The Hat-- A bit More

“You are who you are, Mike. And you are dangerous to a girl like me.”

And with that thought extant in Mike’s mind, the hat curved miraculously toward the curb, jumped it, and was stopped by a cyclone fence. It seemed to throw itself against the diamond laces of wire to wait for the wind to hold it pinned there until Mike could finally get his hands upon it, scrunching it greedily.

Mike’s side ached with a cramp and his clothes were as wet as they could possibly get. His hat was water-logged and the edges were roughed up by the asphalt some. This was a storied moment, Mike knew- the day his hat got away from him- but as he panted and rested against the fence while the wind blew hard against him, his truck started easily with the turn of a key and sputtered almost noiselessly down a side street that led away from town, stolen by some young man further down on his luck than Mike who could not believe his eyes when he walked past the open door and saw the key in the ignition- and no one anywhere near.

Mike had his hat in his hand, and his back to the cyclone fence. He placed the hat to his chest the way one might cover a heart during a baseball game. The hat, after all, had been a gift from a girl he had once slammed against a shower wall, leaving her butt prints in the soap film, her feet, dangling beneath his two squeezing hands that gripped her beneath each horizontal thigh. Her face had made the unmistakable O shapes- the eyes and the mouth all rounded into the astonished look of one who could not believe what was just happening to them but were glad anyway- and Mike had carried the moment all the way through to the end when he was forced to lean against her, his body pumped and spent, pinning her up against the white fiberglass enclosure and panting heavily like a man trying to get his breath back underneath him.

She had rolled her eyes without saying anything. Mike decided that he had accomplished what he set out to do.

Eventually, he let her down and the two of them showered and shampooed and casually went on to ordinary things.

Mike loved the impromptu nature of the things he did. Like chasing a hat down the middle of a town in a rain storm. Like dropping all things and stripping naked and surprising the girl he was with while she went about the business of taking a shower. Even the notion of jumping in his truck and driving 16 hours in a major storm seemed normal and reasonable to Mike. Life was one big adventure. One spontaneous moment stacked- like dominoes- next to the next one.

The man who stole Mike’s truck was a bit of an adventurous soul himself. He was driving down seldom used side-streets, the truck missing badly, the radio turned up loud and the contents of Mike’s bag dumped out onto the passenger seat, a grubby hand lifting each object up to a glinting and red-rimmed eye, while the man made comments to the universe, some of them quite lascivious in nature.

“Oh my goodness. Look at the tits on that little tart!”

Mike had run almost a mile and a quarter in fully wet clothes in the wind and rain. It would be several minutes more before he had walked back far enough to even notice that his truck was not anywhere near where he had left it.