Lets haul this story to the attic

Thinking about Freckles and the latest news caused me to have an unpeaceful sleep. Either it was that or the pizza I had before I bedtime.

I dreamed Freckles was holding a gun to my head.

"I ordered pepperoni and I expect you to deliver me pepperoni," she was yelling.

The pizza in the dream was finally delivered. There was a black funeral wreath atop the box.

I put on my cowboy boots to leave.

"Nice boots." Freckles said.

"I need them, I may be headed for the last roundup."

There were some important questions I knew I wanted to ask her, but in the irritating fashion of dreams, I could not put the right words together.

" How are you going to find me?" she said in a voice that was fading with the dream. '"How are you going to find me if you don't know who I am?"

Her face seemed to melt and some of her flesh was now falling directly on the pizza in rather neat little circles that bore an uncanny resemblance to pepperoni. Her eyes fell somewhere into the pizza like two olives and I found when I stared into the empty sockets, that I could no longer remember if they were blue or green. As the dream ended, I heard a dull explosion somewhere in the near distance and woke up.

Freckles seemed like a dream. maybe she wanted it that way. I patted the pizza box affectionately a few times. A still, small voice within my head was beginning to whisper to me. This had happened before. Most every one I knew was jealous of the voices, because they only talk to me. Something about the voice was reassuring and it told me there was a solution to this Freckles mess.

In a perfect world we would all laugh and laugh and the birds would sing in perfect stereo, then tragically little toy trains would derail and people who really loved each other would go their separate ways in this cantilevered remedial world.

I had never particularly minded being alone and I minded it even less now that almost everyone was gone. I had my memories. What else did I need?

The only business I had today was to call Freckles and settle things once and for all, and maybe do some daydreaming. And daydreaming as most government analysist say today can be hazardous to your health. Of course, as most government analysist today also agree, so can everything else.

The little voice inside my head kept saying this would be my lucky day. Not that you should ever actually listen to those kind of voices. The voices guided me to a bedside table with a drawer. As if guided by the voice I opened the drawer and inside I found an old Timex watch given to me by my friend Bill the day he was killed my a mortar in Vietnam. I reached further into the drawer and found some old photographs I hadn't even realized were there.

I put the Timex on the table and poured a cup of coffee and put the photographs there also. My apartment I reflected, had turned into a halfway house for relics of dead friends. Later as I was flipping through the pictures, sifting through the ashes of my youth, I picked up an old picture that Miss Amarillo 1969 had given me. She was a young girl of about 19 holding the hand of a soldier at some beautiful, forgotton, faraway bus depot. The soldier was wearing a Class A US Army Uniform and you could tell he loved the beautiful young girl and that she loved him. He was a good looking lad when the picture was taken.

Miss Amarillo's eyes were shimmering roulette wheelsof childhood, spinning stars into my soul, making me imagine that the girl knew she was destined to die young and to frolic forever in the airport waiting lounge I was pleased to call my mind. And in her eyes I saw every woman I had ever loved. I no longer had to wait to work things out with Freckles, In a very real sense I already held the answer in my hands.

I took a walk and as I walked the sad undecaffeinated truth kept stepping up and slapping me in the face. I had been looking at things through the wrong end of a telescope and they seemed very far away when, in truth, they were close enough for slow dancing in the make-believe ballroom of my brain.

I don't know if this train is bound for glory. I decided I had to do what my mother had told me many times to do. " Sometimes son you just have to follow your heart."