Peter Grist - Flashback

Wearing his one and only pair of jeans and yet another polo shirt, he slid behind the wheel of his car, dumping a small plastic bag of dirty washing on the passenger seat. He backed out of the slot and headed the short distance towards the town square. He spied an open laundromat that offered service washes a block short of the main square and parked right outside. Huge cream-colored washing machines ran down one side of the laundromat while dryers ran down the other. Just two of the six washers were spinning around churning up suds. The fluorescent strip lights bounced their off-white light from the chrome doors of the giant appliances. At the far end of the shop a slim girl with short bobbed light-brown hair was reading a book with one hand while shoving wet bed sheets into a huge tumble dryer. She seemed oblivious to Ed’s presence, he coughed gently but she still almost jumped out of her skin when she finally noticed him. As she turned he could see she wore a fitted T-shirt that proudly announced I AM A NERD across the chest.

“Oh my gosh, you scared me!”

“Errr, sorry, didn’t mean too,” he offered his most disarming smile. The girl seemed to relax a little. He extended his arm to show the girl the bag of washing.

“I was wondering if you could do a service wash for me please?”

“Oh, for sure, no problem, do you want it just washed or pressed too?”

“Pressed as well please if you don’t mind, thanks.” She stopped what she was doing and took the bag from his hand. After dumping his clothes into a plastic basket and counting the items she handed him a ticket.

“I’m working late tonight so I’ll do them now, have them ready for you for the morning okay?”

“Yes, that’s great thank you. What time do you open?”

“I’ll be in for 8.30.”

“That’s perfect, thanks… err?”

“I’m Molly.”

“Great, thanks Molly, see you in the morning. Oh, what’s the book?”

“Oh it’s a self-improvement book; I am doing a course on psychology at college.” Impressed at her enthusiasm for her job and life in general he offered her his biggest smile again and then turned and headed back to his car.

A quick glance at his watch told Ed that he still had time to kill so he carried on with his ‘to do’ list. The gas station where Buster worked was closed up tight, the lights all off. He carried on and turned left at the intersection onto Main Street. He drove straight passed the right turn for Memorial Square and went on another block to where a neon light beamed brightly from the drug store. There was little traffic but he signalled right and pulled in directly outside the store. An elderly couple were in deep conversation with the similarly aged woman behind the glass-topped counter as the door closed behind him. They all stopped speaking mid-sentence and stared at him with undisguised curiosity. Ed felt like he had just walked into a wild-west saloon where the piano player stopped playing and the barman started moving bottles of liquor quickly under the counter. As a travelling salesman this was not the first time he had come across this situation, and each time he felt like saying ‘Howdy folks’ in his best Clint Eastwood voice. Instead, he waited to be served. The old couple shuffled up a little and the old lady behind the register enquired “Yes, can I help you dear?” He stepped up to the counter and looked down towards the woman’s well-coiffed grey hair.

“Yes, could you give me something for headaches please?” She reached behind her for a box of generic painkillers.

“Will there be anything else?”

Ed shook his head.

“That’ll be three dollars and fifty cents then, thank you”.

Ed handed over the exact amount, picked up the box and headed for the door. He gave a nonchalant nod to the elderly couple as he passed them and wasn’t surprised to hear their voices before the door closed on his departure.

“That’s definitely him, the man Mr Ryan told me about…”

The elderly ladies went back to their gossiping as he climbed in his car. News certainly travels fast around these parts he thought. A very different welcome from the one he had received from Tash earlier in the liquor store. He turned the key in the ignition, fired up the car and selected drive. When he had checked the road was clear he did a quick U-turn across the Main Street and headed back to the library.

He arrived a little before six so he did a K turn and parked in the same spot that he had that morning, next to the Burgundy and rust Nissan, and went inside. He never noticed the pick-up truck with dark tinted windows parked on the other side of the square, with a lone man watching intently as Ed made his way into the library. “Quite a bookworm aren’t you Mr Saunders?” the driver said to himself, “you keep on digging and I’m gonna have to whup ya like you was a redheaded stepchild.”

Linda and Ed came out together at five after six. Ed felt that since he had arrived Linda had been staring at his face, not his features so much but the cuts and grazes on it, but he had said nothing and let it go. They walked towards the Nissan.

“Is this yours?” he asked. She nodded a yes. “You sure that thing’s gonna get you home?” he asked teasingly, looking at what remained of the wafer-thin metal.

“Hey, don’t knock it, I know she’s not pretty but she’s never let me down yet” replied Linda as she gently patted the car on the hood, a pretend hurt look on her face.

“Okay, but I think I’ll keep my distance when I’m behind you, just in case something falls off!”

She gave him a withering look then unlocked the door. As a habit, she had kept the windows slightly open all day but a wave of dry heat still escaped past her. She slipped behind the wheel and started the engine as he got into his car. A thick blue cloud of smoke belched from her muffler pipe as the engine turned over slowly then finally fired. Her Nissan’s air-conditioning unit had stopped working over a year ago but she hadn’t gotten around to getting it fixed yet so she simply wound down the windows more. She did plug the dash-mounted fan into the cigar lighter but that just pushed hot air around the cabin. She was sure it did nothing on a practical level but psychologically, she felt cooler with it on. She clipped her seat belt on then checked her rear-view mirror. Ed was smiling right back at her. It was a nice, warm, genuine smile with just a hint of mischief in there somewhere. She pulled away from the sidewalk up to the stop line at the intersection, indicated left and turned towards home. Ed turned the radio off, just in case, but with the heat of the day still present he kept the air-con on. He followed Linda left on to Main Street then left again at the big intersection on to Homestead Road. A few seconds later the pick-up trucks engine burst into life and pulled away too, slower than the other two cars. It too turned left onto main. It stayed a long way behind them until the driver was sure they were both headed for the stuck-up librarian’s place then he eased off some more and pulled over. He knew where just about everybody in town lived, he made it his job to know.

“Well, well, only been here a day and already you’re in with the Saxon bitch. Well, there ain’t no way you’ll get past first base with that one boy, that’s fur damn sure, she’s tighter than a camels ass in a sand storm”. The watcher chuckled at his own wisdom but the humour never reached the cold darkness of his eyes. After he had lost sight of the two cars up ahead he pulled out again and motored slowly on.

Ed and Linda drove out of town until the residential area became sporadic houses that got further and further apart from their neighbours, then stopped completely. She checked her rear-view mirror often, just to make sure he was keeping up, only to see him smiling back at her. She couldn’t help but smile in return. They turned off of the main highway on to a much smaller road that started to wind its way gently uphill. Farmland was now the dominating feature interspersed with great swaths of Pines and Buckeye as they drove further northeast. Linda clicked her turn signal down and turned on to a smaller dirt track that only had one mailbox at the end of it with the name Saxon painted neatly in white paint on the side. The track lasted just a hundred yards before it opened up. The cars crunched as the dirt track became a gravelled area outside a small but tidy ranch house. The white-painted wooden building stood two stories high with a covered porch that ran the length of the front. There were a couple of recliner chairs and a small swing chair just by the door in the centre. As Ed swung the car around to stop next to Linda’s, he could see a large barn, back and to the left of the house that may be held horses or farm equipment, its big double doors closed tight. The area in front of the house was surrounded by a low picket fence that looked out over grazing land. The sun was just starting to set on the other side of the buildings, leaving a pink tinge to the huge sky. It looked idyllic.