Chapter Eighteen
Ron Lewandowski had thought it would be an unusual day. He had awakened at a place called the Lone Cactus Motel in Needles, with his usual thundering headache, caused by the dry air. Since he was thirteen years old he had been susceptible to weather changes that seemed to wreak havoc on his sinuses. As he got older and his head got further and further from the ground. At twenty-one when he finally stopped growing, he was six feet five inches tall.
For ten years he had become immune to the musty rooms of endless cut-rate motel rooms around the country. The one he’d had the night before added to the ranks of the nameless and faceless. It was actually part of a modular building; Ron had lain in bed wondering if it had been built that way from the ground up or if they had just jammed together five or six mobile homes. He had grown up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and as a child had often fantasized about watching a tornado rip apart a mobile home park. As long as all the inhabitants had already been evacuated, that was. Would it just pulverize it instantaneously into a huge pile of matchsticks or would it pick up the entire cracker box style structure and hurl it, Wizard-of-Oz style, shuttling it off to some kind of a never-never land?
Toto, I don’t think we’re in California anymore, he thought, when later he passed the “Welcome to Arizona” sign. Suzy the rig had seemed like she woke up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. Grunting and groaning, then whining. He had come up with the name because of the way the engine screeched through the higher gears. It reminded him of a fiery-haired girl he’d sat beside in art class during his junior year.
High school? Fourteen years ago? It didn’t seem possible. There was the blur of those first years out, when he felt like he should have been a student at Oklahoma State University because he always ended up there every weekend. He was actually a dock clerk at the J.C. Penney’s at the mall and had three friends in the dorms at Stillwater. Ron should have been there, honing his talents for art and creative writing (his junior year English teacher had always told him he had the best imagination of any student she’d ever encountered). The one thing that kept Ron out of college during those years was the same thing that always messed up his life: his penchant for speed and adventure. That same year he’d sat beside fiery Suzy in art class he’d totaled his father’s Plymouth Fury. It happened one night when he’d sneaked the vehicle out for a night of joy riding during the summer with his friends.
He and his friend Bob had creaked open the garage door and then Bob, who was a guard on the football team, pushed the car into the driveway after Ron had put the transmission into neutral. They managed to get some older college guys to buy them beer and then picked up four more of their friends. Someone named Ray, who was a friend of Bob’s said there was a honky tonk way out in the country that stayed open late and would let them drink there. Four o’clock in the morning, on their way back from the bar, with six people drunkenly yelling, Ron approached a sharp turn too quickly. To compensate, he yanked the steering wheel, which through the big car into a fishtail. It skidded off the road and down into an embankment, slicing into a tree.
None of the three other guys or two girls had gotten hurt, but the Fury went to automotive heaven. Ron’s other friend Jerry had jumped behind the wheel and gunned the engine, in a vain attempt to back it away from the tree and pull it up the grade. Since the bumper and front end had been crumpled and the radiator punctured, the constant vroom of the gas pedal led to a loud series of clunks and hissing sparks from under the hood.
Ron walked a mile down the country road with Alice, one of the head-banded girls before they found a house.
He called the tow truck before he called his father, which made a series of bad moves even worse. In the bright, torturing light of the next morning, he and his father looked at the crumpled remains of the Fury. It had been dropped onto the pavement in the lot of a service station. His father, a soft spoken controller of an aggregates and concrete company looked at the wreck for at least fifteen minutes silently holding his folded arms across his chest. Ron was about to beg him to shout, yell, cuss or at least tell him where he stood when his father finally spoke. Finally he spoke, squinting, the white hair alongside his temples rising. “You have two choices,” he drawled. “Get a job and pay for this or go in the Marines. I ain’t paying a dime for your schooling until you do.”
Ron was dumbfounded. “What, buy you a new car?”
“Thought I made that clear.”
“That’s gotta be about four and a half, five thousand dollars. Don’t you have insurance? Can’t it pay for at least part of that?”
“I don’t think you’re seeing the point here, son. Pay for this or go in the Marines. Or maybe we oughta just put you straight in the marines. It straightened me out. Might do the same for you.”
“But that’s not fair!”
In a quick, violent motion, his father yanked a handful of Ron’s t-shirt and pulled him close, staring hawk-like into his eyes. “You want to talk about fair? I’m in bed fast asleep and get woke up to find that my only son has stolen the car, got juiced out of his mind and almost killed himself and five other parent’s children.”
“Okay, okay dad. I’ll pay! I’ll pay! I’ll pay!”
Ron toiled at J.C. Penney for three years hoisting boxes off of trucks, checking in merchandise. By the summer of 1973 he celebrated his 20th birthday by giving his father the final installment of $85 for the new Fury. Things were starting to look up. He’d met a shy blond haired girl at Hambrick’s cafeteria. She worked the cash register there, in the opposite end of the mall. A name tag pinned to her blouse read “Kimberly.” While he paid her for his Salisbury steak dinner he looked at the graceful lines of her neck and her cheekbones and the way her flawless fair skin seemed to glow. To his friends he would later describe her eyes as “the same color as an aquamarine crayola.” Simple things about her also captivated him, such as the way her lips pursed and tensed slightly while she calculated change. The sum total of it all made his heart melt. He was going to turn away and walk out the door to the final few hours of hoisting freight when he turned back to her instead. “So, Kimmie, why don’t you give me your number so I can ask you out sometime?”
She found a matchbook beneath the cash register and scribbled him a note on the blank inside cover: “646-7492, and please call me Kimberly.” That Saturday night they saw “The Poseidon Adventure” at the Towne Center Theater. Dates that followed brought memories of house parties, more movies, and long talks over a pool table when they would often stop and kiss. Kimberly’s older sister Susan had gotten married the following April and her father had booked a whole hallway of rooms at the Ramada for visiting relatives.
Ron and Kimberly found themselves alone in one of the rooms. Emboldened by champagne and a few shots of Jack Daniels, Ron coaxed Kimberly out of the mint green bridesmaid’s dress she wore.
The following Memorial Day weekend during a loud and boisterous, beer-soaked cookout at the apartment complex, Kimberly took Ron aside and said “I’m late.”
He married her about a year later; giving her a few months to get her figure back for the ceremony after their daughter was born. For the first year it had been blissful. Long lazy Sundays in bed, outings with other married friends, the joy of watching his mother and father gush excitedly over their baby girl. Then came the long hours at work, followed by the scramble to learn the more lucrative career of truck driving. The anxious late nights with his cranky, feverish daughter. The boredom. The weeks at a time he was on the road away from his family. The girlfriends. The discovery.
The lawyers. Like so many couples who married in their early twenties, Ron and Kimberly soon realized they’d grown apart and before their fourth anniversary, they divorced.
Ron had just spoken with his eleven-year-old daughter Merilee from a payphone outside the hotel the night before. She needed new Reeboks, she said. A new bike. Stone washed jeans instead of the old, stiff plain blue kind. Money, money, money, money. Just thinking about it caused Ron
to snap inside and smack the steering wheel with his palm.
Out of the peripheral vision of his left eye, he saw a flash of yellow. It then darted in front of him: a lemon yellow 1973 Mustang convertible. It reminded him of twelve years before, when he’d finished paying off his father for the damage to the Fury. He’d wanted to spend money on a car he could call his own. At the local Ford dealer he’d sat behind the wheel of a Mustang Mach I. A vicious looking navy blue one. When Kimberly broke the news about the conception, his dream of a sports car swirled away into oblivion, though.
The more feminine version of the sports car he coveted sped ahead. Impulsively he jumped on the pedal and threw down another gear, pushing himself to catch up with it. When he neared the car he saw a bright swatch of fabric trailing back from the driver’s head. He realized that a woman drove the car, seeing further the graceful lines of her delicate arms and slender hands clutching the wheel. A twinge shot through him as he breath caught in a ragged gasp inside his cab. Her skin glowed as if she were an apparition. A flash of red at the rear of the car distracted him and he realized that she’d slowed down to angle toward the exit. Unblinkingly he angled the rig behind her, in tow as if she’d been a magnet, impelling him along with her.
He watched her guide the car into a parking space in front of a truck stop restaurant. Had she noticed him chugging off the ramp behind her? He’d have to coast further down the parking lot anyway, into a stall beside the pumps. She would already be seated and maybe even ordering her meal by the time he strolled in. Suddenly, getting a look at the face and hair of the woman beneath the silken scarf she mysteriously loomed more important than two years worth of paydays.
After shutting off the truck and securing it, he took in a deep breath. His arms and legs felt stiff and wooden when he crawled down from the cab and slammed the door behind him. While nearing the restaurant, he thought about how he would approach her. What if she’d grabbed a table just inside the door? He’d just have to find a table across from her and think of a way to sidle forward and introduce himself.
When his hand caught the metal door handle he felt an electric tingle and a surge of anticipation. Once he’d cleared the foyer and the hostess stand, he stood on tiptoe to look around, remembering that at six-five he probably hadn’t had to do that since he was thirteen. The restaurant smelled of pine-sol and fryer grease mixed with brewing coffee. She was sitting on the other side of the large room, near the window. Without the scarf to restrain them, glorious waves of brunette tresses tumbled past her shoulders. She was, unfortunately, facing the window, her back toward him. He would either have to secure a seat directly across from her or catch her outside to get a look at her face.
An elderly couple sat at a table immediately beside her, or else he would have stationed himself there. A coat rack flanked her. Solitary truckers sat in tables forming a fanlike pattern around her, as though they were guarding her. The sign beside the hostess stand invited him to seat himself and he could only get within about thirty feet of the mysterious Mustang lady. He knew that if he failed to plop his butt down in the next few moments they might arrest him for loitering.
A scant moment after his posterior rested onto the vinyl cushion a waitress appeared. She was short and plain and regarded him out of tired eyes. “What can I get you, sir? Coffee to start with?” Ron muttered some type of an affirmative reply, adding that he needed a minute or two to study their menu. While looking over the choices of open-faced tom turkey sandwiches or double-decked burgers, he glanced upward at the woman across the room. She lifted a teacup to her lips, languidly.
When the waitress re-appeared with a coffee pot, Ron quickly ordered a bowl of chili and a cheeseburger, something he thought the cook could slap together in a couple of minutes. Having rid himself of the waitress, he leaned back in the chair and put his foot atop his knee, folding his hands on the table before him, studying her. He wondered if it was his imagination that he sensed an inner light emanating from her. His eyes perceived it as having a faint bluish cast. He shook his head, feeling like Daffy Duck doing an over-the-top wet, slobbery double-take. The light still remained after he refocused his eyes on her.
As a grade schooler, he’d befriended a boy down his street named Jeff. He only saw him after school and on the weekends because Jeff rode a bus to a Catholic school across town. Other kids in the neighborhood made fun of Jeff for the starchy white uniform shirt and evergreen clip-on tie he wore, but Ron liked to run with him. He was the only one in the neighborhood who could keep up with him on his sting ray bike. And his father kept an awesome train layout that covered nearly every inch of the basement in their house.
His middle school friend had come to mind again, because at one point Ron visited the Catholic Church Jeff and his family attended. It had been the first and only time he’d witnessed one of their unusual services, with all the standing and kneeling. Throughout much of the celebration, which they called a “mass,” Ron’s eyes wandered, alighting on the ornate statues and explosively colorful stained glass renderings of the station of the cross. On one wall hang a painting of Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. Pale blue light shone from her the same way as it had from this woman in a truck stop restaurant.
The waitress carried a large oval platter bearing Ron’s food and several other orders. He tore into the cheeseburger as soon as she laid the plate in front of him. While he ate, a plan for approaching the Mustang lady suddenly occurred to him. He could over tip the waitress and encourage her to carry a note over to her.
What to say, though? While enjoying a spoonful of chili he thought of a few possibilities: “Hi, my name is Ron Lewandowski and I’ve been sitting her admiring you from afar.” No, he didn’t want anything that would sound too corny or trite. All he wanted to do was meet her and get a good look at her. From there he could move on to other things. Finally he decided on something simple: “Hi, I noticed you from the other side of the restaurant. I was hoping we could talk. My name is Ron.” He always carried scrap paper in his shirt pockets or the button-down outer pockets of his jeans. Between yakking on the CB and writing down “to-do” lists there was always something to jot down. He found a nice, crisp clean little scrap to compose his important little note. He scrawled his thought down on paper while munching on the remainder of the cheeseburger. Once he had finished he wrote a second draft, this time taking extra care to write smoother cursive. In high school he’d received a 500 word theme back with the teacher’s comment “Can you please print or type? I’m going blind trying to read this.”
Once Ron had finished the final version he waited for the plain little waitress to appear, feeding himself more spoonfuls of chili. He surveyed the black and white checkerboard tile restaurant floor, craning his neck to look toward the kitchen, thinking she might have sneaked back there to collect orders. When he turned his attention back to the dining room, he found himself looking at the belt buckle and attached radio of a burly policeman most likely tall enough to look him in the eye.
Ron looked upward, scanning the crisp, pleated lines of the khaki shirt and a name tag which read “Gabriel” then to the smooth, clean-shaven face of a fair-skinned officer who seemed to be in his early thirties. “Can I help you, officer?” Ron said, drawing from his years of experience of the best way to deal with the law: polite, almost fawning respect.
The policeman spoke in measured, deep tones. “Do you have the red Kenilworth rig with Oklahoma plates?”
“Yes.”
“We need you to move it, sir. It’s blocking one of the entrances for the weigh station.”
Ron noticed an uncannily delicate china blue quality to Officer Gabriel’s eyes. He said “No problem,” and stood up, pushing himself away from the table to walk back outside. On his way out he turned to glance at the woman and she turned for a moment. Long enough for him to see the contours of a high, sculpted cheekbone.
He walked back to his rig on the windless, early afternoon of what would be a warm day. How could a big pol
iceman have entered the diner without him noticing, he wondered. A guy like that could not have just skulked in. He shrugged it off, climbing back up into his rig, firing up the engine, yanking on the wheel and the shift lever. It took him only three gears to get the rig into a safer spot, well away from the fenced weigh station.
He picked up his pace when walking back to the restaurant. The woman had arrived several minutes before he had and might be finishing up as he walked inside. If it took standing up to hunt the waitress down to give her the note and instructions, he would do it. But then, what was wrong with simply walking up to her table and saying “Hi, I noticed you from the other side of the restaurant and thought you might be interesting so I’d like to introduce myself.” What was she going to do, shoot him?
When he cleared the restaurant foyer and smelled the pine-sol, he found to his shock and amazement that she had gone. No sign of Gabriel the cop either. The waitress, however, loomed in the area of the tables on the other side of the restaurant. When Ron had reached her she had reached the woman’s vacant table and was scooping up a couple of bills and change. She snapped her neck around, startled, when she saw him.
Ron said “That woman who was sitting here, she left, right?”
The waitress nodded.
Ron hastily dropped a five and a couple of bills at the place where he had sat and half-walked, half-ran for the exit, trying not to appear like a crazed maniac. Once outside he ran around the building to the side, where he knew the lady had parked the Mustang. By the time the car came into view, he saw that she was within thirty feet of it. He scampered for the remaining yards to close the gap between them, not wanting to get him winded, and unable to speak.
Once he reached conversational distance he realized that the woman was tall. Close to six feet. Sunlight in the parking lot radiated coppery wisps into her way mane. He still had yet to see her face. She turned.
Ron stepped back. He first saw the arch of one high, delicate eyebrow as she regarded him. Time expanded: he could have been looking at her for a second or an hour. There was a slight, almost imperceptible head tilt paired with the quizzical sparkle of her modestly slanting eyes, offsetting her flawless, fair skin. When she spoke, her lips formed the words expressively, as if she had been trying to hit the correct notes along a musical scale. “Good day young man. Can I help you?”
The formality of the greeting and the woman’s hypnotic tone silenced him momentarily. He shook his head, pausing to breathe in before addressing her, unable to keep his hands from awkwardly flailing in front of him, though, in a waving-off gesture.
“I’m so sorry to bother you, miss,” he said, cringing at the choked-up way the words escaped from his mouth. “I thought you were someone I knew.”
She smiled, revealing two flawless rows of pearl white teeth, the corners of her eyes crinkling girlishly. “That’s quite all right,” she said. Ron walked away slowly but stopped to watch her swath her hair with the silken scarf and start her engine, heartened by the reverberation of all the barrels kicking in. When the car pulled away, he committed the license plate to memory: “MEW-339.”