Tense, Future and Present

Here’s what I think. A paramilitary team of you-know-who’s will raid a poorly guarded nuclear missile launch facility in Belarus. Faced with certain execution regardless of his course of action, the young soldier who holds the launch key and codes will feign obedience, reaching for the handset to call his superior, keeper of the second key and the remaining set of codes. With deft precision, the young soldier will remove the knife from his ankle sheath and will plunge the weapon into the nearest thigh before two bullets in his brain will end his heroic ballet maneuver. Switching to Plan B, the terrorists will gun down every soldier at the facility, and will move their technicians into place for the removal of a warhead. However, their movements will alert authorities. More soldiers will surround the facility, and the terrorists will ready their explosives and demand that the soldiers retreat unless they want to be responsible for the complete destruction of a large portion of the continent. I don’t know what will happen next.

But I do know that, while digging out from the current snowstorm, my shovel discovers a man lying under the snowpile at the bottom of my driveway.

“Leave me alone!” shouts the man. The stench of beer and vomit escapes from his beard like fumes in a gas leak. Patches of white and blue punish his cheeks, and there is blood on his dark forehead.

“Man, you’re frostbitten!” I say.

He waves me off, and plunges under his snow bank. With his big hands, he piles snow onto his hair. “I deserve this,” he croaks. The rest is muffled under snow.

“What?” I say, “Look, maybe you do deserve this. I don’t know. But I can’t have you freezing to death on my property. So either crawl into the street and get it over with, or come inside for a cup of coffee.”

Slowly, his shrubby snow head rises and I am standing in the shadow of a broken Donovan McNabb.

“Let you all down…” he mumbles as I guide him toward my front porch.

“Yeah,” I say. “But this should be a learning experience.”

He sits heavily on the glider, sloughing snow from his sweatshirt. “Said dat lasht time…enough learnin’ eshpeeryensh….” He leans back and drops his chin onto his chest.

“Stay with me Donovan!” I try to move him into the house, but he stumbles and drops to the porch floorboards. The wind has picked up and I abandon the big man for a moment. Kicking the door open, I run to the telephone to call for help. At that moment, there is a crash outside. I turn and watch as my front porch, the columns, furniture, and Donovan McNabb are hoisted above the street and out into the blizzard.