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Sitting here in the half-dark with Garth Brooks singing at me, it might be the stale cigarette haze causing my eyes to water. It might be that, but then again it might be something else. I’m wondering how I come to be at this table in a North Little Rock bar. Me, Elzie Timmons, who don’t hardly ever even go into bars. Look at me, working on a bottle of beer, the number of which I already lost count. Jukebox music’s pounding, but it’s not near loud enough to drown out the voice that keeps worrying at me. You see, it’s all on account of a woman. Why did I ever bring her into this place? It might have been an accident, but again, maybe it was meant to be. Just maybe, it was meant to be. I never met anyone like her in my whole life, and now she’s gone. Walked right out that door over there and left me trying to fix a broke heart by pouring Budweiser on it. You ever try that? I’m here to tell you it don’t work worth a darn. This all started one morning awhile back when I stopped off at the Waffle House for breakfast. I was going to work like I do every morning except on Sundays when I’m off and I can sleep late. I been working as a roofer for Buster Goins. Buster, he runs a three-man crew and he has work for us most all of the time. He don’t get any of them big, new subdivision jobs, but he works cheap and there’s always somebody needing a new set of shingles on account of there’s been a windstorm or maybe the roof is old and just starts in to leaking for reasons nobody knows about. When I walked into the Waffle House that morning I saw right off they had a new waitress. The counter seats were filled up and I had to set at one of them little window tables that’s not hardly as big as a spread-out newspaper. The napkin holder and the salt and pepper shakers and the cream and sugar packets and the tobasco sauce bottle with the toothpicks takes up most of the room and it’s all you can do to eat a meal on one. I was trying to decide between eggs and bacon or a ham omelet. This new waitress I mentioned brings me a cup of coffee and pulls her pad out to write my order on it like they always do. She’s a pretty little blonde girl, the fact of which didn’t escape my notice the minute I walked in the door. What I didn’t see when I walked in was two things. No, it was three things. One, her eyes were brown, about the shade of flue-cured tobacco. Two, she had her a build that would stop traffic on the I-40 off-ramp. And three, she walked with a limp on account of one of her legs being shorter than the other one. The nametag on her blouse said Ruthie. "Are you ready to order?" she asked me, her voice soft and kind of timid sounding like she was afraid she was going to be yelled at. There wasn’t no smile on her face and she seemed nervous like waiting tables was a new and trying experience for her. I never thought much about it before but I couldn’t see anything about waiting tables to make a person nervous. You just find out what it is people want and then you bring it to them. It’s not exactly like nailing shakes seven inches to the weather on a hip roof. "Yes, Maam," I said. I give her a smile and tried to look friendly which ain’t always easy for me to do because I have a face that’s been known to scare little children. I was in a car wreck nine years ago when I was fourteen, and my face went into the windshield sudden-like. It left me with this long purplish scar down one cheek that’s mashed in some on account of broken bones that couldn’t be straightened out all the way. That was before I learned to buckle-up when I got into a car, which I’ve made a habit of doing ever since. "I believe I’ll have the ham omelet," I said, giving her the benefit of my lop-sided grin. She wrote it on her pad and I could see her taking a couple of quick looks at my face, the bad side being turned toward her. She hurried off without saying anything else, and I felt a kind of ache for her when she hoppity-skipped back behind the counter. You see, she had a lost and hunted way about her that made me want to hold her and comfort her. I didn’t have no idea that she needed holding and comforting, but that was what was in my mind. When I was a boy a stray Beagle pup showed up in our yard, hair full of burrs, ribs like a Jeep grill. It cringed on the ground whining at me. The tender feeling I had for that pup was what I felt about Ruthie. I’ve seen lots of pretty girls in cafes and places, the way you always do, but this was the first one to give me a case of the flutters like I had then. It wasn’t altogether that I felt sorry for her, which I did in a way. It was because her having a gimpy leg seemed to make the rest of her that much more beautiful. You know what I’m saying? It’s like finding buttercups in the pasture in the middle of cow pies. Well, maybe not exactly like that, but you see what I mean. I never had much to do with girls, and girls never had much to do with me on account of my face being the way it is. Even girls who seemed friendly were out of reach to my way of figuring. All I could think about when I was talking to them was that bodacious purple scar I knew they were looking at. But somehow my face didn’t seem so important when this girl Ruthie was standing next to me. It wasn’t but three or four days before Ruthie begin to smile at me in the mornings. I’d say things to try to get a conversation started, like, "It looks like it’s going to be a nice day," and she’d just smile and wouldn’t say nothing except, "Are you ready to order?" But I had the feeling that she was glad to see me even if she was too bashful to let on. Well, finally, I asked her for a date and she agreed. We took in a movie and neither one of us said much that first time. We looked at each other a lot but couldn’t seem to get the conversation past "It sure was a good movie" and "Yes, it was." Then talking got to be easier for us the second time. We set over coffee after the show and it was like one of those frog-strangler summer rains the way she opened up. She told me how I was the first man she ever felt comfortable enough with to go on a date, how when she was in school kids would mimic her walk and how she’d been afraid all her life that people would laugh at her—things like that. I almost cried listening to her because I knew plenty about those same kinds of feelings and about lonesome. Me and lonesome were well acquainted, I can tell you. Just being with Ruthie made that by-yourself feeling fade right out of my mind. Ruthie and me became lovers before long. She said we couldn’t never go to her house on account of her daddy and mama being there, so we always went to my place. It’s a rent trailer I pay $275 a month for in Landers’ Mobile Home Park. The trailer’s old and just ten-wide by forty, but she didn’t seem to mind any of that. She told me her heart was overflowing with joy. Overflowing was the word she used, and I know my heart was, too. We never talked about our disabilities during our times together. You crawl into a bed with Ruthie and disabilities would be the last thing to cross your mind. We went on like that for several weeks. I’d pick her up when I got off work, and maybe we’d go to a movie or maybe we’d just go straight to my place, depending on our state of mind at the time. It was one of those times when we were at my place, just laying there relaxed and enjoying the quiet and the nearness of each other when she said, "Elzie, you’ve made me a different person." I turned on my side and looked at her, wondering what it was she meant. "Before you started talking to me at the Waffle House and asked me for a date, all I could think about was how ugly I was and how somebody might laugh at me. I never thought anybody could love me." She put her arm around me right then and pulled real close. "I used to cry at night thinking I’d never know what it was like to be with a man. You changed all that for me. Thank you, Elzie." I tell you, it made me feel important somehow, even valuable, feelings the likes of which I’d never had before. That was one night I won’t never forget. Ruthie wasn’t the same shy little mouse that she was when we first met. I could see by the way she smiled and talked to customers at the Waffle House that she had a higher opinion of herself than she did before. I’d changed some, myself, and I was giving some serious thought to marriage. It’s funny how we came to go dancing that night… I mean tonight. It just seems like it was a long time ago. We were in my truck at the time, just cruising around with the windows down, enjoying the night air, and she told me she’d never drank a beer in her whole life. I pulled in at The Lucky Spot on account of it being the first bar we came to and it having that big ace of spades up on the front in neon lights and all. We set in the truck a minute just listening to some old lonesome Merle Haggard song drifting through the windows from the jukebox inside. She said to me kind of wistful-like, "Something else I’ve never done is dance." I tell you, it almost broke my heart to hear her say that. I never thought about it before, but here was a girl twenty years old, feeling the music inside her all her life, wanting to dance but too shy and too scared to do it. I came near to crying. It was crowded inside, crowded and noisy and kind of dark, and several couples were dancing in a space that wasn’t hardly as big as the living room in my trailer. We found us a table and I went to the bar and got us a couple of Buds. Ruthie set there nursing her beer, kind of getting used to the taste of it and all. Fiddle and guitar music was playing and couples were whirling and stomping, having theirselves a good time. Ruthie was watching them, smiling, seeming to enjoy herself, and directly she said, "I want to try it, Elzie. Let’s you and me dance." Well, that just shows you how much she’d come out of her shell. I guess I was more nervous about it than she was, seeing how I wasn’t much of a hand at dancing myself. I took her by the hand and led her out among the other couples. I held her close to me with my arm around her, and at first we just stood there swaying to the music, letting the beat kind of grow on us. It was kind of awkward when we started moving, on account of her dipping down and then up every other step, but pretty soon we got the hang of it and we whirled around like the rest of the people were doing. Ruthie’s eyes were lit up and her smile just about tore my heart right out of my chest. It was right then I felt somebody tap me on the shoulder, and this cowboy fella wearing a black hat says, "Mind if I cut in, Podner?" Hell yes, I minded, but I didn’t say nothing, just stood there and watched while Ruthie, still smiling, went into his arms without missing a beat. I felt like a cedar post standing out there in the middle of the room by myself, so I edged back off the dance floor. That was when I noticed the cowboy had one leg shorter than the other. His was opposite of Ruthie’s, and the two of them looked smooth as silk out there on account of both of them dipping at the same time. It was beautiful to see. I mean, I was feeling like the third pig at a two-pig trough, but them two danced like they was welded together. First thing you know other couples were standing back watching them. Ruthie was so beautiful and happy looking people couldn’t take their eyes off her. They just kept on dancing, one record right after another. Bad as I wanted to, it just wasn’t in me to go out there and cut in on them. I could tell Ruthie was having the time of her life and I didn’t want to spoil it for her. I got me another bottle at the bar and went back to our table where Ruthie’s beer was getting flat. After about forty minutes and one more beer, Ruthie and the cowboy stopped dancing and stood with their heads together talking for a minute. Then she came by herself over to where I was setting. She stood there and looked at me with a kind of sad smile, and I got this sick feeling about what was coming. Finally she laid her fingers gentle-like on the bad side of my face and she said, "I’m sorry, Elzie," and she left. Just walked over and took that old boy’s arm and they went hippity-hopping out the door, the two of ‘em out of sync on account of both of their outside legs being short. My hand went to my cheek where Ruthie’d touched it, and I set there all hollowed-out inside, trying to remember the touch and the sight of her. It come to me how a gambler must feel when his lucky streak runs out. He sees all his winnings being raked in by the player on the other side of the table, in this case a gimp-legged cowboy in a black hat, and he realizes that making the big kill was all a dream—a dream he fooled himself into believing. That was nearly three hours ago, and I’m still looking for salvation in a amber bottle. I keep thinking they might come back, and she’ll sit across the table from me and tell me it was all a mistake on her part and ask me to take her home. But there doesn’t seem to be much reason to hang onto those thoughts now, the bartender telling me to drink up on account of he wants to close. I believe I’ll just try Shoney’s for breakfast in the morning. |
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