Winslow

When we woke up the next morning, we ate breakfast quickly at the same truck stop. It was a choke-and-puke right outta Smokey And The Bandit, swear to god. I mean the waitress was an old slut with boobs bigger than her head, and she was constantly flirting with both of us. It was kind of cute and also kind of weird.

The food was greasier than most- which is saying something. All the food in my time with Jake was greasy, except for the time with Jenny. The room was full of truckers, but if you put them all together, all 40 of them, you might have a mouth and a half worth of teeth. I’m not saying all truckers are like that, but the ones who frequented this “dining establishment” were.

Jake seemed like he was in a rush, but that’s the way most truck drivers are when they have a job as good paying as this one. They often are assessed heavy penalties for late delivery, and Jake was just one driver, which was a handicap. He liked challenging himself; most truckers who really worked the tight runs did two driver teams so they could get more road time.

I would say we were back on the road within an hour and a half of waking up. The morning’s meal sat like a rock in the bottom of my stomach. I swear, when I stop riding with Jake, it is going to be on account of me getting sick of grease. There is only so much fried food fried in pre-fried frying oil and then fried again that one can take.

We went along the road at a considerable clip. The huge diesel was pounding out a staccato that would do an army of bongos proud. The sun was shining in the sky, there wasn’t a cloud in sight; it stopped raining, everybody’s in the play, and don’t you know, it’s a beautiful new day! Not that this is impressive in the desert or something. But Mr. Blue Sky was playing on the radio, so...

Jake was in a chipper mood. He was singing along with the radio and dancing around in his seat. He was chatting about various things, most of them involving how wonderful this day seemed to be. It was a while before he decided to ask me another question about my life.

“Johnny, have you done sex just for sex? Like without the relationship?”

“It’s happened,” I admitted as the Eagle’s song ‘Take it Easy’ came on the radio. “Actually, this song reminds me of it...”

I had arrived in Winslow, Arizona in the cab of an 18-wheeler, the driver of which had decided I was not going to be his traveling companion any longer. This wasn’t a particularly shocking occurrence and I was used to it by now. This was, oh, eight years ago.

I know it was before 9/11, because that event changed my life 15 ways to Sunday.

It really did. I’m sure I’ll tell you the story of where I was at the time and all that, but jeeze. You see, they decided that in order to keep track of who may or may not be potential terrorists, drifters like me could no longer run around the system of the world without ID. Since my very lifestyle depended upon my anonymity, this was a serious problem.

I ended up assuming the Social Security Number of a dead man Rachel had killed somewhere along the line- yet another story. Trust me, you come up with them if you live like this. Anyway, I had to tighten myself up. Assuming that SSN turned out to be a god send. I probably should start looking for another one. I don’t use it very often, but it probably creates a string of commonality.

Only a very few people know all of the details of my false ID, including that its fake. People I trust with my life. It took Jenny a while to realize that I truly have forgotten my real last name. One of these days I will go to either Suzie or my parents and they will tell me my real last name.

Anyway, with me using the same SSN all over the place, they might get some idea of a person to look for. They’d be after the wrong name, sure, but it gives them a place to look. Maybe they’d find out where I crossed paths with him and who I was.

I hate Them. They are anonymous. They are legion. They are the people who try to trip you up, not out of malice but out of apathy. They are the people who know things. They are the people who tell you what is good and what is bad. They are the ones who tell you society is going to hell in a hand basket. They are the unsourced. They are the uncited. They are usually a load of bullshit. They should be ignored as uncited, unsourced, unattributed poppycock. And for some godforsaken reason They are usually the most trusted source in the world.

A new SSN and fake ID would be nice, but it would be so much harder to do that now than it would have been to do it before 9/11. I think there are a few states you can sneak through without actually forging a document, but I’m not sure. Basically I would need what I had before, I guess, but its more difficult now.

What you need is an unidentifiable corpse that has a SSN and papers, but has few if any people who would be interested in their disappearance. You need to get to them and their identification documents before anyone else does. That was always the case. But now you need to hope this is also a person whose fingerprints aren’t on record- increasingly rare- whose DNA is not recorded, and whose picture is not available in any easily found way. To add to all of this, they have to be at least within a plausible range of your age.

Crafting these kinds of IDs is possible, but very difficult. You need an expert in this sort of thing to do it. When I assumed John O’Connell’s ID, pictures had not yet been on file for license photos. I didn’t need to have much in the way of corroborating information that only John O’Connell had. I couldn’t get away with it anymore.

I had a few sets of ID in Chicago that I could use for things like checking into hotels, and other things like it where they never really checked the information they had against real databases. Soon even that sort of thing would probably become impossible. We were increasingly in a world of Big Brother style surveillance.

In any case, to get back to the story, I had don’t remember specifically having seven women on my mind, as mentioned in the song. There were a lot of them, though. This was my own fault. If I had an ounce of sense or sanity I would have married Rachel or Jenny years before this.

I had been back to see Jenny once already and she, to her credit, had not cornered me and asked me to be a present father to our wonderful child. Actually, she had specifically insisted that if that wasn’t what I wanted with all my heart, I shouldn’t. Some would call this understanding or kindness, but I wasn’t sure that was the reason for it.

I think when you get down to it, she couldn’t stand me disappearing again. She knew that if she tried to force me to stay, I would probably run away forever. I think letting me go was her way of keeping me close to her. She was not a dumb woman, and I think she had a tacit understanding of my mental condition.

There was Cheryl, who is a wonderful friend. We usually made love whenever I came to see her. It wasn’t that we were in love. But we did love each other, and we both enjoyed having sex. Being with her was very special to me. It was a loving friendship that existed outside of the bedroom, and a voracious sex life that existed within. Whichever you call it, I had no desire to live my life with her, and she had no desire to live her life with me. We wanted to be in each others lives, but on more sporadic terms. But we were very comfortable with the terms under which we lived our lives.

There was Rachel. Jenny never really knew about Rachel. I think she still doesn’t know. At that point, she was still around and I had run with her for a little bit just about eleven months ago and hadn’t seen her since; I wanted to seek her out. I always enjoyed being with her. We took every opportunity, save a few early on. Rachel I was in love with. I just didn’t know how to tell her, stop, together, forever, until death do us part.

Then there was Kelly. I had been in Fargo less than a week ago and she was insisting that I take her out on the road over summer break. I keep hedging. She’s going to be 18 by then and I knew she was going to try to use that fact to sleep with me. It was a Hobson’s choice. Perpetual refusal would deeply hurt her and her self esteem. Giving in to her would complicate my relationship with the people I considered my family.

She had clearly wanted to ever since I’ve known her, she saw me that way. It was savior love, and then puppy love, and it has grown into something more. It wasn’t that I minded sleeping with with a girl a lot younger than me- I’ve done that before. Its just that I kind of saw her as my daughter in some ways, and it felt wrong. I also knew that once that happened she would either ruin my entire Fargo social world, or there would be another woman I was in love with. My feelings for her were far to strong for sex with her to form a casual relationship, like I had with her Mother. Gosh, saying that sets my teeth on edge.

Of course, there was also Suzie. I hadn’t seen her but she was still on my mind. She’d been on my mind for all 17 years of my traveling, for Pete sakes! My anger from the pain of her rejection had been assuaged somewhat. It was largely Rachel that was responsible for that, as she had sewn the seeds of doubt as to what had transpired on that day.

I slept in Winslow on the streets, as I often did, especially the first night of a stay in a particular place. Having not yet gotten the lay of the land, I was not sure what my plans were, what kind of accommodations I could find, and what kind of work I would do in order to rustle up the money to leave.

As such, I woke up in a door way and started to look around for a job here in Winslow. I think I had seen enough and had no particular desire to stay here all that much longer. I wanted to make enough money to grab the Southwest Chief out of Winslow. I wasn’t quite so desperate to get out of town as to rely on illegal methods of motion, nor the charity of others.

I had no more desire to be in this particular dirtbag town than this particular dirtbag town had a desire for me to be in it. However, at this point I was, for all intents and purposes, broke. I had some money in Chicago, naturally, but that wasn’t exactly something I could access at the moment. Rachel and I had been hoarding the money for reasons I was never quite clear on. It was quite a bit, but it wasn’t like either of us really needed it.

I walked over to the corner of second and Kingsley and there was a fine sight to see. A girl driving a a late-model F350 flatbed slowed down and tried to inconspicuously take a look at me. This startled me and I watched her drive away and followed her truck with my eyes.

She was appraising me. I’d been stared at by enough women in my life to know when I interest one, and this woman was interested in me. I couldn’t see her all that well, just her head, and at speed, but she was a nice looking redhead with her hair in a braided ponytail. She kind of attracted me, too. I had a thing for redheads.

Alright, alright. She really attracted me. I missed Rachel, I missed Jenny, I missed Cheryl, and I sure as hell missed Suzie. A random diversion would be nice. Plus being with Rachel always frustrated me. We both wanted sex but she was unable to provide it for either of us. We tried once, and we succeeded, but she didn’t enjoy it and I didn’t enjoy her not enjoying it. Being unable to do something you and someone you love wants to do is depressing.

This girl looked at me a bit more, shook her head as if she was nuts, and continued on her way. It bothered me. Over the years I have come to realize that I was somehow attractive to women, but the why of that was a perpetual mystery to me. A man who had been standing in the doorway of Bobo’s Bar & Grill talked to himself.

“Ah’ve nevah seen Billah Jean so turn on behfaw.” he muttered.

“Where does she live?” I asked him.

After a moment he started out of his slight trance, “Ah dunno if’n she wan me tah tell y’all dat, stranger.”

“I won’t tell her you told me,” I said, “And I won’t hurt her. I’m mainly interested in finding out why she was staring at me, dude.”

“Aw, awlright then, Billah have ah car repair place ovah on the cawnah o’ thir’ an Campbell. Lives above the place, I reckon’.”

“Thanks man.” I told him.

“Don menshen it, frien’.”

I walked north to Third St, and then walked west along it until I came to “Billie Jean’s Auto Repair”. I saw the Ford flatbed sitting there and she had just gotten in to it. I waited until she backed towards the street, at which point I leaned in the open passenger side window.

“Hi,” I said.

She stared at me with a look of total shock. The little freckles of her face told me she was not quite suited for the desert climate of Winslow. Her green eyes were cute but a little vapid. She had a smear of dirt on her face, probably from working on one of the cars in her shop.

“Who are ya’ll?” she asked.

“Name’s Johnny,” I told her.

“Wah are y’all bother’n meh?” she asked, clearly nervous. Not that I blame her; the encounter we were having was definitely on the weird side of weird. She didn’t know what my intentions were, and I must have gone to some trouble to find her after our previous encounter such that it was.

“I noticed you staring at me, Billie Jean,” I told her.

“Hah da’ya knaw mah nam?” she asked.

“Says it right here on your truck,” I told her.

“Ah see,” she said, although she clearly didn’t. Her being confused by something so simple was usually a turn off for me; I tended to like my companions on the intelligent and observant side. She, more than a little apparently, not fitting that description.

“You want me, don’t you?” I asked her.

She didn’t say a word. She just stared at me.

“Come on, baby, don’t say maybe, I gotta know if your sweet love is gonna save me!” I sang to the tune of the Eagles song. I mean, given the situation it couldn’t be more appropriate, could it? It was not like me to be such a cornball. This girl was bringing out some of my less enjoyed natures.

She smiled for a second and then got serious and I could see a “get lost” forming on her lips.

“We may lose and we may win, but we’ll never be here again!” I continued singing.

She hesitated with what she was going to say.

“So open up, I’m climbing in!” I continued.

She reached over to the door and unlocked it. I opened it and climbed in to her truck. I smiled at her and grasped her hand. Like her face, it was a little grubby, I guess a natural part of her trade.

Even sitting on the seat of this hear truck in oily mechanic’s coveralls, she was a stunner. She looked about 30 years old, but that was only in the smiling laugh lines around her eyes. She didn’t say a word to me for a good long time. She was a totally confusing mix of come hither and get lost.

She drove out to a disabled car maybe 5 miles out of town. I tried my best to help her load it onto the truck. I had a little experience with towing; I assisted somebody else who ran a towing business for a bit once upon a time. I was always willing to grab little bits of work other people weren’t willing to do. It ensured employment without local resentment.

The client, an older lady, climbed in beside me and we dropped her off at what was apparently her home. The lady seemed a bit uncomfortable sitting next to me. I might have smelled a bit. I didn’t think so, though ... I had showered on the train a couple of days ago. She must be a fairly well known customer, likely given the age and condition of the car she was driving. It was an old G-body Chevy Malibu with a bunch of rust and not much good paint.

When we got to her garage I helped her unload the car. I had also worked briefly as a mechanic’s assistant in a few places. I wasn’t bad at it, but most of those employers preferred someone with education and background, neither of which I have. So I did have a pretty good idea of what I was doing here. Especially on a vehicle as mechanically straight forward as an old GM G-body with a 305 V8.

When we were done, I followed her into her office. It was a plain office, not particularly fancy. The computer looked ancient and not particularly well used. A lot of the shop and her office indicated she stuck to domestic cars of relatively simple construction. The room was not really intended to be a luxuriously outfitted place to wait, and it was more than a little messy.

She tried to ignore me, which was confusing. She gave off mixed signals. She went to a door in the office, opened it to reveal a staircase, went through it, and closed the door behind her. How very odd.

I waited about five minutes before I concluded she was trying to wait me out, which was an irritating concept. If she wanted me to get lost, she should tell me so, ya know? I went to the door and found it locked.