Chapter Three

They say that your body tells you in strange ways when things are going badly and you need a change. If you have too much stress in your life, your hair falls out and what's left goes grey. You may even grow scars along the center of your chest where a triple bypass was never performed. This was the case with my uncle Ken. He owned the Champion Contacting Company for which I slaved. Or you might be struck with debilitating migraine headaches, see red and green squares all day and have half your body go numb. This was the case with my aunt Louise, Ken's wife.

My case was altogether different. My body had nothing to do with it. I knew as I sat in the car and the dust from fifty-two weeks of working in the dirt plumed like wood smoke from my cloth seats that I needed a change. I shook my head in disgust and rolled down the windows. I definitely needed a turn for the better, that was for sure, but what I needed even more at that moment was a hot shower to soak in my second wind. I was dead tired from scraping the dirt all day, but I was determined to get out that night, even if only to get out and sit lonely-like at some bar. So I drove away and let the wind sweep the dust from my car. I was headed home.

Home. The word means many things to many people. To some, it's a place where the people who care for them live, a place built in the image of their childhood memories of warmth and safety and stability. To others, it's a fortress designed to keep those memories out, the one place where those who profess love cannot touch them. To me, it's where Heidi lives. No. She's not a Swedish maid. She's a miniature dachshund of gigantic inner stature, and the watchdog of my own broken memories of what I consider home. She's also one of my better friends, and was named after her predecessor, Heidi the First.

We had two dachshunds in our home when Glenn was alive and we were still considered a family. Heidi and Gretchen. I had no idea why my parents decided to name them after busty blondes from some German beer garden. Small, dark and effeminate, those two fragile creatures went through the worst of what the Foster's called home. They were the only innocent ones in a war of guilty parties. Glenn was the first casualty, then my parents, for they were divorced shortly after his death. Gretchen was next. She and Heidi lived at my dad's house, a mile up the road from the house my mother retained in the divorce settlement. One Sunday morning, Gretchen ran out into the road. The car never stopped, the driver most likely never registering the small bump of his tires as he drove over her tiny body. At one time we had all been so close to those two little bits of innocence and happiness, but I really can't blame my father for picking poor Gretchen off the road by the hind legs and throwing her into a hastily dug hole. Once you lose a son, what's the loss of a dog. So no one mourned old Gretchen, except Heidi.

Heidi had watched the outrage committed against her lifelong friend, and at that very moment she became the final victim in our war against all feeling. She was never the same again. She would lie on the couch and cry. She stopped eating. She haunted the old meeting places of the friendship she had lost so abruptly and horribly. Often I would find her crying in the barn where she and Gretchen had spent afternoons napping, and I would cry softly for her, for Glenn, for my parents.

A few months passed and she began returning to the old house a mile down the road. My mother had since sold it, and a friendly, childless couple had moved in. They often took Heidi into their house with the love and attention we were neglecting to give her. She returned there again and again. One day she never came back to my father's place, and at once I felt incredible hurt, and absolute joy. She had found a home that offered her happiness, and none of us dreamed of taking that from her. And sometimes, when one of us dares to go back and look at all we have lost, we go and visit Heidi down at the old house. She's aged and grey now, and doesn't recognize us anymore, but it's my firm belief that she just doesn't want to.

I purchased this new Heidi from the same breeder who gave us our first two dachshunds, and I vowed I would always love her, never forgetting all that had happened before. So I spoiled her rotten.

As I opened the door to my two-bedroom apartment she came flying from the living room, dove to the floor, rolled across the kitchen and crashed into the refrigerator with a muffled cry. This was custom in our home. She performed for me, and I rewarded her regardless of the outcome of her newest trick. She retired with her biscuit to the kitchen where she munched intently.

I showered quickly, donning my good Levis, a white button-up shirt and finishing with my Nikes. As I combed my hair in the mirror, I looked hard at the man who was about to go out all alone and probably return the same way.

I've always been vaguely satisfied with my average looks, short dark hair, brown eyes, solid jaw. But the moustache? It was a neatly trimmed attempt, but I've always wanted a thick, hunter's moustache, the kind my cousin Andy sported; something you could stroke thoughtfully and curl up at the edges.

I started growing my little patch of dirt in college, at my girlfriend Jane's prodding. She thought it looked great. I thought it looked embryonic.

"It looks great," she said, looking over my shoulder at me in the mirror and wrapping her arms around my waist.

"It looks embryonic," I whined. "I'm gonna abort it." It was already covered with shaving cream, and I brought the razor close.

"It's your decision," she said as she turned to leave. "But I think it looks sexy."

This stopped me for a moment, as it always did when we played out this scene. Every week I would get sick of looking at that little patch of dirt she called a moustache, and every week she would somehow manage to save the poor, wretched thing from destruction.

"I can't grow a mustache. The hormones just aren't there."

"You have plenty of hormones. I'll vouch for that," she replied with a laugh.

"I've got to stop pretending I can grow one of these things."

I moved the razor to attack position.

"I still say it looks sexy," Jane called from the bedroom in the nick of time.

"Sure you do," I said. "You're just trying to make me feel better about my hormonal deficiency."

But deep inside I thought I knew the reason why she liked my moustache, as sparse as it was. She wanted me to be just like all the rest. They all had moustaches, full hunters' moustaches, and some had beards too. All of her past lovers, that is.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

The moustache stayed nonetheless.

I shook my head at my past foolishness and flashed myself a scowl in the bathroom mirror. I tried stroking my moustache thoughtfully, but just ended up looking foolish. If I could ask her, I bet she'd say she likes her men clean shaven now.

As I turned to leave the bathroom, I was met with a quizzical look from Heidi. She sat in the doorway with her head tilted to the left as if trying to figure out what I was doing.

"Regrets," I replied.

She only tilted her head the other way.

"Someday, when you have some, you'll take them out of the closet and look them over, too."

I walked past her and moved to the cupboard where I kept the dog biscuits. As I took one from the box, she came flying past me, diving to the ground and tumbling like an acrobat. Her momentum carried her under the kitchen table where she crashed into the legs of the chair on the other side. She yelped sharply. I bent down and peered beneath the table where she lay sprawled out on the rug, trying her best to look wounded and pitiful.

"Alright. It's still worth a biscuit."

I threw her the treat and she crunched happily away, waiving her tail behind her like a victory flag.

"I have to teach you some new tricks," I said as I put on my jacket.

Shabooms in Worcester was my destination, a clean-cut dance club with a bounty of good looking young women, and good looking older women to boot. I had been there many times with my cousin, Andy, when he was in one of his "cut loose from his wife" moods. Don't get the wrong idea of Andy. He's no cheater, or wife- neglector. He's just an over worked, under appreciated, married-too-long type of guy, or so he thinks. So whenever he feels he has to cut loose a little, I go with him, always under his orders to keep him in check if things get out of control. They usually did.

Shabooms was packed when I arrived. I had to park a half mile down the street. As I walked the distance to the club, I wondered if it was going to be worth the effort. If I had known all that would happen in the next few weeks due to the events that would take place that night, I would have turned around right there and headed home. But as it was, I walked into Shabooms and eagerly pushed my way through the crowd, and loud music, toward the bar.

I ordered a Molson. It was far too crowded and there were no bar stools free, so I walked back through the pulsing multitude looking for a place to sit. A spot at the back bar opened up momentarily, but before I could get there a fat lady in a too tight mini skirt squeezed herself in. So I found myself leaning against the back wall like all the other lonelies there who were trying to catch an eye, or a whole body for that matter.

Soon my Molson was empty, and I was musing wether it was worth weaving my way through the crowd and spearing an arm through the ranks of bar-stool-pigeons around the bar to retrieve another. Perhaps if Jane would have been there I would have decided differently, but as it stood, it was a must.

That's when I saw the girl, half way between the bar and the back wall, between sobriety and a meager buzz, and I recognized her immediately.

She didn't see me for quite some time. She sat alone at a table, some distance from where I stood stock-still amidst the swarming crowd. She stared absently at her drink, a Midouri Sour, I think, and occasionally glanced toward the bar. It was on one of those occasions that she saw me, and her gaze stuck fast. Her eyes grew wide with recognition, and bold even, as if they had just focused for the first time that evening. She smiled weakly. Very unlike her, I thought. Of course, it had been a very long time, more than fifteen years, and people do change. But that smile still hinted at something that wasn't quite right. She glanced back at the bar, then continued to stare at her drink.

I was hesitant. I reminded myself that I had to remember who it was I was dealing with, and figure out how to approach her, if I was going to approach her at all. Maybe the night held promise after all, promise of an old friend to talk with, promise of past times remembered. I backed off on that one. Did I really want to remember those past times?

She looked up at me again, this time more boldly, and . . . more longingly? Then she quickly looked away, and I was unsure of just what I had seen. What is it about old flames that can make them still burn you?

There she was, sitting alone, and all I could do was stand there and argue with myself. Maybe that was because I could still remember all that had happened between us, and what she had done to me. But that had been a very long time ago, and like I said, people do change.

I finally got up the nerve to go talk to her, but before I took two steps, a rough looking man approached her first from the bar. I say rough in a very broad sense of the word. His face was rough, his clothes were rough and he looked like he was used to roughing people up. Al Pacino with muscles, that was the first thing that came to my mind. Instantly I didn't like him. They were leaving together.

As she got up to leave, she placed something on the table when Al wasn't looking. Then she looked at me once more. It was a look I had seen only one other time in my life, and it chilled me. I was struck with an image of my brother in school, standing in the middle of a circle of boys. They wouldn't let him out of that circle, and one boy, the biggest, started punching. He wouldn't stop. My brother did not fight back. I didn't know why. He only looked at me as I stood watching, too young and too frightened to help. And that look tore from me the first bit of innocence I ever lost.

I wove my way to where she had been sitting. Under her drink was a business card.  There was the name of a hair salon, and a phone number. There was something very wrong here. I could feel it. My luck wasn't about to change for the better, that was for sure. And I had already gotten my hair cut a few days before.