Our next play date was in Minneapolis, and it was breathing down our necks, so we were out of the Ocean State and back on the road again.

In the morning, Tom plunked down into the seat beside me and asked, "So, who were those two you were talking to out in the parking lot last night?"

I glanced up, caught a little off-balance by the suddenness of his arrival and the left-field-ness of his question. "Huh?"

He jerked his head back toward Providence; "That blond guy and his girl--the ones who were fighting out in the theater parking lot last night, just before the show."

Realization finally kicked in. "Oh---them. That was a guy named Tommy Pentacle, and his sister, Wish."

He gave me a fishy-eyed look. "His sister---who?"

I shrugged. "It's a nickname; 'Wish'."

Rocky came oozing out from under one of the bunks and began wrapping himself around my ankles, purring loudly and demandingly. I scooped him up into my lap for a little ear-scratching.

Tom thought the matter over for a moment. Then he smiled crookedly and commented, "'Wish Pentacle'; sounds like there should be people dancing around a fire and sacrificing chickens and goats, or something."

I sighed, because his ignorance and intolerance for the metaphysical was a continual, stone drag. I took another one of many stabs at enlightening him. "Actually, the pentacle is one of the suits found in a deck of tarot cards. It represents things and feelings of value, and corresponds to the modern day suit of diamonds. Today's playing cards are the descendants of tarot cards."

He shrugged. My little metaphysical lesson flew above and beyond him into the great vacuum of space. "No accounting for taste in names, I guess. So, are you in love again?"

He didn't have to make me sound so much like Davy Jones. I remember the old ads for the sole Brit among the Monkees: "He falls in love the way other guys breathe." Maybe I was a little more susceptible to the love bug than most guys, but I'd never been that bad, even when I was at my worst!

Instead of getting all bent out of shape about it, though, I plastered a big, sappy smile across my face and sighed, "'Wish'! Don't you think that's a bee-you-tee-ful name?"

You could almost hear the syrup glugging out of the bottle. He made a nauseated face and backed away from me, as though I had something contagious. "Uck! Don't do that, man! I just ate!!" He settled back in his seat, then continued, "Weird name, but she was a babe."

I stroked Rocky's back. "More than you know. I've been having dreams about both of them for months, now. After all that, it was pretty much inevitable that I'd meet them face-to-face."

I peered around at him with one eye to check his expression. Just as I had expected, he was sporting his Oh-Boy-Rain's-Left-The-Planet-Again face. I tried not to let it bother me this time. I could never wrap my mind around their inability to accept an entire sector of reality, and I decided that I might as well have a little fun yanking their chains about it now and then when they got too anal-retentive.

Therefore, despite his attitude, I pushed on: "Tommy all but admitted it, himself. You should have seen the look on his face when I joked about having met them in my dreams; talk about being damned by your own silence, and all! I could tell he knew I was on to him; he was pretty good at hiding his reaction, but enough got through for me to be sure."

I hesitated as another impression from the night before resurfaced and made itself a little better known to me. That's the way it works with me, most of the time; I get a split-second impression of something, but it gets lost in the rush of ongoing events, and just sort of circles around below the surface of my conscious mind, kind of like a shark trying to make up its mind about whether something it has found is edible or not, until I'm more relaxed and have the time and attention to spare to deal with it. It usually refines and defines itself a little more while it's waiting to resurface, so by the time I can get back to it, it's usually in a form that I can understand a little better than I could have understood the original impression. "And that Tommy character's not really Wish's brother, either. They look enough alike in the face to pull the sibling act off, but something tells me they're not really related."

I shook my head, puzzling over the impressions, wishing they were clearer. They wouldn't clear up, though, and I had to give up on them for the time being; maybe they'd clarify themselves a little more later on and resurface to let me have another look at them, the way they sometimes did. Or maybe they'd just vanish forever, and leave me puzzled for the rest of my life. I never had any way of knowing in advance which it was going to be; I just had to take pot luck with them. "Whatever the deal is, I hope she'll come clean with me, somewhere along the line."

Assuming we ever get in touch with one another again, that is.

A faint whining sound caught my attention and pulled it away from my train of thought; I looked around for the source of it, and found that Tom had fired up his Walkman, stuck in the earphone-plugs and pumped up the volume. That's his pretty close to perfect defense against things he didn't want to have to listen to; he gets to hear what he wants to hear, and whoever or whatever is irritating him just hears a whine in return. Odds were, he'd plugged in and tuned out just as soon as I'd broached the p-subject: Paranormal.

Rocky seemed to sense my irritation and swatted at the dangling earplug cords, then pounced on Tom's chest, kneading his sweater with much vigor. Those little digging claws awoke him with a squawk. Rocky hopped off him and scooted down the aisle and under a seat. Tom grunted and returned to his doze.

I loved Rocky for doing the feline equivalent of what I had wanted to do to Tom for shutting me out again. I had a feeling, though, that Tom's days as a skeptic were numbered.

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Copyright 2007 by Wren Hazard and Dennis Crabtree

Chapter Six |Table of Contents

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