The neon-lit night is electric.
Heat lightning flashes out over the Gulf, flickering beneath gunmetal-gray clouds, as thunder rolls down Thomas Drive.
The air is thick and humid, heavy from holding back the approaching storm.
**
It's three days before I'll go to the Bay County Medical Examiner’s office to identify her remains, and I'm shocked to see her bikini clad body on the cover of the official event magazine of Thunder Beach, the annual spring biker rally in Panama City.
I've come in search of a woman.
It seems I’ve spent my entire life searching for something—and it usually involves a woman. Ironically, the woman I’m here to see, is not the woman I’ll spend the next few days frantically trying to find.
The woman I’m in search of now, the one not on the cover of the magazine, is here with her weekend biker husband—or is supposed to be, and I’ve come hoping to catch a glimpse of her, hoping for her to see me. When we haven’t seen each other or spoken for a while, I look for ways to remind her of my existence, to reignite the passion and attraction that’s so obvious when we’re together, so quickly evanescent when we’re apart. When we’re together, the intensity is like an exploding star. When we’re apart, the light wave from that star decays so rapidly, and at such a short distance from the high energy event, it makes me question whether it really ever existed at all.
I’ve never been in a relationship quite like this one—from its unlikely birth in the VIP of a strip club to this fire and ice, intimates/acquaintances dance we’re doing now—I’ve never been as strung out on someone in my entire life.
It’s been a while since I’ve even fallen for someone, but back when I had in what seems like a previous life now, I’d only ever do so much pursuing before I’d cut the line and move on. I’ve never been the kind of person willing to convince someone they should want to be with me. I’ve always been like you want to be with me or you don’t. If you’re ambivalent, there’s a reason.
With Regan things are different.
She’s been as inconsistent as any woman I’ve ever been with, and though she’s vacillated between intense interest and casual indifference, I can’t let go.
**
Earlier in the evening, with the sun a plum-colored glow on the rim of gathering clouds, I had left the tiny town where I live and driven my new retro deep water blue Dodge Challenger toward the ebbing light of the diminishing day.
Victim of both a bad economy and an industry that was gasping its last breaths back when things were good, I’m a former reporter—unemployed, untethered, unsure of my next step. So I wander around, mostly at night, in the car I bought a week before I lost my job—lost, alone, searching.
I live in a town of a few thousand people, half an hour from Panama City, called Wewathitchka—Wewa to locals—where for four generations the McKnights, my family, owned and operated the weekly newspaper and produced tupelo honey (the self-employed in small towns rarely do just one thing). Breaking my dad’s heart, I had taken a job with a corporate-owned wire service, working special assignments all over the Panhandle—from state government in Tallahassee to tourism in Panama City Beach—until declining ad revenues at the dailys and the rise of free online news meant there wasn’t a market for what I did.
At the moment, my sole source of income is the two classes I teach at the college—one writing, one philosophy—and it isn’t enough to cover my car payment.
I’ve thought about trying to revive my family’s weekly, which Dad had been forced to close a year or so ago because of bad health and my absence, but even if I could make it work—which is doubtful—it’d be short lived. The days of newspapers in their current form are numbered. Soon, they will go the way of payphones and typewriters and literary magazines—there’ll probably always be a few, but the age of their dominance has come to an end.
