The Sour Hour

I turned sixty-two last March and I celebrated it the way I have celebrated most things lately, that is to say I did not celebrate it. I made a batch of sour ale that day because making beer is what I do at Camp Lassen, out here in the high desert of New Mexico where the wind spends all day trying to sand the paint off the buildings. It was a decent batch. The kettle sugar came out where I wanted it and the funk was already showing hints of cherry in the tasting jar, and that was about as much fuss as I allowed myself over the birthday.

The divorce was four years ago now, Vladek and me, after thirty years of marriage. We split the records down the middle and he kept the house in town and I took the job at the station and neither of us has ever once made it awkward when we run into each other at the hardware store. He is sixty-eight and going gray at the temples and he still calls me Thel, which is its own kind of funny when you think about it, and we say hello and talk about the weather and go our separate ways. It is a cordial arrangement. It is also completely, totally dead, in the way that a thing can be dead and still walk around.

The part I do not talk about much is that Vladek was the last person I slept with, and that was ten years ago, back when we were still doing the performance of a marriage even though the marriage had emptied out long before the paperwork caught up. Ten years is what it adds up to, ten years since the last time anybody touched me with any intention behind it, and I want to be plain about that math because it matters to this story. Ten years is a long time. A body does not forget how to want just because nobody is asking.

What I had to make peace with somewhere around my sixtieth year was that the wanting never actually left. I had assumed it would. I had built this whole quiet little theory that desire was something you traded in at a certain age, like a car you finally stop paying insurance on, and what I found instead was that the wanting just moved in with me and stopped making noise, the way an old cat does. It was still there at two in the morning. It was still there when I did the laundry and caught a smell of the fabric softener Vladek used to like. I stopped expecting anything from it and it refused to stop expecting anything from me, and eventually we came to an arrangement, that cat and me, where I took care of things myself and told nobody, and the years went by like the wind goes by, one long flat note.

Hana says I mummified myself and she is probably right. Hana Hall is forty-six and works supply at the base up the road and she has been my friend since the station bought its water from the same requisition office she runs, and she has zero patience for the way I live. She is the one who introduced me to Damien Conti, two years ago now, at a card game night she put together. He was thirty-eight then and I was sixty and he was this compact, funny sushi chef from the base commissary with a hearing aid he fiddles with when he is thinking, and he beat everybody at gin rummy and then helped me carry my cooler to the car, and I thought about that car ride for about three weeks afterward, which embarrassed me so much I skipped the next two game nights.

Damien is forty now and he has never married and he deploys every so often and comes back, and over two years of barbecues and card nights and one memorable afternoon when he taught me to slice cucumbers paper thin, we have become something. Friends, mostly. Maybe a little more than friends if you count the way we find excuses to sit next to each other, which I try not to count, and Hana counts constantly.

* * *

The call came on a Thursday evening. I was in Brew Quarters, which is what everybody calls my place even though it is just a converted storage unit at the edge of the station grounds, narrow and low-ceilinged with my fermentation fridge humming in the corner like a refrigerator with a secret. I had my feet up on a milk crate and I was going through the day's microclimate logs out of pure habit when my phone lit up with Hana's name.

She had news. The short version, which she delivered fast because Hana always talks like she is being charged by the word, was that a supply run had gone sideways. The convoy from the base got turned back by a washout on the access road, the one that always goes first when the desert decides to be dramatic, and Damien was caught on the wrong side of it. He had ridden out to the station to scout produce vendors for the commissary and now the road was shut and the phones were flaky and he was stranded at Camp Lassen for three days. Three days, minimum, until the county got a grader out there.

There is a motel forty miles east but it was full, something about a road crew, and the station has exactly one guest module and it happened to be the one Damien was standing in when the road closed, so that was that. He was staying. And here was the part where Hana got sly, and I could hear the slyness even through a crackling line, she suggested that since I was close and since Damien had once told her, in front of me, deliberately I always thought, that my sour ale was the best thing brewed in the whole state, maybe I could walk a growler over to Guest Module B and be neighborly.

I said I would think about it. She said that thinking about it was the same thing as doing it, only slower, and hung up on me, and she was right, which was annoying.

I thought about it for exactly as long as it took to fill the growler. Then I thought about it some more while I changed my shirt, which was a confession in itself, because I own plenty of shirts and there was no reason to change except that I wanted to be wearing the green one, the one Damien said once made my eyes look like something, I forget what, but he said it and I remembered it and I was putting it on. I brushed my hair. I put on the little gold earrings that I never wear for work. A woman my age primping to deliver beer to a man twenty-two years younger than her, and if anybody had called it out loud I would have died on the spot, but nobody was there to call it, so I did it.

Guest Module B sat at the far end of the station grounds, past the data sheds and the wind fence, maybe a six-minute walk if you took the gravel path and did not rush. I rushed a little. The growler sweated in my hand and the evening was doing that New Mexico thing where the light goes long and orange and everything casts two shadows, and I remember thinking that I had not felt this nervous walking anywhere in years, this fluttery chest thing, ridiculous, and I kept walking anyway.

He was on the steps when I came around the fence line, sitting on the bottom step of the module with one leg stretched out, and the first thing I noticed was the knife. A long sushi knife, the yanagiba he carries with him like other men carry a pen, propped open across his lap while he practiced a cut into a block of something pale, radish maybe, on a little board balanced on his knee. The second thing I noticed was that he was not looking up, and that his hand was at his ear, working at the hearing aid with his thumbnail, that impatient little digging motion he does when it acts up.

He squinted up at me when my shadow fell across him, and his face did something I had never quite seen it do before, a loosening, and he held up one finger, the way you do when you cannot hear and you need a second, and tapped his ear twice.

Then he took the knife off his lap, careful and slow, set it on the board, and patted the step beside him.

We sat on the steps for a while, the two of us, with the radish thing between us on the board and the growler sweating in the space where my knee almost touched his knee. He poured for me first, into the plastic cup I had brought, then into his own, and he held his up to the last of the light and looked through it like a jeweler, this amber color with a little haze in it, and he nodded once before he even tasted it. Then he tasted it and made a sound low in his throat, not a word, just an acknowledgment, and I felt my face go warm and was glad the light was going orange so the warmth could hide in it.

The sun dropped slow behind the wind fence. We drank. The sour came on the way it always does, sweet first and then the turn, the pucker, and I watched him hit the turn because he hit it the way I do, a small wince and then a settling into it, and I thought, well. There is a person who understands a sour.

We talked about brewing, or he asked and I talked. I told him the truth of it, which was that I had brewed alone for four years and that the alone was the part nobody warns you about. Not the mash or the sanitation or the waiting, those are fine, those are almost holy, but the tasting. You brew a batch and it takes weeks and there is no one to hand the glass to at the end. You drink it yourself, standing in a converted storage unit with a hydrometer in your other hand, and you say out loud to no one, well, that one worked, and the saying out loud to no one is the thing that wears you down. I had never said any of that to anybody. It came out of me in a plain rush, the way truths do when the light is going and the beer is good and the man beside you is quiet in the right way.

He told me his version, which surprised me because I did not know he had one. He said the single life of a chef is silent in a way that people do not guess. Kitchens are loud all day, screaming tickets and screaming people, and then you go home to a bunk or an apartment and there is nothing, no sound at all, and after years of it the silence starts to feel like a texture, something you wear. He said when he deploys the silence gets worse because at least on land he can cook for friends, and at sea or downrange there is nothing to cook for and nothing to cook with and he is just a man with a very good knife and nowhere to use it. He said all this slowly, careful with his words the way he is careful with the knife, and he tapped his ear twice once when the hearing aid buzzed and I waited without him having to ask, and that waiting felt like a kind of intimacy I had not had in a decade. Somebody adjusting around me. Somebody letting me.

By the time the last of the sun was gone behind the fence the growler was half empty and I was loose in a way I had not been in years, laughing at things that were only mostly funny. He walked me partway back along the gravel path, as far as the data sheds, and we stood there a moment in the dark with the wind fence ticking and I thought he might say something and he did not and neither did I, and then he touched the brim of an imaginary hat, a joke gesture, and turned and went, and I stood in the dark grinning like a fool at nothing before I went in.

* * *

The next evening was when the lock happened. I want to set the scene plainly because it deserves it. It was the second full day of the road being out. The convoy was not coming, the grader was not coming, the phones were down to one bar of nothing, and the whole station had gone quiet in that way a small outpost goes quiet when the weather or the road cuts it off, everybody in their own little box, the microclimate logs ticking along on their own.

I had gone out in the late afternoon to check the cold crash tank in the brew shed, which is a walk of maybe ninety seconds from Brew Quarters, and I had done the thing I never do, which is pull my door shut behind me without testing the knob. When I came back I tested the knob, and the knob turned, and the bolt inside did not move, and I stood there holding my own door handle in the form of a knob that was no longer connected to anything