Labor Day ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Labor Day

Labor Day ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

A depressed divorcee named Adele (played by Kate Winslet) lives with her twelve-year-old son named Henry in a small New Hampshire town. Adele has emotional problems and rarely leaves the house. On Labor Day weekend in 1987, when Adele and Henry are out shopping, their lives change unexpectedly when they encounter an injured man named Frank (Josh Brolin). He is bleeding from a wound in his side and is limping. He approaches Henry first, and then Adele, and quietly insists that Adele give him a ride. She is naturally afraid of him but takes him to her home on the condition that he leaves at nightfall.

Adele and Henry learn that Frank is an escaped convict, but the longer they are with him the more they realize they have nothing to fear from him. He was in the hospital for an appendectomy and jumped from a second-story window to escape. There is, of course, an intensive manhunt on for him. We (the audience) are told in little flashbacks what happened to Frank when he was younger that caused him to be in prison. (We are also told in flashbacks how Adele came to be so sad). Even though a convicted murderer, Frank is a good, kind person who knows how to bake pies and wax floors. When the time comes for him to leave, Adele doesn’t want him to go. After about a day, she and Frank are in love. It’s almost as if they were destined to be together. They both know that Frank will eventually be caught if he stays in New Hampshire, so they plan to take Henry and go across the border into Canada and disappear. We know the plan is not going to work out the way they want it to. Will there be bloodshed?

Labor Day is based on a novel by Joyce Maynard. It’s an old-fashioned kind of slice-of-life tear-jerker that is maybe skewed more toward female audiences. It’s entertaining in its way, though, with some good moments (the peach pie, the neighbor boy in the wheelchair, the small-town nosiness, Frank’s kindness). The ending seems a little sappy, rather like a TV movie, but it’s appropriate for the kind of movie it is. If you just wait long enough, things will straighten themselves out and you’ll get what you want, even though you might be too old to appreciate it.

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Nebraska ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Nebraska
Nebraska ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp 

Old-timer Woody Grant (played by Bruce Dern) is badly in need of a shave and a haircut. He’s married to a nagging wife and has always had a drinking problem. (“You’d drink too if you were married to her!”) He has two middle-aged sons named David and Ross. Ross is a TV newscaster. David sells stereos and has an unhappy personal life. When Woody receives a piece of junk mail telling him he has won a million dollars, he takes it literally, not seeing that it’s just a marketing scam to get people to buy magazines. He sets off on foot from his home in Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska, to claim his million dollars. When the police pick him up walking along the highway and take him back home, his son David decides to drive him to Lincoln so the two of them can spend some time together and stop off and visit relatives.

Woody tells people he has won a million dollars and they believe him. When Woody and David end up in Woody’s old home town of Hawthorne, Nebraska, Woody is something of a celebrity. All the people he knew from long ago are either envious or admiring of his newly acquired wealth. Woody encounters an old business partner who, believing that Woody owes him money from when they owned a garage together, wants part of Woody’s winnings—and threatens legal action if it’s not given willingly. Then certain family members, remembering that Woody borrowed money from them in the distant past and never repaid it, want “reparation.” A pleasant family gathering turns into a brawl.

Nebraska is shot in crisp black and white (the Nebraska landscape is an important element in the movie) and is beautifully written and acted. Bruce Dern is perfect as Woody Grant. His wife, Katy (played by June Squibb, who I remember seeing as Jack Nicholson’s creepy wife in About Schmidt), has some of the funniest lines in the movie. Name somebody from her past and she’s ready to trash-mouth them. (There’s a funny scene in a cemetery where she’s talking about some of Woody’s deceased family members.) Woody’s son, David (played by Will Forte), is sympathetic and patient, the kind of son you would want in your old age. There are no thrills and chills, no big moments, no computer-generated effects, car chases or boudoir scenes, but if you can do without those things, it’s hard not to like Nebraska.

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

I, Frankenstein ~ A Capsule Movie Review

I, Frankenstein

I, Frankenstein ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp 

In I, Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s Monster, known here as Adam, is a pawn in the ongoing war between demons from hell and a race of beings known as the Gargoyles. The Gargoyles are “good,” having their origins in the Bible, and are fighting to protect the human race. The demons want to get possession of Adam (the story is set two hundred years after he was created) because he is the only one of his kind, assembled from body parts of cadavers and given life by the “mad scientist” Victor Frankenstein. The demons can learn from studying Adam—and also from the two-hundred-year-old notes of Victor Frankenstein—how to reanimate dead tissue. They have been collecting ten of thousands of dead bodies. When the time is right and they learn what they need to know from Adam, they can reanimate the dead bodies and instill them with demons from hell. The demons in their vast numbers will then be powerful enough to take over the world and enslave or kill all humans. The Gargoyles, of course, are trying to protect Adam and keep him from the demons.

The demon faction is personified by one Niberius who, when he takes human form, calls himself Charles Wessex (played by bill Nighy). He is supposedly a legitimate businessman trying to find the secret of reanimating dead tissue for the good of mankind. The people who work for him don’t even know what he’s up to. He has been storing dead bodies for a long time and will command the legions of demons when the time comes. Frankenstein’s Monster, Adam (played by forty-five-year-old Aaron Eckhart), is nothing like Boris Karloff’s flat-headed, bolt-necked, stiff-legged monster. He is a romantic hero with a toned body and a cleft in his chin. (Of course, there’s the obligatory scene where he strips down.) He wears blue jeans and a duster and looks almost normal except for the stitches that sew his various body parts together. When he befriends a pretty, young female doctor who works for Niberius, romantic sparks fly, even though he has no soul and is a monster created in the eighteenth century. Do they never learn?

I, Frankenstein is based on a graphic novel, with all that implies. It’s long on visuals and action and short on subtlety or character development. It’s entertaining, though, and fun to watch in 3D. Its expensive production values, intelligent script, and “name” actors elevate it way past the “schlock” class. 

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp 

by allen0997

Cigarettes

Cigarettes image 10

Cigarettes ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

When Lester Bright awoke on Monday morning, he thought about how he might skip school that day. He could say he was sick, but he had used that excuse—when was it?—not two weeks ago. He groaned and rolled out of bed. After performing his morning ablutions, he dressed himself in the same clothes he wore on Friday and went downstairs.

His mother, Loyce, was sitting at the kitchen table, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. She barely looked at him when he came into the room.

“I sure do have a headache this morning,” he said, as he poured cornflakes into a bowl and splashed some expired milk on them. “I’m sick at my stomach, too. I think I’m going to vomit.”

He looked at her to see what effect his words might be having, but she was ignoring him. Her eyes were baggy and she hadn’t put on her wig yet or any makeup. She looked like a scary old man. Was it any wonder his friends were afraid of her?

He sat down at the table across from her and eyed her Pall Mall menthol cigarettes while he chewed. Three of them were sticking up invitingly out of the pack. When she got up from the table and went to the sink to rinse out her cup, he reached across and took two of them, sticking them in his shirt pocket.

She turned around from the sink, or maybe whirled around from the sink would have been more like it. “I saw that!” she said. “Put ‘em back!”

“Put what back?” he said.

“Those cigarettes you just stole from me.”

“I didn’t steal any…”

She was on him before he knew what was happening. She moved across the room awfully fast for such a big woman. She grabbed for his pocket and took the cigarettes, ripping his shirt. Any defensive movement on his part would have been useless.

“Have you been smoking?” she asked.

“Of course not!” he said. “I would never smoke!”

“You’re stealing cigarettes from me but not smoking them?”

“I didn’t think you’d mind!”

“What do you mean taking my cigarettes when my back is turned? Are you insane?” She began slapping at him with both hands.

He tried to cover his head with his arms. “You’re hurting me!”

“If I ever see you smoking a cigarette, I’ll cram it down your throat! You’re thirteen years old!”

“I wasn’t taking them for me! I was taking them for a sick friend.”

She stopped the slapping. “Who?” she asked.

“You don’t know him!”

“I want to know his name! Now!”

“He lives down by the river. His name is Harry Burgess.”

“Well, you tell Harry Burgess to get his own damn cigarettes or he’ll be a lot sicker than he ever imagined!”

“I’m going to the school nurse today and tell her you beat me! I’ll have bruises to prove it!”

He had some money he had found on his mother’s dresser, so he stopped at the mini-mart on the way to school and bought a doughnut and a pack of his own Pall Malls. After eating the doughnut in three quick bites, he wiped his hands on his pants and went on to school.

It was still a few minutes before first bell, so he unwrapped his pack and lit up just outside the school gate. His friend Harry Burgess had just stepped off his bus and ran over.

“Where’d you get the cigs?” Harry asked.

“Bought ‘em.”

“I bet you stole them. You never have any money.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“Well, are you going to offer me one like the gentleman you are?”

Harry took one from the pack and was about to light it when the bell rang. “I’ll smoke it during third period,” he said, putting it in his pocket.

At the beginning of third period, when they were supposed to be in study hall working on their American history project, they went to the boys’ restroom on the first floor. After the other boys had gone on to their classes and they were alone, they went over to the row of windows beyond the stalls and lit up, first Lester and then Harry from the same match.

“Oh, tastes so good!” Lester said.

“I’ve been dying for a fag all morning!” Harry said.

After a couple of minutes they were engulfed in a cloud of smoke, so they opened a window a few inches to let some of it out. They were each on their second cigarette when they heard a sound behind them that told them they were not alone. Mr. Phegley, the school principal, had just come in and was looking at them. He had a look on his face that neither of them would ever forget.

Lester didn’t mind the three-day suspension so much—he was always glad for a reason to not go to school—but the bad thing about it was that he was going to have to tell his mother. There would be no way to make a three-day smoking suspension sound like anything other than what it was.

When he got home before noon, she was dozing on the couch. He stood looking at her until she opened her eyes.

“What are you doing home from school so early?” she asked.

“I have something I have to show you,” he said, holding out the letter detailing the terms of his suspension.

“Oh, no!” she said, pulling herself to a sitting position. “What have you done now?”

She reached for a cigarette, lit it and blew a big cloud of smoke in Lester’s face. He inhaled deeply and experienced a few moments of absolute giddiness before she took the letter out of the envelope and unfolded it.

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

My Antonia ~ A Capsule Book Review

My Antonia cover

My Antonia ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

I first read My Antonia (pronounced An-to-NEE-ah) in my youth and recently read it again. It is the venerable American classic novel by Willa Cather, first published in 1918, about life on the prairie in Nebraska in rough pioneering days. It is set in the late 1800s, when all the farm work had to be done by hand, there was no electricity yet to speak of, and cars were still mostly only a figment of the imagination. The story is told in the voice of Jim Burden, a young boy from Virginia who goes to live with his grandparents in Nebraska after his parents die. His grandparents have been farming for a long time and are fairly prosperous and comfortable for the time and place.

Jim Burden befriends a girl a few years older than he is named Antonia Shimerda, whose family has emigrated from Bohemia. They live in a mud hut in the side of a hill and don’t seem to be able to adapt to farming life on the prairie. Antonia’s father, seeing he has made a mistake to bring his family to such a hard life, commits suicide, leaving Antonia, her mother, sister and two brothers to manage on their own. Antonia has no other choice but to do the work of a man to keep her family going. She endures many hardships but survives her youth and grows into adulthood.

Eventually Jim’s grandparents give up farming and move into the Nebraska town of Black Hawk. Jim and Antonia remain friends, as she becomes a sort of servant girl in town to Jim’s neighbors, the Harlings. There is never any sort of “romance” between Jim and Antonia; they are more like brother and sister. Soon Antonia disappoints those who know her by taking up with the wrong kind of man. After she runs off with him and he abandons her, she finds herself with an illegitimate child. She bears this burden as she has all the others in her life. In later years, after Jim Burden has been away to school and becomes a lawyer, he returns to find Antonia married to a not-very-successful but kind man named Cuzak, with a large brood of children. They are happy, although still struggling.

My Antonia is steeped in time and place (isn’t that better than steeped in vulgarity?) and is about a way of life that no longer exists. Its themes are friendship, growing up, overcoming adversity, and holding onto memoires long after one has moved on. It’s one of the most readable classic American novels, for younger and older readers. There’s a reason it has endured for almost a hundred years while a lot of other books have fallen into obscurity.

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

August: Osage County ~ A Capsule Movie Review

August Osage County

August: Osage County ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp 

August: Osage County is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Tracy Letts. Meryl Streep plays Violet Weston, the foul-mouthed head of an unhappy Oklahoma family. She has “a touch of cancer” and for years has taken far too many pills. Her husband, Beverly (Sam Shepherd), is an alcoholic, an intellectual and a used-to-be poet. They have three daughters in their forties. Barbara (Julia Roberts) is the oldest of the three. She has marital problems and a smart-mouthed fourteen-year-old daughter named Jean. Barbara can match her mother blow for blow in the bitch department. The two of them are so much alike they can’t stand each other. Ivy is the plain middle daughter who has never found the right man but has somehow latched onto someone that, for reasons that become clear, she can’t have. Karen, the third daughter, left home years ago and never looked back. She enjoys the fast life in Miami.

Unhappy Beverly (not often a man’s name in the U.S. but is in this instance) disappears and then is found dead. (Was it an accident or did he kill himself?) With his death, all the wayward family members come home: Barbara with her daughter and estranged husband, Karen with her fifty-year-old adolescent boyfriend, Violet’s sister, Mattie Fae, Mattie Fae’s husband, Charles, and her son, Little Charles. Johnna, the Indian woman that Beverly hired as a maid right before he died, lurks in the background, a mostly silent observer until something happens that riles her. There is an ugly confrontation at the funeral dinner, with Violet and Barbara almost killing each other. One thing you can say for these family members is that they aren’t repressed. They don’t bother themselves too much with tact or diplomacy in their dealings with each other.

Meryl Streep is superb, as always, as Violet Weston. She dominates the movie and makes the part her own. You can’t imagine anybody else doing it any better. She won’t win an Oscar because she’s already won three times and won two years ago, but for my money she should win. Other standouts in the cast are Margo Martindale as Violet’s sister, Mattie Fae, who has carried around a secret far too long; Chris Cooper as Mattie Fae’s kind husband, Charles (his rambling grace at the dinner table is a highlight); Benedict Cumberbatch as Margo’s man-child son, Little Charles, who has always been a disappointment to his mother. (“He watches so much TV,” she says, “his brain is soft.”)

August: Osage County is funny and dark with memorable characters and dialogue. It’s not for everybody, of course, but the serious moviegoer who appreciates a fine movie adaptation of a great play should find plenty here to make the trip worthwhile.  

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp  

by allen0997

I’ll Do It but I Won’t Like It


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I’ll Do It but I Won’t Like It ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

I wonder about people who work in offices, and I especially wonder about people who work in offices and like it. I’ve worked in quite a few offices over the long years and I guess I can say I’m stronger for having done it. (That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger). I have to admit, though, that most of the time I didn’t like it. It has mostly been my experience that “office” is just another word for “hell” or “prison.” The best offices to work in are the ones where you have lots of freedom and the worst are the ones where freedom, as a word and a concept, is completely unknown.

I’ve worked at a number of contract positions, meaning that I was part of the organization but not “altogether” a part of the organization. I was, of course, expected to abide by all the rules of the company (start times, codes of conduct, breaks, dress code, etc.) but was excluded from company benefits, social functions and perquisites. If the company was closed for the afternoon so employees could attend the funeral of a fallen executive, for example, I would, as a contractor, have my pay docked, while the regular employees didn’t. Also, being a contractor means that one is completely expendable. If a contract employee’s work is in any way unsatisfactory (and even if it isn’t), he can be removed so fast he won’t even know what happened, with as little fanfare as the changing of a light bulb. So, in a phrase, being a contractor means I am a disposable commodity. If I have human feelings, they’re going to be trampled on.

The best contract position I had lasted for three years. I know I was a fool for hanging around that long, but I was promised a permanent position that never happened. I liked the job—or anyway, could tolerate it—because we had a company cafeteria and a four-day work-week, but also because I had a boss who didn’t much care what I did as long as I did the work I was supposed to do. It was a congenial—some might even say permissive—environment and I probably would have stayed until I died in harness, but my boss (the man who hired me and authorized my pay) was fired for some naughtiness or other, and the corporate robot who took his place decided there was no room in the company for me. (He never liked me, anyway, and the feeling was mutual.)

If you are NOT a contractor, of course, that means you are a “regular” or a “permanent” company employee, which in corporate language very often means “slave” or “possession that we can do with as we please.” At company XYZ, for example, I was never supposed to think for myself or make decisions—that was done for me by a person far superior to me, a manager. I almost felt like I was in third grade again because the manager was breathing down my neck all the time, watching my every move, chewing me out for any little thing. (When I was on kitchen duty, for example, I was chewed out for going to the kitchen to clean up too early, because the three of us who were assigned were supposed to do it as a “team.”) We had endless meetings, some of them conducted over the phone, where we had to sit and listen to some blowhard gasbag of a manager (one of those “superior” people) think out loud, sometimes for as long as two-and-a-half hours. (Of course, nothing was ever accomplished at these meetings.) When the meeting was finally over, I found I had fallen behind on meeting my “deadline.” Guess what the solution was to that? I was supposed to catch up on the work on my own time! (Why else did I have that laptop computer that I was supposed to carry around with me all the time?) If they could figure out a way to get people to work in their sleep, they would do it. They’re working on it, I’m sure.

Of course, managers are notoriously cloven-hooved nincompoops who have no clue about human psychology or how to deal with people. (Some of them don’t even know the difference between “there and “their,” let alone “affect” and “effect.”) They don’t seem to realize that if they treat people like shit, they will get shit in return. You reap what you sow. The good manager, and there are a few of them, knows to treat people the way he himself wants to be treated. It’s so simple. If a manager is liked and respected, he will get so much more from people than if he is hated.

The office, for me, is a very unnatural environment that brings out the worst in people. When you are thrown in with a bunch of office people, strangers with whom you have nothing in common, you learn almost by instinct which ones are to be avoided. You are naturally distrustful of the people who “love” their jobs (or say they do) and believe the company is sacrosanct. (I call these people “abiders”—for them there is no other religion.) They have usually been brainwashed to the point where you can no longer have any possible human connection with them. They believe that every company rule, no matter how stupid, is to be obeyed. If they see you committing some minor infraction or other (he took two ink pens instead of one), they will more likely than not tell on you, just like on the playground in second grade. They cringe if you indulge in any kind of bitchy humor at the expense of the company or its management. They take their jobs so seriously that they become overwrought and face potential nervous collapse if something isn’t done the way they think it should be. They are the watchdogs of those of us who don’t give a shit. Stay away from these people. If you ever hand one of them a knife, you will be sure to find it sticking in your back.

A common question that’s asked in job interviews is, “What is your ideal work environment?” One time when I was asked this question, I said to the female interviewer, “Freedom.” To which she responded, “We don’t have any.” I didn’t get the job, even though I was well qualified for it.

And that brings me to my favorite kind of job, the job where there are no ringing phones, no yak-yakking people, no meetings with a nauseating number of clichés and buzz words spoken, no people (mostly women) complaining about how cold they are while I am dying from how hot it is in the place, no getting up extremely early in the morning, no traffic jams going to or from work, no petty jealousies, no backbiting, no whining, no adult babies, no wishing I was someplace else, no clockwatching, no pretending to be busy when I’m not, no pretending I like something or somebody I don’t, no “Sunday blues” because I have to go to work on Monday, no evenings getting ready for—and dreading—the next day of hell. I control the temperature (a little on the cool side, summer or winter). If my phone is ringing, I don’t have to answer it because it is, after all, my phone. I can work in my bathrobe all day, take extra long lunches, and can take a nap whenever I feel like it. I can have music playing (Mozart, Bach, Glenn Miller, Peggy Lee, Paul Whiteman, or whatever) while I work—or not—and I control what kind of music I listen to without having to defer to anybody else’s preferences. This sounds like heaven, doesn’t it? It sounds a lot like home.

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Lone Survivor ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Lone Survivor

Lone Survivor ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

Mark Wahlberg plays Marcus Luttrell, one of a group of Navy Seals sent on a dangerous mission in Afghanistan to remove a terrorist who routinely kills U.S. marines. Five of the Navy Seals are cut off in rough mountainous terrain and find themselves outmanned and outgunned by Afghan Taliban fighters. (When they encounter two young boys and an old man, apparently innocently herding goats, they are faced with the difficult dilemma of killing them because they are the enemy or letting them go, knowing they will alert the enemy of their presence.) Lone Survivor is based on a book of the same name by Marcus Luttrell, the only Navy Seal to survive the ordeal. After the others have been killed one by one, Luttrell, himself wounded, is taken in by non-Taliban Afghans acting in accordance with an ancient code of honor. He would not have survived otherwise.

Lone Survivor is not exactly “enjoyable” in the usual way. It’s grim and bloody and might give you a headache. We get a glimpse in the beginning of the movie of how Navy Seals are trained for the difficult missions they will undertake. Being a Navy Seal takes a special kind of person, especially the part of the training where you are tied up, thrown into a pool and told, “Now you’re going to see what it’s like to not be able to breathe.” (Do something to help me!)

Lone Survivor, like other realistic war movies before it, shows us how hellish war is and what a toll it takes on those who fight. It’s not just a bunch of pouty Calvin Klein models playing soldier-boy dress-up for the edification of the gals back home.

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Mr. Woodbine is Here

Mr. Woodbine is Here image 1

Mr. Woodbine is Here ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

The nurse came in and took Erwin’s blood pressure. He opened one eye and looked at her and asked if he was dead yet. She ignored him and a little while later she was back again, fussing with the equipment beside the bed, turning dials and flipping switches and writing things down on her clipboard.  A clear bag of liquid hung on a pole beside the bed and drained into his arm. He wanted to ask what it was but he was too weak to get the words out. He was sure he was dying, but he told himself he didn’t really mind. Life was far too much trouble, anyway.

In between times when the nurse was fussing someplace else, he saw people in the room with him. They moved quietly around the bed, as if they were keeping watch or waiting—for what he didn’t know. He couldn’t see them very well, but he knew they were there. (Sometimes one of them would lean over and look closely into his face.) If he tried to speak to them, they withdrew. He wanted only to say hello.

One morning after he had been given a sponge bath (he was beyond embarrassment), he opened his eyes and saw a strange man standing at the foot of the bed looking at him—strange because Erwin had never seen him before but strange also because he was wearing a double-breasted, pin-striped suit with a red carnation.

“Who are you?” Erwin asked in his faint voice.

“How are you feeling, kid?” the man asked.

“Feel stupendous.”

“You know you were shot three times?”

“Feels like more.”

“You know who did it?”

“Not telling.”

“You had surgery to remove the bullets.”

“They didn’t need to bother. I know I’m going to die.”

The man shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not here to say one way or another.”

“You a doctor?”

“No, my name is Mr. Woodbine.”

“You the angel of death?”

“No, but I appreciate the compliment.”

“The undertaker?”

“No, no, no.” He took a cigar out of his pocket, rolled it around between his fingers, and lit it.

“You’re not supposed to smoke.”

“Well, I won’t tell if you don’t.”

“You’re police, aren’t you?”

“No, but I will tell you that I’m closer to being the angel of death than an officer of the law.”

“I give up then. I don’t feel like guessing anymore.”

“You give up too easily,” Mr. Woodbine said with a little laugh. He puffed on the cigar and blew a big cloud of blue smoke out over the bed.

“That ugly old nurse with the red hair is really mean,” Erwin said. “If she comes in and sees you smoking, she’ll probably stab you.”

“I’m not worried about her.”

“Who are those people standing behind you?”

“Oh, they’re nobody.”

“Well, if they’re there, they must be somebody.”

“They’re just curious. They don’t have much to do with their time and they want to know what’s going on.”

“That doesn’t tell me who they are.”

“They’re people you don’t ordinarily see unless you’re in the state you’re in.”

“Dying, you mean?”

“You said it. I didn’t.

“Tell me more.”

Mr. Woodbine opened his mouth to speak again, but the ugly nurse with the red hair came in and he left. When she pulled back the sheet and started poking at Erwin’s legs, he said, “Do you smell cigar smoke?”

“Why? Have you been smoking?”

“Not me.”

“If you smoke in this room, you’ll set off the sprinklers and that will make certain people very unhappy.” She pointed at the ceiling.

“I’ll tell him.”

“Who?”

“That man that was just here.”

“If anybody was smoking,” she said, “I would know it. I’ve got a nose like a bloodhound.”

“Am I going to die?”

“You don’t think I’d tell you, do you?”

He went to sleep again and a large, indeterminate chunk of time passed, maybe days or maybe only hours. Once when he awoke, he was aware of rain pattering against the window and then of Mr. Woodbine sitting in the chair beside the bed smoking his cigar.

“How are you feeling now, son?” Mr. Woodbine asked.

“How do you get in here all dressed up like that, smoking that cigar? Don’t the nurses try to stop you?”

“They don’t see me.”

“Well, that must be convenient. You’ll have to let me in on some of your secrets.”

“There’s nobody around. I thought we could talk a little more.”

“What time is it?”

“Does it matter?”

“No.”

“Tell me how you came to be shot.”

“An argument over money.”

“Ah!”

“And not very much money, either.”

“Not worth dying for?”

“If I live, I’m going to go find the rat that shot me and shoot him. Only I’m going to do it right. I’ll make sure he’s dead.”

“How do you know he’s not in police custody already for shooting you?”

“Maybe he is. I don’t know anything about what’s going on out there.” He pointed feebly toward the window. “The police were here asking me questions but I wouldn’t tell them anything. I want to take care of that rat myself. I never liked that guy anyway.”

“Revenge will be sweet?”

“It already is, just thinking about it.”

“What if I told you he’ll be taken care of and you don’t need to bother yourself?”

“I’m still going to kill him, except I’m going to make him suffer.”

“The way you’re suffering now?”

“Only worse.”

“Even if you live, you might not walk again.”

“I can kill the son of a bitch from a sitting position.”

“I have no doubt.”

“Why am I telling you all this?” Erwin said. “I don’t even know who you are!”

“It’s all right, because I know you.”

“I never saw you before in my life.”

“You have, many times, but you aren’t able to remember. I was there the time you nearly drowned in the swimming pool in high school. Remember?”

“I remember the incident but I don’t remember you.”

“Some of our memories are blocked out. The ones we’re not supposed to remember, for one reason or another.”

“You’re talking nonsense.”

“Not the first time and certainly not the last.”

“Tell those people to stay away from me. They’re getting on my nerves.”

“You just rest now. I think I hear that mean nurse coming.”

Anytime he was conscious, he expected to see Mr. Woodbine again, but Mr. Woodbine came no more.

Finally the day came when he arose from the bed on his own without any nurses fussing around him. His clothes were there, draped neatly over the chair. His wallet, glasses and keychain were on the table beside the bed where he would be sure to see them. He knew that he was being allowed to leave the hospital. Everything that was wrong with him had been fixed. He was renewed. He was going to have a fresh start. All his thoughts of revenge were gone. He didn’t even remember what had brought him to the hospital in the first place. He couldn’t wait to get outside and breathe the fresh air, even if it did smell like bus fumes. He jumped into his clothes excitedly.

He was going to tell the nurses goodbye as he walked past, but they were busy and didn’t look at him. Instead of waiting for the elevator, he walked down the five flights of stairs to the street. It felt so good to use his legs! Who said he might not ever walk again?

It was a brilliantly sunny day. As he walked down the broad steps of the hospital, he saw Mr. Woodbine waiting for him at the curb. They got into a waiting car and, as the car sped away, he lowered the window to feel the rush of air in his face. He was leaving pain and suffering behind. His problems, at last, were at an end.

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997