Last of the Mohicans

I am wearing my new boots. Hale says that he saw Renae in the hallway but that every time he tries to say hello or ask her how it’s a going she ignores him.

Hale states that he doesn’t want to particularly see this movie and wants to see Cool World instead.

 “My history teachers says that if we see it and our willing to give an oral report to the class that he would give us extra-credit.

 Hale says that he thought I said that I am already getting an A in the class.

Dave, I really like this girl She’s something special.

I can still feel her minty lips brushing across my own from all of a week ago.

As we sit down in the sunken merlot interior of the theatre Hale asks me solicitously if I have heard form Dawn Michelle.

I tell him no.

“Like I said, I called over there expecting to hear the sweet mellifluous intellectual chimes of her voice and her mom said that she didn’t live with them anymore. I really don’t know what happened.”

Hale takes several slurps of his soda before stating that he is thankful Renae didn’t tag along.

The movie looks like a tapestry, a bucolic Thanksgiving dinner tablecloth optically blooming with a cornucopia of color.  There is a pre-revolutionary battalion drum batters tempo to the visual panorama flooding the screen.  Somehow the burrowed between the flashes of the Huron mountains it seems hard to believe that less than two hundred years ago this hulking mass Columbus purported to discover was a whistling arboretum of botanical consciousness and  not just a contiguous parking lot fraught with yellow lines, idling, gaseous vehicles—Jurassic faunae of the late 20^th century.

Hale continues to slurp from his pop. As is his nature he always hands me his drink and tells me to get a refill since I am the one closest to the end.  When I arrive back in the theatre Daniel-Day Lewis is sprinting across the screen sans deer- skin shirt brandishing an almost overtly phallic musket chasing down an elk with two fellow long-haired native Americans. Upon killing the Elk they give thanks, releasing its animalistic spirit above the northern hemisphere of the screen.  All the British officers walking around like they are wearing panties plus wigs and three-corner hats. The forts looks like they are made out of life-sized Lincoln logs. Duncan is a fop. Madeline Stowe is gorgeous beyond the geometric slants and syllabic constituting language.   The actress playing Cora is porcelain skinned and looks like a sheep being sodomized the entire picture.

After his third refill Hale comments out loud that you know this really isn’t all that bad for an historical movie.

Everyone is dying as the music thrums along. Everyone is floating off cliffs. Everyone is realizing that les than three hundred years after Columbus wrongfully claimed this land for spain there is bloodshed everywhere.  There is premature death. There  are tears. Life rarely lasts past middle age.

I wonder if this was what Coach Mann was trying to convey when he goaded everyone in his class to come out and see the movie this weekend.

It is a love story. Hawkeye is giving  up Madeline Stowe under the hydraulic thrust of a waterfall. He is giving her up to find more gun powder, He is giving her up to find her again.

When the soundtrack to Last of the Mohicans isn’t yawping in tympanic thunder it sounds like a spritely plucked Irish jig. Hale keeps on assenting. Every half hour he shoves his X-large no ice Dr. Pepper in my direction informing me to hurry up and finish mine so that we can get another refill gratis before the movie concedes.I leave the theatre just as Hawkeye is vowing for a second time that he will find Madeline Stowe again. It is a Friday night. The state cross country meet is tomorrow.  As I am walking up the dim illuminated ramp when I see him. He is wearing the same outfit he wore in class earlier in the day.  He is seated by himself in the second to last row of the lavender tinted theatre. He adjusts his glasses pushing his spectacles into his forehead.

From the periphery of the seats it is hard to tell if he is looking at me or at the movie screen.

When he see me he smiles.

I face the other direction. I am embarrassed. I wonder what he is doing since it is a Friday night and the football team has a regional game tomorrow that would assist them in advancing towards state if they won.

When I walk back to the Theatre I refrain from looking in Coach Mann's direction. Everyone is dying. Everyone is sacrificing themselves into the distilled beauty of the colonial landscape.  Tribes are becoming extinct. Human lives are immolated in flickers and glares.


We watch in awe.

As we exit the theatre during the credits Hale rhetorically states that, you know what, that really wasn't that bad of a movie. The house lights have flooded the interior of Westlake. As I look behind me I see no sign of Coach Mann. I wonder if he realized that I espied him earlier and then felt embarrassed.

I wonder if he was there all a long.

Hale states that he sure wishes he knew were Dawn Michelle was so that we could call her and the three of us could hang out sometime.