My Getaway

I went to visit a friend of mine who lived down in the city.  He said he had something that he wanted to show me in his basement, something I might be interested in buying.  He took me down to look at it so that we could settle on a price.  As we descended the dark, narrow stairs and made our way to the back corner of the basement through piles of dusty, overturned chairs and duct taped boxes, I noticed that something looked strange and out of place.  The back wall seemed a little closer than I remembered.  The ceiling slanted sharply there, and I even bumped my head against it.  I looked closer and saw that someone had nailed a few sheets of drywall together to form a roughly improvised partition.  It looked like it had all been done very recently. 

I turned to my friend and asked him about it.  "Something's different here.  There used to be a door here where you go could straight out to the back yard.  It's all been covered over.  Everything's been boarded up for some reason.  When did this happen?" He just shrugged like he had no idea what I was talking about.  There was a long moment of silence.  My friend seemed uneasy.  He brushed the sweat from his forehead and wiped it against the leg of his pants, pressing his hand a little too roughly against the fabric.  I could hear him breathing heavy in the close, stifling air.  Then I heard a soft thump behind the partition.  I saw my friend's hand twitch, but his face showed no sign that he had heard anything.  I knew then that something was up.

I scrambled back up the stairs and my friend scrambled up after me.  The kitchen was up at the head of the house, and the house sat on the corner of two city streets.  From the kitchen window I could see along both streets.  I looked out at the cars parked along the curb.  Most of the cars were empty and I could clearly see that there was no one in them.  But further down, about fifty yards from the house, I saw an orange and white van that had curtains drawn across the windows in the back.  I could just barely make out the grey smoke curling up from the tailpipe behind the van.  That was it.  They were watching, waiting in that van.

I just shook my head at my friend for betraying me, and then I ran for the door on the other side of the house.  I burst out into an alley between the houses, and I could already hear the scrape of the van door opening and the frantic voices of the cops piling out.  I climbed a fence into the neighbor's back yard and then over another fence and another until I came out onto the street on the other side of the block.  The cops were swarming in from all directions.  I crossed the street and took off running down the sidewalk, knowing that they were close behind.

I turned a corner and I stopped to catch my breath in front of a tall grey house.  I had eluded them for a moment, and I took a second to collect my thoughts and think about my predicament.  I hadn't done anything.  I hadn't bought whatever it was my friend was trying to sell me to set me up.  I had nothing incriminating on me.  I fumbled through my pockets.  The only thing I had was a disk, and I knew that the only thing on it was the rough draft and the final draft of a paper I had written for college.  I could hear the footsteps of the cops on all sides.  They had figured out where I was.  I stayed still and waited for them to come. 

I had the disk in my hand, and for some reason, just as one of the cops came around the corner and came into view, I tossed it away from me and it landed in the grass somewhere on front lawn of the grey house.  I wasn't exactly sure why I did it.  I wasn't sure if it had been a reflex, or whether I had done it to deliberately mislead them.  But the cop had seen me, and the mere act of throwing the thing away had given it an incriminating importance.  The other cops showed up, and some of them hunted around in the grass for the disk while the others handcuffed me and loaded me into a squad car.

Later, the disk would become a great point of contention for the police.  There had to be some reason I had thrown it away.  There had to be something on it.  There had to be something about it.  For lack of anything else to analyze, they scrutinized the two versions of the college paper that were saved on the disk, looking for clues.  They decided that the secret lay in the discrepancies between the rough draft and the final draft, that these differences must form some kind of code.  They brought in all the experts, all the specialists.  And all the while, the days went by, and I sat there in a cell, forgotten, wondering when it would all end.

After the Fireworks

The fireworks had just ended, and we were all left in the dark.  I could still smell the smoke.  There were cars parked along the side of the road where the ground sloped off into the ditch.  There were voices all around, and people would emerge laughing in groups and pairs from the tall grass on all sides and join the crowd of people slowly making their way down the road.  The moon shone down, casting our long shadows on the pavement ahead of us as we moved along at even paces from one another.  People lugged folding chairs and coolers and held their kid's hands or carried them as they slept against their shoulders.

Around dawn we came to a field with a short wooden fence around it.  There was an open gate in the fence and the crowd was flowing in through the gate.  There was a woman there with a clipboard, and she was checking names from a list as people came through.  She stopped me as I came up, and she couldn't find my name on the list.  I explained to her that I didn't live around here, that my brother did, and that he would be able to vouch for me.  People continued to pour in through the gate behind me as the woman flipped through the papers attached to her clipboard, looking for my brother's name.  Finally, she decided to let me pass.  I explained to her that my wife was somewhere in the crowd behind me, that we had gotten separated out on the road.  She nodded and said she'd keep an eye out as she turned her attention back to her clipboard and her list.

I followed some of the people who had passed through the gate, and further on we came into a narrow yard with a ranch house on one side and a barn on the other.  There were fruit trees and taller shade trees in the yard.  There was a door standing wide open in the shadows on the side of the house that faced away from the rising sun.  I ducked into this doorway as the rest of the people kept trudging past.  I found myself in a small unlit room and it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark.  There was a bed just beside the door, and my brother was sleeping in it.  I imagined that he liked to drift off to sleep with the door open so that he could see the view and feel the breeze from outside.  There was a fireplace across the room with the last crackling embers of a fire burning in it.  A wooden chair had been placed in front of the fire, and I saw my cat curled up on it.  He perked up as I came in, and his eyes shined in the light.

My wife shushed me from the corner of the room.  I couldn't see her, but I knew she was there.  She had come in ahead of me.  She didn't want me to wake my brother.  He had a few hours to sleep yet.  He snorted and rolled over the other way like he had heard us.  It began to rain a little as the morning sun crept into the yard, and the rain pattered softly against the open doorway.  I went to another room of the ranch house and watched from the window.  The rain passed just as quickly as it had started and the drops of water gleamed off the fruit in the trees.

The Time

At a family picnic, I was talking to my aunt and I told her that I was thinking about getting a big clock face tattooed in the middle of my back.  I told her that there was a special ink that they could use for the hands so that they could be set for the right time and then they would move and tick along like a normal clock.  The hands could only be set once, and the setting would be as permanent as the tattoo itself, but once set right, the clock would always keep accurate time.  It would never lose a second here or there over the years.  And I would always know what time it was, because I would be able to feel it on my back.  If I was working with someone and they said, "Man, it sure feels like it should be noon already," I could just stand up straight, arch my back to get a sense of the position of the hands, and say, "Nope.  It feels exactly like it's quarter to ten."

My aunt responded to this with a wry smile and a roll of her eyes.  She pointed out that there were some cases where you might not always want to know the time.  I had to admit that that was true.  Sometimes, on a long shift, the worst thing you could do was to keep looking at the clock.  The minutes would just crawl by.  Other times you just wanted to stay in a moment, not caring when and if it would ever end.  I thought about having that clock on my back, feeling every minute portioned out equally, every moment of my life punctuated with that slow inky tick.  I rubbed the back of my neck, feeling like there was an itch I couldn't reach.     

Getting Together

My mother was having everyone in the family over to her apartment for Christmas Eve.  My wife and I were riding over with my old girlfriend and her boyfriend.  We were all close friends.  On the way we stopped off at a gas station for a case of beer.  There was tinsel and lights strung up around the door and the clerk sat behind the lonely counter watching some televised Christmas pageant on a little portable TV, while the snow fell in thick wet flakes all around.  My wife and I sat in the back seat of the car as we headed back out through the slushy streets.  The boyfriend drove, silent and serious, trying to peer through the headlights past the falling snow.  The old girlfriend was in the passenger seat and she turned back to us and laughed and snorted about some nickname I used to call her.  I blushed.  But everything was fine.  We were all together.

We pulled up outside my mother's apartment complex.  We got out and stood around in the dim, yellowed lights and the falling snow, and the boyfriend said something about having to check the rear brakes on his car before we went in.  I was about to get into a whole conversation with him about bleeding his brake lines, when I noticed that my old girlfriend was already starting down the walk towards my mother's building.  She didn't feel like standing around and waiting for the rest of us.  I wondered what my mother would think, having my old girlfriend show up on her doorstep, by herself and without any explanation.  She had never liked the girl.  She certainly wouldn't start liking her now.

But when the rest of us got up to my mother's apartment, we found my old girlfriend sitting in the corner of the living room in a plush chair beside the Christmas tree, sipping a cup of coffee.  My mother had welcomed her warmly into her home, and she came and took the rest of our coats and we all settled in on the couches.  There were carols playing on the radio and the tree flashed its scattered patterns of colored light.  I got up and went to put the case of beer in the refrigerator.  When I got back, the rest of the family had arrived, and everyone was packed into the small warm room.  I saw that the chair in the corner was empty.  I looked around.  My old girlfriend had slipped out and she was gone.  I knew I'd never see her again, and I knew it had to be that way.  I sat down on the arm of the couch and watched as the kids crawled around under the tree looking for their presents.