The vertical blinds gave their whispering vinyl clack as
I stole out the sliding glass door. In the east, racing behind pine covered
hills on the last vestiges of wind from a thunderstorm, low wisps were just
beginning to show black before the predawn gray sky. Not high enough to be
thought of as clouds or low enough to be fog, the wisps struck me as the sad,
forgotten orphans of atmospheric phenomena. I pulled up the collar of my
leather jacket, wishing that it offered more protection from the wet cold.
I could see my breath. Rainwater was still dripping from
the roofs and trees. Overhead, weaker stars were getting dim and dying against
the power of the still unseen sun, but some stood bright in the deep dark.
Broken wind chimes, handed down to her from her mother and which she never had
the heart to throw out, tinkled half –heartedly as I crossed the wide, unfenced
yard to the gravel road.
I left behind all of my clothes aside from what I had on
my back. I could eventually beg, borrow, or steal more. She could burn
everything I left behind for all I cared, but knowing her she would donate
them. The thought of getting dressed in some cold, stinking rest stop bathroom
and putting on a shirt that she had once pulled off of me in the warm dark of
her bedroom was enough to make me sick with sadness.
I
caught myself wondering silly, inconsequential things. Would she miss my boots
at the foot of her bed? What would she do, with her crippling arachnophobia and
aversion to killing any living creature, the next time she saw a spider and I
wasn’t there to shoo it out of the house? How many years would pass before I
didn’t find myself thinking about her from time to time? How many months would
pass before she didn’t find herself thinking about me?
She
had neglected to bring in the laundry before the thunder cracked open the
clouds the day before. It hung from the line soaking wet and gleaming like bleach
white beacons in the gloom. As I passed the clothes I snatched her favorite
item off the line. I wrung out the dripping linen scarf, rolled it up, and
slipped it into a jacket pocket.
The
wet gravel didn’t crunch under foot so much as slide and slosh. Each foot fall
sounded like marbles rolling around in a mouth. The puddles were a milky gray
and they tried desperately to splash, soak, or seep into my boots. There is a
narrow window of time before the sun rises when a diffuse light permeates
everywhere and illuminates everything equally from all angles. It is a calm,
spooky beauty. I knew that if I were still in bed to see it, her face would be
washed with a blue light that would make her look like a stone angel in a
graveyard. I knew she would be waking soon, so I hurried down to the paved road
and stuck out my thumb.
“Jesus
Christ, this goddamned rain, huh?” The big face of a big man in a big truck
wearing a big smile. Old gitter-box country music was playing low from his
radio. “Hope you weren’t out here trying to hitch in that storm last night.”
No,
I was in bed.
“Where
ya headed to?”
As
far as you’re willing to take me, I guess.
“Well,
I’m hauling it all the way down to Redding today, I suppose I could do with
some company.”
I
got in. The number of feet between me and her bed kept adding up, then the miles.
Every one of them broke my heart just a little bit more than the last. Every
one of them told me just a little bit louder, this is really over. Every one of them called me weak, called me a
coward, called me a liar and a lowlife and a phony for leaving. But I kept
racking them up. There was nothing I could do.
She
said that we could work things out. She said that we could start over and make
everything like sparkling new. Beneath eyes argent with tears her mouth said
that she loved me. She meant it. I told her that I loved her more than anything.
I meant it. She kissed my black eye. Together we poured every bottle of liquor
in the house down the sink and went to bed in each other’s arms. Every bottle
except for the pint of whiskey that I found in the pocket of my jacket.
The
driver didn’t pretend to not notice the bruise covering a full quarter of my
face for very long. I was taking a pull from the bottle when he brought it up.
“That’s a hell of a shiner, buddy. How’d you manage that?”
I’m
a drunk, these things happen.
“Hell,
don’t I know how that goes?” He took a swig when I offered the bottle. “Ya
mouth off to the wrong person, get your ass kicked?”
I
told him how we got drunk and she hit me with a vodka bottle. How I started to
strangle her but stopped. I left out how I started to sob when I let go of her
neck and she crawled away from me.
The
driver was silent for several seconds. “Hell, we all want to strangle ‘em from
time to time.” His laugh drowned out the country music. He punched my arm.
The
sun was up and I wondered how long she would worry about me before she dabbed
cover-up on to the bruises on her neck and went to work. I wondered how long
she would bother with trying to find me. I wondered how long she would be alone
before someone else took my place in her bed. I wondered if she would notice
her scarf missing from the clothesline and understand that I had left, and why.
