GOING HOME

GOING HOME

“Powder River Home” came on the jukebox, just as the waitress set the bacon, eggs, and grits before the man at the counter.  Staley’s, the only café in its one-horse town, was deserted, except for the customer, Annie, the waitress, and Reuben the cook.  Within the hour, the local breakfast customers would start drifting in, but things were always slow at six o’clock.

“Going home sounds pretty good, don’t it,” the customer said, addressing his plate more than Annie or Reuben.  “Wonder what I’d do with myself if I just packed it in and went back to Hutto.”  He looked up at Annie before continuing, “Truth is, I get tired of drivin’ some time, but I been movin’ since I left high school, and I’m worried I’d die o’ boredom if I was tied to a single spot.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what,”Annie replied, “I done some travelin myself, and I enjoy it for a while, but not havin’ a bed to call your own ain’t the life for me.  Time was, I never really wanted to go back, but the older I got, the better havin’ a house of my own sounded.”  It was Annie’s turn to address something other than her companions.  “Don’t know why it took me so long to figure that out.”

Silence for a few seconds, then Annie again:  “Well, I just couldn’t stay home when I was a kid.  Mama ran through husbands like they was goin’ out o’ style, but when she married Jake Lucas, I had to leave.  That was the meanest man I ever met, but he had some money, so Mama thought she would live high with him.”  Reuben laughed, but the joke was lost on the customer.  She glared at Reuben.  “I told her if she married that SOB I was gonna leave.  I never knew whether she thought I was kiddin’ or she just didn’t care.  They come home one Sunday married, and I left on Monday, soon as they both left for work.”

“You certain that waren’t why your mammy married him.”  Reuben interjected.  “She knew you wasn’t dumb, and you would have had to have been right stupid to live in the same house with old Jake.”

“Now you just shut up, Reuben Jones.  My mama may have been a little thoughtless, but she loved me.”

“If she loved you, she wouldn’t have run you off like that.”  Reuben chuckled.  

“SHUT UP, Reuben!”  The Styrofoam cup Annie had been nursing bounced off the wall behind the cook’s head.  Reuben returned the glare Annie cast at him; neither made any move to clean the water and ice the cup had once contained.  

The tension subsided after a few moments, as their customer picked up the conversaton.  “Myself, I left home when I was 17.  My folks are dead now, so I got no place to go back to.  When I was in school, they wanted me to stay and farm, but I never took to it.  Plantin’ an’ plowin’ was easy, but haulin’ hay an’ choppin’ an’ pickin’ cotton was just plain ole hard work.  So I volunteered when I turned 17, spent a year in Nam, came back, went to school for a while—I got my GED in the Army—but school was borin’, so I hired out driving a water truck on a construction job.  After about a year workin’ construction, I got on driving a rig, and I’ve been a long-haul trucker ever since.”  He paused and stared off into the nothingness at the far end of the diner.  “’Cept when Jennie was there.”  

“I’m 70 now, and those roads ain’t getting any shorter.  I’ve got a bit set aside, and could prob’ly quit but I don’t know what I would do with myself if I did.  I really don’t know much of anything except trucks an’ truckin’.

 “It might of been different if Jennie had come through—them five years were the best I ever even dreamed of, ’cept for the last three months.  We didn’t even find out it was cancer ’til it was too late to even operate.  I didn’t like working for that plant, but it ’uz worth it ’cause I could get off work and come home.  I’d get there right after she did.  All I really wanted to do was be with her; and I guess it’s still all I want or ever did want.  Its been 37 years now, but I still cry sometime when I think about her.”  He wiped at an eye with a paper napkin.  “I think about her all the time.”

“Well, I’m sorry about your wife.  My last husband got killed in a car wreck about 5 or 6 years ago.  We was separated at the time, and he had filed, but it was still a shock.  I think that would have been just awful if Gene hadn’t been such a two-timin’ bastard—it was hard enough when the night before it happened, I had cried myself to sleep over the son of a bitch.  I can’t even imagine going through that if he had loved me too.”

 “I did fine for a little while after Jennie died, but about two weeks after the funeral, I just broke down and couldn’t quit cryin’.  I quit work an’ just hit the road—drove all over New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and realized that I was OK as long as I was drivin’, so I called Callihan again—I had quit them when Jennie and I got married, and they took me back, and I been drivin’ ever since.  

“Well, mister, I really am sorry.  But I don’t think I’ll be sheddin’ any tears for Gene in another 15 or 20 years.  Probably wouldn’t have even if he hadn’t had Marilyn Dobson in the car with him.”

“If I ’s to quit drivin, I wonder where I’d go?  I couldn’t stand to go back to Plainview, there are too many things that remind me of Jennie there, and I’d just start crying all over again.  I’d go back to Hutto, but it ain’t the same.  Jimmy’s working the farm still, but its got tract houses on two sides, and prob’ly ’ll have ’um on all four in another few years.  I own Granny Lowe’s place, but I rented the house on it to Kenny Pokorny, who works it, and I ain’t goin’ to sell it out from under him.  But anyway, Williamson County is just getting too big for my blood.  Ole Chris’s Powder River country sounds mighty temptin’, but I really don’t like cold and them winters is too long.”  

“Well,” Annie said, “I’ll take me some winter, myself.  Anything to beat these hunderd and ten days we been havin’.”  

“You just sayin’ that, ’cause you never been through a real winter.”

“And just where have you been that’s had a—” as Annie added air quotes around the words “—‘real winter’.”  

Reuben mouthed the word “Korea”, but didn’t speak it, not wanting to interrupt the customer’s continuing monologue.  “I want a small town, I think, the kind of place where everybody knows everybody, and a new person can get to know everbody.  Well, get to know everybody’s name, anyway.”  There was another pause, as he gathered his thoughts, neither Reuben nor Annie wanting to interrupt further.  “I guess what I’d like is a couple hundred acres somewhere west of IH 35, where I could run a few cows and be mostly alone.”  He looked from Annie to Reuben and back.  “Hell, this seems like a nice enough town.  Know of anyone with a few hundred acres to sell around here?”  

Neither Annie nor Reuben could admit to knowledge of available land, and, with no way to respond to the question, they had nothing left to say.  Having finished his breakfast, the customer sat for a few minutes contemplating the dregs in his coffee cup, before arising from the counter stool.  “I got to go, this load’s due in Phoenix tomorrow.  Thanks for lis’nin’ to an old man complain.  I’m gonna head for home.”

The trucker got up, paid the tab, took his receipt and headed out toward the reefer van outside.  Watching him go, Annie muttered to Reuben.  “He seems like a nice guy; it’s a shame he’s so lonesome.  I don’t see why he don’t find a place to settle down.”

“I do not know” Reuben responded, “but some of ’um don’t want a home.  He seems like one of them to me.”

“Well, I guess so, but if he misses home so much, he ought’a have one.  I wonder what he meant when he said ‘I’m headin for home”?

Outside, the trucker climbed in the cab.  Before he started rolling back toward the interstate, he glanced at the framed picture magnetically attached to the center of the dashboard.  The picture showed a broad, straight West Texas highway.  The message taped to the frame read:  

“HOME SWEET HOME”