From The Mouths of Truckers
Keep trucking with On The Road Again by Willie Nelson
We sit next to each other at the counter. It is 5:30 AM on a Tuesday in October. He motions to the waitress, Donna Marie, in the mustard yellow uniform that his coffee mug is empty, and while she grabs the glass coffee pot being kept warm on the top of the brewer, he brackets his mug with three Coffee-Mate pods on the left side and three packets of Sweet N Low on the right side. Donna Marie fills his cup with professional speed and raises her eyebrows at me. I shake my head no and return my attention to Beagle who is in the midst of his ritual of prepping his coffee by alternating creamer and sweetener from the top down.
When he is done he says,
“You did right. You be proud. You ain’t got nothing to say sorry for.”
He slurps a sip of the coffee. His real name is Pete but they call him Beagle because he looks like one of the robbers who is always trying to get to Scrooge McDuck’s money; a body built for type 2 diabetes, no hair under his grimy John Deere cap, and a shadow covering the lower half of his face. His look is perfected by black-rimmed glasses that slide down his nose and make him look older than he is.
“The way I figure you need to be sad. You ain’t gonna put the grief behind if you ain’t do the work. You gotta deny and be angry and bargain and be sad before you can accept she’s gone. Ain’t nobody can tell ya when it’s gonna pop up or how long it’s gonna take.”
He stretches out his arms as if to push away from the counter. It makes his belly jiggle like an oceanic earthquake. He sighs at the release of his lower back and looks at me.
“Wasn’t selfish. You did what ya had to do. Can’t pour from an empty cup. Don’t let nobody say different.”
He leans forward again and the white and blue flannel shirt struggles to stay tucked into his heavy duty cargo pants. While he catches the eye of Donna Marie who has enjoyed a quiet moment of inspecting her long red nails for chipping he says,
“You need to feel the pain, but don’t pitch no tent there. If you don’t feel it, you can’t heal it, is what they say. I listen to podcasts.”
Donna Marie comes over to our spot, brings out her order pad from the pocket of her apron and a short pencil from behind her left ear that I guess I did not notice because it has the same ash blonde color as her pristine beehive. It is not often I meet left-handed waitresses. She adds up Beagle’s check and puts it face down on the counter in front of him.
He lifts it up to squint at the amount through his slid-down glasses while he rummages around his pants’ pocket for some cash. He leaves two five dollar bills and two one dollar bills and a quarter and a dime for his sausage and eggs and the coffee plus Donna Marie’s tip.
“Now, you do you. Ain’t nobody else to do it. Don’t be bullied and don’t be sorry.” He says by way of goodbye and lowers himself from the stool down to the checkered linoleum floor. As he walks to the door, I see a hole in his left pine green sock peek out from his open-cap black clogs. A few minutes later he backs out his reefer and heads to Roanoke, Texas with his load of mechanically separated chicken.
Regitze Ladekarl has re-emerged as a raconteur after a long, successful career elsewhere. She crafts universal tales from everyday lives with an honest, sharp and witty pen. Besides working on a forthcoming novel, she flexes her voice with personal essays, flash fiction, and method writing here on Medium.
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