My friend was visiting Denver from Portland, so I thought I’d better spend some time with her. I drove up from where I’d been staying at my mom’s house in Colorado Springs, about an hour away.
Our plan was to meet at Cheesman Park. A couple years back, when I’d been living nearby, I had started to think of the park as the container for the soul of the city. The idea that Denver is a mountain town is a lie. The Rockies are miles away. You can barely see them from most neighborhoods. More realistically, it’s the last city on the plains. And the park had a midwestern feel to it. I liked its honesty.
Cheesman is pretty big, spreading out into several green sections with paths circling around and shit. We hadn’t agreed on a specific meeting place, so I walked toward the area on the hill where there’s a neoclassical pavilion with big white columns. I figured she might also be drawn to the spot.
I walked past people doing yoga and jogging and sitting on blankets.
Dogs ran around wild, excited almost to the point of blacking out because they were seeing other members of their species. Their owners shouted their names over and over and marched after them angrily.
“Arthur! Arthur! Arthur!”
“Who, me?” said Arthur and bounded off.
A man stood near the edge of the pavilion, shouting into a tree. He wore running shorts and a t-shirt made out of some sort of expensive quick-dry technical fabric.
Into the tree, he yelled, “No, you’re the one starting some shit. I’m just trying to enjoy this springtime afternoon, like everyone else!”
I looked up into the tree.
There was a homeless dude up there. He was standing on a high branch and grinning.
“You’re just a bitch, dog!” he called down. “A pussy-ass bitch!”
I knew who was really enjoying the springtime afternoon.
I didn’t see Rose, so I walked to the other side of the pavilion and tried to call her. She didn’t answer. I distanced myself enough so that I wouldn’t have to hear the escalating tree fight, and I sat in the grass. I took off my sweatshirt.
My phone rang.
When I answered, she said, “Never mind! I see you!” and hung up.
She looked pretty. I hugged her, feeling self conscious about how her shoulders were going straight into my sweaty armpits.
We found a concrete picnic table and cracked a couple of the beers she’d brought. We talked about when the last time we’d seen each other would have been. I thought it might have been about four or five years ago, when she’d been traveling through and stopped into the bookstore where I worked to say hi. She was trying to figure out if that was before or after Taos. I was pretty sure it was after. I’d forgotten that we’d lived in New Mexico at the same time. Shit.
We’d had a writing class together at the University of Utah. That’s where we’d met. What people call a lifetime ago. At least one.
She’d written a poem about how she and a bird exchanged a secret handshake. I still thought about that poem all the time.
“I love this park,” she said. “I’ve never been here before.”
“I’m not, like, a Denver historian or anything,” I said, “So I don’t know any of the details, but this all used to be a cemetery. Most of the bodies are still down there somewhere.”
“I like cemeteries. I hang out in cemeteries all the time.”
I said hell yeah and how that was especially true back in our Salt Lake City days. I started talking about how, when I lived on J and 6th, I would walk down and hang out in the cemetery almost every day, since it was so close and all.
“No way! I lived on J and 6th!”
Then we realized that we’d lived there at the same time. We’d been neighbors. Two doors down from each other. We partied all the time. Damn, we were dumb as hell! How could we not remember that?
We opened another beer, and I thought for a second.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Didn’t we work together too?”
“Where?”
I tried to remember. I remembered her being at work in a yellow dress. Where was that?
“We were canvassing, I think. For the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.”
It was this job where we walked door to door and tried to get people to donate money to help save the desert. I was pretty sure it paid eight dollars an hour, which I’d thought was pretty good money at the time. Especially for walking around and bothering people about the desert. There were bonuses if you got a bunch of people to donate, which I never managed to do.
“I worked for them,” she said. “Did you?”
“Yeah. Two summers in a row. We were there at the same time.”
We laughed again about how dumb we were and talked about Salt Lake and all the people we knew. How the city had been changing. How neither of us went back as often as we should. We drank beers, and she quoted song lyrics I didn’t know, and I talked about what I was doing for work or some dumb shit. Then it started raining.
“Should we call it?” she asked. “You’ve gotta get all the way back down to the Springs. It’s already eight.”
I looked at my wrist even though I wasn’t wearing a watch.
“Yeah, I guess that’s probably a good idea.”
We thanked each other for reaching out, for taking the time to visit. We hugged again and walked separate directions to our separate cars.
I thought about Rose’s poem and her secret handshake with the bird.
I wondered if she and I would ever see each other again.
If we would remember this springtime afternoon in the last city on the plains.
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Nathaniel Kennon Perkins is the author of the novels Wallop (House of Vlad, 2020) and Cactus (Trident Press, 2018), as well as the story collection The Way Cities Feel to Us Now (Maudlin House, 2019). His audiotape collection of short stories, Put Me on a Dog Leash and Make Me Eat Taco Bell off the Floor came out from Hello America Stereo Cassette in 2021. His creative work has appeared in Triquarterly, Rejection Letters, Otis Nebula, decomP magazinE, Pithead Chapel, Timber Journal, and others. He is the recipient of the High Country News’s 2014 Bell Prize. He runs Trident Press.
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image: Charlotte VanWerven
Rejection Letters 