Adventure

651

"No more adventure", sighed the old man. He runs his gnarled hand over the wet basement wall. "This is way beyond the old humidifier", he thinks, as it noisily hums the water out of the air. His old hand aches from contact with the cold wall. "It's OK, baby boy", he whispers aloud. He started calling himself baby boy about a year or so ago probably be cause no one else would.

Sherran had called him baby boy even when his belly had ponched and his hair had thinned. Sherran has been gone for eight years. "In the shade of the old Joshua tree", she'd sing with a smile in her voice. His name is Josh. He was her protector, shading her from the harshness of life but could not shade her from a long, painful death.

He had found the old picture yesterday, going through the boxes of books he found molding in the basement. A picture of a man, sitting, his back against a Joshua tree. He is wearing a fancy serape and a not so fancy straw, sombrero. Sherran picked it up at a yard sale some twenty years ago. He guesses she spent the dime because of the tree.

He goes up the creaky wooden steps to the kitchen, picking up a splinter in his thumb from the loose railing. "Hot cup of tea", he thinks, "I'll figure something out.

The old man sits at the silent table, staring at the picture he left there. He sucks on his thumb, trying to dislodge the splinter that now pounds with a little heart beat. His mind goes back to when he first slipped. There might be a name for such things but Josh calls it slipping. He was an installer, telecommunications equipment, always on the road.

He hated the time away from Sherran but the money was good. His long drive from New York to the Ohio boarder took him seven and a half hours. Every weekend he drove home. One night he watched the dim dashboard clock ticking off the minutes and tried to slow the time in relationship to miles traveled. The first time he shaved twelve minutes off his time. His thoughts were he must have just gone faster. The next attempt it as twenty-four minutes then forty-eight minutes. This was when the side effects materialized. There seemed to be some sort of wake caused by the slipping. Cars too close behind swerved, lost ability to steer correctly. Josh couldn't live with causing a wreck to save time. He slipped only a night and only when traffic permitted. It was the other side effect he now pondered. The ninety-six minute side effect.

On night at sliding speed, Josh tossed hid pack of smokes on the passenger seat. They slid away. It was as if they had gone through the car door. He pulled over to check where they had gone. It must have been a optical illusion. No cigarettes. He tried other objects at the same speed, a cup, a can and many other small items. They all slid across the seat to...?

"Those things really happened", he said aloud, reassuringly. "If things went in, things must be able to come out". He looked at the man and the Joshua tree. The plan blew in his brain like a warm breeze. "This is maybe Arizona, somewhere hot and dry".

He took the picture to the basement, pulled the worn, green, straight back chair to the middle of the dank room. The old man's plan was to bring the warm, dry air the Joshua tree so loved to his moldy,wet world.

How quickly it came back. Twenty-four, forty-eight, ninety-six. Not the days and hours of thought he anticipated. The breeze did not push nor was it warm. It pulled through the basement wall. The old man stood. "Not Arizona, a movie studio", he smiled. The old man took a breath "Adventure".