Gwen, in Green

“Early, I’d say. Otherwise I’d remember.”

“Huh, you forgot where you parked the car the other day.” She closed her desk drawer with a thump and looked at her watch. “And you’re an hour past due for your heart pill.”

“Ummm,” he said absently, as she walked stiffly to the water cooler, drew a cup, and brought it to him, extending the vial of small pills. “Yes, definitely something to do with plants. I’d start, if I were you, with the old files.”

“You know the dust closes up my sinuses.”

“We all have our little crosses to bear,” King said, heading for a nap on the big, black couch in his office.

9

It was too hot to clear brush. Moreover, the mosquito crop was a bumper one, and large, yellow, vicious deer flies added to the misery of being outside. Burning citro­nella torches and a hand fogger made the balcony just barely useable in the late evening. There, over tall gin and tonics, they watched dragonflies flit over the pond and threw peanuts to the friendly squirrels. George had arranged his work schedule to leave Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays free. On weekends they fished. George had worked on every piece of electronic gear in Ocean City, it seemed, and sometimes he took out his pay in a fishing trip to the deep, green waters near the continental shelf, where huge king mackerel and flashing dolphin made for some exciting moments.

In early July, he repaired some small malfunction in an aircraft radio and was invited to take a spin around the area. He called Gwen, who drove the pick-­up truck to the airport and joined him, taking the back seat in a sleek Bonanza. From the air, the most impressive thing about the island beach complex was the water. Next, the widespread activity connected with the construction of the atomic generating plant. Huge swatches of earth had been denuded. Around the plant itself, hundreds of acres of woodland had been swept clean by the bulldozers. The cooling canal pointed a bare, straight line toward the waterway, halted there. On the ocean side, a breach had been made in the dunes. The huge spoil area, almost ready to begin to receive the dredged muck from the marsh, was a tremendous gash in the earth, bare, ugly, holding blue-­green water in the depths of the main trench.

But the islands were beautiful, looking clean and fresh from the heights. It was a lazy day and the pilot had nothing else to do. The air was smooth and there were no clouds. “You two in any hurry to get back?” he asked, swinging the plane upriver. The marshlands seemed to be mostly water. The lines of demarcation between grass and water clear, hard. The water itself was transparent from the air, showed shell beds, dark spots, a sunken small boat.

“Not at all,” George said.

George and the pilot talked technical terms about radios and electronic gear. Gwen’s ears cracked and popped as the plane climbed. She could see the coast. The Port City was up ahead. The pilot circled the city and turned inland. He was checking out electronic equipment. The earth below was veined with roads, streams, railroads, and power lines which took huge cuts through dark, green woodlands. Gwen was saddened by the amount of clearing. She wished idly for the opportunity to travel in time, to go back and see the land as it was when the virgin forests covered it. The neat squares of farmland seemed intrusive.

As the aircraft droned onward, they approached an area of small lakes. Scattered, some almost interlocking, they were of curiously similar shape. “They’re all round,” Gwen said.

“Great,” George said. He and the pilot had been ignoring her.

“The lakes are all the same shape,” Gwen said.

The pilot twisted his head, throwing his words back toward her as she sat in the rear seat. “They say they were blasted out in a meteorite shower. Actually, they’re not all round. More egg-­shaped. But in general they’re like shell craters, a hole blasted out by an explosion.”

“Isn’t that funny?” Gwen asked. “Our pond is shaped like them.”

“Ours would have been a dinky little meteorite,” George said. “We should have put in our order for a bigger one, then we’d have a lake big enough to water ski on.”

“I’ll hop back a few million years and steer you a good one in,” Gwen said.

“Now, on this frequency,” the pilot said, switching the subject, “we get—”

Gwen, dismissed from man talk, contented herself with looking. The plane was making a bank. Soon she saw the ocean. A cloud bank was building far out.

That night, showers moved in from the sea with thunder and spectacular sheets of lightning. They watched the storms from the living room over gin and tonic, piled onto the rug. George topped off the evening with the Casadesus family playing Papa George’s Concerto for Three Pianos and String Orchestra. The air conditioner was laboring. It was cool enough, however, to cuddle, without sheets. Gwen slept in a pajama top, George in full-­color nudity.