The Girl Who Knocked: A Drama
He was six days home from war when she knocked on his door. He had been contemplating suicide. Sworn to secrecy by law and strange spooks with dead eyes, he couldn’t tell her that. Whatever wounds he had suffered were his to bear alone and would be for many years. Still, his world was so turned upside down by the madness he had just escaped that her unexpected arrival seemed appropriate.
San Francisco, 1972; not the halcyon hippie days, but the lull shortly thereafter. It was a good place to be, safe and cheap. Much better than upland Laos with its piles of dead gooks and terrifying fire fights. His apartment at Geary and Van Ness cost $275 dollars a month and felt like a sanctuary.
And there she stood, even more beautiful at nineteen than she had been at fifteen when they first made love on the grass in their hometown cemetery beside the Civil War memorial near the pile of cannon balls. You don’t turn down a vision.
Come in, he said, and she didn’t so much enter as flutter back into his scarred life. Her traveling companion, a nondescript hippie wannabee, stood beside her. She dismissed him with a wave of her hand and he disappeared.
That night, they made love like tigers. All the unspent lust accrued in battle erupted out of him and flowed into her. He wasn’t gentle or considerate or skillful. When they fucked, he…
