Free The Drought by Patricia Fulton, Extended Imagery Page A

not dead, not yet.”
    “What makes you so sure, Jar?”
    His eyes were intense almost feverish. “Promise you won’t laugh.”
    She crossed her heart, solemnly.
    “I keep dreaming about him. Only they’re not regular dreams, I just see flashes of images, like a big puzzle. I see him running through the house, he’s pale, and scared looking for a place to hide.”
    “What about the police? Why don’t we just call them, see if they’ll go up and take a look?”
    Jar threw her a look filled with scorn. “The chief didn’t even believe us about Luke. Now I’m supposed to tell him Barry’s in trouble and I know this because I keep having weird dreams?” He hadn’t even told his own mother about the dreams. They weren’t just about Barry, sometimes there were strange people more shadow than solid and there was a little girl scribbling furiously with a brown crayon. It was the reoccurring dream of the little girl with the haunted eyes that had him filling milk cartons with water.
    Suzy looked in the direction of Barry’s house. You couldn’t see it from the Stop-N-Wash but you could see the hill where it was built. “I’ve spent so much time wondering how it would be to have that kind of money. It never occurred to me what it would be like to have Griffin Tanner as a father.”
    “Barry doesn’t talk about it much.” Inside, the washing machines came to a stop. Jar got up and went inside to change out the load. She followed him and watched as he pulled a tangle of clothes free from an overloaded washer. She offered her opinion. “You know, they really don’t get clean if you overstuff the load like that.”
    He threw her a derisive look and for a moment he looked just like Barry. She put her unopened can of coke on a table and asked, “Can I help?” She didn’t wait for a response, instead she grabbed a rolling cart and moved it toward the second washer. She was about to open the lid when Jar yelled, “NO, not those!’
    She peeked inside and saw the whites. Realizing the source for his concern she said, “Don’t worry, I won’t look at your jockey shorts.”
    He reached over and slammed the lid down. He pointed at the third machine. “If you want to help, do the towels.”
    Trying to stifle her laughter, she unloaded the towels into the rolling cart and rolled them across the dirty, tiled floor. He was about to point out the last two dryers but she headed over to them on her own. “You know these last two run hotter, right?”
    He nodded and said, “Yeah.”
    She hung out while the clothes dried, chatting about the different teachers from the middle school. Before they knew it, they were pulling the clothes out of the dryer and starting to fold. They were finishing the last load when an ambulance screeched past.
    Suzy spoke the question on both of their minds. “Barry?”
    Jar waited, listening for the siren. In the distance they could still hear the faint warble. It wasn’t moving away, it had stopped. Jar looked at Suzy. “They stopped.” He folded another shirt, his head cocked to the side. “I don’t think it’s gone to Barry’s house. I don’t think you could hear the siren from here if it did.”
    Folding the last towel, she placed it on top of the stack and asked, “Is there any way we could check?”
    He looked at the pay phone by the door. She asked, “Do you have his phone number?” He gave her a look that was the equivalent of “duh,” then grabbed one of the quarters out of the baggy.
    “What if no one answers?”
    He tried to sound confident, “Someone will answer.” But he didn’t think so. He’d been trying to reach Barry for the past two weeks and each time the phone rang four times and for a heart stopping moment he would hear his friend’s voice, but it was always just the answering machine.
    Jar slid the quarter through the slot and punched in his friend’s number. On the other end the phone rang, once, twice, three times, then four. Jar waited, expecting