(Originally published online at In Posse Review, but also anthologized in Working Hard For Money, published by Bottom Dog Press. Mary E. Weems and Larry Smith, eds. Huron, OH. 2002. 92-96.) Rose knew the old man was drunk by the way he shuffled through the door and eased onto a stool at the end of the bar. He didn’t grab the counter with his hands, just braced his palms against it and lowered himself gently onto the stool. Arthritis or hemorrhoids, she thought, and all that meant to her was that she was going to have to pour a lot of coffee, listen to somebody else’s misery, and be lucky to count a fifty cent tip. She turned her back to him and went on explaining to some whiney tourists from Ohio how to get back to the interstate, all the while hoping they didn’t forget their bratty kids when they left. She looked at the old man, then into the kitchen at Mack, who gave two hamburgers extra high flips, shook a fistful of French fries into a wire basket and set them to sizzling in the burnt brown oil before spitting his chew into the garbage and wiping his lips on his sleeve. She bused two tables and rang up a trucker’s pigs ‘n a blanket with a thermos to go before she brought water and a menu, but the old man didn’t complain. He was staring at the tacky brown-and-tan cowboy prints hung over the cook’s station and reading the little cute-isms on the walls like the ones that said “longhorns that-a-way” and “sidesaddles this-a-way” pointing the way to the restrooms. She slipped out back while he was looking at the menu and picked up the butt of a cigarette she’d laid on the gas meter outside. The wind was blowing hard out of the north and its cold touch slipped up the run in her stockings like a soldier’s hand. It’s gonna snow tonight, she thought. She fumbled in her pocket until she found a butane lighter with a family crest on it that wasn’t hers. She struck it. The flickering light lit up her bony face like a glow-in-the-dark Halloween mask. She snapped the lighter shut with a practiced whip of her wrist, took a deep drag on her cigarette, and let the smoke trickle off her lips like a honky-tonk love song. When she came back in Mack had the burgers and fries under the heat lights. “I told you no cheese,” she said. “Like hell you did,” he replied. He had rolled his sleeves up and was picking the scabs off a new tattoo of a cobra coiled menacingly on the inside of his left arm. He was a walking mural, but the snake was a first. He was hoping it would hide the tracks and collapsed veins of twenty-five years of heroin use. His other tattoos were mostly naked women with swords or fantastic fire-breathing dragons. His neck was emblazoned with an eagle-crowned swastika. The funny thing was, he was born Jewish. Rose elbowed her way past Mack and into the restaurant, ambling down the counter to where the old man waited. He’d folded his menu and laid it down in front of him; the universal sign, I’m ready. “Coffee?” she asked. “Black” he replied. The old man’s hands shook with tremors and Rose stared until he looked away. He folded them like haystacks on the counter but that didn’t help, so he buried them in his lap. Deep furrows like the arroyos running through the badlands marred his face. He was crisscrossed with more fault lines than California. She turn with less enthusiasm than a merry-go-round at a county fair and picked up a pot of rendered down coffee that would wake the dead and embalm them all at the same time. She held it in her right hand and felt around underneath the counter with her left for a clean cup. She looked up and the old man was leaning across the counter very close to her face. She could feel his breath on her eyelashes. The veins in his eyes stood out like roadmaps, bits of yesterday clung to his teeth like the memory of a bad dream. She could see every speck of the three-day’s growth of brown and gray beard coming up like the dry weeds and frost she would find in her yard at two in the morning when she got off work. His skin had a pallid tint to it, a study in yellow, his jaundiced eyeballs, the nicotine stains on his lips that dribbled down his chin. It reminded her of the urinal in the men’s room she hadn’t cleaned yet. She poured his coffee. He had a black hat that wasn’t a cowboy hat, just a shapeless old bag of felt that kept the rain off his head and the shit out of his hair. It had plenty of use, too, she thought. If I had a truck or a dog that old I’ d put it down. “What’ll ya have?” she asked. “Just coffee.” She wrote out the check and slipped it under his cup before he could change his mind. Mack slapped the bell, shouted “Order up!” and Rose pulled the plates from under the heat lamps. He had scraped about half the cheese off the burgers. The fries hung over the edge of the plates like beach towels and sweated oil like Yankee tourists. I can’t serve this crap, Rose thought, but she did. The Ohio man danced like a puppet in front of the cash register. Rose punched the numbers of his credit card into the box wrong and had to do it over again while he scowled and looked at his watch. She pictured him dressed in a sailor’s suit doing a jig like Popeye, but that only made her think of a sailor she knew once in San Diego. He promised to be faithful but the cafe didn’t take checks anymore, either, so she imagined him like one of those ghetto blacks dancing when there wasn’t any music. His wife walked out of the restroom with her kids in tow and shot Rose a sideways look that said If I ran over you on the highway I’d wash my car first and call for help later. What did she care? Her kids opened about fifty ketchup packages and smeared them all over the table. “Y’all drive safe now, you hear?” On one wall hung a clock that had a cowboy in the middle waving pistols with both hands; an Indian crouched behind every hour. A Blackfoot speed freak on a Harley Davidson whacked it with a baseball bat one night and smashed the glass, but old Mel, the owner, ran out of the office with a sawed-off shotgun swearing he’d blow him straight to hell if he ever set foot in here again. It wasn’t even ten o’clock. At midnight Sheriff Bunson would come in for coffee and pie, his face blown-up like a drowned cow, his grimy olive uniform stinking of sweat. He’d drape his fat ass over his favorite stool, the same one where the old man sat slurping his coffee. Everybody knew he took bribes from over-limit truckers and speeding salesmen and once asked Rose if she’d spread her legs for him when she complained because he impounded her car for breaking down on the highway. Hey, a girl’s gotta work. She pinched a butt out of an ashtray and headed for the kitchen again, but the college kids who ordered the burgers with no cheese cut her off. “I can’t eat this,” one of them said, prodding the soggy fries like they might be sleeping and not dead. “My burger’s cold” griped the other. He had an annoying squeaky voice and thick black glasses like a history professor. They had a girl with them who wouldn’t eat anything because she was a vegetarian and knew how to choose good restaurants. She had long auburn hair that hung down over her shoulders like a gasoline spill. “Let’s go,” she said. She wore a tight white muscle shirt that said PHISH in black letters on the front, and no bra. Her pointy brown nipples looked like they might chew their way through like weasels. I had tits like that once, Rose thought, and she slowly stroked the hair back from her temple. In fairy tales they made jewelry out of princess’s hair, but like the Sierras, if there was gold there once, there’s just ghost towns now. The kids laid a buck down for their coffee and walked out. Rose went out back and smoked the cigarette while the storm clouds ate the mountains west of town and the stars overhead and all her dreams. Little flecks of ice stung her face even though the clouds were not full overhead yet. The cigarette was menthol, too. Just my luck, she thought. Mack was no where to be found and Rose was sure he was drinking again. They had tried being lovers for a while but she couldn’t stand the smell of work all the time. Besides, he kept having dreams he was in prison and Rose was afraid he would kill her in her sleep. She would die and never know the reason. She thought the old man skipped out on his tab, but he had slid down the counter to eat the reject burgers the kids dropped in the bus tray. She bucked through the kitchen doors and turned on him like a rodeo bull, but he hung over the tray like a stray dog and she though he might bite if she came too close. He’d left his hat on the counter and his gray hair hung down in slimy coils like snakes behind him. He had a black satin trucker’s jacket on with a bug-eyed man on the back with wrenches in his hands and the words PERVIS SERVICE stitched in red letters arching across his shoulders. It occurred to her that the jacket was stolen. They had coyotes came down from the hills after the dumpsters like the rest of the bums and truckers, desert rats and crack whores who descended on the café on their way to Las Vegas. Old Mel put out poison sometimes, but mostly he didn’t care. He kept a tarantula in a jar on his desk and when he was drunk enough he would bring it out and let it crawl on his face. He liked scaring kids and city girls. The rest of the time he holed-up in his office like Jesse James, drinking and counting his money, watching the goings-on through a peeling one-way mirror. The old man finished his burger and turned around. His pants were dirty like he’d lived in them for a year, and his boots had soles once, too. “I ain’t got no money,” he said. What did Rose care? In a couple of hours Sheriff Bunson would come in leering like a rat trap and when the snow got bad jumpy truckers would crowd the booths and drink endless pots of coffee and count the hours to Dallas. Mack might sneak up behind her, his breath like diesel exhaust, reeking of whiskey and cough syrup, and slip his hand up her skirt for the umpteenth time until she told him No! and then he would go off and sulk like a lizard under a rock. Every day her face pulled a little further apart until no amount of make-up could hide the cracks and she was sure it was just a matter of time ‘til the whole thing damn split right down the middle. “Just get out,” she said. The old man shuffled out the door with his hat in his hand and his tail between his legs like summer leaving. Outside the snow began to fly for real but Rose was sure some softhearted trucker would stop and be glad for the company, at least as far as Phoenix. Mack dropped a dish in the kitchen and it shattered like a windshield, like a wreck on the highway, like childhood. Rose wondered what hotels and bars and trucker’s cafes might buzz to neon back east, if the air was really sticky, what frogs sounded like when they fucked under a full moon, and how it might feel to bleed young blood again. By morning snow would drift high as hubcaps on a Peterbilt. It fell fast, now, big flakes tumbling down, and she had a sudden vision of a young girl dancing in the backyard of a queer little pink stucco cottage in Sacramento, laughing with her grandmother, catching snowflakes on her tongue. The old woman was bent like a vineyard under a crown of white, her brown hands bare to the cold, wrinkled like raisins. Rose wore wooly gloves, black and roomy like an old Pontiac. The world was her enchantress. She caught snowflakes like fairy’s wings and marveled at their perfect symmetry. “Look!” she cried, over and over again, “Oh look!” The old man was gone, his memory a crooked set of tracks leading off into the night. A line of trucks appeared on the highway, braked and banked, their wipers flopping like buzzard’s wings, tires crunching gravel underneath. Rose stepped outside and listened to the diesels idle, the hiss as drivers set their brakes. She held out her hand on instinct but the snow swirled out of reach. "Hey, Mama," some smart- ass jake-jockey called, but Rose turned east like a night blooming weed. Somewhere she heard that no two flakes were alike, and she wondered how it could be they were different, every one that ever fell. |
| Melvin Sterne: Writer, Teacher, Editor, Photographer |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |