V 1 N. 4 Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream

 

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream

or 

Family Secrets

by

George Brose

 

            The old lady’s body was stuffed in the trunk of my car, and I was driving almost in a trance trying to decide where to get rid of it, when I saw a young man most anxiously signaling for a lift somewhere.  I was in a suburb in the Pacific Northwest near a town not to be named for my own protection in this matter.  He seemed very well dressed to be on his way to school on that bright May morning.  My allergies from the annual pollen assault were really acting up as I looked through watery eyes, and for an unknown reason I slowed and offered him a ride.  I mean if you were in my kind of  predicament, body in the boot, would you be stopping for strangers?

            He hopped in and thanked me in a very polite sort of way and said he was heading for school and was a bit late.  It was his last day, and graduation was that evening and that was why he was wearing a coat and tie.  He had been with two other boys his age, but they disappeared when I pulled over.  

“What about your buddies?” I asked.

“Oh, they go to school in this district.  I go another five miles from here, but my mom had to go to work early this morning.  She usually drives me, but she was already late, and she didn’t want to risk losing her job at the cafeteria.”

“Why don’t you go to school in this district where you live?”

“It’s a long story, but to make it short, I dropped a pass in a football game.”  he replied.

“That’s not a big deal.”  I chucked in.   Lot’s of passes get dropped in a season.”

“Not the one that cost your team a shot at the state championship.” the kid shot back.  “I took so much grief for that from the coaches, my teammates, the school principal,  my girlfriend, even my English teacher, that I quit school.  Mom talked me into going elsewhere.  That’s why I’m heading down the road to my new school.  That was two years ago. Tonight I’m graduating and my mom will be there.”

“What about those two guys who were with you?”

“Oh, those guys.  We’ve been friends since kindergarten.  They never abandoned me.  We’ll be friends for life.  But they stayed on at my old school.”

“Okay, I’m beginning to understand.”  I said through watering eyes.

“Did you play any more football at your new school?”

“Actually, I did.”  The boy replied.  “It took me some time to build up the nerve to go back to the game.  And my reputation followed me even to the new school.  But my mom showed me the meaning of courage, raising me on her own, so I tried again.  This time I decided to play defense so I wouldn’t cost my team anymore touchdowns.  I even made a few interceptions and a couple of colleges are interested in my playing for them next year.”

“So where are you going to college?”

“I’m not.  I need more life experience before I pay money and my time to decide what I want to do in life.  Right now I think I want to write.   But I need things to write about that are beyond the classroom.  If I just read other peoples’ views of life, I’ll never be able to differentiate those things on paper from my own life.    Maybe if I go up to Vancouver I can get work on a fishing boat.  Make my way up to Alaska, work with a crew, experience a Pacific storm.  Then I’ll have something to write about.”

“I think you know more than most people already.”  was all I could add to the conversation.  Then I thought about my own predicament with the old lady in the trunk only a few feet behind us.  What was she doing there? 

To be honest, she was a crook, and I had been her acolyte in the drug trafficking game for several years before I struck out on my own.    Then when things were not looking too lucrative for me I decided to try extorting money from her, knowing her penchant for setting aside some of her profits for the future.  She was always talking about those wealth management ads on TV, but I never paid much attention.  So the day before I picked up my hitchhiker, I had gone to the old lady’s house to make some threats and see what it would get me.  Thought she might have something stashed under the bed.  But it didn’t work out. That’s not how wealth management operates.   Instead she choked on the burrito she was eating and I tried applying CPR rather than the Heimlich maneuver, and she croaked on the kitchen table.  Thanks be to Jesus her bodyguard had called in sick that evening. 

“So your mom raised you?  She must be something else.  She got a name?”

“Yeah,  Raven Willoughby.” the young man said proudly.  “She works at the cafeteria at the local community college.”

That answer hit me a good six inches below the beltline.  I knew Raven Willoughby in a way that I might well be this young man’s father.  And the old lady in the trunk must be his maternal grandmother.

“And she’s raised you all alone?  Where was your dad?”

“Don’t know.   She never mentioned him.  And I don’t care to know.  And we’re about to get to the high school, Sir.  You can drop me off at the next corner.  Thank you so much.  I really appreciate your kindness and for listening to my story.”

“Good luck to you in the future….”    I almost said , ‘Son’. 

I looked for the next ramp off the parkway where I planned to head to a ferry taking me over to an island.   I thought I knew a place there to dump a body that the tides would take out to sea.

A few years later, I heard on the radio that a John Willoughby, my namesake, had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.