The Nightcrawler

by Mick Ridgewell

  She didn’t speak, not a sound came from the pool, but Roger knew what she wanted. When they were little Lisa was always able to get Roger to do what she wanted without even asking him. He dropped his pack and she smiled up at him. Her smile seemed so familiar, like he had just seen her yesterday. She waved and turned, walking back toward the hot tub. She had taken three steps and a long sound sent shivers all through Roger’s body. It sounded like a tree breaking under the heavy strain of an early spring ice storm. But, it wasn’t a tree, it wasn’t spring and there wasn’t any ice storm. The girl looked down at the ice she stood on. A large fissure was working its way across the pool. She looked up at Roger, a frightened little girl, rooted to the spot.

  He wanted to yell something encouraging. Don’t move, I’m coming, I’ll be right there, it’ll be okay. Before he could say any of those things, she disappeared through the surface. His knees buckled and he fell to the floor. For the second time he had watched her fall through the ice and for the second time he was helpless to prevent it. With resolve he sprung to his feet, he wasn’t a little boy anymore; he could get her out before it was too late.

  “Hey, Vermont, what’s shakin’?” Beth was now standing in the doorway.

  Roger looked out the window at the pool. The water flowed into the hot tub from the naked lady’s flask, the snow was gone, the ice was gone. Lisa was gone. Lisa had come to tell him not to leave and then she left. She left him the same way she left him when he was nine. He was shaking, his mouth was open just slightly and his eyes stared unblinking at the pool.

  “Roger, are you okay?”

  He still didn’t answer. He staggered back to the bed and sat down. He looked at Beth, then back to the window. Bewildered, he didn’t know what to say and even if he did he wouldn’t know how to say it.

  Beth sat beside him and put her arm around his waist. “Did you have another bad dream?”

  “You have to be sleeping to have a dream, right?”

  “So, what then?”

  “I wish I knew.” He got up and shuffled over to the window. Peering out, he saw a gorgeous summer morning. The sun was completely above the horizon now; the view could have been a picture from Better Homes and Gardens. The sky was metallic blue, only a jet stream, streaking from the east broke the monotonous hue. The lady statue continued to pour the crystal clear liquid into the hot tub, the gurgling sound gave the whole scene a serene feel. No sign remained of Roger’s dream, hallucination, or apparition. All seemed to be well in Nebraska this fine summer day.

  He did his best to explain what he had just seen, or what he thought he had just seen. Beth felt a twinge of sadness at not having anything to say that might help. She had thus far lived a charmed life. She hadn’t lost anyone close to her. She was not equipped to deal with this kind of thing, so she tried to cheer him up by joking that he wasn’t allowed any more late night snacks. Then she opened her robe, flashed her naked body, and giggling like a schoolgirl, she ran back to her room.

  When she emerged, she was dressed in denim shorts, a tight white T-shirt and bright white Reeboks. Roger had gone out to the playroom. That was Beth’s term for the main room of the apartment. The room with the huge TV that came on when you entered. She sat beside him on the couch, kissed his cheek and said, “Well, are we going to the Grand Canyon or are you going to watch TV all day?” Roger had settled into a gloomy reprise of the scene at the pool and jumped a bit at the sound of Beth’s voice. He was sitting, staring at the TV, but not seeing it. He was unaware of the veejay, introducing a video by Alanis Morissette. The skin on his arms and neck had crawled to life, covered in gooseflesh, as though he were actually standing beside that frozen pond.

  “Well, the Jeep is gassed up, packed and ready to hit the open road,” she added, hands on her hips.

  Roger finally turned his attention to Beth and smiled.

  “Race ya,” he said, grabbing his pack. He sprang from the couch and bolted for the door. He opened it and, like the perfect eastern gentleman, held it open for his lady. He stepped out behind her and as he pulled the door closed Alanis sang that everything was going to be fine, fine, fine. Roger pushed the door open, looked at the TV, he swore Alanis winked down at him from the big screen TV. He shook his head, closed the door and took the stairs three at a time, his pack bouncing around on his right shoulder, his left hand gliding down the rail, guiding his decent.

  Beth had already settled into the passenger seat, the engine running and the radio was crackling some hideous rap thing. Roger tossed his pack behind the driver’s seat and immediately killed the radio, then said, “I don’t think so.”

  “Is that so, and what would you prefer, Mister Sophisticated Easterner?”

  He reached behind his seat and fished a CD out of his pack. Beth took it from his hand, without looking at the disc, she turned the radio on, inserted the disc and Warren Zevon began to sing the story of Werewolves of London.

  “Songs about werewolves eating Chinese food. Christ, Vermont, no wonder you have nightmares,” Beth said giggling while Roger guided the Jeep along the long driveway flanked by cattle pastures.

  The Jeep was topless and Beth stood up howling with Warren, her arms held out to her sides like the wings of an eagle, her hair blowing wildly in the wind. Roger laughed aloud and joined in. AHOOO, Roger, Beth, and Warren Zevon howled all the way to the road.

  In the main house, Jack Walker stood in his second floor bedroom window watching the Jeep carry his favorite child away. Away from the safety net he had provided for her, her whole life. He still trusted Beth to do the right thing, and he felt comfortable with Roger, but Jack knew how much bad there was in the world. It was that bad that made him wish he hadn’t let her go. He watched as the brake lights glowed brightly at the gate, he watched as the Jeep turned left on Route 6, he watched that Jeep until he couldn’t see it anymore.

  Aside from the annual slow pitch games, Jack Walker didn’t lose, but he had a strong sense of losing something as the Jeep disappeared from view. This wasn’t the loss of a ball game, or even a business deal, which Jack Walker had never experienced. This was true, gut-wrenching loss. He wasn’t concerned for her safety really. What he was feeling was his little girl no longer needing him. It was different with Billy, he was a man, and Jack expected him to go out and do his thing. It just turned out that Billy’s thing was the dealership, which kept him under Jack’s thumb.

  Bobbie had always been a wild child but she also seemed to love the ranch so he didn’t anticipate losing her any time soon.

  Beth was another story, he knew it would come, but knowing the potential and living the reality were completely different. So there he stood, forlornly gazing out at the empty road, the Jeep long gone, a huge gap left empty somewhere deep beneath his rugged exterior. He wiped a tear from the corner of his eye and turned back toward his bed. He hadn’t realized that Nora was standing right behind him.

  “Jeez,” he said. “You scared that shit out of me. One of these days I’m going to tie a bell around your neck so I can hear you coming.”

  “So, they’re gone, are they?” She put her arms around him and he held her tight. Nora let Jack believe that he was comforting her, but really, he was the one who needed someone to lean on.

  “She’ll be back in a few weeks, Jack.”

  Nora had known for years that Beth was the brightest star in Jack’s sky. She also knew that he wasn’t as tough as he wanted everyone to believe and his secret was safe with her. He was that tough until Beth came along. That little girl melted Jack Walker’s icy interior just as sure as the spring melts the snow covering the pastures.

  Roger and Beth stopped for lunch in Loweville, Colorado, population seven hundred and thirty-two. Main Street had a bar, a church, a general store and Lainie’s Café. Lainie’s had an extensive menu that included anything your heart desired, so long as your heart desired burgers and fries, or steak and fries, or meat pie and fries. Roger and Beth both went with the burger deluxe, which included a burger
, fries, and a can of soda. They ordered it to go and ate in the Jeep, parked under a huge oak in the only park in Loweville.

  The morning had flown by as fast as the scenery on the side of the highway. The monotony of the Nebraska landscape changed to the less daunting Colorado countryside. The foothills of the Rockies became discernable on the far off horizon. The driving turned more enjoyable with the first sight of those hills.

  The scene over Beth’s pool in the early morning had weighed heavily on Roger’s mind as they left the Walker ranch. Beth had an instinct for reading his moods and an even greater knack for improving them. She was forever talking, but she never got boring. Beth had a way of telling a story, her enthusiasm was intoxicating. She had an endless catalogue of one-liners, which she delivered with the skill of the best stand up comics. She would make up limericks on the fly that could make a saloon full of cattle ranchers blush. Most of all she could bat her eyes, tilt her head and smile at him in a way that infected him. Roger could feel himself flush as her zest spilled out and he absorbed it like a sponge. Beth had more life than any person should and Roger felt better for sharing in just a small piece of that life.

  By the time they stopped for lunch, Roger had heard every indiscretion of Bobbie’s life. The time Jack caught her boffing a cowboy in the hot tub. How she took Jack’s RV to last year’s rodeo and had her own little party. The swimming coach, her history professor. What really shocked the family on that one was that Professor Kindel was a forty-five-year-old woman. Oh, nobody really thought Bobbie was a lesbian or a tramp for that matter. They all believed she did these things to get attention from Jack.

  Billy’s history was less colorful, most of it concerned his Receptionist of the Month club and how long it was going to take before the dealership got sued for sexual harassment.

  This made clearer the points Jack brought up in his study the night before. Why he felt he could trust Beth and why Bobbie and Billy were struggling with the concept.

  There they sat in the Jeep; the sun was bright, but not as hot as the past week had been. The sky a glorious shade of blue, sparsely populated with small clouds that appeared motionless as if in a snapshot. The breeze that occasionally passed through was barely strong enough to move the leaves on the only oak large enough to provide shade in the park.

  The burger and fries had a soporific effect on Beth, the jokes and stories ceased. She sat quietly, looking at the small clouds with a serene look of contentment. Roger was happy to just sit and watch her. He didn’t think it possible to fall in love with someone after just a few days but he felt it happening to him. The tears he wiped from his cheek in the cab of old Pete’s truck after sharing his story of Paige were as distant a memory as could be and would not be completely forgotten.

  “Well, you about ready to hit the road, Beth?”

  “Ready as ever, Vermont,” she said in her typical upbeat way. “Check this out, I picked it up in the café.”

  She handed him a small pamphlet and before he had a chance to read it she continued, “It’s the world’s only lint museum.” Beth began to laugh as Roger looked at her trying to find something funny. “Oh come on, Vermont, where’s your sense of adventure? When are you ever going to get a chance to see a museum that showcases some old lady’s artwork that she has sculpted from the lint she took out of her dryer? Shit, that has got to be worth a slight detour doesn’t it?”

  Roger just laughed. It was as if Beth had suddenly turned into the Loweville, Colorado tourist board. “Well, ma’am, where do we find this riveting piece of Americana?” he asked.

  Beth’s laughter became loud and raucous. Roger was laughing at her, laughing at him, and he knew full well, that she was indeed, laughing at him. She pointed over his left shoulder and there it was, just across the street.

  They visited the world’s only lint museum. It would be the first of many curiosities and actual points of interest they would visit on their journey, Beth snapping pictures of them all. She would even recruit passersby to take pictures of her and Roger arm in arm, in front of each attraction. Things like a giant ball of string, a tree growing out of a rock, the Guinness Book’s record-breaking ear of corn. Beth and Roger were digitally immortalized with all of these quirky things on her camera’s memory chip. She would also get photos of scenic landscapes, the capital buildings in Denver, several mountain peaks, countless valleys and canyons. She was especially anxious to see a shot she took just before sunset, of the moon sitting directly between twin summits near Aspen. The moon was a bright yellow and the eastern sky was purple. They both felt a bit odd looking at the dark sky in the east and the orange sunset to the west. The lint museum was just the beginning of these Kodak moments.

  When they left the lint museum it was close to two-thirty. Roger had resigned himself to the fact that the journey, not the destination, would be the highlight of this vacation. Beth, he was beginning to realize would definitely be the main highlight of the journey.

  It wasn’t long after they got back in the Jeep that Beth fell asleep. She was telling another story, this one about how she managed to pull one over on Jack and Nora in order to go to a Bon Jovi concert, which she was denied permission to attend. She just stopped talking and Roger looked over to find out how the story ended but Beth sat still, her head back against the headrest, her eyes closed and her mouth slightly open. Roger smiled, and inserted a CD into the Jeep’s stereo.

  The disc was one that he and Paige had burned together. He listened with a nostalgic sadness. It was sadness for something lost, but not an overwhelming loss. That was when he knew that it really was over with Paige. If it had been true love, whatever that was, then he would feel worse, much worse. Maybe they both knew it. Surely, Paige knew it first and that must have been why she had made such a clean break. Why she didn’t return his calls, or even see him to talk it out. That realization brought a smile to his face and he listened to the music he and Paige collected together. When the last song played, Roger ejected the disc, put it in the case, thought of tossing it out of the car, but instead, he reached back behind the seat and stuffed it into his pack.

  With his past tucked safely away, it was time to return to the present. Roger tapped the brakes and the Jeep made a sudden lurch. Beth’s arms flung out to grab hold of anything they could find. Her right hand found the window crank and the left got the edge of Roger’s seat. Her fingers were white knuckled as her brain tried to catch up with where she was.

  “Welcome back,” Roger said through a suppressed chuckle.

  “I’ll kick your ass, Vermont. That shit’s not funny.”

  Roger saw that Beth was not kidding around, she was genuinely angry at his little stunt. This made the moment that much more enjoyable for him. His chuckle turned to an all out laugh as he reached over and tried to console her with a hand on her shoulder. He made a mock pout, his bottom lip quivered; his eyes drooped as best as he could. Beth pushed his hand off her shoulder, punched him hard in the arm and as he grimaced she smiled and said, “Pull over Vermont, I want to drive for a while.”

  “There’s a rest area just ahead. We can stretch our legs and then you can drive, okay?”

  True to his word, just past the next rise an exit lane lead the way into a highway rest stop. It looked like every other rest stop on every interstate in the country. Picnic tables scattered around beneath mature trees. Barbecues cemented into the ground with iron grills covered in the crud of a thousand burgers. The grass was six inches long and swayed in the wind giving the illusion of waves over a small lake. There was one building that was maintained by the tourist bureau, men’s room on the right, ladies to the left. It was a rustic log cabin-like structure that seemed quaint from the car, but in need of a paint job and a good cleaning when you got up close. The front wall between the two restrooms was lined with slots, containing pamphlets for the many attractions in Colorado. After Beth used the bathroom, she took one of each of the pamphlets.

  When she found Roger, he was sitting at the picn
ic table closest to the building drinking a Coke he got out of the vending machine behind the restrooms. Beside him sat a large crow staring at him. It had landed there immediately after he sat down. It tilted its head first to the left, then right, as if trying to figure him out, its gaze never breaking Roger’s. In the bird’s beak was a large nightcrawler, still wriggling for life.

  Roger looked at the bird, and asked, “Are you Heckle or Jeckle?”

  “Hey, Vermont, who’s your friend?”

  He hadn’t noticed Beth walking up behind him and he flushed a little, embarrassed that she caught him talking to a crow. He took a sip from his Coke and tossed one over to Beth. The crow cawed at the sudden movement, flared its wings but held its gaze on Roger.

  Beth walked over to the table and sat across from him. The bird held its ground, looking away from Roger only long enough to make sure Beth posed no threat. After she was seated the crow looked back at Roger.

  “I think your feathered friend really likes you,” Beth said.

  They both had a confused look of curiosity as they watched the bird. The fact that it appeared so fearless of two people in such close proximity was odd, but what held their interest more was how it concentrated on Roger’s every move.