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.
“Sorry,” he said indifferently.
“He’s gonna heal it hisself,” one of the truckers in the booth called over.
The blue-rinse twins paid their checks and hurried out. One of the knights of the road sauntered over to the juke and put another dime in. Johnny Cash began to sing “A Boy Named Sue.” I blew on my coffee.
Someone tugged at my sleeve. I turned my head and there she was—she’d moved over to the empty stool. Looking at that face close up was almost blinding. I spilled some more of my coffee.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice was low, almost atonal.
“My fault. I can’t feel what I’m doing yet.” “I—” She stopped, seemingly at a loss. I suddenly realized that she was scared. I felt my first reaction to her swim over me again—to protect her and take care of her, make her not afraid. “I need a ride,” she finished in a rush. “I didn’t dare ask any of them.” She made a barely perceptible gesture toward the truckers in the booth.
How can I make you understand that I would have given anything—anything—to be able to tell her, Sure, finish your coffee, I’m parked right outside. It sounds crazy to say I felt that way after half a dozen words out of her mouth, and the same number out of mine, but I did.
Looking at her was like looking at the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo come to breathing life.
And there was another feeling. It was as if a sudden, powerful light had been turned on in the confused darkness of my mind. It would make it easier if I could say she was a pickup and I was a fast man with the ladies, quick with a funny line and lots of patter, but she wasn’t and I wasn’t.
All I knew was I didn’t have what she needed and it tore me up.
“I’m thumbing,” I told her. “A cop kicked me off the interstate and I only came here to get out of the cold. I’m sorry.”
“Are you from the university?”
“I was. I quit before they could fire me.”
“Are you going home?”
“No home to go to. I was a state ward. I got to school on a scholarship. I blew it. Now I don’t know where I’m going.” My life story in five sentences. I guess it made me feel depressed.
She laughed—the sound made me run hot and cold. “We’re cats out of the same bag, I guess.” I thought she said cats. I thought so. Then. But I’ve had time to think, in here, and more and more it seems to me that she might have said rats. Rats out of the same bag. Yes. And they are not the same, are they?
I was about to make my best conversational shot—something witty like “Is that so?”—when a hand came down on my shoulder.
I turned around. It was one of the truckers from the booth. He had blond stubble on his chin and there was a wooden kitchen match poking out of his mouth. He smelled of engine oil and looked like something out of a Steve Ditko drawing.
“I think you’re done with that coffee,” he said. His lips parted around the match in a grin.
He had a lot of very white teeth.
“What?”
“You stinking the place up, fella. You are a fella, aren’t you? Kind of hard to tell.”
“You aren’t any rose yourself,” I said. “What’s that after-shave, handsome? Eau de Crankcase?” He gave me a hard shot across the side of the face with his open hand. I saw little black dots.
“Don’t fight in here,” the short-order cook said. “If you’re going to scramble him, do it outside.”
“Come on, you goddammed commie,” the trucker said.
This is the spot where the girl is supposed to say something like “Unhand him” or “You brute.” She wasn’t saying anything. She was watching both of us with feverish intensity. It was scary. I think it was the first time I’d noticed how huge her eyes really were.
“Do I have to sock you again?”
“No. Come on, shitheels.” I don’t know how that jumped out of me. I don’t like to fight. I’m not a good fighter. I’m an even worse name-caller. But I was angry, just then. It came up on me all at once that I wanted to kill him.
Maybe he got a mental whiff of it. For just a second a shade of uncertainty flicked over his face, an unconscious wondering if maybe he hadn’t picked the wrong hippie. Then it was gone. He wasn’t going to back off from some long-haired elitist effeminate snob who used the flag to wipe his ass with—at least not in front of his buddies. Not a big ole truck-driving son-ofa- gun like him.
The anger pounded over me again. Faggot? Faggot? I felt out of control, and it was good to feel that way. My tongue was thick in my mouth. My stomach was a slab.
We walked across to the door, and my buddy’s buddies almost broke their backs getting up to watch the fun.
Nona? I thought of her, but only in an absent, back-of-my-mind way. I knew Nona would be there. Nona would take care of me. I knew it the same way I knew it would be cold outside. It was strange to know that about a girl I had only met five minutes before. Strange, but I didn’t think about that until later. My mind was taken up—no, almost blotted out—by the heavy cloud of rage. I felt homicidal.