This story has been shared over coffee and veal cutlets from Trucker’s Heaven in the California desert to the Last Chance for American Cooking Truckstop on the New York Turnpike. Sometimes the birthmark is a scar or an eye-patch or some other discernable disfigurement; sometimes the limp is a hump, a bent neck, a withered arm, or twisted hand, or even a metal brace or prosthesis. Sometimes, it’s a girl, not a boy seeking the ride. But in all cases the hitchhiker is dead, killed in some tragic accident or as the result of some terrific crime. And in all cases, the rider is polite, even handsome or beautiful, except, of course, for a marring physical characteristic.
A curious reversal of the story involves a hitchhiker who is picked up by a trucker, given a ride to a roadside diner. When he comes inside, he discovers that the kindly teamster was driving a ghost-truck, that he had been killed in a horrible accident some time before. This version of the story was even the basis for a country song some decades ago.
Another story involves two teenagers who for obvious reasons are parked on a remote country lane, although it’s widely known that a convicted axe-murderer has escaped from a nearby prison. When they complete their business and are ready to leave (a storm is rising), the car won’t start. The girl panics and demands that the boy do something. Accordingly, the boy locks her in the car and slogs off into the wind, rain, and lightning to seek help. She, in the meantime, thinks she hears a muffled scream, then suddenly becomes aware through the noise of the storm of a scritch-scratching sound on the roof of the car. Remembering the news of the escaped convict, she recalls that his crime was to have beheaded a woman and hanged her body upside down from a tree limb on an isolated country road. As her terror mounts, she notices that the rain is washing blood down over the windshield of the car. Convinced that the mutilated corpse is dangling just overhead, she becomes hysterical, screaming herself into madness. When her boyfriend finally returns, he finds her in a catatonic state, her face frozen into a terrified expression, her eyes unable to close, her mind utterly gone. She remains in this condition forever. The authorities are mystified, for the only evidence that anything unusual happened was that the low-hanging branches of a sycamore tree blowing in the rainy gale had marred the roof of the car, and the tree’s corrosive sap had dripped down to stain the car’s finish.
I first heard this tale about the same time I heard about the snakes in the river. The teller was an older kid in our neighborhood, one who had a driver’s license and was also chockfull of sexual escapades (that were no less fantastic, in every sense of the word) with numerous girls of our mutual acquaintance. The boy in question was his cousin; the girl his older brother’s ex-steady. I don’t recall asking him how, exactly, his cousin learned what it was that drove the girl to madness—as “she never spoke another word” was the story’s conclusion.
I’ve heard the story five or six times over the course of the years. The particulars vary only slightly, and the unsupported conclusions remain unexplained. My son actually brought it home from a baseball camp he attended when he was in junior high. When I asked him how anyone knew what it was that so scared the abandoned girl and then rendered her permanently incommunicado, he scoffed, “Dad. That’s not the point.”
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There are probably thousands of these folk tales around. I have been witness to the birth of one of them. In the retelling, the scene is a Little League Ball park in or near a metropolitan area; the setting is almost always “about five years ago,” give or take. In actuality, the event took place in Denton, Texas. The situation was that the umpires allowed a game to continue after lightning was seen overhead. Sure enough, a bolt struck the field, and a player was—well, actually, nothing happened to anyone. There was a game, however, and a storm. The umpires didn’t order the field vacated until the last moment, and lightning did strike nearby. But all the players were safely under an awning next to the concession stand, and in an hour’s time, play resumed.
The first retelling of this tale came to my notice only a few years after it happened. The teller was an umpire, who related it while eyeing a suspicious-looking cloud on the distant horizon while he explained why he was calling that evening’s game. In his version, he was working the game in question, and he was the only umpire voting for an early suspension. He told the coaches, players, and parents gathered around him that when the lightning struck, a boy was killed. “And I won’t let that happen again,” he solemnly intoned; then he called off the contest.
I later learned that the Cowboys were playing on television that night, and he really didn’t want to miss the kickoff.
I next heard the story a few seasons later. In this rendition, six boys were “killed or seriously injured,” the taletelling coach assured me. “My nephew was there,” he said, “but he had sense enough to get off the field.”
Over the years, I’ve heard that story dozens of times around ballparks from Nacogdoches to Stillwater, Oklahoma. The field moves around—Dallas, Fort Worth, Abilene, Austin, even El Paso—and the number of victims—dead or seriously injured—varies from a single unfortunate all the way up to a whole team. More recently, I’ve heard versions of it adapted for softball, soccer, and one notable equestrian event in which one of the dead was a prize thoroughbred.
In the fall of 1995, lightning did actually strike a football field in a Dallas suburb during an afternoon workout. A youngster was tragically killed, and several more were, indeed, seriously injured. Incredibly, the television reporter covering the story related the baseball field incident, placed it (not surprisingly for a Dallas station reporter) in Houston, and calculated eight deaths as a result of officials’ negligence. The implication, of course, was that the coach, in this case, had been careless of commonsense safety, although witnesses testified that there was no cloud, no storm visibly approaching and that the lightning came “from a clear blue sky.” So, alas, did this tale of tragic woe.
With constantly renewing vigor, this story of athletics and thunderbolts has been woven into the fabric of modern cultural argot along with rivers full of snakes, hapless lovers on lonely lanes, and ghostly truckers and hitchhikers. The tellers relate them as truth, verify them as something they or people they know and unerringly trust have witnessed. Once they are retold, the stories become a part of the personal memory of the tellers’ pasts, as true as any story anyone might relate about his or her past, for they possess the quality of illogic and incredibility, two elements that often are the primary markers between fiction and nonfiction. To put it tritely, the truth is always stranger than fiction, and any story presented as “true” takes on a weight it would not otherwise have. These stories probably start out as entertaining anecdotes designed to titillate, frighten, or amaze, but they end as part of actual personal experience, something to contribute to a conversational roundtable that will steal the show, hold the floor, and give people something profound to think about. But as my son perceived, the point is that the tale—although initially conceived as a fabrication—is true. It’s just not factual. But it probably has a moral, or it did when it was originated: don’t go into strange water without looking first; don’t pick up mysterious hitchhikers or accept rides from strangers; don’t play ball in the rain; and don’t go for a slap and tickle on desolate country by-ways, at least not on by-ways near a prison from which dangerous murderers are apt to escape. The teller creates no harm in retelling it, even with individualized embellishments; and, in most cases, they’re good stories, fun to listen to, easy to remember and adopt as our own. If they’re obscure enough, they can even be adapted into award-winning fiction.
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I have no way of knowing if Larry McMurtry ever heard the story about water moccasins in the Canadian River before he wrote it into his novel. Perhaps one of his cowboy relatives or acquaintances told the tale to him at some point in his youth; perhaps he read it in a book of such yarns. Or perhaps he never heard it before and made it up entirely from whole cloth. It’s a nice piece, and it fits well into the fiction
al fabric of Lonesome Dove; it was also memorably dramatic in the television version of the novel.
But at the least, I maintain that even if it did happen to some luckless cowpuncher, or to some fisherman, hunter, youthful skinny-dipper, or soldier in a foreign land, it didn’t happen but once—well, maybe twice—but certainly not as often as it’s been claimed in the retelling of it. If it did, no river or lake in America—maybe in the world—would be safe to enter. At the same time, though, maybe it would be safer than contradicting some taleteller who will swear on a six-pack of quality brew that the incident truly did happen, and that he saw it with his own eyes. Who knows, maybe he did.
MY FIRST DATE
“The absence of romance in my history will,
I fear, detract somewhat from its interest. “
—Thucydides
Dating in my hometown when I was a kid was not easily done if for no other reason than there simply wasn’t much to do. The movie had burned down when I was in junior high, and the bowling alley went up less than a year later. Occasionally there was a dance held at the Teen Canteen, but ticket prices were high, and the chaperones usually outnumbered the couples on the dance floor two-to-one. There was a drive-in movie, but asking a girl out to a drive-in was, in those days at least, like making an obscene proposition. Besides, it was only open between June and September. So dating, for the most part, was restricted to driving around and around the town’s main streets, “The Drag,” with an occasional stop at the Dairy Queen for a Lime Coke, and to attending special, school-sponsored events such as banquets and dances.
Not surprisingly, most kids in my hometown didn’t date very much at all. There were the “steady” couples who logged hour after hour during the early weeks of their courtships, driving around and around the town with an occasional stop at the Dairy Queen for a Lime Coke. But when their romance had progressed beyond the public display stage, they retired to “The Lanes,” where they would park for hour after hour of love-locked embraces, pausing only for an occasional tour of “The Drag” so their parents wouldn’t get wind of their teens’ torrid trysts on rural byways.
But that was for the “steadies.” The rest of us mostly hung around the Dairy Queen parking lot after we had used up all of somebody’s gas, waiting on the “steadies” to take their dates home and come by with wild, pornographic tales of the escapades—or for midnight, whichever came first.
Frequently, however, an event would occur which would require even the most reluctant among us to seek a female escort for the evening. Events such as the Senior Banquet, the Sports Banquet, the Band Banquet, the Future Farmers’ Banquet, the Future Homemakers’ Banquet, the Future Teachers’ Banquet, and all kinds of other “feeds” would force even the farm or ranch boy to trade in boots for a pair of dress shoes and a starched shirt for an evening of preordained misery in the company of some “young lady” to whom he wouldn’t have spoken three words otherwise and probably wouldn’t say more than five anyway.
I personally participated in a number of these events during the four years I spent in high school, and I soon evolved a theory about teenaged dating in a small town. It stems from all those years of sitting beside some “young lady” and eating cold creamed-chicken and cherry cobbler and listening to some bore drone on about the marvelous wonders of whatever organization was sponsoring the affair: There is no way for an individual to have a good time on a date.
The odds are totally against it. In the first place, no small-town boy is going to ask out any small-town girl he knows well. The only reason why he would know her well is because he sees her every day—in class or some other activity. To be turned down by a person whom one might encounter on a daily basis thereafter would be intolerably embarrassing. In the second place, no normal “young man” is going to ask out any “young lady” who will fail to provide him with the proper social status he thinks he deserves. As a result, he usually finds some girl who is, in his eyes anyway, ravishingly beautiful, markedly intelligent, and who represents almost everything he does not through her personal interests and activities.
Thus, two total strangers frequently embark on an evening which is designed by him to be interesting for her; but because he has probably totally misjudged her, the event will turn out to be boring, confusing, strained. Then, after spending most of his time worrying about whether she will enjoy it and whether she is enjoying it, he devotes countless hours to worrying about whether she has enjoyed it sufficiently to go out with him again, knowing in his heart of hearts that she wouldn’t if her life depended on it.
But in spite of all this anguish and worry, the dating ritual continues throughout adolescence and young adulthood; the particulars change, but the pain marches on. Indeed, it spans generations. The practice is firmly established at an early age. Parents expect it, friends encourage it, society demands it. In a small town, it is particularly important, for without it, one imagines when he discovers girls and a daily growth of whiskers at about the same time, he could wind up being one of those “old bachelors” his mother shakes her head over whenever one of their names is mentioned. There are only so many years to master the craft, and it’s important to establish experience so one can point to a track record and assert himself as a social if not a masculine animal.
My experience was no different. Years later I would find myself still uncertain and insecure over the same problems that beset me when I was fourteen and, as yet, dateless. But every time I looked over at my female companion of the moment, I realized that the pattern for disaster was cut long ago, in a small almost anonymous town where I experienced my first date.
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I was like most boys at “almost fifteen.” My most prized possessions were my Learner’s Driving Permit and my limited access to my old man’s 1953 Chevy. As most of my older classmates had done, I had been driving with friends providing the licensed driver in the front seat for almost a year; and while I had logged my share of miles around “The Drag,” talking with my buddies about cars, school, music, college, and, of course, girls, I had not yet found the courage or the motivation to venture onto the highway of society with a “young lady.”
I had maintained a secret crush on a girl named Sherry French for over six years, all the way back to first grade, and as soon as I received my real driving license, I told myself, I would have no hesitation about calling her up and asking her to be my first date.
Unfortunately, a friend of mine, Allen Jenks, who had been driving for almost a year with a real license, had taken advantage of his early start as a motorist by establishing a dating relationship with my intended. This bothered me somewhat, but I took comfort in the fact that his only access to a car was his one-sixth share in a 1958 Rambler—Jenks also had five older brothers of dating and driving age, and a weekend claim on the auto was a rare premium. As a result, he used my car to meet Sherry on “The Drag,” with my ever-present self behind the wheel. Also, I was sure his general clodishness would be no match for the savoir faire I knew I would exude upon receipt of my real driving license.
But suddenly, in the spring of my freshman year in high school, things advanced at a more rapid rate than I had anticipated. The annual Spring Dance was upcoming. Normally, I attended such affairs “stag,” usually in the company of a whole gang of friends, including Jenks and some other proud but dateless guys, and I had no reason to think that this time would be an exception. Jenks, however, announced that he was going to figure out which of his brothers had “dibs” on the Rambler that evening and ask Sherry to double date.
Now my whole social life didn’t depend solely on one friend, and even if it had, Jenks would not have been the one to set any patterns for me. But later the same day, I ran into my best friend, Matt Holcomb, who tilted the scales in a fatal balance.
Every boy in a small town grows up with a “Best Friend,” and Holcomb was mine. I don’t suppose we did much of anything in our entire lives without discussing it with each other. Naturally, we each felt superior to
the other in various and different ways, and I suppose it would be fair to say that our friendship was based as much on competitive squabbling as anything else. But I was sure we knew each other very well. So it came as a tremendous shock when he suggested that we get dates and double in my old man’s car.
Holcomb had, like Jenks, been a licensed driver for quite a while, but his parents had better sense than to allow him out on “The Drag” in their car, so he logged his hours on the streets behind someone else’s wheel, usually mine. Once he broached the subject of getting dates for the dance, childhood taboos about seriously discussing girls vanished. We spent the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out, ostensibly for each other, who would be best to ask.
Second to finding something original to do, the major problem about dating in a small town is the limited number of “young ladies” a “young man” could choose from. As a freshman, my choices were even more severely limited. In the first place, there were only about thirty girls in the whole class—upperclassmen were already dating about half of those. Junior high girls were absolutely out of range, and to invite an older girl was to invite ridicule from my peers if not a black eye from some junior or senior. A few more were “undatable” owing to physical deformities or socioeconomic family situations that would have—I’m now ashamed to say—scandalized my parents and robbed me of whatever prestige the date was supposed to provide in the first place. Of the remaining fifteen, five were in all my classes, and the potential discomfort of having to go eventually without a date and face those who turned me down was more than I could stand. Of the ten remaining, five were Church of Christ and did not dance; two were Baptist, and their parents would not let them dance; and one was a Jehovah’s Witness and couldn’t go out on a Saturday, even if anyone asked her. That left two; and one of those was Linda Cunningham, whose family was so rich that none of my crowd dared even speak to her, let alone consider offering to chauffeur her to something as mundane as a Spring Dance in something as common as a ’53 Chevy.
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