Brief Encounters with the Enemy Read Free

were woods, and beyond them I could make out the river. This was the true boulevardof the city that for decades had brought coal in and taken goods out. The glory years. If I waited long enough, I’d probably see a gunship float past.
    I came into a neighborhood that looked like it had been abandoned. The whole place was gray and rotting and lacking any trace of life. I sat down on the steps of a two-story brick house with an addition covered in aluminum siding, and the moment I did, a wiry woman appeared on the porch across the way and looked at me. She was wearing a nightgown that she clutched around her. An old man in pajamas came and stood at her side. I took out my lunch and ate it while I watched them confer.
    “There ain’t no one living in there now,” the woman said.
    “That’s okay,” I said.
    They conferred again.
    “Hey, mister.”
    “What?”
    “There ain’t no one in there now.”
    “I heard you the first time,” I said.
    They looked startled. The man took a step forward like he wouldn’t stand for that kind of talk. I got up and stretched my legs. My feet felt swollen. I moved on.
    “Hey, mister,” the woman said as I passed. “Is the strike still on?”
    “No,” I said, “it’s over.”
    “What’d he say?”
    “Hey, mister,” the man called, “when’s the strike going to be over?”

    It was dusk, and I didn’t know what to do. I turned left and then left again. Was I going in a circle? I thought about how the cooks would be starting their shift at the restaurant. A car pulled up beside me. “Would you like a ride?” a friendly voice asked. I looked in the window and saw Ned Frost’s bearded face smiling up at me. “Were you going to walk the whole way?” he asked. Then incredulously: “You weren’t going to
walk the whole way
!”
    There was a young man about my age sitting in the passenger seat.
    “I was,” I said.
    Ned guffawed. “Young legs.” Was there subtext in that? “We’re heading your way,” he said, “and we’ve got two empty seats.”
    The young man got out to let me in the back. He glanced at me with a mixture of shell shock and glumness. He was tall and thin with a tie that he’d tied too short. He had razor nicks on his neck. “Nice to meet you,” he mumbled.
    Ned sped off. I marveled at the amount of distance a car could cover in such a short time. In two minutes I was back in familiar territory. I listened to the conversation going on in the front seat, but whatever was being discussed was sparse and hushed. I thought about telling Ned that he could let me out, that I could make it the rest of the way, but my legs hung from my torso like concrete poles. Soon we arrived at the young man’s home. They exchanged some words about the next day’s work, and then the young man got out and I took the front seat. We watched him walk to his building and waited until he let himself in. I wondered if Ned Frost was looking at his ass. “He’s not going to work out,” he said with genuinedisappointment, driving off. “It’s too bad, but he just doesn’t have the patience for it. Cartography is a job of patience, really.”
    “That’s true,” I said.
    At this, Ned laughed heartily, taking his hands off the steering wheel and rubbing his palms together. Then he was silent, brooding. He drove slowly. Finally, he said, “I was actually thinking about calling to see whether you’d be interested in working in the office again.” He stopped at the light and said deliberately, “There is work. You know how to do the work. The work is what speaks.”
    I wondered, if I accepted his offer, whether he would still give me letters; I wondered if the letters were worth it for the job; I wondered if he expected me to sleep with him. He spoke with great enthusiasm about all the upcoming projects, and by the time we had arrived at my apartment building, I had agreed to take the job. I would start the following week, and Ned Frost would drive me to and from work as