“Del”, First Place Award for Prose, EPIC Group Writers Writing Contest, 2021.
The evening news called it the coldest winter in decades, but Del remembered it as hot—hot air blowing at him out of all the registers, all the time.
“All these windows,” his wife would say. “What were they thinking with all these windows?”
Del would scooch his chair away from the hot breath of the furnace laboring to keep the house warm and stare out all those windows at the cool, white snow.
That was the winter he changed his name. He had been called Del before, by his school pals and in the army, but it was his legal name, Delbert Leander III, his father’s name, that bullied him from every piece of correspondence that crossed his desk. Delbert Leander The Third kept its eye on him, reminded him daily, as his parents had done, that he was destined for great things. Delbert The First and Delbert The Second had been great men, and he was expected to pile up great loads of cash and security just as they had done.
The judge asked only two questions. “Are you doing this for any illegal purposes?” and “Will changing your name hurt anyone?” The answer to the first was easy. The second, harder. He suspected his wife would not be happy, that this could even be construed as hurt. Hurt that he would cause her. But he half entertained the vain hope that she might, just might, think it was cool. Well, not cool. Cool to her was still a word for describing the evening air after a hot day or the moment the pie was ready to eat. It was not a word for an idea, or a lifestyle. But he couldn’t quite give up the thought. After all, she had understood him once.
But when the first piece of mail addressed to just plain Del Leander arrived, she scoffed. “How darned informal everyone is getting!” He grimaced, but she didn’t see it. “It‘s those hippies. They’ve got no respect for decent people.”
Del thought the hippies might have got the right idea, but he didn’t say so. Later he would try to convince himself he had been trying to be kind, or polite, but even then he knew it was just cowardice.
When the snow finally melted and bits of green showed outside all those windows, he couldn’t get them open fast enough. The furnace pumped out even more blazing hot air. His wife closed the windows.
“Who opened this?” she would say, never waiting for an answer.
It was plain it could only have been him. The children were gone; the cat couldn’t have done it. Years later he would wonder why she never asked him why he did it. At the time he didn’t think it strange. She never asked him why he did anything.
He felt the sweat every morning when he, encased in a crisply ironed shirt and tie, hung his suit jacket in the car and squeezed behind the driver’s seat. He strapped himself into the seat belt, his wife’s requirement, necessary to preserve life in case of a crash. He opened the window and sucked in as much cold spring air as he could, carefully combing his hair back into place before each sales call. At the end of the day, even hotter, he would buckle himself in and open all the windows for the drive home. Later he would wonder why he thought the life he was living back then required preserving.
He saw the hippies on TV that spring, demonstrating or something. It never mattered to him what they were doing. It was the hippies themselves who fascinated him. They wore no suits, no ties. Their loose, unbuttoned shirts flowed under necklaces and beads. They topped ragged denim with stretched out T-shirts, went without shirts at all, or covered their bare chests with leather vests. Flowers lived in their ragged beards, scarves threaded their wild hair.
“They look like sissies,” his wife would say.
He did not always remember to nod in agreement.
He watched their hair moving in the breeze, overflowing their shoulders. They were always outside, standing at ease with one hip out, sprawling on the ground, or dancing. They draped their arms over young doe-eyed girls. Girls wearing loose, long skirts that swept the ground, hair blowing free of whatever it was that his wife used to corral hers.
“Cool, man,” they’d say, as if all the rage and terror and weight that possessed everyone else had trickled out of them, leaving them free. They’d look directly into the camera for only a moment before staring off into the distance at something he too wished he could see.
He touched the stubble at the back of his neck, looked over at his wife, her hair trapped under a hard, coated shell. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had his fingers in her hair. It seemed a fortress impenetrable.
He thought about joining the hippies. Hell, he was well past forty now. Surely, he had some wisdom to impart. But even as he said it to himself, he knew that if there were any sage advice to be had, they were the ones in possession of it. Still the hippies were supposed to believe in free love, whatever that meant. Maybe it meant love for someone like him without the cost he had paid to buy it.
He wondered if it was really love he had bought in his marriage.
In those passionate days and nights before the war when everything seemed like it might be lost at any moment, it had seemed like love. But, after, when the war had been won and though lots of things were lost, he was not, he came home and married her, and he wondered now if the ceremony in the church had more to do with a mortgage signing than love. He was certain he had married the house, the children, the job, the car, the lawn he mowed every Saturday. But the girl he had clasped to himself in the days before the war, well, he didn’t know where she had gone, but she wasn’t his wife.
He didn’t blame her. She had lost two brothers and an uncle and had been through the privations of a home front at war. She was burnished by her experience, hardened into something he had at first thought beautiful, but now knew to be just hard.
At night, he dreamed of her walking barefoot toward him in a field wearing a long, white dress. Her long hair trailed behind her like wings, a daisy tucked behind one ear. He woke up to realize it wasn’t his wife he had dreamed of.
By the time the heat registers stopped forcing hot air into his lungs, he had a backpack stashed in the garage where she would never see it. A thick roll of twenties was stuffed in the toe of one of his army boots. A couple of old flannels were crammed in next to some T-shirts and underwear his wife would never miss from the wash. He bought a pair of work pants at the Army/Navy and three pairs of new socks. There was a pocketknife, a canteen, his blanket from the service, and an old jacket she had told him to give away.
On the morning he pretended to be sick, she went to church alone. He retrieved the backpack, added a jar of peanut butter and some crackers, and dressed himself from the pack. He took everything out of his wallet, except for the cash and his driver’s license, and slid it into his pocket. It—he—felt thinner, slim, primed for action.
The rest of the contents of his wallet laid heavy in his hand. The plastic cards issued by hotel and gas companies proclaimed Delbert Leander III a big man, worthy to procure services at worthy establishments that his respectable employer would pay for. The fifty or so commercially printed business cards of fifty or so other men just like him carried the names of their fathers and bore the respectability of their positions, in their respective, respectable companies. A Who’s Who of the earth movers and world builders of the city. Solid respectable men who went to work every day in suits just like the ones hanging in his closet, in cars just like the one his wife had driven to church. How many men in this city carried his cards in their wallets?
He went into the spare bedroom, empty since the last child had left home. The cat eyed him from a fat pile of black fur on the white chenille bedspread.
He knelt on the floor and popped the register cover off. He shoved Delbert Leander The Third’s identity into the heating duct. The cards disappeared into the blackness below. He replaced the register, shouldered the pack, walked out the back door, and hopped the fence into the woods.