Ford's Dream

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Ford Hawks woke up on the morning of 21st August 1996 feeling like he hadn’t slept at all. He looked around blearily, reached for his glasses and watched his modest bedroom swim into focus.
Comic book posters and movie posters on the walls, his beloved bass guitar in the corner, a few of his sketchpads lying on top of various surfaces.
He stumbled out of bed, cracking his shin on his chair as he stood, figuring today was headed in that direction. He was large but a lack of confidence made his largeness somehow awkward, he gave people the impression that at any moment he might apologize for taking up too much space.
Making it into the kitchen he put on some toast and a pot of tea. He and his mother drank it, she said his father had gotten her into drinking it and she’d kept the habit. His mother came in while he was buttering toast, tired from her late night at the tv station where she worked lighting for both recorded and live shows.
“Hiya mom. Toast,” He mumbled and she smiled at him. She remembered when he was quite the active child, boy scout and eventually Eagle scout, but in the last couple of years he’d gotten lazier and lazier. She could never quite bring herself to chide him for it, he was so sweet natured for one thing and for another she could never think of what he should be doing instead of being lazy. When she tried to think of things they always seemed to be ephemeral and difficult to pin down. So she thanked him for the toast, knowing it was the closest to making them both breakfast he was going to get and sat at the kitchen table.
Ford sat down, dropping his toast on the floor as he did. He grunted in dismay, then made a slight pleased sound as he noticed it had fallen butter-up. “Bonus,” he murmured to himself, picking it up.
He commenced half-reading his book as he ate his toast, quite capable of reading and talking at the same time. She looked at his book, a translation of The Odyssey and felt a tug at her heart. Ford tended to like stories of a boy without a father and particularly about boys who grew up without but eventually found their fathers. She wished it could be that simple for him. Odd how hard it was to remember the specifics of her husband, the routine of their life together, but she remembered the feeling of being with him perfectly. He was almost as tall as Ford, scarred from wounds taken on his job as a police officer, rough-voiced but with a way of making fun of himself at the least expected moments that always made her feel she’d chosen the right man. 
She was sad that Ford never got to meet him, she’d named the boy because they’d watched the Star Wars films together and her husband Jim had liked Han Solo so much. Oh, wait, not all three Star Wars films, that was impossible, Jim had died a couple of months after Ford was born, in 1977. Funny how details like that would be hazy sometimes, then snap back into focus. Indeed, she’d brought Ford to see Return of the Jedi in the cinema.
“I saw the show mom, the lights looked great. Henckley stepped off his mark but you managed to adjust the lights before anyone noticed.”
He was a thoughtful boy -ah, he was becoming a young man, really- and he tended to do things like that, notice her work, ask her about it. She watched him with concern across the table, he looked more like her than his father but she knew he had something of his father in him, she just didn’t know how to help him bring it out. He was so shy, where Jim had been so confident. 
She remembered how Ford had been such a little adventurer as a boyscout, utterly fearless. She thought he still was really, he just had nothing to motivate him anymore. He liked to sit around coffee houses and draw in his sketchpad, she’d seen some of his work. It reminded her sometimes of Jim’s sketches but she knew Ford’s were better. Jim had sketched with a kind of exactitude that would have served a police sketch artist well, perhaps it was being a patrolman that made him take on that style. But Ford tended to capture little idiosyncrasies, he’d abandon photo-realism sometimes to find that little something that humanised his subject.
Abby thought that she’d give anything to have her husband and son both at the table this breakfast. She thought things like that all the time. She’d been a widow for nineteen years but it felt like weeks, such was the feeling of loss and emptiness. She was resigned to being alone because Jim was in her heart forever. There were plenty of offers, she was a beautiful woman and she worked at a TV station after all, lots of successful men who thought she should feel very fortunate to have their interest, but she discouraged them all gently.
Ford was thinking much the same thing as he half-read half chatted with his mother. He glanced at her, it’s always difficult for a child to perceive their parent with any perspective, but Ford knew she had aged differently than most of his friends’ mothers. She looked almost too young to have had him, though there was a melancholy about her that made him wish sometimes he could think of a way to reach her. He resolved to ask her to stargaze with him this evening when he got home from work, that was something that always seemed to bring her a kind of peace.
From early childhood he remembered gazing at the stars, Abby identifying the constellations with an easy familiarity. She always spoke of The Two Warriors constellation with a peculiar reverence that was perhaps the reason it had become his favourite. It was a cluster of stars that seemed to represent two figures locked in eternal combat. On his loneliest nights he’d go out on the roof and look up and he wouldn’t feel quite so alone.
He’d turned nineteen this summer, hard to believe. He felt awfully old, twenty just around the corner. Still a virgin, he’d had a couple of girlfriends but never for very long, he was too awkward to sustain any relationship. Janine, the girl with the clunky-framed glasses, had been on his mind every day since the beginning of senior year of high school. She was cool in a kind of outsidery geeky way. She wrote great articles for the school paper Ford drew cartoons for. She dated a guy who got the best results in the state for business studies in year-end exams, which seemed like a waste to Ford. 
This summer he’d been working on his portfolio in coffee shops, he’d worked all through high school at a video store and kept it up part time since leaving school. Sometimes Janine came in, once she asked him to recommend a movie. He’d noticed she liked old movies, she’d rented a couple of screwball comedies and he knew she’d never rented Bringing Up Baby, but when she asked for the recommendation he thought she’d think he was being a smartass if he recommended it because the director’s name was Howard Hawks, same surname as him. Maybe she’d think he was coming on to her in a really stupid way. He knew she’d love the movie but he couldn’t recommend it so he just murmured and pointed at the new releases section where she picked up Strange Days. 
She’d actually liked it a lot and thanked him for recommending it when she came back but Ford just mumbled she was welcome and shambled off somewhere. 
Breakfast such as it was, was finished and Ford got up, kissed Abby’s cheek and went off to work. He came in and said hi to the owner Susan, she was very fond of him and he got along well with all the girls who worked there, though he was far too shy to take it beyond sometimes jawing about movies with them. He worked a few hours and then went to the coffee shop.
He had a booth he liked, it always seemed to be free for him. He’d slide in and be out of the way, drawing people that came in, or drawing Janine, or sometimes drawing random things that occurred to him, even things from dreams.
Last night, in fact, he’d dreamed. Maybe that’s why he felt he hadn’t slept at all, the dreams must have made him restless.
He’d dreamt he was standing over a coffin, draped with the American flag, surrounded by Police officers. A strange man who looked a tiny bit like Robert Smith told Ford ‘Your father is in that box’ and Ford wondered if he should tell him it was in poor taste, but when he looked down again it wasn’t a coffin, it was a very old-looking box, not unlike a music box. He frowned at the idea of his father in there and reached to open it to show the strange man, but the man was gone. He tried to open it anyway but couldn’t. Shambling and awkward though he was, Ford was strong. He should be able to open it easily even if it was stuck. He could see no locking mechanism either. But no, the box wouldn’t budge. 
The strange man’s voice called out to him. “It’s for the best, your father’s enemy is death and he has not yet defeated him forever.”
Well of course he hasn’t, you insensitive jerk, he’s dead, Ford wanted to say but the man wasn’t there and he felt foolish. 
The dream changed and he was standing in a picturesque town, not Portland or anywhere around that he knew, but not a million miles away either, he guessed. It looked like small town America, quite pleasant on the eyes, slow-paced. He liked the place and in the dream-logic he knew his father had lived here. This made no sense because Abby had said she and Jim both grew up in Portland, but just the same Ford knew this place and his father were linked. 
He started walking down the main street, thinking of how his father should never have left this place, maybe he wouldn’t have been shot and died on the job. This place needed protecting too, just like the city he was from. He caught his reflection in a store window and for a moment he thought he saw a lean, scarred young man with eyes as black as a crow’s. But it was just a moment, he looked down at himself and sure enough he was himself, plaid shirt, sleeveless sweater, slightly flared jeans. And Sheriff’s badge. A sheriff’s badge on his chest, he walked the street and knew he was this town’s protector. The dream made it all make sense and he didn’t question it. 
He walked further and paused outside a diner, he didn’t see the name. In the diner, a young man, the one he’d seen in his reflection, was holding Abby and a baby in his arms. Abby looked strange, younger -but not much younger- and her skin looked… green. It wasn’t just her either, a massive man with fire engine red skin looked down at them and said the baby was a little Warchild. That word sent a shiver through Ford so violent that he woke, feeling like he hadn’t slept at all.
Ford sat in the coffee shop trying to remember his dream. It was slipping away the more he tried to remember it, so much so that he became frustrated and just started sketching instead, faces from the dream. This helped, he could recall the faces when he was drawing. The scarred but handsome young man. The huge red-skinned man. Even his mother, so different in the dream, only a little younger but so calm, so brave, so alive looking.
He got up to go to the counter to ask for another cup of coffee, standing around with that vaguely apologetic expression as he waited. Janine came in and gave him a slight smile and a nod as she walked right by on her way to the ladies room. Somehow that slight smile was worse than nothing because it reminded him she knew who he was, he’d just failed to make an impression beyond that. 
The waitress took his order and said she’d bring his coffee over so he made his way back to his booth and was horrified to see Janine looking at his sketchbook. She hadn’t picked it up or anything, she was just looking down at the page it was open on.
“Is this your mom?” She asked, hardly looking up from the drawing.
He was excruciatingly embarrassed, what kind of weirdo draws a picture of their mom? He shook his head but then thought she’d think he was denying it so he said too loudly “Yeah” then cursed himself silently. 
“I saw her at graduation. She’s so beautiful, huh. You really captured her here.” She gave him a bright smile that sent seemingly all the blood in his body up to his cheeks to instantly redden them, then she was gone and he was alone, banging his head softly against the booth after getting in, murmuring “Lunkhead!” to himself. 
He didn’t know she was only around the corner and could hear him, he didn’t know she’d asked him to recommend a movie because she’d gotten into screwball comedy after she heard Ford talking to Susan the store’s owner about it. And she’d stood right beside Bringing Up Baby because she was hoping he’d recommend it and she could mention how he had the same last name as the director and that was cool, or something like that. She smiled to herself sadly, wishing she could explain to him that no matter how shy or lost you were in this world, there was always someone who was more of a lunkhead than you. She could be that lunkhead, she thought. But she got her coffee and left.
Ford soon went back to sketching. He cheered after a while, no point in staying down, he may as well enjoy the lazy afternoon. He started working on a sketch of the town he’d visited in his dream and he was amazed at how clearly he could remember it once he was putting pencil to paper. 
He finished sketching, got up to pay for his coffee and found a ten dollar bill in his jacket pocket he couldn’t remember the origin of, he’d been pretty sure he’d spent whatever money he put in that pocket. “See?” he murmured to himself. “At least I’m lucky,” He finished the thought silently, paying for the coffee and tipping handsomely, passing some of that luck on.
Even if nothing changed, he thought as he walked out onto the street, life could be a lot worse. 
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