Obscured View

It happened many years ago when I was still a young woman barely getting by with a GED, a low paying job, and absolutely no ambition. I was working as a waitress at Red’s Bar, a sleazy dive that somehow managed to retain its liquor license despite the complaints from disgruntled residents of the working-class neighborhood in which it was situated. Our boss, who proudly referred to himself as the only redheaded wop in Kentucky, swore that the establishment’s survival was due to his charismatic personality and sweet smile, but those of us that actually knew him thought it was more likely the result of cash changing hands under tables and favors owed for services no one wanted to think about.

It was around ten o’clock and the December night had turned so frigid that what had been rain puddles when I’d arrived nine hours earlier were now covered in thin crusts of ice. I never bothered to do practical things like checking the weather forecast and the cold winds slithering down from Canada had caught me off-guard and underdressed. Wearing nothing but a pair of Levi’s and a light tee shirt, I was running to my burnt orange 1973 Monte Carlo, so full of dings it could have passed for a giant washboard, before my nips froze off. I was just reaching for the door handle when a deep voice echoed, “You’re goin’ to catch your death dressed like that.”  I turned to locate the speaker and saw a rippling silhouette emerge from the shadows and begin moving toward me.  

It was Tuesday, the slowest night of the week; there were maybe five regulars sitting at the bar going cross-eyed watching the ice cubes in their sevens and sevens melt, and no one hanging around outside to help me. I had been single for a while now and knew the dangers that a young woman faced when alone on a dark street with a stranger creeping up on her. The best choice I had was to yank open my car door, dive into the driver’s seat, lock myself in, and get the hell out of there, but instead I just stood watching the mystery man slowly close the space between us. There was something about the way he moved, casually, smoothly, as if his joints had recently been lubed, that was oddly familiar and I couldn’t help trying to figure out where I had seen that walk before. Then he stepped into a feeble pool of illumination under a flickering streetlight, stopped and tilted his head, as if trying to solve a challenging math problem, looked right at me, and smiled. The Earth screeched to a halt. “Robert?” I whispered. “Is that you?” The smile widened into a broad grin and he nodded.

 Suddenly, it was three years earlier, and I was holding the receiver of my faded pink princess phone to my ear while my best friend Carol sobbed on the other end as if she’d just learned that her dog had been run over by a semi. But this wasn’t about a Poodle or Pomeranian, it was about her boyfriend Bobby who had just been sentenced to eighteen months in prison for breaking into a gas station. I wasn’t surprised. As soon as my seventeen-year-old best friend told me about the foxy boy that she’d met at the refreshment stand of the local swimming pool when he asked to “borrow” five bucks because he’d ordered a Coke and hot dog that he couldn’t pay for, I’d smelled trouble. In fact, truth be told, I was shocked that he hadn’t been incarcerated sooner. 

Fortunately for Carol, she was one of those girls who believed in the motto “Out of sight, out of mind” and within a couple of weeks there was a new guy oozing through her bloodstream. This did catch me off-guard because I had always thought my best friend and her favorite felon were a matched set. She was all dimples and strawberry blonde waves, an innocent who viewed the world through cobalt blue eyes so round she constantly looked amazed. He was tall and loose limbed with a dazzling smiled and curious head tilt that transformed him, if not into a raven-haired Rob Lowe, at least into someone that you expected to say something fascinating if given the time. As a couple they looked exquisite, like a pair of tiffany candlesticks.

Carol and I, on the other hand, wouldn’t have been friends at all if we hadn’t met while working at a little mom and pop diner that smelled like fried bacon and was packed from sunrise to sunset with faithful customers that were too poor to leave a tip of more than a quarter or two. Where her looks overflowed with God’s generosity, my compact figure and average features were a testament to his practicality.  While people were kind to Carol just so they could hang around gawking at her like art lovers gazing upon Van Gogh’s vase of Irises, I had to be hypervigilant just to keep them from robbing me blind. Fortunately, my-hard earned caution kept me from going along with Carol’s unnatural trust in people, so when she cornered me at work one morning and whispered, “Audrey, if I tell you something will you promise never to repeat it?” instead of saying, “Sure,” like someone caught in her aura, I replied. “Depends. What is it?” And although you might think that my curt reply probably pissed her off, the truth was, my no-nonsense attitude was what Carol liked best about me. 

Taking a big gulp of air and squeezing out a few always at-the-ready tears, she stuttered, “R..r..robert is d…dead.”

“Dead! What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know all the details. His mother called last night and said that he got into a fight in the prison yard and someone stabbed him…and…and…he…he died.”

“When did this happen?” I asked, thinking it would be easier to process if I had at least one piece of concrete evidence.

“She didn’t say,” Carol replied. She studied a grease spot on my apron for a few seconds, then added, “But it got me so shook up that me and Billy are leaving town.”

“Why, because your ex didn’t have enough sense to keep his smart mouth shut around the big boys?” The look she shot at me said it all. I was a heartless bitch who loved to be proven right no matter who it hurt. Taking it down notch, I changed tactics and asked, “So when are you going?”

“Tonight,” Carol stated, her blunt response indicating that Kentucky wasn’t the only thing she was done with. “Billy’s uncle has a ranch in Montana just outside of Bozeman. We’re gonna live with him; I’ll work in town waiting tables while Billy learns how to be a cowhand.” I thought about Carol living with a guy who was more boring than the Dictionary and had the IQ of an earthworm, trying to figure out why a city girl would want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere two thousand miles from everyone and everything she knew. 

My nasty mouth had rendered me unable to criticize, however, so I just mumbled, “Well, I hope it works out for y’all,” and walked away.

I didn’t hear from her again, which didn’t come as a surprise everything considered, and after I quit the restaurant and went to work at Red’s, it just became another sliver of my past. And if I hadn’t been standing face-to-face with the ghost of Robert, whose body looked suspiciously solid, I wouldn’t be thinking about it now. “Aren’t you going to offer me a lift?” he asked, motioning toward the car. “I haven’t eaten today, and there’s a place off I-65 that has the best burgers and hottest coffee in town.”

“How do you know it’s still there?” I snapped, already fed up with his nonsense. “Things change pretty quick around these parts, and you’ve been dead for three years.” 

“Just go to Hal’s with me and we can talk,” he replied without actually answering as he walked around to the passenger side door.  

When I got into the car, I considered just starting it up and driving away, leaving the lying asshole standing on the sidewalk, but my car hated the cold even more than I did, and my luck it would refuse to start. I reached over and unlocked the passenger side door, and as Robert folded his lanky frame into the seat, I cranked the key and the starter cried and groaned before the engine finally turned over. “Where is this place?” I asked, pulling away from the curb. Twenty minutes later we were sitting in a booth, the worn seat held together with silver masking tape and the table scarred but clean, listening to the music of beef sizzling on the grill and sipping some of the best coffee I’d ever drank. I had to give Robert credit. He might not know how to bring home a paycheck or tell a story that wasn’t three-quarters bullshit, but he sure knew a good place to grab a bite to eat late at night.  After the waitress brought our burgers and fries, I was ready to start the interrogation.

“So, fill me in,” I demanded, watching him gingerly slurp the steaming brew. “You look plenty healthy to me.”

“Where’d you hear that I wasn’t?” he asked, his hazel eyes, the colors layered like the paint on a di Vinci masterpiece, boring into me.

“Where do you think?”

“My guess would be Carolyn.”

“And you would be right. So, tell me. What the hell was all that about, you robbing a gas station, going to prison, being stabbed to death? And don’t make shit up. Did you know that your antics upset Carol so bad she moved all the way to Bozeman, the fuck, Montana just to get away from the whole mess?”

“Why have you always talked to me like I’m a pile of garbage?” Robert asked, sounding hurt and confused.

“Because you sponge off of trusting girls who would be kicked out on the street if they didn’t have friends like me to help with the rent, you lie about everything just for the hell of it, and you’re nothing but a common thief, and a lousy one at that, is why,” I answered, intentionally inserting as much disdain into my voice as I could muster. 

He drowned a crispy fry in the lake of catsup on his plate, shook his head, then looked up and gave me a twisted sneer. “You know,” he began, “if I saw me the way you do, I would be disgusted, too. Listen,” he said, pushing his plate aside and leaning forward so he could speak softly and still be heard. “You’re right. When I was with Carol, I didn’t earn money to pay bills the way I should have, and some of my stories weren’t exactly accurate, but that girl wasn’t my patsy. You were hers. That money you gave her? She didn’t use it to buy food, or cover the rent, or pay for her poor momma’s operation, or any other fool reason she gave you. She spent it on clothes, and make-up, and anything else her heart desired.”

“Oh, please,” I blurted. “I told you I’m not falling for your lies.”

“Do you know why I broke into that gas station?” he growled. Unwilling to be drawn in, I just rolled my eyes. “Well, do you?” he barked. 

The waitress, who was sitting in the corner counting her tips, looked up. “Something I can get y’all?” she asked.

“No ma’am,” Robert answered. “We’re good here.” He glared at me, then continued. “I did it because you weren’t the only person Carol borrowed money from. She owed people all over town, and some of them were getting disgruntled that they hadn’t been paid. That was when my good friend Billy Joe McTavish, who became Carol’s new beau after I was sent up, said that he smoked pot with this gas station owner who had a big stash of money he’d made by selling drugs; marijuana, cocaine, stuff like that. Well, Carol, Billy, and me cooked up a plan where they would take the guy out and get him drunk while I went in and grabbed the cash.”

“And son of a bitch if it didn’t come off without a hitch. The key was hidden in a false rock by the back door and the money was in a safe under the cash register, just like Billy said. The job was so easy, in fact, that I was in and out in a flash. Afterwards, I went back to Carol’s place to wait for them to get home so we could split up the score, one third apiece. Trouble was Billy hadn’t told me that the mark had a camera set up inside which he checked every day. When he looked at the film the morning after the robbery, what did he see but yours truly making off with his loot? He knew he couldn’t report the money stolen, so he finagled the playback somehow and told the police that someone had broken in and taken his tools. Naturally, when the cops saw that altered video with my face as clear as day, they came right for me. I prob’ly wouldn’t have got more than a couple months except I’d already had some run ins with the law, (you can’t imagine my shock to hear that) which added to my time.” 

“But why would Carol make up a story about you being dead?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

“You’d have to ask her to know for sure,” he answered around a mouthful of food, “but my guess is she did it so that you’d feel too sorry for her to try and talk her out of leaving.”

I took a sip of coffee while turning his explanation over in my mind. As much as I hated to admit it, if you knew Carol you knew that Robert’s version of the events actually made sense. I moved on. “So, what happened to your cut?” I queried, although I had a bad feeling that I already knew the answer.

“That’s what I’ve been tryin’ to find out,” Robert replied, cramming the last of the burger into his mouth. “But thanks to you, I have a real good idea where to look,” he said, licking the grease off his fingers and giving me a slimy grin. He motioned to the waitress that he was finished, and obviously anxious to be rid of us, she brought the check right over. “By the way,” he said standing up and handing it to me, “I hope you don’t mind taking care of this. I spent all my money bribing people into telling me where to find you.” 

Snatching the paper out of his hand, I snapped, “No problem. I’ll do anything to get you out of my sight. By the way,” I added as he walked toward the door, “can I ask where you’re going?”

“I was thinking of touring the Northwest,” he answered, giving his head that infamous tilt. “Thought I’d get there by way of Montana.” He walked out and the door swung shut behind him.

“Hope you’ve kept your thumb in shape,” I smirked, enjoying the thought of Robert hitchhiking his way through the Rocky Mountains in winter. Not that it mattered, but I wondered just how much of that ludicrous story had been true. I headed to the cash register, digging in my pockets for my tip money, then remembered that I’d laid my keys on the table when Robert and I sat down. I walked back to get them, only to find that they weren’t there. The booth hadn’t been cleaned yet, so I: moved the dishes around looking under plates and behind glasses; shoved my hands behind the seat cushion; even got down on my hands and knees on that stained crumb- covered floor, but had no luck. Just as I stood up trying to think where else they could be, from out in the parking lot I heard a car start and honk twice as it pulled away. Oh, no, it couldn’t be. I got to the door just in time to see Robert pulling my old Monte Carlo onto the highway. “Do you have a phone that I can use?” I shouted to the waitress. She set a desk model on the bar for me and as I dialed, I cursed the day that Carol and I met because, as I’ve already said, I am one of those people who has to stay hypervigilant just to keep from being robbed blind.