December, 2002

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california
** Part Three **

The bus stopped in Casper, Wyoming. There had been some sort of groundswell of public sentiment while I was asleep, the upshot of which was that we were being allowed an hour for a meal downtown, rather than at a truckstop. Apparently good old-fashioned American greasy spoons were not compatible with the delicate foreign palates which had unknowingly entrusted themselves to the Greyhound experience. After my brawl with that obnoxious midget I wanted nothing more to do with continental cuisine, but fortunately for me (and to the dismay of the Ellis Island contingent) there was nothing in downtown Casper but cowboy restaurants.

I walked into the nearest bar and found a pay phone. There was a bullet hole in one side. This must have been quite a gathering place for psychopaths at one time.

"That was put there yesterday," said a mouth uncomfortably near my right ear. I jumped and, recovering myself, turned to face what must have been the bartender. He was grinning at me and wrapping a bar towel around and around his wrist and elbow as though it were a pair of nunchucks. "Some extra rowdy good 'ol boy got a little mad at his girlfriend." I nodded in the most neighborly way I could manage and dialed my editor in New York.

The phone rang. "Hello?" inquired a young female non-New Yorker on the other end.

"Ed?" I asked loudly. I find that to get past the inevitable self-important temp worker in my editor's office it helps to make believe there's a bad connection.

"I'm sorry, sir, but there's no one here by that name." I'm in the habit of calling him "Ed," short for "editor," but I wouldn't expect this farm girl to know that. I tried again.

"Lemme talk to Mr. Farnsworth," I shouted. "It's important."

"I'm sorry, sir, but Mr. Farnsworth is not taking calls at the moment on accounta he's in a meeting." This is what he tells them to say, but this one's got a spin I've not encountered before.

"Tell him it's Sam Spade and I got those photos of his wife he wanted," I screamed as loudly as possible. Several heads at the bar turned to see what kind of a maniac was going to shoot up the pay phone this time.

"Just a moment, sir. Please hold." Suddenly it was Neil Diamond singing "Song Sung Blue." It never ceases to amaze me how impressed temp workers are by the names of fictional private investigators. It literally works every single time.

Suddenly I heard Ed's voice. It jarred me out of my 70's reverie. I was beginning to sway back and forth to the hypnotic strains-"Song sung blue, every garden-Who the hell is this?!"

"Hi, Ed, it's me. Nice girl you got at the desk today. I'd say a Vassar girl on accounta the accent."

"Snide, how many times I gotta tell you I never want to hear your voice again?"

"C'mon, Ed, I got a great story here, a mystery. Just what you said you needed."

"I never said I needed it from you, in fact, if I never get anything from you again it'll be too damn…"

"Hang on there, Chief, don't you even wanta hear what I got?"

"No, and next time you won't even get through, because I've got your game figured out! Sam Spade, my ass!" He was starting to lighten up. I could tell he was interested. He hung up with another flood of abuse. That's just his way.

I walked over to the bar and sat on a stool. There was a young guy at the other end of the bar washing glasses who looked vaguely familiar, but I didn't think I knew anybody in Casper, Wyoming. Probably just this weird trip catching up to me. I ordered a beer.

"'Fraid we got no mic-ro-brews," said the bartender.

I found this reasonably insulting, but it's true I wasn't dressed for Wyoming, so I tried to overlook it. "You got Bud?" I asked.

"You want a glass?" he asked insinuatingly. Why was this bartender baiting me?

"Bottle," I said sharply. He eyed me with his head cocked to the side for a minute and then shuffled back to get the beer. I hadn't noticed by the phone, but he seemed to have some kind of walking disorder.

He came back with the beer, wiping the mouth of the bottle with his rag. I tried to remember all the surfaces I had seen it touch since I sat down. "Where you headed?" he asked companionably.

"California," I said.

"Gotta sister in California. Just a buncha fags and winos from what I can tell. What you goin' out there fer?"

"Hollywood," I said in what I hoped was a sarcasm-laden voice. "I got this script, see, and I think it's a great vehicle for, uh, Mel Gibson, so I'm going out to hopefully take a meeting and get the thing off the ground."

He looked at me with his quizzical stray-dog head and then pounded the bar with a surprising amount of force. "Charlie Sheen!" he shouted. Evidently the rest of the bar was used to this, because it caused no stir with anyone. I thought I saw the dishwasher jump a little, though.

"What I really want to do is direct," I added hopefully, fearing my sarcasm had been misplaced.

"Charlie Sheen was in this bar," he said, leveling a finger at me. "Kicked the shit out of a guy right over there." He indicated the far corner, and then slapped his rag joyfully on the edge of the bar, sending flecks of beer foam in every direction. "That's a god-damn movie star."

I just nodded my head in agreement. "You got food?" I asked, hoping to leave California behind.

"Anything you want," he said, suddenly well-disposed toward me, maybe because I failed to challenge the idea of Charlie Sheen as the Platonic Ideal Movie Star.

"How 'bout a hamburger," I said.

He walked to the end of the bar where a doorway led to a better lit room in the back. "Cheyenne, throw a Big F on the grill!" he shouted, unnecessarily loud. Cheyenne. Why not Casper? I had the impression he wanted everyone to know exactly what I was eating. He shuffled back to where I was sitting.

"Had a local boy back a while ago wanted to go to Hollywood, be a ac-tor." He had a way of hyphenating words for that extra measure of contempt. "Had his throat slit not ten miles outta town when his bus stopped for gas. Never did figure how come they didn't fill up in town. Plenty a gas in Casper." He had a disturbing glint in his eye. I started feeling lonely for the Europeans. "Never found out who did it, either. Sure musta hated ac-tors." At this he gave a kind of dry chuckle, like sandpaper on a dead cactus. He shuffled off to help someone at the other end of the bar.

At this moment a girl appeared with my hamburger and my heart stopped beating. She was without a doubt the most unbelievably beautiful hamburger waitress on the face of the earth and I was sure if I didn't tell her so I would spontaneously combust within a few seconds. She wore Wrangler jeans, an apron over a western shirt, and a black hat tipped jauntily back. Her short brown hair was cut carelessly, like nobody ever looked anyway, and her nose was slightly freckled. As I hastened to describe her eyes before I fell down, prostrate and lifeless, at her feet, I was interrupted by the gnome of a bartender.

"Cheyenne, drop that hamburger and get me some onion rings, girl. I ain't payin' you to stand here and get drool on your shoes!" This struck me as a peculiar turn of phrase for a hick, but I soon forgot about it. Cheyenne high-tailed it back to the kitchen (and oh! what a high tail she had!) and I found myself face to face, once again, with the bartender's finger. Face to finger. Whatever.

"Now you listen here, ac-tor boy." I didn't correct him in light of the circumstances. I noticed peripherally that all eyes were now turned in our direction. With his free hand he brought a gun out from under the bar and set it between us in a pool of beer. How that rag got so wet I do not know. It wasn't from cleaning. "Cheyenne's my daughter, and my cook, and my waitress, an' I don't want no city boy ac-tors smilin' at her like a calf in a slaughterhouse." This made no sense at all to me, but I had never seen one and I could have been wrong about the way it looked. "Now you gonna finish up that hamburger and then get the hell outta here, you understand?" I have never liked being treated like this. There must have been something about the way I looked or the way I was dressed that made him assume he could get away with it, because he was really very surprised when I picked up that gun. From what I could see the rest of the bar was, too.

"I think I'll pass on the hamburger, no offense to Cheyenne," I said. I pulled a ten out of my pocket and left it on the bar. I saw Cheyenne peeking out of the doorway to the back and flashed her my most charming I've-got-a-gun-pointed-at-your-Dad smile. I could have sworn she smiled back. Fortunately the door to the men's room was within sight of the bar, so I walked over to it, swung it open, and quickly fired three shots into the toilet. There was an audible gasp, I hope from the bartender. There's no better revenge than plumbing problems. Those can be very expensive.

I tucked the gun out of sight inside my parka and walked out. I ducked around the corner and stashed the gun in a snow bank. I was concerned that someone might have heard the shots, so I took back streets to reach the bus. I expected a truck full of drunk vigilantes around every corner, but somehow they never materialized. What was even more peculiar, the bus didn't leave for another 30 minutes, and although I was more or less cowering in my seat the whole time I never saw any sign of hostile locals. Could Cheyenne have convinced them not to follow me?

Finally we left, not without the usual grumbling about the local fare, which was supposedly inedible. I couldn't have said. I was getting extremely hungry. It was a relief to leave that little town behind.

Part One  ** Part Two  **  Part Three