White Scarf

 

            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.