Bob Bickford

Someday, I want you to wake me up in the middle of the night because it’s raining. I’ll say that I want to go for a walk, and you’ll be happy because that’s what you were thinking, too.

(Dear Ghost, when we were little)

I got left behind in a Mississippi gas station once, at midnight.

Driving all night, asleep in the back of a rental Buick Wildcat, and we coasted in under the lights and the engine shut down. The quiet ticked, and my parents spoke in low voices. I always loved it when they talked to each other too low to be overheard. Not whispers, just the shorthand murmuration of people who know each other’s warmth and smell in the middle of the night. It told me they had lives other than what I saw, that they were real people who had business with each other besides me. It made me safe.

They got out of the car, quietly, a snicking of latches on either side, and their voices moved off. I had time, I thought. After a moment, I got out too, and breathed in the different world.

Mississippi smells different than anywhere else, at midnight. The black air is so warm it washes against your skin like underwater. In the distance, dogs bark. On the highway, semi-trucks are snoring dragons as they slow down. Electric lights don’t do much against Mississippi darkness. It all feels slow and sweet and dangerous.

The Gulf sign glowed orange and buzzed. A halo of moths swarmed around it, frantic to reach the unreachable light. In the shadows beside the station, the corpse of an automobile rested, its front end smashed into something unrecognizable. I wandered over for a look. The back was still a Chevy Biscayne, pretty new. I had enough light to see the dealer sticker on the trunk. Hattiesburg, it said. I didn’t know where Hattiesburg was, but the car was never going back there.

A little further in, I saw a humped line of more derelicts. I loved cars, and I loved old cars that had lost their drivers most. I wandered deeper. Too dark to investigate, and the dead cars seemed to sense me there. I already knew what ghosts felt like, even then, and there came a stirring I recognized. I skedaddled. If you don’t pump your arms, it looks like fast walking and not running in case anyone is looking. I rounded the corner, back into light, and…

The Buick was gone.

The cement in front of the pumps sat as empty as if my parents had always been my imagination. The Gulf sign buzzed bright, and the moths swarmed. I thought if I stayed perfectly still, the impossibility I looked at might change, but it didn’t. I was alone.

I didn’t know what to do. I headed for the fluorescents in the gas station office, because it was the only thing I could think of.

Filling stations didn’t have 7-Elevens in those days. They weren’t the places I go at midnight to get a hot dog and a Coke slush when I can’t sleep. Those days would come later. Back then, they were daytime about hot sun and gasoline and tire changes and dirty hands and tow trucks. Change got made out of a drawer in an office that reeked of motor oil and cigarette smoke.

At night, gas stations were about bad business. Especially gas stations at midnight, outside Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Four men sat in the office. They didn’t ask me what I was doing, a small boy alone in the middle of the night. They looked through me, and decided I was invisible. They went back to saving their hideous world, back to their darkness, their beer and ball caps and hate. One of the men held an automatic pistol in his lap. I didn’t need Freud or teenaged wisdom to understand his gun-caresses looked exactly like what they were.

I found a plastic chair, and sat there for a while in the cigarette smell and fluorescent light. It’s not hard to be tough, when you’re little. Nobody has come along yet to say different. You are what you are. I think I’ve always known about dragons and what they mean to me.

Back outside seemed like a better idea. The bell over the door tinkled as I went out.

I found some pebbles on the dark asphalt. I like touching sand and rocks, when I’m in strange places. No matter how distant, dirt is where I came from—and it feels like home because it is. Our mother’s skin, wherever we are, forever and always. I rolled the pebbles against my fingers, watched the dark road and waited.

Sure enough, the pebbles worked.

I’d like to believe they were charmed, because I still have some road to walk and I might need them again later. I also believe that my mom’s radar stayed just about perfect, and it would have been blaring alarms in her head before the Buick got more than a couple miles south. Headlights approached, like I had conjured them. It’s funny how you always know the lights that are coming to rescue you.

I don’t remember my mom and dad even being mad, or saying much. Get in. I curled safe in the back seat, asleep almost before my dad wheeled us back on the highway. Sometimes I hope when I die, I see 1967 Buick Wildcat headlights getting bigger, and my mom rolls down the passenger window as it coasts up.

Get in.

I can’t wait to make you laugh again, ghost. For now, the moments of you get caught by the wind, Polaroids blown like leaves. I run after them and I stuff my pockets, but some get lost. I still hold pebbles, and I still know which way is west. Someday, that same wind will scatter me into the Pacific. The currents know you, and will float me home.

Promise you’ll wake me in the middle of the night, whenever it rains.

***COVER PHOTO BY DONNEZ CARDOZA***

When I was little the library was my favorite place.I was born in Lone Pine, California. My parents liked to move and so did I, for a while. I have roots throughout the United States, but I was mostly raised in Toronto, Canada.

My father was a psychiatric social worker who grew up in the slums of Boston. He was a tough guy who got an education on the GI bill and pulled himself out of his birthright. He married twice, the first time to a woman who left him a widower. Alone with a toddler, I suppose he was determined that it wouldn’t happen to him again, because the second time he married a woman much younger than he was.

She was the product of a Southern family; royalty that included the same Duke family that bought a university and named it after itself. Wilful and rebellious, she scorned Southern convention, rejected the closeted skeletons and wide streak of alcoholism that hid behind decorated formality. She disowned her family, converted to Catholicism, marched for civil rights, and married the older man from a poverty-stricken background. I am the oldest of the seven children she bore, one after the next.

We were brought up in curious contrasts. There were the economies that so many mouths to feed on a middle class income made necessary; (hand-me-down clothes, Tang and powdered milk, peanut butter for ten thousand consecutive school lunches), but my mother’s background dictated private schools, music and dance and art lessons.

I attended St. Michael’s Choir School and studied piano and organ at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. I hated studying anything at all; my mother was determined that I should be a doctor and despaired over my future. I only wanted to read fiction, and did so endlessly. The library was my favorite, enchanted place (it still is). I didn’t realize I was in fact studying for what I wanted to do most.

My father’s plan to not be widowed again fell through, and my mother was suddenly gone when I was 16. He had been ill equipped to raise one child the first time, and now there were eight of them; the youngest only three years old. In some sense we lost him, too.

Life changed, just like that. My behavior guaranteed me a quick expulsion from my exclusive school. I did manage a high school diploma (by the skin of my teeth) but I was mostly happy to leave school for good. I lost an early love, and wandered to Los Angeles. I learned about the streets, and about living in the places that cause most people to lock their car doors when they drive through. I was blessed with the same genes that took my father through life in the mean part of Boston, and survived.

Eventually, I grew up and moved again, first to Atlanta and then back to Canada. I made a living in the ‘fixing cars’ arena. I live in a very old house on a wooded lot that is infested by dogs and turtles and parrots, and perhaps the ghost of a young girl. My teen-aged son is a light in my life who wants to be an author and a professional football player. I never tell him that both are nearly impossible, because they aren’t.

The library has continued to haunt me. When age said the possibility of a university degree was long past, I decided to try my hand at a novel anyway. Somehow I finished it, and have produced one a year since. I’m working on my tenth.

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