by Jameson Draper
I can’t remember the exact date, but it was the day they tried to kill the president. I was on the Eastern Shore with Margaret. Deep country. A nautical seafood joint on a sinking peninsula. We sat inside because it was late afternoon and the Slaughter Creek mosquitoes swarmed. Inside there were men with blue stripes on their shirts and women in star-spangled crop tops, devouring soft shell crabs and oysters and stewed tomatoes beneath the banal charm of two-toned life savers and nautical wood replicas of three-hundred-year-old schooners. I went to the bathroom to take a piss and the wall was bare white, save one small photo of an unremarkable obese middle-aged man sitting in leisurely quietude in a red tarp-lined above-ground backyard pool. I wondered who took the picture and why they framed it and why they put it there, right above the toilet. That was when I heard someone say they shot the president. Margaret looked at me when I returned, mouthed I know, then pushed her leg up against mine beneath the gingham tablecloth. I knew to be quiet. This was not the place.
After dinner, we ambled down the muggy street and over the causeway toward the mainland and let the mosquitoes feast on our blood. There was an old cannon from a forgotten war and Margaret laughed at me when I stopped to read the plaque next to it. I like the colonial countryside; though it has long been swept into the dustbin of history, one cannot tell the story of America without it. The sun was low in the sky but it was still hot and we walked onto a cement dock with a sloped ramshackle hut and a long line of stacked, rusty crab traps. We laughed in silence because nothing felt real. It seemed like we were new people that day. Our histories melted into the swamps and nothing surrounded us but the moment.
We rode home in the sunset. Margaret drove because I can’t drive stick and she takes pride in it. The Volkswagen tooled along the two-lane pavement and bent around soy fields and baby corn stalks. We had the windows down and Ethiopian jazz played on the radio. Her hair was curly and lush and dancing in the wind. I could smell it from the passenger seat. The brilliant sunset cast an effervescent pale on the marshland and we outdrove the bugs. The gold turned to an orange that splayed across the mystically flat horizon and shot forth bursts of fire through the loblolly pines and she was backlit by the light, the light that told me I loved her, and for once in my life I knew where I was going.