cards. These ladies, they’ll do almost anything for a hot shower, anything, or so I hear. They try to make their way down that hall unnoticed and go to knocking on doors, or just try them to see if any’s unlocked.
This lady did not fit any of those three categories, so my eye was up in a different way immediately. It ain’t often you pull into the big back lot reserved for rigs and see a woman wandering around the landfill just beyond the bar ditch, particularly not in the November snows of North Dakota. She was looking for something, and since I was running a little ahead of schedule, was just gonna catch some tube or maybe even a shower, I figured I’d help her out. Maybe with two sets of eyes, we would find whatever it was, just a little quicker, and get her out of that relentless wind.
Out there, the state, or whoever, highway department, maybe, tries to hide the fact that they build landfills around the truck stops. Guess they figure no one is going to notice the smell seeping from them in all the diesel clouds. They try to beautify the fills, planting trees and such toward the edge of the lot. These get used for more than beautifying in the warmer months, but that day, the wind was way too sharp for any two people to be thinking about dropping their drawers for some connecting time, no matter how big an urge they might have. Most prefer the back of the sleeper cab in general, but I’ve seen them in the bushes often enough to know it happens.
That poor lady and I were the only ones there, among the exhaust tubes jutting from the landscaped hill, sending nastiness in invisible sheets. Her tracks were like the small, hard deer prints I’d seen in New York, all those years ago when I used to spend some regular time in the northern climes. Her tracks came and went in all directions, sometimes crossing each other, sometimes stopping abruptly and heading in another direction.
“Uh, miss? Ma’am?” She didn’t hear me, the wind being what it was. If the snow had not thawed and refrozen a couple of times before that day, her tracks would have all but disappeared from behind her, even as she made them.
“Ma’am?” She turned, hearing my shout this time. She was Asian, Japanese, as you know from the news, but at the time I wasn’t sure exactly which variation. I could tell people who were Vietnamese, even half-Vietnamese and half-American, right off, but I always had trouble with others. I could spot differences if you lined some up, but couldn’t say which was which. I can’t even do this at home.
Now, the wife says she can tell which Texans are Scottish, which ones are Irish and such, and even claims she can tell who is whose daddy and who ain’t but all that’s bullshit. There’s some children she’s looked right at and not recognized who their real daddy is but maybe that’s selective on her part—hard to say with the wife. Liza Jean McMorsey likes to see things just the way she does.
She’s always been that way. Whenever she demands I cut the damned lawn because of mosquitoes, she says I scared all the birds away with my noisy engine afterward. She suggests we need an ass-kicking push mower, the kind with rotating blades that eat around like really sharp teeth. When I tell her the birds leave because the mosquitoes were their food, she laughs, drinks another Big Red, and goes back into the house to watch for birds from her big old picture window.
So wouldn’t it just kill her to see the exotic bird I found in the winter dusk of a North Dakota night? The wife was the one who sent me there in the first place, in a manner of speaking. Usually, I do the short haul, local runs only, Big Antler to Lubbock, Lubbock to Amarillo, and the like. Every now and then, she says I’m getting on her nerves again and lets me know it’s time for me to accept one of the over-the-road runs. So this time, things worked out for both of us. She got a break from me and it was the time of year I go out for a few days by myself, anyway. Where I wind up depends on the night skies, so this was just as well. I always try to bring her back something nice. For the longest time, it was those Lladró porcelain figurines that she loved so dearly and put in the china cabinet as soon as I gave them to her but those only dredge up bad memories now, things I do not want to bring back at all.
I put in for an extended haul with several suggested cities and got an assignment immediately. Who else wants to go up to Bismarck in November? I wanted a vacation from her anyway, so I was glad to let her think she had come up with the idea of me taking the load. She even packed my bag, looking to make sure there weren’t any rubbers in my shaving kit, like they weren’t available in every drugstore and rest area john along the way. Even the idea of someone else looking at me in my boxers gets her crabby and cross-eyed, though she hasn’t had a look for me in them for over ten years.
Anyway, when I spoke that second time, this lady came on over, opening up this rucksack thing she carried on her back, pulling out a sheet of notebook paper, like the kind you rip from a spiral-bound, raggedy teeth blowing in the wind. The sheet might have flown from her hand, but she kept a firm grip on it. There wasn’t a damn thing on it except for a straight line and something that might have been a tree or a stick of some sort, both drawn in pencil. Inside that bag, she was pretty well stocked with cash, though, and that was about when it was clear she was not American.
“Miss? You might want to keep that there bag closed,” I said, not wanting to reach for it, but if she kept flashing that stack around the Oasis, she was not long to have it. I won’t try to repeat the things she said to me, not because they were outrageous, or anything like that. Well, they were outrageous, but not in a nasty way. She just did not seem to have a very good grasp of English, you would say. Her peculiar version of the language sounded almost like she maybe got it from watching movies on TV through bad reception. It seemed logical, considering all that eventually happened.
I assumed I didn’t understand what she was saying because the idea was so darned way-out-there. I was sure she was joking on me, like Candid Camera was hiding in those trees at the landfill’s edge, just to see what I would say to an Asian lady who could barely speak English telling me she was looking for the ransom buried by some character in a movie. Well, I showed them.
“First,” I said, “you ain’t even in the right town. Why don’t you come on in, with me, get a little warmed up, have something hot to drink, and we’ll go from there.” I reached for her hand but she acted like I wanted her map and pulled away, just enough to let me know she was not being led anywhere.
I was wishing Fred Howkowski was with me. He would have known the ins and outs of whatever she was talking about, even with only her passing snag of English. I remember the story of Fargo, but just barely. I must have been missing something awfully important that this girl saw. Fred would have been able to tell me right off what I lacked. He knew all the movies, used to talk about them, compare everything we did together to movies. How he saw that damned many is anyone’s guess.
A lot of shows, he watched silent from the back fences of the drive-in movie places where he grew up. He’d hitch a ride out from the reservation to those neighborhoods when he was young, get dropped off at a gas station or whatever, then wander around. When it was dark enough, he’d make his way over to the Star-lite, or the Auto-vue, and watch them play out through holes he had carved, himself. I asked him how come he never just jumped the fence and watched from the concession stand where they had speakers mounted on the outside walls.
He liked it better speaking his own dialogue, making up the stories to suit the things he saw up on the screen. Sometimes he would do this after we’d gotten to know each other in Vietnam, when we were back to Camp Hockmuth near Phu Bai once a month at the rear. In the mess hall of an evening, they mostly showed us wholesome-type, inspirational movies. Who needed that nonsense with the things we were witnessing and participating in daily?
Those jokers inside the hall would be eating that bullshit up, Doris Day and all. Fred and I would be outside the back windows, sparking a joint if no one else happened to be around. He would make Doris say all kinds of things to her leading men, and the things they would say back, man, I was sore from laughing most nights by the time we went to bed. He was just crazy about the movies. Listening to him there, or in the nighttime fields, talking about his favorites, was sometimes all that kept me going. His voice, in those sweaty jungles, allowed me to forget things were crawling into the poncho we used for a tent when I would doze