Popcorn Songs

It's been a long time since I dreamed during "nightsleep" and remembered it. But when I'm sleepless and manage a quick nap, it's almost always dreaming. I woke around 2:30 this morning after going to bed around 11. I read a chapter or two, checked email, played a game of spider solitaire, went back to read in bed, and finally got a 20 min nap in around 4:30. While napping, I dreamt I was driving at night along a dirt road, there may have been more to the dream, but I only remember the headlights going out and me struggling to get them back on, not knowing how to work the car's controls. I woke with that tingling feeling I get when I wake up from dreaming right before the bottom of the fall, or just before the monster eats me.

In college, a few friends and I were in my car driving deep in Pennsylvania Dutch territory. We turned off the main highway onto a little side road for who knows what reason. We were joking, laughing, basically oblivious to most of what was around us. We weren't drunk and hadn't even been drinking. I didn't do that. I was driving on instinct--flying casual, as it were. We rounded a corner that I reckoned would take us back to the highway when all hell broke loose. The car lurched like it hit something. There was an enormous thud from the front passenger side and a grinding of metal that sounded like something really important broke. The car stalled. The headlights went out.

I'm not normally superstitious, but right then I was scared shitless.

The car was still coasting when my roommate, Al, sitting in the passenger seat asked, "Did we hit somebody?"

"No fucking way. No fucking way!" I wasn't trying to convince myself of it, there was just too much flying through my head to say anything else. I knew there hadn't been anyone there--I wasn't ignoring the road, just not actively concentrating on driving. I would have known if there was someone there to hit.

Brian in the backseat pulled himself halfway into the front between us and said, "Should we go back and look?"

That was when I realized how terribly frightened I was--that I didn't want to go back and look, even if there had been someone there. If I'd thought there had been someone, it would have been easier. I could have gone back and done what I needed to do to help the person. But I was certain that we hadn't hit a person. But we'd certainly hit something. If not a person, then what?

"We gotta go back and look," Al agreed with Brian.

Maybe it was the story I'd heard a few weeks before that paralyzed me. A friend had confided in me about a date that ended at a lookout point near a lake. She said that one minute everything seemed normal, then lights appeared over the lake, moving too fast to be a boat and where no car could have gone. There was a noise coming from the same direction, something between a hum and a buzz. The lights raced toward them over the lake growing bigger and brighter until you couldn't mistake them for anything man made. In a panic, they flung themselves onto the ground and rolled under the truck, as the sound grew lounder and the lights brighter. They huddled together as the deafening sound and the play of shadows on the ground told them the lights were hovering over the truck. The car horn went on and off in the din. If there'd been anyone to see, I wonder whether the headlights were flashing.

She said it ended so suddenly, she wonders whether it ever really happened.

The headlights on my car began to flicker. I turned the ignition and the headlights died. The engine didn't turn over. My stomach made up for it.

I put the car in park, but I wasn't ready to get out.

"Do you guys really think we hit someone?" I asked.

Brian cracked first, "Shit, I don't know."

"It doesn't matter, we need to go make sure we didn't," Al said. He had a habit of shortcutting arguments.

"Dammit." I got out of the car and circled around the front to the passenger side, watching the direction we came from. Al and Brian were climbing out.

"If we hit someone, wouldn't we see damage?" I pointed at the unblemished front and side of the car body.

"You lost a hubcap," Al said.

We all looked back from where we came, at the bend in the road where something happened. The moon was out enough for us to see ourselves and the car, but trees covered the road behind us. There it was pitch black and we couldn't see a damn thing. The roof of an old farmhouse reflected light a ways back from the turn.

We all started walking slowly back down the road.

It's some sort of medical fact that when you can't see your other senses become more acute. All of us must have heard, smelled, felt or tasted something, because we all stopped walking together and none of us looked eager to go into the blackness under the trees.

"If the car starts, we can turn around and point the headlights down there. We won't see anything without light anyway," I tried to sound more reasonable than frightened. I think I failed. They agreed. We walked back to the car and got in.

It would have been a miracle that the car started, if it hadn't stalled as soon as I took my foot of the gas.

My voice started as a low rumble and built to a scream repeated, "No no no no no!" I was beating on the steering wheel. If there had been neighbors, if there had been anyone out there, they would have come looking at the racket. But there wasn't anything, except whatever we'd hit and some old farmhouse that was probably abandoned. That meant no phone. In the age before mobile phones, that meant we were up shit's creek.

We sat silently in the car for quite awhile.

I turned it over again and didn't let off the gas. It started and kept running. I played a delicate game of balance with both feet on the brake and gas to get the car in gear and we were moving.

We were back to the highway when Brian asked, "Are we gonna go look?"

I was hoping to avoid the question. "I'm afraid it'll stall if I try to put it in reverse. We'll drive back up the highway to where we turned the first time and make a loop."

We did it. We couldn't see anything. We didn't stop for fear of stalling. The headlights cycled dim and bright all the way back. None of us said a word the rest of the way.

The next morning, the car wouldn't start. I described what happened to a guy I knew at the auto parts store. This was back when I still did some of my own car work. He said it sounded like the alternator went. I had it replaced before noon. I have a scar to prove it. Eventually I had to replace more parts--the car's electrical system never fully recovered from that night.

I drove back to the bend in the road by myself. I found the largest pothole I'd ever seen, next to a collection of hubcaps leaned up against the faded picket fence around the farmhouse. I didn't stop. I didn't see my hubcap.