45

Chapter 45

I decided to ride out the rest of the day in the front yard under the big tree, not knowing what to do next. No one was about and I had the whole afternoon to consider my dilemma. At this point, I was sure the police would finger-print the paintings in the truck and I would be hauled in as an accomplice in one of the most annoying bank near-robberies of the city's history. Aiding and abetting, harboring a criminal, conspiracy to commit robbery...art theft? Who knew what they would throw at me in an effort to get me to talk. I steeled my resolve.

It was then that something flitted across my peripheral vision and I heard the screen door slam shut. Turning around in my lawn chair, I saw Bufford peeking through the curtains of my living room, surveying the scene, eyes wide as ping pong balls.

It took an hour or more to calm him down to the point he could re-count his experience. His story truly was incredible, but I knew a thing or two about celestial events and metaphysical anomalies, so I recovered rather quickly from the temporal aspect of his tale. After, I berated him for the "asinine stunt" and huffed about his "lack of vision and general hold on reality" for a while. Then we discussed the potentially contrasting values of immediacy and caution in a situation like his and finally determined that things were not going as he had hoped. In the end, he gave me the truck keys and described its location. He had hidden it on the east side of town beneath a Tresseme shampoo billboard partly obscured by a grove of crab apple trees. No more decisions would be made today, he said. He needed to sleep. He suffered from something like an extreme case of jet lag and complained of an infernal honking sound in his head that would not go away. I told him I hoped he understood, but that I was leaving early the next morning and we would talk on the phone the next day. We shook hands and he retired for the night across the yard to Ineola's house.