“So what happened to you lip?” I asked.

We had settled into a Denny’s Restaurant along the highway, letting the cab leave.

The mountains loomed over us through the steamed window like a life-sized painting, glorious but somehow not quite real.

My cup of coffee steamed in the cool interior air like a humidifier, my hands curled around the pale cup for warmth.

Louise grinned, although the wounded lip gave her a pained expression. The blister was only part of the damage. Winter had caused her lips to crack and bleed, and though she applied lip balm heavily, the wounds seem to grow worse, not better.

“It’s a cold sore,” she said. “I’ve had it since the first snow hit back in early October. I’m told I’ll probably have it until winter breaks in late April. I suppose this isn’t the right climate for me.”

I saw my opening.

“I can’t stand it either,” I said. “Back home I hated winter. I spent most of my time aching to move to California where I could go all year without seeing a flake of snow, or needing to wear gloves to keep my hands warm.”

“California? Isn’t that where you called me from?”

“Yes, I went there first.”

“But I thought you came west to see me?”

“I did,” I said. “But I needed to duck the law.”

“Is that why your family called me looking for you?”

“When exactly did they call?”

“About a week and a half ago,” she said. “They got my number from one of my old letters they found in your room back in Jersey. They said you were in trouble, that you had taken some money and that you were probably addicted to drugs.”

“I’m in trouble, I’ll admit. And I did steal some money. But I’m not addicted to drugs.”

“They said they found drugs in your room near where they found the letter.”

I thought back, envisioning the third floor room I had used as refuge when living with my family, tracing it out in my mind, the bed stand, the bed, the dressed, and finally the book shelf where I would have kept the letter and any other odds and ends.

“Of course!” I said. “The prescription. The army gave me darvons when I complained about a tooth ache.”

“Well, your uncle sounded concerned on the phone,” Louise said.

“As he should be, he wants his money back. What did you tell him?”

“That I hadn’t heard from you – and this was before you called.”

“What did he say to that?”

“He seemed surprised.”

“That’s because he figured I would head straight here and should have reached you by the time he called. Anything else?”

“He said he was sure you would contact me eventually, and asked me to call him if you did.”

“Did you?” I asked, gripping my coffee cup a little too hard.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know why. I just didn’t,” she said. “Maybe I figured I would hear what you had to say before I did anything.”

“And now?”

Louise struggled to smile, but the attempted brought an immediate grimace of pain, and a new leak of red from one of the multiple cracks in her lips.

We had already ordered food.

Louise craved a BLT. So to make it easier, I had ordered one as well. We both also ordered chicken soup, hoping something magical would keep me from getting a cold through the abrupt changes of climate and the cure the one Louise’s living here had brought her.

But when the waitress deposited the plate with the sandwich beside the steaming bowl of soup, Louise shook her head.

“It’s no good,” she mumbled. “I’ll never be able to get my mouth around it.”

“Don’t try,” I advised. “But do get some soup into you. The food will do you good. Did you see a doctor about your lips?”

Louise nodded as she eyed the steaming bowl, apparently struggling to find a way to attack it. “The doctor gave me some pills and some salve. But he said the condition wouldn’t heal until warm weather. The harsh cold keeps aggravating the condition.”

“Then maybe you should try and get out of the cold,” I said.

“Sure, and spend the rest of the winter in my apartment like a prisoner?”

“You could come to LA with me.”

Louise blinked, staring at me as if she couldn’t quite believe what I had just said, then she said, “Come again?”

“I have an apartment in LA,” I said. “Come back with me. It’s warm there, even in winter.”

Louise sucked at the blood oozing from a crack in her lower lip. “I’ve only been to California once, when I was a little girl,” she said. “My parents took me to the red woods.”

“LA is quite a bit south of the redwoods,” I said.

“Oh, I know. I was just thinking,” she said, then sipped at her soup.

She jerked from the heat as the still scalding soup came in contact with the blister. She mumbled, then blew on the soup, staring over the lip of the spoon as she did.

Her eyes always surprised me, because they often broadcast more than she actually said. The first time meeting her during my employment tour of the print factory back east she had warned me “you’ll be sorry” implying my taking the job, though her sharp blue eyes said quiet openly that we would get involved.

“Thinking about what?” I asked.

“About your offer,” she said, her eyes doing the same thing now as they did back then, her words meaning one thing while her eyes said something else. “Maybe we should get out of here.”

“I’m a little nervous about going back to your apartment,” I said. “Since my uncles know that’s where I would likely wind up.”

A vision of the Cadillac popped up again in my mind.

“Would they come all the way here looking for you?” Louise asked.

“I took a lot of their money,” I said.

“How much?”

“Ten thousand dollars.”

“Ten…?”

“They didn’t tell you?”

Louise shook her head. “They just told me you stole some money, they never said how much,” she said as she struggled to get up. I dropped several singles on the table for a tip, then crossed over to the register to pay as Louise put on her coat. Then, we pushed outside where the chill greeted us again, stabbing at our faces and hands.

“I hate this!” Louise moaned, the wind attacking the strands of exposed blonde hair that fell outside her hood. “We need to go somewhere warm. You said you had rented a room near here,” she said. “Maybe we should go there.”

So. I hailed another cab and directed the driver to the motel. If anyone had discovered my hideout, no sign showed of it. But I was nervous and didn’t want anyone, especially the motel clerk seeing me returning with Louise. So we hurried passed the lighted office. The woman inside seemed preoccupied with paperwork, and never looked up.

I wondered again about the Cadillac and its possible relationship to my uncles. If all went according to my plans, the Cadillac was sitting outside Louise’s apartment waiting for me to arrive or return.

I fumbled with the key, my fingers so numb from the cold I could hardly feel them. Then I pushed open the door into the little room beyond, warmth oozing out from the interior as if we had finally made our way home.

The sparseness embarrassed me after having seen the richness of where Louise lived, but she said nothing, easing in as I relocked the door and attached the chain. Slowly she removed her coat, laying it on the room’s only chair. She sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Such a small place,” Louise said.

“I don’t need much,” I said. “and it serves my purposes.”

“Which are?” Louise asked, once more giving me a look with much more meaning than her question, her blue eyes filled with that same look I used to get before our walk to the bus stop, that “Are you going to kiss me or what” look that eventually made me kiss her and more, although in a place so public as a bus stop my hands could only reach so far and we could only do so much.

But here, alone in a motel room thousands of miles away from anyone who knew us, and with walls around us to keep nosy people from seeing, we could do anything we wanted.

She smiled; I smiled back.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, a character straight out of The Wild Ones, with crew cut and leather jacket, and two days growth I had not tried to shave while traveling the bus.

I had taken a bold step back in the 1950s, looking much like old photographs of my uncles and not the hippie I had last seen prior to joining the army, more tough on the outside than I ever felt within.

While I was critical of my looks, Louise seemed to admire me, grinning at me, leaning back, shaking her blonde hair out of her face.

“Are you just going to stand there or what?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“Take off your coat and come over here, you big lug,” she said.

I slipped my jacket off and cross the room, settling onto the bed beside her.

My arm eased around her waist as if no time had passed, and we stood again on the bus stop back east, part of that after work ritual in which we would take each other to the limit the bus parted us.

But now, we had no limits. No time imposed for us to hurry to get in our kisses and touches before the bus arrived; no prying eyes of strangers that kept our hands hidden as we felt for each other, and our passions from pushing too far. My fingers felt for your breasts, and she made no move to stop me when I began to unbutton the front of her shirt.

When I stopped, she asked, “What’s wrong?”

“You mean I should keep going?”

“Of course,” she said, then lifted her face to kiss me.

Our lips touched and out of habit, I nipped her, accidentally pinching her wound. Her head jerked back.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be,” she said, and kissed me again, pulling me down so that I was on top of her, her open shirt exposing her bra and the swell of her breasts, my fingers curling around the fabric in a desperate attempt to feel the flesh beneath.

“Take it off if you want,” she said.

I slid my hand behind her back, she rose up onto her elbows, but to no avail since I could not more figure out the workings of the bra catch than I could atomic engineering, resulting only in my fingers getting tangled.

Louise laughed. “I suppose I’ll always have to do it for myself,” she said. “None of you men are any good at releasing it.”

She sat up, reached back with both hands and quickly released the catch I could not have, her bra falling away from her firm breasts to reveal what I had only imagined before, though my fingers knew every part of what my eyes had never glimpsed.

But when my palm cupped one of her breasts this time, the touch was far different than any before, she seeming to shiver under my touch, she moaning as I stroked the flesh.

This was no dance in the parking lot, I thought, or even the imagined back seat of the car I had plotted but could never manage to arrange since my uncles rarely let me drive. Everything was before me and I was stunned.

Perhaps the shock of it left me more shaken than I had thought, because when we finished removing the rest of our clothing and attempted to get to the act, goose bumps covered my arms, but the rest of my anatomy remained inert.

Louse said nothing as I rolled off her like a defeated general, my sword laying limp between my legs.

I later learned that this sort of thing happened from time to time, but had not happened to me. I felt like shit, and eventually crawled out of the bed and fell into the chair to contemplate my failure as silence filled the room.

No, not silence.

Outside, the wind had picked up again, stirring up the loose snow and casting it against the windows and door, a gentle ticking that kept me on edge, although the naked and weary Louise had already drifted off into the sleep.

She lay on the bed as if dead, scaring me a little, making me feel as if I had expounded my crime by involving her in it.

What happened if the police raided the room just then and found us like this? Would she be charged?

But another feeling nagged me, too, the sense that I had come all this way – crossed the country, and back, only to find myself as lonely as when I had started.

A vague temptation made me want to slip back out and vanish – part of this from the embarrassment of my failed encounter, but part from the fact everything felt wrong, as if this was the wrong foot to start out a new life on, and that I had made a serious miscalculation in presuming I could steal my way into happiness.

I wondered if I was gay, though I could recall no attraction to other males.

I wondered if the black Cadillac had finally figured out where I had gone and was now riding back towards the motel, men behind its tinted windows pulling out their pistols for a sudden and deadly invasion.

Unable to deal with the ticking of snow and my own thoughts, I flicked on the tape recorder I had purchased in Denver and let some Simon & Garfunkle tunes fill my head instead.

I felt as scared here as I had for the first few days, and thought about the pistol I had stashed in one of my suitcases. I fished it out, fitting it in the palm of my hand as I stared at the door.

The music played:

I can hear the soft breathing of the girl that I love

As she lies here beside me a sleep with the night.

Outside, a car door slammed. I heard footsteps pounding on the pavement apparently getting closer.
Her hair in a fine mist floats on my pillow

Reflecting the glow of the winter moonlight.

Voices sounded next. Insistent, angry voices that I imagined came from men brow-beating the clerk into information as to which room I was in, and demanding the key. More footsteps came. Someone knocked on the door to the room next to mine.

But I’ve got to creep down the alley way

Fly down the highway

I aimed the pistol at door, feeling time tick away in me like the ticking of a bomb, knowing that outside the door the men from the Cadillac waited, and would soon burst in on me their own guns blazing.

Before they come to catch me I’ll be gone

Somewhere they can’t find me

But instead of the door exploding open to the kick of a shoe, silence returned, interrupted only by the tick of the snow and the whirr of the wind.

I turned off the tape player.

The silence seemed as dreadful as the voices. I forced myself up, determined to get dressed.

If someone was coming for me, at least I wouldn’t be naked.

Yet still no knock came. Even the highway sounds seemed to grow less as the night grew and the snow mounted.

Was someone outside or what?

Dared I look to find out?

Even as I crossed the room and edged open the door, I felt like a fool. When I saw nothing through the narrow opening, I pushed the door open more, expecting hands to reach in for me, instead finding only snow mounting outside, making the door harder to open.

If anyone had come to collect me, they were no longer there, no was the imprint of their footsteps – just old signs now filling in with the heavy flakes.

I should have felt less afraid, but I felt more fearful than ever, my throat throbbing with the intensity of my heart beat.

My mouth had also gone dry.

An unreasonable urge to get a soda came over me, and since I had seen the soda machine along the walk from the office earlier, I stepped out into the cold, bare-chested and barefooted, with only my pants to protect part of may anatomy from the piercing wind.

I stumbled into the snow with a pistol in one hand and coins in the other, the snow oozing between my toes with each step, even as I tried to step into the low ebb of the drifting. But at one point, I had to step into higher snow and my big toe struck something solid beneath.

Cold, which is supposed to numb pain, did nothing to numb this pain and I let out a howl despite my need to stay quiet.

My wail woke Louise and her head popped out the open door.

“What on earth are you doing out there?” she asked.

“I was thirsty.”

“So you had to yell about it?”

“I stubbed my toe.”

“If you had thought to put shoes on – not to mention a shirt – maybe that wouldn’t have been a problem. Get your soda, then get back in here before you’re as sick as I am.”

I did what I was told, dropping the coins in the machine, punching the button for the soda I wanted with the point of the pistol, then hobbled back towards the motel room.

So much for creeping down the alley way, I thought, let alone flying down a highway.

Yet for some reason, I felt the spell broken, and knew that no one would be visiting us that night. But I also knew I had to get out of town soon before the danger came again. And I knew I wanted to take Louise with me.

On the lamb menu

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