9
The sun wakes me at eleven, and I remember I have to take my Saturn in for a much-needed oil change. With no shave, shower, or anything in my stomach, I’m hungover as hell and step straight into Wisconsin’s scolding peak. The air hits me thick. It’s the type of suffocating heat where you’re sweating immediately, blanketed by humidity. I walk to the car and open the door. I turn the key of my old and loyal silver bullet. A million miles and counting.
My house isn’t enormous in the rearview but it’s plenty big enough for me. It’s my parents’ old place, an old wooden make with the furnished stained maple through and through. It’s a beautiful brown, sure fire country home. A cabin or lost-artist-in-the-woods type, which suits me just fine. I pull out of the driveway and start heading to town.
Tubbs Road is lined with miles and miles of farmland—crops and livestock. I know every single home out here, and every family that lives inside them. I drive past a particularly familiar property filled with cows in the pasture and smile. Growing up, I had a buddy named Trevor who lived on that farm. His family had what seemed like thousands of cows back then, all penned up together, some twenty times our size. From time to time, during long days of boredom, Trevor was liable to start poking them with sticks. He wasn’t ill meaning or anything, but he’d poke hard enough to get a solid stir out of them. It was relatively harmless I suppose, but something about the whole thing always made me uneasy. I don’t care how bored I was, I would never go around poking cows with sticks. Not only did I find the whole impulse sort of odd, I also didn’t fully trust the look some of those cows had in their eyes. Trevor never seemed to notice, and if he did, he just didn’t give a shit. He would boss them around and get them where he wanted them to go, but the way he’d mess with them and play around I never found wise. They’re far more intimidating than you’d think up close, cows, and the way I see it, they’re just as liable to have bad days as the rest of us.
Well, all that joking around damn near caught up with him one day when he almost got trampled to death. He revved them all up just a bit too much and they tried to stampede him like you see those bulls do in the streets of Spain. I nearly had a heart attack watching it as he barely escaped, laughing his maniac head off. Later that night, I helped him steal a road sign he’d always wanted and we carried that thing two miles through the dark country backroads like morons. Trevor was always dragging me into these schemes of his. It took me a while to understand that he had more dangerous and questionable desires than I did, but I cut bait with him eventually. As I drive past the farm today, I laugh at my young stupidity and wonder if I’ll be laughing in another twenty years at all the things I’m doing now.
I gotta say, the cows look more and more lifeless these days, almost as if they’re catching wind of the agenda, little by little, one blade of grass and one nipple tug at a time. They’re probably one irritating stick poke away from revolution. Poor bastards. What a war that’ll be when it happens.
I’ve made it to town and I’m only a mile from Sal’s Auto. God, I feel like hell. Signs of life on Main Street: a couple kids sell husked corn out of their truck bed on the corner of Ash Street. Miss Morris, a silver-haired angel and town librarian, walks hand in hand with her grandson back toward the doors of Johnston Public Library. A group of teens ride their bikes and take a turn down Marshall, no doubt heading to Lion’s Park where their friends will all gather and invent ways to pass another hot summer afternoon. Sprinklers are scattered about in a few yards, and I find myself jealous of the grass bathed in water. I’m sweating like mad and feeling delusional. My air conditioning is long since broken and the small droplets forming on my forearms are beginning to run down my skin like rain on windows.
It’s moments like these where I consider swearing off drinking forever. I really should have eaten something. My stomach turns a bit. My head pounds a light drum, and I rub at my eyes. It’s insane, but right when I blink awake, I swear to God I see her, appearing like a blazing Johnston desert mirage, walking away down the sidewalk. She’s holding a guitar case in her right hand with a duffle bag slung over her left shoulder. A banging crescendo like orchestra under my skull jolts me from my malaise and my hands grab tight to the steering wheel. I flash my eyes through my mirrors and like a lunatic I swerve off and squeal to a stop on the side of the road. The sound doesn’t make her turn around though. In the rearview I see her white shirt reflecting the sun and her ponytail swaying between her shoulders, even her shadow on the sidewalk draws something out of me as she journeys out of town.
Before a logical thought appeals to any reason I might have, I rip my car door open in a sudden burst and bound jackrabbit-like out of my vehicle to the sidewalk. I’m fuckin light-headed, and I know I look ridiculous but what does it matter? I’ll never be able to live with myself if I miss one more chance. I’m heading toward her and gaining some ground but now I’m seriously pouring sweat. Salt stings my eyes. Head spinning, sick, hungover and driven crazy with irrational impulse and no plan whatsoever, I make my way.
What does one say at a time such as this? Suddenly my state repulses me but I’ve come this far, and I have to try. I have to. I continue on, one ragged step at a time and as she sways slightly there back and forth, effortlessly and beautifully aligned, I’m mesmerized. My heart in my chest pounds. Everything is electric. She hauls that guitar in the 5-degree humidity as the bright white Wisconsin sun beats down on us both. Now or never, man. These are the moments you remember.
Some thirty yards away I let out a primitive “Hey,” and she turns around. She’s squinting and I know I must look clownish—neglected and crazed. I push some wet hair off my forehead and try to breathe. My God is the air thick. This is ridiculous. I’m still closing the distance but the world all of a sudden begins to darken around the edges. In a pulsing orb of washed feeling that comes reverberating through my shoulders and spine, my focus blurs and becomes unstable. My breathing is labored and you’ve gotta be fuckin kidding, I know this feeling. I’m twenty yards out and my consciousness is fading, escaping down the burning sidewalks of Main Street and abandoning me. God, not now. How pathetic. I stop and try to stand my ground, but my knees are growing weak. Oh for fuck’s sake.