Finally, I asked Woody, the self-styled leader of the team, what they hoped to find at the end of their quest.
He took a deep breath before answering. “I don’t exactly know,” he said, carefully enunciating each word, “because as yet it has no name.”
He made a point of walking away from me before I could probe further. “And when you find the thing that has no name, what then?” I called after him.
Ms. M stole up to me and answered my question in a hushed voice.
“Like you with your mushrooms,” she said, “we will not disturb the thing in any way. We are an investigating team. It is our job to locate and describe previously unknowable phenomena, not meddle with its destiny.”
“What if the thing, as you call it, doesn’t make the same distinctions?” I asked.
At first she brushed my question off with the back of her hand as being unworthy, but then she said, blushing in the faded light, “We are not without the ability to defend ourselves.”
I was curious as to what she meant, but not curious enough to go much further with this quixotic group and I announced, thanking them for their company, that the time had come to go my own way.
“I’m sorry,” Woody said as I started to walk away. “I’m afraid we can’t let you go.”
“What do you mean you can’t?” I asked, though I didn’t feel I needed permission to walk away.
“For one, you know too much,” he said.
“Hey, I know nothing,” I said. “I’ve been winging my way through life.” But it wasn’t knowledge of the world, or knowledge in general he was referring to. He meant—why hadn’t I seen this right away?—that I knew too much about their project.
While I was overstating my support of their venture, someone sneaked up behind me and conked me with what may have been a club or an old hiking boot. When I came to, I found myself trussed from neck to toe by silken threads as though I were in a cocoon being carried along on a palette like a wounded soldier. So whether I liked it or not, I became a passive companion on their absurdly dangerous (perhaps dangerously absurd) adventure.
56th Night
I anticipated the two guys lugging me around on a stretcher would get tired of their assignment and it happened even more quickly than I expected.
The one they called Pill had been complaining all along, mostly under his breath about my weighing more than I should and how it was oppressing his back.
“What do you want to do with him then?” Larry said. “You got a better idea?”
“Sometimes—look, don’t say anything to the others—I wish we weren’t hamstrung by being non-violent,” Pill muttered. “Anyhow, I got to answer nature’s call, if you know what I mean.”
So they put me down, virtually dropped me, and Pill went off in the woods somewhere to take a leak.
“The nerd drinks too much water,” Larry said to me.
“How did you get this cocoon around me?” I asked him.
“Hey, that’s one of Ms. M’s little tricks,” he said. “She’s got a little spider in her, that girl. No more questions, okay?”
When Pill didn’t return after what seemed like ten minutes, Larry called out to the others for help. There was no immediate response and it was beginning to get dark. “What do I do now?” he asked no one in particular, though I was his only audience. He raised his voice, took turns broadcasting Woody’s name and Ms. M’s name into the vast unknown, his voice echoing back at us the only response. Nerves got the better of him. He began to do a kind of twitchy dance to pass whatever time needed passing. “What do I do now?” he asked again.
In answer to his question, I suggested he untie me so there would at least be two of us against whatever.
He couldn’t do that, he said, repeated it several times for emphasis before taking out a pocket knife and chopping at the spidery threads that held me.
Progress was slow—the strands difficult to cut—and I had only one arm free when Woody and Ms. M reappeared.
Woody took charge, suggested that instead of splitting up they all go together to look for Pill. Perhaps, said Ms. M, Pill, who had no sense of direction, had gotten himself lost by going the wrong way.
“What about this one?” Larry asked, meaning me.
I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for or even what my best hopes might be in the present situation.
“It’ll take too long to unravel him,” Woody said, “so I think it best to just leave him here until we get back.”
“Sorry,” he said to me.
When they were gone, I picked up Larry’s knife from the ground where he had dropped it and I used my free arm to saw away at the strands swaddling my legs. It was laborious work and I assumed they would be back before I made sufficient progress.
Hours seemed to pass without their return and I kept at it, though my arm began to ache, looking over my shoulder all the while, a kind of free floating urgency driving me.
Eventually, I was able to stand on one foot. Just as I was beginning to master the problem of remaining upright, I heard something moving in the brush, edging its way toward me.
I resisted panic, held my knife at the ready in case whoever it was intended me harm. And perhaps it was the group of young adventurers returning or at least the ones who had survived temporary disappearance.
To my surprise, a small, familiar, elderly woman appeared, brushing what seemed like spider webs from her clothing. I couldn’t place her exactly, though I was sure we had met before. She resembled Molly more than a little, Molly twenty or so years down the road, a considerably older and cronelike version of my lost muse.
She greeted me with a cackle and an odd, almost benign smile.
“You look familiar,” I said. “Do I know you?”
“Do you think I’m attractive?” she asked.
I could see this was a delicate question and so I worked an answer over in my head, modifying it again and again so as not to seem either dishonest or hurtful. “You have a beguiling manner,” I said at long last.
“I do what I can with what little I have,” she said, the benign smile slipping from one side of the mouth to the other. “Would you like to dance with me?”
“I would,” I said perhaps too quickly, “but I have a broken leg.”
She considered my answer, seemed to chew on it while clearing her throat. “Is that a yes or a no?” she said, holding out her bony arms in my direction. For a fraction of a second, I thought of not taking her hands, though no other alternative offered itself and I could almost hear the sound of dance music coming from some incomprehensible distance away. And the next thing I knew we were whirling about to the distant strains, my bad leg keeping pace.
I put it down to illusion but she seemed to be getting younger as we danced in circles barely touching the earth as if the laws of gravity had taken the evening off. For a moment, I thought she had morphed into Ms. M.
I wondered as we flew in circles if she were responsible for the disappearance of the others. I also wondered if the same fate, whatever it was, was also what awaited me.
I asked her her name.
And then, momentarily, our dance took a horizontal turn and we were on the ground, my hard-on preceding a terrible awareness of desire. I held on to her pillowy ass with both hands as I entered her. “Come to me, masked man,” she whispered.
And so we danced on the ground with my fickle prick between her legs which were wrapped around me like a ribbon. As soon as I came, the dance was over, the music silenced, and she, the unnamed, disappeared the way she came.
57th Night
My hair had turned white after the encounter with the crone who had emerged from the deep woods like an apparition. Insofar as I could tell, I was still alive, though conspicuously diminished.
By using the North Star as a reference point (and perhaps it was another star altogether), I gradually found my way back to the highway. My plan, which was the faded echo of what had got me here in the first place, was to hitch a ride into Maine.
That was before I discovered that I was already in Maine having crossed the border in the course of my travels off the beaten track.
I needed to get myself together and with, rest in mind, I stopped off at the first motel that came my way, the Down Home Inn, which was owned and managed by a undernourished ornithologist. When he informed me that Cabin 13 was all he had available—the other quarters were in the process of being updated for a Virtual Reality convention—I knew I was in for a bad time.
I fell into a dreamless sleep on top of my covers (still in my clothes) and lost the world for several hours before being recalled by a series of heavy knocks on the door.
“Open the fucker up,” a voice said, “or I’ll break the fucker down.”
“What do you want?” I found myself calling out, struck almost instantaneously that silence, a total refusal to acknowledge the intrusion, was a better way to go.
“You’re in my room,” the drunken voice called back. “Get your ass out of my room.” He banged on the door with a heavy fist.
I looked around for my watch and couldn’t find it in the dark, as if knowing the time would be a way of getting my bearings. It was at this point I opted for silence, assuming I was dealing with someone either drunk or mad.
“I’ll break you in half, dickface,” he shouted again after a momentary interlude in which I thought he had given up and gone away.
I called the office from my phone on the bed table and got a recording that advised me to keep trying.
My only hope was to outwait him and trust that whatever the door was constructed of would withstand his siege.
There were extended periods without the thumping but it always managed to return just when I thought he had given up and gone away.
Hoping the door was sufficiently well-constructed to withstand his assault, I returned to the bed.
No matter, I couldn’t get back to sleep while the attempt to break down my door persisted.
Finally, I heard footsteps moving into the distance and I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.
I must have dozed because there was daylight coming through the curtain when I opened my eyes again.
I showered quickly, not wanting to leave myself in a vulnerable state, and dressed with similar dispatch into the alternate set of clothes I had on hand.
I was ready to see what faced me on the other side of the door when the phone rang.
Though I had no good reason to answer, the siren call got the better of me. “Who is it?” I said, avoiding the amenities.
“If I were you,” a woman’s voice said, “I’d get out of there in a magic minute.”
Who am I running from this time I wanted to ask but there didn’t seem any point so I hung up the phone and left the sanctuary of my room.
I stopped briefly to read the message scrawled in blood on the outside of the door. “GIVE IT UP,” it said.
I hadn’t taken two steps from the motel when a burly man well over six feet tall approached. I had noticed him asleep at the wheel of a truck parked near the office.
“I was the guy at your door last night,” he said. “I don’t remember what I said, but I hope you didn’t take it to heart. I’m a notoriously unpleasant drunk.” He held out his hand. “No hard feelings, okay?”
I shrugged. “You had me worried,” I said.
“Look, ol’ buddy, I’d like to make amends,” he said. “It would make me feel a whole lot better if you accepted a lift in my truck to where you’re going.”
I said I wasn’t sure where that might be since I didn’t know which of the several resort islands in Maine the kidnappers had taken Molly.
“Don’t worry, we’ll find her,” he said, “or my name isn’t King Buck, which in fact it used not to be. You have to let me make it up to you. Please.” He got down on one knee as if he was proposing.
Sober, he seemed harmless enough, and so, not without some residual reluctance, I accepted his offer.
“What kind of cargo do you carry?” I asked him.
“The female of the species,” he said with a wry smile.
We hadn’t gone very far when we hit a bump in the road and I noticed, in what must been a subliminal flash, inadvertently turning my head, a braceleted human arm spilling out from the tarp in the back that secured his otherwise hidden cargo.
58th Night
The trucker, who insisted I call him Buck, kept up a kind of jokey patter as we drove toward Vinalhaven, the first island on our itinerary, his third beer clutched in the hand that was unattached to the wheel. When we started out, Buck had warned me that it was dangerous to let him drink beyond his limit.
I thought this might be the time to say something.
“You probably have had enough, don’t you think?” I said, putting my caution as delicately as I could.
“Where did you get the idea that a few beers was going to make some kind of fucking monster out of me?” he said in a voice I hadn’t heard before except perhaps outside my door.
“It’s what you told me,” I said.
“I told you that?” he asked the now-empty bottle in his hand. “I guess I must be some kind of liar, huh?”
“I think I see her,” I said, pointing to a twentyish blond just ahead, carrying a package under her arm. “You can drop me here if that’s convenient.”
The truck drove up to the woman so that Buck could get a better look at her. “Not too bad,” he said, “but I think we can do better.”
“I can get out anywhere here,” I said, ignoring his odd remark.
A man came from the other direction and took the package from the woman and they went off together, arms around each other.
“What do you want to do about that?” he said as he trolled after the couple in his truck. “If she were my wife…” He left the thought unfinished.
“The sun must have been in my eyes,” I said. “I can see now that she’s not Molly.”
“It’s good you said something,” he said, chugging his fourth beer, “because, hey, I was going to run that pretty boy down for you. Just kidding. Just as well. There’s a causeway up ahead to the island. Don’t worry. I’m not going to drop you before we get what we came for. Zum zum.”
By this point, I was more than eager to get away from him but I could see that asking to be dropped off was a sure way not to get me what I wanted.
The island was larger than I imagined it would be. I did know from remarks Molly had made that the kidnappers were in possession of a lodge near the central marina.
There were two attractive women in a Cadillac convertible that pulled alongside us and Buck, keeping pace, danced his tongue at them in obscene gesture.
“Asshole,” the one in the passenger seat called to him.
We followed them in the truck, kept them in sight for much of the time by going twenty miles or so an hour over the posted speed limit. They lost us briefly, but then we found their car in the parking lot of a seafood restaurant called Paradise One.
Buck parked the truck at the side of the road about 100 feet past the restaurant. He laid out a plan, which didn’t make a lot of sense that had me going into the restaurant and convincing the women to join us in the truck.
I opened my door and I was getting ready to swing my legs over the side when he grabbed my arm. “You’re coming back, with the babes or without, right?”
“Uh huh,” I said.
“I’m not going to have to go in after you, am I?” he said, digging his fingers into my arm.
“Look, Buck,” I said, pulling my arm free, “I’m not afraid of you.”
He glared sternly at me, then in seeming slow motion, tears began to fall, big sloppy tears sluicing down his meaty face. I was appalled.
Before more tears spilled, I was out of the cab and working my way toward the Paradise restaurant and eventually inside. It was an overlit, undersubscribed place specializing, from what I could tell based on the plates that passed my way, in extravagant portions.
A cursory glance of the ro
om did not readily reveal the two women I had been assigned to approach. What it did reveal was that Molly (or a woman who could have been her sister) was in a booth at the back with two men of disparate ages I had never seen before. She was sucking at the claw of a lobster.
She hadn’t seen me, or hadn’t let on that she had, and I took a booth which allowed, from a discreet distance, a privileged view of Molly’s area of the room.
So as not to stick out, I ordered a fish burger—the waitress said it was the Specialty of the Maison—with home made generic cole slaw and sweet potato fries.
The longer I looked at Molly’s back, the less sure I was that it was actually her. This lingering doubt proved an appetite depressant, so I decided to visit the Men’s Room by way of Molly’s table. In a neighboring booth were the two sexy women we had followed to the restaurant and they smiled in my direction as I passed.
I had almost reached Molly’s booth when Buck appeared, sporting a sawed-off shotgun he had extracted before our eyes from under his red flannel shirt. “This is a stick-up,” he announced. “You put your hands on the table where I can see them and no one will get hurt.” He was so drunk he teetered from side to side, his open fly a cavern of false hope, as he slurred his announcement.
The small crowd ignored the outburst, went on eating as if nothing untoward had taken place, as if no plug-ugly six-foot-six intruder waving a shotgun had abruptly forced his way into their lives.
59th Night
When Buck started spraying the room with buckshot, those of us who weren’t dead or immobilized got down under the tables to protect ourselves.
As soon as his ammunition ran out, Buck was taken into custody by a team of local police. Only to be released a few hours later when word came down that he was an undercover government agent on a mission so secret that only those in the highest of high places knew what he was about.
In the meantime, I got to be comforted by the two attractive women from the Cadillac convertible in the circumscribed space under their table.
Dreams of Molly Page 6
