Broke and Thawing near Las Vegas

A quick note to new subscribers. Welcome, welcome! I’m so very glad you’re here. If you’re here for the Be Your Own Editor workshops, the first one will be next Saturday, Feb 10. Expect details in your inbox Wednesday, Feb 7. Now back to the regular programming. On the first Saturday of the month, a story about people, often strangers, showing up for each other.

It’s just me, little smoky gasps from beneath a raised hood, and two $1 bills in my pocket. Lime streaks are drying fast on the windshield of T’s popsicle purple CRX. I’m not sure how many miles I’ve come since waking this morning in the driver’s seat to a signpost—Prison. Do not pull over—that was just out of sight last night. The sky drapes itself across flat brown land and asphalt, wooing sparkles from microscopic remnants of shattered glass. “What now?” I raise my head to reticent glare.

An empty phone booth in a different desert (in Kuwait). Photo by Arthur Caldwell, used with permission by his son, photographer Ian Caldwell.

Would that seventeen-year-old eyeballing indecipherable hunks of metal be inspired by the knowledge of a red Ford and a woman with three decades more lines etched into her face who could pop the hood and trace wires past the firewall to troubleshoot a jury-rigged fan switch? Is it possible that van called Ruby, that woman already existed, like a seed? Maybe just because we’ve only learned to see time one way doesn’t mean that’s the only way it works. Maybe that’s why the woman child was perpetually chill. Or maybe she was just numb. 

She didn’t regret telling T with a wink she’d take the CRX solo for a spell so T could ride with the guy she’d been flirting with. T had been all smiles since the three of them had run out of dough at the same time and decided to caravan back to northern Utah. How many days had they spent getting booted from casinos? Both she and T were roughly the size of the pencil nubs they’d used to play Keno over buffets of wet eggs and greasy bacon. So, it was no wonder that was the closest to gambling they’d been allowed. T had a laugh like a fountain gushing full force that could transform all-you-can-eat into gourmet and a five-dollar score into a jackpot, though. So, they’d stayed till they were almost dry.

Two phone calls, coins cobbled from the console, had preceded the engine’s lime belch. The lonely phone on the side of the freeway seems almost contrived, but memory insists. Wind-and-sand-tousled hair flying, she’d roused T, who’d made it home. J had refused to pull over when the cars had been separated by traffic leaving Vegas. And only now did T remember she had all the gas money on her. “Ummm.” T let out a sound between a sigh and an oof. “Let me think.”

The dwindling pile of change felt like feathers in her hand. “I gotta go,” she said before the operator asked for more. She fumbled through her mental rolodex. Finally, unwilling fingers dropped a quarter in the slot and tapped digits that would connect her to the childhood home she’d left a year earlier. Memory becomes fickle now. Maybe she fished. It’s likely it seemed too much to explain, too precarious to ask. It’s likely she said never mind, she was fine, and dropped the phone on its cradle, palm empty.

In this telling, the can of Coke and ham and mayo on Wonder Bread on an outdoor picnic table came after the calls. But it may have been first. The retired couple eyed her as she ate, the man glancing around their desert-colored ranch home, the only thing off this exit. Imagine their conversation as the whisper of a young woman drove away in a flurry of grape and sand. “What’ll become of a girl like that?” Silence. “Maybe we should have done more for her.” A hand on stooped shoulder. “We did all we could.” Glad he’d been firm, still alert. You never knew these days what kind of trap may be being set.

“What seems to be the problem?” He hasn’t quite cleared the distance between his truck and the CRX. Other than an occasional long-hauler like a toy high up in a cab, the man in the fitted white button-down, looking like he dropped a Stetson on his front seat, is the first person who’s come this way.

I tell him I kept the heat on, windows rolled down, feeling wise, though I only knew to do it because T had said to watch the temperature gauge. I don’t explain the paper-sack-and-marker sign—Stop, T & J. I’d stuck it in the rear window with gum last night, just to do something, preferring to stop by choice rather than run out of gas.

“It’s this hose.” He points to U-shaped rubber as if we’re buddies figuring this out together. “I think we can make a temporary fix. Ya have far to go?”

I put him at halfway between me and my parents’ age. A few years older, and I’d find his kind eyes handsome. Now, I’m just grateful I don’t have to look into them when I admit, still staring into the hood’s abyss as he wraps what looks like nylon tightly around the tube like a patch, that I have a few hundred more miles and not enough to get me there.

When he hands me a small wad of bills, I say quickly. “Give me your address. I’ll pay you back.”

“Nah.” He’s already turning back to his truck. “Help someone else who needs it sometime.”

Behind the steering wheel, I crank the engine, wipe away the first trickle I’ve felt on my cheek since leaving Las Vegas, and drive.

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