“One, two, three, four, five.” And rest.
He’s not the first man or the last to be confronted with the futility of trying to move forward and the futility of staying put.
The Hi-Top Truck Stop and Diner has only two customers sitting at its counter: Edie Linderman and an old cowboy who bends down so low to his slice of huckleberry pie, it looks as though he might slurp it right off the plate. Nothing but coffee for Edie. She’d stopped just to use the restroom, a smelly, begrimed, cinder-block closet for both gas station and café customers. But once she headed back to the car, fatigue caught up to her.
Now she swivels around on her stool to face the plate-glass window and its view of the highway. When Roy comes along, she figures, he’ll doubtless see his white Impala parked under the gas station’s bright lights and stop. Maybe he’ll want a piece of pie too. At the Spur he said he was going to end his meal with coffee and dessert, but they’d left before he even finished his steak.
The waitress refills Edie’s cup without being asked. She’s as big and wide as Edie’s mother-in-law though closer to Edie’s age and with similarly short hair.
“You sure he’s coming?” she asks Edie and chuckles. “It’s awful late.”
“I’m sorry,” Edie says. “Are you closing?”
“Didn’t you see the sign? Twenty-four hours gas and food. I get paid if I don’t do nothing but sit on my ass all night long for the two or three customers who walk through the door.”
“You have some long nights, I bet.”
“I got my trucker regulars,” the waitress says. “And lonely cowboys.”
She laughs in the direction of the old cowboy. “And just a week or so ago, a carload of young folks—not much younger than you and me—
come in about three o’clock in the morning. Headed to Missoula, they said. Five girls and a guy. Can you imagine? And he had hair down to his shoulders. I kind of wanted to ask him what kind of shampoo he used. This was about the prettiest, shiniest head of hair I ever seen.
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I’m guessing you’re like me,” she says, pointing to Edie’s close-cut hair.
“Sick of trying to deal with it, so you chopped it all off.”
“Something like that,” says Edie.
“What does he think of it?”
“What does . . . who?”
“The fellow you keep looking out the window for. What does he think of your crew cut?” When the waitress laughs her shoulders bounce up and down. “Hell of a time to be meeting someone out here in the middle of nowhere. Can’t say it don’t happen though. This here’s a Greyhound stop. But if no one’s getting off or on— whoosh!
The bus keeps right on a-rolling.”
“My brother,” Edie says. “We were up in Bentrock on family business. He was supposed to be following me.”
The waitress’s face puckers with disappointment. She glances over her shoulder at the clock. “Maybe he had car trouble.”
“Maybe.”
“Or you had a hell of a head start.”
“We left at the same time.”
The waitress looks out the window with concern that matches Edie’s. “How far you have to go tonight?”
“Gladstone.”
“You still got a few miles ahead of you. You wide-awake now?”
“I believe I am.”
“You know what this trucker I know does? When he’s feeling sleepy? He pulls out nose hairs.” The waitress bends down to peer into Edie’s face. “You could maybe do eyebrows.”
Edie opens her purse. “How much?”
“Free with a meal. Ten cents without. Refill’s free.”
Edie puts down a fifty-cent piece. “I don’t need any change.”
The waitress picks up the coin, flips it in the air, catches it in her palm, and slaps it onto the back of her other hand. “Heads or tails?”
she asks Edie.
“What? Oh, heads. Heads.”
The waitress peeks under her hand but keeps the coin out of Edie’s sight. “Heads it is. You’re a winner.”
The Lives of Edie Pritchard
33
Edie smiles. “What have I won?”
“Hell if I know.” The waitress’s shoulders bounce up and down again.
Edie doesn’t get back in the Impala. She paces the Hi-Top’s parking lot, pausing occasionally to look down the highway. The air has grown cool. She hears the faint, rhythmic thud-thud-thud of thunder.
No, it’s not thunder. Parked not far from the Impala is a truck and horse trailer, probably the rig belonging to that old cowboy. And there’s a horse in that trailer, stamping a hoof against the boards with a rhythm so regular it could be a message in Morse code. Finish your pie. It’s time to go.
Edie drives out of the parking lot, heading north, back toward Bentrock.
Roy stares at the dirt, weeds, and stones only inches from his face and continues to haul himself across a landscape that seems to vary only in offering different patches of dirt, weeds, and stones.
All around him are faint noises, the scratching, scurrying, crawling, creeping sounds of creatures hunting and being hunted, yet Roy has not seen another living thing.
Edie drives the length of highway that she drove earlier, waiting and watching for an indication or a sign she can’t even be certain she’ll recognize. How, in this world—with its immense empty spaces—can people find each other?
That white shirt.
The creature least suited for negotiating this terrain, Roy moves at perhaps one mile an hour. Past his swollen lips and gums, each breath heaves out and in. The taste of blood is like a mouthful of copper pennies. The blood drying on his forehead and down the side of his face cracks like parched earth. Either during the truck rollover or in the repetition of pulling himself forward, something has happened to Roy’s right wrist—and each time he curls his fingers, the muscles in his forearm cramp and rebel with pain. Both the physical
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sensation of his broken leg and the thought of it sicken him, and just as he starts down the other side of the hill, he has to stop, raise himself farther off the ground, and vomit. The retching causes so much pain he cries out and has to lie down in the tall grass. After a few moments of rest, he begins again to creep forward.
In the days and weeks to come, when she tells her story of this night, Edie will say again and again that she has no idea how she managed to see Roy. No idea. She was driving slowly, yes, but she had no reason to believe he was out of the truck, much less lying out on the prairie, almost a hundred yards from the highway.
But that shirt, that white shirt.
The highway, of course, is Roy’s goal, his reason for crawling forward for one agonizing hour after another. Occasionally cars speed past—the sudden welcome pour and sweep of headlights, then the red blink of taillights.
Now Roy sees a different light, a bouncing searching beam, almost as though it’s in flight.
Then the light has a voice and its voice is Edie’s, fainter than a whisper across the dinner table. “Roy? Roy? Oh God, Roy, Roy!”
She’s running toward him, running through the coarse, sharp silver sagebrush with her bare legs and those flimsy sandals.