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Number Three in the short story series, Character of the Song
West Bound and Down
“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.
“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 dulls it. He 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 flipside.”
(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 1943 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 Cafe©, which Tilly Rae owns and serves as cashier, head waitress, and chef. “But them roses,” he adds, “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 asks her every day if she will marry him. She usually ignores the invitation or quips, “Ask me tomorrow.”
He will, too. He is not one to easily give up on an idea.
Jimbo was also born in 1943 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 burg of 2800 or so souls is stuck between Albuquerque and Amarillo. It was christened Santa Rosa 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.
Grandmother Maria was an excellent seamstress. Jobs were scarce in Santa Rosa in 1900 (and remain 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.
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.
The content below was originally paywalled.
Over Medium
“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 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 skirt; the Drink Coca-Cola metal sign behind the counter; and the flat-top grill, used for frying eggs, 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 Cafe© 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. He is greeted by two big rigs idling on the backside of the gravel parking lot.
The truckers amble towards the cafe. They look like a mallet and an anvil. 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, 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.
Isolated but unforgotten in the dim back corner booth, Eli Abernathy, proprietor of Abernathy Five & Dime on Main Street, and Justice Warren, Guadalupe County’s longest-tenured deputy sheriff shoot the shit.
Abernathy is 67 years old, grizzled, and lean with bushy eyebrows and beady eyes. He wears a well-worn gray fedora; a white dress shirt at least 10 years old, less bright than it once was, buttoned at the throat; coal-black trousers high on his waist and short at his ankles; and black dress shoes that shine like an Onyx gemstone.
Sergeant Warren is 63 and bull-like, muscled from years of faithful weightlifting. He is not as thick as he once was but solid as an Alabaman’s belief in the Crimson Tide. Warren is from Mobile, Alabama, where everybody knows everything about everything, and nobody has learned anything new in several generations.
“Nobody likes you,” Abernathy says to his friend Warren.
“I’d like a second opinion,” Warren wryly replies.
“There ain’t one to be had because ‘nobody’ in this case means ‘everybody’.”
“And they elected you spokesman, I guess?”
“More like an appointment than election.”
“More of a disappointment, from my view,” Warren concludes.
He wipes his mouth and drops the napkin onto his empty plate.
“Whose turn is it to pay?”
“Mine,” Abernathy sighs.
“Gotta scoot. See ya tomorrow.”
“Yuh. See ya then.”
“Sit anywhere you like,” Tilly Rae greets the truckers. “I’ll be right with you.”
They nod and look about the place before choosing the table in front by the plate glass window.
She smiles at Sergeant Warren who pecks her on the cheek on his way by.
“See you tomorrow,” he says.
She wipes her hands on her apron and attends to the cash register, where Abernathy waits, toothpick bouncing in the corner of his mouth, then disappearing and reemerging at the opposite corner.
Abernathy wiggles his bushy brows at Tilly Rae while she tallies the morning fare.
“What you need is a kid or two. Still not pregnant, I take it?”
She takes his ten and hands him change.
“Still not,” she sighs.
“I’m free Thursday,” he grins.
She touches her forehead with her elegant fingers and closes her eyes like she has a headache.
“Well, think on it, sweetheart.” Then, he leans in and whispers, after looking over his shoulder at the truckers, “Want me to stay?”
“I want you to go sell a trinket or two so you can afford breakfast in two days when it’s your turn to pay.”
“You sure? I’ll stay”
“I’m fine. See you tomorrow.”
Tilly Rae strikes a waitress pose between the truckers like a million other waitresses across America might do but unlike any of the others, too, because none of them look like Aubrey Hepburn on the cover of LIFE magazine. Most do not possess that rare air of being accessible, familiar, and untouchable. It is not intentional, but it evokes desire, admiration, and aspiration in the males around her. Most view her as a rare gallery piece to be admired and discussed but above their station.
“What’ll it be?” she asks
Billy “Wild Bill” Yates replies, “The special for me with black coffee and a glass of water.”
“Bacon or sausage?
“Is it patty or link?”
“Patty.”
“Sausage, then.”
“Sourdough, white, or wheat?”
“Sourdough, please.”
“Hash browns or grits?”
“Hash browns, scattered and crispy.”
“How do you want your eggs?”
“Over medi”¦er, scrambled.”
Tilly Rae puts her fist on her hip, pencil in the fist.
“I take it you ran into Jimbo in the parking lot?”
Billy grins sheepishly.
“He told you not to get the eggs over medium.”
Billy shrugs and both truckers grin.
“He doesn’t know over medium from over the Niagara, which is where he oughtta go”¦in a barrel”¦with the lid nailed shut.”
“Over medium, please.”
She shakes her head and writes something on the pad, presumably not a cuss word.
“And you?”
Sam Perkins, the mallet-shaped one who calls himself Mighty Mouse on the CB, answers, “Same as him but bacon crispy.”
She takes the menus, delivers the coffee and water, and heads off to cook their breakfast. Dropping by the jukebox, she fires it up with the Eagles “Take It Easy,” which always reminds her of hitting the open road, which she longs to do and which she did once but was abandoned in Santa Rosa. That was a lifetime ago.
The men admire that her cooking moves are in step with the music. They watch as if they are seated orchestra-level at the opera house, mesmerized by a Russian ballet dancer. Add the smell of frying bacon to the atmosphere and you have a trucker’s dreams.
When she delivers the plates, the first thing they each do is test the egg with a fork and knife.
“Geez, this is perfectly over medium,” says Perkins. Yates agrees.
Her patented smirk greets the compliment.
“I am glad you like them. People ought not get too much of their information from Jimbo Olmstead. He is not all there.”
They chuckle.
“Say,” says Wild Bill curiously, “I know this sounds trite, but what in the good earth is a girl of your obvious qualities doing waitressing in a dive in a one-horse town? Did you get lost on the way to Hollywood?”
“Left, not lost,” she retorts quick as a hiccup. “I was left here.”
The sudden sadness in her voice is augmented with a dash of bitterness and a hint of yearning.
“Sumbitch,” offers Perkins with a bite of bread sopped in the yellow of the egg stuffed in his jaw.
“Exactly,” she says and returns to her stool behind the counter, indicating her clear intent to entertain the discussion no further. She lights a cigarette, picks up the opened newspaper, and reads the article about the death of author Henry Miller.
Summer of Love
The summer of 1960 was a wild one in the United States. There was civil unrest, and racial tension. Winds of change blew against the American flag and the idyllic appearance of suburban life in the 1950s. The clarion voice of Martin Luther King called for equality for minorities. He urged and led a peaceful resistance. John F Kennedy, the fresh-faced senator with the power of the orator and mystique of Camelot on his side captured America’s imagination and road a tide of enthusiasm into the White House. For the first time, the Summer Olympics were covered on live television. They were held in Rome Italy. Dallas, Texas was getting not one but two professional football teams. The Dallas Texans of the American Football League and the Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League each called the Cotton Bowl home. The Texans, owned by Lamar Hunt and coached by soon-to-be-legendary Hank Stram moved to Kansas City the next year.
None of that meant much to Tilly Rae. Sure, racial tensions were high in Texas where she lived and her parents were old-school segregationists and hard-shelled Baptists, but Tilly Rae was young and in love with the free-spirited Francisco “Cisco” Ramirez, a boy of mixed blood, his father being Mexican and his mother Irish-Scots. He had frizzy red hair, freckles to beat the band, a lean, muscular build, and played the guitar and smoked Marijuana, which in 1960 was becoming a thing for American youth. Cisco had the good stuff, Mexican weed, that smelled like a skunk but freed the mind. He was a singer-songwriter bound for LA and bound to take the cute Baptist girl whom he had yet to deflower with him.
She was seventeen, as cool as the other side of the pillow, and madly in love with Cisco and freedom. For too long, she had lived under the heavy thumb of her father. Too long her father had preached fire, brimstone, and spittle on her while she sat beside her mother in the front row of their church. That became a source of sore embarrassment as she entered her teens, sitting in the front row. Her friends gathered like a covey of quail near the back of the sanctuary, a safe distance from the prying eyes of their mothers.
Tilly Rae was saved, baptized, and ready to fly. Every time the congregations sang, “I’ll fly away, o glory, I’ll fly away” she did, right there in the pew, in her mind, in her spirit, she gripped Cisco’s hand and flew away to Los Angeles or maybe even San Francisco, the land of dreams and dope.
In the boisterous summer of 1960, 17-year-old Tilly Rae Dunn slipped through her second-story window, which overlooked the front porch roof of the parsonage. She carried a sleeping bag stolen from her father’s closet and a small suitcase borrowed without permission from her mother. The suitcase was pink and hard-shelled. Inside it was packed with makeup, toiletry items, night clothes, four dresses, and a pair of culottes. She was not allowed to wear jeans, pants, or shorts. She planned to change that. She had only $20 to her name, which she had saved over the past month. That also happened to be the most money she had ever possessed at one time.
Onto the thick branch of the front yard pecan tree, she stepped from the porch roof, then worked her way expertly to the ground. Her 21-year-old dreamboat boyfriend Cisco, the coolest cat in Cool, Texas – a tiny town west of Fort Worth, where her father pastored – waited in his Volkswagen bug in a stand of Oaks at the end of the block, smoking a joint and humming a tune he was writing in his head”¦
And did you slip and fall
Into my dream
And were you playing
In the stream
Of consciousness”¦
“Ugh that’s not it.”
He erased every line but the first two. He thought he was onto something there.
Cisco and Tilly Rae made love on a lonely road outside Amarillo, where they stopped to stretch. Tilly Rae was bent backward conforming to the trunk, which was warm because the VW engine is in the car’s rear, so the trunk is the hood. It was her first time. It was not the romantic moment she imagined or hoped. It was hurried, awkward, and disappointing, at least for her. She didn’t know. Maybe it was the same for him, as well.
She bled and wept. Cisco tried to comfort her, to reassure her. She did not want to talk about that or anything else. She was already homesick and sorry she had agreed to run away with him. She fell asleep and slept all the way to Santa Rosa.
Cisco used Tilly Rae’s $20 to get them a room at the Goodnight Lodge, a motor hotel off the highway a mile, and not a half mile from the Rainbow Cafe. Tilly Rae was in a state of remorse and seething anger. What she thought was love led to a doobie-fueled unceremonious screw against a beat-up VW bug. It was nothing close to her dreams of love.
Cisco suggested he would let her have the room and the bed and he would sleep in the car. He expected her to say no to that.
She did not.
The next morning, feeling bad about leaving him in the car all night, but having slept fitfully herself, she intended to urge him to sleep a while in the bed before they traveled on to California. She would go to that diner while he slept and get them a bite to eat.
He was gone. No sign of him. She waited all day and into the night. She had no money to rent the room again but the old woman at the desk took pity and told her to keep it another night or as long as she needed it. They would settle up later. She didn’t sleep at all that night or the next and were it not for the kindness of Hattie Mae Winslow, the old woman who ran the hotel, she would not have eaten either.
On the third day, same number as Jesus lay in the grave, there was no resurrection of hope, no sign of Cisco.
“Ye gonna hafta call yer folks, honey. There ain’t nothin’ for it but that. That boy ain’t comin’ back, He’s gone onto Californy without ye and I am right sorry to say it.”
Tilly Rae sobbed hard for an hour, her face planted in Hattie’s lap. Hattie rocked her patiently on the edge of the hotel bed.
“There, there, darlin’. Let it all out. There, there.”
She kept saying it until Tilly Rae had, in fact, let it all out.
The girl dried her tears, washed her face, applied a little lipstick, and never shed another tear for Cisco or any other boy.
She borrowed the hotel phone and called her father.
“Oh, Daddy! I am so sorry. I am so sorry,” she cried.
“You ran off with that Mexican like a common whore. You’re his now and no daughter of mine. Never call this house again and do not darken my door as long as I live.”
The words were like the boulder Roadrunner dropped on the head of Wile E Coyote. They flattened her. She was breathless, wordless, homeless, and lost.
Somewhere, her mother screamed bloody murder at her father but would not go against his word. That much Tilly Rae knew. She may as well be orphaned. Her father may as well be dead, although she could not bring herself to wish that upon him.
Now what?
“You got a room here as long as I’m alive,” Hattie assured her. “But I got very little in the way of money. I can’t support ye, darlin’. You walk yourself up to the Rainbow and tell Ol’ Buck Henry I says give you a job and do it now. He needs the help and you need the work. It’ll get you a little money and take yore mind of these troubles.”
Tilly Rae did not want to work in a cafe but nodded anyway.
“And about yore daddy. Baptists be funny about sin sometimes. They get all self-righteous and forget how Jesus loved people who made bad decisions, like Magdalene the whore and that wee Zacchaeus the no-good tax man. They forget who Jesus is because they are afraid to face what is bound up in their wicked selves. Go on now. See Buck Henry and tell him what I said. Shoo.”
The Rainbow Cafe©, a History
Buck Henry was an elderly black man and a cook. He had worked in diners up and down Highway 66 from St. Louis to Winslow.
The kindly Jewish octogenarian, Jakob Levy, founded and owned the cafe. He had no children. His wife was dead. His siblings and other family had reconvened in Israel and settled there. He wrote his will on a napkin in two sentences.
“My house, my car, my bank account, such as it is, and my business The Rainbow Cafe, I leave to my faithful employee and friend Buck Henry. I am, of course, of sound mind and so-so body. “
Levy gave the napkin to the other Jewish proprietor in town, Samuel Phillip Silverstein, of the S.P Silverstein & Associates law firm. Silverstein put it into legal terms and kept it for Jakob, not telling Buck or anyone else about it until Jakob died in 1958. The cafe, the rickety, rundown house with paint peeling and wood rotting, and the rusted-out 1955 Dodge pickup went to Buck.
Buck would forever say after that, “I don’t know if he liked me or not. Did he want me to have it, or couldn’t he give it away? However it was, I own it now.”
Buck hired Tilly Rae on the spot and always claimed he would have done it even if not given strict orders by Hattie Mae Winslow. Buck schooled Tilly Rae in the ways of the roadside diner. She learned to be a waitress, short-order cook, and bookkeeper, not to mention counselor and entertainer of diners. When Buck’s diabetes took his left foot and most of his eyesight, Tilly Rae faithfully ran the cafe. She threw herself into the life thrust upon her, pushing all thoughts of Cisco and Cool, Texas to the far corners of her consciousness. She toughened up. Her heart hardened itself against disappointment, betrayal, and abandonment.
Reverend Dunn refused to lighten his stance on Tilly Rae. Not thinking how her father’s stubbornness was genetically passed to her, Tilly Rae, in turn, refused to make further efforts at reconciliation with her parents. They remained estranged.
In September 1965, Buck Henry died at age 65. Tilly saw to the arrangements. A crowd of more than 300 crowded the Living Water Church of God in Christ to pay their last respects to the best short-order cook any of them ever knew. The church capacity, counting pews, choir loft, vestibule, and all aisles was about 275. How 300 people wedged themselves into the church was a topic of spirited debate for months.
Buck did as Jakob Levy before him. With his family either in Georgia or dead, the lifelong bachelor left the diner to his faithful friend and employee, Tilly Rae Dunn.
She put Tilly Rae Dunn, Proprietor in vinyl letters above the double glass entry doors. She had made something good out of the bad way she was left in New Mexico.
She wrote in the diary Hattie Mae gave her on her 17th birthday, “September 28, 1965: You can leave me to rot but I won’t. I was petrified when you left me but petrified won’t rot.”
Tilly Rae kept dreaming of LA. The postcard Cisco gave her in 1960 inviting her to run away with him featured twin Palm trees in the foreground, with the city behind them in the distance against the backdrop of a brilliant sunset over the Pacific. It looked like Paradise to Tilly.
Cisco had written on the card, “Tilly Rae, be my love and share my life on sunny beaches.”
She often pulled the card from the pink suitcase where she kept it along with other papers and memorabilia – her mother sent her birth certificate to her care of the diner shortly after her father disowned her.
Tilly Rae would eventually understand that even in his stab at romance, it was all about him. “Share my life” he had written.
“Screw your life,” she always said before putting the postcard and her broken dreams back into the pink suitcase.
Redemption
One month to the day after Buck Henry died in his sleep, Phyllis Dunn walked into The Rainbow Cafe. She looked exactly like her daughter but with silver hair, sad tracks from the corner of her eyes, carved into her flesh by rivers of tears and squinting against an unforgiving Texas sun.
Tilly Rae, stunned to see her mother, dropped a stack of plates, which made an awful racket and caused the half-dozen diners to jump and one PTSD-addled soldier to dive onto the floor.
Phyllis and Tilly Rae hugged for a long time, each woman weeping on the other’s neck.
“I’m sorry, Mama.”
“No, no, no, no. I’m sorry, Tilly Rae. I should have come for you.”
The old, weathered house that first belonged to Jakob Levy and then to Buck was now Tilly’s. She was renovating it with Jimbo’s help, replacing rotting wood, and giving it a fresh coat of paint. Furnishings were spare.
Tilly Rae took her mother home with her and they talked for a long time that night over two pitchers of coffee. She learned of her father’s fate.
Pastor Dunn was in good form, eloquent and passionate four Sundays ago. He declared the certainty of death in his sermon on repentance, quoting Hebrews 9:27 from the King James Bible. His voice roared like a lion king’s. He gripped the thin wooden top of the podium on either side so tightly that the muscles and veins in his forearms looked like the stone rendering of a Greek god’s arms.
“It is appointed unto man once to die!” Brother Dunn shouted, visibly vibrating. He held the podium in a death grip. His body went stiff, his eyes rolled, foam bubbled at the corners of his mouth, and he broke off chunks of the podium in his hands, held them aloft, and toppled backward. The sick thud the 50 or so stunned congregants heard was the back of Brother Dunn’s skull cracking against the wood flooring of the platform. He had fallen back as stiff as a statue and dead as a doorknob. The doctor said it was the Widow-Maker that got him. The clogged artery burst, and he was dead before he hit the floor.
“I know he regretted talking to you the way he did. He was so distraught. The very thing he preached so hard against – pride – held him in its vise grip. If he had only lived”¦”
Phyllis lived with Tilly Rae until she died in 1969. She spent every day loving on her daughter, making up for lost time. She died peacefully in her sleep.
Here Comes that Rainbow!
Back to today, June 7, 1980.
Wild Bill and Mighty Mouse feel bad. They can see they touched a nerve. They eat in silence. She warms up their coffee. They nod thanks. She returns to the counter, her half-smoked cigarette, and the newspaper. She snuffs the cigarette and waves off the wisps of smoke when she spots the two boys hop-skipping across the parking lot toward the diner. They are dirty, unkempt, and barefoot. The hot asphalt does not affect them.
The bell tied with a ribbon to the inside door handle rings as the bigger of the two boys pushes it open.
Every time the bell jangles, she thinks of her mom. The bell was Phyllis’s idea. She also thinks of their favorite Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, which the Santa Rosa Picture Show runs every Christmas.
“Every time a bell rings, an angel gets her wings,” she whispers. “Thanks, mama.”
The oldest boy, a wiry-haired carrot top with freckles and crystal blue eyes props his elbows on the glass counter, which is neck high to him, rests his chin on his crossed wrists, and looks up at Tilly Rae. A wry grin on his face like he just spotted the grand prize at a carnival ring toss, he makes cow eyes at her.
“You’re pretty,” he says.
She shakes her head. Boys”
The smaller boy stands back, not cowering but not bold like the first. While the bigger boy has Irish in his genes, the little one has a mop of dark hair and olive skin. His eyes are chocolate brown. Maybe Italian descent, she thinks.
“What’s your name?”
“My name’s James McClintock,, but Granny calls me Jimmy Jump-Up, ’cause I can’t be still very long. This is my half-brother Oliver. We got the same mama but different daddies. Granny calls him “O-Boy,” on account of he says, ‘Oh boy’ a lot.”
“I see. Why is this the first time I have seen you around here then?”
“Well, we just come to town last week, come to live with Granny ’cause Mama is sick and maybe dying and Granny is taking care of her and us.”
“That’s a lot for a grandmother. Where is your father?”
“He’s in jail for selling dope. Granny says he’s a good-for-nothin’.”
“And O-Boy’s father?”
Jimmy Jump-Up shrugs.
“Not sure who he is, and it was a real bone of contention between Mama and Daddy.”
“I bet.”
She smiles at the little one, who still stands back, hands in his pockets. They both wear worn-out jeans with the cuffs turned up. Jimmy has a slouching striped t-shirt with a hole gouged in it , revealing his navel. Oliver has a dingy white t-shirt with “Carlsbad” in cursive on the front of it.
“What can I do for you?”
“Granny says you might have some sandwich stuff we can buy on her account, so she can make us lunch.”
“Who is your Granny?”
“Hattie Mae Winslow is her name.”
“I thought so. Wait here. Don’t move.”
“Yes’m.”
Tilly Rae fills two paper grocery bags with sausage, bacon, flour, sugar, loaves of bread, and eggs.
“Now, you must not drop these on the way home and you tell your Granny they are on the house. You got that? No charge. If she needs anything else, she just needs to let me know.”
Jimmy Jump-up nods furiously.
Both boys have been studying the assortment of candies on the two glass shelves of the counter.
“Missum, how much is them candies?” Jimmy asks.
O-Boy perks up, his eyes opening wide as he studies the candies.
“How much you got?” she asks.
He pulls a dirt-streaked right hand out of his pocket and opens his palm to reveal a shiny quarter.
“Where did you get that? From Granny?”
“No Ma’am, fount it on your parkin’ lot just a minute ago.”
“Well, luck would have it, them candies are two for a quarter.”
“Oh boy!” shrieks Oliver clapping his hands and putting his face to the glass.
Jimmy Jump-Up dances a little jig and picks the last Cherry Mash. O-Boy points to the big, swirly, multi-colored lollipop.
“Those are excellent choices. I will put the candies in the bag ,and you are not to touch them until these groceries are safely in the hands of Hattie Mae, understood?”
“Yes’m!”
Tilly Rae stands by the front door watching two delighted barefoot urchins skip across the burning asphalt and head for the Goodnight Lodge to deliver the treasures.
When she returns, feeling 10 feet tall for finally finding a substantial way to repay the kindness Hattie Mae showed her when she was an abandoned, frightened teen alone in a strange world.
“Them candies ain’t two for a quarter,” observes Wild Bill.
“What’s it to ya?” she fires back.
She washes the truckers’ dishes while they study their bill. Before she can return to the table to collect, the truckers are out the door, Wild Bill in his Stetson and Might Mouse in his trucker’s cap.
They are climbing in their rigs when Tilly Rae rushes out the door after them.
“Hey, you!” she cries, waving two hundred-dollar bills frantically over her head. “You left too much money!”
“What’s it to ya?” Bill grins as he closes the door and puts his rig into gear.
Thunder claps. Lightning flashes off the shiny hoods of the two rigs. They grumble into motion. Wild Bill and Mighty Mouse tug on their horns and wave goodbye to the now-soaked proprietress of the Rainbow Cafe©.
She looks down at the two crisp hundred-dollar bills in her hand. They will ruin in the rain if she isn’t careful. She tucks them into the pocket of her apron. She adds her tears to the raindrops rolling down her cheeks.
Already, the fast-moving storm is passing. She looks west at the trucks headed west where she still longs to go. She sees the rainbow.
An hour later, Jimbo strolls through the door. He needs to make sure she is ok.
“I know I’m early and” he starts.
She circles the counter, lowering her head like a rodeo bull staring down a clown. She looks at him from beneath her trim eyebrows. Her long lashes flutter.
“Hold out your arms,” she commands. “Wide.”
“What the”
He shrugs and holds his arms perpendicular to his body, like a man on a Cross.
She nods and rushes to him, mashes her body to his, hugs him desperately, and sobs like that lost teenage girl from so long ago. Jimbo is knocked back a half step. He is also stunned for a moment. Stunned stiff. He gathers himself and hugs her back just as desperately. Palms the back of her head. Feels her firm, slender body pressed to his hardened frame.
“There, there” he whispers. “There, there.”
“Ask me one more time, Jimbo,” she sniffles. “One more time.”
She kisses his throat, thinking of wasted years and rainbows.
He is baffled.
“Ask you one”¦you mean”¦marry me? Ask you will you marry me?”
His heart pounds on his rib cage like a caged gorilla, threatening to leap through his chest.
Tilly Rae Dunn hears her mother’s voice in her head, what she said about her stubborn father: If he had only lived.
No one could say that about his daughter, Tilly Rae Dunn. Not anymore. Not ever again.
“Tilly Rae Dunn,” Jimbo, squeezing her like a drowning man clinging for life to a piece of driftwoon, “Will you marry me?”
“Yes! Yes, today. Right now, Jimbo. Marry me and take me to LA for our honeymoon. I want to stroll barefoot on Malibu beach tonight “with you.”
Inspiration
This story was inspired by Here Comes That Rainbow Again, written and recorded by Kris Kristofferson.
The scene was a small roadside cafe©
The waitress was sweepin’ the floor
Two truck drivers drinkin’ their coffee
And two okie kids by the door
“How much are them candies?” They asked her
“How much have you got?” She replied
“We’ve only a penny between us”
“Them’s two for a penny, ” she lied
And the daylight grew heavy with thunder
With the smell of the rain on the wind
Ain’t it just like a human?
Here comes that rainbow again
One truck driver called to the waitress
After the kids went outside
“Them candies ain’t two for a penny”
“So what’s it to you?” She replied
In silence, they finished their coffee
Then got up and nodded goodbye
She called, “Hey, you left too much money”
“So what’s it to you?” They replied
And the daylight was heavy with thunder
With the smell of the rain on the wind
Ain’t it just like a human?
Here comes that rainbow again
Here Comes That Rainbow Again lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC