****
An hour later, Heather pulled her car around to the back of Wal-Mart, to the garage. Not seeing the Volks outside, I muttered, “Christ.”
“Still working on the car, huh?” Heather said. She pulled into a parking place and turned the engine off. “Want some company while you wait?”
“Sure,” I said.
We had gone to Perc’s, a coffee shop in a strip mall on the beach. We talked over giant paper cups of cappuccino, and small talk about Perry’s and Heather’s life had given way to questions from her about my relationship with Sara. She was subtle, but I knew she was more curious than the average friend. Sean, for instance, wasn’t at all concerned if I thought I might get married.
“Married. Wow,” was my insightful answer to that question. I didn’t tell Heather that I’m not quite sure if it would be legal for me to marry Sara or not, though I was tempted. I hadn’t confided in anyone the details of what the situation was with Sara and I, and I wanted to. I didn’t feel comfortable at the thought of telling Heather, though.
“I haven’t really thought about marriage at all,” I told Heather.
“Jesus, Fluke, you’re living with her,” she leaned forward and looked exasperated, “and you haven’t thought about marriage?”
“Typical woman,” I said, and got a punch in the arm.
A silence fell over us again, and I occupied the moment by slowly turning my cup in circles on the table, feeling the hot liquid through the paper. Soft music came from two stereo speakers mounted in the upper corners of the room, and I recognized Jewel’s voice. A goateed guy in a black turtleneck sat two tables over from us reading a book of poetry by Bukowski; I suppressed the urge to yell to him, “Stereotype!” I fidgeted with my cell phone, checking the time, looking to see how many calls I missed, knowing I hadn’t missed any. I looked back at Heather, who looked like she was going to say something, but was searching for a way to say it.
“You know you could have taken me out any time you wanted to, Fluke,” she said.
Oh, man. Don’t do this.
“Um, yeah. Well, Heather…” I started.
“Still could,” she said quickly, looking off in goatee boy’s direction. I couldn’t tell for sure, but she seemed to get tense, anticipating my response.
I leaned forward, resting my arms on the table and said, “Heather.” She kept her eyes on goatee boy.
“Yes?”
“Look at me,” I told her.
She turned her head to face me, and I said, “Thank you. It’s very flattering that you would say that.” My brain worked feverishly, building the speech as I said it. The next four or five words appeared in my head as I spoke one, and I did my best at improvisation.
“I think we’re victims of bad timing. If you had said this stuff to me back when we worked at Perry’s together, I would have jumped for joy.” I lit a cigarette from the pack on the table and continued. “If you had said something to me before I left on that last delivery, even. But, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on which side of this table you’re sitting on, I met Sara that night, and I haven’t looked back.”
She looked down at the table. She scraped at a spot of some dried-up substance with her light green colored nails. She always had an unusual color polish on her nails, which was one of the things that had attracted me to her so long ago. Some guys are ass men, some guys love big boobs, but I looked at a woman’s nails first. Nails and ankles, for Christ’s sake.
“You’re a weird guy, Fluke,” Sean always said when he caught me staring at a woman’s ankles exposed from a hitched up pant leg, or walking down the beach.
“Sara and I are doing really well, like I told you inside Wal-Mart. In fact, I think I’m totally in love with her. Who knows where we’d be, though, if fat-ass Perry hadn’t sent Kevin home early that night? I would have probably gotten off early, and Kevin would have gone to Sara’s house. I would have just be-bopped on to the Tune Hole and picked up the latest Tool CD, which I still haven’t gotten, by the way,” I laughed a little, thinking back to the night I met Sara, and how the most important thing at the time was picking up the new Tool CD.
Heather let out a small laugh without smiling. She seemed uncomfortable, and I felt bad, like I was lecturing her.
“Listen, Heather. I want be your friend, but I don’t want there to be weirdness.”
She nodded her head, still looking at the table, and said, “That’s okay, Fluke. You don’t have to do this. I’m not some love-stricken Fluke groupie. But I’ve liked you since I started working at Perry’s with you. You were the funniest, most laid back guy, and our smoke breaks were what kept me going there. I felt kind of lost without you there when you left, and then, when I found out you were with Sara, I kind of felt like I was losing a dear friend.
I can handle being your friend without weirdness, Fluke. I’m a tough broad,” she said, laughing. “But, if something goes wrong with Sara, and I know this will sound pathetic, but keep me in mind.”
I smiled a big, stupid, grin and said, “Cool. A back-up girlfriend.”
We both laughed and I glanced at my clock on my phone. “Hey, can you get me back to Wal-Mart? The car should be done now.”
And we sat in her Cavalier, tension gone. If anything had changed, it was a slight boost in my ego, and hopefully, a little relaxation on her part. We’d still be friends.
As long as Sara doesn’t mind, I thought to myself.
“You know, I did get the new Tool CD a few weeks ago. You’re welcome to borrow it, if you want,” Heather said. She reached up to the CD holder strapped to her sun visor, pulling each disc out an inch or so, searching for it.
“Well, I’d like to, but I won’t be able to get it back to you for at least a week,” I told her. The thought of the trip loomed over me once again; I had managed to push it away for the last hour.
“That’s okay, take your time. Like most of the world, Fluke, I’ve moved into the twenty-first century—I’ve got it on my iPod, if I start having withdrawals or anything like that,” she said.
“Hey, I’ll get caught up one day. Don’t mock me for being old school,” I chuckled.
“Sure thing, Mister Compact Disc. Wait, why do you say a week?”
“Well, I’m off on a little road trip,” I said, purposely being sketchy. I didn’t even want to get into the reason for the trip with Heather.
“Road trip? Cool. Is it with your friend Sean? Where are you going?”
“No,” I answered. “Sara and I have to make a run to Texas for a few days,”
“Is everything okay? Family emergency or something?”
It sounded kind of funny, because in a way, I supposed it could be a family emergency.
Jesus, I hope not.
“Sort of, Heather. Sort of.” I answered. “Actually, we have about 10 pounds of good stuff to deliver. Strictly business. Some coke, dope, heroine….you know.” I laughed at my own stupidity, jokey-Fluke as always, and she did too. Thankfully.
I glanced at the garage entrance just in time to see the Volkswagen backing out at what seemed like an excessive speed. The driver hit the brakes hard and did what looked like a movie stunt to park the car, spinning it in a circle and coasting into an empty spot. Right now, I bet someone was calling out my name over the intercom inside, looking for a Fluke to come get his car.
“That was quite a parking job. Did you see that?” Heather asked, handing me the Tool disc.
“Yeah. That’s Sara’s car.”
“Oh. Well, I guess I’ll talk to you later, Fluke. Have a nice trip, okay?”
“God, I hope so, Heather,” was all I could say.
12.
We were only a couple of hours into our drive to Texas. Interstate 10 had little traffic, surprisingly, but it didn’t matter. We weren’t in a hurry to reach our destination. I glanced into the rearview mirror as we crossed the Florida state line, and bid the sunshine state a silent farewell. If I were alone, or with Sean, I might have hung my head
out the window and screamed something important, like, “WOO-HOOOO!” or just “AAAAHHHH!” for a good 3-5 seconds. It was what I always did when I crossed a border, and somehow never grew tired of it. I held back this time, and we rolled into Alabama without acknowledging the state we left behind or the state we were entering. The idea flickered briefly across the surface of my mind that it was symbolic of Sara and I leaving what we knew behind in the hopes of answers that we might regret knowing, without fanfare, or hoopla. My mind wandered from this, as it usually did, and I watched the scenery go by as we approached the tunnel in Mobile, Alabama.
I had been pleasantly surprised that morning by how efficiently Sara had packed her things. I was guilty of thinking that women were synonymous with over-packing. I didn’t think that this stereotype of women, as a whole, was totally unfounded. From trips with my mother as a child, to the most recent of girls (excluding Sara, that I had actually dated long enough to travel with), none of them had left a trunk less than jammed full or a back seat empty. The women in my life had never left anything behind that might be needed to take out a wrinkle, take off lint, or leave hair uncurled, not to mention having an outfit on hand for every conceivable situation. I had loaded the car this morning around 7am, whistling, and even though it had a smallish trunk, there was nothing in the back seat of Sara’s VW except for things which actually could have been placed in the trunk as well…a mid-size in-descript black duffel bag. Oh, and Flukey the bear was strapped in behind the drivers’ seat.
“We’re bringing Flukey?” I had asked Sara earlier when she handed him to me.
“Of course we are, silly. Don’t you think he wants to know what’s up with mommy and daddy?” She looked at me strangely, as though she couldn’t contemplate why we’d leave a cheap stuffed bear behind.
I stared at the bear’s shiny eyes for a moment and decided that yes, maybe he should be along for the ride.
“Okay, I’ll put him in the car.”
“Buckle him in,” she said, sipping a glass of orange juice.
Also in the back seat were several pairs of ladies’ shoes. Sara had a lot of shoes. I, myself, usually had anywhere from one to four pairs of shoes: athletic shoes for those rare moments of physical activity, some sort of brown boot or low-quarter for general all-purpose wear with most of all of my clothes, occasionally a pair of dressier black shoes, and my standard footwear, a pair of leather sandals. None of my footwear was chosen out of a sense of vanity or style; they were selected based on necessity first, comfort second. The sandals were the only ones purchased simply because they were comfortable and cool in the summer, as well as easy to slip on at any given second. My other shoes were bought simply because I had to have them; I couldn’t wear sandals every day, as appealing as the idea sounded to me.
I reflected on Sara’s possession of practically one pair of shoes for every possible outfit combination, and more than one pair for some ensembles. Had I the desire to sit and kill an afternoon crunching numbers, I imagined the shoe-to-outfit ratio would have worked out to somewhere along the line of 2.5 to 1, though I couldn’t be certain due to countless variables (clothes hanging in closet she no longer wore, shoes she bought because they were “cute” and never wore, etc). It was something that I thought was a little overboard, and yet I loved it. Women treated themselves a certain way…with a certain degree of self-indulgence, and care, that most men did not. While part of me thought of the literally thousands of dollars Sara must have spent on shoes, the other part of me was extremely happy that she didn’t wear just one pair of shoes with everything. If she were one of those girls that wore a pair of combat boots with everything she owned I might have been annoyed enough by that alone to have worked myself into a drunken state, and in verbal frenzy addressed the issue, thereby guaranteeing an ended relationship over footwear.
No matter which way I looked at it, it was still nice to not be overburdened with baggage. We both had smallish cars, and having the car crammed full of things, at least for me, made trips just a little unpleasant. I stole a quick look at Sara, and thought for the millionth time about how happy she made me in just every way.
We had both been pretty quiet thus far on our trip. I wondered if Sara was silently considering what might come about this week, or maybe like me, occupying my thoughts with many things that really didn’t amount to anything as we sped along the highway at 70mph. I spent at least five miles comparing the mile markers with the reading on the odometer, verifying that they did indeed match up, and silently praising the government for a job well done. I monitored the VW’s fuel consumption, mentally calculating how many miles per gallon we were getting based on miles traveled and a rough guess as to how much gas was in the car to start with. I contemplated the patches of asphalt on the road, wondering what caused them to have to patch the road up. Was it wear and tear? Horrifying wrecks? Or were they hiding unsightly bloodstains from the countless number of run down armadillos? I then wondered why they couldn’t make the patches a little flatter, so the car wouldn’t bump so much.
I looked up from the road in time to catch a billboard, which advertised a “$5.99 all-you-can-eat buffet” at one of the casinos on the beach in Biloxi. I glanced at Sara to see that she had seen it also, and our eyes met.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked me, eyebrows raised.
“Yeah. A little six dollar buffet action sounds pretty good,” I told her.
“Lobster…crab…steak…yummy,” she said, and my mouth began to water just thinking about it. Her enthusiasm for the food was catchy, and my forever grumbling stomach agreed loudly.
“It’s pretty early…” I began, glancing at my watch and seeing that it was just barely 10am. My protest was only half-hearted: we hadn’t eaten breakfast, and my mind was already starting to focus in on just one thing…food.
“By the time we get there it’ll be almost lunch time. With parking and all that…it should work out just right.”
“Cool. Sounds good to me. Did you catch what exit we take?” I asked.
“This one coming up looks good. Let’s see…Keesler Air Force Base, Biloxi, and Ocean Springs. I think that I may have actually taken this one before just so that I could be next to the water. I’m sure we can find it from there.”
I nodded my head, and got ready to make the turn for the beaches and casinos of Biloxi, Mississippi. My stomach growled, and I could already taste the seafood.
“It’s funny that they can offer so much food…so much good food, so cheaply,” I commented, referring to the low prices that casinos always boasted for their buffets.
“Oh, it’s just a drop in the bucket compared to what they take from people,” she said. “They make so much money, and this just helps draw people in to gamble.”
“Hmmm.” I thought about what she said, and realized that it was, of course, absolutely correct. I also began to think it would be fun to throw a little money around at the tables. “Well, whaddaya say you and I try our luck?” I asked, knowing that I was the idiot that the cheap food drew in and not really caring.
“Do you know how to play? The rules, and all that?”
“Not really,” I admitted, grinning at her. I had gone a couple of times, and I had friends who considered themselves experienced at gambling, but I just hadn’t gotten into it like they had.
She giggled, and I was happy because it was the first laugh we had all day. Something about our journey, our mission, had left us in a quiet state of melancholy all morning, and I had an inkling that this little excursion was going to break us out of it. I checked my mirrors, and we made the final jump over and exited.
****
We sat smoking contentedly after having attacked countless crab legs, steak, shrimp, oysters, and lobster. The sounds of the casino leaked into the dining area from the two floors of slot machines and gaming tables that lay outside of it. I was initially surprised at the fury with which Sara tore through so much food, maybe even surpassing me in quantity, but it had appa
rently put her in a really pleasant frame of mind. We enjoyed our smokes and each other’s company quietly for a few minutes.
“Did you hear something, Sara?” I said, stubbing out my cigarette, and angling my ear towards the dining room doors. Say hello to Mr. Idiot, again, I thought.
“What do you mean?” she replied, her brows furrowing just a little.
“There it goes again,” I said, “did you catch that?” I started to smile, and she smiled back playing along with Idiot Fluke.
“I don’t know, Adam. I think I might have heard something…” she said, playing the part and smiling, feeding the moron-animal inside me, forcing me to continue.
“I think I hear the blackjack table calling my name,” I said to her. I leaned in toward her and whispered, “Shh, listen closely.” We both cocked our heads, listening for the sound of the blackjack table, stupid grins plastered on our faces. “‘Aaaadam,’ they are saying. ‘Come win some money, Aaaadam. We have got lots of money for you and your beautiful giiiiirlfriend…’”
Sara laughed finishing her cigarette and we stood up, both stretching as we did.
“Okay, Mr. Fluke. I guess that we can play some games. Blackjack? Is that the game du jour?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I said to her.
We left the large dining room moving sluggishly with the added weight of our meals inside of us, but in good spirits. I felt lucky, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything with the ever-present Fluke Factor. I only hoped that the monster didn’t rear its ugly head and that I actually got to win a few bucks. A fleeting thought of winning enough money so that I never had to work again crossed my mind as we walked through aisle after aisle of slot machines.
That would be an amazingly wonderful fluke, Adam-boy.
We finally arrived at the main area with what seemed to be fifty tables of varying shapes, design, and purpose. It was a little overwhelming, and I figured it was best not to count my chickens just yet.
Fluke Page 15