A Brush with Fury

 Ancestry.com says I don’t have the gene for remembering dreams, but sometimes I do, and sometimes I wake up remembering something from long ago and not just remembering it but working on it as though I was rewriting it; so, I’m pretty sure I had been dreaming about it.  A couple of days ago I woke with a stiff-neck headache as though I had been writing or reading something that had me worked up, but what I was thinking about, was a girl I met just one time when I was about fourteen.

My stepfather, Welk, was in the habit of taking me with him when on some of his business trips and took me with him on this occasion to meet with a business associate.  We went into the man’s house and Welk and the man walked off some place to talk.  The man’s daughter stood there looking at me.  She was obviously a tomboy, dressed in jeans and a sloppy shirt. 

I don’t recall how old I was back then, but I was younger than sixteen, because I tried to enlist in the Marine Corps at age sixteen, and I was too old by then to want to go with Welk on any of his business trips.  I was younger than fifteen, because I knew I was going to enlist in the Marine Corps so every spare moment I was working out.  I knew boot camp would be tough, and I didn’t want to take any chances.  And I didn’t think I was as young as thirteen, because Welk bought me a bike right before I was thirteen, and I rode it everywhere as often as I good.  So, I was probably fourteen.  

I don’t recall how old the girl was, but she knew a lot of interesting stuff and did a lot of interesting things in the land behind her house; so she was probably fourteen as well.  She said, “do you want to see some really interesting things?”  She had a bit of a smirk on her face.  Maybe it was her job to keep me amused while Welk and her father talked business.

“Sure,” and off we went out the back door, and she really did have some interesting things to do back there, trees to climb, ropes to swing on, weird half-standing structures to explore, and she was talking a mile a minute the whole time.  

Once we seemed to have seen everything I said, “shouldn’t we be getting back?”

“Yeah, I suppose,” she said; so back we went through the back door and into the house where her father confronted me in a rage.  “What could possess you to take my daughter off like that?”

“Whoa.  She just wanted to show me some of the interesting things she played with out back.”  

“You had no business to take my daughter off like that ,” he yelled, his rage undiminished.  I looked over at Welk.  He said, “you really shouldn’t have.”

I said, “I don’t know what’s going on here, but we didn’t do anything wrong.”  She just took me out back to show me some interesting things.”  I was really worked up by then.  I looked over at the girl.  She stood ramrod straight and was staring with a furious look at her father.   

I repeated, “we didn’t do anything wrong,” and her father looked me in the eye to see if I was going guiltily look away, but I didn’t.  He was a huge man, and I was a long way from being big or tough enough to make it through boot camp, but I knew we hadn’t done anything wrong.  

Welk hustled me toward the front door.  I gave the girl one last look, and she was still staring at her father with a look of fury and outrage. 

I thought of this event many times over the years, but only just the other day after probably having dreamed about it again, did I realize that the girl’s father had probably paid for his bad behavior.  His daughter, and I think she was an only child, wasn’t going to let him get away with the embarrassment he caused her.

Before I actually gave up going back to sleep, I found myself examining the idea of seeing that girl later on or perhaps writing to her because we seemed to get along better than some of the girls I really did go out with later on, but her father was an impenetrable obstacle, unless she had subjected him to some painful instruction.  But even if she had, I had no plans to have a girlfriend when I was only14, but rewriting my history as I sometimes do, I thought about it.   Could I have found occasion to give her my address and asked her to write?  But could she carry on such a correspondence?  Could I?  But no.  Had I thought of that while we were out back looking at all the neat things she had to play on, I could never later on have looked her father in the eye.