Sometimes, Luck is All You Need
I’d joined the Army. It was February 1975, I was eighteen and I was hitchhiking from Solana Beach, California to Minneapolis to visit my mother before riding the big dog to Fort Knox for Basic Training. It was evening and dark, six or seven o’clock. I didn’t own a watch. I was standing on a ranch access onramp to Interstate 15 some miles east of Mesquite, Nevada, the country around me was desert. A guy in a ’55 Chevy 3100 stepside pickup, Trademaster V8, 3-speed transmission with a column shift; a twenty-year-old ranch truck, the meadow-green paint faded and the fenders, box and doors wrinkled and banged from the work, had left me there.
Harlan, the guy driving it, a hard-lived fifty or so, cowboy lean, saddle-leather complexion, sun-chapped lips and broken, whiskey-colored teeth, his sweat-stained Silverbelly Stetson on the seat between us, pulled regularly from a bottle of Jimmy Beam he held jammed between the thighs of his jeans. His left hand, a Camel Straight wedged between his nicotine-stained little and ring fingers, his middle finger amputated to a stub just above his palm, he draped over the wheel to steer the truck. His right hand he used to shift and raise the bottle. He’d picked me up just north of Las Vegas.
The level of the whiskey in the bottle had been dropping steadily as we rode the miles. It didn’t seem to have much effect on his driving, he kept the truck at forty-five miles-an-hour and mostly between the lines. He offered me a pull and I took it, seemed like the polite thing to do. When he reached to take the bottle back, he let his hand rest on my thigh for a moment before he took it. When we got off at the ranch exit, he invited me to spend the night in his trailer, said he lived alone and had a hot shower, more whiskey, burgers and beans in the fridge. Cowboys, I knew where that went; I’d once traded with a cowboy for my life. But that’s a different story.
I got out of Harlan’s truck at the bottom of the exit and watched as the red round taillights and the grumble from the little V8 disappeared into the dust of the gravel road toward the mountains on the north horizon. Cold, windy, hoary skies and getting dark, I stood on the on-ramp for maybe an hour and six or eight pickups and a long-nose Peterbilt hauling hay accelerated past my thumb. The warm from the whiskey gone, the chill was starting to dig in. I thought about Harlan’s invitation and wondered if I’d made the right choice, a burger, whiskey and a warm place to sleep sounded good. And maybe worth the swap. But that decision was made. I checked to make sure the zipper on my jacket was all the way up and stuffed my hands back in the pockets of my jeans.
Hitchhiking on the freeway is illegal, the law is posted on a black and white aluminum sign on every on-ramp in America; violating that law risks you a ticket and maybe an overnight in the local constabulary on a vagrancy charge; I had almost ten bucks in my pocket. But it was dark and the cold was coming through the soles of my boots and I was shivering and I walked up the ramp and down the shoulder and kept walking, the muscle work taking some of the bite off the wind. The freeway was almost empty and I’d walked a couple of miles when a Cadillac a few years from new, gold paint, gold vinyl top, ski racks and skis, braked hard onto the shoulder.
The passenger side window rolled down and a woman’s voice yelled at me from the driver’s side.
I couldn’t hear her, “Ma’am?” I said.
A guy my age sitting in the passenger seat exhaled warm cigarette smoke in my face, “She wants to know if you can drive in snow.”
“Yes, Ma’am. I’ve driven through Minnesota winters.”
“We’re from Bel Air. We’re going to Salt Lake City. Do you have a drivers’ license?”
“Yes Ma’am.”
“Can I see it?”
It was dark and I was cold and I pulled out my wallet and handed the card through the window. She clicked on the dome light and held up my Minnesota license as she considered my face and my facts. I looked over the car; a four-door Sedan de Ville, glossy dark wood trim on the dash, gold brocade seats with brocade buttons. The idle had the deep, quiet lope of GM’s 472 cubic-inch big-block. They were young, the guy wore a Hansen surfboard’s t-shirt (my first stick had been a Hansen), shades, shorts, blond beach dreads, baby smooth skin, cigarette pinched between his fingers, his flip flops braced against the dash, a box of Marlboros and a Zippo between them. The woman wore a filmy gold blouse with no bra and white culottes. Her hair was long and straight, the same blond as her passenger’s maybe with a little color, her skin under the dome light almost the same baby smooth. She gave me a long look through the open window as she handed me my license, “If the snow gets bad, I need you to drive.”
“Happy to do it.”
The back seat was the same gold fabric and buttons as the front seat, I threw in my bedroll and closed the door and she chirped the tires and accelerated hard up to eighty-five miles-an-hour, I watched the speedometer over her shoulder. The speed limit was fifty-five.
“This is Norman. I’m Esther. We’re going to Salt Lake City.”
“People call me Luck.”
“That’s not the name on your license.”
“It’s what my mother calls me.”
“Luck. That’s fine. We’re going to need all the luck we can get tonight; there’s a blizzard coming, that’s what the radio’s been saying.”
“Good skiing,” I said from the backseat, not knowing shit about skiing.
“I’ve never driven in snow.”
“I can drive,” Norman said, his voice pouty.
“No. Absolutely no. No more lawyers, no more judges, no more POs. No, you’re not driving.”
“Rollers ain’t out here.”
“’Aren’t,’ Norman, please. Texaco next exit.”
The canopy at the Texaco was brightly lit, three pumps underneath; two red pumps for regular, a silver Sky Chief pump between them for ethel. There was a faded red Studebaker Commander parked on one side of the pumps, two flat tires on the driver’s side. Parked on the other side with the hood up was a mist green Ford F250, most of the paint baked off by the desert sun, orange rust climbing from the running boards up the doors and fenders, mid-fifties truck, heavy-treaded tires, a flatbed made from steel plate and angle iron with wood two-by-eights bolted down for a bed. The steel work was rough like somebody’d fabbed it up in a hurry with a cutting torch and a buzz-box. They’d used a lot of 6010 welding rod to do it, I recognized the spatter. The welds weren’t pretty but they were straight and the penetration was deep; that bed was going to last a lot longer than the truck. A guy wearing a straw cowboy hat, flat-soled farmer boots and faded jeans, and the Texaco mechanic in his army-green bus-driver hat and uniform, the back of his jacket and the butt of his pants caked with oily dust, leaned on the V-grill and a round fender and fiddled and studied under the hood.
Esther pulled the Cadillac in behind the Ford. Both the red pumps had cardboard taped over the glass, “Out” hand-lettered in black marker. Norman slammed the door and angled for the men’s room at the back of the building. I got out and followed him.
The floor was grey-black concrete, puddles under the urinals, the stool stained with shit spray. The mirror was broken and the beige walls were covered with names, pictures and commentary done in colored markers, spray paint and ballpoint pen, a lot of it sloppy or stylized and unreadable. There were comments about Nixon, McGovern, Viet Nam, women’s names and proclivities, n****rs, sand n****rs and OPEC, hearts and arrows, swastikas, the Hells Angels’ logo, red and white banner above the skull and feathers, a blue pen calling somebody’s mother a whore, hippies with locks and beards and hairy armpits, enormous dicks, tongues, and dangling ballbags, lady crotches, people sucking, licking and screwing in ways that defied gravity and the human body, all painted with varying amounts of creativity, talent and color. The piss stink made my eyes water.
The Texaco mechanics used the sink to wash up, an open tin of Goop mechanic’s soap, mostly empty of its creamy goo and smeared black with grease, sat balanced on the edge of the sink. Norman unzipped at the urinal, I stood next to him. There were no partitions. Above the urinals sprayed in swooping letters in red paint over the words and pictures drawn before was a message, “Sometimes, luck is all you need.” I thought about that, about how much our lives depend on which side the lady takes in the flop of a spinning coin.
“Stay away from my mother, Luck.”
“What?”
“I said stay the fuck away from my mother.”
“Who?”
“Esther. My mother.”
“She’s your mother?”
“Don’t talk to her.”
“What do I say when she talks to me?”
“Fuck you,” he said, shaking it off and zipping up and not bothering to pull the handle. While I was still pissing, he pulled a mirror and a folded paper packet out of the pocket of his shorts, razored out a couple of lines, horned them straight off the glass, a line into each nostril, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
As we came around the corner of the building and into the canopy light, Straw Hat slammed the hood and climbed into the Ford. The starter cranked slow and hard; the guy had the door open and I could see him toeing the starter button with his left boot, his heel on the clutch, and working the gas pedal with his right, and yanking the choke knob in and out until a brown-grey cloud of raw gas and burned oil coughed out the tailpipe and the engine caught and hacked itself into a rough idle, an inline six by the sound of it. Straw Hat revved it a few times to clear the idle and let out the clutch and pulled away from the pump. The wind had picked up and snow had started to fall and swirled in the truck’s wake as it disappeared into the dark. Esther pulled forward and got out. Her culottes were lacey and thin and whipped around her legs. She was wearing flip flops, too.
“Normie, come pump the gas.”
“Make Luck do it. He’s your driver.”
I said, “Glad to,” As I walked around the back bumper, the Texaco man stepped in front of me, “I’ll do it, kid. What’ll it be, Ma’am?” he asked her as he cranked Straw Hat’s gallons and dollars back to zero and lifted the handle. He had the red Texaco star stitched above the brass-zippered breast pocket, his name, Lemuel, embroidered below the zipper in the same red thread. He wore black-rimmed glasses and had the scrawny build, leathery skln and big hands of an old man who’d spent his life working outside.
“Fill it up, please.”
“We’re about out. All we’ve got left is ethel. Should be enough to get you on your way. We’re supposed to get a delivery in the morning if the snow holds off. Check under the hood?”
“Please.”
I glanced at the motor as he was pulling the dipstick, the 472, just like I’d heard.
An hour later, we were back on the freeway and the snow was blowing sideways, heavy enough that it reflected the headlight beams back into the windshield and the road ahead was hazy grey against the swirling white and I had to squint to judge our place on the lane. Esther was driving sixty-five, Norman was dialing the radio knob through the AM stations, the only sound in the car was the slap slap slap of the wipers and preachers preaching about sacred taxation, Brigham Young’s beard, the holy wrong of criticizing church leaders, how black folks represent Satan and white folks represent Jesus; station after station, mile after mile. There weren’t many stations that time of night in that part of Utah, preachers on all of them, their voices rising and falling all with the same sexy rhythm; a just-you-and-me whisper rising in urgency and volume to a final fevered, “Jesus!” then falling back to pillow talk, the same voice, the same erotic tempo, every station, over and over, for miles. I stretched out sideways on the brocade and tried to fall asleep. I used my bedroll for a pillow.
I wasn’t sleeping when Esther said, “I think he’s asleep.”
“I can’t stand that fucker.”
“Honey, stop it.”
“Let’s drop him at the next exit. Fuck, let’s drop him here. Right now. What’s he going to do?”
“Your language. And no, I’m not dropping him off, I might need him to drive.”
“You’re driving’s fine. Let’s get rid of him.”
“Why don’t you like him?”
“I don’t like the way you look at him.”
“Honey.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Honey, no.”
“Fucking forget it.”
There were no exits and the blowing snow was fingering onto the road and giving us a hard thump in the lower back as we sped over its digits. The wind was strong enough that it was pushing the car around and I could feel the tires losing traction then grabbing then losing it again. There was almost no traffic and no light except the glare of the headlights reflecting back through the windshield lighting the gold seats and leaving black shadows. We passed a semi on its side in the median, no cops or wreckers, and we kept going. We passed another semi rollover and then a car in the ditch and another and still no flashing lights, and still Esther didn’t slow down. What little traffic there was, stayed in the right lane. When we caught up with a car or truck, she’d merge into the left lane, the Cadillac slewing side-to-side as it wallowed through the deep snow, and once past, she’d merge back into the right lane, the car slipping back into the deep tracks that grabbed the wheels and steered us north.
Still driving sixty-five, we’d just passed a semi, when suddenly we were spinning, the car whirling counter-clockwise down the middle of the freeway so fast the force threw me against the passenger side door. Then we hit what must have been clear concrete and the tires hooked up and the Cadillac rolled up on the passenger side wheels so I was looking straight down through the window at the snowy road on the other side of the glass and I thought, “Oh, fuck.” And then the tires lost traction again and the car slammed back onto four wheels hard enough that the springs and shocks on the driver’s side hit bottom with a loud, steel-on-steel crunch that sounded like damage and I was thrown back across the seat to the driver’s-side door and we continued to spin.
I heard Norman scream, “Mommy!” as he was flung against the passenger door and then against her. She sat silent, both hands on the wheel, elbows locked, all four tires skidding. When finally we stopped, we were in the middle of the interstate the car facing backwards in the lane, Esther frozen at the wheel, Norman scrunched tight against her and quiet, both of them staring through the windshield into the brilliance. In the silence, the sound of the big motor idling too deep to hear, a pair of headlights blinked through the glare and the slow-moving semi with a box trailer we’d just passed eased silently onto the shoulder and motored around us and kept going.
From the backseat, I grabbed Esther’s shoulder and shook it, it was rigid in my hand and she didn’t move. I got out and opened her door and stood in the blowing snow and leaned in grabbed both her shoulders and shook her and still she didn’t move, her elbows still locked, her hands frozen on the wheel, her eyes wide and staring. One clenched finger at a time, I loosened her grip on the steering wheel all the while looking for headlights coming toward us. When her hands were free, I reached across her and gave Norman’s dreads a shove, he’d been staring into the glare while I pried Esther’s fingers free, he turned and looked at me like he was surprised I was there. “Give me a hand,” I said, “We’ve got to get the fuck out of here.”
He came around and stood next to me in the blowing snow in his flip flops and shorts and we pulled her out from behind the wheel. She dropped a flip flop as we muscled her into the backseat, I threw it on the floor by her feet. She moaned and turned her head side-to-side on the seatback until she saw Norman and whispered, “Normie, Normie. Are you okay? Are you okay, baby?” She held out her arms and Norman slid into the seat next to her and she hugged him with both arms. I shut the back door and got behind the wheel. She was short and I had to move the seat back, it was the first time I’d used a power seat.
I drove north at twenty-five miles-an-hour. The car pulled hard to the left like she’d bent a tie rod or maybe a control arm. The Cadillac had power steering and that made it easier to keep it in the ruts. The wind continued to blow the snow sideways across the windshield and the interstate remained a brilliant white and gray blur. In the rearview mirror, Esther and Norman sat close, Esther in the middle, Norman against the door behind me, his head on her shoulder, his eyes closed, his hand resting on the filmy fabric covering her right breast. She gripped his hair in the fist of her left hand, the other she laid on top of his hand cupping her breast, her eyes were closed, her head leaned back against the brocade seat.
It was 4:30 in the morning when I started seeing exits for Salt Lake City, the snow had stopped and the plow trucks were starting to catch up. I reached over the seat and woke up Esther and she gave me directions to the apartment.
It was a small one-bedroom apartment, second floor, neatly raked gold shag carpet, wood-frame couch with square gold and white stripped cushions and matching chairs opposite a coffee table. The rooms were painted a low-lustre gold; dozens of movie posters and photos of people, black and white and in color, with scrawled notes and signatures and framed in tarnished brass hung square and level throughout. Across the living room, as you walked in the door, hung a full-size poster for the movie Duel; a collage of sepia-tone photos, Dennis Weaver’s eyes open wide in panic above the long-nose Peterbilt semi-tractor, the star of the show, with its streaked and dirty windshield, glinting headlights and terrifying rusty train-rail front bumper, “The most bizarre murder weapon ever used!” The poster was signed by Steven Spielberg in Maybelline-red marker across the grill of the truck, “Thank you, Esther,” he’d written, his signature below illegible but for the two Ss.
“Normie,” she said, “you sleep here,” she patted the couch. “Luck, come in here.”
The bedroom had the same gold carpet as the living room, the curtains were a sheer white fabric with embroidered gold flowers, the bedspread and pillows were gold, the sheets were silky white. There was a brass incense burner and a box of incense on one of the nightstands. Esther lit a stick, I read the label while she was in the bathroom, sandalwood, patchouli, rose, bay and vanilla: Tapping into the powerful energy of the earth to attract abundance, healing, and overall well-being; Creating an environment perfect for manifesting desire; Drawing prosperity, good luck, success, and blessings; Removing blocks, setbacks, and obstacles preventing you from accomplishing goals. It smelled good, too.
Esther knew what she was doing and didn’t seem to care that Norman could hear her moans and loud-whispered commands, or that I hadn’t showered in a week. When she was done and her breathing was quiet and I thought she’d fallen asleep, she rolled suddenly on top of me, grabbed my hair in her fingers and pressed her palms into my temples and in the dim light stared into my eyes like she was trying to recognize me, her L’Oréal tresses covered my nose and mouth. She stared at me for many seconds, the pupils in her hazel eyes slowly shrinking and focusing, her lips pulling back into hard rails, her expression becoming one of rage. She rolled off me and turned her back and whispered over her shoulder, “Get out.” I was too awake to sleep, too tired to ask questions. Her tone left no room for conversation. I slid on my jeans and boots and grabbed my bedroll. As I walked out, I saw Norman still dressed in his shorts and Hansen t-shirt lying on the couch. In the morning light coming through the curtains, I could see his eyes following me. I didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t like me, either.
* * * *
It was morning rush hour when I got to an on-ramp to Interstate 80, the sky was deep-winter blue and clear and it was cold. Standing on the ramp with my thumb out, the second car, a faded dark green, two-door VW Squareback, air-cooled boxer engine, 4-speed transmission with a cue-ball shift knob, black leather-wrapped steering wheel, Nevada plates, picked me up. The car stunk like cigarette butts, coffee, burgers and sweat. Ziggy, the smiley guy at the wheel, early thirties, clean shave and getting bald, was a professional pool player on his way to New York for the Eastern United States Championship. When I was in high school, I hung out at the Pit & Paddock, a biker bar in St. Paul, and learned to play 8-ball. I’d never heard of 14.1 Continuous or 9-ball and so Ziggy explained the games and I tried not to fall asleep.
From Salt Lake, Ziggy and I headed up the interstate into the mountains and for a few hours the road was plowed and we were driving seventy on the flats, forty in third gear up the hills. We were climbing a steep curving grade in third gear when we caught up with the blizzard; as we drove past the apex, the freeway was suddenly covered with snow and the snow was blowing straight at the windshield and the road was invisible.
Ziggy screamed, “I can’t stop. I can’t stop. I can’t stop.” As he was screaming, he banged his chest and shoulders violently back and forth between the seat and the steering wheel all the while stomping the brake pedal hard enough so that I could feel it through the floor. For many seconds, I didn’t understand his panic, there was no reason. And then I saw what he was seeing, the snow blowing straight at the windshield and buffeting the car so it rocked on its springs made it seem to Ziggy’s senses that the car was racing backwards down the interstate. In that moment, Ziggy went from rational guy explaining the rules and strategies of 9-ball, to a man feverishly insane, his body bouncing uncontrollably between the seat and the steering wheel, his eyes bulging, his breathing fast and shallow, his mouth agape, his words, as he continued to scream, disintegrating into meaningless syllables.
His screams hurt my ears and I tried to calm him down, “Ziggy, we’re okay. We’re okay. It’s blowing snow. We’re fine.” When I put my hand on his shoulder, he flinched away from me, clicked open his door and rolled out of the car onto the snow-covered freeway and on his hands and knees crawled frantically toward the center median, screaming, crying, trying to stand up and run, slipping, falling back into the snow, trying again and falling again. As I watched through the open door, the car started rolling backwards on the grade and I yanked the emergency brake lever between the seats and the car stopped and idled quietly. Ziggy reached the shoulder, still on his hands and knees, and looked back at me, the blowing snow making his features hazy and gray.
The road was deserted and I got out and clumped through the snow across the lane to the shoulder, he was still on his hands and knees, “Ziggy, we can’t stay here. Your car’s going to get hit. We’ve got to get moving.”
“Luck, help me. Oh God, Luck, help me.”
I reached down and took his arm and he shook it off, “I don’t want to die out here.”
“We’re not going to die. Let’s get off the fucking freeway,” I grabbed his arm and he yanked it back again.
As we were arguing, a late sixties Chevy C20 pickup, four-by-four, fleetside, I couldn’t see its color in the dark, idled to a stop beside us. Because of the heavy snow and the howling wind, I hadn’t heard it coming, “You guys okay?”
“Oh my God. Oh my God, help us, please.”
“The blowing snow is fucking with his head. Give me a hand. Let’s get him in the car.”
“I’m not getting in the car. No. I’m not. No.”
Guy in his twenties, Carhart coveralls worn through at the knees, leather and beige Sorels, the laces untied and hanging loose, a beige knit cap, got out of the truck and the two of us grabbed Ziggy’s arms and pulled him to his feet. “No,” he screamed, “No.” In his panic, he swung his fists at us and I took a hard blow to my cheek, the Chevy guy took a punch, too, and cussed about it. Ziggy got away and fell in the snow and rolled away and we picked him up and he kept fighting and fell again and finally we wrestled him to the car and shoved him into the passenger seat and slammed the door. He opened it and I slammed it again and he didn’t move.
“Thanks for stopping,” I said.
“That guy’s fucking nuts, you better get him some help. Good luck.”
The Squareback is a light car but its engine is in the back, the weight directly over the rear wheels, giving it good traction in snow. As I drove us east further into the blizzard, the snow got deeper and dragged against the bottom of the car and the winds howled and raged around us and the gusts of snow blinded me so I couldn’t see the hood. The drifts were getting deeper and when we hit them, the snow would explode against the grill and the windshield and the wipers would take several swipes before they cleared it, and until I could see the ghostly profile of the road again, I was driving entirely by feel. I stayed in second gear and didn’t dare take my foot off the gas.
The wind buffeted the car but with the deep ruts from the invisible cars and trucks ahead of us and the steady push from the rear wheels, we stayed on the road. When we were ten miles or so out of Cheyenne, it was dark by then, a snowplow passed us, blazing headlights, flashing amber lights, loud scraping blade, the salt spreader pinging pellets off the side of the car. There were thirty or forty cars, pickups and semis stacked up behind the plow and we merged in at the back of the line. Ziggy was unconscious on the seat next to me.
* * * *
The plow led our convoy to Little America, a truck stop with a motel, a restaurant, a bar and a hundred and eighty gas pumps, that’s what the sign said. The motel lobby and restaurant were crowded with travelers led in by the plows. Truck drivers hauling diesel, lumber and laundry detergent, salesmen selling office supplies, farm equipment and helicopters, Viet Nam vets in their dress greens humping duffel bags and headed home, parents yelling at little kids playing hide and seek, people traveling alone and in couples and threes, people going skiing, people moving and starting new jobs, people going home.
Those days, Irving was the General Manager of Little America, beer gut, no wedding ring, acne scars, crewcut going bald, yellow-tinted glasses with polished brass frames, blue sport jacket over a beer-stained white shirt, no tie. He stood behind the receptionist gal holding a half-empty glass and watched us stomp the snow off our feet as we came through the doors. Rooms were sold-out for those who asked and Irving had to explain to people unaccustomed to sleeping on the floor that there were no beds, listen to their complaints and threats with sympathetic nods, then explain again, for the second, third and fourth time. The freeway was closed for three days, for three days Irving walked the hallways and venues of Little America with his bleary eyes and hospitality smile and begged us all for amity, and kept his shirt stains damp.
Ziggy and I walked into Little America together, he was stumbling and leaning heavily on my arm. People were staking out places to sleep, laying out jackets and suitcases against the walls to mark their spots. Ziggy and I claimed a piece of floor between a cowboy hauling horses to Bitter Creek and a couple of guys in jeans and ponchos with long hair and beards hitchhiking to San Francisco. Every person in the room of roughly legal age had a cigarette in their hand and the air was thick with smoke and loud conversations about the snow and the roads as we negotiated for places to sleep. I leaned my bedroll against the wall and held Ziggy’s hand as he slid down the wall next to it and I went back to the car for his suitcase. The leather case for his pool cues lay on top of the suitcase. I left it in the car. When I got back, Ziggy was sleeping; I set his suitcase down next to him and leaned against the wall and I fell asleep, too.
Outside, the wind blew the snow in swirls and eddies and the drifts piled up against the windows on the west side of the building and the windows were dark to the ceiling other than a faint blue light filtering through the snow from the wall pack lighting and the floods in the parking lot. The windows on the east side were clear, the pump islands blown clean by the wind except around the cars abandoned at odd angles and the drifts piled up in their lee until they were buried entirely. For three days, the flickering fluorescent ceiling lights in the lobby and the canopy lights glowing dim and gray through the blowing snow and the east windows offered no hint as to the hour asserted in roman numerals on the railroad clock above the reception desk.
When I woke up, the lobby was stirring awake. Ziggy sat leaned against the wall next to me with a cigarette looking out the east windows at the dark gray dawn and blowing snow. The hippies and the cowboy were still snoring on either side of us.
“Sleep okay?” I said.
“Good enough.”
“Hard day, yesterday.”
“What do you mean?”
“The snow?”
“What about it?”
“The blizzard, the car going backwards, the guy in the pickup, you don’t remember that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t either. Let me buy you breakfast.”
As he was talking, the cowboy sat up, rubbed his face and pulled on his boots, “Better feed and walk the horses, going to have to borrow a snow shovel just to get in the damn trailer. Owner wanted them two days ago. He’s going to be pissed. This storm ain’t letting up.”
Sitting in a booth with fake leather seats and a dark wood-grain Formica table top, a pile of pancakes in front of me, I said to Ziggy, “You sure you’re okay?”
“What are you’re talking about?”
“I was there. I pulled you out of the snow. I shoved you back in the car. I drove you here.”
“That never happened.”
“I was there, Ziggy.”
“So was I, Luck.”
I stared at him across the Formica then pointed to my face, “The bruise, the split lip, you did that.”
“We’re not having this conversation. You drove when I was tired, I fell asleep. That’s our story.”
When we were done with breakfast, we walked over to the bar. It was 7:30 according to the railroad clock above the reception desk. It was a big bar and it was getting crowded, bar stools and a bunch of high-tops already full. At one end, there was a 7-foot Valley pool table, a four-foot chandelier with fake leaded-glass light panels that said “Billiards” hanging above it. Two guys shooting, eight, ten guys holding drinks and talking about the blizzard and watching; a long line of quarters queued up under the cushion over the coin mechanism. Ziggy stopped and watched a few shots, walked over and slid two quarters into the queue then turned his back and went to the bar and I followed him, “The second quarter’s for you, thought we’d play a game. Rum and Coke?”
“Sure.”
“You play much?”
“Hung out at a biker bar when I was in high school, played some eight-ball.”
“Got a rating?”
“I won some beers.”
Sitting at the bar, we could see the table and we watched as Ziggy’s quarters inched up in the queue. At the same time, the line of quarters behind us was getting longer as people woke up and realized the freeway was closed and the blizzard was raging and they weren’t going anywhere and there was nothing to do but drink, sleep, argue and maybe play pool.
When Ziggy’s first quarter came up, he jostled and bumped his way through the crowd to the table and said hello to the guy who’d won the game, shook hands like they were old friends, and pulled a cue off the wall rack, glanced at the tip but didn’t bother to look for a weight or roll it on the table to check it for straight, put in his quarter and racked the balls and chalked the cue.
It was an ugly game. The other guy dry broke, Ziggy got up, open table, missed and sat back down. The other guy pocketed the ten and missed, Ziggy sank two balls and missed but hid the cue ball behind the eight. The guy tried to hit one of his balls with a bank but missed and fouled and gave Ziggy ball in hand. Ziggy ran two balls and hooked the guy again and he fouled and Ziggy ran the rest of his balls and won the game. Luck, that’s what I was seeing.
I was up next. Ziggy dry broke, I ran four little ones, Ziggy knocked in two but left me hooked and I gave him ball in hand. I won the game, anyway. And the next two. The third guy I played, Chuck, broke and ran and I was done. Chuck was a bald guy maybe thirty; he had a two-piece Palmer cue with a linen wrap and mother-of-pearl inlays. He talked a lot of shit, “Hope this kid’s ready for an ass whoppin’” he said to the crowd just before I broke. He shot hard, every ball hitting the pocket with a plastic crack and rattle you could hear across the bar. Chuck was drinking Jack straight up with a beer back. His wife was sitting on the floor in the lobby with a glass of bourbon on the carpet beside her. It wasn’t 10:00 yet.
Ziggy put up two more quarters and when he got up, Chuck still had the table. Ziggy won the game when Chuck scratched on the eight; Ziggy’d missed a shot and hung the eight on the lip of a side pocket and Chuck knocked it in to lose the game. When I got up, Ziggy said let’s put some money on it. I told him I had six dollars to my name and he said don’t worry about it and laid two fives on top of the chandelier. He told me I’d win and I did and he handed me the two fives. The next guy wanted to bet on the game and I put one of the fives back on top of the light and won the game and another five bucks. I lost the next game. But from then on, every game had money on it. And I had sixteen dollars in my pocket; I ate and drank for three days on that.
Interstate 80 was closed and for most of us marooned in Little America, it was a three-day drunk, there was nothing else to do. Except smoke cigarettes. By noon the first day, the smoke had overwhelmed the motel’s air handling equipment and a blue-grey cloud hung head-high from the ceiling. The staff was exhausted and Irving quit trying to keep up with the lobby ashtrays and by afternoon the first day, they were overflowing onto the carpet. The smoke and the stink made my eyes itch and my throat raw. We coughed constantly, all of us.
The first afternoon, a woman going home to her parents in Pittsburg and leaving her husband in Salt Lake City, stood in the middle of the lobby and told her story, the lost jobs, the foreclosure, the wrecked car, the lost friends, the bloody noses, the AA meetings, the being broke and the crappy apartments getting crappier. Tall, blond, heavyset, thirty-five, maybe forty, orange lipstick smeared around her mouth, she told us she wasn’t going to be married to the loser bastard any longer. Her words were slurred and hard to follow and she struggled to stand and not spill her Johnny Walker. When she was done, the crowd around her cheered and raised their glasses. She passed out in a corner by a window, her feet pulled up to her butt, her drink on the carpet beside her, her head leaned back against the snow-blue glass and the tears ran down her cheeks.
The afternoon of our second day, a guy sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall, puked a frothy cream-colored puddle into his lap and passed out and sat with the puke in his lap for hours and the Bacardi stink surrounded him. A drunk woman spanked her screaming kid and the kid screamed louder and she dragged the kid to the door to shove her out into the blizzard. Another woman stopped her at the door, talked to her quietly, and sat in one of the lobby chairs with the kid in her lap until the kid fell asleep. A woman gave her boyfriend a blow job, her head in his lap under a jacket pretending to sleep and thinking nobody was watching.
As we got drunker, there were threats and shouted arguments and a couple of fist fights with haymakers and clumsy kicks and guys grappling and rolling on the floor with bloody noses. During the first fight, Irving called the cops. They told him they couldn’t get to us. That evening, the snow stopped.
Our third day, Ron and Terri got engaged, they were from Cambridge and driving to Pasadena for graduate school. The two of them stood on a table in the lobby to make their announcement. They were both drunk and after they announced and toasted and we all cheered, Terri fell backwards off the table. She was fine. It was Kristi’s birthday and the cooks made cakes and we sang Happy Birthday and she blew out the candles, there were six, and we all had a piece. Her father was there, her mother was sleeping in one of the lobby chairs.
All three days, Ziggy hung out in the bar and drank rum and cokes and played pool. After the first night, I don’t think he slept. A lot of cash got set on top of that light, four or five twenties on some of the games, and the pool table got to be the center of the carnival, drunks crowding the players and yelling at them for good shots and bad and throwing bills on the table and crowding around so players had to push the people back to take a shot. Ziggy kept shooting, winning a few games then losing one and cycling back through the line of quarters under the cushion. That third afternoon, the freeway was still closed but the rumor was that the plows had it almost clear and they were going to open it later that night.
Before they opened it, Ziggy played a final match with Chuck, eight-ball, race to five; the first person to win five games wins. It was a five-hundred-dollar game. Chuck had to take a leak and while we were waiting, Ziggy took me aside and gave me his keys and told me to put our luggage in the car, fill it with gas and park it by the door and to let him know when I was back. Most people were in the bar watching the games and only a tired-looking mom bouncing her kid on her knee saw me pick up our luggage and carry it outside.
The crowd was loud and drunk and they’d been waiting. They saw Chuck as the guy to beat; for three days, he’d won every game he’d played except the one the first morning against Ziggy and another one or two the next day. Ziggy’s wins were just luck, we all saw that. When I got back, I nodded to Ziggy. Chuck had just won the lag and got the break; the lag is where the two players both shoot from one end of the table, bounce the ball off the far rail and whichever ball ends up closer to the near rail wins. I had nothing riding on the match; all the same, I was disappointed but not surprised when Ziggy lost the first three games, Chuck pounding the balls into the pockets as though hitting them hard earned him extra points. He was on the eight-ball about to win his fourth game of five, Ziggy had three balls on the table and hadn’t won one when he said to Chuck, “Want to make it interesting?”
Chuck was drunk and didn’t see it coming, none of us did, “Fuck yeah, I’ll take your money. How much you got?” Ziggy pulled five neatly folded hundred-dollar bills out of his shirt pocket, counted them so Chuck could see them and set them on the light. Chuck waved his wife over, she was drunk, too; she turned her purse upside down and wadded bills, ones, fives, tens, twenties, spilled onto the table and Chuck smoothed them out and counted them and set the stack on top of the light next to Ziggy’s hundreds. Now it was a thousand-dollar game.
When Chuck fouled on the eight ball and Ziggy won his fifth game, he bellowed into the crowd, “Lousy, cheap fucking win” and demanded another match, double or nothing. Ziggy shrugged and Chuck’s wife dumped out her purse again. With all the ones counted, there were sixteen hundred dollars and change on the table. The truckers, ranchers, sales guys, vets, hippies, college students, moms, dads, me, all of us drunk and in need of a shower, stood packed so tight around the table it was hard to move. We all knew who was going to win; the side bets were running two-to-one. To make Chuck whole on the bet, one of the guys staked him the four-hundred, he was that sure. We were all that sure.
In the next five games, Ziggy missed shots twice, both times because he narrowly missed cue ball position for a following shot. In game two he was forced to shoot a long bank that he just missed, in game three he missed an impossible combination. Both times he missed, he didn’t leave Chuck a shot and when he got back up, he ran out both games. He was shooting with the bar stick. Chuck, sitting on a stool with his Palmer between his knees and a bunch of guys standing around him, didn’t sink a ball the entire match. In game five, the final game, as Ziggy trickled the eight-ball into a corner pocket on an easy final shot, Chuck crashed over his stool and lunged to his feet. He was drunk and since the second break he’d been cussing Ziggy to the crowd around him and getting steadily louder as he lost games. Now he’d lost the match and a couple of thousand bucks. “You son of a bitch. You sorry son of a bitch. You hustler motherfucker, I’m going to break your fucking neck.”
Ziggy grabbed the cash off the chandelier, caught my eye and I shoved through the crowd toward the door, Ziggy’s hand on my shoulder pushing me forward. The yelling and Chuck’s threats got louder behind us; a lot of people had lost money on that match. “You drive,” Ziggy said as he pushed me through the door. The big thermometer on the wall just outside the door said the temperature was six degrees.
I still had his keys and as the engine caught, I jammed the cue-ball shifter into reverse, stomped the gas and side-stepped the clutch. The tires spun in the snow as Chuck, roaring curses and swinging his cue stick, burst through the doors and the lobby light and the blue smoke and the yelling drunks spilled into the parking lot behind him. Chuck swung the butt of his cue at the hood of the car and missed and slipped in the snow and fell and dropped the stick and picked himself up and kept coming and about then the rear tires of the VW hooked up and I drove us the hell out of there.
“Jesus,” I said, “Where we going?”
“That Palmer’s an eight-hundred-dollar stick. He’s lucky he didn’t hit the car. Freeway’s open, been open for a couple of hours. The announcement’s at 10:00. Irving told me that’s when he kicks everybody out.”
We hadn’t gone fifty miles before we were out of the snow and the freeway was clear. I drove all night while Ziggy slept. We got gas in Ogallala, Grand Island and Omaha. We hit Des Moines at morning rush hour and stopped at Donut King. We sat at a booth and we both ordered coffee, black. I had a cake donut with sprinkles. We talked about Little America and our thrilling getaway and Irving tipping him off about the freeway (that tip had cost Ziggy five bucks). He pulled Chuck’s wadded bills out of his pocket, counted out ten twenties and handed them to me, “Luck happens sometimes.” he said. I’d never held that much money before.
“How much did you win?”
“A little over six.”
“Hundred?”
“Thousand.”
“Jesus Christ.” Ziggy dropped me at a ramp to northbound 35. That night I ate dinner at my mother’s house. And took a long shower.