Will-o'-the-Wisp




I had this girl’s number stored in my phone. The contact name was "Work." I'd been sleeping with her for the better part of a year. But then my wife called the number. I'd left my cellphone at home and she thought, like any sane person, she'd call the mowing company I worked for in order to get hold of me. What she got instead was the spry twenty-one-year-old whom I'd met months prior while mowing the Southern Illinois campus. She was into older men, and though I wasn't quite tens years her senior, I could pass as her father, which is probably why she called me “Daddy.” But this isn't about her problems.

That all got smoothed over. I started doing therapy with Sheila, my wife. This is how they went: we walked in, Sheila cried, the doctor explained how I was bipolar, afterward we went to a fast food joint (Sheila and me), then I went home to take a shower, where I did my crying. Being bipolar means no alcohol, no nicotine, no caffeine, and, of course, no philandering. So I quit them all. I think I was proving a point. I always had to do something odious. Even if it was the right thing, I had to justify it wrongly. So I got on the straight-and-narrow out of spite. And I was a good boy for a long time, a couple months maybe. 

But then I went back. I relapsed. Being a scumbag is inherent to my person. It’s in my blood. In my sex. Always has been. Always will be. Sometimes a guy has to get his eyes screwed out by a twenty-one-year-old and remind himself that there's a difference between banging and making love, between building a life and living in the moment, between home-cooked meals your wife sets out for you and a Hot Pocket some chick nukes in the microwave.

I blame the microwave. It lulled me to sleep. I didn't even hear it go off, didn't even feel her climb back into bed after she'd eaten. I was in snooze-ville. The sex wore me out. It was good sex. Weird, but good. 

I was supposed to be home for dinner by eight, but I awoke in a cold sweat. It was dark out and now she was asleep next to me. I reached over her and stared at the clock.

Eight-fucking-thirty. 

I sent Sheila a text: "stayed late @ work... be home by 9." 

I pulled on my pants, said my goodbyes. 

"When will I see you again?" she asked me.

I didn’t answer. I kissed her and left, buttoning my pants as I walked through the dorm. My mouth had the terrible taste of great sleep, but I had a tin in the car with a few mints and a ring inside that I remembered to slip on while heading home. I took back roads because I knew I could speed without getting pulled over. I hadn’t been driving long when I saw this blinking red light low on the horizon. I thought nothing of it. Air breathed through the dashboard vents, cooling my sweat. I always longed for winter. I hated that hot time of year, hated how my skin stuck to the leather seats, hated unpredictable winds and the storms they carried, hated freon. But what could be done except maybe another vacation to a cooler place where men ice-fished and their wives complained about it?

As the light on the horizon grew larger, its color changed from red to orange. It began winking. Manteno, where I lived, was still a wall of light pollution rising into the night, and beyond that, Chicago's lights erased every star the suburbs didn't. My nose twitched at the smell of smoke. A commercial came on the radio, then another. Soon I let off the gas to lean over the steering wheel and squint through the windshield at a woman running around a flaming mess of a car, its front end smashed against a telephone pole. 

I parked, leaving the motor on, the door open. I heard my shoes in the rocky shoulder. The woman spoke in "ands" and nouns: "Ambulance... baby... God... night." I heard a child screaming in the back seat. Flames followed the curve of the windshield and pointed at the sky. I ripped open the back door and dove across the radiating upholstery. Heat singed my knuckle hair as I undid the baby from its car seat, those soft ribs bending under my grip.

I held the child to my chest and rushed away from the flames toward my own car, where I handed over the baby to its mother, feeling on my skin and in my lungs how wonderfully cold a hot summer night night can be. The woman surprised me. She held our heads together---mine, the baby's, her own. I heard the flames laugh when the wind blew through them, heard the dinging of my open car door, heard the whispering of a prayer, all of it there on the highway where I wasn't supposed to be. 

And then I left. I didn't give my name. I didn't stick around for the cops. It was like any other thing. I stopped, saved a baby from a burning car, and kept going. I don’t know why. I had to get home for dinner I guess. I had to get home to Sheila. 

Back at the house, I found Sheila at the dinner table, her arms crossed. She was pissed. But I had a story, an excuse, a good one. I smelled like smoke for a reason.

“Listen to this,” I said.

I relayed the night's events to Sheila. Frantically, heroically, I told her about the car, the fire, the baby, and her knitted brow unravelled. Pretty soon, she grasped my biceps, put my head to her breast, kissed me. And she prayed as well, just like the woman. She thanked God that I was all right. But even in all her authentic worry, she could not help pulling away from my grip, staring me in the eye and, like any sane person, asking, “What were you doing down there?”

Days later, I sat alone in my hotel room, clipping the article out of the newspaper: “Child’s rescuer still a mystery.” It described me as an angel.