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A short story teaser
Note: This short story is a work in progress, raw, unedited, and unfinished. It is one story in a ten-story series tentatively titles The Character of the Song, based on characters in popular songs. Two stories are complete and in ebook form: Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John and Confession: The True Story of Pancho & Lefty. Follow the link and get them cheap. Following is the unedited opening of Tilly Rae Dunn & The Rainbow Cafe. This story, when completed, will be provided free of charge to paid subscribers. Additionally, my subscribers will receive a signed paperback copy of the finished book.
“Breaker, breaker, 1-9, this is Wild Bill. You there in the rockin’ chair, you got your ears on?”
The metallic voice comes across the CB radio attached beneath the dash of the Shiny red 1974 Peterbilt with the chrome grill and duel chrome stacks, and it sounds like the voice of frying bacon, the way it crackles and pops.
“10-4, there good buddy,” comes the reply from the Peterbilt. “Mighty Mouse in the house and on the air.”
“Mighty good! Mighty good,” answers Wild Bill, who leads a three-truck convoy racing west on Interstate 40, along a lonely, desolate stretch of New Mexico. Wild Bill’s 1972 seafoam blue Kenworth is trimmed in white. The residue of a half-dozen states temporarily dulls the shine of it. Wild Bill hauls a trailer filled with massive rolls of carpet from a Georgia mill. He is lugging it to a wholesaler in Los Angeles.
“10-4,” Wild Bill says. “How ’bout you, Back Door?”
“Ol’ Possum at the back douh,” comes the answer from a voice dipped in the sap of a Georgia Longleaf Pine. “All cleah back heah.”
“We flyin’!” answers Wild Bill, “Nothing ahead but blue skies and cactus, and a cloud the size of your fist over Albuquerque. Oh, and that little sky-blue diner called Rainbow Cafe outside Santa Rosa 20 mile ahead. I need a bite o’ breakfast. Y’all in?”
Time is tight but Wild Bill is hungry, and it is already half past 7 AM, New Mexico time.
“Roger that!” answers Mighty Mouse.
“Negatory,” says Ol’ Possum. “I’m westbound and down, lookin’ fuh that magic mile. See you all on the flip side.”
(The “magic mile” is trucker slang indicating the final mile of a long haul.)
“Roger that, Ol’ Possum. Keep ‘er sunny-side up and between the lines.”
“10-4.”
Tilly Rae Dunn, born in 1941 to Reverend Wade Dunn and his wife Phyllis, is known to some around Santa Rosa as “The Desert Rose” because of her unique blend of vulnerability, often prickly banter, and natural beauty.
“She’s a rose, pure and simple,” says Jimbo Olmstead, a regular at the Rainbow Café, which Tilly Rae owns and serves as cashier, head waitress, and chef. “But them roses, they got thorns. Now, don’t forget that.”
By June 1980, which it happens to be at the time of our story, Jimbo has been courting Tilly Rae for going on two decades to no effect. He is not one, however, to give up so easily.
Jimbo was also born in 1941 but a month before Tilly Rae. This puts them each on the edge of 40, single, and stranded in Santa Rosa.
Well, Tilly Rae is stranded there. Jimbo was more or less planted there. The Olmsteads go nearly as far back in Santa Rosa as the town itself. This town of 2800 or so souls today is stuck between Albuquerque and Amarillo and was christened in 1890.
Ten years later, in 1900, James Olmstead and his wife Maria settled there. James was born in London. Maria was from the state of Chihuahua in Mexico. They met at the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, Texas, and married in that same church three months later. They decided to go west to California to seek their fortune in land and crops, but they got off the train in Santa Rosa.
They never left.
Jimbo (James III) is the oldest grandson of James and Maria Olmstead and a third-generation Santa Rosa citizen.
Maria was an excellent seamstress. Jobs were scarce in Santa Rosa in 1900 (and remained so in 1980), but Maria found work darning socks and mending jackets. Soon, she was commissioned to make custom dresses for local women and pants and shirts for men. She taught James to sew. He was a fast learner.
James opened an upholstery shop. While Maria continued her work as a seamstress, James worked in leather, canvas, and cloth, mending furniture, automobile upholstery, and making canvas tents.
That was all a long time ago.
Jimbo now owns and operates Olmstead Upholstery, which is a Santa Rosa staple but still a business with tight margins and low profits, not unlike the Rainbow Café, where he takes his breakfast and dinner almost every day of the year.
“Tilly Rae,” Jimbo asks, “How do I like my eggs?”
“Over medium,” Tilly sighs. Her voice has a little rasp but is not too high, low, or rough. There is no detectable accent.
Pouring over the morning edition of the Albuquerque Journal, Tilly Rae Dunn leans on the glass-topped counter, near the cash register, nursing a cup of steaming hot, black-as-sin coffee, and holding a Virginia Slim 120 cigarette between the index and middle fingers of her left hand as elegantly as Aubrey Hepburn. If Norman Rockwell could see her like this, she would almost certainly inspire a Saturday Evening Post cover.
In her teal dress with the tight skirt and the top buttoned up to the V-necked white collar, and her white apron tied about her waist, she looks like 1955. Her red heels do nothing to deter from that image any more than the look of the diner that hasn’t changed since it was built in, you guessed it, 1955. Its black-and-white checkered floor; round, glistening, Naugahyde, red stools, which Jimbo’s dad upholstered, with their chrome cylindrical pedestals; small square tables scattered about the dining area; its teal counter, almost the same shade as Tilly’s dress; the Drink Coca-Cola metal sign behind the counter; and the flat-top grill, used for frying eggs and burgers and everything you can fry on the back wall”¦it all feels like yesterday. You wouldn’t be surprised if Elvis or James Dean strolled through the door to order a burger and a coke, except they are dead.
Tilly has that Hepburn look about her, too ““ the short-haired Hepburn vibe, with her brunette hair, doe eyes, and narrow, perfectly symmetrical nose. She is slender with a neck made for kissing, pert breasts, a narrow waist, shoulder-width hips, and sculpted legs. Despite the desert sun, her skin remains fair and her cheeks pinkish. It is little wonder truckers frequent the Rainbow Café in Santa Rosa, on exit 277, on the eastern edge of town.
“And what is this?” Jimbo heckles, forking his egg and lifting it for inspection.
“Over medium,” Tilly replies, arching a manicured eyebrow over the thin ribbon of curling vapor from her Virginia Slim.
“Ain’t done it,” he argues. “I could fly this thing like one of those new frisbees they got now. It’s that solid.”
“Then go outside and fly it,” she huffs wearily. “Or go fly a kite for all I care.”
He shrugs.
“I’ll just add more ketchup.”
He knows it makes her ill to think of ketchup on eggs.
Thus concludes the morning egg conversation, which has been going on between them for nearly 20 years.
“See ya, come supper,” he says on his way out.
“Not if I see you first,” she sings back with a twist of glistening lips.
That is how it goes every morning of the world, except when Jimbo doesn’t show and Tilly refuses to worry or wonder why. At least, she tries to refuse it.
Wearing his customary western fare of snap-button shirt, boot-cut jeans, Tony Llama boots, and Stetson hat, Jimbo squints into the morning sun and blue, clear sky. Facing east, there is not so much as a wisp of a cloud. He palms a Marlboro Red and lights it. Tilly Rae may smoke in her cafe, but Jimbo would never be so presumptuous.
Two big rigs are idling side-by-side on the backside of the gravel parking lot. Their drivers approach the diner, which means they must pass Jimbo.
They look like a mallet and an anvil, these two. The mallet has a board-straight body and a big, square head. The anvil is short and thick but solid.
Cigarette dangling at the corner of his wide, thin mouth, the lean, raw-boned third-generation tailor steps off the porch and tips his hat to the truckers.
“Mornin'”, he says, sizing them up to figure out whether he ought to stay a while longer just in case. He figures not. They seem harmless as doves.
“Leave us anything good to eat?” BIlly “Wild Bill” Yates, the anvil-shaped one, asks with a grin.
“Well, I left you some. You’ll have to judge how good. Don’t expect eggs over medium is all.”
Before either trucker can work out the egg comment, Jimbo passes them and settles into his Silverado. He hangs his elbow out the window and watches through the diner’s plate glass window as Tilly Rae snuffs her cigarette and greets her guests.
“She’ll be alright,” he says to himself. “Nice fellers there.”
He is facing east now and sees the gathering clouds in the distance. He sniffs the air.
“Gonna come a turd-floater,” he says out loud. “Not for a minute though.”
He decides to check in with Tilly via phone later, just because.