Candy Smokes

During a late August afternoon that tiptoed on twilight Becky and Peter kayaked down the Menomonee River. They complained about school and wondered what to do that night when it finally was too dark to go on. Over the trees they heard singing – a heavy, baritone voice that bellowed a song in Italian. Becky said it was creepy to be hearing that song while dusk fell over the river. Peter joked with her about an axe-murdering phantom with a half-masked face, and Becky reacted the way an immature teenager would. When she ran her kayak onto a rocky inlet, she hopped out of it and swatted at Peter as he ran after her. She didn’t run far because she didn’t want to be alone in the woods.

***

There were big houses on the other side of the parkway, and two men sat down on a bench across from them and smoked cigarettes in the crisp fall air. They were walking down to the village for drinks. Mike pulled out a flask full of bourbon and he and Ryan took pulls from it and laughed about being too responsible to drive but not very attractive to girls without having a car. They made elaborate stories about the housewives of the doctors or lawyers who lived in the houses; that the women were lonely and would like the company of the two bachelors. The heard the singing – something about nessun dorma, tu pure, o, principessa coming around the bend, and they saw the man singing opera. The bachelors tried to contain their tipsy giggling as the man passed by them, pausing from singing. They whispered about him after he passed, and they decided to drink some more of the whiskey before following him down the parkway. Later that night they were thrown out of a bar for starting an argument over the dartboard and making lewd comments to a waitress.

***

The walking paths were brown and uneven and flooded from the melting winter snow, and two old women driving back from the mall commented to each other about how nice the spring was and how bright the red berries looked on the brown shrubs of the parkway. Marge said she was thinking of moving to Arizona once and for all because she was getting too old for the winter, and Emily agreed. There are only so many winters you can take before it’s too much, she affirmed. They drove past the opera man and they heard him singing through the closed windows before the sound of driving drowned out his performance. Emily asked Marge if she remembered her cousin Tony who would come down to the restaurant and sing for all the guests when he had too many gin and tonics. Marge laughed and recalled that he had a wonderful voice, and that it was too bad his wife divorced him because of his gambling debts.

***

The man who sang opera walked his usual route down the parkway. He was tall and big and round, and his brother always used to call him linebacker. It was dark and quiet that night, and he could hear the river through the trees bubbling. His voice was deep and loud, but he had been working on his pitch and breath control to sing the tenor aria. He belted out tremano d’amore e di speranza before he paused and nodded to a girl who jogged past him in the opposite direction. He continued with ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me even when he saw the dark figure of a fawn in the moonlight, staring at him from a small field between the street and the river. Everything was still, and he decided on a grilling a steak with asparagus for dinner when he got home.