The Sound OF Boots (Conclusion)

Go back east. What a strange suggestion. Savannah was cleaning out Allison’s room. She sorted through clothes, knick-knacks, throwing some things away, storing most of it in the upstairs bedroom under the eaves. She made space in the bureau drawer, untouched for years. It was filled with clothes left behind, photos, scrap books, items no one wanted. She couldn’t imagine why her daughter would suggest she go back east. She was stuffing musty sweaters in a black garbage bag when a pair of boxer shorts fell onto the floor. She picked them up and held them out. The elastic waist band was sprung, ruined by sweat, which also had left a yellow stain forming a V in the back. Gabriel Raul’s. After watching a particularly grueling match, Savannah had asked if she could keep those sweat soaked shorts.

“But why would you want such a thing,” he had said.

“Because it’s you,” she had answered.

And this was what she had of him over 20 years later. Savannah stood, slipped out of her jeans, pulled on the boxers. They fell around her hips below her belly with the marks of child bearing. “What are you doing now, Gabe?” she said. For an instant, she thought about trying to find him. She sat on the bed. It was warmer here under the eaves. The wind had grown stronger and moaned around the window. The wide Montana landscape could be as closed in as a small town in Pennsylvania, after all.

Savannah looked down at her bare legs. The muscles were still toned, but the skin was clearly no longer young. And you Gabe, she wondered. Is your skin still like satin? She looked in the full length mirror against the wall. Gray had dulled the red gold hair. She rubbed the shorts between her fingers. The cotton had turned silken over the years. Oddly, it was not the sex she remembered the clearest, but the way she had felt when she ran to him, from out of cabs, under street lamps, along a corridor, outside the stadium, along the many streets in back of all those hotels, in day light or in dark. She had run on long, young legs, flat out and unequivocal, flinging herself at him, wrapping herself around his body, burying her face where his shoulder met his neck, breathing in his very being.

No, she would not try to find Gabriel Raul. She had experienced the best the universe had to offer. She hoped he had as well.