Chapter Nineteen
Ron followed her.
When the woman had gone to her Mustang, he had pretended to shuffle off toward his rig. While walking he had turned to look over his shoulder several times. She fired up the engine, eased the car out of the lot and angled off on a course east. Same as him.
He decided that he would leisurely tail her. For the first several miles she was not yet in view so he wondered if she was a lead foot. While driving, he briefly looked up at the sky. It was so much bigger out west than in the plains where he’d grown up or the crowded claustrophobia of interconnected megalopolises of the northeast. There, in Arizona, he could sit tall and stare down the straight highway clear to the vanishing point on the horizon. Miles ahead the vehicles all appeared to be fleas, scurrying in an orderly, straight line. So far, no yellow.
Watching the road, pounding the clutch and jerking through all the gears he re-summoned his mental photo frame of the woman. Her height had fascinated him; he had always been drawn to females of taller-than-average height, ever since high school. In high school, there had been the “Twin Towers” of the drill team, Wendy Tyree and LeeAnn Veigle. Each of them easily five-ten, he liked to watch them twirl and strut on the football field. The Mustang lady was taller. Then there was that billowy, glorious, cascading brunette hair, emanating an aura that set her apart from all the similarly-tressed ladies he’d ever seen.
Her eyes seemed wise, disarming. When she’d looked at him he had to stand back and catch his breath. They seemed slanted yet she was clearly not Asian. Maybe it was the way the sculpted cheekbones balanced off against them. Ron had long considered himself a connoisseur of feminine beauty. While he and his friends would look at a centerfold or pictorial from Playboy or Penthouse, they would often toss out predictable comments like “I’d drink her bath water,” and “I’d like to stick it in her!” Ron would instead offer a detailed analysis. “The way her faces seems out of focus it looks like they had to do some heavy-duty airbrushing on her,” and “her forehead is too high for size and set of her eyes,” or “shorter hair cut, in a bob with Betty Page bangs would make her look sexier.”
If the woman in the Mustang had been in a magazine pictorial, Ron imagined it would have been a classy one: possibly laying atop a grand piano, in profile, propped on her shoulders, head leaning back, her hair flowing downward, tickling the piano keys. Her body at once hidden and tantalizingly revealed by a cleverly placed fur draped atop her. Her feet strapped in by high-heeled sandals. Ron instantly realized though, that the ‘Stang woman was several years older than the typical girl they featured in such magazines, possibly decades. It was more the knowingness of her expression and the elegant ease with which she carried herself, more than any wrinkles or dull, dry skin. On an objective standard, she could have been thirty or fifty.
But there was more to it than just that.
An odd sense of “rightness” compelled Ron forward, seeking the upcoming stretches of asphalt for her. For a moment he thought of the sappy role Richard Dreyfus played in the movie “American Graffiti.” He sees a glimpse of a beautiful blond in a white-on-white ‘57 T-Bird convertible and she captivates him, goddess-like and he spends the entire rest of the movie searching for her, scouring the streets. Was this something like that, but on a vaster scale? The immediate difference was their ages: the woman in the yellow Mustang could possibly have been old enough to be his mother.
Was it, then, an oedipal thing? The English literature classes revealed to him that weird things happened in Shakespearean era plays. A guy turned into a donkey; an upstart killed a king, chopping off his head and jabbing it onto the end of a club; two lovers killed each other because their parents couldn’t get along; and finally, that kid with a thing for his mother that drives him into a possessed trance that compels him to kill his own father.
Was this like that?
No.
There was something larger than just normal horny curiosity or white-lined boredom at work. Maybe if Shakespeare had been alive today he might write a play about a long distance trucker entranced by a muse. That was it! She must have been some kind of a spiritual guide for him. Not in that sickeningly sweet Olivia Newton-John way from “Xanadu,” but in a way that she was divinely sent for him.
If nothing else, it took the drudgery out of another long run. He realized that in his daydream about seventies movies, Shakespeare plots, and ethereal beings that he’d allowed his speed to drift downward. This was the Great American West, for crying out loud. He jumped down on the pedals and slammed the shifted down, fancying for a moment that he was in a medieval jousting duel, fighting for the lady’s honor.
His speed climbed from sixty to sixty-five, then seventy and nudging upward. In the higher gears the Kenilworth’s engine droned sweetly, like the high-pitched whine of the buzz saw from his grandfather’s basement. The tool he’d used to construct a coaster car for him out of planks of pine. Ironically he realized that his load behind him consisted primarily of plywood and pine which would become part of the inventory of some giant super hardware store chain.
So where was she? Ron realized that she’d had several different opportunities to angle off highway 40, either north or south. For all he knew, she could have been on her way to either Mexico or the Grand Canyon. She seemed headed on the same beeline as he was, however: due east. The truck strained when he threw down another gear. It climbed a gradual grade, and for a moment his view of the road ahead had been limited to the crest of the grade. Once he reached the top, he leaned forward in the cab. Traffic had increased, since he was drawing near to one of the top tourist destinations in the universe. Still he saw a flash of yellow among the cars ahead and his pulse quickened. Instinctively he tromped down on the gas pedal and the rig lurched forward.
It was her.
He sped up slightly, to keep pace. She may have been a pretty woman with a delicate face like a china doll, but she had kept a heavy foot on the gas pedal. During his years on the road, he’d flirted with many women from his high vantage perch. The dance usually involved speeding up, cruising ahead of them, then slowing down, allowing them to ride in the back draft for a few miles. If a woman suddenly bolted out in front of him and stayed there for a few miles, then he knew she was interested and responding, playing into his game. Sometimes hours would pass while they would play “now you see me, now you don’t.” Inventive lady drivers would flash him glances of long, slim, tanned legs or cleavage. Other drivers he’d talked to had told him of even more spectacular goings-on. One of them, named Randy had described passing a taxicab where “the girl was paying for her cab ride, but she wasn’t using money.”
In this case, Ron thought it best simply to hang back and tail her. She’d tied her hair up in the scarf again and put on big sunglasses that covered the top half of her face. Her motions were few and very limited: she would occasionally brush a stray strand of hair off of her cheekbones or adjust her sweater collar. Other times she kept her hands on the wheel, in the ten and two o’clock position and gaze out at the open road ahead. She seemed to be entranced. Ron considered playing his game of pulling up alongside her just to see if she would react to him and break out of her spell. He even started to swing the wheel around and grab for the shifter knob, plunging down with his foot once again but decided it was best to lay back.
Something was guiding him. He thought it must have been his imagination, but he could sense a pale violet aura around the entire car. It emanated a force field that kept him back at a distance, watching her. It was a lonely stretch of highway, on a day during the middle of the week, in the early afternoon. Cars and trucks passed them headed the opposite direction on I-40. Up ahead he could see other cars also headed east. Yet it seemed that other vehicles, other entities shared the road with them. The more and more he thought about it, the more and more his skin tingled. Goosebumps on a hot afternoon on a desert highway in Arizona in May.
Ron made note of their surroundings: they were headed in
to Grand Canyon territory. The main national park was still several miles north of the highway but it was still possible to view many of the great gashes in the earth from the roadside. As a kid he had learned of the national park in his geography class and had seen pictures of it on television, during travelogues and in westerns.
The movies had always shown it as a place of spectacular, awesome grandeur, but as far as natural wonders were concerned, Ron felt that the Niagara Falls had it all over the Grand Canyon, hands down. True, the Grand Canyon was sprawling and majestic, with beautiful rock formations but it was also dry and dusty and barren. The falls had enraptured him from the first moment he’d seen it. They seemed to have been perfectly sculpted by nature. The way the countryside fell off in a perfect shelf and a flowing, surging river rushed over it in a perfect, steady stream, creating beautiful rainbows was a treat for the eyes in a way that the Grand Canyon simply could not compare in his eyes. Instead, the canyon seemed to be the very antithesis of the falls, possibly after millions of years of wind and climate changes, plus an ice age or two. It had all diminished the raging river to the pathetic little trickle of the Colorado, thousands of feet below.
Ron snapped out of his geographic inner soliloquy long enough to realize that he’d fallen behind her again. He grabbed for the shifter, nearly knocking his thermos off the console. At that moment the sun peeked out from behind a fluffy cloud and shards of sunlight sliced through the windshield and pierced through his vision, piercing hot pokers of pain into his brain. He cried out in the cab, and grabbed his temple, wincing. The pain was so intense he wondered if he should slam down the clutch and angle the rig onto the shoulder to allow it to subside. Instead he paused for a few deep breaths and pinched the skin on the back of his hand. It was a trick his family doctor had taught him when he was sixteen and had been having the headaches for four years.
Ever since his accident on the moped. When he was eleven years old he’d seen an advertisement for the moped in the back pages of Boy’s Life magazine. His friends from the neighborhood had already abandoned their sting ray bikes the year before and most of them had moved on to racing bikes with high wheels and skinny tires. The moped looked much different from the racing bikes. Shorter, wider wheels for one thing, and it contained a small engine that would power it, similar to a motorcycle. No special license was required to ride or own one. To Ronnie it seemed only a couple of small steps away from driving a car, and it cost only $199.99.
The first time he’d shown his father the picture of the moped, he had simply smirked. “Yeah, I can see you becoming the human hood ornament for a semi rig,” he said.
His mother wouldn’t even discuss the idea.
After several lengthy pleas at the dinner table, his father finally relented, in his sighing, resigned style. “All right, Ronnie,” he said. “I can see this means a lot to you. I thought it was going to be a passing thing. If you can come up with the first $100, I’ll match you the other $100 and you can get your moped.”
And Ron set out to save every dime of his allowance and comb the neighborhood for other money making opportunities. A freak blizzard hit Tulsa that following winter and had dropped over a foot of snow. Ronnie and his friend Jerry knocked on several doors that week, bundled up in ski clothes offering to clear people’s driveways for ten dollars. By the end of that week he’d done eight driveways, splitting the take with Jerry sixty-forty (since Ronnie was bigger and stronger, able to clear away much more snow). When spring finally arrived that year he arranged to borrow his father’s lawnmower and cut lawns for five dollars. By the time school let out for summer vacation, he had his $100.
Ron could remember the event as if it had happened the day before yesterday. His father took him to Reed’s Hardware supply, a business that also dealt in bicycles. They carried the same exact Moto Guzzi moped he’d seen in the magazine. He settled on a bright orange one that had been marked down to $185 because of a scratch on the paint and a speedometer glass that had cracked on the edge during shipment.
When Ron took it for his first ride he’d hyperventilated in his giddiness and had trouble keeping the vehicle standing upright. As if he’d somehow forgotten how to ride a bike. It was a bright, sunny day in early June, and as Ron cut in and out of car traffic around the Will Rogers shopping plaza, he felt as if his life had finally become perfect. A few drivers had shouted at him out of their windows but he paid them no mind. Their indignation was a sure sign he was being recognized as a daredevil, a young man on a fast track to life’s inner circle.
None of the other kids in his school had a moped, though many of them talked of either getting that or a motor scooter. Over the next few weeks, Ron pedaled or cruised on his moped everywhere, to Lack’s market for licorice shoestring runs or to Downey Acres pool where all his friends with their water slicked hair would enviously watch him circle the parking lot beyond the concrete poolside.
By the fourth of July the bright orange machine had paled somewhat and Ron longed to go faster, to feel more power beneath him than the tiny moped engine could provide. To further worsen things he saw Terry McNeely a red-haired guy just a year older than him, riding a small Kawasaki. Suddenly the moped seemed only slightly more exciting than a Big Wheel. Still, he continued to ride it. He realized that something as fast and flashy as a Kawasaki loomed many snowy driveways and overgrown yards away. He would need a license, also. In the meantime, Ron discovered a trick that would make his lowly moped seem more powerful and faster. He could pick up speed if he accelerated at the top of a hill. Gravity would take over and for a few moments he’d feel as if he rode a mechanical steed, nimbly cutting in and out through cursing drivers in traffic.
Halfway through August the odometer passed the 2,000 mark. Exhilarated, he wondered how far he could have gone if he traveled that distance non-stop. California, where all the movie stars were. During the last week before school started he rode his steed practically every waking moment. His favorite trick was to catch Riverside Avenue at the aqueduct and turn the corner to McBride parkway. The gradual grade would carry him past Lacey’s cards, The Hobby Shack, and the post office before he could turn quickly into Landmark Way and slow down.
That August day was cool and misty, as if the gods were preparing everyone for the coming school year. Traffic was thicker than normal with parents scurrying to back-to-school sales. Sounds Incredible records across the street was playing the new Beatles album over the outdoor speakers and when Ron sped down Riverside Avenue, he could hear the chorus of one of the songs: “Let me take you down, cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields...nothing is real.. And nothing to get hung about” When Ron turned quickly at Landmark his tires hit a wet patch at the corner. The moped skidded sideways, into the path of an oncoming sedan that could not stop. The front wheel of the moped caught under the car’s bumper, launching Ron out of the seat.
Strawberry fields forever.
Ron shuddered when he thought about it, eighteen years later. He’d been thrown forty feet, bouncing off the roof and hood of a pickup truck before hitting the pavement. His shoulder hit first, and then his head slammed down violently, sending him into a coma that lasted one month, keeping him in the hospital until around Halloween. He’d shattered his collarbone and arm, split open his skull and broke both of his legs when they tumbled behind him, raggedy-Andy like. All these years later sharp temperature changes still caused the blinding headaches.
There were no such sharp changes in the Arizona desert, just heat, heat, heat. He glanced down at the convertible and the corners of the woman’s scarf fluttering in the wind. Something caused his skin to tingle and his insides to shiver though the air conditioning barely worked inside the cab.
He remembered that he’d awakened bald-headed and sore, with a mouth so dry it felt as if it had been sand blasted. There was a fuzzy outline of something that at first looked like a giant white crab coming at him. The picture gained clarity gradually, like the picture on an old TV set with its tubes slowly warmin
g up. Eventually the crab’s claws metamorphosed into a nurse’s arms and the pointed shelled head revealed itself to be her white cap. Then he could hear her saying “Ronald, can you hear me?” and it seemed like she had to shout over loud talking and singing coming from somewhere.
He thought at first that she’d met him at the side of the road where he’d landed after his encounter with the pickup truck. Another nurse appeared, then a young doctor with bushy hair and scared-looking pale eyes, the pupils merely pinholes. Later on, his overjoyed mother and father came to see him and then a few of his school buddies. Someone showed him a newspaper clipping about his awakening. It said that his first words were “The Empress saved me,” and he had always chalked it up to delirious talk.
The CB radio squawked loudly, blasting him out of his meandering daydream of long ago. His right hand wavered, knocking his opened thermos bottle off the console. He bent over quickly to retrieve it, before it spilled out all the lukewarm black coffee. On the way down he caught a glimpse of a highway exit for the Petrified Forest National Park and a view of the convertible. When he returned upright, he decided to gun the engine and catch up to the Mustang. She was in the left lane so he would be able to get a good look at her.
While he gradually pulled up even with her, the same cold shiver returned, gaining intensity, causing him to tremble. Clouds above had blotted out the sun’s rays, adding to this effect. He pulled the cab ahead, to get a look at her face and she suddenly took off her sunglasses, dropping them into the console. He saw her eyes and said “Oh, my god.”