Jules Hinton's Strange Trip: Chapter Seven by JCH and Kas  

         He hung the phone up for the third time.  Nothing.  Or rather something.  The first time he had thought he’d mistakenly hit the wrong number, but each time he attempted to dial the number he got the same recorded message, ‘The number you have dialed is no longer in service.’  He was trying to call Tim before he left for work.  They could be having trouble with the phone lines.  It seemed that every time there was a repair to be made in the neighborhood back home it would inadvertently knock the phones out of whack.  He’d try again later.
         Nikki was just walking back to meet him from turning in their room key as he pulled the door to.  “What?  No luck?” she asked between chewing her gum.
         “Yeah.  But it’s not that important.  I figure I can call again tonight or tomorrow.“
         Nikki slipped ahead of him and opened the driver’s door to the car.  He raised an eyebrow for a second, then walked around to the other door.
         “I can drive until we stop for lunch, while you entertain us with tales of your wild youth,” she grinned.  Jules crossed his legs uncomfortably in his seat.  He hated the confined feeling of the car.  Sure it had been cheap enough.  But not built for comfort, or his long legs.  Nikki grunted as she ground the gears, trying to shift into reverse to back out of the parking space.  A pair of Mexican men with longish dark hair and Dodger baseball caps were watching them from a bus-stop at the edge of the road.  She had told Jules as they were getting dressed that since she had told him more about her last night, that it was his turn this morning.  Jules had thought this ironic since she had not really said much at all about herself.
         “Well,” he began, ”most of the things that I really consider to be the important events in my life began after I got out of high school.  That is ‘small-town high school.’  Bishopville isn’t famous for much, but it takes a certain amount of unhealthy pride in the fact that Bishopville High always has one of the best football teams in the state.
         "I began playing music back in junior high, and carried it over into high school.  Ted, Charley, Jimmy...  We started a band back then that we took with us to college.  That’s probably the best memories I have about that time.  Writing songs together, goofing off, that sort of thing.”
         Nikki had managed to swing out onto the highway, slowly picking up speed.  She was adjusting the mirrors to her height, trying to watch all of them at once.  It was humorous seeing the nervous glint in her eye, constantly checking the rearview.  Obviously, she had not been behind the driver’s wheel in some time.  It had been the same for him after so much time riding on the bike, but he had hoped she hadn’t noticed.
         “So,” she said distractedly, jockeying for position with the faster moving traffic, “what happened to the other guys in the band?”
         “Oh, they’re still there, the last I heard.  Playing little clubs in Bishopville, or doing gigs on the weekends in the surrounding cities.  Probably will until they’re all sitting around somewhere in  their rocking chairs with their harmonicas, balding, trying to hold onto some form of a ponytail or something.”  Jules ended the statement with a chuckle, yanking on the end of his own ponytail for emphasis.
         “And you wanted to escape that?”
         “Well, it’s a little more complicated than that.  My mom is off teaching at the University--medieval history.  My step-dad and his kids, Tim and Rita, are all living in the house that I grew up in, that my dad left us when he died.  It’s really hard sometimes being there.  I mean, I know it’s my house, but here is this whole other family living where my family once lived.  My real sister, Paula, left a long time ago.  Got married young and lives in New York with her husband, a dancer or something.  She hates my mom, probably because she’s old enough to remember our dad.  She resents our step-dad and his whole side of the family.”
         “And you like them?”
         “Yeah, they're good enough people.  But it’s hard not having my mom there all the time to bridge the gap between us and them.  She’s got an apartment at the University and we only see her every few weekends during the school year.  She has to drive several hours just to come home.  Which I’m not real sure she would do more often if she lived closer to home.  I don’t see how she can make a marriage work like that.  Or maybe that’s how it does work.”
         “Did she and your dad get along?”
         Jules scrubbed a hand through his hair and adjusted his ponytail again.  The sun was getting bright enough to warrant wearing his sunglasses, but he’d left them in his bag in the back.  He squinted into the sunlight and the bright-black road ahead.
         “It’s hard to tell from what she’s told us about that time.  She doesn't talk about it too much anymore.  Never did really.  But I guess it’s got to be hard living with someone... or something, like that.  I can’t imagine it.  How can you go to work the next day, after learning that the person you married, the person you though you’d spend the rest of your life with, has cancer?  She told me that Dad seemed to take it very well--that he didn’t let it stop him.  At least at first.  He was a professor too.”  His voice trailed off, and Nikki got the message that he didn’t want to talk about anymore.  She put a hand on his knee.

         By that evening, the sky was threatening.  It looked bizarre, Nikki said, seeing the clouds building up on the flat Texas landscape, twenty miles or more in the distance.  They were driving through the rain a little before 7 p.m., and had just pulled into a gas station when a man told them about the tornado.
         “Yeah, it just touched down right back at that little town, ‘bout ten miles or so down the highway.  I just heard it on the radio.”  They had just come from there, had pulled in thinking about finding a place to stay before the storm hit, but had pushed on, not particularly impressed with the town’s selections of motels or restaurants.
         Jules shared a stare with Nikki while the man went on pumping gas at the next pump over.  She took a twenty from his hand as he started to fill the tank and kissed him deeply.  But her eyes were drawn behind him toward that dark line of clouds not far off.  They had just come out of the curtain of rain, had just out run it enough.  Jules could almost imagine something immense twisting back in that mass of roiling black clouds.  His eyes played tricks on him while the man related what he had heard on his car radio, could almost make out the sinuous twist and curve of something huge dancing across the land.  His imagination.  Maybe he could find a song in that somewhere.  Or a poem.
         He finished pumping and walked to the back of the car, staring off to the West, into the clouds, droplets of rain striking his face, and stretched his arms.  He could not see Nikki inside the glass window of the gas station/food-mart.  A momentary pang of fear stabbed at him.  He casually glanced at the elderly woman behind the counter and chuckled.  It was a song.  Elderly woman standing behind a counter in a small town.  She was looking back at him with an unreadable expression stretched across her face.  Not the stare.  Something else.  Jules shrugged.  He needed to use the bathroom too.  It would just be a little uncomfortable going in there after Nikki had already paid for the gas.  He was always conscious of the workers thinking he was going to rob them blind, thinking back to his own days in retail.   He had had many gas station attendants make enough mistakes concerning him on the bike.  It seemed that half thought that he would just jump on the motorcycle and roar off once he had finished pumping his gas or would come in the store guns blazing and rob the place.  Or they would look right past the bike and automatically think he was in a car.  He wasn’t sure which was worse.
         He wiped the weariness out of his eyes and walked toward the door.  “Excuse me,” he said to an old man who was walking out as he was walking in.  They had almost bumped into each other, but the man brushed right past him as if Jules wasn't there.  “Bathroom?” he asked with a lazy nod to the lady behind the counter.
         “In the back by the beer cooler,” she said with a practiced smile.  Jules was sure she had glanced above her head to where he figured there was a video surveillance monitor.  Jules eased around a display of oatmeal cakes, mentally making a note to return to them before they left.  The door with the little stick-woman on the outside was closed and Jules could hear a hand air drier blowing inside.  He hoped she wasn’t going to get sick again.  After another Griddle House breakfast that morning, they had stopped twice for emergency bathroom breaks.  Jules stepped inside and closed the door.
         It stank.  A condom dispenser hung from one wall.  What was the point of glow-in-the-dark condoms? he wondered.  Maybe he’d have to see for himself, he mused.  A little treat for he and Nikki that night.  The mirror was partially obscured with some sort of rust or tarnish.  Jules winced, glancing at the mass of white and brown half-visible in the toilet.
         “Jeez, just flush the damn thing,” he thought angrily.  He hit the handle with the toe of his shoe...
         Something tickled his scalp.  It felt as though the skin on the back of his head was tightening ever so slightly.  He heard the door to the women’s room across the hall open, partially obscured by the sound of the gurgling toilet.  Nikki walking out to the front.  Someone else coming out.  Hah!  The men’s room just big enough for one person and here even in a little gas station in the middle of nowhere they have a women’s room with two stalls!  Talk about unfair privileges!  Discrimination even.
         Boots.  Stepping out... out of the... boots...
         Pain struck his head like a baseball bat.  Numbing.  He staggered, falling onto the floor.  He felt his mouth sag open.  Felt saliva drip down his chin from a quivering lip.  And the graffiti on the wall in front of him, the wall that he was sagging toward, blurring.  Blurred, shifting slightly.  The words changed.  And danced.  Phone numbers.  Something about someone’s sister.  They shifted, grew fuzzy.  Some vanished, changed into other rude statements.  Something about the Dallas Cowboys or Troy Aikman sucks cocks, or something coarse like that.  A hastily scrawled sketch of a naked woman became the peace sign, then a dollar sign before changing back.  Or had it been the other way around?  His stomach lurched.
         And then the pain lifted.  Just slipped away.  For a second, there came a grunt from the other side of the door.  Someone was trying to get in.  More goosebumps.  This time from the eerie sound of the person on the other side of the door.
         He regained his balance, shook off the disorientation, and looked back at the door.  No sound now.  The front of his jeans were wet.  Cursing, he staggered over to the door to listen.  Nothing.  No sounds of boots.  He could hear the woman at the counter sharing a laugh with someone, probably a customer.  Or a neighbor in the inevitable near-by trailer park coming to get out of the way of the storm.  Jules rubbed his chin, felt the saliva there and saw that his hand was shaking.
         He unlatched the door and looked out into the little hall between the bathrooms.  No one there.  The woman behind the counter was looking back toward the direction of the bathroom, talking to a man in a business suit, like she had heard the door open.  Jules felt his ears go hot as he walked out quickly, taking the aisle furthest from sight, and then reached the door.  His hands were still shaking and he could feel the woman’s stare on his back.
         Nikki was sitting in the car, drinking from a styrofoam cup and fiddling with the radio.  Rain was blowing into the covered area beneath the pumps, carried by the wind.  It felt cold on the wet area on the front of his jeans.  She looked at him as he clambered into the passenger seat, noticing the damp spot, an eyebrow rising in a question.  She sat her drink down next to another in a styrofoam cup bearing the store’s logo in the console between the seats.  She tried to steady them both as he closed the door, the car already pulling away before he had a chance to strap on his seat belt.
         “I got you one, too,” she said.  "Had to have one to settle my stomach.  What happened?”
         “You don’t want to know,” he said, wishing abruptly that he could take it back, that she wouldn’t have to hear the shaken sound of his voice.  She started the car, and pulled out.  His skin felt clammy.  “I need to change jeans.  Try to find somewhere to pull over, if you can.  I’ll get a pair of jeans out of my bag in the trunk.  And I don’t mean another gas station.”  He was leaning against the side of the door now, his face against the glass.  It was really raining now, coming down much harder than just a few minutes before at the store.  The wipers dragged back and forth.  Almost in slow-motion, it seemed.  They needed changing, Jules thought.  Great.  He didn’t want to put any more money into the car than he had to.
          “Man,” Nikki said, poking her head up as far as she could above the steering wheel to the window.  She was trying not to look at him, he thought to himself.
         “Don’t tell me you see a tornado,” he smirked.  “That would be great on top of this.”  He was slurring his words, he realized.  She looked at him sideways.  Probably trying to figure out if I’m flipping out or something, he thought.  Though she was being remarkably calm about it.  Which was just like her.
         “Nah, just the clouds and the rain.  I think you’ll get yourself a lot wetter trying to get out now and change in this.  Maybe we should head up the highway a little more and try to find a place to stay in the next town.  The lady in the gas station said Smithee was just a few miles away.  I don’t like to drive in this and...”  She stopped talking abruptly, changing lanes to get around a tractor trailer struggling in gears up an incline.  She wasn’t going to say it, he thought.  She wasn’t going to say, ‘And I don’t think you should be driving at all right now.’  She fiddled with the radio station for a few minutes nervously, shutting it off again just as suddenly.  “Can’t drive in this and listen to that noise,” she muttered.  Something about too many damn country stations.
         Jules took a sip of his coke.  Jeez.  It tasted sweet, too sweet.  Why was it that fountain drinks tasted so far off from the bottled stuff.  He had heard the boots, right?  The boots from the hallway at the inn, the night in the desert.  Slow, steady.  And a man grunting.  He took a long draw from the coke and snuggled himself against the side of the door, locking it just in case it pushed open.  You never knew about these old Detroit-built horses.  He could hear thunder rolling in the distance.  And Nikki talking to herself, mumbling at the other drivers.  He could hear the sound of their cars coming close in the rain on the wet pavement.  The whoosh.
         “Sounds like... ”  He forgot what he was going to say, already falling asleep.  And then he was passing a huge metallic water-tower on his motorcycle.  He was supposed to meet the guys that afternoon to play at a high school reunion.  And then he realized that it was his high school reunion.  He was late.  Why couldn’t he remember where it was?  He was near Bishopville, he thought.  Somewhere near it, but an unfamiliar area.  And then he saw people on the side of the road, staring at tornadoes in the distance.  The women were all dressed as cheerleaders, the guys in their letter jackets.  They were all just standing there, jaws dropped open.  And he watched too, feeling like an ant.  Seeing himself in the crowd from above.  Ants crawling.  He had seen that on TV once.  Or twice.
         “Drink this,” Nikki was saying, stroking his sweaty hair.
         Bright sunlight was shining through the window.  He wanted to sleep, to feel all the energy wash out of his body.  He pulled the blanket -- blanket? -- around himself.  Where did the blanket come from?  Still in the car.  A rest-stop.  He sipped more coke through the straw.  She must have gotten another one from a machine somewhere.  This one wasn’t as sweet.  If he could just get some sleep, he’d be okay.  All of this would be one bad dream.  Funny.  He had dreamed about tornadoes some as a child, intrigued.  And sometimes, as he would be lying in bed late at night trying to get to sleep, he would wonder if the sound he was hearing was a tornado or just a train making a late-night freight run through town.  Always wished his mother would be there to calm his fears, to tell him everything was going to be fine.  The sound never got any closer.  But the threat...  Not really scary things.  Just... something he wanted to stay away from.  Like dangerous animals, dogs, capable of doing anything on a whim.
         “Did you see any tornadoes?” he asked her, still sipping the drink.  She wasn’t there.  The driver’s seat was empty.  Spots of rain partially obscured the morning sun shining in on him.  It felt warm and safe.
         Jules felt a sudden prickling chill and goosebumps along his arms.  He snuggled deeper into the rough blanket.  This was really what he needed.  No worries.  Just a long, drowsy vacation, an escape from reality, whatever that was.  He wanted to tell Nikki to keep driving and let him sleep.  It felt great.
 She better be careful, though.  Sick people out there.  Twisted.  Remember what happened to her before.  That thought forced open an eye.  He peered out through the window until he saw her.  Saw the man talking with her, saw him raise his hand, striking the side of her face, the force knocking her onto the wet concrete.
         He wanted to scream.  Numbness held him.  He wanted to leap up, but he felt so tired.  He couldn’t move.  He might as well had been chained down.  The man was stalking toward him, though Jules could dimly see out of the foggy window.  He struggled faintly with the blanket, only tangling his hands further.  Drooling again.  He looked up at the window, saw his reflection in the glass.  Saw his reflection through the glass...  Through the glass...
         His skin seemed to crawl.  Pain lanced through him like a nail that had been heated until it was white-hot and then driven like butter into his skull.  His stomach was all in knots.  Coughing, fighting for a breath.  The blanket was off and he was rolling on the ground, fists flying to fight off groping hands that never came.  Jules forced his eyes open.  Everything was a white blur.  He could feel the wind on his face, and the sun.  He gripped the thick grass by the handful and tried to drag himself forward.  It was difficult.  He had to find Nikki.  The man with the face... that face...  Jules looked around in a daze.  It didn’t make sense.
         Not a rest-stop.  Somewhere out in the country.  He could see trees.  Rolling hills.  An old stone wall and a big tree--a huge tree--on the other side.  The road.  He looked for the truck.  Nowhere.  Had he been knocked out?  His head certainly felt as if he had been hit with something.  Rage tried to fill him from somewhere.  Dumped.  He had been dumped out in the country.  Nikki had been taken again, kidnapped, and he had been left for dead.  Where was she?  The road couldn’t be too far.  He had to find it.  Quickly.  Had to contact the police.
         Jules staggered over to the edge of the grayish stone wall, gripping it for support.  The branches of the tree on the other side hanging over gave him some shade.  He could barely feel his feet.  His head was swimming, threatening to spin out of control.  Squeezing his eyes shut, he held on.  He held himself there for several long minutes, listening to his pulse pound in his ears.
         It grew louder.
         Louder still.  Something tickled the back of his hand.  Jules rubbed it, felt wet stickiness.  He looked.  Blood.  He had cut his hands on some thorns.  As he watched, a dangling branch dipped down to brush his arm in the wind...  No wind.  The branch trailed against his forearm, thorns in it scraping bloody grooves in the skin.
         His mouth hung open.  He staggered back to get a better look at the tree.  It was hard to see, but the branches looked odd.  He could only see the top of the tree on the other side of the wall.  The wind must be really blowing it on the other side of the wall, though no wind reached him.  He stared.  The branches were twitching.  And then... and then the whole mass seemed to move.  It moved, slowly... down along the wall.  He watched in awe, dumbstruck.  It was like the tree was moving.  Moving down to a crumbled section about twenty feet away.  He could walk through there to get on the other side now, without climbing the wall, a distant thought told him.
         The tree was moving?  Moving toward that gap in the stone wall.  Being blown, his numbed mind suggested futiley.  He could see the top of its branches twitching wildly, as if the wind was blowing them in a dozen different directions!  The ends of the branches that hung over on his side were scraping the stone, minute thorns digging at moss growing there, twitching vaguely back in his direction.  He would be able to see the tree soon.
         And then he turned and ran with all the strength that he could muster.  Stumbled, then fell, hands flying, groping among grass and weeds and roots.  Through bushes.  Hearing sounds of the wind picking up behind him, breaking old twigs, scattering rocks.  He did not turn to look behind him.  He didn’t really think.
         A slick patch of leaves caught his foot and he fell hard against the ground, knocking the wind out of himself.  A sudden pain in his head caused him to pull himself into a fetal position.  He wanted to scream.  And then the blackness came on him.  He felt nothing...  Saw nothing...

         It was the sun that woke him again.  Or the sound of voices.  He could hear a car idling nearby.  And then nothing.  Again.
 

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