“The prettiest girl / in all the world / is in a little Spanish town / but I left her / for a Bonnie lass / and I told her / I’d see her around / but that Bonnie lass / and her heart of glass / could not hold a candle / to bumming around…”

– Tom Waits

…His eyes popped open and his brain popped awake and he realized she wasn’t in the bed beside him which was the reason his eyes had popped open. He knew what time it was even though he didn’t know how he knew that but when he looked at the digital clock on her bedside table he saw he was correct: 4:37 AM. And we went to bed past 1:30 AM. His impulse now was to gather his things together as quickly as possible and leave as fast as possible, out the window if necessary.

But he hauled himself out of bed and walked around the corner into the small kitchen of her studio apartment where he knew she was. He looked out the window at the brown rooftops of Chicago where they spread outward to the blue lake stretching away into the distance in the growing light and then he noticed that she had Sherwood Anderson’s short story collection Winesburg, Ohio beside her on the table. She’d already told him more than once the book was disturbing to her and now here she was reading it again.

When he asked her what was wrong, she said, “I can’t stop thinking about those things you told me.”

He knew what things she meant, but he also knew the things he’d said had now been completely twisted around in her mind so that they no longer bore any resemblance to the things he’d actually told her.

The tension in the room was now so high he felt like the ice he was walking on might break through at any second and he was just trying to keep his balance as best he could so the ice wouldn’t break.

As he walked back into the other room she followed him and asked him what he thought about it all.

He was five feet eleven inches tall and weighed one hundred and ninety pounds, most of it muscle. In the worst of circumstances, Mike Tyson himself would not have scared him at all (think about David and Goliath) and he knew his own hands were lethal weapons if he wasn’t careful, which was one reason he was always watching himself.

She was five feet two inches tall and weighed a hundred and ten pounds. But she had a right hook on her that could take down a heavyweight prize fighter when aimed right, and especially when it was a sucker punch like the one she reached up and gave him right now.

He realized she’d hit him in the ear when the lights popped on again with his ear ringing like a dinner bell and he found himself staring down at her who then reached up again and grabbed him by the long brown hair on both sides of his head.

She then yanked back with all her might and sent both of them flying across the small room toward the couch, her flying beneath him while yanking his hair and him flying above her trying to not fall down on top of her but somehow they made it to the couch via flying through the air, she fell into the cushions and pulled him down on top of her by the hair like she wanted him to kiss her, which she did. Instead, she spit in his face, but not full on, only more like a gesture.

And in that moment her face was as beautiful, fresh, youthful (they were both forty-six but right now she looked sixteen) and lively as he’d ever seen it before (except one time) and even though her eyes were also truly murderous right now and he knew that she would really have killed him in that instant if she’d somehow been able to. He sometimes wondered whether she’d ever actually murdered anyone back in the dark depths of her mysterious past and he was never absolutely sure that the answer was no. It would be like her to do it and to get away with it, too.

He wanted to throttle her, that is, choke her to death – but only for an instant.

Before he knew what hit him he had his clothes on and he was down in the street heading on two feet for his automobile at high speed with the key in his hand like the pacifist he was. She was hanging out the window shouting at him, “And don’t come back this time either you son of a bitch!”

When he turned around and looked at her hanging half-way out of the window with her beautiful long red hair dangling down like a grown-up Rapunzel confined to her tower, she looked at him, their eyes met, she relented, and then she smiled at him sadly, then waved goodbye at him sadly before she turned away inside (heartbreakingly) and closed the window.

The Drifter

(Images also by The Drifter)