Track 4 – The Cattle and the Creeping Things - The Hold Steady

“So you never told me how you met him.”

“Huh?” Jake opens his eyes and looks up at Molly. We’re in the present, in the hospital. She smiles down at him.

Jake’s hospital room is all peaches and mauves, the kind of colors that are offensive to the senses by their very neutrality. He is tucked tightly into his bed lying face up, which makes him feel like a corpse. He likes to sleep face down with limbs hanging every which way, but he’s not much into flopping over ever since his body found out all about the physics of deceleration.

“How’s the car look?” For some reason, this is of the utmost importance to him.

“Bad.”

“It always looks like that.”

“I know.”

“Totalled?”

She nods and smiles. Molly is a funny kind of beautiful. When she isn’t looking at you, she’s nothing special. When she smiles, she’s God and the Devil and everything in between. I’m exaggerating again. Maybe she’s as good a reason to live as any.

“Scooter,” she says,” I was asking about Scooter. You never told me how you met him. It seems like an awfully big coincidence.”

“He would say there’s no such thing as coincidence. That it’s just pattern recognition in a non-patterned existence, another excuse to look for God.”

“I think that’s a lot dumber than it sounds.”

“Why do you want to know how we met?”

“It’s just been a strange week, is all.”

Jake looks out the window, and Molly takes his hand. From his room he can see the beginning of the Pacific, except today it’s indistinguishable from the gray sky, as if the piers were butting up against some strange ending of everything.

Jake closes his eyes again for a second. Suddenly there’s a flash of pain that goes through his brain, he can’t even think. When it passes he says, “With Scooter at least, there’s no such thing as coincidence.”

But she’s gone, and it’s dark out. Jake looks around, confused. The blinds are closed now. She must have stayed, arranged his world. On the table is a mix tape and a note.

They came and brought your stuff, the rest is in the drawer. I thought you might like me to leave this out. – M

The tape is labeled “Jake.” It had been everywhere with him, following him and driving him the same way that Scooter did. It was a symbol to Jake. Most everything is. Is this story a fable? I really don’t know—I don’t see much of a point or lesson in it. Of course, there’s not much of a point in any of our lives. Things just happen and we all do our best to sort it out and ascribe meaning to it.

Jake picks it up and turns it over in his hands. It feels good. Somebody has put it together again with scotch tape and wound it back up. Probably Molly. He puts his fingers in the spools and runs them along the magnetic tape. He has it memorized, so he can make another one. This one probably won’t ever play again.

“He told me once he was exactly what I expected.” Jake says it aloud to no one. “But he wasn’t.” The only reason he says this is so you can know it.

Being unexpected is why Scooter existed, I guess, and why the story is worth telling. Maybe it’s not, but it killed him. We’ll get to that.