Onward Toward What We're Going Toward by Ryan Bartelmay Page A

saw the way Mort looked at him. The last thing he wanted was his daughter marrying some Lakeville townie destined to work the silver mines. Such was Mort’s idea to improve his daughter’s life—keep her away from guys like Green.
    Green met his second wife not long after he had gotten out of the air force. He went in thinking he was going to fly planes but learned that he had a knack for numbers—“tracking” them, as his squadron commander liked to say. “Geneseo, what you can do with numbers is what them fighter pilots can do with riveted-together hunks of metal. It’s a goddamn thing of beauty.” Green earned the nickname Counter and was a finance clerk stationed at Clark Air Base during the Korean War. He liked the routine of the air force; he liked the chain of command; he liked shining his boots; he liked knowing what was going to happen every single day—the same as the day before, over and over and over. After Korea, he was stationed at Nellis AFB in Vegas, and when he was discharged (honorably) in 1961 after eight years of service, he got himself an apartment in town because he enjoyed the desert and the sunshine, and didn’t want to go back to Montana. There wasn’t anything but silver mines and snow in Montana anyway, and he didn’t want any of that.
    One night after imbibing his share of beer at Binion’s Horseshoe Casino, he stumbled into the Glitter Gulch, a bottom-tier Vegas strip club (a “juicy joint”, as the air force guys liked to call it). He didn’t marry a stripper, but that night, he bellied up to the bar next to Leigh Ann Rogers, a roommate of one. Green was so smitten with Leigh Ann—the way she held her martini glass and
wore a suede vest and kept saying “groovy” and threw her head back and laughed, showing a piece of pink chewing gum—that he married her two weeks after they met. The sex was amazing.
    Then there was Jane. The night he met her in 1965, they went to a diner on Cypress Boulevard and drank coffee until three in the morning. She wore turquoise earrings, and Green liked the way the conversation sometimes got to the point that night where neither of them knew what to say so they didn’t say anything but instead looked at each other, locking eyes, both knowing that they should be talking because you talk on first dates, even though neither would admit they were on a first date, they were simply getting coffee at a diner. In the parking lot, after she unlocked her car, Jane turned to him, and he kissed her on the forehead, and she wrapped her arms around him and hugged him, really hugged him, and he smelled her shampoo, which smelled fresh like a pile of just-out-of-the-dryer laundry. From the moment of that forehead kiss, their futures converged, and they walked the same path, helping each other, loving each other, connecting with each other, for thirty years. All he really wanted was another person like her. He hadn’t seen this coming—a hospital bed in Peoria, Illinois. He couldn’t wiggle the toes on his left foot. The left side of his body felt tingly. It made him want to scratch, and he did. He scratched the hell out of the left side of his face and head and his left ass cheek.
    Mary sat next to his bed. The television was on—a edited-for-television version of Pretty Woman , the scene where Edward (Richard Gere) takes Vivian (Julia Roberts) to San Francisco by private jet to see La Traviata . Mary had seen the movie nearly a hundred times, and here she was watching it again in a hospital room in Peoria, Illinois. Green scratched at his face again as the opera character Violetta Valéry from the movie sang: Gran Dio! morir sì giovane —“O, God! To die so young.” Mary looked at Green and forced a smile.
    If it’ll play in Peoria . . .
    About an hour later, Green’s doctor called Mary out into the
hallway. Dr. Gannaway was a young guy, about thirty-five,