Premonition - For Jonnie, 40 Years Later

A very select few people in my life (three) saw a version of this a few years ago, a chunk out of a short story I'd written. I pretty much haven't touched it since, since it kinda burns. Maybe you know what I mean.

I've been asked if it's fiction. Probably. I lie a lot, really. More likely than not I always have, and surely anyone whose followed me all these years knows that. Anyhow, fiction or not, there's a specific day involved, at least in my mind. It's that kind of unimportant detail that roots a writer in a narrative, or so I hear.

So, fictional or not, a decennial anniversary has arrived. Isn't that more important than the other ones? I don't know. It just takes my breath away that a sweep of time that vast can run through one's fingers in what seems only a heartbeat - or, as you prefer, it intrigues me as a writer.

Anyhow, it just felt like it needed updated. So if you don't want to read it again, that's OK. I'm just indulging myself, and will shortly put it all away again for another few years.

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We began bombing Hanoi and Haiphong again that day for the first time since '68, the B-52 heavies running routes up the Red River Valley out of Thailand and dropping tons of spectacular rolling death. The gooks' Nguyen Hue Spring offensive was taking a heavy toll - they weren't dicking around with hit and runs by their Charlie surrogates this time, and no longer even bothered with the pretense of a popular guerrilla war - there were 120,000 uniformed NVA regulars and over 1000 tanks on the roll on the wrong side of the DMZ. We killed - well, a lot. And the South eventually turned them back to hold on for another bit, mostly because of our airpower. Again. I would doubtless be going back soon.

But I didn't care about that. Don't even recall hearing about it.

Apollo 16 launched for the moon that day, but was ignored. Since the high drama of Apollo 13, the space program had settled back into obscurity. There would be only one more flight to the moon, ever, and that before the end of the year. But nobody gave a shit, and our last push out into greatness died.

But I didn't care about that. Don't even recall hearing about it.

All I knew about that day, and all I care about it now is...

That last day of the last weekend was dying; the sunset had broken sullen red through the cold overcast signalling the late hour. I had to go. Her last kiss had been almost desperate as we squeezed together for the last time before I got in the car and started down the street.

I could still taste her. Can now, if it gets to that. Memory is a powerful thing.

In my rearview mirror, she was there on the sidewalk in front of her house, being brave and waving. The drizzle had stopped, but as I drove away the raindrops on the window ran and blurred her into watercolor softness till I couldn't see her anymore. Funny, she's clear in my mind, like one of those trick photographs where everything is out of focus except that one thing that so sharp it could cut. Maybe it was  because I'd seen her being brave and waving me goodby so many times before. God knows, it's how I've seen her in dreams a thousand times since.

Down the road, to the main streets and across town into Kennewick, onto US 395. The Blue Bridge rose in front of me, the final divider, where I would cross the river and slip out into the cold desolation of the desert to begin rolling the endless miles away from her. But something was wrong. I felt a charged pressure buzzing behind my eyes and in my throat. I thought I was going to be sick.

I pulled off the road and stopped in a parking area near the water in Columbia Park.  I got out of the car and stood leaning against the door-jamb, hands on my knees. A sharp wind skipping off the water cleared my head a bit, and I suddenly knew what I wanted. I clambered up onto the hood and looked back, kidding myself I could see the roof of her house miles in the distance as the sky roared tattered red and grey and black over me.

I hated leaving again. I hated the cold. I hated the drive. I hated the alone. That was it, all of it - I hated the alone.

I wanted to go back.

The cold wind flicked at my hair as I strained to see her, and a sudden chill ran goose flesh up my arms and between my shoulders. I lit a cigarette and stood on top of my car, alone in the deserted park, smoking. My eyes were watering in the breeze, trying to see what I knew was invisible from there.

Something needed to be done, but I could not think what.

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It had been different this time, somehow. The joy was there, the love, the frantic dance to squeeze the weekend dry of every slippery, escaping moment we had together. But there was a distant, almost unheard dissonance, a tone set my first day in town.

We were driving down a two-lane country road. For the entire morning, she'd been quiet, introspective, and seemed more so as she watched the countryside speed past us. I turned the radio off, and asked her if everything was all right.

Without warning, she suddenly put both hands to her face and burst into tears.  I made a near-panic stop on the side of the road, and pulled her to me.

"Good God, Jonnie, what's wrong?" She continued crying, great gasping sobs. Slowly, the tears ebbed.

"Just hold me for a little while," she said, quivering in the circle of my arms, her face pressed into my shoulder and neck. "It will be OK. I just got really scared for a minute."

She was just under too much pressure. She would be graduating from high school in a couple of months, and we were expected by everyone to marry, although we'd set no dates, and she was going to leave the only home she'd ever known to be with me. It was a scary time, life-changing stuff, too fast for her to absorb it all. That's what I thought.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

"Look, I understand," I said, "it's just too much, that's all. We can slow down, take a breath. We have our whole lives. We can wait. I will wait as long as we need."

"No," she said firmly, "That's not it. That's not it at all. There's something wrong. There are things I need to say and I can't say them, I don't know how...I just feel like something is about to happen. And I’m afraid and I don't know why."

I chuckled, and indulgently kissed her forehead.

"C'mon, babe, it's US. We're together. We're going to be together forever. Nothing's happened, nothing's changed."

She looked up at me, teary-eyed and flushed, still sniffling, and said "Tell me it's going to be OK."

I smiled and gathered her into a bone-crushing hug. "It's going to be OK. I promise," I said.

She kissed me (salt from her tears) and held my face in her hands, and looked into my eyes. As always, I was instantly lost in those bottomless pools.

"Remember last summer when I said I'd never doubt you again? You say everything's going to be OK, then it's going to be OK. That's all I need. I'm just being silly." Her eyes locked onto mine, looking for...something.

After a few moments, satisfied with whatever she saw, she softly kissed me again then slid back over to the passenger seat. She folded the mirror down out of the sunshade.

"God, I'm a mess," she said, laughing and sniffling. She wiped her eyes and cheeks with a tissue from her purse, and beamed that heartbreaking smile at me, sunlight on rippling fields of wheat.

"I'm sorry," she said. "You're right. There's just a lot of stuff going on right now and I'm probably a little freaked about it. That's all."

She didn't believe that for a second.

And the matter was dropped. But there was a shadow cast, because for all my protest and assurances and logic...

I'd felt it, too.

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I jumped down off the hood and started the car. I needed to go back to her. It was as urgent a need as I'd ever had, almost physical pain. I needed to gather her up, I needed to protect her from the dark mirrors of the future, I NEEDED to take her with me.

NOW.

I drove back up out of the park to the 395. The ribbon of asphalt stretched left and right in front of me. The car idled. All I had to do was turn right instead of left, and go back and get her. I knew she would drop whatever she had in her hands, walk away from whatever she was doing and come with me without hesitation, without question, with nothing but the clothes on her back, if need be.

Forever, it seemed, I sat there, crushed in the grinding space between past and future, the springs and gears and balances of time stopped, waiting patiently.

I laughed at myself angrily and shook my head to clear the fog. God bless her, she was turning me into a romantic fool. We would be together, but there was going to be no white knight sweeping her up and taking her away. It was real life, for all that I loved her and she loved me. The love was enough. And I had promised her father, and she was only two months from graduation. We could wait two months. Three at the most. And I was going to be driving vicious snow tonight back up over the passes no matter what happened, and waiting any longer would only make it worse. So, why was I still sitting here?

The car idled. A gust of north wind, promising a bad drive, rattled the car, nudging me to decide. I snorted with annoyance and jammed the gearshift into first, and popped the clutch, screaming out into the street.

Was that it? That random swirl of air, created by the flutter of some butterfly on the other side of the world months ago to meet me there in that second - is that where it is, the dividing of the path? Is life really made up of such miniature intricacies?

I don't know. And I certainly wasn't thinking of it then.

As I turned left, not trusting myself to even signal, and accelerated out onto the road, past the fork of decision, time quietly resumed, unnoticed; fulcrums shifted and forces swirled to new moments and directions changed and life unraveled and knit new patterns. Links and paths faded and disappeared and new ones stretched ahead without even making a ripple around the non-spaces where worlds that might have been once were.

Blind as a newborn kitten, I didn't see any of it. As I headed out onto the desert, I sourly reflected on how badly I hated premonitions. Some said they were echoes from futures unlived, darkly glimpsed reflections of the infinite, mirrored hallways of possibilities...

For me, I didn't believe in them at all.

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In Our Next Episode: Something else, probably involving redheads.