A cop had kicked me off the interstate ramp and threatened to bust me if he caught me thumbing there again. I was almost tempted to wise mouth him and let him do it. The flat, four-lane stretch of highway had been like an airport landing strip, the wind whooping and pushing membranes of powdery snow skirling along the concrete. And to the anonymous Them behind their Saf-T-Glas windshields, everyone standing in the breakdown lane on a dark night is either a rapist or a murderer, and if he’s got long hair you can throw in child molester and faggot on top.
I tried it awhile on the access road, but it was no good. And along about a quarter of eight I realized that if I didn’t get someplace warm quick, I was going to pass out.
I walked a mile and a half before I found a combination diner and diesel stop on 202 just inside the city limits. JOE’S GOOD EATS, the neon said. There were three big rigs parked in the crushed-stone parking lot, and one new sedan. There was a wilted Christmas wreath on the door that nobody had bothered to take down, and next to it a thermometer showing just five degrees of mercury above big zero. I had nothing to cover my ears but my hair, and my rawhide gloves were falling apart. The tips of my fingers felt like pieces of furniture.
I opened the door and went in.
The heat was the first thing that struck me, warm and good. Next a hillbilly song on the juke, the unmistakable voice of Merle Haggard: “We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy, like the hippies out in San Francisco do.”
The third thing that struck me was The Eye. You know about The Eye once you let your hair get down below the lobes of your ears. Right then people know you don’t belong to the Lions, Elks, or the VFW. You know about The Eye, but you never get used to it.
Right now the people giving me The Eye were four truckers in one booth, two more at the counter, a pair of old ladies wearing cheap fur coats and blue rinses, the short-order cook, and a gawky kid with soapsuds on his hands. There was a girl sitting at the far end of the counter, but all she was looking at was the bottom of her coffee cup.
She was the fourth thing that struck me.
I’m old enough to know there’s no such thing as love at first sight. It’s just something Rodgers and Hammerstein thought up one day to rhyme with moon and June. It’s for kids holding hands at the Prom, right?
But looking at her made me feel something. You can laugh, but you wouldn’t have if
you’d seen her. She was almost unbearably beautiful. I knew without a doubt that everybody else in Joe’s knew that the same as me. Just like I knew she had been getting The Eye before I came in. She had coal-colored hair, so black that it seemed nearly blue under the fluorescents. It fell freely over the shoulders of her scuffed tan coat. Her skin was cream-white, with just the faintest blooded touch lingering beneath the skin — the cold she had brought in with her. Dark, sooty lashes. Solemn eyes that slanted up the tiniest bit at the corners. A full and mobile mouth below a straight, patrician nose. I couldn’t tell what her body looked like. I didn’t care. You wouldn’t, either. All she needed was that face, that hair, that look. She was exquisite. That’s the only word we have for her in English.
Nona.
I sat two stools down from her, and the short-order cook came over and looked at me.
“What?”
“Black coffee, please.”
He went to get it. From behind me someone said: “Well I guess Christ came back, just like my mamma always said He would.”
The gawky dishwasher laughed, a quick yuk-yuk sound. The truckers at the counter
joined in.
The short-order cook brought me my coffee back, jarred it down on the counter and
spilled some on the thawing meat of my hand. I jerked it back.