– A Horny Short –
Ross Kelly didn’t expect or even seem to want much from life. As such, he rarely gave thought to much of anything beyond what was happening in the moment. Now was no different. Completely lost in the thrum of the pressure washer and the rhythmic switchbacks of the wand as he drew the jet across his work van, he was oblivious to the clouds of mist he threw into the early evening light. They danced haphazardly, sometimes organizing themselves into brief arcs of colored light in the strengthening gold of the setting springtime sun. Sometimes they coalesced into larger drops that flashed with the brilliance of a spit of lightning. And whatever they did, they fizzled on the driveway, sparkled on the tips of the reemerging blades of grass, and darkened Ross’ wheat-colored nubuck Timberland boots into a shade of varnished oak.
He was just swirling the hissing stream across the “Sons” in “Kline & Sons HVAC Technicians” when Helene called from the front door. Of course, not much can compete with the sound a pressure washer makes—it isn’t even the din of the pump motor so much as the forceful drum of each drop of water as it reverberates into your arms and resonates through your entire body. She stood impatiently at the top of the sagging wooden steps, hands on her hips. The near fluorescent pink of her sleeveless top was in stark contrast to the chalked gray metal cladding of the trailer that framed her. Her bottle black hair was pulled back in a sloppy pony, revealing the planes of her slightly haggard face. She was hardly a shadow of the girl Ross remembered from high school. The one he had taken under the bleachers after the homecoming game in a quintessentially in-the-moment act that led them directly to this unglamorous life.
“Ross!” Her shrill voice sliced the droning machine and he glanced over at her, releasing the trigger and bringing a rush of silence into the yard. A jet flying overhead seemed a mere whisper as their ears rang. He lifted his cap off his face and simultaneously raised his eyebrows at her in his idiosyncratic replacement for ‘what now?’ Helene cocked her head at him. “How much longer do you think you’ll be?”
He blinked. “I’m almost done. Why?”
“I thought we could walk. Take the dog with us.”
He nodded at his boot as he mindlessly kicked at a coil of hose on the drive. Ever since Helene had been given an old FitBit from her mother, she had taken up a rigorous battle against the roll that had accumulated at her waistband following the births of their two children. And that was fine, although he had been less than thrilled at the sudden abundance of rice in their evening meals. “The kids up for that?”
“Ross Alastair Kelly, you’ve been home for nearly two hours and haven’t noticed your kids aren’t home?”
Truthfully, he hadn’t, though the trailer now did seem oddly quiet, the yard unusually free of balls and nerf guns. “Right. Where are they again?”
“Stacey’s. Just like the whiteboard in the kitchen says.” She turned and wrenched the screen door open. “Finish up. We’re losing light.”
Ross squeezed the trigger—all at once restoring the cacophony—and resumed zigzagging the pressure washer across the van, its hose dangling at his side and lazily slapping against his damp boot.
Ross had just cleaned up and shouldered the misshapen door of the sagging plastic shed into a closed-enough-to-lock position when Helene re-emerged with the dog. Cheyenne had certainly not been his idea. A german shepherd mixed with god knew what else, she made the trailer feel impossibly small and could eat her weight in dog food just about every week. If it had just been a matter of the kids pestering, Ross could easily have said “no,” and tolerated the resultant protests. But Helene also done plenty of the campaigning, citing reasons like exercise, company for her, and family bonding.
While he himself had made an art of appreciating the status quo, he also knew that his wife had not. It was surely disappointment enough that their home had wheels and that most of their clothes had plucked from the rack at the Salvation Army, though she never said it. To make matters worse, Ross had not been unable to satisfy her sexually for at least a year, try as he might. His concession to a dog seemed like the least he could do.
Cheyenne’s nails scrabbled on the driveway as Helene attempted the click her harness in place. “Perfect timing. I thought we’d head back to the lake.” Ross squinted at the tree-lined horizon, which marked the edge of Scotchdale Creek as it wended its sinuous route to the state’s southern border.
“Let me use the bathroom, then I’ll be out.”
Ross had to slightly turn his broad shoulders in order to pass through the narrow hallway that led to the back of the trailer in order to not dislodge all of the family photos from the dark paneled walls. Very little had changed about the trailer since Ross and Helene had inherited it from Ross’ grandparents. True, the path in the rust-colored shag carpet had worn deeper and darker, and there was now a tatty strip of duct tape at the threshold to the bathroom to keep one’s foot from snagging the place where the rug had given up entirely. The entire home still retained the unmistakable scent of mothballs, though Helene had invested in every sickly sweet scent of plug-in air freshener she could find to mask the octogenarian musk. Very little furniture had been replaced—from the once-overstuffed blue sofa to the octagonal kitchen table—it all coordinated with the interior in a consistent tired and faded motif.
It was funny how twelve years of living in those conditions had snuck up on them. Ross didn’t give it much thought anymore, but he knew Helene saw waging any war against the trailer’s sorry condition meant also admitting defeat to any kind of real upgrade in lifestyle. Still convinced that this was all temporary, Helene daily stood at the limescale encrusted kitchen sink and washed Ross’ grandmother’s chipped strawberry-patterned dishes as though they were merely guests in the trailer, striving not to outstay their welcome.
Ross sank onto the end of the bed and reached for the combination to his gun safe. Like a pocket universe, the volume of the metal cabinet represented Ross’ solitary claim to privacy because Helene never questioned the safe. To her, it was merely the clunky thing wedged between the lowboy and the clothes hamper that barred access to the one free electrical outlet she could plug the vacuum into. And since Ross hadn’t made regular trips to the range for nearly a decade, she would have no reason to suspect that its original contents had actually been completely sold off in the last year or so. As the dial clicked home beneath his fingers, he paused and listened. A breeze whispered through the sheers at the window, the trailer’s metal sheathing clacked as it contracted in the cool of the evening, and Helene could be heard out in the yard, coaxing Cheyenne to sit.
He pulled at the door and the safe yawned open, the sky blue light in the room falling on dozens of new white socks, stacked just as obsessively as if they were bundles of Benjamins or kilos of cocaine. He removed and squeezed a pair, the soft springiness of fresh cotton blooming in his palm, the familiar surety of a fresh start. He tugged at the soggy laces of his boot and felt it unclench his ankle. The fixation reached back to his childhood. It might have begun as something else—like the fascination with the white gloves his grandmother wore to polish silver, the spotless fingers running across the gleaming scrolls and filigrees of an ancient tea set like a miniature dance over ice. He later swatched his own hands in toilet paper, running them across walls and furniture until they unraveled into feathers.
Perhaps after that, it was the friends and family tour at the microelectronics plant where his father worked. His memory of that day was mostly of a labyrinth of corridors, endless turns of fluorescent lights and dull beige floor tiles, the hum of meaningless but incessant adult conversations around him. But standing prominently amongst the tedium—a flower pushing up through a crack in cement—was the bank of windows that looked into a clean room. Three anonymous technicians, head to toe in white, moved about the stainless steel tables and microscopes. Ross had pressed against glass and craned to watch their white booties as they stepped across the floor, their bottoms impossibly spotless.
Later that day, sitting on the floor of his bedroom and cradling his foot, he had looked disappointingly at the gray-tinged soles of his white socks, wondering just how to achieve the same immaculate look of the lab workers. “You don’t need new socks,” his mother said dismissively without looking up from dinner preparations. She peeled potatoes with a vengeance into the kitchen sink, the limp shavings flopping into the sink like his pathetic hopes. “As long as there aren’t holes, we’re going to keep wearing the ones you’ve got.” Crestfallen, Ross had silently cringed at the idea of having to wait until his socks were threadbare before he would get ones as snowy pure as the silver polishing gloves or the technician booties.
Eventually, adolescence and the turning wheel of fashion would cause Ross to forget—at least for a time—about the long-anticipated joy of pulling a fresh pair of white socks onto his feet and over the ankles. The thrill of the the bleached cotton padding swathing his toes was replaced by the pursuit of sports, the wooing of girls. Thinner ankle and no-show socks in gray and black became the norm. It wouldn’t be until many years later that Ross’ first obsession would come out of dormancy—quite unexpectedly—on job training at Kline & Sons.
An small accident involving a clogged condensate line had resulted in soggy work boot. Ross lifted his foot in disgust, foul slime clinging to the hem of his uniform navy twill pants as his Clete, his mentor, howled in hysterics. “Here,” he had thrusted a folded pair of socks at Ross’ when they got to the van. “Lesson of the day—always keep spare articles of clothing with you. You never know what you’re going to get into on the job.” He had winked at Ross with eyes still water from laughter.
Shoe Horny 