“In a heartbeat. She wanted to pay part of the house expenses, but I wouldn’t allow it. I felt I wanted to do it whether she accepted the offer or not. But I hoped and prayed that she would.”
“Do you think she might have felt a little compromised, or ‘bought’ with that arrangement?”
“I don’t, I think she understood that I’d do it, anyway. And she kept the refrigerator full of good things, the wine rack full, and paid all the utility bills. It was a pretty even deal, close enough for both of us to feel like the contributions were equal, and she really seemed to enjoy our living arrangement. We loved each other, so it didn’t make any difference; no one was counting.”
“Did you ever talk about getting married?”
“No. I think we were both afraid to go there. We both valued keeping independent lives with old friends and going out separately—or together. I don’t mean we had separate romances going on—it wasn’t an open relationship thing—but we didn’t feel we wanted to limit ourselves to doing things we could only do together. We were both home and slept together every night for almost five years, unless one of us was traveling.”
“That begs the question, what happened after five years?”
Jim lifted his right hand from the steering wheel, turning it palm-up in mid-air above the shift lever, “A guy named Jeff. He came into the Bella Vista once in a while to sit at the bar and hit on girls. One night when there wasn’t much going on, he started a conversation with Annie. He found out about her software engineering degree, and couldn’t help but notice her obvious magnetic personality. Jeff was a marketing type for a Cupertino software company and could see her potential as an attractive accomplice in customer calls. Penny had kept herself up-to-date with the latest in personal computer technology and was a power computer user. She knew her way around the operating systems and most popular applications. She wasn’t current as a programmer since she’d never practiced it in the field, but she didn’t need to be a functioning programmer to be the perfect marketing specialist.”
“I can see where this is going. She took a job with Jeff’s company and drifted away?”
“Yeah. Her commute into the valley for her new job was worse than mine, and after a while she decided she had to move in closer. We talked about doing it together, but in the end, she told me she thought our good times together were coming to an end. I’d suspected that was coming too, but didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t try to talk her out of it, I don’t believe in pushing something that’s not there.”
“Maybe you’re too much of a gentleman?”
“Maybe, but I can’t do something I don’t believe in. I wanted her to be happy, and I didn’t want tension around the house because we were forcing it. That was also around the time I was burning out on the whole Silicon Valley scene and thinking about moving back to San Diego. Losing Annie was the clincher. I wasn’t going to stay around there without her; it would have been too—too hard to deal with . . . .” Jim ended this part of his story with a wavering voice that he tried to hide, clearing it as though it was just a dry throat.
“Jim, I can tell from your voice that this didn’t turn out well, and it’s getting hard for you to talk about. You don’t have to go on.”
“No, I’m fine. I want you to know. But stop me before I start to cry . . . .” he said with a wry smile. Penny didn’t know if he meant it, or was trying to be light hearted, but she suspected he meant it.
Jim went on, telling Penny more about his burn-out in the military contracting business, his decision to return to San Diego, and his futile attempts to convince Annie that the move would be good for them both—maybe even restoring their old relationship. He described Annie’s hesitance, because she wasn’t sure she could replace her new opportunities in San Diego. He also knew she was probably right. On that one visit, it was clear to both the relationship had lost its magic. He’d held onto a thread of hope, but—there was Jeff . . . . Jim glanced sideways at Penny to see that she’d again removed her sunglasses and was watching him intently.
He struggled through to the end of the story when Annie lost her life in the crash on the Bayshore, just when, after years of trying, he’d convinced her to come back down for a week to reconsider San Diego—and him.
Except for the road noises, there was complete silence in the van for the next several miles, both not knowing where to take the conversation. Trancelike, they stared up the highway, at the shimmering surrounding desert landscape and evasive mirages that offered no happy vistas to take their minds off the sad story Jim had just finished.
Jim finally said, “Penny, I’m over her. I’d been losing her month by month for a year or so after she took that new job, and I knew it. Her death made me wonder time and time again whether it would have happened if she’d moved to San Diego. Or was it somehow written in stone that she would die in a traffic accident on a certain day and at a certain hour? I second-guessed myself for years, telling myself I should have tried harder. Eventually I realized it was a fool’s errand and the answer was unknowable, so I swallowed hard and accepted the reality. I’m not in love with a ghost. And I can’t tell you how glad I am that you walked into my life that day up on the mountain. I want you to know I’m not carrying that old baggage anymore, and I’m open for you.”
Tears filling her eyes, Penny placed a warm hand on Jim’s knee and gave it a little squeeze, saying, “That was the best thing you could have said. I love you, Jim.”
“Glad to hear it, now that we’re getting married.”
The squeeze turned into a hard pinch. “You know what I meant.”
They both choked back happy tears and rode along again in another silence until a highway sign said, “Needles - 10 Miles.”
“Do you want to know the strangest thing?” Jim asked.
“What, dear?”
Jim hesitated before saying, “Well . . . I’m having second thoughts about telling you this, now. Maybe I shouldn’t say it.”
“Oh great! You dangle a question like that out and then don’t know if you want to ask it? You might as well get all your secrets out now while there’s still time to . . . whatever—”
“Okay, that was stupid of me. But, I don’t want this to put a heavy load on you. I don’t mean for it to be that.”
“Well, hell, Jim, try me. Just say it without all the drama.”
“Okay, then. Annie died in that accident five years ago the same day you and I met up on Starvation Mountain.”
There was a long silence before Penny said, “Ohhhh . . . . Oh, my God, Jim. I don’t know what to say . . . .”
“Yeah, I know; I’m afraid you’re going to believe I’ll think of you as a replacement. But I don’t—believe me I don’t—and won’t ever think of you that way.”
“Well—it’s not only that,” Penny began, “But what if things don’t work out for us? You’d feel like you’ve been hit by lightning twice and it just wasn’t to be for you. And I’d be feeling a ton of additional pressure to not take us there.”
“Yes, the implications are endless.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
“It never seemed the time was right. There was no context for it before.”
“I hate to think that I now have some obligation because of this, or that I’ve been scripted into replacing Annie. That would be a heavy trip and I don’t want to think of us that way. I want the natural feelings you and I have for each other to take us wherever we’re going.”
“I hope we can do that, and I’m sorry I brought it up.”
“Jim, I’m not going to look at it any way other than it was a coincidence and there’s no meaning to it. We could have met the next time you were up on the mountain. And then what? No implications like these.”
“Can you do that, Penny? I hope you really can.”
“Yes, if you can, too.”
“Should we just accept it as karma that’s out of our control—and try not to look for anything deeper?”
“I love you, Penny.”
Late the same evening at the adobe block house on Wildcat Canyon Road
“Why the fuck don’t we have something new on her by now? It’s been six days and there’s been no movement since that last trace on Caminito Castillo?” Carlos Garcia screamed over the phone at the two men sitting amid computers, cell phones and tables covered with maps.
“Nothing. It’s like she turned it off and hasn’t used her cell phone since then.”
“Fuck! They could have jumped on an airplane to London for all we know. Talk to that app’s guy again to see if there is something else we can do.”
“Okay, Carlos. But I have doubts—”
“Fuck your doubts. Make something happen!”
Jim and Penny checked into the Needles Ramada Inn where Jim had arranged a room for the night. The plan was to change into riding leathers in the morning before breakfast, and after finishing breakfast, drive to the Desert Truck and Van Rental lot where they would unload their Harleys and drop the van.
“This is our jumping off point, dear. Excited?”
She reached to hug him and answered, “Absolutely,” as her cell phone fell out of a side pocket in a bag she was carrying trip items in. “There it is. I’ve been looking for that for days. Not that I use it much, but I’ve been wondering where it was hiding.”
“Battery’s probably dead. Your Harley doesn’t have a cell phone charger, so you should charge it overnight in here. Do you have an AC adapter for charging?”
“No. The only charger I have along is one of those cigarette lighter plug-in things that’s out in the van in one of my junk bags. I’ll plug it in out there so it’ll be ready in the morning.”
“Good idea. Hurry so we can go to bed.”
“Nice bikes, where you riding to?” Fred, the manager of Desert Truck and Van Rental asked.
“East, following the ‘Easy Rider’ route,” Jim answered.
“Yeah, you too?” We get a lot of people doin’ that. Not many stop in here, but a whole lot of them go by, wearin’ those Captain America jackets and helmets.”
“I know. There are even high-buck organized tours set up for groups. They supply the food, drinks, and sleeping bags for where Wyatt and Billy slept out on the ground, and even motorcycles if you don’t own one. People come from all over the world to do it,” Jim said.
“Don’t seem like it’s the same. Probably serve wine and cheese to ‘em, too.” Fred said, wrinkling his nose at the thought. “A little grass would be better, doncha think?”
“I think you’ve got something there,” Jim laughed.
“What about you, little honey? Are you really gonna ride all the way to New Orleans?”
“My name is Penny. Glad to meet you, Fred. I don’t think we’re going all the way to New Orleans. I haven’t been riding long distances for years, so we’re playing it by ear. But, at least I want to get to Las Vegas, New Mexico.”
“Why’s that?”
“I think that’s where the beauty of the western landscapes mostly ends. I don’t think I want to ride through Texas and Oklahoma: too flat, monotonous and boring,” she said with an indifferent look. “And too many rednecks,” she whispered in an inaudible, low voice.
“Yeah . . . flat . . . except for the Needles over there,” Fred said, pointing toward a line of sharp, barren peaks, to the north, “It’s kinda like around here.”
“We just drove a couple of hundred miles through flat and barren,” Penny said as she pointed back toward the desert to the west. “Why are you out here, Fred?”
“Cheap livin’. And I’m a river rat. On it ever’ weekend. Love it.”
Penny ended the conversation saying, “To each his own. I can understand that.”
“Park the van over there by the office door, and we’ll finish the paperwork.” Fred said.
Fred ran Jim’s credit card and pushed the receipt across the counter for Jim to sign. While signing the customer line, Jim said, “We’d like that van for our return trip if it, or one like it, will be available in around ten days.”
“Should be something available. What are your requirements?”
“Nice big comfortable seats and air conditioning,” Penny answered.
“That’s all we have. Can’t rent nothin’ else out here without those. Call me when you’re a day or two out.”
They ran through a simple checklist while their motorcycles were warming up. Hand signals for slowing, stopping, turning, caution, and are-you-okay, which was nothing more than the usual curled, touching forefinger and thumb with an upward head nod. They also made sure their helmet’s person-to-person radios were set to the same frequency and in working order. They planned to use the radios as the main method for staying in contact, with the hand signals as the backup if one or both radios failed.
Turning and waving at Fred, then flipping their face shields down, they accelerated out of the gravel lot, heading southeast to the three parallel Colorado River bridges into Arizona a few miles away. As they entered the highway bridge, directly above the California shoreline of the Colorado, Jim radioed Penny to stop behind him as he slowed on the narrow apron alongside the traffic lane. Penny asked, “What’s going on? This is not a good place to stop, it’s too narrow.”
“Watch.” He pulled his cell phone out of his jacket breast pocket and held it up for Penny to see.
“Are you going to call someone from here? It’s too dangerous!”
“A moment of symbolism; pretend it’s a Rolex,” as he threw it over the guardrail into the Colorado.
Penny immediately knew what he was doing: making the same symbolic gesture Wyatt had made as he and Billy left Death Valley on their trip to New Orleans. Throwing his Rolex into the desert sand was how he cut himself off from the straight world’s time and schedules—and maybe even any concern for the rest of the world. It was a gesture of not caring, a middle finger salute.
As Jim started to flip his helmet face shield down, Penny yelled, “Wait!”
Jim turned around for a better view to see what Penny was up to. With a big smile on her face, she was frantically unzipping first one pocket, then a second, and then starting to unzip a third when she stopped, and in frustration said, “Damn! I left mine in the van.”
“Do you want to go back for it?”
“No. That wouldn’t be right in this moment. It’s the same, anyway; I’m cutting the cord, too. I just won’t have the pleasure of throwing it in the river like you did.” Then, with a radiant smile, she yelled, “Yeah baby, we’re heading out, just like Wyatt and Billy!”
Jim gave her a thumbs-up that she returned, still smiling, as they snapped their face shields down and twisted the throttles—hard. Van Morrison echoed in Jim’s head: We were born before the wind . . . .
Late afternoon, The adobe block house off Wildcat Canyon Road
“What are we getting from Deep Tracker, Tommy?” Ferdy asked.
“Nothing new. The phone is still at Desert Truck and Van Rental, same as it’s been all day.”
“And that’s only a couple of miles from the Ramada where it spent the night?”
“Yeah. I wonder if they dropped a rental car or truck—whatever they were drivin’—and switched to something else?” Tommy mused.
“Seems like it. Let’s give it a few more hours to see what happens. Maybe it’ll start moving again and we can get some idea of where she’s going.”
“Then what? What if it’s still there?”
“Then we drive out to Needles.”
“Oh great, Ferdy. Can’t wait!” Tommy sneered.
“Yeah. By the way, when I talked to Carlos earlier, he said we’d be talking to Arnie from now on ‘cause he’s too busy with something.”
“I think I’ll like that better. Carlos’s too much of an ass—”
“Yeah, I know what you�
��re sayin’, Tommy.”
Sixteen - Rt. 66
Rt. 66: two letters and two numbers: symbols of freedom for generations of American youth, or for others, a hope to replace lost hopes left in a rear-view mirror. Or the words for a new song a musician hoped would be the next hit: lyrics courtesy of mountains and deserts, rhythm provided by rolling, curving two lanes separated by a painted white line, and percussion courtesy of the rumble of countless, gleaming, deep-throated motorcycles.
They rode through western Arizona’s windblown, sunbaked, bleached colorless villages. Semi-abandoned and forced into obsolescence by the newer, faster freeway, and overflown by airliners, the dusty streets slept as cross-country railroad freight trains occasionally rumbled past sleeping homes and yards with bored children and weary dogs. Appearing to be miles long, the trains inched their way across the barren landscape, now only to whistle at the forgotten towns lying by the rail bed.
Finally escaping the barren desert and looking for relief from the heat and dust as they rode up to the pine forests around Flagstaff, an old diner by the side of the highway beckoned. Penny said into her helmet microphone, “Jim, I’m going to burst a kidney if we don’t stop somewhere soon. How about at this diner?”
“Yeah, let’s do it. I’m in the mood for a burger and fries.”
“Thought we’d never stop. My back is hurting, and I need to get off this seat.”
“I was worried about that. Let’s take our time here.”
“Have a French fry, that salad won’t give you the calories you need for this ride,” Jim said as they relaxed in the booth’s turquoise vinyl-covered bench seats.
“Okay, but just a few. Please slide the ketchup a little closer so I don’t have to worry about dragging my sleeve across your greasy burger.”
“Here it is. I don’t want to see mustard stains on that pretty shirt. You can have all the fries you want before they’ll show up on your figure.”
“It happens before you ever realize it, dear. You know, I can’t stop the thoughts of what happened when we dropped those keys off at Ramona from creeping back into my mind when I let my guard down. What do you think will happen when we return to San Diego?”
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