Doubled or Nothing

by Warren Esby

  After several hours of driving, and having exhausted my thoughts on Ivor and old Ms. Halloran and the really weird events that preceded my departure from Boston, I started to settle down to the monotony of driving. Of course not everything had been weird. Julie hadn’t. She may have been a little kinky, but definitely not weird. Out of boredom, I began to count the Toyota Corollas I saw. I knew I was driving a very common car and I was curious about how many of them I could actually see on the road. I wasn’t really that curious, but I had nothing better to do and I was tired of trying to figure out things that I couldn’t. I realized that black was a very common color for cars. I had a black Corolla myself in fact. So I began to look for black Corollas which gave me something to do and kept me alert. In the course of two hours, I had seen at least six. All were coming towards me on the opposite side of the road. Very few Corollas passed me. They usually didn’t have the power to do so. It’s not that I drive very fast. I’m an aggressive driver I believe, but not foolhardy. I generally stay two or three miles over the speed limit since I can’t afford to get a ticket. I usually stay over in the right lane and get behind someone doing about that speed. If they’re old people going very slow, I wait for an open stretch of road and then carefully choose when to pass. That’s because with the Corolla being underpowered and not having been tuned up at least since the odometer had last moved, it can take up to a week or two with the pedal to the metal to pass anyone going over fifty five. So I generally take it easy, and I don’t expect to be passed by an old Corolla with a 1.6 liter four cylinder engine like mine, although it does occasionally happen.

  And then I noticed another black car that could be a Corolla traveling behind me, also reluctant to pass like I was. I slowed down to see if it was a Corolla so I could add it to my list, but it slowed down too, so I couldn’t really tell. Then I sped up to catch the mom and pop that I had been following. I noticed that they had slowed down because I wasn’t tailgating them anymore. By the time I caught up to them, I was really moving and the road was open ahead so I went ahead and passed them. To my surprise, the black car behind me also sped up and passed them and then pulled in behind me. It was now close enough for me to see it was a Buick Regal and would obviously have had enough power to pass me at any time if it had wanted to. But it slowed down too and took the approximate same position behind me it had taken before. Needless to say, I was curious. It stayed behind me for over fifty miles, slowing down when I did and speeding up to pass the occasional slow truck that I was able to pass safely. I finally pulled into a rest area and sure enough, it followed me in. Almost. It went around to the back where the big rigs were parked. I kind of wandered past the rest rooms to the back pretending I was just stretching my legs and looked for the Buick. I was hoping to see who got out of it. I could see it parked quite a ways away and I waited, but no one got out. I walked very slowly to the men’s room waiting some more and finally went in to take the pause that refreshes. When I got out and looked before going to my car, the black Buick was gone, so I got in my little Corolla and drove out. Just as I was about to get onto the entrance ramp I noticed the black Buick Regal coming around some of the big rigs parked in the back and following me onto the interstate. For the next hundred miles, that Buick stayed behind me.

  I finally needed to stop to get something to eat, so I went into the next rest stop that advertised that it had a McDonalds expecting the Buick to follow. But it didn’t. It kept on going. I glanced at the driver as it went by. It was a bald man with a mustache I thought, but I really couldn’t tell about the mustache since he purposely turned his face away from me as he passed. I did notice he had Illinois plates on the Buick and quickly tried to memorize the numbers on the plate. I only got the last three. After I ate and got back into the Corolla and made sure I kissed the steering wheel again, and as I was getting onto the interstate again, I noticed coming out of the area where the big rigs were parked was, that’s right, a black Buick Regal. I figured that baldy must have gone up to the next exit, turned around and come back to the previous exit and turned around again. I decided to see if there was enough time for him to be able to do that, presuming it was him, by seeing how far it was to the next exit. I remembered that it had been ten miles from the previous exit before the rest area had come up. But it was a good twenty miles to the next exit, which meant a sixty mile round trip that should have taken him at least forty five to fifty minutes to do at a minimum if it was baldy in the Buick following me now. But I had only been in the rest area for twenty five or thirty minutes. Way too short a time. But this damn black Buick was behaving just like the last.

  I decided to forget about it and hope it was a coincidence. Once again, when I had to stop, the Buick followed me in and parked out back, and followed me out again. Once again, about a hundred miles further on when I stopped to get gas, it didn’t follow me in, and as I was getting off the interstate going very, very slowly, it passed me and the driver turned his face away. He turned out to have a full head of hair and the license plate on the Buick had a different number, but it was still an Illinois plate. I drove around to where the big rigs were parked after I gassed up. No black Buick. But as I started to pull back onto the interstate, sure enough a black Buick Regal was following me. Now I thought to myself, what’s the chance of there being three identical black Buick Regals following me all the way from Boston to Cleveland and taking turns tailing me. I realized what the answer was. About as much chance as there is of three .25 ACP caliber Beretta Bobcat semiautomatics being in the basement of the MIT athletic center.

  I stopped once more at a rest area before I reached Tommy’s exit. Sure enough, the Buick followed me in. I parked in back where the big rigs were and went in to the rest room. When I came back to the Corolla, the Buick was parked right next to it. No one was in it. I looked inside but there was nothing unusual about the interior. I got into the Corolla, kissed the steering wheel and got back onto the interstate for the final leg. The Buick did not follow me out and was not visible behind me. I reached Tommy’s exit just before dusk. As I came off the interstate I took a left and pulled over to the right side of the road on top of the overpass between the westbound lane of the interstate that I had just got off and the eastbound lane whose entrance was just ahead. Tommy was already there parked and waiting for me so that I could follow him to his apartment. I got out of the Corolla and walked over to his car. We chatted for a few minutes and then I started to walk to my car to follow Tommy. As I did, I was passed by a black Buick Regal. As I glanced over at the Buick, the driver actually looked at me rather than looking away. It was a young woman with black hair. I swear it looked like she winked at me before passing us and taking a left hand turn onto the east bound lane of the interstate. It was getting dark so I couldn’t be sure, but I did notice that the black Buick Regal had Illinois plates. I later learned that winking like that was just the sort of flaky thing that Olga would do.

  Chapter 4

  Tommy was one of my fraternity brothers in undergraduate school. He hadn’t changed much in the four years since I had last seen him. He was rail thin and had the same distinctive haircut. It looked like someone had put a bowl over his straight hair and cut it evenly all around so the finished product looked like an inverted bowl of hair. You know you read stories about the old days when people would put a bowl belonging to the family over the heads of all the males in the family once a month and cut off all the excess to give each of them an even haircut. Well Tommy looked like he had been using that same family bowl, although when I looked at him again, I realized he must have bought a new bowl. His hair was completely straight and even all around, except now it came below his ears rather than ending at the tops of his ears as it had in college. I guess Tommy had grown up and decided to get an adult haircut. Tommy had what would have been considered a nice apartment. It was located over the garage next to his parents’ house. It had a bedroom, a bathroom, a main room and a kitchenette off of the main room. Aside from the small kitchen tabl
e and two chairs, there was a couch with a coffee table in front of it, a floor lamp next to the couch, a wide screen television and an enormous pet bed with the name Muffy embroidered on it. Lying curled up on one end of the sofa was a shaggy, golden haired, medium sized dog of no discernible breed.

  “Muffy. Get off the sofa. You know you’re not supposed be on the sofa. Go to your bed.”

  Muffy dutifully got off the sofa and walked over to the bed with her head down. She sat in the middle of the bed and stared up at me with a pair of the most sorrowful brown eyes I have ever seen. Her body looked like a half-sized golden retriever, but the eyes looked like a beagle’s. Now that was an improbable mix, especially since her coat looked like it was entirely golden retriever and the face definitely looked like it was entirely beagle, except for the golden fur that is, which I had never seen on a beagle.

  “That’s really strange,” said Tommy. “She just loves her bed and never gets on the sofa. She’s always in that bed whenever I come in. I don’t know what’s wrong. I hope she isn’t sick.”

  Well I didn’t know if that could be true, loving that bed as he said. As I looked around the apartment I noticed there was a layer of golden colored dog fur everywhere that was about six inches thick. Except, that is, on the dog bed where it was only about two inches thick. That’s why I mentioned that his apartment would have been considered nice. It would have been considered nice if it hadn’t been covered ankle deep in dog hair. Now Tommy had been known as the biggest slob in the fraternity. He was like that Pig Pen character in the old Charlie Brown comic strip. Eventually no one would room with him. Despite many threats by the fraternity officers, he either refused or was incapable of cleaning up his act, or more precisely his room. The final threat was to de-brother him. Now that’s a strange term isn’t it? Well not really if you think about it. When you join a fraternity, you become a brother since you are supposed to be like a brother to the other fraternity members. So I guess when you get kicked out you are no longer considered a brother and the term for that is that you were de-brothered. I don’t know if that has more status than someone who had never been a brother in the first place, but the net result is the same. Of course they did tell him if he ever got his act together, they would make him a brother again. Does that mean he could be re-brothered? I actually never heard that term before, and I have often wondered if there was a re-brothering ceremony or you had to be initiated all over again. I guess being a de-brother may have some greater status over never having been a brother at all when you think about it. I wondered if you could be de-sistered from a sorority as well. I suppose you can.

  Well, Tommy and I had never been that close. And because of his reputation as a slob, I wouldn’t have necessarily stayed with him, but I didn’t know anyone else to mooch off of between Boston and Chicago so I took the chance he had changed. He hadn’t, but I was glad to be there nevertheless because camping out somewhere in my sleeping bag no longer appealed to me because of the parade of black Buick Regals up and down the interstate. Tommy and I sat down on the couch to catch up on the last four years with Muffy still looking at me with those big sorrowful eyes.

  “How’re you doin’?” I asked.

  “Pretty good. And you?”

  “Okay.”

  “What’s new?”

  “Not much. How about you?”

  “Same.”

  “Want a beer?”

  “Sure. I could use one.”

  Tommy went over to the little refrigerator in the kitchenette and opened the door. There was nothing there except one beer. He opened the beer and handed it to me and said,

  “I’ll go get us some more. My dad keeps some in the extra refrigerator in the garage.”

  He then went out the door and you could hear him going down the steps to the garage below. When the door shut, Muffy got out of her bed, came over to the sofa, jumped up next to me, sat down and looked at me with those sorrowful eyes and then she tossed her head up and down once. I speak dog language so I knew what she wanted. She wanted me to be pet her, so I did as I sipped on my beer. A few minutes later we could hear Tommy climbing back up the stairs. Muffy reluctantly got down from the sofa, went over to her bed and sat in the middle of it and stared at me. Tommy came in with a six pack and looked at her.

  “Good dog,” he said.

  We continued our scintillating conversation for another hour or so as we finished off the six pack. Since Tommy had to get up early the next morning to go to work, and I wanted to hit the sack since I was tired and had driven so much, we decided to go to bed. I went down to my car and got my sleeping bag to throw on the couch. I laid it out on the couch and climbed in. The last thing I remember as I fell asleep is seeing Muffy still sitting in the middle of her dog bed staring at me.

  You know how when you wake up you remember the last dream that you have just before you do? Well I woke up in the middle of the night having dreamed of being run off the road by a black Buick Regal. I dreamed I had hit a tree and the air bag had saved my life but I was paralyzed from the waist down. I couldn’t move my legs. So I woke up, but I still couldn’t move my legs. I looked over and Muffy was sound asleep, curled up on my legs. Between her weight and the little space in the sleeping bag, I really couldn’t move my legs. I shooed her off and she went back and sat in the middle of her doggy bed looking at me. I moved the coffee table right next to the sofa where my legs were to prevent her from getting on my legs again and went back to sleep. I woke about an hour later dreaming I was in bed with Julie and she had rolled over for a kiss, but her morning breath was so bad I was about to tell her to go brush her teeth first when I realized I was awake. Of course it was Muffy again. She was no longer curled up on my legs. She was completely stretched out on top of me with her head on my chest and her muzzle near my face. I gave up. I moved the coffee table next to where my head was and I laid down with just my head on the sofa and the rest of my body on the coffee table. It was very uncomfortable, but Muffy seemed to be happy. She laid down on the sofa and stretched out taking up the two thirds of the sofa I no longer occupied. I was very flattered when she made sure her muzzle was against my arm when we both went to sleep.

  Needless to say I didn’t sleep that well that night, but I didn’t tell Tommy when he asked. When Muffy heard Tommy get up, she immediately went back and sat on her bed. He came out and asked if she had bothered me. I said,

  “No. She was great. She never got out of her bed all night.”

  Tommy then got her leash and took her out for her morning walk to do her business while I took a shower and shave. I decided to only change my underwear since I only had a few changes of clothes and didn’t want any more of my clothes coated with dog hair. Tommy put food in Muffy’s bowl, which she immediately gobbled down, and changed the water in her bowl. She drank some of that and then went back to sit on her beloved bed. Tommy and I went down to have breakfast with his parents.

  His mother’s kitchen was immaculate. You could have eaten off the floor it sparkled so much. In fact I would rather eat off that floor than eat off anything in Tommy’s apartment. As we were finishing up our second cup of coffee, I could picture in my mind Muffy stretched out on that sofa or perhaps curled up in a ball at the end of it. I thanked Tommy’s parents. I had already stowed my stuff back into the Corolla before coming down for breakfast, but I still needed to brush my teeth and, of course, say goodbye to Muffy. On the way back up the stairs to the garage apartment, I asked Tommy if he had ever thought of parting with Muffy. He looked at me strangely and said no, of course not. I told him if he ever wanted to, to please get in touch with me. I went over to the doggy bed where Muffy was sitting and petted her goodbye. I have often wondered recently whether Muffy would prefer living in the Cayman Islands with me rather than in Cleveland with Tommy. After all I can now afford to give her an entire room full of sofas and she could have her pick. It would have to be a dognapping that got her here, however, since I am supposed to be in hiding and I can’t contact Tomm
y to make him a direct offer he can’t refuse.

  I finally said goodbye to Tommy, got into the Corolla, kissed the steering wheel and headed back to the interstate. It was a good thing that my next stop was Chicago, and it was not nearly as long a trip as coming to Cleveland from Boston, since I was pretty tired after the long drive the day before and not getting too much sleep. Maybe, like yesterday, I would have a parade of black Buick Regals to keep me alert. I actually hoped not. As I got on the interstate I realized that Muffy was the second real blonde female I had slept with that month. I guess you never forget your second one either. I didn’t think I would. I haven’t yet.