Lunch had already come and gone without a single customer when I heard the clip-clop of horse's hooves on asphalt and looked up to see her coming down the middle of the main street of Bloomingdale. She wore cut-off jeans, a white tank top, and the captured sun in her long blonde hair. I remember trying not to stare, trying to look at my lukewarm Coke, at the bench I sat on, at the people eating lunch across the street in the diner, at anything but her.
The sound kept coming closer and stopped in front of me. I looked up, giving what I thought was my best smile. She smiled back, and I saw that she had hidden some of the sun there, too.
"Hello," she said. The horse sighed noisily, saying hello too.
"Hi." I stood up, suddenly remembered I was employed. "Can I get you something?"
"You work here?" she asked, not condescending, just curious.
"Yes," I said. "Well, sort of... for today, anyway." She laughed and smiled, and I think my heart ceased to beat right then.
"Well, I'd take a pop then, if it’s cold," she said. I ran to the cooler, extracted the bottle, put the cap expertly against the side and gave it a whack. The cap came off cleanly, with no spill. I walked back and handed it too her, reaching up so she wouldn't have to bend down.
I'd like to say our fingers touched, that some kind of spark passed between us, but nothing like that happened. I just fell in love, simply that.
"On the house," I said.
"Thanks," She took another drink from the sweating bottle. She had a slight accent that I couldn't place, but it certainly was not Bloomingdale, Indiana. And there were no stables for miles around.
"Been riding long?" I asked.
"Oh, a while. I live... far away," she said, not looking at me.
"Up by Rockville?"
"No, just... well, just far."
"Oh." My brain short-circuited, running a million things to say past me, trying to pick out the best one. I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. I watched her drink the Coke and look around the square.
I had a million more questions, like her phone number, her address, anything to keep her there a moment longer, but she just drank that last of the Coke and handed it back to me.
"Thanks," she said. "I've gotta get going."
And just like that she turned the horse and clopped back the way she had came. I called out goodbye, but she didn't look back, didn't wave.
I turned around, set her bottle among the empties, and when I turned back to watch her leave she was gone. Just gone. No sounds, no last minute glimpses.
Like she had vanished.
I looked around, suddenly realizing that the street was empty except for me. The usual after lunch rush of ten or so downtown buyers weren’t there. I was the only one that had seen her.
Of course I asked around about her. Old Man Johnson, when he got back from feeding the fish, knew nothing. "The term fishing implies catching fish," he said, "which I did not."
"And you're just addled from too much sun," he added.
Neither Mrs. Hampel, who ran the diner, or Tina, the waitress, had seen anything. It seems, on that warm spring day, that the girl had come and gone like a cool breeze.
And though I hung around the gas station for weeks, practically bugging Old Man Johnson into his grave, she never returned. After a month I only went there once a day, and I finally quit altogether after Christmas. She was never there.
I tried to forget her that year. I tried with Debbie Knight, with Brenda Hartwell, and with Stacy Landa. I tried with baseball, basketball, and football. But nothing worked. Always, in the back of my mind, was the smell of that warm spring day and the sight of that girl too pretty for words. Riding up, drinking the pop, and leaving.
As time went on the fact that she disappeared became less important. I told myself she turned, and I didn't see it. She galloped into a field, and I didn't hear it. And although my heart quickly accepted these answers, I don't believe my head ever did.
And that next year, when the snow began to melt and the trees to bloom, and Old Man Johnson started fishing again, I waited.
The days were still chilly, but I sat there on the same bench every chance I got. And on the first warm day, the first day I could have sat without a shirt if I was so inclined, she came back.
I wasn't sitting on the bench, though, I was inside, underneath Mrs. Sempel's car, trying to put brakes on it and mostly failing. I had the radio up loud, to compensate for the sound of hammer on brake drums, so the first thing I saw of her was the hooves of the horse from under the car. I slid out from underneath the car, wiping my hands on a shop rag.
I had changed in a year. Grown two inches, put on twenty pounds of mostly muscle from football and baseball, but she was the same. And I don't mean she looked that same, I mean she _was_ the same. Same clothes. Same hair. Same size.
It was as if someone had rewound the year, and we were back where we started.
"Hello again," I said.
"Hello again," she returned.
"Do you think I could find out your name?" I asked.
"Maybe," she said, smiling. Her eyes were brown, almost black. I noticed that her feet were bare. Had they been bare last year? I couldn't remember.
"I tried to find you, after last year," I said.
"I can be hard to find," she said, not looking at me. I got her a Coke before she could ask and handed it to her. This time our hands did touch, and hers was cool.
"So what is your name?" I asked. "Mine's Burt Rowe."
She took a drink. "Jennifer," she said. "You can call me Jenny, though."
Jenny, I said to myself, tasting the name. I liked it. It fit her, somehow.
"Can you stay longer this time?"
"I don't know... It looks like you have work to do," she said, nodding at Mrs. Hampel's Olds.
"That Olds can wait," I said. "She's not coming for it until tomorrow."
"Well, I can't really... I really have to go." She handed me the bottle and turned the horse around.
"But where do you live? What's your last name?"
"I live... far away," she said. "Goodbye, Burt Rowe," she called out, looking straight ahead as she left.
"Goodbye, Jenny," I said. This time I watched her go, watched her every second. I tried not to blink or breathe. As soon as she got past the Ben Franklin she started to fade. Her blonde hair slowly became the color of the hillside, the horse's legs faded into the black of the asphalt. She became dim, until I saw more of the hillside and the street than her, and then she was just gone.
I stared down the street. The phone rang in the shop, and I stood there. I heard Roscoe, the town mutt, knock over the garbage behind the diner, and I stood there. I wanted to turn my head, but I couldn’t. She was gone.
I didn't bother asking around about her after that visit.
I tried not to think about what she was, or what she might be. I tried not to love her, anymore. But over the years, I was always there. I was always waiting. It was as though I only existed for the three or four minutes a year that she appeared in my small town.
I asked her more, a little more, every year. She told me where she was from, and what her last name was. I scavenged the morgues in the newspapers for miles around until I came across the only possible explanation: an unidentified body, found in the woods along a trail not far from Bloomingdale, thirty years ago. Wearing cut-offs and white shirt with blonde hair. It confirmed what I knew, but couldn't change my feelings.
I found her grave out at what used to be the pauper's cemetery. A simple stone, gray and unremarkable. The cold of the day couldn't match the cold I felt inside looking down at that ugly stone. I wanted to replace it, to erect a monument with shrubs and flowers to her memory, but in the end I could not. I'd have to explain, and the explanation was insanity.
I finally bought the store from Old Man Johnson the year before he passed. She kept me rooted to this small, dying town. The guys down at Elmer's, the only bar in town, think I'm just a good ol' townie, born to live and die here. They don't know about Jenny.
No one knows about Jenny.
Last year I told her that I loved her, and asked if there was any way she could stay. She said nothing, but I saw the tears in her eyes as she handed me the empty Coke bottle and turned the horse to leave.
"You can come, though," she said.
My hope is that this is the last trip she will make from wherever she is to this little gas station in Bloomingdale. I have the horse and I'm squeezed back into clothes I wore fifteen years ago when I first saw her.
As she rides up she sees me, standing here holding the reigns. I look down and see the sixteen-year-old body back, young and strong. She dismounts and gives me a cool, short kiss, the first time anything other than our hands have touched. This time I do feel something, like a low current, pass between us. I hand her a Coke and she remounts, as do I.
They will find my body later that day in the front seat of my ‘75 Dodge Charger. The Charger will still be running, with all the doors and window shut and all of the vents and cracks plugged with wet towels. I didn't want to screw it up. I had to be sure.
And as we ride off up the hill, side by side, the countryside begins to fade, and the road turns to hard packed dirt. She puts her bare heels to the horse's flank and laughs as he picks up speed, her hair trailing behind her in the wind.
I stop and watch, pausing between worlds. Then with a snap of the reigns and a touch of my heel, I break the horse into a gallop to catch up.
Bio:Paul Strain lives in East Central Illinois with his wife and three sons. This is his first publication since taking time off to establish a career. Hopefully, it won't be another ten years before the next one.
E-mail: pwstrain@mail.com
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