The Hat- Part 3 Of A Windy Affair

If you sat at the south end of Weed and looked down her solitary main street in a storm, you could still see that Weed catered to the travelers who pulled off of Interstate 5 for one reason or another. Coffee shops and auto repair shops seemed over-abundant. There were two auto-parts stores visible through Mike’s misted-over and foggy auto-glass. There were four lanes, two on each side of a yellow pair of lines, and there were the fast food joints with their sky-high freeway-visible signs on both sides of the boulevard.

If Mike got out of his truck and popped the hood, water could blow in sideways and not help his current situation much. After all, it was water that caused this problem to begin with. The rain was now a light rain, but the wind was now heavier than ever. The wind really did “howl“, like a ghostly beast as it stampeded unseen through the crevasses of man-made objects and across the open ends of man-made orifices. It had power- this wind. It made its mark in the world by the hallowed “hoooooooo” sounds it created in its frenetic journey toward somewhere mystifyingly else.

Mike soon gave up on trying to recollect the face of the girl he was supposedly racing to see. Her face was a smeared thumb-print on an otherwise busy sheet of paper. Mike could hear her laughing. He could imagine her nipples pulled by calculated suckling and he could even recall the pink shade of polish she painted on her tiny toes. He knew her name and he had her phone number memorized, and he could probably tell a perfect stranger where to find her by the habits that she practiced. But her face?

Her face was as generic a memory as any other unknown face filing silently by. Her face was just a known quantity. It had two eyes. A nose. A mouth that kissed. It wasn’t pock-marked and that was all Mike could recall.

Mike was surrounded by glass and vinyl and steel and yet Mike’s mind wanted to spread out considerably. If he could not remember the face of a girl he was hell-bent on driving down to see, then what of the others? What were they to him? All of the others? The important ones and the legs he simply spread by any means?

Which faces stuck and which were missing?

Rather than deal with stepping out into the torrential wind-driven water, Mike chose another option altogether. He would sit on the side of the road in his little truck, going through his collection of artifacts and memorabilia, and try to remember the smallest of details about every girl’s face that he had ever wrangled a moment inside of.

There was that German girl on the beach in Texas. She had sparse eyelashes that made her eyes appear childish and dumfounded. She had a small bump on her nose that made her face appear crafted, in contradiction to her eyes. She was not fat but thick enough to hide most of her cheekbones, which weren’t very high but appeared round like slices of golf balls. When she smiled, one of her front teeth could be seen to be overlapping the other one in what Mike imagined was a playful and sexy licking gesture.

A tooth licking a tooth. Yes, Mike thought. Yes. And her English had a tone about it that suggested she didn’t know how to talk up in her nose.

Mike reached back behind the passenger seat and pulled out a hat. This was an Akubra, made from rabbit-hair felt and manufactured in Australia. The girl who bought this hat for Mike left it on the seat of his truck one day and then disappeared back to where she came from- a fiancé who litigated for large settlements and a job examining corporate take-over legalese for a private law firm in San Francisco.

Her face Mike could tarry over. She was originally from Hawaii- from Oahu, actually- and she had the face of tolerance. There were African and Asian and Anglican features all intermixed like a description of her heritage. An Anglican priest and a Phillipina great-grandmother and father. An African-Portuguese grandfather. A Japanese and Russian mother. There were some Chinese and Korean in there in small portions, as well.

Mike thought the resultant configuration suited her just fine. She had a face that passed for Mongolian and Cherokee and Okinawan depending on the light and point of reference. Mike loved her face, because it seemed more well-traveled than he aspired to be. Her face suggested the entire world on a delicate scale. Her face-when Mike had been drinking- reminded him of an entire collection of National Geographic Magazines.

Mike placed the well worn but well-cared-for hat atop his curly-haired head, and continued down the list.

Ah yes. Her.

When she screwed, she made the unmistakable mouthing gestures of a dying fish. That girl had a face full of angles and worry. And she was clingy. Hers was a face in constant need of repair. More eye liner. More rouge. More mascara. Thicker foundation. Mike smiled to himself alone in his truck as he recalled the red lipstick he found smeared all over everything he owned. The girl needed a “wet paint” sign, Mike thought. She was a hazard to a nice pastel button-down in any color.

Faces came up and floated off as Mike went through the list. Surprising mostly to Mike were the larger numbers in the earliest of his hunting years and the scarcity of the past few. Girls really did become women and women really did get snatched up and married to men who gave them children and immobile bubbles of security that these women thought of as “home”. That was really how the system operated. That was how the ritual was suppose to play out.

Mike was now feeling cold and alone and unsuccessful and displaced and ineffective within the outlines of his own life.

“Damn it! Man!” he thought. “I need to remember her face!”

Outside his truck, the winds still pressed hard against everything flat and howled past everything else. The rain was picking up again. The downspouts and gutters filled and spewed again, and the entire night seemed blanketed by the popping and pinging sound of drop after drop.