Emily Ann, Jack and I walked a few hundred yards, around a bend and out of sight of the barn. It started to rain. I paused to look at the sky. While we had been running through the woods, the sun had disappeared behind a wall of gray. Now the clouds had reached critical mass and a cold downpour drummed on our heads.
I started along the rough road again, hurrying but no longer running. Jack lifted his face appreciatively to the sky as he took a long sniff. Emily Ann shook herself. I growled.
The pause in the barn had let me catch my breath, but in no other way was I any happier. My face was chilled but I was uncomfortably hot inside my jeans and sweatshirt, and I itched in various places, including several that could not be addressed in public. Hay had worked its way inside my shirt and fallen partway down my back. The weight of my fanny pack increased half a pound with every step. My glasses were steamed up on the inside and rain spotted on the outside. I took them off and wiped them but my wet sweatshirt only made a smeary blur.
With my glasses back on, I saw that the trees ahead were thinning. We hurried forward, and I saw houses, ranch houses built in the Sixties, huddled on their grassy plots. We had come out of the woods and reached suburbia.
The old farm road petered out between two chain-link-fenced yards, ending at a curving street. The day was still early, perhaps 9:00 or a little later. Children would be in school and their parents gone to work. If anyone was around they were safe and dry inside. The street had the deserted air of a town in a science fiction film where everyone has been spirited away.
Even with no traffic, I didn’t want to leave Jack leashless on the street. He’s a bright guy but any dog can get distracted by a cat or squirrel at just the wrong moment. I took Emily Ann’s leash and threaded it through his collar and looped it around once.I had no idea of which way to turn. I could see intersections in both directions. “What do you guys think?” I asked. Emily Ann unhesitatingly turned right, and Jack and I followed her.
And followed her and followed her. Who decided back in the Fifties or Sixties that neighborhoods should consist of winding streets? Each led into another and curved around. I could hear traffic noises indicating signs of life somewhere off in the distance, but I couldn’t get there. Every street looked like the one we had just walked down. We walked and walked, getting wetter and wetter. I became convinced that we must be going in circles and tried to pay attention to the houses at each corner, but their identifying details ran together in my brain until every house looked alike.
A couple of times a car hurried past on its way to the outside world or to home and warmth and comfort. I thought about flagging one down to ask how to get out of this place, which set off an argument in my head about the wisdom of doing so. The shy voice said it was too embarrassing to be lost in a residential neighborhood. The alarmist added that anyone I stopped would think I was insane and probably call the cops, and with my luck it would be Chief Johnson who came to arrest me. The practical one said we’re bound to find our way out eventually, and to keep moving.
Whenever I paused to look around, the dogs would shake their accumulated rain onto me. I wished I could do the same; my wet clothes sagged more with each step. Thank heavens I'd worn jeans; pants with an elastic waist could have spelled disaster.
At last I saw a neon glow against the cloud-darkened sky, and was able to keep making turns toward it. We reached the entrance to the tract and I recognized where I was—about a mile and a half from Bob’s driveway. I turned right and stumped up a straight stretch that in a car would seem flat, but actually had a steady rise. I felt as though I'd been tramping around for years.
The neon glow grew brighter, and at last I reached a Texaco station with two covered bays for gas pumps and the usual little attendant’s booth with a cash register behind a counter and a rack of tired looking snacks. And—wonder of wonders—a pay phone at the edge of the lot.
I hauled out my wallet from the fanny pack. It held a five and six ones, and seventeen cents in change.
I walked to the counter and laid a dollar down in front of the attendant, a vacant-eyed man wearing a shirt that looked suspiciously like a pajama top. “Could I get some change for the phone please?” I asked.
He managed to focus on me, and then on the dollar bill. He shook his head. “Uh uh, I can't just give out money. You gotta buy something.”
I found it necessary to close my eyes and breathe deeply so I would not scream at him. When I opened them again, Jack was looking worriedly up at me. Suppressing a wish that my companions looked more threatening, I glanced around to see what I could buy. Mints and gum and little cellophane bags of salted nuts and odd brands of candy bars I didn’t recognize hung limply from the rack. Everything looked faded and old, and even though I was beyond hungry I saw nothing in this place I could bear to put into my mouth. I finally picked up a package of chewing gum that claimed to have eight sticks of mouth poppin’ cinnamint flavor and laid it on the counter next to the dollar.
Pajama Man rang up eighty-nine cents on his cash register. The drawer popped open and he fished for a dime and a penny.
“Wait a minute,” I said quickly, realizing he was about to close the drawer again. I could be buying stale candy all day. “I need change for the phone. Give me some quarters while you have the drawer open.” I pulled another dollar out of my billfold.
He frowned and looked at the two bills. “Um…”
I was really going to have to teach these dogs to bite people. I'd think about how later. Now I was seized with inspiration. I picked the two dollar bills up and put them back in my billfold, and handed him the five. Instantly his brow cleared. “Uh, okay,” he said.
“And be sure to give me four quarters for one of the dollars,” I reminded him. He managed to oblige. I heaved a sigh of relief and turned away from the counter with my change.
“Um, ma’am, you forgot your gum,” he called after me.
I turned and he was holding it out, smiling. “You know what?” I said. “I just needed the change. You can have the gum.”
His smile got bigger, and I realized how young he was. “Gosh, thanks,” he said.
I waved to him and decided to postpone biting lessons for the dogs. “Come on, pups,” I muttered. “Let’s call someone to give us a ride.”
They trotted obediently at my side. As we emerged from under the high canopy over the pumps, the rain renewed our general wetness. The phone’s height was awkward, the top of its stainless steel hood reaching my chin. What had happened to phone booths you could step into and sit down, those quaint, old fashioned ones with a door you could close? No doubt they had been supplanted by cell phones and the driver’s seat of a car.
I leaned against the too-short booth, realizing with a pang that Bob would be my first choice of someone to call for a ride. That obviously wasn’t an option.
I should call Kay and have her fetch me. But I didn’t know what time the furniture was being picked up—Kay had said dawn which could mean anything from five a.m. to ten or so. She would need to be at the store.
I could call the police; after all, I'd been chased by a man with a gun. At least I thought he had a gun. Chief Johnson couldn’t still be on duty, could he? Surely he didn’t work around the clock. I considered whether explaining the whole thing to someone new would be worse that talking to Chief Johnson again. But he would have told the next person on duty about the events he had handled on his shift.
The sarcastic inner voice piped up. “Can’t you just hear him? ‘It was a busy night. I did a routine traffic stop and it was Kay Chelton’s crazy cousin claiming her boyfriend had been kidnapped by a space alien posing as a blonde in a red suit. Later she called to tell me about a message the space aliens had beamed down onto the boyfriend’s phone machine.’”
“Stop it, it was Kay who added the space alien bit,” I said out loud. The dogs pricked their ears at me. I reached for the phone. “I'll just tell the police we were chased by a man with a gun.”
The police officer in my head asked, “And what kind of gun was it, Mrs. McGuire? Oh, you didn’t get close enough to see? You say it was tucked into his waistband and you saw it through a set of white organdy sheers?”
I couldn’t do it. I ran through a mental list of other people I'd gotten to know in the few months I'd been back in Willow Falls. They were acquaintances, people you said hello to when you passed them in the street. I had met several friendly people at the dog park, but I didn’t know anyone’s last name. A tattered phone book was tucked under the phone, but the phone book is not enlightened enough to list people by their dogs’ names.
I pulled out the book, looked up a number. Dialed for a cab.
The ladies’ room beckoned next; I didn’t want to look so scary the cab driver would refuse to pick me up. Both dogs shook themselves hard as soon as I closed the door behind us. Luckily they were just wet, not muddy, so a few paper towels erased the evidence of their ablutions from the walls and floor. They panted happily at me, shiny and eager for whatever would come next.
I, on the other hand, felt like a refugee from a junkyard. Only so much damage to one’s appearance can be repaired with cold water and paper towels in a Texaco restroom. In my case it made no appreciable difference. Twigs of hay stuck out of the hair plastered to my skull. Mud streaked up my cheek, partially covering a scratch on my forehead. My wet clothes clung to me in a clammy embrace. My face was flushed and my neck blotchy and overheated. Mushroom goo smeared one knee, and a liberal coating of stick-tights decorated my jeans from the hems on up. My shoes squished as I shifted my weight. I was probably lucky the cashier had waited on me at all.
“Blagh,” I scowled at my reflection. I don’t waste space in my fanny pack on cosmetics or cleaning equipment. A few wet paper towels took care of the mud, and I fluffed as much water as I could out of my hair with my fingers. I made a face at myself in the mirror, and left the restroom to wait for the cab.
It took forever to arrive. After a few minutes I sat down on the curb by the attendant’s booth. When the taxi finally pulled into the drive I hauled myself to my feet. The white station wagon, several years old, was emblazoned with the name of the cab company and its phone number painted in purple and red on the doors. I pulled open the back passenger door. Emily Ann stepped in and lay down by the far door as Jack bounced in.
“Hey, lady,” the cabbie protested as I slid my wet butt onto the seat, “I don’t take no dogs in here.” He peered at me over thick glasses perched halfway down his long nose. A stout man in his early sixties, he sported the kind of stubble on his face that always looks like a three day growth of beard, no matter when it was last shaved off. Jack put his short front legs on the back of the front seat and laid his muzzle on them, giving the driver a soulful look. His tail wagged madly. “What the hell,” the driver shrugged. “Where you goin’?”
“Two twenty three Maple,” I told him and settled back for the ride.