Picking Up Where I Last Left Off... The Hat, An Emerging Short Story

Life got in the way of this story. I got back to it today. Feel free to skim and join in where you last left off, or start over, or go get something sweet to eat and do what makes you happy...

-The Hat-

As the rain blurred across the windshield and the wind buffeted the small truck side to side, Mike kept his one hand tight to the steering wheel while he fiddled with the clasp of a bag- not a purse, he would argue- sitting on the passenger seat. If he could undo a bra in the dark while a goosey girl squirmed, he could get his own bag opened on the freeway in the rain. Just a little fiddling and… there… the clasp clicked and fell away and Mike slipped his hand inside and fished around, looking for a girl.

Mike’s bag was basically kitted out like a purse. There were keys and medicinal bottles and lip ointments and tangles of unnecessary bric-a-brac. There were small grains of sand from the beach and small crumbs of cookies from broken packaging. The bag was a go-everywhere-with-Mike kind of bag, and its leather had developed shiny, well-rubbed patches from being toted and greasy sheens in places where things were spilled inadvertently.

The bag was a purse with a manly look and feel, but you didn’t tell Mike that, or you heard about it. Mike wasn’t a fighter, per se, but he would unflinchingly get in your face and let you know you were wrong when you crossed over his lines drawn with sharp sticks on hard ground. “Men didn’t carry purses” was one of those lines. They carried “bags“.

From the purse Mike pulled out one of those cheap credit card wallets with a clear plastic view-window on one side, and leather on the back. There was a picture of a girl in a bathing suit on a beach inside the plastic. Her image looked well-preserved and cared-for within the small wallet, and the wallet looked as well-traveled as the bag.

Mike took his eyes off the blurry, storm-distorted freeway and let them travel down the curves of the dark-haired girl. She had the curves of a coastal road which led Mike adrift. Caution bumps chattered beneath Mike’s tires, and he veered the truck back to the center of the slow lane where water was collecting faster than it was running off. Gusts of wind peeled these puddles up and hurled them sideways across both sides of the freeway. Mike looked at the girl in the picture again. It was an odd time and place to be thinking about “her”.

The wind and the rain in combination qualified this storm as one of the Pacific Northwest’s worst-of-the-decade. Mike was in the thick of it, driving South from Seattle to what he hoped would be LA in one reckless marathon driving stint.

She said “Yes, you can come see me,” and that was all the impetus Mike needed. Here he was, staggering down the interstate with the radio drowned out by wind, struggling with visibility and large hard-to-see puddles that splashed violently upward and physically slowed the small truck while muddying its steering. The storm came out of the southwest- meaning lots of moisture and warmer air. The picture Mike held in his right hand was taken in the southwest, as well. It was taken on a beach on Kauai, almost ten years back, where Mike pointed out the magic of the dragon “Puff” and took this savored picture.

“In a land called Hanalei…” Mike sang as he admired her body in the wet suit. The girl smothered him with kisses and dripped the ocean all over him.

The memory is what Mike reached for when he reached for the photo. The memory of a devoted girl who simply wanted companionship and lots of sex and marriage and several babies.

“Whoa!” Mike said. “I’m far too young!”

“I’m not getting any younger,” said the girl.

“I’m only twenty-six!” Mike argued convincingly.

Mike won the argument and lost the girl. That girl was now married with three children and still- Mike imagined- having lots of sex. Mike was here, trapped inside of a small truck out on a large and lonely freeway in the wind and rain, driving toward the promise of good sex in poor judgment while his windows fogged and faded and fogged and faded.

Steam was finding its way out of a soggy engine compartment, and the little truck began missing badly. In the chaos of the smashing winds and the violent up-splashes of puddle water, it was hard to tell that the engine was having problems, but Mike was sensitive to these things. Mike was a mechanically-minded man who watched gauges and listened to the songs that machines sang, and his little machine was singing sickly. Water had gotten into something it shouldn’t have, and Mike squinted through the water that roamed across his windshield, looking for a way off the freeway.

Weed. There was a town called Weed just up ahead. Weed seemed like an odd name for a town, but Weed it was. Mike missed the first exit for Weed because he simply could not see it.

“Shit!” Mike leaned over his steering wheel and tried not to breath. There was another mile or more before another exit presented itself.

Mike sputtered off of Interstate 5 on Weed’s southern-most exit, and sputtered back along its main road- now heading north- looking for a dry place to park the truck. The rain had lessened considerably in a short span of time, but the wind continued to lift large sprays of water from the ground and carry them sideways. The truck engine died.

“Shit!” Mike turned off his radio and coasted over to the curb. “Shit!” This was not a dry place to repair a wet electrical problem. But this is where the truck had landed.

Even with the howling wind and the chattering of driven water against the auto glass, Mike’s world fell angrily quiet. There was nothing to do but sit here and go nowhere, Mike knew, until there was a lot less water blowing air-born in the wind.


Mike’s radio was now off and all his lights were off and the truck rocked gently side to side as the wind slammed against it in pulses. There were other cars out on this stormy night, cruising slowly along a four lane boulevard, going one way or the other and sending waves and ripples outward as they cruised through puddles with their tires. For a brief moment, Mike thought to run to them- the unseen faces in these slowly cruising cars- to ask for help.

But only for a moment.

Resignation came over Mike like a rain storm, and he hunkered down. After nine hours of sitting and driving, he could surely sit some more. In the busy silence the storm became music and Mike tuned in to stave off stagnancy. There were the singing wires. The dripping downspouts. The tittering and the popping sound of water droplets striking anything and everything.

Within this tinny, stormy tune and the swaying of Mike’s shelter, there were thoughts and feelings and human, living moments of blinking and breathing, of fiddling with knobs and of days and dreams all called forth to consider, as if the storm and this dead vehicle were conduits to catching oneself up to one’s own busy life.

Most of what Mike valued were trapped and dry in here with Mike. There was his bag. There were the contents of his bag. There was a pillow case full of his favorite traveling clothes. There were a collection of oddities collected over the years and strung together to hang like a talisman on his rear view mirror.

Mike’s transient nature that so appealed to him was adequately represented by what Mike collected in the cab of his truck, and sitting here listening to the music of a storm, Mike was at peace with his predicament, with his stranded situation, with him just sitting here on the side of the road while a storm carried on all around him.

“Yes, you can come see me,” she said over the phone. Mike was stunned. As often as he had visualized pulling her shirt up over her head and the way he would unbutton her button-down jeans with skillful fingers, and as clearly as he saw his hand resting heavy on her pelvic bone and his cheek rubbing coarsely across her pubic bone, the face had disappeared.

Vanished. There was a voice on the phone. There was a body so very much unlike his own. There was a scene where they met along Venice beach and a dinner and a date. But there was no face. There was no picture of a face. There was a blank fuzzy memory where a face most assuredly existed. Mike closed his eyes and willed himself to remember the face of a girl he was driving to see. Her face would not bend toward Mike’s strong will and did not show itself. Mike felt suddenly cold and lonely. The situation had transformed itself with the absence of a memory. Without her face, Mike was just a guy trapped in a small truck on the side of the road in a big storm in a small town called Weed.

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 her own job examining corporate take-over legalese for a private law firm in San Francisco.

Now 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 still feeling cold and alone and now 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.

--II--

She was three weeks of memory long and twenty-two days of obsessive love-making. Her face was plainly beautiful- Mike got no arguments anywhere he made that assertion- but her upper thighs were starting to swell and you could see the shape of things to come.

Her name was Shelly and she had joined the Army and was leaving town, giving her a great impetus to get some before she left and giving Mike the perfect cover for his fear of long-term sex-filled debauchery tied to commitment and love.

It was a perfect union for the both of them, and out of it, came the leather bag that Mike toted around with him everywhere he traveled.

It was a parting gift- somewhat of a joke- but Mike found its uses far outweighed its stigma and so it traveled as Mike traveled, picking up spills and rubbed-up shiny spots and filling up with lots of unnecessary stuff that Mike had attached some sentimental value to.

“Here. I think every man should have one of these.” she said to him, staring into his face in an up-close moment Mike could never argue with- you didn’t argue with a face like that, it was far too beautiful.

“A purse?” Mike stammered.

“A “bag” silly. For when you travel to come and see me.”

“Yes. Of course. A bag. A bag for traveling. How thoughtful.”

“How thoughtful? Since when did you become so fucking polite?” She grabbed his crotch and squeezed it firmly. “You’ll fill it with memories of me, won’t you?”

“I will.”

“Good. Because when you come to see me, I want to empty out your bag and see what it was that you thought about me. Oh, and I’ve left you little things hidden around your house.”

“I’ll be sure to look out for them.”

“Oh, they’ll find you. I want you to remember my face like it was your mother’s face.”

Mike smiled. The impulse to kiss her face came over him and he bent forward and she responded with a tilting of her head. They had gotten this maneuver worked out to where it came naturally to both of them. There was no clacking of the teeth or fumbling with noses. The kiss was long and deep and sincere and quite arousing for the both of them.

“Just once more before my flight?” she whispered in his ear.

“Where?”

“In the ladies room.”

“Wha?”

“Oh come on! You have a purse…”

As the wind cheered loudly across the top of Mike’s little truck, Mike’s own humor warmed as he recalled the way she clenched her lips to keep from making any noise.

On an impulse, he pulled the release on his hood latch and erupted from his truck, hoping to battle the wind and find the problem and get on the road again, heading to LA where a girl was waiting for him.

The wind snatched his Akubra from his head and sent it rolling headlong down the center of the four lane road.