I Don’t Know You But This Is What I Wanted to Do with My Love

The pay phone rang every single night at the exact same time and for the exact same length. I don’t remember when it started. But for 33 minutes it would ring, right at 3 AM. Every. Single. Night.

It feels like I was the only one who ever heard it, too. My husband, Dale, never once perked his ears. And in my apartment building, no one ever seemed disquieted by the noise. Not to my knowledge. Not once.

No disembodied footsteps marching to the window the floor above me. No angry pleas shouted out the window to “shut that thing up.” No police officers called to the scene so they could shine their crime-killing light from the safety of their car then drive away… Nothing.

My day started off normal enough. It was my husband’s 40th birthday, Dale. I already mentioned that though, didn’t I? That his name is Dale. Sorry my brain has been a mess lately. Did I say brain? Maybe it’s my heart? I don’t know. I’ve just been a mess lately.

I’m 33 years old lying awake at 3:03 in the morning, having these thought conversations with myself, and listening to this freaking pay phone ring nearly non-stop. With only a beat of respite every 20 seconds or so when the person on the other end has to hang up and re-dial.

This has gone on for maybe a month? Maybe more? Who knows? Maybe it’s been all summer. And now that fall has really settled in and the busy-ness of summer has taken its leave, my mind has gone from clarity to confusion. Or is it the other way around?

Bugs have started flying in through my bedroom window—the peripheral kind you can only catch a glimpse of; the kind that fly right up to the entrance of your ear canal and usher you awake with their high-pitched secrets that only your anxiety can really understand.

The crickets are louder than ever outside, too. They made a home in front of that dried-up, dark house across the street, the neglected one with the faded yellow door and busted-up blinds. The crickets live in the untamed mess of bushes and chain link fence out front, scraping their wings together, trying to find a partner who makes sense.

I turn on the TV to disrupt the noise.

Flip the channel, static. Flip the channel, static.

Flip the channel…

…tonight on Cold Case Bank Robberies of the 20th Century, retired detectives in this small Nevada town are still baffled by the 1939 robbery of The First National Bank of Winnemucca.

On September 23rd of that year eyewitnesses described a young masked woman running out The First National Bank doors with a canvas duffle bag in hand. This young woman then jumped on a small motorcycle, skirting down the road, with long, jet-black hair flowing in the wind.

Whoever she was, she made off with $20,000 in tow and exactly zero cops on her tail. 45 years later, even with the help of the FBI, the bank robber is still at large. This person could be living in Winnemucca to this day…

Click. I turn off the TV.

“Too close to home,” I say out loud.

Maybe I need a little chat to ease myself into sleep.

I spark a conversation with my lifeless husband next to me, as you do in the small hours, “Did you know that all serial killers are sociopaths, but not all sociopaths are serial killers? I remember reading that somewhere.”

Dale, half-asleep, gets up and walks to the bathroom. “Huh?” he says as he stands over the toilet, drool caked to the side of his mouth, his rotund figure and balding head lit up perfectly by the flickering streetlamp just outside the window. He starts peeing loudly.

I talk over his stream, “It makes you wonder. Is there a scale of sociopathy? And do the less sociopathic ones need more justification to feel okay with murder? Maybe it’s just the momentous act of murder itself and then some sort of indescribable release they feel. They’re incredibly present in their feelings I imagine. No thoughts needed, no justification, not until society finds out, if they ever do.”

Dale returns from the bathroom, “Ya know, I’ve really eased into my depression since turning 40.” He pauses to scratch his butt, looking down at me in the dark, “I know it’s been hard since we moved out here. So thanks for today. And thanks for really trying these last six months.”

He plops down in bed with his back facing me as usual.

I turn away from him and face the window, “I think about that story recently where that trucker drove over that animal activist. This guy just barreled into this woman, ripping her to shreds underneath thousands of pounds of metal and livestock, wheel after wheel after wheel. Makes you wonder what was going through his mind, just pure hate? Is there such a thing? He got fed up with her moral imposition blocking his way, so his animal brain took over, rage grabbed the wheel and fate pressed the gas. No remorse. You never know though, maybe it was just an accident.”

Dale mumbles as he drifts to sleep, “If you want sex, just wake me up when you’re done ta…”

It’s 3:11 and the payphone is still on its warpath. Instead of waiting 22 more minutes for it to end I’m feeling very much in the moment, like I don’t want to waste time anymore. I need to answer this call, put a stop to this siren-like ringing and figure out what’s on the other end.

I get out of bed, grab the first sharp thing I can find for protection (the kitchen shears), put on my robe, unlock the deadbolt, exit the front breezeway, walk down the steps and cross the street to the payphone.

There’s a small black notebook sitting on the shelf underneath the payphone. Like it was there just for me and no one else. I open the notebook and a quarter falls from the pages, perfectly into my palm. The crickets stop. The payphone stops right then, too, mid-ring.

I see blinds shuffle in my periphery. And my eyes naturally shift from close up to wide-eyed. I’m focused right on the front window of the cricket house. An old face appears through the broken blinds. It’s dark but not so dark that I can’t make out that it’s an old woman, probably a hoarder (judging by the junk out front), perhaps widowed, maybe hard to love.

I’ve never noticed her before. She’s watching me intently, without shame, waiting for me to do something. It’s a little weird actually. But not so weird that I don’t take my attention back to the small black notebook in front of me. I look down, flip to the first page and see a phone number with the instructions ‘call me’ written underneath.

Does this phone number hold the answer? Is this the person who’s been calling? As I ponder these questions, my hand takes on a mind of its own, positioning the quarter between its thumb and index finger, and floating itself right up to the coin slot—my whole body feels weightless as I dial the number: 4-8-7-3-2-8-3.

No ring, no time lost, just an instant pick up, “Hello.”

I look up and see that the old woman is no longer at the window.

“H-hi?” I respond.

“I just ate mushrooms,” I hear a woman’s voice say, very matter-of-factly.

“Y-yeah? I tried them once. I had a bad trip; never did them again,” I continue the conversation as if it’s not strange to be talking on a payphone, in the middle of the night, in my robe, barefoot, with someone I don’t know, whose number I got from an unclaimed, small black notebook.

“I take them every night at this time,” her voice grows louder.

“Is this the same lady who lives in the cricket house? Are you the one who calls the payphone every single night at 3 AM?”

A few moments pass, I hear deep, focused breaths on the other end, “I have a feeling. And it’s that odd psychedelic feeling where you don’t know what to do with all the love you’re experiencing, but you want to do something with it… I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for a while now.”

I snap into consciousness, “What the hell’s going on? Wh-who are you?”

I see the blinds open. It’s the old woman I saw before, now with a phone held up to her ear. At 40 feet away I can only make out a visage of wrinkles and long, dark, flowing hair.

“I’ve been spinning thread every single night for you. I feel your unhappiness. It feels like waves crashing,” she says calmly.

The streetlamp glows brighter, illuminating something at my feet. I look down and see a line of thread I didn’t notice before. It starts at my feet and winds on down the road. There’s no end in sight.

Measured and meaningful in her tone, she utters, “I don’t know you but this is what I wanted to do with my love.”

“I-I don’t understand,” I respond, stupefied.

The crickets suddenly break the silence in a cacophonous burst, growing louder every second. I don’t know what it is about the small hours, about this call, about what end I’m going to meet, but I feel okay. Strangely, I feel okay.

“Follow it,” she commands, her voice echoing beyond the payphone, reverberating right on down the urban desert road.

I hear a dial tone. She hung up. I look over and see her face peeking through the blinds. She pulls the blinds all the way up and presses her face right up to the glass, her nose and lips smashed flat against the window. She breathes heavily on the glass for a few seconds, enough to fog it up, stepping back, she draws an arrow in the fogged-up window. It points the way of the glowing thread.

I see her more clearly now that the blinds are pulled up. She’s slim but figured, pretty in age, wearing a vintage dress. Native American I think, storied and stoic, creepy but not haunted. And creepy not because of her looks; it’s the fact that she’s calling a payphone at 3 in the morning with strange instructions involved that give her an air of creepiness.

The blinds drop in an instant, and close up. All at once the crickets stop their scraping, and the streetlamp flickers out. The only light left is the full moon above and the glowing thread beneath.

I feel okay with doing what she says, following this thread. But there’s no way I’m walking for miles at this hour, or any hour. I jump in my car, grab the keys from the visor, start it up and race down the road. I don’t care about speed, no cop in this small town is patrolling right now anyway. I only care about what’s at the end of this thread.

It must be after 3:33 at this point. Pretty soon abandoned houses and dead casinos turn into open desert roads and star-filled skies. I’m no longer shielded by civilization. And the thread glows brighter under the moon every mile.

Right turn after left turn I eventually arrive at a graveyard, away from city lights, far from Winnemucca. I’ve never seen this graveyard before. The road just ends here. But the thread continues on. It winds its way up a hill and through a small iron gate at the top. I grab a flashlight from the glovebox hoping it works. I turn it on; it’s faulty, in and out. I leave the car headlights on, just in case, and start my ascent up the hill.

It doesn’t take long to reach the gate. I open it. It creaks in creepy fashion (because why wouldn’t it). The thread travels through and around gravestones, about 50 or so bodies rest here. I can’t say if they’re in peace or not.

I follow the thread and start to hear the patter of rain but I don’t feel anything. I look up; there’s not a storm cloud in sight. Up ahead I see a pinyon-juniper tree with a crude wooden cross stabbed into the ground directly underneath it. The thread looks like it ends there.

As I get closer to the tree I realize the “rain” I was hearing is a riotous cloud of crickets swarming around the cross. Upon further inspection, I see that they’re cannibalizing each other, ripping each other’s heads off, tearing limbs from bodies, ritualistic feeling. And there are so many of them flying about that it’s causing a mini-windstorm, kicking up half-eaten crickets off the ground and flinging them everywhere. I’ve never seen anything like it.

I’m able to make it through the cloud of crickets. There’s a shovel right next to the cross, blade firmly planted in the ground. The thread does end here. And it’s tied to the shovel handle.

Through all this strangeness, I’ve been so focused on an answer that I forgot I’ve been gripping the kitchen shears in my left hand this entire time, ever since I left the apartment. Perfect realization at the perfect time I guess. I cut the thread from the shovel handle and start digging.

All the crickets fall to the dirt right when I cut the thread. The few that are left alive start serenading me with a slow song as I dig. They’re sitting in the juniper above me, soul-weary, sharing sorrow, telling me tales of their plight. (At this point I’ve given up on logic.)

With the moon on my back and a flickering flashlight at my feet I’m finally able to start making out what’s underneath all this dirt. It looks like a canvas duffle bag, half-buried, about the size of a small backpack.

“Oh thank God it isn’t a dead body,” I sing back to the crickets.

I reach for the bag, uncover the last bit of dirt and unzip it. There’s a bunch of cash haphazardly strewn about inside. I see hundreds of hundreds; I’m no savant but it looks like five figures worth of hundreds.

Before I have time to count I hear sirens in the distance. Then I see cop lights blazing down the highway just over the horizon. Thinking they saw my headlights and are headed my way I yank the bag from the dirt, grab my flashlight, cut a bit of thread for proof of this weird night and take off. Through the iron gate, down the hill and into my car I go.

A turn here. And a turn there. The glowing thread still lights my way. After a while I’m back to streetlamps and casinos, I don’t hear the sirens anymore. And I don’t know if they were after me, either, or if they were after some rogue, speeding car I didn’t see. But still, that’s a huge sigh of relief…they’re nowhere to be found now.

I pull up to my apartment building and get out. As I walk up the steps, the streetlamp flickers overhead. I look across the street to the cricket house, I don’t see her in the window but I do see a small, half-covered motorcycle I never noticed before in the alleyway next to her house. Hmm, no mind.

I turn back around, open the building doors, walk through the breezeway, down the hall, fumble my keys a bit and open the door to my apartment. I walk inside, the time on the microwave says 3:33 AM. What? I’m confused. It feels like hours have passed, not minutes. Dale gets up with all the commotion.

“What is going on? Did you go somewhere?” he asks, perturbed.

I don’t answer.

“My God, Moira, you cannot keep staying up through the night and expect us to live a normal life together,” he erupts like he’s had that statement locked and loaded for months.

“I-I don’t know what to tell you…I talked to an old lady, there was a glowing thread I followed. I heard the payphone ring again…” I say nervously.

“Wait a minute, still? That payphone?” he walks to the window and points across the street. “It doesn’t work. It’s never worked. Not since we moved here. I tried using it a bunch of times before our land line was set up. I’ve told you this.”

“Yes, that payphone, and yes, it does ring. It’s been ringing for weeks if not months—ever since we moved here.” I say back with growing confidence in my mental state.

“It hasn’t been ringing, Moira! I would’ve heard it, too. Are you really so damn unhappy here you have to dream up reasons to leave in the middle of the night? I thought you made an appointment with a doctor to figure out what the hell’s wrong with you,” he lashes at me with little, true concern.

“I h-haven’t yet. A-and there’s nothing wrong with me,” I shrink.

He looks me up and down, “Why are there dead crickets in your hair? What’s that dirty bag in your hand?”

“I…I told you, Dale. The payphone.”

He walks up to me, looks down at the duffle bag and sees thousands of dollars stashed inside, “What the…where did you get this?”

“I followed the thread,” I hold up the faintly glowing bit of thread I cut.

He looks right through me, “No-no-no-no-no, we gotta take this back to wherever you found it. What if this is dirty money? What if someone saw you?”

“What? No one saw me. Well, the cricket house lady did I guess but she’s the one who answered my call. This…this is gonna change my life.”

“Your life?” He sifts through the bag taking a moment to count the cash. “There’s $20,000 here. What about my life? We have no idea whose this is, or what kind of danger we could be in for having it.” I sense an all-too-familiar undercurrent of violence rising in his voice.

With a surge of anger and resoluteness, he grabs me by the arm, snatches the bag from my hand, walks to the front door, slips on his shoes, and turns sharply down the hallway.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going with my money?” I gain a voice.

“I’m taking it to the police. I don’t want a life where I have to look over my shoulder.”

“Then don’t! I’ll look over mine.” I run out the door to try and take it back.

He grabs my hand and throws it from the bag handle with enough force to knock me down in the process. I watch from a fetal position on the ground as he marches down the hallway, out the building doors and down the apartment steps to the car.

“I’m not unhappy here!” I respond to his earlier statement. “I wasn’t unhappy back home, either. It’s not where I am. It’s not who I am. It’s who I’m with. And I’m with you, Dale. And I’m so damn unhappy because of it!” I gain the courage to lift myself up off the ground and run out to the car to take my life back.

In one last attempt to force a 6-foot-2 man twice my weight to give me back what’s mine I stand between him and the car door. He reaches around me, grabs the door handle and pulls it toward him with all his strength, pulling me right along with it. I’m driven into him with a powerful force. He winces. And I hear him make an uneasy sound I’ve never heard anyone make, like all the breath was taken from his body at once.

Oh my God, I forgot I had the kitchen shears in my hand. I never put them down this entire time.

Dale’s eyes and mouth widen. He takes a step back. And the shears move with him. I look down at his gut and immediately take my hand off the shears. They're all the way in his abdomen. He’s losing blood fast. I must have hit a real fated spot.

He tries to grab on to me. Instead of helping, my instinct pulls me away from being crushed, and I move to the side. He tries to grab onto the top of the car with bloody hands and slips, falling gut first to the ground, jamming the shears even further into his body. He howls and recoils.

There’s not a soul awake on this street except his and mine—flickering and glowing, respectively.

I kneel down next to him. His face is pale and growing more pale by the moment. I tear the duffle bag full of cash from his hand. No remorse. Then I pull the shears from his gut thinking it’s the right thing to do. (It wasn’t.)

He’s in shock from everything, from the reality of all this. From being asleep just a few minutes ago to lying in the street, bleeding out, from his wife stabbing him with the kitchen shears.

I jog to the payphone across the street, punch in 9-1-1, press the phone to my ear, there’s no dial tone. I try again. It doesn’t work. I smack the phone against the receiver a few times to show him I’m trying. Still nothing.

I run back and kneel down at his side.

“Just stop. It’s no use. It’s bad…deep. I’m already in and out of consciousness,” he says in a rapidly fading voice.

“But…” I protest, faintly.

“There’s no way to explain this. Hide my body. Leave town. We have no family. No one’ll know.”

“…”

“This…this is what I want to do with the last of my love,” he softens.

Blinded, torn…emboldened, I do as he says.

“I’m so, so sorry,” I tell him as if I just spilled coffee on him.

“W-w-what a weird way to die…” he says as he breathes his last breath.

Lifeless now, eyes blankly staring up at the night sky, I close his eyelids and drag his body a few feet to the trunk. I pop it open and with every bit of strength I’ve got I lift his upper half just enough to set him on the bumper, then I push his backside in. Then I lift his legs up and roll him in the rest of the way. I toss the duffle bag in, too, and close the trunk.

Out of the corner of my eye I see the blinds shuffle from the cricket house. The old woman lifts the blinds all the way. We lock eyes for a moment. She pantomimes a huge wave crashing with her hands. I even see her make a little crash sound with her mouth as the wave hits a metaphorical beach and runs ashore. I let it wash over me, get into the car, start the engine and drive off.

Streetlamps fade. Casinos disappear. The road opens up like never before. Far and away I make it to the nameless graveyard. This time I pull right up the hill, knock down the iron gate with the front of my car, make space to turn around and back up to the gravesite. The open grave and shovel are still there.

I pull Dale out with my whole life force and plop him down into the grave. I grab the bit of thread from my robe pocket, throw it on his chest and spread a bit of earth on top—letting the dirt fall away through my fingers. The crickets sing their final peace.

A cop car wails in the distance. I take my time as I finish burying him and hold space for a moment, for an old me, for a new me, for fate and fortune. Then I get in the car, take control of the wheel and make my way back to Winnemucca. It’s home now, my home—as it was always meant to be.