Simple Things

by Press, Lycan Valley

  Elizabeth growled again. Mark shook his head.

  “Kid, I like you, I really do. But you better start explaining, or I’ll let my lovely wife loose and she’s had more than she can handle today. She may look like Barbie but that’s more a disguise she wears. Underneath, she’s more like Cujo. Her little girl was covered with maggots earlier today. So talk.”

  Alice wrinkled her nose. “Maggots? Disgusting.”

  Then she looked at the ground. “Is that a dead mouse? Cool.”

  “Nope, not cool,” Mark said. “It came from your mom’s purse and she didn’t even use it.”

  “Wow,” Alice said. “This Maldad shit is awesome.”

  “Talk, Alice, what’s Maldad? We want to know what’s so fricking awesome,” Mark growled.

  Alice looked at him and blinked. “Oh, you don’t know what Maldad is? I forgot that it’s kind of new.”

  She suddenly folded her legs and sank to the ground.

  Mark stepped forward, grabbed all three purses and threw them away from where they sat, closer to the house. He wanted to look at them later.

  “Well, Maldad is this new kind of religion, actually it’s more of a cult,” her voice took on the quality of a professor giving a lecture. “It’s a mixture of Catholicism – of course, what cult doesn’t borrow from the Catholics? – and some Voodoo and witchcraft. It’s spreading all over Mexico. It’s really attractive to the poor who are affected by the drug cartels. They cast spells to get money, to protect themselves, or to harm those who pose a threat or threaten them. Very handy religion.”

  The adults stared at her.

  “Where did you learn this crap?” her mother asked.

  “School. Contemporary religions class,” Alice answered. “Dad made me take the class when I told him I didn’t believe in God anymore. I’m reconsidering. Some of these new religions are really freaky.”

  Gail laughed. “Yeah, great. I’m sure that’s what your dad had in mind. So why were you afraid to wear a purse with the word Maldad on the label?”

  “Oh, didn’t I say? The world Maldad means Satan or extreme evil and if you own something with that word printed on it, it’s like a curse. Horrible things can happen to you,” she shivered. “Throw those cheap ass purses away!”

  “Fine time to tell us,” Elizabeth muttered.

  “Who was throwing this purse party? Some psycho soccer mom?” Mark asked.

  “Well, evidently, yes,” Gail said. “Her name’s Linda, and her son’s on Patrick’s soccer team. We don’t like her.”

  “Nice.” Mark rolled his eyes. “And what’s her crime, being Mexican in the suburbs?”

  “Hey, buddy, we’re not racist!” Elizabeth said, poking him in the arm. “She just didn’t fit in.”

  Alice snorted.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Gail snapped.

  “Nothing, madre.”

  “Oh, ha, ha,” Gail responded.

  “Let me hear it, why did this woman hate you guys,” Mark said. “Why did she want you to own Maldad purses?”

  Elizabeth and Gail exchanged guilty glances.

  “It was nothing,” Gail said. “We just . . . well, we left her off the list for the soccer mom’s spring luncheon.”

  “And she found out and she made this big deal,” Elizabeth said. “Accused us of being racist.”

  “After that, well, she didn’t speak to us anymore,” Gail said.

  Mark looked from one woman to the other.

  “And you weren’t surprised when she invited you to this purse party?”

  “Well, yeah, but it was free margarita’s,” Elizabeth said. “And these things are usually packed, you know. The hostess invites everyone, that way she gets more sales.”

  “So lots of people were there?” he asked.

  “Well, no,” Gail said. “It was just Elizabeth, me and Alice, and some other Mexicans.”

  Mark laughed. “And you didn’t think that was odd?”

  “The margaritas were really strong, Mark,” Elizabeth said defensively. “I don’t see why you’re blaming us!”

  “Mom, mom, mom,” Emily said, tugging on Gail’s shirtsleeve. “Mom, mom.”

  Gail didn’t notice since most of her day was spent ignoring the words “Mom, mom, mom”.

  “Mom, mom, listen!” Emily persisted. “Callie’s scared again!”

  Gail turned to her child. “What’s wrong, Emily? What?”

  “Callie’s scared!” Emily pointed back to the porch where her best friend sat sobbing. Elizabeth jumped up and ran toward her daughter.

  Gail asked Emily “What’s wrong with Callie, honey?”

  “I think it’s because those snakes keep crawling out of Alice’s purse, Mommy.”

  Everyone looked back at the black leather purse Mark had tossed away from them and saw a dozen green and red-striped snakes writhing on top of it. One was still sliding his way out of the top of the purse. Alice started screaming from where she sat on the grass.

  Gail grabbed Emily and Matt scooped up Alice and they all ran toward the front porch.

  Patrick came running out of the house and saw the pile of snakes.

  “Awesome! Can I keep these?”

  Like many others, I’m a fan of fifties memorabilia. The good ol’ time of sock-hops and soda pop. Take this coffee cup for example. The last time it was filled, it cost a mere nickel at any truck stop diner. That wasn’t as long ago as you might think.

  The legendary Billie Sue Mosiman dropped this off on her last pass through here. When Billie isn’t on the road with her husband, Lyle, she can be found spinning words into stories at her Texas home.

  SAFE HAVEN

  Billie Sue Mosiman

  ICE covered the world. We were in a 2015 Freightliner that was beginning to feel like an igloo. Ice coated the windshield so the wipers scraped uselessly across the icy sheet. Ice had accumulated on the side mirrors and the grill so the truck began running hot, the temperature gauge inching into the red zone.

  We were in Illinois and the freak blizzard happened as quickly as a rainstorm. It was a white-out and we could hardly see a car length ahead.

  Dan pointed out yet another big rig jack-knifed in the left lane, half on the road, half in the median. We could barely make out the driver standing outside his cab, staring back at his trailer canted like a bent straw.

  “We’ve got to find a place to pull off.” Dan’s voice was strained. There were no shoulders and no place to move off the highway.

  The small red car in front of us began to slide on the icy surface of the freeway, slowly turning and making a circle. Because of the snow, we only saw a blob of red beginning a slow dance in front of us. Dan applied the truck brakes, hoping not to slide into it and over it. I’d seen that before. A big truck sitting atop a small car at a red light in Missouri on a sunny day. The car was crushed flat and whoever had been in it was long gone from this planet.

  I let out a little scream, panicked, seeing in my mind’s eye our truck rolling over the red car.

  Then the car, after performing a perfect pirouette, righted itself and went on down the inside lane, but I knew the driver must have filled his pants. He couldn’t help but recognize we were see-sawing our way down the road towards him with no way to stop.

  “Jesus God!” Dan let out a pent up breath. He slowed even more so we were crawling along, not going more than fifteen miles an hour. Everywhere we looked, we saw cars and trucks sprawled off the road in ditches and the median. A black pick-up sat on its top, upside down.

  Our wipers grated over the iced windshield like claws along a stone wall. Dan had the defroster blasting on high and still the window caked and thickened with ice. Our vision was so impaired the world outside us looked like a warped ice land of trembling terror.

  “The truck’s going to shut down from ice clogging the radiator if we don’t get off here soon.” Dan ran a hand over his craggy handsome face as if to wipe away the worry.

  “We’ll find something,” I
said, but not believing it.

  Just as I voiced the lie, it became truth. I leaped in my seat and pointed out my side window. “There! Take the exit, there’s a truck stop!”

  Dan didn’t have time to slow. He whipped the wheel right and the rig slid onto the ramp and down it easily enough. The truck stop sat right at the end of the exit ramp and we pulled into it, parking by several other big trucks.

  As soon as we stopped and Dan pulled the yellow truck brake, five or six men streamed from the truck stop door and began knocking the ice off the radiator and the side windows.

  Taken aback by this generosity, Dan shut off the engine and stepped out into the blizzard. I buttoned up my coat, pulled a stocking cap over my head, and joined him. I gestured I was going inside and Dan waved me on. He joined the men trying to de-ice the truck, thanking them for the help.

  I stepped through a wooden door into warmth and unbuttoned my coat. Looking around I saw a long bar running down the right side that had clerks and waitresses behind it. Two men sat at the bar eating hamburgers.

  On the left were hallways leading, I assumed, to restrooms and laundry and maybe a TV room. At the back of the building I saw worn tables and chairs that looked ancient. Some men sat there playing cards, but they weren’t truckers, not by the look of them. They wore suits and two-toned shoes, and most of them had their hair slicked back with gel or some kind of shiny substance. They looked like gangsters, that’s what they looked like and it unnerved me.

  I took a stool at the bar and pulled a menu toward me. Hamburger, twenty-five cents. Coffee, a nickel. I looked up in surprise. Maybe the hamburgers were little tiny sliders and the cheap coffee was just a perk for coffee-swilling truckers.

  I ordered both and slipped off my coat and hat to drape across my lap. Dan came in the door trailing a swirl of snowflakes in the air, the other men behind him. He was smiling and happy and that was a damn sight better than the deep worry riding his face on the dangerous freeway.

  He sat beside me and said, “What’s good here?”

  “I don’t know, but the hamburgers are only a quarter.”

  “Twenty-five cents?”

  I nodded and his eyes widened. “I’ve never seen a twenty-five cent hamburger. What is it, the size of a silver dollar?”

  The waitress just then brought my hamburger on a pink saucer and it was so large it lapped over the rims. She set down my mug of coffee and said, “There you go, Sugar. That will warm you up from the ice storm. It’s treacherous out there, isn’t it?”

  I agreed that indeed it was and we were lucky to find this place.

  She twinkled like a kewpie doll and asked Dan what he’d like. Staring incredulously at the huge hamburger he said, “I want what she’s having.”

  “Coming right up!”

  “I can’t believe it,” he said.

  I had a mouthful of burger and couldn’t reply so I just waggled my head. The blend of charbroiled hamburger, lettuce, tomato, onion and pickle was having a holiday in my mouth.

  Dan and I had almost forgotten our terror on the frozen highway. We were inside a safe place, warm, out of danger, and filling our bellies.

  For a mere thirty cents for each of us.

  It wasn’t until after we’d eaten that other things about the truck stop began to appear odd. The whole place looked as if it had been transported from the 1950s. The black and white checkered pattern of the tiles on the floor. The old Coca-Cola red box behind the counter where you lifted the lid to find bottled drinks. The milkshake machine, the handles for filling soda glasses. Even the waitresses with their flirty upswept hairdos and pink lipstick.

  “You get a glimpse of those guys in the back?” I asked Dan.

  He craned his head, leaning back to look around me. He sat perfectly still for a few moments. Leaning forward again he said in a low voice, “That’s not right.”

  “Maybe they were going to a convention or something and got stranded like us.”

  “Dressed in zoot suits and splats like Hollywood extras from an old crime film?”

  “Could be, I guess. Don’t worry about it. Listen, if you’ll bring in the ditty bag, I’ll do the laundry while we’re stuck here.”

  Dan slipped from the stool, taking the check with him to the register. The same waitress sauntered over and rang up the bill. She gave change for a dollar.

  Remembering a tip, I put a folded dollar next to the pink saucer. The waitress came back and refreshed my coffee. Her smile was genuine, but creepy at the same time. What did she have to be so cheerful about? She worked in a broken down old truck stop and today’s weather was going to insure she wouldn’t be getting home unless the blizzard broke.

  Dan returned with the dirty clothes and we wandered down the labyrinth hallways searching for the laundry room that most every truck stop had available for truckers. We ended up at a dead end and a locked door where numbered shower rooms waited patrons. We took another hallway and another locked door and the only room off this hallway was one with a sign on it reading MANAGER.

  Dan knocked on it to ask about a laundry, but no one answered.

  Back in the main part of the truck stop we asked our former waitress about it.

  “Sorry, Sugar, we don’t have no laundry. Never heard of a laundry in a truck stop before, oh my.”

  We found an empty table in the back and sat down, the lump of dirty laundry in the ditty bag lying on the red vinyl bench seat next to Dan. “Who needs clean clothes anyway? My shorts don’t stand up on their own yet.”

  I laughed. Dan was the most hygienically clean man I’d ever known. If he didn’t get a shower every day he was one unhappy camper. He always looked spiffy in his jeans and pressed shirts. I wasn’t married to a slob, that’s for sure.

  One of the suit-garbed men at a nearby table called over. “You want to play a little poker to pass the time, friend?”

  I wanted to, but knew I wasn’t being invited. They were looking at Dan.

  “Not right now, but thanks,” he said.

  The guy shrugged and turned back to his companions. Laughter rang out from the group and I had a feeling they were making fun of us in some way.

  “When do you think that storm might break?” I asked Dan.

  “When the moon turns green over the Mississippi.”

  “No, really, when?”

  “I can’t tell you, hon. I haven’t seen the weather on TV. Do they have a TV in this joint?”

  “I haven’t seen one.”

  “No laundry, no TV.”

  “But the delicious burgers are only twenty-five cents!”

  Dan grinned. “And the coffee’s a nickel!”

  We sat with our laundry and ordered more coffee until after a while a sense of despondency descended on us both. I’m usually the grumpier one and was this time. “I don’t know how long we can stay in here. Do you think the truck will idle so we can run the heater?”

  “No, we better not chance it. Hell, the diesel might be gelling for all we know. It gets below zero and that truck’s not going anywhere. I think I’ll call dispatch, report I’ll be late delivering.”

  He sat with his Samsung smartphone in his hand, frowning at it.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “No bars. No connection. Must be the snowstorm. I bet Qual-com doesn’t work either.”

  Our satellite connection in the truck that tracked us and which Dan used to put in load information wasn’t working if our phones weren’t, he was right.

  “We’re trapped here for the duration,” I said. My back was already hurting and I doubted there was anywhere here to stretch out or lie down.

  “You’re trapped all right,” a voice said from behind Dan.

  I looked up to see a pockmarked young man who could have been a teen version of Richard Speck, the Chicago nurse killer. He was six feet tall and gangly, all long arms and legs. I shivered despite the warmth in the place.

  Dan turned, smiling. He was charismatic and never met a stranger kid. I saw his smile
falter as he gazed on the young man. The boy was disheveled and skinny, his hair a straw-colored blond. He didn’t look particularly friendly. “You know this place well?” Dan asked.

  The boy let out an unnerving cackle. “Know it? You could say I live here. Trapped like you.”

  Dan didn’t know what to say. One of the men at the poker table gestured to the boy to come over and when he obeyed, the sitting man reached up, grabbed him by the back of the neck and jerked him down. He whispered furiously in the boy’s ear then let him go. The boy stumbled back, grimacing, his bottom teeth showing.

  “What was that all about?” I asked.

  “Hell if I know. That’s one strange kid there.”

  “I don’t feel so good about this place, Dan.”

  “I’m getting the same no-good feeling. Everything and everyone seems a little...off...”

  “I’d say. Listen, you ever see the photos of Richard Speck, the guy who murdered the girls in Chicago?”

  “When was that? I remember the name.”

  “1966, somewhere around there. Killed eight nurses?” The boy now really, to me, looked like Speck. “That boy looks like him. Younger maybe.”

  “Speck’s dead, died in prison.”

  “I know. He just creeps me out, that’s all. His eyes, like he knows what you’re thinking and telling us we’re trapped. Then that crazy Widmark laugh.”

  We sat nursing our mugs of coffee, lost in our own dark thoughts.

  One of the men from the table approached us again, this time a different one. He had a head of full brown hair and wore a pinstripe suit. His shoes were polished and black as midnight.

  “We were just saying you ought to come over and visit with us,” he said. “My name is Charles. We’d really love to chat with you folks.”

  Seeing no polite way out of it, we rose and followed him to the back table. Charles pulled out a chair for me to be seated. Dan took a chair next to me. He introduced us, said our truck had ice on the windshield and radiator so we came into the truck stop. The highway was a disaster.

  A heavy-set man made introductions. “This is Charles you just met. I’m Alphonse, this here’s Ben, but we call him Bugsy, and this is George. He used to be my enemy and now he’s a friend. What can you do, eh?” He paused, studying us. “I saw you looking at our clothes. This isn’t the fashion anymore, is it? But we feel comfortable in the garb so we keep wearing it. That’s how it is in purgatory.”