Watchman on the Green

*This one came from the idea of discovering desire in a place you never expected to feel it. An empty nest, a dusty base town, a window at the wrong time. Thanks for reading with an open mind.*

I came to Falcon Ridge with two suitcases, a box of books I didn't need, and no plan worth the name. My son had been gone from the house for almost a full year by then, off at college and thriving, and it had taken me that long to admit the house didn't miss me back. Forty-four years old, a history teacher on summer break, and I drove four hundred miles to a dusty strip of Nevada so I could stand in my friend's spare room and think, well, now what.

Mariah had the whole thing arranged before I even said yes. She tended bar at The Crow's Nest, right along the fence line of the base, and she had a little cottage out back of her place that nobody had rented since spring. She'd been after me for two years to visit. The timing, she said, was perfect.

"Perfect for what," I asked her, hauling my suitcase up her front step.

"For whatever you want it for," she said, and took the other end of the suitcase like we were moving a piano.

That's the trouble with friends who've known you since you dated their brother. They don't let you pretend. Four years ago I'd spent a few months with Mariah's brother Dale, and it had been fine, honestly fine, the kind of thing that just quietly runs out of road. But it put her in my life for good, and she'd been watching me drift ever since, and now she had me standing in her spare room with a fitted sheet in my hands and nowhere to hide.

I didn't know what I was doing there. I want to write that down plainly, because later on there's going to be a lot of speculation about motives, most of it mine. The truth is I packed the car because the quiet in my house had started to feel like something with weight, something that sat on my chest at night, and a change of scene seemed like the cheapest possible treatment. People take worse vacations for worse reasons.

The cottage out back was small and clean and smelled like the cedar blocks Mariah stored her winter coats with. That's the only time I'll mention how anything smelled in this whole story, so savor it. I unpacked the two suitcases in about twenty minutes, stacked the box of books in a corner, and then stood in the middle of the room with my hands on my hips like a woman who had just remodeled a kitchen instead of emptied one.

There was a window over the bed. Through it I could see the back of the main house and, past that, the dark line of trees that separated Mariah's property from the green commons near the base fence. I remember thinking the view needed curtains. I remember thinking a lot of things needed curtains that summer, and I was slow about all of them.

Mariah took me to The Crow's Nest my second night in town. It was a Thursday, early enough that the place was mostly regulars and the regulars were mostly contractors and a scattering of soldiers too young to be interesting and too tired to be loud. She poured me something with grapefruit in it and leaned her forearms on the bar like she was settling in for a lecture.

"Okay," she said. "House tour. Kitchen, you've seen. Dartboard, broken. Back room, where the good booths are."

She pointed with her chin toward the far wall, and I looked, and I'll admit the Crow's Nest had done something clever back there. The whole back wall was glass, wide windows running nearly floor to ceiling, looking out over the green commons where the base fence curved around. Somebody with more vision than the current owner had put in those windows on purpose, because the green was the only pretty thing for a mile in any direction and they'd framed it like a painting.

"Nice," I said. "Real nice. Why are you grinning?"

"I'm not grinning." She was grinning. "It's just that those windows do a brisk business after midnight sometimes."

"After midnight. Do I want to know?"

"Probably not." She wiped down a spotless stretch of bar, which is what bartenders do instead of taking a breath. "It's called a green show, honey. Every few months, some soldier on leave gets a little brave or a little bored, comes out onto the commons after the lights go down, and puts on a show for the window. Nobody knows who it's going to be. Nobody plans it. It's just one of those things about this town."

"Like a weather event," I said.

"Exactly like a weather event. Half the bar treats it like one. There's a guy who rates them."

"Of course there is."

"You'd be amazed." She patted the bar and went off to deal with a table, leaving me with my grapefruit thing and a mental image I found, to my surprise, sort of funny rather than sort of horrifying. A town with a fence, a green, and a window. A whole little ecosystem. I'd taught sixteen-year-olds about the Silk Road for fifteen years; I understood the appeal of a crossroads.

That was also the night I ran into Collin again, though nothing came of it that night and nothing much came of it for weeks, so I'll hold him for later. What matters is that by the end of that first week, Mariah had me covering some of her shifts, not for money, she insisted, just to keep me from sitting in the cottage inventing reasons to call my son. I was a quick study at pouring beer and a slow one at the register, and I liked the back room, the quiet end of the bar by the windows, where nobody bothered you after the dinner crowd thinned out.

Closing time on a Friday, about three weeks in, Mariah kicked the last stragglers out and went up front to run the till. I stayed in the back room. I don't fully know why. Habit, maybe. The green was dark by then, just a faint gray-green shape under the distant base lights, and I had my chin in my hand, watching it the way you watch a fire or water, without expecting anything.

I was forty-four years old and I was watching a lawn, and I was thinking, this is what my life is now, and I was almost okay with it.

Then a shape came out of the dark.

He came from the fence line, walking into the one pool of light the base lamps threw across the commons, and I remember the specific thought I had, which was, oh, someone lost. He was young, obviously young, twenties, built like a soldier who'd spent his whole enlistment in the gym out of boredom. Short hair. He stopped in the middle of the light and he turned, slowly, until he was facing the bar.

Facing the window. Facing me.

And here is the thing I have gone over a hundred times since. He looked right at the glass. There was no mistaking it, no accident of angle. He knew there was a window, he knew the bar was closed but not empty, and he looked at it anyway, the way you look at someone across a room before you do something you've already decided on.

Then he pulled his shirt over his head.

I should have moved. That's the part I keep circling. I was a grown woman alone in a dark room, and every sensible instinct I owned said stand up, walk away, turn a light on. I did none of those things. I sat there with my chin in my hand and my drink sweating on the bar and I watched a stranger take his belt off in a pool of light two hundred yards away, and I did not move a single muscle.

His boots went somewhere behind him. His pants went with them. He stood there in the light in nothing but his underwear for a moment, facing me, and then he pushed those down too, and I breathed out, one long unsteady breath, like I'd been holding it since he walked in.

He was hard already. He took himself in hand like it was the most natural thing in the world, and he looked at the window while he did it, and I understood then that the show was the whole point. I wasn't catching him. I was the audience.

I felt something I hadn't felt in years, and it embarrassed me, it genuinely embarrassed me, this hot guilty jolt low in my stomach, this feeling of being seen and wanting to be seen, all of it aimed at a stranger I couldn't have picked out of a lineup an hour earlier. My last years with my ex, and the gray stretch after, and the careful nothing of dating since, none of it had felt like this. This was simple and shameless and it was not mine to feel and I felt it anyway, sitting frozen in a dark bar with my hand pressed flat on the bartop like I was steadying myself on a boat.

In the front of the house, the register drawer banged shut. On the green, the young man kept going, unhurried, watching the window.

The register banged again, and then came footsteps, and I would like to say I stood up when I heard them, but the truth is I didn't move. Collin came around the corner with two bottles, one in each hand, said something, and then stopped saying it.

He's forty-six, a civilian contractor over at the base, and I'd known him two years by then, ever since Mariah's birthday weekend in Reno, where we'd spent an hour arguing about whether the Donner Party counted as history or just bad planning. He had a dry way about him. He watched things before he talked about them. That night he watched me, then the window, then the young man on the green, then me again.

"Well," he said.

I opened my mouth. Nothing useful came out of it.

He set both beers on the bartop, pulled out the stool next to mine, and sat down. Then he picked up one of the bottles, worked the cap off on the edge of the bar like he'd done it a thousand times, which he had, and took a long drink. He did not look away from the window while he did any of it.

"Should I be leaving?" I managed.

"That depends." He nodded at the green. "You watching him or watching the door?"

"Collin."

"I'm just asking." He settled his elbows on the bar. "Because I came back here looking for you, and now I'm watching a kid put on a show in the pool of light, and honestly I'd like to know what kind of situation I've walked into."