Glad And Sorry

When he came up through the tunnel, the darkness had not yet lifted and the cicada were still in full damp rattle.

The heat had broken in the night, and the coolness was stirring up an apparational moving fog, heavy, moist. The street lights were dropping fuzzed cones of grainy and ineffectual light straight down into the fog.

Across the street he could see the smeared neon in the windows of the slaughterhouse bars and diners. A laugh broke like a whip and set off a dog somewhere out in the neighborhood beyond. From the stockyards he could hear the sleepy and pleasant idling of freight trains, readying to move out across the plains and into the mountains.

At the mouth of the tunnel there were two children huddled in rain slickers, shaking little UNICEF cans. There was nothing in his pockets but blood. His pants and socks and boots felt sodden.

He couldn’t stand to change and shower in that filthy locker room with all those bellowing and exhausted men. Every morning he liked to be the first one up the tunnel, the first one home in bed next to his wife as daylight made its appearance at the windows.

He would be drifting off to sleep as his wife dressed quietly for mass and kissed him goodbye.