Short Stories (0 - 0K Words)
2015.09.26
"Life Around the Bend" - Jakob Nexo Drud (2899 words)
John Lachman's riverside shack was a poem and a shamble in a rare spot of nature, exactly as I remembered it from twenty years ago. The road there was longer and more arduous, though, and not just because my knee hurt with every rattle of the rental. Back in the day, the gravel had been just as loose, but it had been paved by friendship and camaraderie against the DDT polluters upriver. Now I wasn't so sure what the road was made of. Hard feelings that had either cooled or festered, or perhaps a little bit of both.
I got out of the rental and stretched, struggling to straighten my leg. As I crossed his weed-dotted yard, John Lachman ducked out of the hut, putting on his hat against the sun. He looked well enough for a guy of 71, still a bear of a man with enough muscle on his chest and arms to match a dockworker. A beard had conquered the lower part of his face, white and mighty and wild like the beech and persimmon forest around him. He stopped a good distance from my car.
"Paul Weinman," he said. "You came."
"At our age you don't turn down old acquaintances. You might not get another chance to see them again."