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.