Waiting

Route 66 still snakes across the prairie, hidden in the folds of Interstate 55 and steaming into the same places like the tired old piece of history it is.

Rearing its head in the parking lot of the old Dixie truck stop it finds a familiar line of rumbling behemoths.  Their great hulking bodies dark and trembling as the truckers inside sleep hidden from people in the parking lot by locked doors and generated air conditioners.

At the end of this line stands a European style, double-decker bus full of people whose bodies are slick with sweat and whose eyes sag with the weariness of temperatures well over a hundred degrees on a hot July night.

Across the parking lot is the shuttered and now defunct gift shop, that old purveyor of stale pecan candies and cheap knick-knacks that once lined the highways of every major road between New York and California.  Next to it are the remains of the Dixie Café, the original place for truckers looking for a good meal where they could rest and call home.

Under a huge orange moon, heavy with humidity and ripe with a fecundity peculiar to a midsummer night in the heartlands is one old pick up truck blasting hot air on the wooden park bench leaning against the wall and sitting on that bench is a single figure. 

Straight back not touching the bench, feet together and right in front of her, she clutches her purse tightly in her lap.  On the ground beside her is a small suitcase and wedged between her and the cast iron arm of the bench is one slightly out of place nod to the modern age, a computer case, neat and black, its canvas sides protecting a laptop.

The bus pulls away leaving her alone in the night and her eyes scan the horizon.  She isn’t really worried; this is just one more adventure to add to all the others in her repertoire.  But she is vigilant as the moonlight glances off her silver hair as she tries to look less tired than she is actually feeling.

 

After a while a lone white car pulls almost silently into the lot and seeing the old neon sign glowing over the shadowy figure, pulls up in front of her.  A man gets out of the car and the woman pulls her suitcase over to him.  He lifts it into the trunk.  She lays the computer beside it, and then they get into the car and drive away.

Route 66 is left lying in the shadows, embracing the familiar sound of sleeping semis as it slurps up the light of the juicy orange moon.  It could be 2012, or 1958.