She was dressed like a lumberjack,

and she made it look good. Black and blue checked flannel tucked into tight-fitting Wranglers, long black hair and not much makeup, an easy smile as she sidled up to my table and asked if I wanted to dance.

I did, and we did, one of those slow Eagles numbers, Lying Eyes maybe. Apropos, though I didn’t know it yet. She sat with me after the song ended, bought us a round, and I thought, okay then. It was Friday night in Bozeman, Montana, and I was a cab ride away from the K-Mart. Freshly showered and shaved with a lot of time to kill, I’d told the driver to take me somewhere with live music. An hour later I was three beers into a hell of a night and no longer alone, twenty-two and stupid, but who isn’t at that age?

Her name was Robin, and she was older than me. Quite a bit older, she told me later, when we were naked and sweaty and spent.

 Forty. And married.

Knowing none of that at the time and glad to have a woman to talk to about crazy shit like coyotes howling to make you cry and the way the stars move in a circle that's too big for us to see all of, and to sway to the music with, our respective holds growing tighter as the night wore on, I felt pretty good. After we closed the place and the cab took us back to the K-Mart and she bounced me off the walls of my Kenworth, I felt even better. Then, like a dumbass, I started asking questions. Too curious to just have fun and take the moments as they came. I’m still that way, I guess, only these days I ask the questions up front. Maybe there is some benefit to growing older.

She was from Cody, Wyoming, and her husband was back at the hotel with the friends they had come with and the other friends they had all driven up to see. He was probably fucking somebody, she said. I had no idea if that meant they had some kind of open thing or he was just a shit and she was getting even. In the end it didn’t matter. I was doing someone’s wife, or she was doing me. Both, I guess.

I felt like a piece of shit.

But I felt really good too, because of the way she clung to me as we danced, the way she looked into my eyes as we moved together, and the way she laughed and nodded her head in four-four time while Bonn Scott wailed from the juke.

Forty, I thought the next morning as we ate biscuits and gravy and drank gallons of coffee, both a bit fuzzy around the edges but not too bad, considering. Wow, I thought. Looking back I still have to wonder what was missing from her life. She seemed to have it together, a lot more than I did, if the conservative gold bracelet and matching necklace and hundred-dollar hairstyle were any indication. I wondered where her wedding ring was, and how long it had been since it had graced her finger. No mark there, not like the one on my finger now, engraved into the flesh after almost ten years.

When the cab pulled up to her hotel I expected to see some grizzled biker-type waiting at the entrance, pissed as hell. He would rush over and yank open the door and I’d have to put up or shut up. That didn’t scare me much, I knew a little about fighting, real fighting, not that movie shit or even some on-the-mats sport kicking. Down and dirty, short and sweet. I’d fought a guy in his forties when I was fifteen, and come away without a scratch. Not that I’d kicked the guy’s ass. But he hadn’t been able to land anything, and I figured I eventually would have. Like I said, twenty-two and stupid.

But there was no husband waiting to jump us, only the cold wind and the blinding sun and the long miles between both of us and the places we had to go next. She kissed me and got out of the cab then leaned in the open window and handed me a slip of paper with her phone number on it. Call her when I got to Cody, she said. Then she was gone, and a half-hour later I was rolling east on the interstate, headed for the high-line and North Dakota.

I got to Cody a lot with that job.

All these years later, I still wonder what I had that she was looking for, beyond the obvious. Did I make her feel young again? Was her old man cold or distant or broken? Was I a fool?

Sure I was. We all are at that age, and maybe at any age.

The night I met my wife, Victoria, at a little Texarkana dive bar behind the Flying-J, I recognized something in her eyes, though I didn’t understand it at the time. She was slinging drinks and her smile lit the place up, her crazy mane of flaming hair drawing my gaze as though it were a moth. But she had to ask me twice if I wanted to hang out and shoot some pool after her shift was over. Older and wiser maybe, or just more scarred, and therefore more scared.

But I agreed that second time. I’m glad I did. No one else could have gotten me playing air-drums on their dashboard while doing my best Diamond Dave doing Ice Cream Man.

I still feel like a piece of shit every time I think about Robin and the husband I never saw. But I also feel good, just like I did twenty years ago. Because that tall redhead with the kind eyes and the sexy shoulders peeking from her blouse cut-outs directed her room-lighting smile toward me the night we met, and thinking about that one day I realized what it was I saw in her eyes, and in Robin’s.

It was them seeing something worthwhile in me, and not being afraid to grab hold of it. And if you ask Victoria, she’ll tell that the good ones don’t let go.

She's right.
 

 
SR