Dreams of Molly

96th Night

I was, I fleetingly told myself, too old to run, but on the other hand not played out enough to stay. For days after I was more or less on my feet, my old (if older) self again, I was doing improvisatory rehearsals of my escape. Each morning, at the whisper of first light, I would take an extended walk from the house, varying direction in the continually thwarted hope of coming to some place I actually wanted to go, and then, not always easily, find my way back to what I thought of as a circumstantial domestic arrangement.

It was what they bargained for, wasn’t it? They knew when they took me in, or should have known, that I had made a secondary career out of running away from seemingly comfortable situations. I had nothing against Mina and Bobby, but I had trouble imagining a scenario that included spending the rest of my life with them in a secluded cabin buried in the woods. The future I saw for myself was elsewhere.

Actually, I had no future in mind for myself. That is, I was open to a variety of futures and I didn’t want to recapitulate the present routine indefinitely.

It was not in my scenario to be Bobby’s father and Minna’s prodigal husband returned.

Squeezed against her in her narrow bed, I would ask the uncommunicative Mina how and why she happened to live in an isolated cabin in the deep woods.

One time she said, “Oh this cabin has been in the family for at least a hundred years.”

Another time, she said, “My mother gave me this place as a gift when Bobby was born.”

Another time, she said, “Two guys from Denmark built it in the Danish fashion with imported logs to have a homelike home away from home. Things didn’t work out as planned — one killed the other and fled no one seems to know where, leaving the house available for the first passerby, which was mother.”

There were several other versions which contradicted in part some of the earlier versions. When she said, “Why do you think you have a right to know?” I decided to leave (setting gratitude and whatever aside) and not, not ever, come back.

The problem was, I hadn’t to this point discovered a way out of the woods. I assumed — why wouldn’t I? — that if I traveled long enough in any direction, I would eventually come to some outpost of civilization. Whatever there was.

Have I neglected to mention that there was a car on the premises, an ancient VW Beetle, which Mina would take off in periodically to bring in provisions? I never got to go with her, never found out where she went. Whenever Mina left the cabin for an extended period, it fell to me — it was my job by unspoken agreement — to babysit Bobby.

When I asked her how far it was to the nearest town, the answer I got was, “Far enough.”

“How many miles exactly is far enough?” I asked, as if I didn’t mind not knowing.

The only answer I ever got to that question was, “You don’t want to know,” said with a sassy smile.

I considered taking her ancient VW to make my escape, gave serious consideration to the idea about before rejecting it as unthinkable.

I could leave them in good conscience, but I couldn’t take their transportation away from them.

I avoided sex with Mina the night before my planned escape so as not to deplete my limited energy.

I woke myself in the dark, tired as usual with a hard-on from sleeping pressed against Mina’s ass, dressed in whatever came to hand, assuming as I started out — this my first go on the northern path — that first light was no more than an hour way.

I found myself taking small methodical steps in the dark, not wanting to lose the tricky path. Odd sounds emanated from the woods, but I had no idea, had not troubled to discover, what creatures might be out there.

I had a broomstick with me to use as a walking stick and as an emergency protection against the otherwise unforeseen.

As a precautionary measure, I swung my stick out in front of me like a blind man, driving off imaginary demons.

It seemed to be getting lighter, though it may only have been that my eyes had made private peace with the dark. It troubled me that the morning was so long in arriving. I worked myself into a frustrated rage at the night’s protracted sway.

So I increased my pace, began to run, wanting to leave the night behind in my wake, aware as the path danced away and the brush swiped at me that it was a madman’s hope.

Abruptly it was light and I reclaimed the path. It was a well-lit morning and I noticed a small black bear up ahead on its hind legs snatching berries from a bush. He was a few feet off the narrow path, too close to pass without calling attention to myself.

Impatience prodded me. Perhaps there was a way of getting by the bear, who was after all preoccupied with his breakfast, without his noting me.

I hunkered down, moved slowly ahead, tiptoed by him with apparent success, when a fallen branch snatched my ankle and I tripped noisily, grasping air. With a show of annoyance, the bear looked over in my direction — I pressed myself against a tree to avoid being seen — then after he had taken my measure (or had missed seeing me altogether), he returned to his task.

I hid behind the tree while considering what I might do to defend myself if the bear took it into his head to come after me.

And then the bear moved away, seemed to disappear briefly.

It was a while after I had passed his spot — I was still moving with extreme caution — perhaps a half-mile further along the path, when I heard footsteps behind. I quickened my pace at first but when the footsteps sounded behind me at the same or similar distance, I spun around to see who was there.

It was the same damn bear, tiptoeing on his hind legs, mimicking my pace in his deceptively quick lumbering manner. I fought back the impulse to run — surely he could have caught me if that was what he was up to — and continued warily at the pace I had set myself.

I knew very little about the habits of bears outside of folk lore and movies, though I had never heard of bears in any context trailing after people. I assumed that eventually — what could he possibly be thinking? — that he would discontinue his aberrant behavior.

But in fact what seemed like another hour passed and with it the five or six miles I had covered and the bear — I glanced back from time to time — was still the same relative distance behind me.

His idiot tenacity was getting on my nerves. He was on all fours when I turned around and I shook my fist at him and shouted at him to go away. I waved my arms at him to emphasize my point.

On his hind legs now, the bear gave the impression of waving back at me.

He seemed not to understand or at least was refusing to acknowledge that he did, shaking his head and looking abashed. Whatever was going on with him, he made no move to shorten the distance between us.

I took a few quick steps and then turned abruptly around to catch him off guard.

He was still approximately the same distance away. When he noticed that I was facing him, he did an almost graceful 360-degree turn.

Hard to explain what got into me, but the bear’s antics amused me unreasonably — perhaps it was the release of tension — and I broke into a near-hysterical laugh, which he mimicked in his bearish way almost to perfection.

I decided not to be afraid of him — he had probably wandered off from a traveling circus — and I invited him, gesturing my intent, to join me. To my surprise, he refused and we continued walking in single file as we had before.

Weary of my long-running private dialogue, I tilted my head to the right and talked to the bear over my shoulder. I told him that after losing Molly, a loss that seemed to recapitulate itself, I had found it difficult to respond to other women. He acknowledged my lugubrious remarks with the occasional grunt.

Eventually we reached a clearing. Ahead in what seemed like a stage set for a town was a compound made up of institutional brick buildings. There was no immediate sign of life, but I thought I noticed a machine gun emplacement on the roof of one of the two-story buildings.

Though I had never seen the place from the outside before in daylight, I had no doubts as to where I was.

Clapping me on the shoulder as he went by, the bear scampered into the deserted clearing. I called to him to come back moments before a machine gun serenade welcomed him to the neighborhood.

I watched him lurch awkwardly into the woods, a howl of surprise preceding him. There was nothing I could do for him. Aggrieved at the loss of my companion, I veered off in the direction I had come, seeking other options.

97th Night

The world teetered on the brink of light when I woke. The others were already going about their morning routines, Bobby chopping firewood in the yard, Mina boiling water, wrestling with encroaching nature in the kitchen. I felt imprisoned in their routines.

I dressed in a black t-shirt and faded jeans, the clothes alongside the bed, and put on my old New Balance running shoes, which were showing signs of erosion.

I had a crust of bread with honey and a cup of herbal tea before announcing to Mina that I was going for a run. She said nothing, wore a ragged smile.

It was a partial lie for which I felt the barest whiff of guilt. I was going for a run, but I had, you see, no intention of returning.

I took the southern path this time, the one Mina had warned me against, noting that it could be dangerous while making a point of offering no particulars.

“How do you mean dangerous?” I asked.

Her answer was to roll her eyes.

“No, please,” I said, “tell me what you mean. What’s so dangerous about the southern path?”

“I’ve only heard rumors,” she said. “It’s the way things are, you know that. The world wherever you go, it’s a dangerous place.”

We kissed goodbye. I took Bobby’s broomstick with me as protection against the unspeakable.

The sun came through the scrim of leaves, dappling the path making it all but impossible at times to see directly in front of me. When blinded by the sunlight, I tended to slow my pace until visibility returned.

Despite these periodic slowdowns, I felt I was making good time as if some kind of standard needed to be met. The only worry I had was that I was not the least bit worried. I knew from a history of such experience that exhilaration carried with it promises of comeuppance.

Sometimes it seemed to me that during my periodic moments of blindness there had been something or someone there, haloed by the light, standing in my way, though when the glare passed whatever I had sensed was gone.

I put it down to a susceptibility to delusion perhaps set off by Mina’s warning.

But this time when the sun receded there was clearly someone there, a smallish woman in a black dress, perhaps a nun’s outfit, standing in the center of the path some ten feet away.

I was pleased to see another human being and I greeted her in a friendly manner and asked her where she had come from.

At first she said nothing, smiled nervously, then frowned. Then she mouthed the word “food,” though it could just as easily been the word “fool.”

I had some food and water with me in a ratty backpack, but hardly enough to satisfy my own burgeoning hunger. As a way of changing the subject, I asked her if she lived nearby. Perhaps she was actually some kind of nun and there was a monastery not far from here.

She smiled slyly, pointed again to her mouth, meaning whatever it meant, that she was hungry, had taken a vow of silence, was unable to speak.

I tore off a crust from the chunk of bread in my pack and held it out to the woman, who made no response.

“It’s good bread,” I said. “I assumed when you pointed to your mouth you were telling me you were hungry.”

When I least expected it, she grabbed the crust from my hand and shoved it in her mouth.

In seconds, the crust, which she disposed of as if she were grinding mortar, was a memory and she pointed to her mouth again.

So I broke off another piece of bread and handed it to her and then another after she obliterated the second piece with even greater dispatch than the first.

In short order, she had consumed the sizable chunk of bread I had been saving for my lunch but she seemed unsatisfied, pointing once again to her mouth, her gloved hand, which she held out toward me, trembling with expectation.

“That’s all there is,” I said, holding out empty hands.

“You’ve been so kind to an old woman,” she seemed to say. “Still, I know there’s more.”

Reluctantly, I produced the hardboiled egg which had been nesting at the bottom of my pack, pretending to be surprised at its presence. She disposed of the egg without removing the shell.

And still she was unsatisfied, her hand pointing again to her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking out the pack to show her there was no more food.

She picked up one of the books that had tumbled out and squeezed it into her mouth, disposing of it in three chomping bites.

The other, which was one of mine, she sniffed at, nibbled at the edges and then returned.

“Didn’t we once dance together?” I asked her.

“That was my sister,” she seemed to say.

Licking her lips, her tongue black with ink, she studied me for a protracted moment and then in apparent slow motion pirouetted. I didn’t see her disappear. One moment she was there and the next she was gone.

I had a carrot in the pocket of my jeans, but I hesitated reaching for it. It seemed to move about restively as if it had a life of its own.

I had the path to myself again, but I hesitated moving on.

My first impulse after the hungry woman had disappeared was to return to Mina and Bobby, whom I suddenly missed or imagined I missed, abruptly aware of being alone in the world.

As a matter of will, I continued in the direction I had been going.

I made a point of shortening my stride so if I decided to return, which I promised myself was not going to happen, there would be a less demanding trip back.

I hadn’t gotten much further when I arrived at the southern path’s end, came to a crossroads in the woods. Having no basis for choosing right over left or left over right, I stood in place for the longest time, weighing the pros and cons of my next move, glancing one way then the other.

98th Night

“What do you think you’re doing, honcho?” a voice called to me from behind a bush. “Didn’t you see the signs? There’s a dress rehearsal of a war going on at this site.”

I had heard explosions in the distance, which I had attributed to thunder.

When the speaker in a major’s uniform — his name tag read Grope — appeared from behind a bush, I recognized him (allowing for the alterations of aging) as my childhood friend, Lenny.

We had a brief reunion before returning to the business at hand.

“You better get out of here pronto, Honcho,” he said, pulling me over to the side of the road — the bushes dense with troop life. “I’m under explicit orders to take no prisoners.”

“Which way should I go?” I asked.

He thought about it, surveyed the scene in all directions.

“With all this random rocket action going on, there’s no absolutely safe place to go. You may be best off hanging out in the bushes with the rest of us.” At that moment, a missile exploded about twenty feet from the brush where the major’s troops were hunkered down.

“Is that live ammo?” I asked.

“War is serious business, Honcho. You can’t train one way and fight another. If you don’t use live ammo, if you just go through the motions, the troops will think war is some kind of pussy picnic. You see what I’m saying. You got to practice the same way you play the real game. Don’t worry about us — we’re punishing the enemy shitloads more than he’s punishing us.”

I decided to go on. “Good to see you, “ I said.

“Watch your ass,” he said, hugging me while looking over my shoulder. “Believe me, the other side will not be as gentle with you if you get in their way.”

I headed in a direction that with any luck would circumvent the troop activity of the other side.

A helicopter seemed to follow overhead and occasionally dumped what looked like sandwich wrappers in my direction. They were actually notes, warning me to move somewhere else unless I had no objection to being strafed in the next 10 minutes.

The notes offered no specific information as to the appropriate direction to go so I continued where I was heading though at a somewhat brisker pace.

At some point, a jeep cut me off and someone coming up behind me shouted “hostage,” which is how I got taken prisoner by what I thought of at that point as the enemy.

I was frisked, blindfolded, my hands tied behind me, and dumped into the back of the jeep. “Where are you hiding your weapon?” someone asked.

“I’m a civilian,” I protested.

“There are no civilians in war,” another someone said, though it might have been the same voice.

I was briefly imprisoned in what smelled like a latrine — they let me out when someone of consequence insisted on coming in — then delivered me, my blindfold slipping over one eye, to what I assumed was the command tent.

The commanding officer, Colonel Field, looked on as his Adjutant interviewed me. Before the questions came, my blindfold was removed, my hands untied and I was offered my choice of coffee or tea.

I appreciated their kindness and asked if the coffee was fresh brewed before accepting the tea.

“We’re the good guys,” the Adjutant said, to which the Colonel nodded his approval, “but we’re losing the war and we had to do something that we might otherwise disapprove of to increase our leverage. So by democratic vote among the senior officers, we decided to take a hostage from the other side to pressure them to release the officer class soldiers of ours they’re holding prisoner as leverage against us. When our men saw you they knew right away from the way you were dressed — no ordinary person walks around in clothes as blatantly ratty as yours — that you were someone of consequence among the enemy. We hope that you’ll be as frank with us and I have been with you. Who is it we have in our possession?”

“I’m a civilian,” I said.

“The Colonel told me you would say exactly that,” he said.

“I can understand your not wanting to betray your side, but what we’re doing here is trying to end the bloodshed, not extend it. So by helping us, you would also be helping your friends. Our only goal is to establish a fair and lasting truce. Is that something you oppose?”

“Of course not,” I said, “but…”

“I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “You look like a civilized man. We’re not asking for information on our enemy’s troop movements, which you would be in your rights to deny us. All we want from you, in effect, is your name and rank.”

I repeated my claim, told them that I had been walking in the woods and stumbled on their dress-rehearsal maneuver.

“So you say,” the Adjutant said. “What if I told you that several of our men saw you embrace Major Grope, who is reputed to be second in command on the other side? Do you also want to deny that you embraced Major Grope?”

After that, I saw that there was nothing I could say to change their minds about me. “Look,” I said, “you can tell Major Grope that you have his childhood friend, Honcho, in custody.”

The Colonel and Adjutant shared knowing looks whose implications passed over my head. Before I was escorted from the command tent, the Adjutant thanked me for my cooperation and shook my hand.

For much of the next day, I was kept prisoner under armed guard in an adjoining tent.

I should mention that while this questioning was going on we were under almost continuous bombardment, most of the missiles exploding at a relatively safe distance.

I was using the latrine when a bomb fell just outside my box, shit flying about in the next few minutes as if it had wings.

When I let myself out — the door to the box had already fallen off — I discovered that my armed escort had been killed, half his head blown away. Also, the tent I had been staying in was a few flapping shreds of its former self.

Explosions lit up the sky and I saw through the trees perhaps a half mile away the gleam of paved roads. It may have been a mirage but I lowered my head (to make myself a smaller target) and ran a jagged path toward freedom. There was no point continuing in my role as useful hostage while the side that had captured me was being wiped out.

Along the way, I stumbled over what might have been the mangled body of the Adjutant — there was no time for mournful thoughts — as I hurried through the woods toward the paved roads of civilization.

99th Night

At long last, I was out of the woods, moving along the collar of a wide two-lane road with a snaky double line at its center. As a car neared, I would hold up my thumb half-heartedly in time-honored gesture. Repeated rejection soured my mood.

It was only after I decided not to raise my thumb that I got my first ride. It was from a middle-aged couple — a long married couple it seemed — in the throes of what might have been a twenty-year argument.

I didn’t know how tired I was until the moment my rump met the back seat and I drifted off.

Even asleep, the voices of contention penetrated my cocoon and joined forces with whatever fragmentary dreams were playing on the same wave length.

“How far are you going?” the wife, who was in the driver’s seat, asked whoever she thought she was talking to.

I might have answered but if I did it was with intention rather than speech. “As far as you’re willing to take me,” I might have said. I was in the business of creating distance between myself and the circumstantial domestic compromise I had taken pains to escape. When the game is escape, distance is the measure of accomplishment.

While accumulating distance, I felt oppressed by the ongoing dispute in the front seat that was my responsibility to resolve. They had chosen me as their audience and I had fallen asleep on the job. Couldn’t I do anything right?

“When you can forgive yourselves,” I said to their stand-ins in my dream, “you will be able to forgive each other.” I was of course talking to myself.

“That’s just the problem,” the stand-in for the woman said. “He’ll never forgive himself because he knows at the bottom of his soul that he’s unforgivable.”

“You know, sweetheart,” the stand-in for the man said, “you can be a sanctimonious bitch. I suppose you’re forgivable, right?”

“At least I can forgive myself,” she said after an intake of breath, offering an icy laugh that sounded like glass breaking.

There was a moment, a measure, of silence and the car swerved to get out of its own way.

“Isn’t one lane wide enough for you?” he said, addressing his remark to me.

“People with low self-esteem tend to be cruel to those closest to them,” she said. “It’s not his fault — he can’t help himself.”

“I won’t dignify that with a reply,” he said.

“You already have,” she said.

“We need your help,” the man said, nudging me with a rolled-up newspaper. “Are you awake?”

I blinked my eyes open and was disturbed to discover that we were parked at the side of the road. “What’s going on?” I said.

“We need you to settle an argument,” the man said. “You must have heard most of our argument. Tell us who you think is right.”

“Right about what?” I asked.

They talked over each other in strident voices and what filtered through made little sense to me.

“Uh huh,” I said, playing my part.

“We’re not always like this,” the woman said. “Zach needs an audience to express his…”

“Just shut up,” he said, shouting her down. “Will you shut up, for God’s sake.”

At this point, the woman slapped her husband, a resounding blow, which he answered after a pregnant pause of outrage with a closed fist.

After he hit her in the eye, he apologized, but there were more blows to come, punctuated by apologies, curses and cries of pain.

Sensing they had forgotten me, I slipped out the door on my left and trotted off wearily in the direction the car was pointed.After awhile, my breath coming in echoes, assuming there was no immediate danger pursuing me, I slowed to a feverish stumble.

I was amazed how much the landscape I was passing resembled the landscape I had already passed.

It struck me as a profound discovery that the passing scene of the American road (if indeed this was America) tended to repeat itself as a kind of delayed emphasis. As I filed away this awareness for future use, a familiar lumbering car appeared alongside me, the passenger window rolled down.

“Please don’t forsake us,” the woman, who had an ugly bruise under her left eye, said. “We desperately need your help, Jack. We’ve agreed between us not to fight in your presence. We need someone of your seeming objectivity and wisdom to mediate our dispute.”

“You’ve got the wrong person,” I said. “I have no wisdom to offer.”

“Nonsense,” the woman said. “No matter. You have our word that we will defer to your wisdom whatever it is. Besides, Jack, this is not the direction you were escaping in when we picked you up.”

She reached behind her and opened the back door.

I groaned silently, and with an unacknowledged sense of defeat, climbed into the skanky back seat, pulling the door shut behind me on the second try. The man, who was in the driver’s seat, whisked the car around in a daring maneuver and we restarted our trip together as if for the first time.

100th Night

You’re never out of the woods, I saw that now, even when you’ve planted your feet on paved roads. Unspecified time had passed — three days, a week, a month? — since I had kissed Mina and Bobby goodbye as prelude to taking a run through the woods from which I secretly hoped never to return. I had made a point of not thinking about them as I worked my way against unforeseen obstacles back to civilization.

The thing was, civilization as I remembered it, seemed to have disappeared while I was unavoidably elsewhere.

Days would pass with no signs of human habitation outside of two ratty gas station/convenience stores idling miles apart on opposite sides of the road.

Despite my single-minded pursuit of freedom, dumb luck had impeded my progress. The knowledge that I should have been further along at this point nagged at me with punishing regularity. I needed wheels to make time, but I had become with good reason wary of accessing another ride with strangers.

About a mile back, I had inquired of a clerk at the Puritan Farms self-service gas station as to where the nearest town was.

“This is the nearest town,” she said.

“This?”

“We sell stamps in the back,” she said. “We share a zip code with the Puritan Farms station on the other side of the road down aways. We think of ourselves as a town.”

I asked her if she knew of a place in the area that rented cars.

She thought about my question for more time than I wanted to hang out in her store.

“There used to be one in the back of the middle school,” she said, “but I don’t think it did much business. I don’t remember when it closed down — the owner died or something — but it was like ten years ago. Sorry.”

As I walked along the side of the road, I kept glancing over my shoulder, expecting to see Mina’s VW floating toward me in the distance. If I spotted her faded blue splotched with white Beetle before she spotted me, I could step back into the brush until it passed. I rehearsed the move periodically so as not to be taken by surprise.

After awhile, I came to what looked like a bus stop and I sat down on a rickety bench to await the next bus. I was awakened by a head sticking out the window of a sheriff’s car that was idling a few feet from where I sat. “What’s going on here?” the head asked.

“Isn’t this a bus stop?”

He ignored my question. “You got any money?” he asked.

His question seemed presumptuous but I answered anyway so as not to give offense. “Some,” I said. I also had a credit card but I didn’t see the need to acknowledge all my assets on such short acquaintance.

“I’d also like to see some ID, if you don’t mind,” he said.

I did mind. “What’s the problem?” I asked. No doubt my appearance had given him the wrong impression. My hands were grimy, there was a cut on my face, my pants had an alarming stain below the crotch.

“We have a nice town here,” he said. “It’s not that we don’t like strangers, it’s just that we like them better when they’re somewhere else.”

I got up from the bench and walked off into what was beginning to seem like a sunset. It passed my mind that he might shoot me in the back and I chose not to think about it.

When I looked up, the sheriff’s car was crawling alongside me.

His twangy voice accosted me. “We were having this polite conversation when you jumped up and walked away,” it said. “That’s disrespect. Do you mean to be disrespectful?”

“I’m getting out of your town,” I said.

“Is that right?” he said. “You might have told me so I could have arranged a parade. If there’s no objection, I’ll ride along to see that you don’t get lost.”

I didn’t see that objecting would make a difference one way or another.

It felt odd walking alongside the sheriff’s car, which was mimicking my pace, but it must have felt odd from his vantage also. At some point, he offered me a ride since, as he put it, we were both going in the same direction.

I said I didn’t mind walking, but five minutes later he asked again.

I noted, though there hadn’t been much traffic, that a string of cars was piling up behind him.

“You don’t get anywhere being a hard-head,” he said. “I know how lonely it can be being out on the road by yourself. And you must be tired. You’re not so young any more.”

With measured reluctance, I accepted his third offer of a ride. I didn’t trust him but I had the sense that one of the cars in the group crawling behind us — the fourth or fifth — was Mina’s ancient faded-blue Beetle and this at the moment seemed the lesser of two unpleasant alternatives.

Sheriff Mike, as he called himself, didn’t seem so bad up close, though there was the musty odor about him of someone who hadn’t bathed in a while. It may have been me I was inhaling or the inside of the car, but it came to the same thing.

Anyway, the sheriff wanted to talk and it seemed not to matter a lot who was the one on the other end. “You ever been married?” he asked but he went on as if my answer, if offered, would have made little difference. “I been married twenty-three years to the same woman before she left me for some damn salesman who was passing through. When she was gone, even though I kind of missed having her around, it struck me that I never loved her. That’s a terrible thing to realize.

And what was worse, and much worse, I couldn’t remember if there was anyone I ever loved. Which has to mean there wasn’t ever anyone. Not anyone fucking ever. At the same time, I could remember the names of seven people I flat out hated. What does that say about my life? Then I began to wonder if anyone ever loved anyone. You know what I mean?”

While I was thinking about his question, the sheriff went on to another subject. “You ever kill anybody?” he asked, glancing at me to see my reaction. “When I first took this job — believe it or not I wasn’t always a sheriff — I hadn’t had much experience with killing my own species. You could probably count the number on one three-fingered hand. Of course there isn’t much opportunity to kill in a small burg like this. In most cases, a good sound beating would serve the same purpose.” He paused for breath.

I had lost the train of his thought. “What purpose is that?” I asked.

He stepped on the brake abruptly and we stopped with a jolt. My head bruised the windshield. The horn of the car behind made a mild almost-unintelligible protest. Meanwhile, we were moving again. We passed a diner that had been boarded up, what looked like the remains of a For Sale sign lying like a sacrifice to some heathen deity at the foot of the front door. Next to the diner was a furniture store long since deserted, a Sale sign in the dark window with a spidery crack separating the “a” and the “l.”

This is where my jurisdiction ends,” he said, pulling into the dirt lot behind the furniture store.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“This is where you get out,” he said, turning off the ignition. He waited for me to climb out the door before he eased himself out from the driver’s side.

Looking to make amends, I thanked him for the ride, taking a few backwards steps. “Wherever we are,” I said, “I guess I’m a little closer to where I’m going than I would have been had I walked.”

The sheriff came around the car in my direction.

“Thanks again,” I said, making a move to turn away while still keeping him in sight.

He kept his hands at his sides much like a gunfighter waiting for whoever dared to make the first move. “I’m going to ask you to run,” he said.

When you suspect that your life is on the line, your senses become increasingly acute. I noticed a rock the size of a child’s baseball a few feet away and I contrived to stumble and fall on top of what I perceived to be a possible weapon.

When I was standing again still facing the sheriff who hadn’t moved, I had the rock in my hand. “I’m going,” I said, taking another step backwards. There was no one around, though I heard an unseen car grinding along in the near distance. I showed him my back for a moment, but desperate curiosity got the better of me and I turned again to face him.

All I can say in my defense was that he was drawing his gun, that it had already cleared his holster when I hurled the rock with an abrupt sidearm motion, catching him above the left eye. I may have heard the gun fire, the indistinct sound echoing. It may even have fired twice as he made up his mind to fall.

The big man fell like timber, a hand in the air as if brushing something unseen away, and that’s when I began to run.

At that moment, a faded blue VW huffed its way up the dirt road in seeming slow motion, kicking up gravel. I recognized the woman driving and the boy, somewhat older than I remembered him, dozing in the back seat. I got in without hesitation and momentarily we were on the road.

It was possible, wasn’t it, that the sheriff only meant to frighten me? I forgave myself, or tried to, for being unforgivable.

I may have heard an ominous siren in the distance or I may only have imagined the official music of police pursuit, but for the moment there was no car in the rearview mirror coming up behind us. In gratitude or perhaps love, I brushed Mina’s shoulder with the back of my hand,

“How long it’s taken you to find us,” she said.

101st Night

When I claimed consciousness this morning, I was fifteen-years-old — yesterday had been my birthday — and I was lying in bed with a woman almost old enough to be my mother. Though she was lying on her side facing away, I could tell from the hair color and body style that she was not my actual mother. I couldn’t remember whether we had a sexual history together or not.

The odd thing was, I knew what was awaiting me, remembered in thinly veiled outline the essential details of the next forty-five years of my life. At first, it seemed like an advantage, thinking I might avoid this time around some of the misjudgments I was destined to make.

If you had nothing new to look forward to, it hardly seemed worth the effort to echo an already-failed past. One of the pleasures of life was the exhilaration of surprise.

I got out of bed and collected my clothes from virtually every corner of the room. It struck me that the older woman still asleep in my bed had been a birthday gift from my father, who had been announcing everywhere (I always assumed it was a joke) that it was about time I lost my virginity.

Perhaps nothing much had happened between us because I knew for a fact that my main stage sexual debut was several months down the road and that in fact I lost my virginity to Lenny’s sexy older sister, Sybil. It was possible, I suppose, to have forgotten my one-night stand with this older woman hiding her face in my childhood bed and that sexy Sybil was actually my second between the legs.

After Sybil, until I met (and married) Hannah, I pursued a few women here and there (really girls) whose names escape me, with limited success. What do I mean by limited success? I mean everything more or less but the one thing that counted (at fifteen) on your permanent reputation. What these unremembered members of the opposite sex had in common was that each in her own way had denied me what I assumed I needed. And so I married Hannah, who denied me nothing. And once we were married — the reasons, there always reasons — our sexual life was reduced to talking about what we no longer allowed ourselves to do. And then, one day, without advance word, Hannah went home to her mother to resume her interrupted childhood.

That shouldn’t have happened.

The detritus of that loss never went away not even after I married Anna and passed in the world as an adult. Not even after I behaved badly, choosing desire over obligation, and ran off with Molly. Not even after the memorable early years with Molly when we were mostly almost happy. When Molly left to find her uncharted real self, it was as if Hannah were leaving me all over again.

But at this moment I was just one day past fifteen and all of my failed relationships were still out there in the murky distance of future time.

“Did we?” I asked the woman, who showed some signs of stirring.

It was odd that I could remember the major events of what hadn’t happened yet but no telling details from the recent past.

“What time is it?” she asked. “I must have fallen asleep. I never intended to stay the night.”

When she emerged from the bed — I had my back turned so as not to reveal the extent of my vain unappeasable need — she was fully dressed. “Do my parents know you’re here?”

“You told me they were away,” she said.

Did I? They almost never went anywhere — my father liked to sleep in his own bed — so it was hard to imagine where they might be if not somewhere in the house. “Did I mention when they’d be back?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter, sweetheart,” she said, caressing my face. “I’ll be on my way.”

I searched the files of memory for her name and the only thing that came to mind was Mrs. Andsons, who was the local pharmacist’s wife. I spoke it under my breath so she could avoid responding if it wasn’t her own.

“Yes?” she said.

I had no question for her or none I felt comfortable asking, but I couldn’t let this opportunity pass unventured without losing respect for myself. “You might think this is a weird thing to ask,” I said, “but I must have had too much to drink because I don’t remember what we did last night. What did we… do?”

“You have nothing to reproach yourself with,” she said. “Nothing.”

If she intended her comment to ease my mind, it served in fact to exacerbate my uneasiness. “Nothing?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “You’ll have to excuse me now, Jack. I really have to get home and make nice. When I’m not in the old tyrant’s bed overnight, he’s subject to evil thoughts in the morning.”

I tried to think of something to say that would keep her with me a little longer but nothing I came up with sounded quite right. At the last, I made the worst of several possible choices. “Give me another chance,” I said.

She took a step toward me which she instantly nullified by taking a step back. “Sweetheart, I can’t,” she said. “It’s so sweet of you to ask and I am tempted, but no, no I can’t. Maybe another time. You never know. The gift-wrapped package of Trojans I brought over, darling, are in the sock drawer of your dresser.”

She blew me a kiss and escaped through a series of doors into the street and I watched her ruefully from the window. She seemed to morph into Molly as she hurried away.

Even in my dreams, even with a willing partner, I couldn’t get it right.

I went back to bed and closed my eyes with renewed resolution.

This time when Hannah and I made love for the first time, it would not be in the backseat of my father’s Dodge.

This time I would not have sex with Anna’s friend, Yvonne, in an airport phone booth.

This time I would not disappoint Molly, betray Anna, run from Mina. I would continue to love them no matter how badly we treated each other. If you refuse to acknowledge disillusion, love can survive anything.

No matter, I would wake in the morning an old man in Mina’s bed.

Nevertheless at fifteen years and a day, setting hypocrisy aside, all I really wanted in this life — the be-all and end-all of my childhood aspirations — was to get my ashes hauled, get laid, get screwed, get fucked, get going.