I went to bed around midnight with no call, then I slept on egg shells waiting for him to call to tell me he had arrived. I woke up around 2am and tried to call him and it went straight to voicemail. I was worried but I heard a ting about 45 minutes later from my inbox and then I found this email:
Tara didn't want me to drive. Meeting mom and Sam. Raining really hard as I hit 29 Palms. Jamming and fell asleep coming around corner and a coyote sitting in the middle of road. I am half a sleep, slam on breaks. Go off the road a little and blow tire. Middle of nowhere. What little light my head lights are throwing off is casting shadows on Joshua trees. It is cold and raining hard. I decide to wait it out. I dose off to the rythum of the sound of a good rain on the roof. 3:30am I wake up, dead asleep to wide awake like when you...tap, tap, tap, tap, at first I think it is the last bits of rain falling from an over hanging joshua tree, but the moon is out. Bright. No more rain. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. I wasn't worried about it, but now I am. I look in front, side to side, then in my rearview mirror, and then I see it. A shadow, a large shadow. And almost a red glow. Tapping on my back window is a decrepit, bearded old man. His eyes focused on me is tapping on the window. Our eyes meet and he stops tapping. But his hand stays on the window and he starts to walk toward the drivers side of the car. I am panicking trying to think of what to do if he breaks my window. As he walks he starts to tap again on the window. He comes face to face with me, he is dirty but his beard is bright red I can now see. His eyes piercing mine. Tap, tap, tap. It feels like he has been tapping on my forehead in a Chinese torture chamber for the last hour. I have not said a word. I don't even know if I am breathing. His finger nails are long, dirty and thick. He lifts them and begins to walk away. Then he points to an animal sitting in the middle of the road. Sitting there is the coyote that I had swerved to miss a couple hours ago, before I stopped to take a nap. The man whistled twice and they walked under the nearby railroad bridge. I started the car and decided to get the heck out of there, flat or not I would ride that tire to the rim. I spun out and started over the small hill and then I saw something I could not believe. In front of me the road was completely washed out with at least three feet of deep water still running down it. I got out and looked at the flash flood area. Had I not been stopped by the coyote, I would have hit the ditch at 80 miles an hour. I then hear whistling, then louder whistling. I heard the same two whistles from before. Now off to my right, I see the old man and his coyote standing above me on the train tracks. His teeth laced with gold and dirt, his smile ear to ear. He tipped his hat and walked away.
Sent from my 0iPhoneapping
After I read the text, I laid in bed for the next few hours trying to contact Dave and find out if he was indeed out of the desert. By his own account he was a few hours behind and had a blown out tire on drenched, flooded out roads with a coyote and a yellow fingered old guy wandering around. I never reached him that night and finally got in touch with him the next morning. At that point, I was freaking out over what had happened and how he got to Vegas. Dave didn't seem to understand why I was having a heart attack. I then reminded him of his email in the middle of the night and he stated laughing and said, "Oh that, that was just a ghost story I thought of in the middle of the desert and wrote it down so I could remember it to tell the kids."
Which begs me to ask the question, what kind of exotic creature are men? No really, who are these people. A woman would NEVER do this to another woman, or man for that matter. Dave keeps me on my toes, that is for sure and there is definitely never a dull moment. By the way, it took me until basically today to be able to laugh at this.
