Mona stood behind the linoleum-covered counter cutting the strawberry rhubarb pie into eight perfect wedges that reminded her of moist linen. It was yesterday’s pie and just beginning to shift its color from tired dusty rose to an even more unappetizing dusty gray that would slide so easily into Mona’s black and white world. To compensate, she sang softly in her smoky, lounge voice, “Cry Me a River,” the Julie London hit that was climbing the charts. Julie, Brenda, and Kay were all part of her dreamy girlfriend club, who sang to her, with her, and sometimes would sit on the diner stools and listen to Mona cover their hits. They’d nod approval and smile that smile women share when a friend has clinched or even stumbled upon a moment that rings true.
Mona’s ongoing soundtrack played in her head every night between 5 PM and 1 AM at the incandescent Galaxy Diner, just a sharp right turn off Route 66. With each refrain of what had become her old familiar song, she conjured up scenes of her imagined life. This movie played with only minor variations on her mind’s silver screen, more intimate but even more romantically saturated with technicolor than the movies she’d seen at The Jubilee, the town’s lone, ramshackle moviehouse.
It was the early summer, and the afternoons were long with the sun not rolling out of sight down Route 66 until nearly nine. The dinner crowd never showed up till after seven. Mona had finished the setups, filled the sugar and salt and wiped down the counter and tables twice, more out of boredom than hygiene. Laurie, less experienced but with a penetrating smile and a uniform two inches shorter and a size tighter, would wander in around six but was usually late with a lame excuse. Johnny B was in the kitchen prepping. The extra time gave Mona a chance to stare out to the Galaxy sign where its neon “Steaks, Chops, Seafood” had already started blinking. It only took a moment to lose herself in the blinks, a message from another universe trying to make contact.
Jack and Neil nosed up to the Galaxy in their Roadmaster after a six-hour drive from Dayton, gunned the engine once, got out and stretched. They entered slowly, getting the kinks out of their bodies and sat at the counter. “Coffees,” Jack said, firm but not commanding. And more gently, almost like a question, with an accent Mona couldn’t nail down, he added, “Black for me.”
“And a little milk in mine,” said Neil. “What’s your pie? Is that rhubarb?”
“Sure. But take the berry. It’s from a can, but it’s today’s. That rhubarb’s a little sad.” The two guys chuckled and nodded and downed their coffees from the heavy white mugs and the berry pie with its sticky, dark blue-purple filling.
“You heading West?”
“South maybe. Then maybe North. Then West. Want to get the coast sometime. See some friends. But there’s no hurry. The road’s always there.”
Mona nodded. She remembered her uncle’s compass and the time he showed her how to use it to never be lost, but it never sank in. She never cared which way she was heading. Sometimes on her breaks, she’d go out to the shoulder of Route 66 and stare down the road. That was always West—it never changed.
“We thought we’d take a spin around here before we’d do some serious driving.”
There was a pause, long enough to spot nearly empty coffee cups. “Wanna come along? Show us the sights?”
“A joy ride?”
“Every ride is joyful. Turning wheels sing. And never go flat.”
“As pancakes.”
“You’ll be back before they miss you.”
Mona fingered her nametag and felt how easy it could come off. Donnelly was always such a cheapskate. “Sure. Looks like you have room in that boat.” She paced off five steps to the right, placed her nametag and apron on the oilcloth back counter and called out through the swinging door, with a teetering top hinge about to free itself from the frame.
“Johnny B. Take care of things. I’m goin’ for a smoke.” She heard a grunt from the kitchen, Johnny B’s code that he’d heard her, then walked back to the floor. The two guys were already moving out the door.
“Where we headed?”
“Doesn’t matter. These roads don’t lead anywhere.”
She wanted this, a memory that she could step into and revisit any moment of any day. To drive off with Jack and Neil. It was playing out in front of her like those hazy movie dreams. The two wanderers from another world, now with a third, on the road.
They followed a mouse’s maze of back-country turns—left, right, a fast right, straight on, curve left. The Roadmaster sped and swerved and kicked up dust like it knew where it was going—or didn’t care. Neil held the wheel and Jack, sitting shotgun moved his glance back and forth from the road ahead then back to Mona, taking up as much backseat real estate as an earth girl could in 1953.
“Turn here, this next left by that fence. There’s an entrance.”
Neil turned the wheel of the Roadmaster. “Okay, chief, let’s see where she goes.”
The little sign had lost one of its slats and was in need of a paint job, but it still told where they’d landed. Belleville Cemetery. The three souls vacated the car. The two guys didn’t feel lost, because to be lost, you have to be headed somewhere. And Mona wasn’t lost because she knew exactly where she was. Back roads always lead you back to yourself.
They walked through ankle-high grass. Someone had mowed it last month, but this droughty July didn’t encourage much growth.
“Tell us a story.”
“One about you.” They kept walking and could see rows of stone markers.
“We made love in this field all summer. But only at night, after his day shift at ‘Carl’s Castaways—Lived in Furniture from Loving Homes.’ He drove Carl’s pickup. He did the pickups in the pickup. That was the first joke he told me when he picked me up at the Galaxy. I told him I didn’t come from a loving home, so we didn’t have a sofa. I wasn’t joking, but he laughed anyway. We met on the sly at nights after that because I wasn’t allowed to see him—his kind—anytime. That was stupid but that’s the way it was. Hell, I was legal. That’s probably why I did it. I liked him okay, and in the dark, I mean the real darkness. I sometimes pretended he was someone else. Someone in the movies. Or someone I read about. It was almost always a man. Sometimes it was two.
And after he’d roll off and leave me, I’d play this game. I’d lay there in the darkness, and I’d start making these little mousey sounds. ‘Squeek. Squeeeek.’ And after a while, the bats would come out. There’re a lot of bats around here. You could hear their wings flapping right above you. I’d lie real still making these mousy sounds ‘til the bats would swoop down on me. And in the last second, they’d know I wasn’t a mouse, and they’d zoom back up. But sometimes—they’d get so close, I could feel their wings brush across my breasts. And that—that would make me hotter than anything.”
She felt her steps guiding her to Charlie Miner’s grave. Maybe by one of those bats that was really Charlie in disguise. A guy she knew in high school and came this close to giving herself to. It went far enough to cause some trouble. Not big end-of-your-world trouble, but enough to divert eyes and start a low-down rumor that meandered but then dried up like Jonah’s Creek in July. There was some obligatory fumbling in the back of his DeSoto, but it didn’t amount to much. All he’d talk about was the Army. So much that Mona finally said, “You’re not going to be happy till they have you. So, what are you waitin’ for.” And that was all it took. Light the fuse and he cannonballed off to find himself before all the others were tagged, and rounded up, and sent off to play some war-games. Too many of them, including Charlie, swung at a Nazi low curve ball and struck out. Still, Mona would think more than once, at least he found out who he was. Better than never.
And there they were, Mona, Jack, Neil and Charlie in the late afternoon before the Galaxy opened up to the supper crowd. She shed her gravy spattered waitress togs and left them hanging on a branch of an elm sapling, peeling them off slowly while the two drifters watched with smiles of encouragement.
It was up to her to pick the right spot. She lay down on a patch of kudzu that marked the boundaries of what remained of Charlie Miner, long gone from war wounds, which is how his obit read, but the town talk was that it was from an overdose when Doris Velaski up and left him when he got back, like an abandoned dog at the intersection of Bored and Broke.
Mona understood how he must have felt and was happy to lie there with Jack and Neil on either side and Charlie under the ground beneath her. She thought back to the night when Charlie needed her as much as she did him, that night when the stars didn’t quite align.
They lay there—Mona, like a slice of Velveeta between two slices of rye with the boy’s bottle of Wild Turkey within reach. She wished Charlie could be there, and in a way, Mona thought, he was closer than he’d been since their missed opportunity. The threesome soon rolled onto their backs, sharing the last of Neil’s Camels. She was glad Charlie was near, just six feet away, and pretended he was joining them in a smoke, because she knew three on a match was bad luck.
The walk back to the car was nearly silent. The moon would soon be floating over razor cut branches. The three of them staggered among the lichened headstones, a few times making up toasts to people they’d never met or would never meet up with again. The Roadmaster coasted forward and kept her engine to a low rumble. They passed a dead fox on the side of the road, and it made Mona think again about that other summer before the war.
The guys left her at the Galaxy door and didn’t feel the need to show her in. This wasn’t a date, but they parted friends, or something like those planets that pass as close as they can to each other, then go off again on their own paths.
Mr. Donnelly, the co-owner with his brother, Ralph yelled out, reminding her that the meat loaf and mashed with the side of creamed corn was up for table two, and she’d better get moving, or she’d end up washing dishes, or worse. Another thought came to Mona. After this shift she could make it home and stuff her two plaid overnight cases with a few necessities, catch a couple winks then get to the Greyhound station by dawn. There was always an early bus heading West down Route 66, some of them going all the way to the coast.
And she’d bring along that berry-stained napkin that one of the travelers had scribbled on.
Oh Galaxy pie
the world’s a deep dish platter
gas before empty
Laurence Carr’s books include: Strides, reflections on 6 acres; Traverse; Paradise Loft (CAPS Press); Threnodies: poems in remembrance and The Wytheport Tales. His novel, Pancake Hollow Primer (Codhill Press), won a Next Generation Indie Book Award. Carr publishes Lightwood, a magazine of arts and culture at Lightwoodpress.com. Also visit at www.carrwriter.com.
