Why Dave Left
Dave left town. Dave’s my best friend—we’ve known each other since high school—and he took off without even telling me. He even left behind the book I had given him for his birthday a few years back. The book was called Ten Surprising Reasons to Live in Wachahachee City. My father wrote the book; he’s a former mayor. Admittedly, it’s a nonfiction account by an unknown author about an unknown town in a forgotten part of the state, and it was a pretty thin book—seventy-three pages—which is one page for every one hundred residents of Wachahachee City, give or take.
I became aware of Dave’s sudden departure from our stinking town through Samantha, Dave’s coworker. Dave and Samantha work at Bumble Cars! It’s a bee-themed bumper car place over on South Wachahachee Boulevard. The cars were shaped and painted to resemble bumblebees, if you haven’t figured it out already. I went over there to show Dave a gnome-shaped pen I had carved out of pine. I was kind of proud of it. The place wasn’t crowded at all. A father and son were battling it out; the son laughing maniacally whenever his dad broadsided him.
“Hi, Sam, is Dave around?” Samantha and I had dated a few months back—which is the reason I used a shortened version of her name. We went out twice before she broke it off. She said I was too “confrontational” and “emotionally detached” and “trying too hard” and “my fingers were misshapen” and I “didn’t like dogs” and other such nonsense. I had told her I disagreed, and that we should get some ice cream and discuss it further. She declined.
“Nah, he left,” Samantha said. She looked hopelessly engaging in her Bumble Cars! polo shirt. Her wavy red hair didn’t mesh well visually with the theme of the outfit, but I didn’t mention it. She’s kind of touchy on the red hair subject—which I learned the hard way. However, I adore red hair, especially hers. I merely thought it didn’t succeed aesthetically with the black and yellow motif. Sam got promoted to “Lead Bee” last month even though Dave had seniority. Recently, Dave wondered out loud if the enchanting curves in her bumblebee shirt had anything to do with it. I told him he was entirely mistaken—Sam was a diligent employee and possessed the mentality of a worker bee and he was more of a forager. Dave didn’t take too kindly to my opinion, but sometimes the truth can sting a little. Of course, we couldn’t bring the subject up with Samantha—she’s a little self-conscious in regards to her overachieving chest area too.
“Oh, is he sick?” (Dave caught a lot of colds.) He told me that the city air here is too humid and has suspicious mold spores floating around in it. His sinuses were continually bombarded by the “diseased air” and the “moldy oxygen” he had to breathe. I told him he should get checked out by one of those ENT doctors and find out what was actually going on. He said the doctors here weren’t especially qualified; otherwise, they’d be somewhere else. I can see his point; my dentist constantly pokes my tongue with his sharp dental curette whenever he’s talking to the hygienist about his new F-150 or his wife’s podcast.
“Nah, he took off,” Sam said. “Left town. Quit.” Samantha has an interesting way of putting things—direct, to the point, sometimes out of order. I didn’t believe her at first, because Dave wouldn’t suddenly quit and leave town without telling anyone, especially me. Sam was polishing the headlights on a bumblebee car and didn’t seem too annoyed with the fact that one-third of the employee roster at Bumble Cars! was now AWOL.
“Well, did he say anything or leave a note or tell you where he was going?” I found the whole idea preposterous and hard to swallow, like Dave’s mother’s goulash. If you’ve never had Dave’s mother’s goulash, consider yourself lucky. She makes it with gristly beef and the potatoes she uses never seem to soften up and it’s heavy on the salt and paprika and she serves it with a chunk of stale bread. It sits in your stomach like a lead anchor. Honestly, you could describe most of her food the same way.
Samantha got a call. She looked at her phone and answered. She shook her head at me and was soon engrossed in conversation with the caller. I decided to head over to Dave’s mother’s house since it was too early for dinner and too late for lunch. On the way, I got a whiff of the “Wachahachee Breeze.” For those of you who are uninitiated, the Wachahachee Breeze is a waft of air flowing in from the west and has a notably peculiar, and not so pleasant, aroma that could sting your nostrils and pierce your lungs if you breathe it in too hard. Dave used to say it smelled like a “rotting moose” and had the “putrescence of maggot-infested vomit” and could “kill a baby rhino with one strong sniff.”
Before I left, I called Dave, but I was sent straight to voicemail. Dave wasn’t a “phone person.” It wasn’t a permanent fixture on his person, and you never could tell if he’d seen a text because he rarely texted back. I sent one anyway with the old What’s up? salutation, but I didn’t expect a response. Dave said texting is an annoying habit people got into because they’d forgotten how to communicate “on a human level.” Once, I texted him to see if he wanted to see a movie. He got back to me and texted he couldn’t make it. Three weeks later.
Dave’s mother, Teruska Vagoskané, a widow, lived alone in a split-level on a few acres of farmland. She makes some extra cash by selling zucchini and rutabagas and turnips and beets to city folk and tourists under the name Teruska’s Veggie Pulp Circus. (It doesn’t translate well from Hungarian.) There aren’t a lot of tourists in Wachahachee City, but we are semi-famous for growing the largest turnips north of Boise and south of the Canadian border. Dave used to comment it was because of the nuclear power plant a few miles out of town and its effluent into the Wachahachee River. We all used to laugh at the idea, but now I’m beginning to wonder. By the way, the zucchini and the rutabagas and the turnips and the beets all end up in the goulash.
Dave’s father, Tomas Vagoska, died last year in a boating accident, which is strange because he didn’t own a boat, and he was nowhere near any significant body of water. He was following a vehicle hauling a boat trailer on Wachahachee Highway (Route 5) when the trailer’s hitch failed and the motorboat with various sailing implements crashed through Tomas’s windshield, effectively bisecting him from the fourth rib up. The emergency medical technicians found Mr. Vagoska’s head, shoulders, and arms in the back seat and the rest of him still buckled in the front. Dave and his father used to go fly fishing together and would bring home carp, black crappie, and yellow perch. I never got into fishing since I’m not keen on handling worms or insects. Dave doesn’t fish anymore.
As teenagers, Dave and his older sister, Petra, would often tend the wooden vegetable stand by the side of the road on his family’s property. Every summer, pretty Canadian college girls on holiday would stop at random intervals and buy a turnip, just for the humor of it all. Young Dave would immediately fall in love with the fair-haired beauties and make small talk and compliment their wardrobe and try to make them laugh with his country humor. He would include a simple yellow daisy with their purchase. But without fail, they would smile their expensive smiles and leave him a dollar tip and be on their way to bigger and better adventures, crushing his innocent teenage adoring heart with an unmerciful stomp.
Teruska opened the door with a wary gaze, as if I were trying to sell her Korean encyclopedias, even though I’d been to her house several hundred times over the past decade. She was only five feet three, but she was built like a linebacker, so you wouldn’t want to mess with her. She was wearing her usual floral peasant dress and dirty apron, and she looked as if she could use a shave.
“Ya?”
“Hi, ma’am,” I said. I never called her by her given name because I wasn’t sure if it was pronounced with a long u or a short u. I didn’t use her family name either because it hurt my tongue, and it sounded profane. “I’m Dave’s friend. Remember me?” I always had the feeling that not every button worked properly on Teruska’s remote. I reflexively looked down to see if she was holding a kitchen utensil or some kind of large, heavy object that she might use as a weapon. Dave said his mother would sometimes beat him with such things whenever he misbehaved, or her goulash didn’t turn out as “horrendous as she had hoped.” No permanent damage resulted from these beatings, but I could see Dave was always a bit “twitchy” around her when I visited. She held nothing but a worn dish rag, so I stood my ground.
“Ya?” Dave’s mom was not the eloquent or effervescent type when it came to conversational intercourse. She had a unique way of causing your scrotum to contract by uttering a single syllable. My balls probably subconsciously knew they might end up in her stew if I wasn’t careful. Once I found a mysterious, gravy-coated “organic object” when I was fortunate enough to partake in their four o’clock supper after school. Dave suggested we bag the mysterious morsel and send it over to the university for testing. I couldn’t decide if he was serious or not.
“I was wondering if Dave was around,” I said, as non-confrontational as I could muster, bowing slightly out of respect. I grasped the gnome pen in my pocket in case I needed to thwart a possible oncoming assault or poke an eye out, if it were absolutely necessary.
“He no here,” she said with a dismissive wave of her kitchen towel. “He go bye-bye.” She looked me in the eye, daring me to say anything quite as poignant as the words she had just uttered. I experienced a weakness in my knees and ankles and held myself upright by sheer will. “Ookay?” she said, after a few tense moments and snapped her towel at me, as if I was a bothersome fly, and shut the door. When I heard the click of the deadbolt, I believed we had reached a milestone in our relationship—no blood was drawn, and medical personnel were not summoned to the scene. I remembered Dave showing me a scar from a serving fork puncture. His mother stabbed him for getting a C in music class—Dave never took to the clarinet as well as his parents had hoped. Maybe it was his moldy lungs keeping him from excelling in woodwinds.
“Okay,” I said softly after the door had shut, loosening my grip on the pocketed wooden figurine. Did He go bye-bye mean Dave went out for the day, or did it mean he skipped town?
Having escaped physical harm but gaining no real clue as to Dave’s sudden departure, I headed to the mall to speak with Nicole, Dave’s recently estranged girlfriend. She worked at Victoria’s Secret, and it appeared she was inventorying panties when I approached her. Nicole is probably the nicest and most friendly person I’ve known, and I was truly heartbroken for Dave when they broke up a few weeks back. Her smile lights up a room, as they say. She obviously doesn’t go to my dentist.
“Hi, Nicole,” I said with the confidence of a shy teenage boy in a Hooters restaurant.
“Hiiii,” she gushed, making me feel more important than I should have. “Look at you! Did you get a haircut or something?” I hadn’t. In fact, my hair may have been slightly longer than when I’d seen her last. This would have been the day before she dropped Dave’s heart into a Ninja blender and stabbed liquify repeatedly. Dave, Nicole, and I went to the rodeo, and everything seemed fine between them. (I had asked Samantha to join us, but she declined.) Nicole would jump out of her seat every time one of the handsome cowboys successfully lassoed a beast. Dave, three beers in, sat quietly watching her bounce with his droopy eyes and the most serene, inebriated smile.
“Yep, yep,” I lied. “And I’ve been working out lately.” I lied again, unless you count biking over to Zip’s Drive-In for a late-night snack as a form of aerobics. Unlike Dave, Nicole was an exercise fiend: She ran half-marathons, attended yoga classes three times a week, and worked out with the college football team. Yeah, she’s one of their cheerleaders. So I hoped my little self-promotional fib wouldn’t be too obviously transparent.
“I can tell, you big stud. Looking good.” Now some may misconstrue this simple compliment—if a woman said this to a man as she held a pair of red hiphugger panties while gently rubbing his upper arm—as a suggestive invitation, but one must pay attention to the circumstantial context. I tried to remember this important fact as my neck and face got warm, and my gaze wanted to stray from the tenderness of her gray eyes. I never lusted over Nicole, even though I had every right to—she could be a part-time model. Dave was like a brother to me, and Nicole was like a sister... or a sister-in-law. Dave told me once that he experienced imposter syndrome when he was with Nicole; he didn’t think he deserved a woman “so perfect” who “touched every base” and made his heart “sing like Karen Carpenter.”
When Nicole told Dave she wanted to downgrade their relationship to just friends, Dave was crushed, although if you asked him now, he would say he saw it coming. Nicole is fun. She has a good time wherever she happens to be, whether it’s at work or at a party or simply hanging out with friends. But the flip side of Nicole’s vivacious temperament is that she requires fun in return. She needs her partner to be cheerful with a laugh-out-loud attitude and a love for life as an energy source for her continual mirth. Dave was none of those things, but in his defense, I can’t think of anyone other than Nicole in the entire Wachahachee Valley area who possesses those qualities. A few days after the breakup, Dave told me he was almost glad it happened. He said his poor heart couldn’t have survived much longer from Nicole’s vigorous, over-the-top enthusiasm for everything. He looked me in the eye and repeated, “Everything.”
“Thanks, Nic,” I said. “Hey, have you seen Dave or know where he is?” I knew this was a long shot, but Dave didn’t run around in a large crowd, and Nicole seemed to have closely monitored his every action when they were together. Dave joked that he couldn’t “fart on Pikes Peak” without her getting wind of it. Besides, they’re still friends, right? Um, Dave and Nicole had not gone out at all after their unhitching at Bruno’s Steakhouse on the fateful Sunday night after the relaxed merriment at the rodeo the day before. Dave said she even gave him a “consolation prize” over dessert. It was a fitness tracker with a built-in pedometer, so he could count all the “unaccompanied steps” he took on his “solo nights” walking the streets of his neighborhood, wondering if Nicole had only been a dream leading to a “torturous awakening.”
“Wow, it’s so crazy you would ask me that,” Nicole said with a crinkled nose as she straightened a pair of panties on a display table and picked up another pair. “Davy called me last night and said he’s going to be away for a while, didn’t know when he’d be back. I don’t know where the heck he’s going, but he seemed dead set on leaving.” She put her hand back on my arm. “Where’s he off to? Do you know? Did he get another job?” Nicole had never been markedly enthused with Dave’s professional career choices.
I related to Nicole my conversation with Samantha, leaving out the part dealing with Sam’s overachieving chest area. I explained how Dave had quit his Bumble Cars! job and skipped town, and he didn’t have the decency to tell me. I mentioned my meeting with Dave’s mother, leaving out the potential eye-stabbing part, and how she had said Dave went bye-bye. Nicole put her panties down and planted a fist on her hip. I briefly looked down at the panties and then back up to Nicole. This was unintentional, purely reflexive.
She cocked her head and said, “Huh. Dave wouldn’t do something like that.” I nodded in a sad, dejected way, possibly attempting to gain some sympathy points with her, even though she was my imaginary sister-in-law. Estranged. I reported Dave’s neglectful attitude regarding my texts. “Well, no surprise there,” Nicole said flatly and scanned the barcode on another pair of practically non-existent underwear. We both stood there silently for a while, her scanning, me trying not to scan. A gaggle of older women came in, and Nicole said, “Hey, I gotta go. Nice seeing you again.” She smiled and lit up the place and punched my shoulder. It didn’t land as firmly as I would have liked.
It was wonderful seeing Nicole again but also a little depressing knowing we wouldn’t be hanging out as much. I probably wouldn’t be enjoying her company again unless I needed some lingerie. I hadn’t gotten any closer to finding out Dave’s motives for leaving by visiting his ex-girlfriend, so I stopped by the mall eatery to think of my next move. Dave once said burgers were a good way to “stimulate the brain” if you needed answers to something. I knew he was joking because we both were hungry and he was trying to come up with an opening line to ask Nicole out. Halfway through his cheeseburger, he came up with this: “If your eyes were stars, I’d look up more often.” It worked.
I got to the jewelry store a half hour later. The burger trick came through once again. Dave and my sister, Ruby, didn’t socialize much. They knew each other and were friendly, but they weren’t drinking buddies or anything like that. However, Dave and Ruby’s husband were. My brother-in-law, Andrew, was a clean-cut, educated, straitlaced sort of guy, but he enjoyed hanging out with the likes of me and Dave for some reason—not very often, but it happened on a semi-regular basis, enough for me to see if he knew anything. Andrew was the manager at Reynaldo’s Finest, a jewelry store over on Pensky Avenue, next to the Plant Stand nursery.
The ping of the door as I entered made all three employees turn their heads in my direction. After seeing I clearly had no money or any possible reason for me to be buying expensive jewelry, they went back to their coffee and resumed their conversation. I asked to see Andrew, and he came out in his gray suit and striped blue tie, sporting his metallic smile (he had braces), and we shook hands. I went through the entire saga of my day again, leaving out the parts about the panties and the burger, and his face soured. It was immediately apparent he was not going to illuminate any of the murky mystery behind Dave’s disappearance.
“He borrowed three hundred dollars from me yesterday,” Andrew said in a not-so-convivial manner. He was visibly perturbed by the monetary kidnapping as I gazed into the display case between us. I saw a glittering set of earrings with a price tag so high my face turned a pale green. Andrew saw my reaction and said matter-of-factly, “Norwegian pink diamonds. Very rare. You interested?” I usually don’t see the sober, business side of Andrew. When he’s with Dave and me, he lets his hair down—bad analogy since he shaves his head, but you get the point. The three employees with nothing better to do chuckled at the sales pitch, and I shook my head.
“Did Dave tell you anything that might explain where he might be headed?” I asked, already knowing that if Dave didn’t tell me his plans, he probably wouldn’t spill his intentions on Andrew. Ruby and Andrew got married on a spring afternoon four or five years ago. He had given her an engagement ring with a diamond so excessively oversized it had its own Wikipedia page. Probably not a Norwegian diamond, I’m guessing; it must have been one of those cheap-ass Swedish diamonds. For their honeymoon, they went to the Florida Keys for a week. Ruby brought me back a tee shirt with the phrase Miami Sucks Cigar Company in a circle on the front with a cartoon pelican smoking a cigar in the center. Andrew gave me a bottle of key lime pie-flavored vodka. I haven’t cracked the seal yet.
“Dave didn’t tell me shit about leaving town,” Andrew said. “All he said was he was in deep financial straits and he’d pay me back with interest in a few months. The dude was practically begging me.” This didn’t make any sense. I know Dave doesn’t make a lot of money, but he couldn’t have serious money problems because he doesn’t own anything. He practically lives rent-free with his cousin, and he gets most of his food from his mother. Plus, he wouldn’t beg for money. If he needed something, he would ask me first; I’m sure of it. I didn’t know how to respond to this latest curveball, so I thanked Andrew and headed out.
“Wait a sec,” he called when I reached the door.
“Yeah?” I said.
“I’ll give you a ten percent discount on the earrings.”
When I got back to my apartment, I was dejected, confused, depressed, and annoyed. I was no closer to finding an answer to my friend’s swift exit from Wachahachee City than I was when I found out about it. I opened a bottle of beer, squirted some lemon juice in it, and collapsed on my couch to think things through. I half-heartedly texted Dave again, not bothering to say anything more than Hey. I added loneliness to the list of emotions I was experiencing and considered going to bed even though it was only 6:45. I decided cramming food in my face would be a better option, so I called Samantha.
“Hey.”
“Hey, Sam. Wanna get a bite to eat?”
“Uh…”
“My treat.”
“Nah, I don’t think so. Did you find Dave?”
“No.”
Dinner was a Chicago-style pizza. After eating, I watched TV for a while, but I couldn’t get Dave off my mind. I called Sam again and asked if she wanted to get some ice cream. She said okay. I met her at Pete’s, an ice cream shop near where she lived; it has a flying cow as a mascot. We reminisced over the good times we had while we were dating. I told her the details of my visit with Dave’s mother. She grimaced. I told her how Nicole believed my working out untruth. She laughed. I described the Norwegian diamonds at Andrew’s shop. She salivated. I walked her home and she gave me a hug.
I kicked off my shoes and sat in the dark, the taste of butter pecan still on my tongue. Sam’s delicate perfume continued to linger as I reflected on the past several hours. It seemed weird not having my best friend around, even if it had only been one day. I recalled a time a few nights after the rodeo—Dave and I went to get cheeseburgers, and we ate them in my car. He said he’d have a “fighting chance” outside this “putrid town” and needed a “clean break.” Was he forecasting a new life for himself away from here? Had he already formed plans to leave? I didn’t think so. I’m fairly confident that deep down he genuinely liked this place. Which is why, sitting there alone in the darkness, I couldn’t for the life of me think of a single, plausible reason that might explain why Dave left.
