Day Out of Days Read Online Free PDF

also left the seat warmer on. I’m about to drop the gearshift down into drive when I look up through the snow and there she is—Becky Marie Thane—standing directly between the headlights, staring straight at me with a look not unlike my dog’s. She’s standing there shivering, without her coat, and the snow catches hold of her red hair and glows in the backlight, like a halo. Am I now having a religious experience?
    She comes running up to the window as I roll it down, amazed. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I just thought maybe you’d want to stay in my room since you can’t—I mean, I have a couch and everything. A separate couch. It’s a fold-out, you know—an alcove with a sink. Not a whole room exactly but I just thought it would save you a trip in this weather. I’m not trying to—you know—”
    “Oh, thanks, Becky,” I cut her off. “I really appreciate it but I ought to be getting on down the road.”
    “All right, that’s fine. That’s fine.” She smiles. “I just thought I’d offer. I wasn’t trying to—”
    “No, thanks so much though. It was really great to see you again.”
    “Bye,” she says sweetly, and gives me a little fluttering wave, then blows me a kiss as I drive off. I watch her in the rearview mirror as she darts back into the lobby, stomping the snow off her shoes at the entrance. I’m trying to think what movie this reminds me of. One of those corny black-and-white forties Air Force films with tearful good-byes as Jimmy Stewart flies off into the wild blue yonder. Why is everything I’m conjuring up in black-and-white?
    The snow is really assaulting the windshield now, as I head for the Louisville junction, the dog turning tight circles in the back, then dropping down into a ball and tucking her nose into her tail; resigning herself to yet another hundred miles of black highway. Istart drifting off into the past as the visibility gets dimmer and whiter. Maybe there’s a correlation between external blindness and internal picturing. I can see the edge of the mattress now and our gray bowls side by side; our knees touching. These are some of the other things that go sailing through my head as I strain forward to keep the car between the lines: Leaving the desert on a clear day. Boarding the Greyhound. Getting off in Times Square. Huge poster of a pop group from England with Three Stooges haircuts. Blood bank with a sign in the window offering five dollars a pint. Black whores with red hair. Chet Baker standing in a doorway on Avenue C. Tompkins Square Park, with its giant dripping American elms. Cabbage and barley soup. Hearing Polish for the first time. Old World women in bandanas and overcoats. Cubans playing chess. Rumors of acid and TCP. Crowds gathered around a black limo, listening to a radio report of Kennedy’s killing. Jungles burning with napalm. Caskets covered in American flags. Mules hauling Martin Luther King’s coffin. Stanley Turrentine carrying his ax in a paper sack.
    I’m turning around. I’m in the middle of a blizzard and I’m turning around. I come up on a giant tractor-trailer rig jackknifed in the ditch. No sign of a driver. I’m up over the median now with the hazard lights flashing, hoping nothing is roaring down on top of me from the opposite lanes. I’m driving blind. I’d get off to the shoulder but I can’t tell where it is. Something is happening to my eyesight from the constant oncoming flow and swirl of snow. I feel as if I were suddenly falling through space and the wheels have somehow lost all contact with earth. I really am coming completely apart now, shaking, terrible shivers, gripping the wheel as if any second I could just go plunging off into the abyss and never be found.
    Somehow I instinctively poke my way back through the gray to the looping exit, and limp back into the Holiday Inn parking lot. The family from Tupelo are unloading their huge crew-cab dieselin the whirling storm, sliding their coolers and luggage across