When Jill returned, after giving the twins lunch, she joined Ben out on the deck. The couple loved the outdoors, and living in northern Illinois, both knew you had to make the most of every decent weather day which came your way. The usual choice was extreme cold, or hot and humid, with not much in-between. Spring usually lasted about a week, so the near-perfect weather was both rare, and welcome. She sat in the plastic patio chair closest to him and set two lemonade glasses down on the railing.
“So husband, how did it go last night?”
Ben told her all of the boring particulars of what it is like getting a sleep study done. Jill moved the conversation along. “Well, did you dream the dream?”
“Yes, I did Jill.”
“Did Doctor Levine wake you when he wanted?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Well, was there anything new? Did it help? Did he have anything to say?”
Ben’s mouth had suddenly gone dry, and he took a drink of the lemonade. “Must be Country Time.” he thought to himself, “Not like the lemonade shake-ups I used to get at the fair.”
“Jill, I have to tell you something, and I want you to listen without interrupting until I am finished.”
“Are you okay? Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing is wrong. I will tell you all I can and then you can ask me anything you want, but please let me get through telling you all I can first.”
She didn’t like what her husband had just said and her face showed her displeasure. “What do you mean about telling me all you can?” She put a strong emphasis on the three words “all you can.”
“Jill, please. Hear me out and then ask questions. Will you do that for me?”
She nodded her head yes, but crossed her arms and looked at him suspiciously. She feigned a smile and gave him an “I’m all ears” tilt of her head and motioned him to go on with one long sweep of her hand. It was a look Ben had not often seen, and he knew that he was walking on thin ice.” He continued, “Jill, I am pretty sure— no, very sure I will never wake you up in the middle of the night with the dream again. I am also sure that I know what the dream was trying to tell me. I remembered something which I had long forgotten. I knew the moment that I woke up that what I remembered was the key to the whole reason I was dreaming.”
He took another sip of lemonade and he could see that his wife was like a pressure-cooker ready to explode so he continued before she would burst. This time he spoke very fast so as to get it all out very quickly. He sounded almost like one of those legal disclaimers at the end of a Viagra commercial.
“I have to take a trip to Spider Lake, to our old resort— and before you say anything, I have thought it through. I am going to ride my motorcycle which gets forty-eight miles to the gallon, and I am going to camp out so it won’t cost much. I may have to stay at the resort in a cabin for one night; that is, if one is available. Maybe the owners will give me a discount if I tell them that I grew up there. I might even persuade them to just let me have a look around. I promise it will not take long.”
Jill’s expression changed from distrust to a kind of wonder. Ben could not tell what she was thinking, and he was kind of surprised by her unexpected softening. She remained quiet.
“Jill, I can’t tell you what exactly happened in my dream last night, but I can tell you that if it is what I think it is, it is probably a good thing. I can also promise you that there is nothing to worry about. This is not a mid-life crisis or anything like that. I just need you to trust me. I will keep my cell phone on, and I will be in constant communication with you. I promise.”
Jill waited for Ben to continue. There was a long pause which indicated to her that he was finished, and then she asked, “Are you sure that this trip is necessary Ben?”
He was shocked at her question. He had expected her to ask why he was going. He thought that she would be combative and at the very least, argue the many valid reasons for him not to go, but she just looked at him and waited for his reply. “I think so Jill. I can’t promise anything more solid than that, but I believe that I have to go.”
“When would you need to leave?”
Ben thought of saying “The sooner the better,” but instead he said, “Early tomorrow morning.”
Jill was a card-holding, dyed-in-the-wool skeptic when it came to things such as women’s intuition, but some inner voice had been telling her for months that her husband needed to make a trip to his boyhood home. She dismissed the random thought at first, but later she had begun to squirrel away money in a cookie jar; thinking that if she was experiencing intuition, if it was real, the savings would help her husband when the time came.
Now as her husband was telling her that he needed to go to Spider Lake, in essence validating her intuition, she started to become uneasy. She felt a sense of déjà vu. Each time she had the intuitive feelings it seemed to her that she had also felt— what? Was it sunshine? She had no idea that her intuition would be so intimately connected with Ben’s recurring dream. Something extraordinary, almost supernatural was happening here and it frightened her. She began to cry.
“Jill, are you okay? Why are you crying?” Ben got up and crouched next to his wife. He put his arm around her. “Jill, everything is going to be okay. I will just be gone a few days. If you are that upset, I will—”
She stopped him mid sentence by shaking her head no and putting a finger to his lips. All she said was; “Ben, you have to go. I have something to show you. I’ll be right back.”
Jill returned with the cookie jar she had kept hidden in the back of the cabinet above the refrigerator. Her eyes were still wet with tears. She handed the jar to Ben without speaking. He opened the jar and looked inside. “Jill, what is this all about? How long have you been saving this? We could have used this money to pay bills.”
“No, Ben. This has been saved for your Rhinelander trip.”
He didn’t understand.
“Ben, do you remember when your dream became more frequent, when it started to wake you almost every night?
“Yes.”
“About the same time you began having the dream each night, I began having this intuition. Somehow I knew that you would someday need to go to Spider Lake and that I should save this money. I can’t explain how, or why I knew, and I wasn’t even sure if it was real until today. There were times when I thought I would take a ten or twenty out for groceries or gas money, but each time I opened the jar to take money out, I would get the feeling again, and I would drop money in instead, even if it was just loose change.”
Ben looked down into the jar which was full of coins and bills. He didn’t know what to say. He was as surprised as Jill at the obvious connection of his dream to what his wife called intuition. The idea of women’s intuition had always seemed like a cliche to him, an old wives tale.
This morning, when he woke to remember the missing element of his dream it felt just like what it was, a remembered thing from his past. This revelation of his wife’s intuition made the whole thing something very different than just a memory. Something that would be categorized in the same genre as flying saucers or Bigfoot. He could picture himself talking all about it with George Noory on Coast to Coast Live in the middle of the night. “Yes, George, my wife and I were having a Vulcan mind-meld.”
“Jill, I don’t know what to say. I don’t believe in ESP. The whole idea of you saving money for a trip I hadn’t thought of until this morning kind of gives me the willies. Is your intuition telling you anything else?” He felt absurd asking the question. There was more to Jill’s intuition. She was getting a feeling that her husband may be in some kind of danger. She chose not to say anything. She didn’t yet trust this new feeling.
“I don’t believe in it either. Maybe it is just a coincidence. Maybe I just instinctively knew that you would have to go there to remember something. After all, you told me that something seemed like it was missing, and that half of your dream was from your childhood at the resort. Lets not get all kooky about
this Ben.”
She said this despite the fact that she did not believe it at all. The two of them were having a shared experience and she knew it. She hoped that she was wrong about the danger. She changed the subject.
“Why don’t we take the twins to the park. It’s a beautiful day. We can have a glass of wine and a late lunch. You up for it?”
“Sure Jill, sounds good— and thanks for understanding.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
A Boat Ride ( 1968 )
ome on dip-weed, times a-wasting.” Matt tapped mockingly on his empty wrist as if he was wearing a watch. “Aren’t you about finished painting that boat? It makes me tired watching you do all that work.” He faked a yawn. Ben was not amused and pointed the yellow paint brush at Matt’s face.
“You could use a fresh coat yourself butt-head. I think yellow is definitely your color.”
Matt laid down in the grass. Still using his best yawning drawl he said,“I think I’ll take a little beauty rest Ben. Wake me up when you are finished.” He sprawled out on the grass and pretended to snore.
“Why don’t you make yourself useful and go catch some grass hoppers instead of sitting there flapping your jaw? Better yet, go bail out the boat, or get some crawlers out of the compost bin.”
“I would much rather watch you paint my man. It’s inspiring. Kinda like watching Leonardo paint the Sixteen Chapel.”
“It’s Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel you dweeb.”
“Sixteen Sistine whatever, which boat you want me to bail?”
“Number six, it’s the one I was in when I caught the huge musky.”
“You didn’t catch that fish. You just had it up to the boat. That doesn’t count.”
“Bee Ess Matt. I could have easily landed her if I had a net big enough. She was tired out, and if she hadn’t seen me passing the pole to Mister Regola I might have even landed her by hand.”
“No way Ben, you said you wouldn’t even put your hand in the water. Heck, you’re afraid to even go swimming ever since you seen that little guppy. Hey turn up the radio, I like this song.”
Ben turned up the radio. The Beatles were singing Hello,Goodbye. “You say “Yes”, I say “No”. You say “Stop” and I say “Go, go, go”
Matt sprung to his feet. “All right, I’ll go bail out number six.”
“Keep your eyes peeled for the evil little fur ball. The last time I saw the little turd he was riding my dog in the clearing.”
“I bet all the adults were fawning over how cute the little fuzzy wuzzy Roy Rogers was.”
“Yeah, they always do. And what’s worse is, I can’t get anywhere near my own dog any more unless he’s inside the house. Every time I go to pet him the little jungle rat goes bonkers. It’s even worse if there are no grown-ups around. Then he jumps on your head and bites your ears. There was a girl here last week named Cathy that went to pet Bo, and the little fur-ball jumped on her head and took a dump in her hair.”
“Is that right? And she didn’t even tell her folks?”
“No, she was too embarrassed. She didn’t want to catch it from her older sister, and the turd was so dry that it just rolled off her head. No evidence, no crime. That Morris is one two-faced psycho little monkey. You see how he acts when big people are around? I swear he knows what he is doing.”
Matt picked up the plastic bat which was leaning against the picnic table and began to make his way down the embankment towards the dock. He turned around and walked backwards holding the bat by its handle and swinging it into his open hand. “That’s why I carry the whiffle bat whenever I come over. I would rather have a croquet mallet, but I would probably kill the little lint-ball, and your old man would be pissed. A whiffle bat a day keeps the furry menace away.” He laughed as he turned around again and walked the path downward towards the lake. His laughter stopped abruptly and turned into what started as a kind of half wail, and ended as a shriek. Ben dropped the brush he was holding and ran towards the boat dock. When he rounded cabin six to where Matt was, he could see why his friend had shouted.
There on the dock was Morris, the mangled carcasses of dead frogs were scattered all around him, his face and torso stained red with amphibian blood. The crazed monkey was pulling leopard frogs out of the live well one by one, rolling them on the dock, then biting into the out-stretched creatures. The frogs being rolled on the dock under the monkey’s bloody hands reminded Ben of a twisted psycho baker rolling his unholy dough. The monkey would then hold the frogs with head in one hand and webbed feet in the other, and eat the poor amphibians like some kind of bloody corn on the cob.
Ben yelled at the monkey and then picked up a rock and threw it, missing the animal by several feet. The monkey just sneered at the boys with his bloody teeth, throwing another mutilated frog over his shoulder like some kind of pint-sized hairy Roman centurion at a feast.
Both boys were now throwing any available objects they could find, hoping to tag the bloody creature and possibly save the remaining green inmates still imprisoned on death row in the live well. The projectiles began getting closer to their mark as the boys improved their aim, finally causing the monkey to take flight, snarling at them as he loped up the bank towards the clearing.
The two of them were speechless. Shaking his head, Ben grabbed a broom and swept the carcasses off the dock and into the water.
“I guess we can’t keep the frogs we catch in the live well any more. Did you see the little fur ball rolling them out on the dock Ben? What do you suppose he was rolling them for?”
“Maybe to keep them from jumping. I don’t know. What do I look like, a monkey expert? I’m going to go put away the painting stuff Matt. Do me a favor. When you bail the boat out, use the water from the bucket to rinse the guts off the dock would you?”
“Sure man.”
“And make sure there aren’t any frogs left in that live well. I’ll get some bait and be right back.”
“That creepy monkey keeps getting creepier. Just when you think you have seen it all, the nasty little thing ups the ante.”
“Let’s just get out of here and go fishing Matt. I’m tired of talking about Morris.”
The boys were soon out on the lake, far away from the bloody menace at the resort. They took turns rowing towards the west end of the lake where Ben had fought his now legendary fish. They were not in a hurry. The day was beginning to grow very hot and humid. Prime fishing time had already passed, so they cooled off by jumping into the cool water. They could hear far-away laughter coming from the girl scout camp. The girls were throwing each other off the raft.
“Hey Ben, you want to go over there?”
“What for? You know we’re not allowed.”
“If we were on that raft, we would own it.”
“No doubt.”
“Let’s go clear the raft just one time.”
“We are just going to get kicked out.”
“Come on man. We’ll leave as soon as we throw them all in.”
“Okay Matt, we row over there to get a closer look, but if there aren’t any cute girls, we bail. The mission is aborted. I’m not risking getting in trouble for pushing any skinny pimply faced red-heads, or tinsel-toothed Bertha Butts off the raft. If we get there and you go anyway like last time, I will start rowing and you can swim back or take your chances crossing Rule property. I mean it.”
The boys each took an oar and pulled in unison, slowly propelling the wooden rental boat further west and slightly north towards the Girl Scout camp. They were in no hurry, both rowing at a leisurely pace, often veering off course because one or the other was not pulling his oar the same as the other. They would have splash-fights with the oars when they needed to cool off and sometimes the boat would make a full three hundred and sixty degree turn because one of the boys would row backwards to annoy the other, ending in yet another splash melee.
As the old saying goes, the boys handling of the rental boat would have broken the back of any snake. They had been horsing aro
und and not seriously rowing for about an hour, and were no nearer to their intended destination than when they started. A sudden and almost imperceptible north breeze began to riffle the lake’s surface and push the boat slowly southward, causing even more difficulty in steering, and on one occasion when the bow of the boat should have been facing northwest but was actually facing due north, the boys spotted the monkey climbing the old Rule water tower.
“There’s that blood-sucking hairy fur-ball climbing the tower. Man, I wish I had my father’s twenty-two. I would love to pluck off a shot at him from here. I bet I could nail him in one shot.”
“Dream on Matt. You couldn’t hit him from here in one shot even if you were the only surviving long lost blood-relative of Annie Oakley herself. You would be lucky to hit him in ten shots with this breeze.”
“It would be a blast to see his reaction to the bullets ricocheting all around him though. I bet that bloody sneer would be wiped off his little face.”
“Well, I guess if we are going to daydream about blowing the monkey away, I would rather have an anti-tank bazooka. One pull of the trigger and Morris’ little bits and pieces would be feeding that musky I almost caught for at least two weeks, and that eye-sore of a tower would be fish structure.”
In the time it took the boys to fantasize about the many ways of killing Morris the monkey, he climbed from the lower iron framework to the top of the wooden tank and then over it and he disappeared from their view.
The breeze stiffened to a gust which upset the surface of the lake enough to turn the riffles into waves, and the first faint rumblings of thunder of a distant storm could be heard from off to the south and west.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Motorcycle Trip ( Present Day )
en was right about his hunch that the dream would stop. He slept the whole night through in utter blackness devoid of any thought. When the alarm woke him at five in the morning, he felt as if he had just gone to sleep. He thought about the previous day, how so much had changed. He and Jill had felt some kind of deep connection and even though they did not speak of it again, they both felt that their love for each other had increased because of it.
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