“Besides,” he added, “the good Lord has seen fit to stop us up not more than an eighth of a mile from that there truck stop just up the way. There’s bound to be vittles ‘n’ more, so if’n yer keen, y’all can stretch yer legs a bit.”
Milo was quite happy to be able to work out his own kinks. He hadn’t sustained any injury from the sudden stop, nor had he felt any particular soreness, but then again he hadn’t been stretching his neck and torso around backward, trying repeatedly and unsuccessfully to flirt so heavily with the two college girls that had positioned themselves at the very rear of the bus. It’s not that he wasn’t interested, indeed, he had thought of little else on this trip west with his two friends, but Milo was incredibly shy around girls, and always had been.
The girls, in fact, one named Lou, and the other Cyndi, were quite attractive. Lou, while not a traditional beauty, had a certain something about her that Milo just couldn’t ignore. She had hair the color of October he decided, a rich tangerine hue he found he preferred on women over the blond that seemed so typically popular. She had a mildly freckled face, but instead of it distracting him, he found it made her expressions livelier, and more authentic than her traveling companion. She wore a short blouse, made even shorter by the way she’d tied it off a little bit above the waist. It had a floral pattern that mixed brown, purple, and yellow stems with opposite colored petals. Her dark, forest-green bellbottoms complemented the blouse, and Milo thought the way she filled everything out made it all even better. True, she was a little curvier than her friend, but Milo had never liked skinny girls all that much. Their bodies had reminded him of middle-school boys. She had a very pleasant voice, and when she spoke, Milo found himself getting lost in not just her tone, but the intelligence that seemed to come with it.
Cindy was the taller of the two, and had a mane of hair that could rival the black of the inkiest blackbird. She was graced with pointedly smart features, yet could carelessly flash a smile that led him to believe that she could easily be on the cover of one of those fancy movie magazines his sister was so fond of. She was long and lean and had legs that seemed to go on forever. It didn’t seem to bother her one iota that even though they were in a desert, and it was the middle of November, she only ever wore short, loose, and thin skirts. Those miniskirts accompanied by footwear, which he learned were called “go-go boots,” allowed her to show the right amount of skin from the bottom of her knees up to the perfect area of her thighs, making it impossible for the hormone-driven males to think of anything other than what it all led to.
In hushed tones, kept between the fellas, Nicco said that he believed that she was wearing the boots merely to tease him. He said that at night, when no one else was watching, she’d slide up her skirt and open up her legs just enough for him to get a glimmer of her hairy southern peach, and if given half a chance he’d show her how a proper man handled something so sweet and fine. Milo had given a quiet chuckle, but Rush almost let the cat out of the bag when he laughingly exclaimed that the only thing Nicco knew about “peaches” was nothing at all, and that he would be surprised if Nicco could even tell a peach from a banana.
This led Nicco into a speech defending his honor with stories of supposed conquests, stories they had both heard numerous times since Nicco had moved to Williamsburg with his mother three and a half years earlier. Usually they involved giving it hard to girls behind some mysterious bar, or talking the skirt off of some broad after slipping some green to a projectionist in some unknown movie theatre. But the stories Milo and Rush were actually interested in hearing were those of Nicco’s father. The man was a mystery to the two friends; they had never even seen the man, let alone met him.
Nicco had certainly been scarce during the summers of those few years, and Milo believed that he probably had been to at least half of the places, or more, that he had boasted about. But the destinations themselves and his supposed conquests were all the usually vocal Nicco was willing to talk about. When prodded for more information about his absentee father, all he was willing to admit was that Mr. Capinelli was always away dealing with the family business interests, his friends referred to him as Frankie, and that he was a very important man that needed to be present and available in New York to make sure things were running smoothly. What those things were, Nicco never really said, but the sense of an adventure in a faraway place was more than enough to give Milo all the drive he needed to get out of his small Virginia town and head off to something new.
Milo had graduated high school earlier that year, and lacking the funds for college, decided he would ask to up his hours at his job at Culver’s Grocers. Mr. Culver was a kind man, and offered him five more hours a week. But with his father deceased and his mother absent most of the time, Milo knew any opportunity would be better than his life currently. So when Nicco said he had an uncle in Nevada who was looking for some young men willing to work odd jobs, Milo jumped at the chance. If he knew then exactly what some of those odd jobs would entail, he might not have taken up Nicco on his offer.
*
And so it was that Milo found himself heading down an old, dusty road toward the only glimmering trace of mankind, besides the Greyhound, for miles. He was accompanied by his two friends, the two lovely coeds at the back of the bus, and five other people. There was a single mother of Spanish descent, Hortensia, who seemed to speak little English and clutched a very young baby to her as if she felt the world was out to steal it, and a couple in their forties, coaxing their retarded son named Angus onward with the promise of ice cream. Milo had never traveled with a retarded boy before, but found the boy to be rather intelligent and funny. Angus even managed to get Rush to fall for the “pull my finger for a prize” prank on their first day of travel, to the horror of his parents. Rush had not been paying particularly close attention to what Angus was asking him to do, as he had had most of his attention directed toward the ladies. Not more than a second had passed before Rush naively pulled on the boy’s index finger and there was a surprisingly loud riiiiipp sound coming from his Angus’s ass. The smell that followed almost immediately was enough to generate moans and curious looks from the other travelers captured within the moving vehicle. Angus erupted with laughter! While the smell was absolutely revolting, Angus’s genuine glee at pulling one over on the older boy had Milo laughing out loud, which only made things worse as the gas was so strong it seemed he could taste it by doing so. This, in turn, got the girls to giggling from underneath their coats. Angus would travel back and forth between his parents and Milo’s friends, but only after assuring the group he would pull no more pranks on them.
“Angus, my man,” Nicco said with a smile, “you’re just too damned smart for us and we know it!”
*
Milo had been to a truck stop before, but never one quite this big. He was impressed with its size once he got close enough to really get a good look at the place. He figured it couldn’t be more than a few years old. It had a full service gas station just outside, a locker room, showers just beyond the men’s room, and a fully stocked convenience store with a diner attached. Nicco, Rush and Cyndi had decided they would go get a seat at a booth in the restaurant. Milo and Lou had both stated they could use a bit of time to freshen up and had headed toward their respective restrooms. Before they got more than a couple steps headed toward their lavatories, Lou grasped him by the biceps and signaled toward a toadish looking man making no effort to hide the fact that he was staring around one of the magazine racks right at her. “Wait up for me before going back, will ya? That fella is giving me the willies.” Milo agreed and headed into the men’s room.
After Milo finished, he came back out to see that Mr. Toad was no longer around. The thought of the man was giving him the heebie jeebies now as well. Wondering what a man like that would be reading, Milo decided to head his way over to the magazine rack. At first glance it looked to be the usual array of gas station literature, hot rod magazines, monster and movie rags. Today’s paper was there as wel
l. Resting in the lower left hand corner were some magazines whose covers had been slightly shielded by a wooden board. The title of an article managed to catch his eye and he thought he could make out the word “tarot”.
He recalled a friend of his sister’s had brought a tarot deck over to his house one night during a sleepover. He was a few years younger than his sister Jeanie, but that never stopped her from allowing him to participate in some of her and her friends’ play, and the other girls never really seemed to mind. He remembered that night clearly. He recalled the girls giggling over the possibilities the cards might bring to their futures. They all took turns and debated what the true meaning of the cards might be. Sometime during the evening, Jeanie’s friends convinced her to let Milo pull a card. He deserved to know what the fates had in store for him as well, didn’t he? She said she would allow it, but would only let him pull one card, since he was too gullible and would probably believe anything. Besides, she added, she didn’t want to ruin his impressionable mind. Amber then shuffled the cards and spread them apart before him in the shape of a fan.
“Pick one,” she giggled.
He reached down to the splayed deck and touched one card. He looked up to Jeanie and she nodded that it was okay. He turned the card over. Amber, who owned the deck, squealed with glee when she saw what the card was. That started a chain reaction with the other girls who all let out little squeals of their own.
Milo didn’t get it, he just couldn’t figure out what all the excitement was all about. He had seen some cool images on some of the cards, like a dragon and a grim reaper. But this card was just confusing, it had some kind of cloud hand holding a fountain cup that was shooting water down into a lake or pond, with a white bird holding a small wafer in its mouth diving down into the fountain cup. What could be so exciting about a fountain cup with a diving bird?
Amber went on to talk about the card, which was the Ace of Cups, and what it meant for his future. She said that he would have a love so incredibly deep that it would rival that of some people named Romeo and Juliet. He asked who they were, and the girls all giggled again. Amber did say to, “Beware, however, for while a lover’s bond, if true, is strong, it shouldn’t blind you toward sharing love with others.” That had made no sense to him, because he thought that if you were supposed to love one person, then what good would it be to love anyone else? Then the girls said that they wondered if any of them in the house that night were feeling a strong desire to kiss the boy. Perhaps they were to be his true love and could only find out by true love’s kiss! This was enough to send poor little Milo safely to his room to bed for the evening. He thought about it for a while that night, a little bit less the next night, and then packed the thought away into memory, until now.
Being the curious sort, Milo picked up the magazine and immediately went wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Lightly attached to the cover was indeed a tarot card, and sure enough, it was the Ace of Cups! While it was the same card, it had an almost more radiant look to it, as if the colors had been made more vibrant since he’d last seen them as a child. Now the magazine the card was attached to, like the card, was anything but dull.
The title of the magazine said Private, but there seemed nothing being done privately on this cover to Milo. The young lady smirking at him seemed not to possess any sort of way to give herself any privacy at all. She seemed to be making damned sure that truly nothing was private for her any longer. Instead of causing Milo to grow in any sort of sexual anticipation, the way the young vixen was spreading her legs comically brought Nicco’s earlier conversation to mind, and with that, the image of a sliced peach drifted to the forefront of his thoughts.
At that moment, he heard a melodic voice say, “What’cha doin over there?” and went into a mild panic. Looking up, he saw that Lou was walking toward him not more than four strides away. How had she been so quiet? He managed to mumble out something along the lines of “Uh, gohh... nothing”! Lowering his arm, he tried to put the magazine back quickly. Not wanting to break eye contact with Lou as he did so, he missed the shelf and dropped the porno rag on to the ground. As it dropped, it opened, and as it opened, she gave him a curious glance. In that glance, he knew he must take action… and so he did.
Milo was a gifted and natural athlete. He’d enjoyed sports his last few years in high school and had played basketball and had managed to letter in both football and track. It was only natural that a feeling of surprise and complete betrayal of his own body took hold after what happened next. While desperately trying to save some face and dignity, Milo did what any red-blooded American would do. To retain the innocence of a woman so fair he bent down as quickly as he could to pick up the magazine. As he did so, he misjudged the distance between his body and the protruding second row of the magazine rack. His forehead slammed into the row with a loud crack.
Startled more than hurt, Milo reflexively jumped back, and as he did, the sleeve of his flannel shirt caught on a piece of wood protruding from the magazine rack. Trying not to fall back entirely, Milo pulled back in an attempt to try and reposition his arms, or at least tried to as only one of them managed to reach behind him. He then unwittingly performed a half pirouette while simultaneously pulling the magazine rack and its contents onto himself, then crashed into another rack of assorted trinkets behind him. Somewhere, amidst all that racket, he heard a woman exhale, “Ohmygawd!” The last thing he was fully aware of was the back of his head exploding while magazines jumped out on him from their perches above.
Lou was kneeling beside him in a heartbeat, and as she attempted to remove some of the magazines which had just moments before assaulted him, all she could get out was, “Wha… wha… What happened!?”
Others came rushing in now, including the convenience store clerk who was supposed to have been behind the counter this whole time. “What the fuck are you doing to my store?” he demanded. Milo was about to explain, when Lou spoke up and said, “Never mind that. Help me get him up!”
“You’re going to have to pay for this, you fucking hippies,” the clerk with the name Zed inscribed onto his ID badge said, while staring in a mild state of shock at the whole of the situation. “What the hell, whatever happened to people respecting other people’s property?” “If you think for one moment that you’re—”
He was cut off short as Lou looked him squarely in the eye and said, “Your shelving was improperly installed, and it’s a miracle that my friend here isn’t seriously hurt. No screws to hold any of the shelving in its place, no cautionary signs warning of uneven floors, I bet this kind of thing happens all of the time!”
For a moment Zed stared at the woman incredulously as he tried to make sense of what was going on. “And while I am on that subject, I’m sure that’s grounds for a lawsuit, if poor Milo there should decide to take legal action!”
Zed began visibly mouthing the words, “No screw, uneven floors,” as if trying to convince himself that that those were indeed the words he had just heard come out of the young woman’s mouth. Then three new words, “Move it, asshole!” broke that train of thought and Zed finally decided that it would be best, for now, to comply with the visibly upset girl.
After shaking out a few cobwebs, Milo had gotten to watch a majority of the events unfold. He understood very quickly that nothing other than his pride was broken, and that he would most certainly be all right. He was more embarrassed than anything else, and while he felt he could have easily pushed the shelf himself, he felt mesmerized by the display of authority by this fiery-haired valkyrie. He had never seen a grown woman take charge so firmly before, and part of him wanted to see where else it would go. But after easily pushing up the magazine rack, the show was just about over.
*
Not long after the whole debacle, the rest of their friends and fellow delayed travelers arrived to glimpse the chaos. They arrived to see Lou chewing out a store clerk and Milo with a lightly bleeding crack on the head, looking dazed under the magazine rack. After getting Milo patched
up and putting the fear of an unwinnable lawsuit into Zed with the bogus made-up-on-the-spot legal jargon Lou had thrown at him, they all decided to help get the shelving back upright and the magazines back on the rack, which instituted more hilarity and good-natured ribbing, both then and for the last hour and a half it took them to get to Vegas. Lou told her version of the story to their friends, and when Milo tried to intervene, she stopped him by saying that he wouldn’t be able to do it justice, and with that knock on the head he was sporting now, he was lucky to remember anything correctly.
Milo sat next to Lou the rest of their journey to Vegas. When things died down a bit and they noticed Rush, Cyndi and Nicco had gotten into a quieter, private conversation, she’d asked for an explanation of what had actually happened. Seeing no reason not to tell the truth, he knew he couldn’t seem any more lame, he told her everything just the way it happened. She asked why he’d gone to such extreme effort to keep her from seeing a dirty magazine. He told her about wanting to protect her innocence, that he knew it sounded corny and that he hardly knew her, but it seemed right at the time, and that if a similar situation were to arise again, he would take another lump on the head. She laughed aloud at his explanation and said that while it was indeed corny, it was ridiculously sweet.
Milo asked her why she had covered for him back at the shop. He really had been responsible for the shelf falling, not only down, but on top of him, and he knew she knew that at the time. She said that she understood, but had a strong distaste for people who hated not just hippies, but anyone. When she heard Zed going off on them she knew she had to put him in his place.
“If we’re being honest,” she said, “I think you’re pretty cute and kinda groovy.” She told him she had caught him stealing glances at her when he thought she wasn’t looking, and was terribly disappointed it took so long for him to get to talking with her without his two friends. They talked about that and more, until Daryl the bus driver announced that they would be arriving at their stop soon.
Never Fear - The Tarot: Do You Really Want To Know? Page 46