Dreams of Molly

by Jonathan Baumbach

  I was amazed how much the landscape I was passing resembled the landscape I had already passed.

  It struck me as a profound discovery that the passing scene of the American road (if indeed this was America) tended to repeat itself as a kind of delayed emphasis. As I filed away this awareness for future use, a familiar lumbering car appeared alongside me, the passenger window rolled down.

  “Please don’t forsake us,” the woman, who had an ugly bruise under her left eye, said. “We desperately need your help, Jack. We’ve agreed between us not to fight in your presence. We need someone of your seeming objectivity and wisdom to mediate our dispute.”

  “You’ve got the wrong person,” I said. “I have no wisdom to offer.”

  “Nonsense,” the woman said. “No matter. You have our word that we will defer to your wisdom whatever it is. Besides, Jack, this is not the direction you were escaping in when we picked you up.”

  She reached behind her and opened the back door.

  I groaned silently, and with an unacknowledged sense of defeat, climbed into the skanky back seat, pulling the door shut behind me on the second try. The man, who was in the driver’s seat, whisked the car around in a daring maneuver and we restarted our trip together as if for the first time.

  100th Night

  You’re never out of the woods, I saw that now, even when you’ve planted your feet on paved roads. Unspecified time had passed— three days, a week, a month?—since I had kissed Mina and Bobby goodbye as prelude to taking a run through the woods from which I secretly hoped never to return. I had made a point of not thinking about them as I worked my way against unforeseen obstacles back to civilization.

  The thing was, civilization as I remembered it, seemed to have disappeared while I was unavoidably elsewhere.

  Days would pass with no signs of human habitation outside of two ratty gas station/convenience stores idling miles apart on opposite sides of the road.

  Despite my single-minded pursuit of freedom, dumb luck had impeded my progress. The knowledge that I should have been further along at this point nagged at me with punishing regularity. I needed wheels to make time, but I had become with good reason wary of accessing another ride with strangers.

  About a mile back, I had inquired of a clerk at the Puritan Farms self-service gas station as to where the nearest town was.

  “This is the nearest town,” she said.

  “This?”

  “We sell stamps in the back,” she said. “We share a zip code with the Puritan Farms station on the other side of the road down aways. We think of ourselves as a town.”

  I asked her if she knew of a place in the area that rented cars.

  She thought about my question for more time than I wanted to hang out in her store.

  “There used to be one in the back of the middle school,” she said, “but I don’t think it did much business. I don’t remember when it closed down—the owner died or something—but it was like ten years ago. Sorry.”

  As I walked along the side of the road, I kept glancing over my shoulder, expecting to see Mina’s VW floating toward me in the distance. If I spotted her faded blue splotched with white Beetle before she spotted me, I could step back into the brush until it passed. I rehearsed the move periodically so as not to be taken by surprise.

  After awhile, I came to what looked like a bus stop and I sat down on a rickety bench to await the next bus. I was awakened by a head sticking out the window of a sheriff’s car that was idling a few feet from where I sat. “What’s going on here?” the head asked.

  “Isn’t this a bus stop?”

  He ignored my question. “You got any money?” he asked.

  His question seemed presumptuous but I answered anyway so as not to give offense. “Some,” I said. I also had a credit card but I didn’t see the need to acknowledge all my assets on such short acquaintance.

  “I’d also like to see some ID, if you don’t mind,” he said.

  I did mind. “What’s the problem?” I asked. No doubt my appearance had given him the wrong impression. My hands were grimy, there was a cut on my face, my pants had an alarming stain below the crotch.

  “We have a nice town here,” he said. “It’s not that we don’t like strangers, it’s just that we like them better when they’re somewhere else.”

  I got up from the bench and walked off into what was beginning to seem like a sunset. It passed my mind that he might shoot me in the back and I chose not to think about it.

  When I looked up, the sheriff’s car was crawling alongside me.

  His twangy voice accosted me. “We were having this polite conversation when you jumped up and walked away,” it said. “That’s disrespect. Do you mean to be disrespectful?”

  “I’m getting out of your town,” I said.

  “Is that right?” he said. “You might have told me so I could have arranged a parade. If there’s no objection, I’ll ride along to see that you don’t get lost.”

  I didn’t see that objecting would make a difference one way or another.

  It felt odd walking alongside the sheriff’s car, which was mimicking my pace, but it must have felt odd from his vantage also. At some point, he offered me a ride since, as he put it, we were both going in the same direction.

  I said I didn’t mind walking, but five minutes later he asked again.

  I noted, though there hadn’t been much traffic, that a string of cars was piling up behind him.

  “You don’t get anywhere being a hard-head,” he said. “I know how lonely it can be being out on the road by yourself. And you must be tired. You’re not so young any more.”

  With measured reluctance, I accepted his third offer of a ride. I didn’t trust him but I had the sense that one of the cars in the group crawling behind us—the fourth or fifth— was Mina’s ancient faded-blue Beetle and this at the moment seemed the lesser of two unpleasant alternatives.

  Sheriff Mike, as he called himself, didn’t seem so bad up close, though there was the musty odor about him of someone who hadn’t bathed in a while. It may have been me I was inhaling or the inside of the car, but it came to the same thing.

  Anyway, the sheriff wanted to talk and it seemed not to matter a lot who was the one on the other end. “You ever been married?” he asked but he went on as if my answer, if offered, would have made little difference. “I been married twenty-three years to the same woman before she left me for some damn salesman who was passing through. When she was gone, even though I kind of missed having her around, it struck me that I never loved her. That’s a terrible thing to realize.

  And what was worse, and much worse, I couldn’t remember if there was anyone I ever loved. Which has to mean there wasn’t ever anyone. Not anyone fucking ever. At the same time, I could remember the names of seven people I flat out hated. What does that say about my life? Then I began to wonder if anyone ever loved anyone. You know what I mean?”

  While I was thinking about his question, the sheriff went on to another subject. “You ever kill anybody?” he asked, glancing at me to see my reaction. “When I first took this job—believe it or not I wasn’t always a sheriff—I hadn’t had much experience with killing my own species. You could probably count the number on one three-fingered hand. Of course there isn’t much opportunity to kill in a small burg like this. In most cases, a good sound beating would serve the same purpose.” He paused for breath.

  I had lost the train of his thought. “What purpose is that?” I asked.

  He stepped on the brake abruptly and we stopped with a jolt. My head bruised the windshield. The horn of the car behind made a mild almost-unintelligible protest. Meanwhile, we were moving again. We passed a diner that had been boarded up, what looked like the remains of a For Sale sign lying like a sacrifice to some heathen deity at the foot of the front door. Next to the diner was a furniture store long since deserted, a Sale sign in the dark window with a spidery crack separating the “a” and the “l.”

  This is where m
y jurisdiction ends,” he said, pulling into the dirt lot behind the furniture store.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “This is where you get out,” he said, turning off the ignition. He waited for me to climb out the door before he eased himself out from the driver’s side.

  Looking to make amends, I thanked him for the ride, taking a few backwards steps. “Wherever we are,” I said, “I guess I’m a little closer to where I’m going than I would have been had I walked.”

  The sheriff came around the car in my direction.

  “Thanks again,” I said, making a move to turn away while still keeping him in sight.

  He kept his hands at his sides much like a gunfighter waiting for whoever dared to make the first move. “I’m going to ask you to run,” he said.

  When you suspect that your life is on the line, your senses become increasingly acute. I noticed a rock the size of a child’s baseball a few feet away and I contrived to stumble and fall on top of what I perceived to be a possible weapon.

  When I was standing again still facing the sheriff who hadn’t moved, I had the rock in my hand. “I’m going,” I said, taking another step backwards. There was no one around, though I heard an unseen car grinding along in the near distance. I showed him my back for a moment, but desperate curiosity got the better of me and I turned again to face him.

  All I can say in my defense was that he was drawing his gun, that it had already cleared his holster when I hurled the rock with an abrupt sidearm motion, catching him above the left eye. I may have heard the gun fire, the indistinct sound echoing. It may even have fired twice as he made up his mind to fall.

  The big man fell like timber, a hand in the air as if brushing something unseen away, and that’s when I began to run.

  At that moment, a faded blue VW huffed its way up the dirt road in seeming slow motion, kicking up gravel. I recognized the woman driving and the boy, somewhat older than I remembered him, dozing in the back seat. I got in without hesitation and momentarily we were on the road.

  It was possible, wasn’t it, that the sheriff only meant to frighten me? I forgave myself, or tried to, for being unforgivable.

  I may have heard an ominous siren in the distance or I may only have imagined the official music of police pursuit, but for the moment there was no car in the rearview mirror coming up behind us. In gratitude or perhaps love, I brushed Mina’s shoulder with the back of my hand,

  “How long it’s taken you to find us,” she said.

  101st Night

  When I claimed consciousness this morning, I was fifteen-years-old—yesterday had been my birthday—and I was lying in bed with a woman almost old enough to be my mother. Though she was lying on her side facing away, I could tell from the hair color and body style that she was not my actual mother. I couldn’t remember whether we had a sexual history together or not.

  The odd thing was, I knew what was awaiting me, remembered in thinly veiled outline the essential details of the next forty-five years of my life. At first, it seemed like an advantage, thinking I might avoid this time around some of the misjudgments I was destined to make.

  If you had nothing new to look forward to, it hardly seemed worth the effort to echo an already-failed past. One of the pleasures of life was the exhilaration of surprise.

  I got out of bed and collected my clothes from virtually every corner of the room. It struck me that the older woman still asleep in my bed had been a birthday gift from my father, who had been announcing everywhere (I always assumed it was a joke) that it was about time I lost my virginity.

  Perhaps nothing much had happened between us because I knew for a fact that my main stage sexual debut was several months down the road and that in fact I lost my virginity to Lenny’s sexy older sister, Sybil. It was possible, I suppose, to have forgotten my one-night stand with this older woman hiding her face in my childhood bed and that sexy Sybil was actually my second between the legs.

  After Sybil, until I met (and married) Hannah, I pursued a few women here and there (really girls) whose names escape me, with limited success. What do I mean by limited success? I mean everything more or less but the one thing that counted (at fifteen) on your permanent reputation. What these unremembered members of the opposite sex had in common was that each in her own way had denied me what I assumed I needed. And so I married Hannah, who denied me nothing. And once we were married—the reasons, there always reasons—our sexual life was reduced to talking about what we no longer allowed ourselves to do. And then, one day, without advance word, Hannah went home to her mother to resume her interrupted childhood.

  That shouldn’t have happened.

  The detritus of that loss never went away not even after I married Anna and passed in the world as an adult. Not even after I behaved badly, choosing desire over obligation, and ran off with Molly. Not even after the memorable early years with Molly when we were mostly almost happy. When Molly left to find her uncharted real self, it was as if Hannah were leaving me all over again.

  But at this moment I was just one day past fifteen and all of my failed relationships were still out there in the murky distance of future time.

  “Did we?” I asked the woman, who showed some signs of stirring.

  It was odd that I could remember the major events of what hadn’t happened yet but no telling details from the recent past.

  “What time is it?” she asked. “I must have fallen asleep. I never intended to stay the night.”

  When she emerged from the bed—I had my back turned so as not to reveal the extent of my vain unappeasable need—she was fully dressed. “Do my parents know you’re here?”

  “You told me they were away,” she said.

  Did I? They almost never went anywhere—my father liked to sleep in his own bed—so it was hard to imagine where they might be if not somewhere in the house. “Did I mention when they’d be back?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter, sweetheart,” she said, caressing my face. “I’ll be on my way.”

  I searched the files of memory for her name and the only thing that came to mind was Mrs. Andsons, who was the local pharmacist’s wife. I spoke it under my breath so she could avoid responding if it wasn’t her own.

  “Yes?” she said.

  I had no question for her or none I felt comfortable asking, but I couldn’t let this opportunity pass unventured without losing respect for myself. “You might think this is a weird thing to ask,” I said, “but I must have had too much to drink because I don’t remember what we did last night. What did we… do?”

  “You have nothing to reproach yourself with,” she said. “Nothing.”

  If she intended her comment to ease my mind, it served in fact to exacerbate my uneasiness. “Nothing?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “You’ll have to excuse me now, Jack. I really have to get home and make nice. When I’m not in the old tyrant’s bed overnight, he’s subject to evil thoughts in the morning.”

  I tried to think of something to say that would keep her with me a little longer but nothing I came up with sounded quite right. At the last, I made the worst of several possible choices. “Give me another chance,” I said.

  She took a step toward me which she instantly nullified by taking a step back. “Sweetheart, I can’t,” she said. “It’s so sweet of you to ask and I am tempted, but no, no I can’t. Maybe another time. You never know. The gift-wrapped package of Trojans I brought over, darling, are in the sock drawer of your dresser.”

  She blew me a kiss and escaped through a series of doors into the street and I watched her ruefully from the window. She seemed to morph into Molly as she hurried away.

  Even in my dreams, even with a willing partner, I couldn’t get it right.

  I went back to bed and closed my eyes with renewed resolution.

  This time when Hannah and I made love for the first time, it would not be in the backseat of my father’s Dodge.

  This time I would not have sex with Anna’
s friend, Yvonne, in an airport phone booth.

  This time I would not disappoint Molly, betray Anna, run from Mina. I would continue to love them no matter how badly we treated each other. If you refuse to acknowledge disillusion, love can survive anything.

  No matter, I would wake in the morning an old man in Mina’s bed.

  Nevertheless at fifteen years and a day, setting hypocrisy aside, all I really wanted in this life— the be-all and end-all of my childhood aspirations—was to get my ashes hauled, get laid, get screwed, get fucked, get going.

  The Dzanc eBooks Club

  Join the Dzanc Books eBook Club today to receive a new, DRM-free eBook on the 1st of every month, with selections being made from Dzanc Books and its imprints, Other Voices Books, Black Lawrence Press, Keyhole, and Starcherone. For more information, including how to join today, please visit http://www.dzancbooks.org/ebook-club/.