I just moved here and I’m renting a room in that apartment with the engineer and his Rottweiler. There’s no washing machine so I spend Sundays doing laundry across from McGuckin’s Hardware, in the same strip mall as the 24-hour diner with the perfect over-easy eggs. It’s no small feat to perfect the over-easy egg, and Bob knows this as well as I do. It’s one of the things we share, along with our birthday on the 24th of May. His is years before mine, of course, but that doesn’t feel like it matters when it comes to birthdays. We’re Geminis. Ruled by Mercury. We get off on communicating.
We were both surprised (Midwesterners that we are) by how much the sun shines here. We marveled at the aspen leaves (which actually do quake) and the sunsets over Flagstaff Mountain that pink up the undersides of the long thin clouds hovering over Pearl Street.
There’s a mouse in the laundromat today, running from underneath the commercial strength washers, scurrying along the walls, dashing under dryers. I have sandals on because it’s summer and maybe we’ll dip our feet in the creek later. I let out a screech because what if a little bag of blood runs across one of my bare toes but then I bite my lip.
I don’t want a scene. If I play it cool, no one will recognize him. I’ve taken him to the over-easy diner, the farmer’s market (which he hated, can we leave now, he kept murmuring) and the Safeway out by the movie theater without anyone pointing or staring. Bob’s the kind of guy you see a lot of in Boulder—scruffy scarf, puffy hair, shoulders up, eyes down. So, he kind of blends in if you don’t look close enough. We just walk along minding our own business, and it’s worked out fine so far.
If you’d asked me which Bob I wanted, I’d have said ‘Don’t Look Back’ Bob; skinny, sarcastic, chainsmoking. Grilling me about what I liked about him. But I got 1970s Bob. Post motorcycle accident, a little weight in his face. Singing about cabins in Utah and reminiscing about past loves. He’s probably a better companion.
I’m stacking my panties and standing on one foot, one eye on the last place I saw the mouse. Bob wipes his forehead with a faded bandana. Hot one, he croaks, his voice like sun-cracked earth in one of those sepia photographs of starving families fleeing the Dust Bowl. We could take a dip after, I suggest, shoving my pile of pastel Jockeys in my laundry bag. I imagine us on one of those big rocks past the library, our toes numb in the froth watching kayakers practice tumbling upside down in the rapids.
Usually, Bob’s up for anything, but today he seems preoccupied. The mouse skitters under the machine my stack of quarters was on and I plant my butt in a chair and lift both feet off the floor. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Bob chuckles. He has this way of making fun of me, kind of gently putting me down while making it obvious that I amuse him. He pulls a harmonica out of his breast pocket, his favorite in the key of C, and starts to blow into it. C’mon man, I whisper, looking around, they’ll recognize you for sure. Bob ignores me and starts to play the harmonica part from Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright, the song that inspired me to buy that Yamaha guitar for 200 bucks and throw it in the backseat and drive all the way out here with no plan and no job and no money.
I’m trying to figure out what this has to do with the mouse when my last load starts to slow down in the dryer, my cut-offs and tank tops slowly tumbling over each other one more time and one more time and one more time until they lie still. The mouse is scared of the music, I guess, because it’s nowhere to be seen and I stuff my clothes in my bag without folding them, just to get out of there quick before someone spots him and the jig is up. But Bob shakes his head when I gesture toward the door, my bag over my shoulder.
It’s the part of the song where you remember that this is not going to end well, that it didn’t really even start well and the tune you thought so naively was a little love song the first time you heard it ends up a quick-witted break-up song every time.
I get what he’s saying even though his face is half covered with two hands and that harmonica. But I’m not ready to be Bob-less. I just got here. I don’t know anybody, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next. I don’t even know what I came here for. All I know is I couldn’t stay where I was, and Bob has been with me all the way.
Bob stands up and walks out the back door. Down the street is the poetry school where Allen Ginsberg and all them hung out. I think maybe he’ll wander over there. I follow him and peek down the alley. Bob is headed the other way, north toward the strip club and the highway to the national park. Maybe he’ll head even farther west, I think. And then I realize other people need him, too. And I can probably do this on my own.
I hear the harmonica getting softer and softer, but Bob never does look back.
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