Ray Gorham - 77 Days in September

She looked at him, disgusted. “I can’t help you with that.”

Doug turned, and as he stepped towards the door, he dropped his hand from her shoulder and rubbed it across her breasts. “I think you could. I bet you’d be great.”

Jennifer knocked his hand away. “Get out of my house, you pig!” she spat, no longer disguising the disgust and anger she felt.

Doug laughed as he showed himself to the front door. “Thanks for having me. I’ll stop by again to check on things. Don’t forget to call if you have any problems.”

Jennifer didn’t reply, she just watched the door close behind him.

“Are you okay, Mom?” David asked his mom as she walked into the kitchen. He sat at the kitchen table, chewing on a piece of dried spaghetti. “You look upset.”

“I’ll be fine. It’s just Doug. He’s having a hard time dealing with things, and that worries me.”

“Do we need to get a hold of the police?” David asked, a grin on his face.

“He is the police, Son, ” Jennifer replied, her eyes on the door. “That’s a big part of the problem.”

Tuesday, September 20 th

Northern Texas

Kyle awoke to the sound of wind whistling around the cab of the truck. The weather had turned stormy the night before, forcing him to call it a day earlier than he would have liked. Luckily there had been a semi truck close by on the side of the highway, and Kyle had been able to force it open and get out of the weather. Now he lay on the top bunk, listening to the wind as he drifted in and out of sleep. An unfamiliar sound caught his attention, and he sat up in the bunk and listened. The sound grew more intense, until finally he realized it was rain.

This was the first significant rainstorm of his journey, and Kyle was not about to waste it. He put on his shoes, climbed out of the truck and, in the near blackness of the early morning, hurried cautiously to where his cart was stowed under the trailer. He dug out empty water bottles and positioned them around the truck to catch the runoff, then stripped to his underwear and washed his body and his clothes in the downpour. It had been forever since he’d showered, and with the rain pouring over him, he could feel the layers of grime washing away.

Feeling clean for the first time in weeks, Kyle grabbed a clean set of clothes from his cart and climbed back in the cab of the truck. Cold and wet from the impromptu shower, he pulled a blanket off of the bunk and wrapped it around his shivering body, then dropped into the passenger seat. The chattering of his teeth accompanied the steady drumming of the slowing rain, and with his knees pulled up to his chest, Kyle rubbed his arms and legs in an effort to warm them.

The sun was just starting to lighten the sky on a day that looked to be cold, wet, and gray. As Kyle warmed up, he took in the world around him through the rain-streaked windshield. In addition to the mud, crops, and streams of water, he was relieved to see the city of Dalhart in the distance, a city he had originally planned on passing through early the day before.

Kyle put his feet down and dried his hair with the blanket, then dropped the blanket onto his lap and inspected his injuries from Lubbock. The bruises were fading but still felt tender when pressed. The visor mirror showed that the purple around his eyes was turning dull gray, and the cut on his cheek was still slightly swollen, but the scab was starting to wear away. Kyle laughed at his reflection. With his beard, bruises, and self-inflicted hair cut, he’d have no chance of passing as the man in the picture on his driver’s license.

He unwrapped the blanket and dressed, putting on the last of the new clothes he had looted with Ed back in Houston. It had only been sixteen days since that excursion, but it felt like a lifetime ago as he thought about everything he had been through since then.

Kyle climbed into the driver’s seat, pulled out the set of keys he had found the night before, and inserted the key in the ignition. He hit the power button on the radio and once again tried to coax some life out of the unit, but met with no success. He’d only listened to one presidential broadcast since leaving Donovan’s, and as one accustomed to reading the news two or three times each day, he was anxious to know what was going on. Frustrated with his failure, he turned off the radio and threw the keys back on the dash.

He looked to the west, where the sky was gray and threatening as far as he could see. The rain had slowed to a steady drizzle, the steady sound of it almost lulling him back to sleep. Shaking his head to stay awake, Kyle reached into the back of the truck for a case of CD’s he’d noticed and, flipping curiously through the mix, was delighted to find a disc that had been a major part of his childhood years.

Kyle slid the disc out of its case and held it tenderly in his hands, memories from thirty years earlier flooding his mind. He scanned through the song list on Eddie Rabbit’s Greatest Hits and immediately spotted the first song he had any memory of, I Love A Rainy Night . Kyle’s thoughts drifted back to his childhood, to the family car trips when his mother would pop in their Eddie Rabbit cassette and crank that song up every time it started to rain. Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, Kyle had heard the song a lot. He was quite young, maybe five or six years old, when the song had stuck in his memory, and at that age, had loved to sing along with his parents and older brother as they barreled down the freeway, all of them singing at the top of their lungs. The tradition continued as he got older, but gradually became a symbol to him of how un-cool his parents were, until every time the cassette was slipped into the player, Kyle and his brother, Kurtis, would moan and groan and refuse to sing along.

Reflecting back now, he was sure that his mother had continued the tradition to get a rise out of her sons, but also to instill a memory, as every other cassette, and eventually CD, had been switched out of the car with the exception of Eddie’s. It had even gotten to the point that Eddie Rabbit became the family peacemaker. If Kyle and Kurtis got to fighting too much in the back seat, their mom would threaten to pop Eddie into the player, usually eliciting promises of improved behavior followed by peace and quiet for a good twenty minutes.

As he relished these memories, Kyle’s fingers began tapping out the song’s beat on the steering wheel, and with the rain outside providing background percussion, he soon found himself singing the song he’d grown to love to hate. “Well, I love a rainy night. I love to hear the thunder, watch the lightning, when it lights up the sky….”

He was on the chorus following the second verse, singing “I wake up to a sunny day” at the top of his lungs and drumming enthusiastically on the steering wheel and dashboard, when a boney hand reached out and grabbed him on the shoulder. Kyle jumped violently in his seat, throwing the case of CDs in the air and banging his thighs sharply against the steering wheel. He spun to his right and looked into the face of Louise Kennedy.

“Pipe down! I’m trying to sleep!” she shouted at him.

Kyle exhaled slowly, his heart pounding in his chest like a jackhammer. “Louise. Sorry. I forgot you were back there,” he said. “I guess I got carried away.”

She gave him a dismissive look, then crawled back into the lower bunk and turned her back to him, pulling the blanket tight around her narrow shoulders.

Kyle watched Louise as his heart slowed to its normal rate, then turned back to the front and picked up where he’d left off, minus the drumming and earsplitting vocals, with memories and worries about his parents and brother and wife and children filling his mind.