Sweet Water

by Anna Jeffrey

  The next thing she knew, the customer was beside her inside the shoebox of a kitchen. “Hey, hey,” he said softly, “it can’t be as bad as all that.”

  “Yes, it can,” she blurted out on a sob. Then, remembering the sputtering hamburger patty, she flipped it over and wiped her eyes on her wrist. “I’m okay, now. Something just got the best of me for a minute.”

  “Nice kitchen,” he said, looking around. “It’s...well, tiny.”

  He stood so close she could see the pulse at the base of his throat. “It’s not my dream kitchen,” she said on a sniffle, “but I’ve cooked in worse. At least it’s easy to keep clean. Look, you shouldn’t be in here. I’d appreciate it if you went back to the other side of the counter.”

  “Come with me?” he said.

  She frowned. “Where? To the lunch counter?”

  His white smile lit up the kitchen like a bright light. “Keep me company while I eat?”

  “Look, I’m okay. You don’t have to—”

  “I hate eating alone.”

  She didn’t believe him. This guy had lone wolf written all over him and eating alone had to be the norm for him. On the other hand, she couldn’t imagine that anyone who looked so delectable ever had to eat alone. Still, she wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist and said, “Let me finish up. I’ll bring it out and sit for a minute, okay?”

  Holding her gaze, he pointed a finger at her nose. “I’ll be waiting.”

  She would bet her last nickel few women kept him waiting.

  After he left the kitchen, she sneaked into the apartment bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. A notebook sized mirror covered the front of the medicine cabinet. As she looked into it, she was sure she had seen herself looking worse, but couldn’t remember when. “To hell with it,” she mumbled at her image. “He’s just a man, right?” She blew her nose, ran a brush through her hair, then washed her hands and returned to the kitchen.

  Though there wasn’t much to be done for her appearance after the day she’d had, she did put extra effort into making his hamburger as good as she knew how--meat cooked to a perfect medium rare, bacon fried to just the right degree of doneness, vegetables clean and crisp. She added an extra slice of cheese and a side dish of special dressing, which was a modified Thousand Island she made from scratch. She even placed the finished burger on a white crockery plate rather than inside a plastic basket and added a handful of potato chips, showing gratitude for the care he had shown her.

  On the way to where he sat at the counter, she picked up the coffee carafe and an extra mug for herself and forced a smile.

  “Like your shirt,” he said, flashing a grin. “How smart does a man have to be?”

  “What?” Having forgotten what she was wearing, she glanced down and saw the declaration across her boobs, I’LL TRY TO BE NICER IF YOU TRY TO BE SMARTER.

  His eyes held a teasing glint as he patted the stool beside him. She filled her mug, uncertain if she wanted to be teased into cheeriness or if she wanted to keep her pity party going for a while. Still, she couldn’t tell him no. She skirted the end of the lunch counter and sat down beside him. Feeling a new tear coming, she touched the inside corner of her eye with her fingertip.

  He lifted the top bun half off his burger and spooned on the dressing, behaving as if he didn’t notice her wipe away a tear. But he saw. This dude wouldn’t miss anything.

  “So what’s making a pretty girl like you cry?” he asked without looking at her.

  Unused to discussing her problems with the café’s customers, she hesitated. But then, what difference would it make if she told him? She had no one else to talk to and she would never see this character again, which might cause her some regret if she were in better spirits.

  “Sometimes your world just falls apart, you know? Yesterday, I hear somebody’s bought this building and even the whole damn town and I have no clue who.” She lifted the mug and sipped. “Then today I find out my man’s done me wrong.”

  She would have added, and my mother’s dying, but she hadn’t yet been able to say those words aloud.

  He didn’t remark right away, but bit into his burger. “Lover’s quarrel?” he asked, chewing.

  “Goes a little further than a quarrel. I think it’s more a scorched earth retreat.”

  He swallowed and sipped his coffee. “Good hamburger.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So he cheated a little, huh?” He set down his cup and took another bite.

  “Understatement.”

  “Cheated a lot?”

  She puffed out a sarcastic laugh. “He got another woman pregnant. I think that qualifies as a lot.”

  He stopped chewing and those blue, blue eyes shot her a sober look across his shoulder. “You don’t say.”

  Speaking the truth was almost more than she could bear and the tears came double time, so many she couldn’t catch them before they fell. She turned her head and stood up, intending to escape into the kitchen.

  His hand wrapped around her forearm and she could feel the strength in his grip. “Wait,” he said, and stood up, too. “C’mon.” The jukebox had stopped playing, but he tugged her to the front of it, dropped in another quarter and played the same Sinatra song, “All the Way.” “You dance?”

  She managed a don’t-be-dumb look. He smiled that killer smile, drew her into a dance position and began to maneuver her around the floor. With his heavy biker boots, his feet moved like concrete blocks, but his arm around her waist felt like the most natural thing in the world and she fought herself to resist wrapping both arms around his neck.

  “Listen to the words in this song,” he murmured, “especially the first part.”

  She knew the words. The song may have been popular before she was born, but in the hours of solitude that sometimes dragged by in Pecos Belle’s, she tired of the radio, so she played the old juke box. The poetic words reminded her that Woody had never loved her all the way and in the deepest part of her, she had known that all along. Maybe she hadn’t loved him that way, either. “This is an old song,” she said with a big sniff. “How do you know the words?”

  “I like music. And I dig Sinatra.”

  She sniffed again.

  “It’s okay,” he said softly, pulling her closer. “Everybody needs a good cry sometimes. Just go ahead.”

  “But your shirt,” she blubbered.

  “Just go ahead and cry,” he repeated.

  So she did, dampening the front of his shirt and his handkerchief. Unusual that he had a handkerchief. With the exception of Lanny Winegardner, most men didn’t carry them these days.

  As she took comfort in the strength of his arms and body, the firmness of his muscled chest, his cheek against her hair, soon her tears subsided, leaving her with a stuffy nose. Still, she couldn’t miss his scent. The masculine mix of soap and water and musky cologne seeped clear into the marrow of her bones. She read somewhere once that smell was the oldest and most profound of the senses. She knew she would never forget how this stranger smelled or how his arms around her felt at this moment.

  After a while, she told him she had to lock up and check on her mother. He said he would take the remainder of the burger with him and she wrapped it in a foil to-go package. When he started to pay, she refused his money. The price of a hamburger was cheap therapy.

  He roared away on his big black bike without telling her his name and she hadn’t told him hers. She didn’t even feel embarrassed for breaking down in his presence. He was a stranger and she would never see him again.

  Chapter 5

  By nine o’clock, Marisa had finished the nightly ritual of helping her mother bathe, swallow her pills and get into bed. The nighttime silence hung around her like a heavy black cape. With no one to talk to, it was easy to feel restless and down in the dumps. She could think of no one to call for a time-consuming chat. In the world she left behind when she came here, she’d had acquaintances, though few friends. She had lost touch with them months back.
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  If she went to bed now, she wouldn’t sleep. Lying alone in the dark would only give rise to dark thoughts, which were already blacker than the bottom of a mineshaft.

  She kept a stack of crossword puzzle books in the dining-area hutch, but tonight she couldn’t make herself sit in the quiet and play with words. TV’s offering promised to only depress her more. The walls of the fourteen foot wide mobile home seemed to be closing in on her, so she opted for the great outdoors.

  A wooden deck spanned half the length of the trailer and a pair of aged oak rocking chairs sat near the front door. Before going out, she switched on the front porch light and checked for a rattlesnake. April might be early for them to be out, but it wasn’t impossible. With her luck, one could be passing by and seeking heat on the planks of the wooden deck that had been warmed by the sun all day.

  Satisfied no viper awaited her, she slipped into a coat, turned off the porch light and went outside, into the night’s embrace. Technically, it was spring, but Agua Dulce lay on the eastern shoulders of the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of three thousand feet. The nighttime temperatures dropped into the low fifties and would for a few more weeks.

  A zillion stars hung against the clear, velvet-black sky and a three-quarter moon washed the landscape with silver. Marisa plopped into one of the rocking chairs, staring up at the moon’s oval

  shape and ethereal color and thinking that nothing but that lunar surface could be more silent than this part of Texas at night. In a town of ten people, clustered in the western reaches of a huge county with a total population of ninety-seven, only coyotes and a few desperate crickets made night noises. Even the highway was quiet and dark after nine o’clock.

  As a child, she had been frightened by the vastness of the silence and the density of the utter darkness. As a teenager, she had been bored by the desert ambience. Tonight, even with her heart heavy and her future bleak, she wondered how she had lived away from Agua Dulce for fifteen years. This arid, remote corner of Texas was the only place that felt like home. And, God help her, she found comfort in the isolation that had shaped her childhood.

  She clicked on the radio anchoring a TV tray beside the chair and tuned in on a Vince Gill song. “Someday.” A song of loneliness, yet hope that someday the right one would come along. Boy, could she relate. Vince’s fine tenor voice in the chilly dark air seemed to crystallize all the wretchedness that simmered inside her and she pondered why had she never been able to hang onto a long-lasting relationship with the opposite sex. Woody was just one more example of her rotten history with men.

  A couple of years before coming back to Agua Dulce she had been engaged. Her intended’s company had worn thin as he became increasingly content to let her pay the bills. The infamous last straw had come when he used her MasterCard without her knowledge and bought a Jet Ski. She had spent two years paying off the balance, faithfully sending a money order every month.

  And it was a good thing the payoff had taken no more time than that, because she sure couldn’t afford to make payments on a credit card balance now.

  She had not once anticipated her present circumstances. At eighteen, she had left home for Dallas, full of ambition to earn a degree in culinary arts. Her dream was to be hired as a sous-chef in an upscale metropolitan restaurant or one of the big hotels in Dallas or Fort Worth and eventually work her way up to executive chef. She had even considered becoming a master baker. She was good.

  Then things happened. Plans failed to gain traction. Out of money, she dropped out of school and drifted from cooking in one fried food joint to the next, going nowhere, accomplishing nothing, barely making ends meet.

  And now she had returned to where she began.

  Agua Dulce. English translation: Sweet Water. This place’s reason to exist was a single water well of unknown depth and volume that produced cold, sweet drinking water, a rarity in West Texas.

  Not far from where she sat, visible in silhouette, stood the flat-roofed, pumice-stone building that protected the precious well. And not far from that stood the huge round tank that stored water for the use of all Agua Dulcians. Just after World War II, so the story went, a promoter from the East had the well drilled at great cost, hoping to establish a real town and make a fortune in a land sales scheme. She wondered if he knew he had drilled for the wrong commodity. In those days the fortune to be made from holes in the ground in West Texas was from crude oil. The modern-day testimony to that fact was more than six hundred oil wells in Cabell County.

  She stopped her mental wandering. What was she doing musing over geology and geography? She had enough that was closer to home to worry about.

  As Vince finished on a blue note, she heard the crunch of footsteps and peered out into the night. She recognized Bob Nichols approaching, bundled up in a safari coat, his bushy white hair and beard appearing to glow fluorescent in the moonlight.

  “Good evening, Marisa,” he said softly as he stepped up onto the deck.

  Bob always spoke formally and barely above a whisper, as if he feared he might disturb the measureless desert quiet. He had lived in Agua Dulce for at least twenty years. She remembered when he came. He owned and operated the Starlight Inn, a ten-unit motel that was a hodgepodge of mobile homes and concrete block buildings ranging from ten to fifty years old.

  “Hi, Bob,” was all she answered, not really wanting to encourage conversation or a visit.

  “How is your mother this evening?”

  “She had a good day, I think. Her mind seemed to be working better.”

  He nodded. “Ah.” He came to where she sat, carrying an Albertson’s Bakery sack. “I brought her a treat. I went in today.” He handed over the white paper sack.

  He meant he had gone to Odessa or maybe Midland, where all Agua Dulce citizens went for shopping or doctor visits or other necessities. To Marisa, the trip to Odessa or Midland, where she had lived and worked at Denny’s for a time, was a chance to mingle among other human beings--to see the bright lights, so to speak. To a recluse like Bob Nichols, the trip was a trauma. She looked into the sack. Doughnuts and sweet rolls. “Hey, thanks. She loves these.” She set the sack on the TV tray and turned down the radio’s volume. “Did you have a good trip?”

  He shook his head and sank into the other rocking chair.

  “Do you have customers tonight?” She asked mostly because his having guests in the motel usually meant breakfast business in Pecos Belle’s. He raised seven fingers. “Seven? Hey, that’s good for April, right?”

  The months between tourist seasons were lean, April being one of the leanest. With school still in session, no families traveled the highway and the snowbirds who had come south to escape the snow and ice of the northern climes were heading home.

  He nodded and sighed.

  “Where they from?”

  “The North mostly.” In Bob-speak, that meant anywhere north of Amarillo. “Except for a biker. He came from Fort Worth, I believe he said.”

  So the guy on whose shoulder she had cried was spending the night. An inexplicable flicker of interest flared. “A biker?”

  “Not a real biker. Not a Hell’s Angel or anything. He does have a very nice Harley-Davidson, though.”

  This time, it was Marisa who nodded and said, “Ah,” wondering if he would show up for breakfast in the café.

  “Marisa,” Bob said, and she could hear an almost indiscernible tremor in the way he said her name. “Have you heard the news?”

  Here it comes, she thought. A conversation she wasn’t up for. “You mean about the town selling?”

  “I’m very worried. If things start happening here, I fear they won’t come.”

  They were visitors from outer space. Marisa couldn’t see Bob’s eyes in the dark, but she had seen them light up often enough in the daylight when he talked about They and Them. In a different way, he was as far out of touch with reality as Mama. To his credit, she believed him to be just as harmless. “Before we get all excited and worried, Bob, let’s
wait and see what happens.”

  “I’ve worked so hard and for so long, Marisa. We shouldn’t discourage them. There are signs. Very positive signs. Sounds. Coded messages. I know they want to come, but I suspect they fear they won’t be welcomed.”

  Marisa couldn’t imagine what kind of communication he had going on with Them. He had never said exactly from where They beamed in, but in the doublewide mobile home where he lived, it appeared to her he had radio equipment sophisticated enough to communicate with Pluto.

  He looked toward something neither of them could see in the dark, but both knew was there—a level, football field-size concrete slab, surrounded by boulders the size of a car and on one side, several tiers of seating made from slabs of limestone.

  The thing was located in Lanny Winegardner’s pasture that butted up to the far side of Bob’s motel. Lanny had often said that when he gave permission for the construction of the UFO landing pad, he had no idea what a monstrosity Bob would create. With the occasional help of a hired backhoe or a CAT out of Pecos or Kermit, but mostly single-handedly, Bob had toiled at building the landing pad ever since he came to Agua Dulce. He had even built a chain link fence around it, shutting out Winegardner cattle.

  Just as the rancher hadn’t anticipated the size of Bob’s endeavor, he hadn’t counted on the groups as outlandish in dress and behavior as Bob who came and sat on the limestone seats for meetings. Even so, none of it appeared to be of great concern to Lanny. When a man owned as much land as his XO Ranch encompassed, losing the use of a little square of it wasn’t that big a deal. If she had ever met a man who truly championed a “live-and-let-live” philosophy, it was Lanny.

  Marisa couldn’t imagine how much the landing pad had cost. Tonight as she and Bob stared toward it together, she wondered again from where his seemingly unlimited supply of money came. To this day, his background was a mystery. All she really knew about him was that he was kind to her mother.