remote Air Force base. Never mind that she was twenty-three and had graduated from college; she should stay in Orlando and actually live at home like her emotionally, socially and sexually retarded but otherwise average younger brother who had just finished his fifth year in pursuit of a recreation degree at some podunk college with perhaps another semester left to go.

Downhill. Then left on a smaller street of squatty cinderblock houses painted sun-faded pastels with St. Augustine lawns dying of some parasite, browning in blighted patches mottled like the back of Ronald's world globe head mounted on a pencil neck in the front seat before me.

Stumpy palms dotted their yard and a rotting nameless, leafless brown tree in the center begged to be a stump. A manicured sidewalk curved up to a pinkish-coral cinderblock Florida-style house with louvred windows wound shut as tight as those in the car. Ronald yanked the parking brake and shut off the motor. In the silence that followed, you could hear cyanide pellets drop and plop then begin to fizz. We'd all hold our breath, strapped into that sealed chamber, and gaze for an extra minute through thick glass at a world that would soon spin and fade to gray as we finally drew a burning last breath then rode the blackness up the chimney like smoke, as the Death Row jargon goes, until we were no more.

Turns out, it was to be nowhere near that easy.