Red Earth Review #2

“Ready to trade?” he asked after ten minutes or so.

“Sure.”

We traded sports sections, and silence descended for another ten or fifteen minutes. Then, yawning and pretending to consult my watch, I rose and said I had better get going.

“All right,” Merv said without looking up from his paper. “What time does school let out these days?”

“Two forty-five.”

“How long do you think it would take you to get from there to here?”

“I don’t know. Fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “See you tomorrow around three o’clock?”

And so it began. In the weeks to come, I met a rogue’s gallery of truckstop regulars: diesel jockies, tiremen, janitors, waitresses, cooks and dishwashers, farmers and ranchers, custom cutters, oil exploration crews, hitch hikers, the guys from Maupin Truck Parts. To my young eyes, used to so much sameness, all of these people were interesting and strange.

Indeed, they seemed almost cartoon-like. There was the 300-pound sixth grader, son of one of the janitors, who could play Donkey Kong for hours on a single fifty-cent credit, fueled by nothing but cinnamon rolls and Dr. Pepper. There was the seventy-year-old waitress whose battered station wagon was so full of old newspapers, clothing, and assorted other junk that it was impossible to see in any of the car’s windows but the front windshield and the driver’s side door. There was the owner of the local Cadillac dealership, who liked to boast that in ten years of coming to breakfast at the truckstop he had “never driven the same car twice,” and the knife-wielding prostitute who insisted, no matter how many times she was caught plying her trade, that she was “just a broke college student looking for a ride to Tulsa.”

Everyone had a story to tell or seemed to be acting out some part that had been assigned to them. Merv, for example, was the henpecked former truck driver who had been “grounded” after a long career on the road by Jeanie, aka “The Queen Bee,” his buxom, redheaded wife of forty years who ran the restaurant side of the business. There was something decidedly theatrical about this marriage/managerial team.

Whenever they fought, which happened at least once a week, every part of the exchange was carried out in public and included an extensive cast of bit players and extras. A waitress would show up at the filling station and announce to Merv (and anyone else who happened to be there at the time) that Jeanie wanted to talk to him over at the restaurant right away.

There were certain “issues” they needed to discuss.

“Issues,” Merv would mutter from behind his newspaper. “Is that her word or yours?”

“Hers.”

“Well, you can go back over there and tell Mrs. Queen Bee . . . “ 3