When they made love, say after she had yelled at him for staying out too late with his friends, she would press herself against him and groan with pleasure, and it seemed to him that he was going to stay here forever, the house and land as good as his already.

He was glad she had not brought up why he had been fired.  Instead of spreading the grass seed as he had been ordered on a section of the mine marked for restoration, he and his crew had been discovered by their supervisor taking a break down by the silt-filled creek with a case of beer.  He was discovering it difficult to find another job.  He had been looking for six months.

Left alone in the hammock the evening of their fight over his failure to find a job, he envisioned her return from work that day and considered his options.   Love in the hammock was one of the benefits of the drought. No mosquitoes.  But maybe he should let her wait.   Let her consider how lonely she would be if he was gone. 

He walked up on the ridge and then down to the creek where Danielle’s ancestors had kept their small still.  It had never been raided.  They just stopped making whiskey.  The creek had all but dried up, leaving only a shallow pool and a trickle of water.  Sometimes he thought about how much he would have enjoyed sitting here, hidden by the thick stand of evergreen laurel, and tending the still.  He sat there until he heard the crunch of her car tires on the gravel. The approaching darkness would surely cause her to worry about him.

***

Today was Saturday.  Danielle was at work until noon in Birmingham at her job as a surgical nurse at a head trauma center.   As far as he could tell they mostly treated young men who had been in motorcycle accidents, young men who mostly died.   He considered how he might look into training himself for a specialist’s job again.   He aspired to be a strip mine blaster.  What was holding him back was that most of the blasters had military training with explosives.  Once he had paid for an internet course but had not completed it.  Danielle was still mad at him about that and brought it up now and then.   When she did, he complained about his lack of military training, the veterans’ unfair advantage.

The last time the subject came up she had said, “Then go to Iraq go to Afghanistan.”

And he had replied, “You can get yourself killed in those places.  You want me to get killed?”

“I want you to do something.”

He looked at the canoe, painted in a camouflage pattern, sitting on the ground before the porch.  Once the canoe had been blue, but since he had stolen it and wanted to use it for duck hunting, the paint job served a double purpose. Danielle had wondered where he got the canoe.  He told her he found it floating in the river after a big thunderstorm. He joked with his friends that he had found it on top of a Volvo in a rich suburb of Birmingham. His fishing and camping gear were beside it along with a single suitcase. His guns and other things were at his mother’s house. Once the canoe would have been on his truck, but that had been repossessed last week. When he had tried to persuade Danielle to make the payments, she had refused.