Submarine

She was Dutch and I met her at a party.  Holland started exploding when she left, one block of cheese at a time.  My mountain boots were the perfect match for my yellow checkered suit, the one I’d bought before leaving home.  All around us mouths talked and laughed.  There was a song about a man being chased by the devil and how his pockmarked face was a dead giveaway.    

I had a full pint of Bauer’s apricot schnapps in my pocket.  I pulled it out and offered her a swig.  Without speaking she took the bottle and tilted her head backward, and I watched her full profile down half the contents like she was ill or something.  She looked at me sideways and I said a silent prayer.  Perhaps I was not alone in the universe.  Maybe the dice and the cards were really songs. Lyrics and melody delivering her to me.    

Her name was Buddy B. Minner.  She’d dropped the birth name of Lotte and substituted Buddy B. for it. She kept Minner for legal reasons. A lawyer for her father put money into her account every month.  She could do whatever she wanted and this made her spontaneous and dangerous, similar to a submarine hunting cargo ships.

“That’s quiet a name,” I said. 

“Yes, I like Buddy B.  My cat in Amsterdam was named Buddy.  She died when a boat caught fire.” 

“Sorry.  I’ve heard that cats can die in burning boats.”

“Water or fire doesn’t give a cat much choice,” and then she put her head down and asked for another drink.  Nervously, I took a quick hit and gave her the bottle, which she finished off. 

“We need more of this,” she said. 

As we walked to the trading post, the one run by the Boer on the edge of a long fall in the Drakensberg, she stopped for a moment.  Her blonde hair mixed with the moonlight and her skin took on the tone of a good moonstone.  “I killed my husband.” 

“Did he deserve it?”

“They said it was murder, but I was found not guilty by the court.  Does it matter?”

“Yeah, I’d say so.”

“No, I mean does it matter to you that I killed my husband?” 

“Sort of.  I don’t know. Did he need killing?”

She didn’t answer.

We bought the schnapps and returned to the party. I finger fucked her on the couch in the shadows. No one noticed. They were all dancing.

Well, that was good enough for me, and our relationship continued to hub the ditches for the next three months, and we lived on various fruit schnapps, and her fireplace became an alter, and she liked being naked in her fur coat and I always imagined she was a large fox with good breath, and then she cut her hair down to a half-inch or so, because I’d done the same thing, and after an argument, she broke into my house and took a hot bath and waited for me, and when I came into the bathroom she asked me to just fuck her, right there in the bathtub, and I didn’t, but sheepishly asked her to watch “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” with me, and when it was over, she said, please just fuck me, but I was developing a cold and told her I needed to go to sleep, and so she sat at the foot of my bed, still naked, and I dozed off and awoke to the sound of a rock breaking my bedroom window: the second busted window of the night.  She was standing outside, naked. I glanced at her clothes on a chair and then, she was gone.  

I never saw her again and heard she’d flown first class to Colorado to be with friends who were medical people of some sort. 

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