As they headed further away from Boston, Carter thought how incredible it was that he stopped at a gas station and ended up with a copilot. Even funnier was the fact that it was just another path along the road of life as he knew it, and he wished that his life before this had traversed such a path.
“So you’re going where in Colorado?” Carter asked.
“Boulder, it’s really close to Denver,” she said.
She directed him to take route 76 into Denver. A couple of hours still separated them from their destination, but Carter felt the end of the trip approaching. For a girl in such a dilemma, Carter could not get enough of that peachy aroma emanating from her silky black hair, which whipped from side to side each time she looked to and fro. He sneaked another peek at her while she was focused on something up ahead and to the right side of the road. What is it about her? he wondered as he moved on through the plains of Colorado.
CHAPTER TEN
Brenda acted as Carter’s tour guide, especially when the Rocky Mountains bumped the horizon ahead. Carter hadn’t even noticed the mountains before Brenda pointed them out. Denver neared, but Carter did not want the ride to end. He even obeyed the speed limit, seemingly the only car on the road that did. Speeding was the only way to get from point A to point B in these western states.
They had spent the afternoon driving and chatting like long lost friends. It was pure chemistry. Carter kept glancing over at his passenger, disguising his observations and reactions with idle conversation, but admiring the curve of her chin, her darting blue eyes, and the wonderful curves of her black leather jacket.
Carter soon learned from his tour guide that the merging interstates in Denver are referred to as the Mousetrap, encircling the big city. The Omega meandered through, jumping off at route 36, which headed to Boulder. Brenda reiterated that she didn’t want Carter to go out of his way, but Carter insisted that he had no set plan, and had always wanted to see Boulder, although the idea never really crossed his mind.
Carter followed Brenda’s lap down to slender legs tightly wrapped in black jeans, which zippered at both ankles. She was the picture of slenderness, far from shy, yet just as far from boisterous. Carter loved her smile. It had a perfect arc to it. Carter held her average looks with highest regard and she passed in the eyes of this beholder.
Brenda was cute, and carried herself well. Confidence and sassiness boosted her self-esteem and her personality, but Carter could only wonder to whom she belonged, and all the while acting calm, cool and collected. After all, someone was pulling his strings at times, so why not pretend to be who he wasn’t? This place is definitely a stage, he thought.
From the moment they first bumped into each other and coffee went flying, Carter never lost a connection. He was pulled in at first through her striking blue eyes, which forced him to connect to her warm, yet witty personality. Although he was taken in by her eyes, initially, he was hooked by her charm. He didn’t even have to talk all that much, so there was never an awkward silence. She carried the conversation and opened her life up like a book, except when it came to things Carter cared about most. He wanted to know more about her personal life. It was a very long car ride, and for a car ride of that length, Carter expected more silent moments. He believed that she could carry a radio talk show with ease.
Brenda was a bit younger than Carter, or so it seemed to him based on her exuberance. She also had innocence about her, but Carter could tell that she was not all innocent. He also saw fire in her eyes which screamed ‘don’t mess with me.”
In a dark way, she was sexy to Carter. Mix into that formula a fiery, wise-ass, sarcastic chick with personality characteristics much like himself. What’s not to like? They may both be on the move, but she was a keeper.
Brenda spent the ride talking about the city of Boulder, which was apparently the greatest city in the world in her blue eyes, which reflected her enthusiasm.
“I spend a lot of time at the Pearl Street Mall,” she said. “There is so much to do there. There’s always an event…like a concert or an art show. Street musicians hang out and play for money, and some people actually live on the mall. It’s a hip place to hang, but I’m not sure I could live there,” she said with a chuckle. “But it beats the hell out of Iowa.”
“You’re from Iowa, huh?” Carter asked.
“Yup. Moved to Boulder when I was sixteen.”
“And now you’re…”
“Happier,” said Brenda with a smirk. “A girl who reveals her age…reveals everything.”
Carter chuckled as they moved in on the valley of Boulder. This looked like paradise to Carter, or nearly so, he thought.
“So what brought you to Boulder?” he asked.
“A bus,” she said with a smile. “Is this a pop quiz?”
Brenda’s playful grin turned what some would consider rudeness into playfulness that turned Carter on. She always just hit him the right way. Anyone else, he thought, would have been out of his car back in Denver. Brenda made Carter feel at home. Obviously, he pried harder than she cared to bear, so Carter changed the subject to her precise destination.
“Actually,” she began, “you can just drop me off in town on Arapahoe Avenue. I have a friend who works at Conoco, and he can help me get home.”
Carter became silent as his heart plunged into his stomach. He could hear the splash. He tried to make his disappointment unnoticeable, traveling along, humming to the radio occasionally. He was safe though, because Brenda kept talking about the city of Boulder, and what it had over Denver. She wouldn’t suspect anything. After all, they had only known each other a few hours. Easy come, easy go, he thought, battling surprise that she didn’t want to reveal her true colors.
“I guess this is it?” Carter said, while he brought the car to a stop. Who is he? Who is he? This question repeatedly ripped at Carter’s brain ever since she had mentioned “he” at Conoco. Maybe he was just a friend, like she had said. Carter thought that he had to be more than that, but what the hell did it matter? His brain produced this bickering as if he had multiple personalities going at each other. He hoped that this internal bickering would not seep through to Brenda’s ears. What would he do if he said this aloud? He knew that he would turn bright red. Say goodbye. Say goodbye. His mind confused him. His mind controlled him. This had never happened to him before, and he was nervously petrified.
He couldn’t be sure about everything he’d said to her, or for that matter, everything she’d heard. As much as he wanted her, he wanted her gone before he said something offensive, if he hadn’t done so already. He figured that Brenda saw this as merely a ride by a Good Samaritan. He cringed at the thought of being only that to her. He wanted it to be more. He felt it was more. He exhausted himself with such pettiness, but Brenda spoke and saved him from this dangerous concentration.
“I really appreciate the ride,” she said. “It would have been a long walk, to say the least.”
Not for you, he thought, and then shared his smile with her comment and his thought. Now he wanted to give Brenda a real ride, but it was too late, and he’d probably never see her again.
“Thanks again,” she said, winking and slamming the heavy door shut.
That was that, and Carter watched her shapely butt wiggle away. Then her butt stopped and turned around, making the already nervous Carter wonder if his gaze had been detected. Brenda motioned for him to roll his window down. Carter became excited, almost giddy, as he reached across to roll the window down, crunching his knuckles on the door.
Brenda extended her smile as she tilted her head into the car and said, “Carter, there’s a motel just down the road a bit. You said that you were looking for a place for the night, right?”
“Yeah…yeah, sure,” said Carte
r, and before he could thank her, she reached across and softly pinched his cheek, then dragged her soft fingers back across his cheek on her hand’s retreat. It wasn’t much, but this excited Carter. It would certainly have excited him more had she invited him to her place for the night instead of sending him off to the motel alone. He sighed to himself, a sigh of surrender, saying, “Thanks, Brenda.” He figured someone was inside waiting for her.
***
Carter spent the following morning perched on a brown-stained wooden bench on the front porch of a motel, sipping boiling hot black continental coffee out of what he thought was a Styrofoam shot cup. He’d slammed shots of whiskey in bigger cups. He could not believe such splendor existed in this world. The snow-capped mountains lifted to the clouds, right before his eyes, like a stairway to heaven. This is a different world, he thought, sipping and admiring. He suddenly realized why Brenda had fallen in love with this place, and he at least wanted to see a little bit of Boulder before moving on, but he was unsure about where he was going to end up?
Carter closed his right eye and held his little white cup in front of his left eye, trying to increase its aesthetic value by creating another alp. He held the cup up for about a minute as if he was toasting to the Rockies. He felt that toasting was apropos because the beauty before him was worthy of nothing less.
His admiration of the Rockies before him was enhanced since he had never really been to the mountains. He looked at the tops again. Sure, they may all look similar, but with the extra hump that he had created with his cup, the image before him matched that vision he had during his time above.
Although the last few days had been challenging for Carter and would have been for anyone in that position, he knew it would take days before he would recoup his loss of sleep. He expected to be sluggish and lethargic, but he had never felt the way he did when he created that alp with his cup.
Pressure built up behind Carter’s eyes, and it was nothing he’d ever felt before. He knew aspirin or ibuprofen would do nothing. It wasn’t so much a headache as it was pressure behind his eyes. The thickness persisted for several minutes. He put the alp down and removed his vision by looking down at his feet. He could feel the pressure diminishing, and continued looking to the ground since it was providing better results.
While Carter was trying to decrease the pressure, he formed a mental picture of the mountain tops. He again felt pressure surging, and wiped this mental picture clean. There was no escape. Looking at mountains or thinking about mountains seemed to be equivalent to the release of severe allergy symptoms for Carter. He did his best to avoid these actions. However, he tested this mountain theory a couple more times to verify that he wasn’t going crazy. The results were like clockwork. It was an odd trigger, he thought, but at least he had a trigger.
The mountains were such a majestic thing of beauty bestowed upon us by Mother Nature, Carter thought. From his seat, he looked at other beauty marks left by Mother Nature to see if he had reactions to them as well. He looked at the Aspen trees, and appreciated them with no side effects. He noticed all the pedestrians, bikers and hikers and everything was fine. Prairie Dogs were okay by him.
Carter sat there noticing the sights and sounds of Boulder, Colorado. He found it hard to believe that he was actually in Colorado. He never went anywhere, and here he was uprooted from Boston and living the life of a gypsy. With this thought came a strong aroma floating by his skull. It was definitely an Italian smell, but Carter was torn between the aroma emanating from pizza or some other Italian dish. That didn’t matter though. What mattered was his connection to reality. Was he connected to reality, and if so, was that reality true? Was he really seeing mountains and Aspen trees and sniffing pizza? How did he know that he wasn’t dreaming? How could he prove it?
If he pinched himself and it hurt…would that do it? Would that be sufficient proof? No. Is it impossible to verify since dreams feel so real? Yes. Carter had reason to be skeptical. The whole life that he had been living up to this point was not a dream, but it wasn’t real, or true, in another sense. He didn’t know his true relatives. Well, he thought that he did, but he needed to verify if they were truly related.
Sights and sounds were useless to him at this point. Even if he discovered the truth, how could the truth ultimately be ascertained? Who had the final say? All he could do is try and take a leap of faith.
As Carter sipped his hot coffee forcibly slow, he appreciated the warm morning breeze clipping his face on the right side. He watched a Magpie peaceably glide from one tree to another with its outstretched blue wings cutting the breeze, while anxious cars below tried to beat a deadline. The sun had broken away from the land, which told Carter that it was early morning, but as for the exact time, well, that really didn’t interest Carter. He had a lot of thinking to do, and a lot of forgetting.
After the man in the motel office explained to Carter how to get to the Pearl Street Mall, Carter hopped into his Omega and went to check it out. There seemed to be a lot going on, and although Carter wasn’t a huge fan of crowds, he became part of it. After all, he didn’t come all this way to turn around and go home.
Moving down the brick walk, Carter window-shopped with the aroma of grilled hotdogs permeating his nostrils. He liked the smell of hotdogs, but not the taste. With cookouts in Boston, the burger won out every time. He knew that he was not the only one, because they kept throwing more burgers on and there were always hotdogs left from batch one. Carter and his counterparts could not get past the pig thing.
The gourmet coffee shops spilled out more pleasing aromas, from Hazelnut to Columbian. The medley forced Carter into one of the coffee shops, which doubled as a bookstore. He looked up at the big sign above the door: Book End Café. Carter browsed through the books first, but his weakness for French Vanilla coffee drew him in quickly to the other half of the store. After the complimentary sip of what they called “coffee” at the motel, Carter prepared for the big leagues. A little patio for coffee connoisseurs out front lured Carter, where he camped out with a Westward newspaper, a large publication listing all the goings-on in the area.
Although the calendar swayed toward spring, there came a cool breeze down from the mountains on this late afternoon, making Carter rethink his decision to go with the windbreaker. Although enough covering for now, he sensed that more apparel would be required in the very near future. Brenda had warned him about weather fluctuations, and he heeded her warning since he knew nothing about the mountains.
His last swig of coffee put him on his feet to give the mall a final perusal. He saw some pretty strange creatures, even from the Boston viewpoint. People out here pierced every part of their body. In a mere five minutes of walking, Carter had seen a pierced chin, bellybutton, forehead, eyebrow and tongue, and then another guy wearing a red bandana had an earring with a chain that hooked up to his nose. These were only the piercings that showed. He cringed while imagining further options. On the center green, Carter saw the people Brenda had referred to. She had mentioned that people live there, and tents and sleeping bags confirmed that.
Right next to Carter on the sidewalk stood a man with ratty clothes and matted hair, playing guitar and singing “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Carter noticed a few dollars scattered about in his opened guitar case, and this musician kept sneering at the guitar player at the end of the grass, about 50 feet away. The other guitarist jammed much louder and much worse, and Carter felt that he was more of a nuisance than anything else. But this free country dictated that good verses bad could battle it out in the music arena as with anything else.
As Carter sat on the bench listening to the end of “Puff” as it shifted into the beginning of “Joy to the World,” he found himself humming along. He was inside a great moment. The crisp air snapped him into awareness of the things surrounding him. The mountains rested in the backgrou
nd of this great moment, and the activity on the mall was a sight for him to behold. He was feeling better at this moment than he had in the past week, and maybe that wasn’t such a hard thing to beat, but the important thing was that he felt good. He couldn’t fathom why he was not mourning his great loss, but this only pushed him harder to get answers. He was hell bent on making sense of it all, determined not to stop until he did.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out only a quarter, but figured it was better than nothing. Taking a few steps closer, he flicked the quarter into the musician’s guitar case. His budget was beyond low, but he felt that he should give the guy a small token of his appreciation, if nothing else. Instead of a Thank You or an appreciative nod, the man scowled at Carter for what he could only interpret as being due to what he considered a worthless donation. Carter stepped toward him, reached into the guitar case, and refunded his donation. Smiling as he did, and watching the amazement on the musician’s face, he turned and gave the green another glance before moving on.
Carter scanned the hustle and bustle of the Boulder Mall. It was far from Quincy Market, and in more ways than one. However, he considered it to be a pretty good turnout for a small town. He could actually see the Rockies from his vantage point in the town square. He tried his best to avoid eye contact with the mountains, but perhaps it was his close proximity to them that caused pressure to build in his head.
He thought it best to just avoid eye contact with the mountains by averting his eyes. Then his forehead froze with excitement, anticipation, uncertainty and fear. He caught sight of Brenda instead. Carter’s enthusiasm was dulled because some guy accompanied her. It would have surprised him a bit more had she been alone, and there was no doubt about that. Now he was more concerned, and hell bent on not being noticed. Although he tried to get close enough to see her, he didn’t want to get close enough for her to see him. That would be extremely awkward, and more so for him than her.
Desert Son Trilogy: Desert Son, Wayward Soul, Spiritual Intervention (Books 1-3) Page 8