The Writers Retreat

So a few of us have decided to make it a regular event to retreat to an old farm house in New York for the express purpose of drinking bourbon, lighting fires, firing (bb for now) guns and writing. The farmhouse has no internet, no phones, and minimal cell reception. It is beautiful.
The following is my most complete work from the retreat this weekend.
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He was four beers into a two-beer night when he made us promise; just sober enough to convince us, just drunk enough to believe himself. So when, years later, we found it scrawled in the margins of his will, we were probably more surprised than we should have been. The arthritic tilt of the tiny letters, the bright ink against the yellowed paper, meant that he had recalled. Or decided. The addition, made in the last few months, as he sat surrounded by his books, listening to Bach, read only,

Remember: you promised.

And so we had. There were only three of us left at the time—fifteen years prior, Brenda has wrapped her Beemer around a tree, and a decade later Francis had been discovered at his computer desk, tranquilizers in hand, deleting old photos. So, we owed it to the guy, as the last ones left.

You’d be amazed how easy it is to get two-hundred and fifty quarts of used motor oil in Jersey City, free, no questions asked. The boat, surprisingly, was the tricky part, requiring some less-than-legal copies of Coast Guard papers Ralph “found”. Two mornings later, in violation of every health code in Hudson (and Bergen and Essex) county, we had him in the front seat, the tiny Volvo straining to pull the boat to its final launch. Dodging the police and red lights like clockwork, we sat in the car with a silence we had never shared. And as the condos parted to the warehouses that still survived, we took in the Passaic with peace that spoke the volumes we had wished to write.

Phil didn’t blow out the torch until the boat approached the horizon, the two lights thus vanishing as one. The fireboats had caught up by the time he’d passed under the Pulaski Skyway, but the motor oil was a stubborn burn, mimicking Newark, Elizabeth, Paterson, the Oranges…
They’d have it out by the time he reached the Kill van Kull. But by then they’d be smelling him in Bayonne.