Markleflurry Island

The Markleflurry Market smelled of cantaloupe. It was the only store in town. The pay phone was up front next to the soda fridge, which hummed loudly in his other ear.

“Markleflurry Station, this is Janet.”

“Hi there Janet, this is Ed.”

Despite being the best backcountry pilot in the state, Edward Stevenson III was very nervous with women and had a particular weakness for Janet. She was a small nosed redhead who's worst enemy, and most flattering confines, were the buttons of her floral print dresses. It was her attire today which had perhaps induced his current predicament.

“Janet, I must confess something to you which I am not proud of.”

Ed winced and rocked forward on his heels.

“I’m supposed to pick up some special ingredients for the cook at Rosy Meadows. But I lost the list.”

“Oh dear, Mr. Stevenson,” she said, because she called everyone Mr. So-and-so, even though he had asked her a dozen times to please call him Ed.

“I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience, Miss Janet,” which is what everyone called her, “I’m a moth-brained oaf unworthy of your time and salvation.”

She giggled. “Don’t be silly, Mr. Stevenson.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” he said.

“It’s no trouble, really, Mr. Stevenson.”

“Jaws is playing at the movie theater next door.”

“You’re joking,” she said, nearly whispering.

“I know you prefer horror,” he said, “but in this little town, that may be the best we’ll get.”

“Let me get your message to Rosy Meadows, sir, and I’ll be right back with you.”

Janet put the line on hold and set down the phone. She stared down at her peach fingernails. Marissa and Carla and she had painted their nails the day before, lying on the dock in the long evening sun. Her thumb had already chipped.

She took a deep breath. Rosy Meadows was fifty miles into the backcountry of Markleflurry Island. Getting word back to their cook would require her to talk to Ranger Hartley. She hated talking to Ranger Hartley. She always got the feeling she disappointed him.

Taking another bolstering breath, Janet stood and walked to the back office. Markleflurry Station was built in log cabin style. As Janet walked by the mantle, she smelled socks laid out to dry on the bricks. A thunderstorm had struck the crew coming in from Rosy and the men were still complaining about it.

Markleflurry Island was shaped like a cow laying on its side chewing a rather bulky cud. Markleflurry Station was nestled in the cow’s armpit, under the towering peaks that lined her belly. The mountains and sea combined to create unique and unpredictable weather patterns.

“Mr. Hartley, I have a message for Rosy.”

Ranger Hartley didn’t look up at Janet where she stood before his desk. She picked at her chipping fingernail polish.

Ranger Hartley’s sideburns were fluffy, drooping ever so slightly, and wiggling with the motion of his jaw. His olive drab uniform was snug around his speckled neck. 

He spoke into the radio on his desk, a black brick with a foot-long antennae. 

“Hartley. Rosy Meadows. Six.”

Rosy Meadows had avoided the late summer storm, nestled as it was in a sunny valley in the heart of the island. Five buildings comprised the station - the station house, the ranger’s house, the crew bunks, the shop, and the barn. 

The station house was the center of activity. It was here the guests to the station were greeted with cookies and tea. In the front a deluxe pantry housed the active food inventory. Upstairs dwelt the station guard, his wife, and their two boys.

The radio dwelt in the kitchen of the station house. Sometimes it was hard to hear, over the click of cowboy boots, the whistling of tea kettles, and the bubbling of pasta water, although that was not the case today.

“Hartley. Rosy Meadows. Six.”

The tired bureaucrat's call rang out across the clean tables and benches, painted a fresh coat of white two years prior. Wiped clean that morning after breakfast by the eldest son. A couple coffee cups lingered by the sink, one leaving a ring on the counter as black as tobacco spit.

The windows were open, and the scent of warm grass rushed through the room, carrying the yellow and cream curtains on its back.

“Hartley. Rosy Meadows. Six.”

Unheard, but for the younger son, who had run inside to retrieve his kite. It was Sunday, and thus a terrible day for conducting business, even in a world removed from the world.

This younger son couldn’t hear Ranger Hartley over the squeak and tremble of his feet on the worn wooden boards. Even if he had, he could not have known what Hartley wanted.

“No response,” Ranger Hartley said. “Can’t get a message through.”

Janet stared at him in disappointment. Ranger Hartley had a peculiar tic of rhythmically squishing his lips together like a catfish. 

Janet tugged at the sleeve of her red cardigan, suddenly feeling its woolen itch.

“Mr. Stevenson, I hate to disappoint you, but we can’t get a message through to Rosy Meadows.”

“I’ve really buggered this up, haven’t I?” said Ed.

On the other end of the line, Ed could hear Janet light a cigarette. He had stood at the front desk many times flirting with her, wondering if she knew that was what he was doing, watching her clever little fingers tap the ashes into her green ashtray.

Ed Stevenson had stopped smoking ten years prior, the same time he stopped drinking. But he still loved the smell. It might be hard to marry her without picking up the habit again.

“This is like the time I forgot the bananas for Dewitt’s birthday cake,” said Ed.

“I didn’t know Dewitt liked bananas,” said Janet. 

Dewitt was the lead Ranger for the whole district. No doubt Janet would file that trivia away for the next time she planned an office party. That was one of the things Ed liked about her - she was thoughtful and ambitious.

“And Mexican wedding cookies,” said Ed.

“I was trying to tell Carla the story about you and Dewitt in the swamp when you were ten. How did that story go?”

Ed chose to focus on stories of his childhood with Dewitt. As military brats let loose on a rainforest, they capsized more boats than they could remember stories for, in pursuit of fish and uninhabited islands.

Ed chose to omit stories of his reunion with Dewitt. This was because the decade-long interim was full of marvelously lovely women of every kind and shape, and the liquor he needed to be brave enough to pursue them.

His rehabilitation was made complete by several nurses who taught him how to listen to beautiful women even while sober and celibate. Since then, it was the wisdom of the fairer sex that Ed respected the most, although he had to admit that he found other attributes more pleasurable.

“Miss Janet,” said Ed. “Any chance you could check in on Rosy for me?”

Janet and Ed had been chatting for thirty minutes. He knew Janet would have one of her plump calves set atop the opposite knee. A complex communications contraption before her would have blared if anyone else had attempted to call.

“Of course Mr. Stevenson,” said Janet, hopping to her feet. 

It was so pleasant to talk with him that she had forgotten about the time. This often happened with him, and it brought a hot blush to her cheeks. 

Marissa and Carla had seen her blush yesterday when she mentioned him, and they had tittered and teased her mercilessly. She tolerated it because she knew they were jealous. Imagine what they would say when she told them about the movie.

He must really be embarrassed, as it was the first time he had offered to take her out on a date. Perhaps she shouldn’t read too much into it. 

“Hartley. Rosy. Six.”

Ranger Hartley glared at an elk mount on the wall behind Janet. He scratched his long sideburns.

“Last chance,” he said. Janet gulped.

“Hartley. Rosy. Six.”

At Rosy Meadows, the kite had suffered an unfortunate run-in with a rather large stick, and was in need of repairs. The station guard’s wife stood at the kitchen counter, stitching the torn kite with a fishing line.

She switched the radio to channel six and answered Hartley.

After a brief exchange that sounded like static to Janet, Ranger Hartley turned the volume down on his radio and blinked blithely in her general direction.

“Don’t know where the cook is,” said Hartley.

Twenty minutes later, Janet had finished another cigarette and sat coiling and uncoiling the phone line around her little finger.

“And you just popped it back into place?” Ed asked. In addition to being innately terrified of women, he was also squeamish.

“Yes, easy as pie! I popped my brother’s shoulder back into place at least a dozen times when we were younger.”

“You learned that from practicing on Tom?”

“No, it was Bennet who was the klutz.”

“Well I tell you, Miss Janet, the shred of a hold that humanity has on Markleflurry Island would fall apart if it weren’t for you.”

As she giggled and refuted, Ed had the sudden memory of her round thighs, revealed sometimes by her skirt.

“Mr. Stevenson!” Janet gasped from the other end of the line. “We may be in luck.”

She plunged him into silence. Ed stood at the pay phone, tapping his spare quarters against the metal frame in rhythm with the music wafting down from overhead. 

Ed wore bell bottom jeans and a button up from his mother. She lived down in the southern part of the state and insisted he visit nearly monthly. 

His mother’s support had been indispensable when he was recovering from “rumspringa a la Stevenson,” as she liked to call it. The title was not incidental and was in fact inherited. In her senescent senility, she regaled him with her own exploits. These surpassed his in financial, psychedelic, and erotic zeniths and nadirs.

Now a teetotaler, Ed had been committed to doing right by Janet since about an hour after he met her this spring. He started to fret that he had overstepped by asking her out to a movie. 

“Oh Mr. Stevenson, you’ll never believe what happened,” Janet came back on the line, breathless.

Hearing in her voice a good kind of awe, Ed felt hopeful.

“It’s a Terrestre Sherry that the cook needs you to pick up. He said they only have it at Mike’s in Clayton.”

Janet’s voice shone like an angel down on Ed’s shoulders. He felt a wave of auburn light slide over him, the color of her hair. It was a good thing to ask her out. He really had to do something about this.

“How did they find that out?” asked Ed.

“The station guard’s son found the cook! Can you believe that?”

The cook and the cowboy had been out fly fishing in Rosy Creek. Well, the cowboy was fly fishing, knee deep in a wide arc of ripples.

On the shore, the cook was sitting under the shade of a respectable osier dogwood, on a soft and molding log, soaking his feet and puffing on a tobacco pipe. His pants and shirt were damp up to the armpits because his waders leaked. He liked it that way on these afternoons as hot and dry as an oven.

The little boy ran up and asked him what he wanted Ed to pick up from the mainland. The cook told him as much as he thought the little boy and Ed could actually remember.

When the kid ran off, the cook puffed on his pipe. His small cloud of smoke wiggled past the pine trees, towards the heavens. Around his feet the water was clear, flashing white where it shimmered across his skin. The rocks below were all the colors - red, yellow, green, purple.

The cook thought about how lucky Ed was, in that handsome way, lucky because he could charm a secretary into doing his dirty work. He thought about the world beyond worlds and wondered how many times a day it aligned with our puny pleas. He thought about the soup he would make with the sherry, and how happy it would make the crew.

“Miss Janet, I think I’ve occupied you until five minutes after five. My sincerest apologies.”

“No trouble at all, I’ve already clocked out,” she said. “I get personally invested in things, you know.”

Ed pressed the phone to his ear, looking up at the bright blue sky out the window.

“You are a marvel, Janet,” he said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome … Ed,” she said, sounding shy in that theatrical way she had. It was a total ruse. The woman had no shy part of her, a trait which brought him much delight.

“Janet, I’d love to take you to the movies. If it would please you?”

“Yes it would,” she said, and he could hear that she was smiling. “I’d like that.”

“Two o’clock on Saturday?”

“I’ll be there,” said Janet.