Amarillo in my Rearview Mirror

By Noni Nelson

To Dianne Matson it seemed life couldn't get any worse. She'd lost her job, her apartment, her lover and been reduced to living in a trailer park in Amarillo. Finally swallowing her pride, she made the trip back home to Oregon, hoping for some peace and quiet to lick her wounds. What she hadn't expected to find was a beautiful, red-haired woman living in a tepee down by the creek.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Noni Nelson
• Release date: Jan 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458048578

Noni Nelson

Noni Nelson lives on the sun-drenched coast of Western Australia. Besides writing poetry and stories,she enjoys travel, roller-skating, gardening and walking, especially on the beach.

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Amarillo in my Rearview Mirror

Published by Noni Nelson at Smashwords.com

Copyright Noni Nelson 2011

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Chapter 1

Dianne Matson hated Texas! She hated the heat, she hated the dust, and she hated the innumerable flying bugs that inhabited the Lone Star State. Unfortunately, right at this moment she had an overload of all three as she inched her ancient Chevy truck along the potholed gravel road that led into the trailer park where she currently resided. No way in hell was she going to call this rundown community of misfits home! Her vehicle’s air con had long since died and with today’s temperatures still nudging the 100 degree mark at six pm, the windows were wound down to try and alleviate some of the first item on the hate list she was mentally compiling. Naturally this state of affairs allowed plenty of the latter two into the truck’s cab, so by the time she finally pulled up outside her rented double-wide, a cool shower was first and foremost on her mind. Soon she was standing under a tepid stream of water in the community shower block, sluicing the day off her tired body and trying to raise enough energy to be outraged by the mould growth on the wall tiles. When she’d first moved into this park some three months ago, the general level of cleanliness in the public facilities had appalled her but she’d soon learned that complaints along these lines were met with polite smiles by the Park manager, vague promises to ‘Git right onta that, Ma’am’ and very little else. Now she hardly even noticed the general state of disrepair, she just wore her flip flops in the shower, dodged the largest of the craters in the road and made sure any foodstuffs she consumed were bought in a clean and shiny supermarket, not off the grimy shelves in the front two rooms of the manager’s house which doubled as the park store. Even when a cockroach emerged from the gap under the wall of the adjoining cubicle, all she could do was aim a half hearted kick in its general direction as it scuttled under the plastic shower curtain and out into the main bathroom area.

Damn, but my feet ache, she muttered tiredly, and not for the first time wondered how her world had come down to this: living in the Sunny Acres trailer park just outside of Amarillo and working in Charlie’s All You Can Eat BBQ & Bar for minimum wage and tips. And that particular commodity was becoming scarcer every day as the global financial crisis bit deep into the pockets of nearly everyone in this rural community. Six months ago she appeared to have had it all: a loving partner, a nice apartment and a good job in a print store downtown. True, she still didn’t like Texas anymore then than she liked it now, but with Karla by her side, she had been prepared to put up with almost anything. And then it had all collapsed in quick succession, tumbling like a row of dominoes, though with hindsight she supposed you could say it all began to go downhill the day she agreed to leave L.A. and accompany Karla back to her home town.

A sudden gust of hot air swirling under the door announced the arrival of a clutch of teenage girls, their squealing and giggling shattering the quiet as they vied for the three remaining shower stalls. Dianne sighed, knowing the small amount of water pressure she did have would drop to a trickle once this lot got started. Reluctantly she turned off the tap and began to towel dry her short cropped dark hair, idly studying her body in the steamy cracked mirror hanging askew on the back of the door. Running herself ragged at Charlie’s at least had the advantage of keeping her weight at an even 135lb, which sat well on her compact frame and hadn’t varied more than a pound or two since her high school days, some fifteen years ago. She still had the strong arms and legs of the AAA softball player she had been right up to the day she left California less than a year earlier. Steady grey eyes and a determined set to her mouth completed what she had always considered a plain face, but which had attracted its fair share of girls and, she reflected wryly, in her teen years and early twenties, more guys than she cared to remember. Saddled with a distinctly warped sense of humor she had rather enjoyed watching their reaction to her admission that she batted for the other team. Her sexuality had never really been an issue for her until the move to Texas, having come out to her own family and friends at age seventeen with a surprising lack of drama. Though the fact that she’d been born to anti-establishment hippie parents in an Oregon commune probably, she admitted to herself, had a lot to do with their acceptance.

Stepping into a pair of cut-offs and a tank top, she remembered with a grin, the reaction her coming out had elicited from her older brother, Jonathon, who at that time had been twenty and studying economics at college. He had just rolled his eyes and made a comment along the lines of Duh, like tell us something we didn’t know, little sis. Thinking of Jonno always made her smile; he was so different to the rest of the family and she knew that at times her lifestyle, and that of their parents, was a real trial to him. Not for the first time she wondered how someone so earthbound and conformist was born into their family. Her mom and dad still had a few acres of land on the site of the original commune where they grew organic vegetables, made jewelry to sell at art and crafts fairs, and generally behaved as if time had stopped sometime around Woodstock. In fact the last time Dianne had seen them, some three years ago, her dad had been full of talk about the replica of a Native American sweat lodge he was building. She herself had always been a free spirit and a wanderer and, the day after her high school graduation, had hit the open road in a bright yellow VW Kombi van. It had belonged to her parents and she and her Dad had spent many companionable hours, elbow deep in grease, restoring it to its original condition. Well, almost original, she had drawn the line at her mom’s attempts to decorate the paintwork with flowers, starbursts and peace signs!

The year that followed was spent exploring the Southwest states, reveling in the natural scenic beauty of such places as Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, Grand Canyon, Monument Valley and many smaller, less touristy areas off the beaten track. Having inherited her mom’s natural gift for painting and drawing, she soon found that hand- drawn charcoal sketches of people, especially children, were a sure fire money- maker and allowed her to put fuel in the van and basic foodstuffs on her table. For a time Dianne was mesmerized by the red rock canyon country she encountered while traveling and occasionally thought about settling down somewhere in Utah. Eventually however, homesickness for the tall timber of Oregon, and the desire to have a less precarious method of making a living, had turned her wheels for home.

Time had slid by quickly after that. A community college course in Graphic Arts and Sign Writing, taken on a whim, had revealed exactly where her true talents lay and she aced the subject to a point where her instructors were begging her to come back and teach others. But she had known she would never have the patience for a nine-to- five job just yet, so Dianne had started with a booth at the arts & crafts market where her mom sold her jewelry. In no time at all the word had spread about her almost uncanny ability to take an idea out of somebody’s head and transfer it onto paper. That is EXACTLY what I wanted, became a phrase very familiar to her ears as she progressed from simple birthday or wedding invitations, up through flyers for local businesses and finally the offer of a job with a large advertising agency in Portland. But she had only stayed with them a short time, then parlayed her talent into jobs all over the west coast; even surprising herself by settling into the hurly burly of life in L.A. for several years. It was there that she had met Karla. There had been more than a few women in her life, from her first girlfriend in high school, up to the previous relationship before Karla, which had been live in and lasted some ten months. But in truth she had to admit getting bored fast and generally the first hint of real domesticity sent her bolting for higher ground. Ah, but Karla, she had been different: for the first time Dianne had wanted someone more than they wanted her.

As she walked back through the heat haze to her trailer, Dianne wondered why the past had been weighing so heavily on her mind of late. Perhaps it was part of the grieving process she was still going through following the breakup; to figure out how you arrived a certain point in your life, you had to have some idea of where you had been. A snatch of melody and lyrics from an old Judds’ song chased their way through her brain and she sang quietly to herself as she unlocked the door and stepped inside the trailer.

A burst of plaintive meowing from the cat curled up on the window ledge drowned out her voice. Smiling, she reached over and petted his sleek black coat. What’s the matter, Mischief, you don’t like my singing voice? Well, you could be right, Mom used to say I scared away all the birds in the forest when I sang as a kid. Or are you just hungry big boy? Looks like you ate all the kibble I left this morning, come on then, let’s get you some dinner.

Feeding the cat and making herself a toasted tomato and cheese sandwich was about all she had energy left for tonight. The heat was enervating in spite of the small window air conditioner that was keeping down the temperature inside by at least some twenty degrees. Plus she’d been on her feet at Charlie’s for over ten hours today, doubling up as a server in the buffet and working behind the bar. They were woefully understaffed even though customer numbers had been dropping month by month as the recession bit hard into jobs all over. The owner (whose name was Eric, not Charlie, go figure) had no intention of hiring any new staff, he just ran the ones he did have into the ground. Bastard, she thought savagely, he knew damn well that none of them dared complain; money was just too tight everywhere and most of the other gals had mortgages to pay and kids to support. The whole of this side of town was littered with empty houses, ‘Bank Foreclosure’ signs swaying like empty gallows in the front yards.

By nine pm Dianne could barely keep her eyes open and she slipped outside to sit on her step and have a last cigarette before heading to bed. The temperature had dropped to almost bearable as the shadows closed in around the worn out assortment of trailers and park homes and the smell of meat sizzling on BBQs and the squeals of kids splashing in the pool gave the whole complex an almost vacation-like atmosphere. Unfortunately she knew this to be far from the truth. Sunny Acres had very few holiday makers on its books, and when it did, well, you could be sure that the KOA down the road was full up. The main clientele here were the hard luck stories of Amarillo. Hispanic families unable to afford a real house, single mothers with young children and babies, pensioners eking out their meager Social Security checks, and the real dregs of society, the alcoholics and drug users. But lately these troubled financial times were ushering in a new breed of poor: previously working class white families unable to make their mortgage payments after the main breadwinner had lost his or her job. She had watched them trickling in for the past few months, some defiant and angry, some subdued, all of them with that same look of bewilderment that Dianne knew she had probably worn herself initially. The look said: "what happened, what did I do to deserve being in this dump?’ Just then, a voice from close by penetrated her thoughts.

Hola, Senora Dianne, como estas? You like some carne asada? That wife of mine, she cook way too much again. The speaker was her immediate neighbor, Manuel Garcia, and as he slowly walked the ten feet or so from his front porch, Dianne’s stomach gurgled in response to the savory smell of meat in the small tray he carried. Manuel was at least eighty years old she guessed, small framed and burnt to the color of the earth, his back bent from many years of hard physical labor, picking crops for a living. He and his wife, a cheerful and energetic woman who spoke very little English, had turned over their home in town to one of their sons and his growing family some years ago and retired to the trailer park. Maria still found it hard to get out of the habit of cooking large amounts for her family, who all visited often, and Manuel had taken to occasionally bringing Dianne leftovers, which she always gratefully accepted.

Gracias Manuel, it smells divine. I didn’t think I was hungry until I smelled that; tell Maria she is an angel.

You need to eat girl, you work too hard on an empty stomach, is not good. Manuel’s wrinkled face was creased in a teasing grin. Ever since Dianne had moved into the park he had been on a personal crusade to fatten her up - like a lot of Hispanic men he liked the ladies with curves to spare. His Maria was nearly as wide as her five foot frame was high and his three daughters not far behind their mother. Settling on the stoop next to her, he lit a cigarette and gestured out to the darkening shadows of twilight; with no mountains or even hills to obscure the light, real darkness came late on the flat Texas plains.

The end of another beautiful day. Dias gracias. How lucky am I to live to see another sunset.

It was one of things that Dianne found so likeable about this man. From all accounts his life had been hard: born into brutal poverty in a family of eleven children back in Mexico, rudimentary schooling, he’d had known nothing but work, work, work since the age of twelve, then the responsibility of a family of his own from twenty one. Two of his own brood of seven children had died young - one daughter of fever as a baby and a son in an auto accident as a teenager - but Manuel never complained. His simple gratefulness for a roof over his head and food on his plate were a reminder to Dianne that she really didn’t have it that bad. She grinned affectionately at her neighbor and spoke through a mouthful of the delicious spicy meat which she was eating with her fingers, much to Manuel’s obvious approval.

Manuel, only you would give thanks for a day of 100 degrees, when we have already had five in a row. I swear today I could have turned off the BBQ at Charlie’s and fried eggs on the hood of my truck!

At the mention of Charlie’s, Manuel spat on the ground at his side. Ha, that place, they would not know how to cook good BBQ if it bit them in the ass! All they care about is money, money, money, and the sauce they use, repugnante! Everything bought in a bottle from who knows where, when they could make it themselves as I do. Lazy!

With this indictment on the culinary arts displayed at her work place, Manuel heaved himself to his feet and took his leave, insisting she could bring back the dish whenever. Manana.

Watching his slow progress back to his trailer Dianne wished, not for the first time, that the Garcias had more money for healthcare. She guessed that some simple anti- inflammatory drugs would take a lot of the pain from Manuel’s aching body, but she also knew that every spare penny the couple had went to keep their children and their families afloat. She ground out the butt of her smoke in the dirt then rose and went back inside and crashed on the bed. Mischief curled up near her feet, purring in rhythm with the cicada’s nightly chorus.

Chapter 2

Six am came way too fast and Dianne swore softly as she groped for the off button on her bedside alarm. She would have loved to hit the snooze for just another five minutes but she didn’t dare. Her shift started at seven am, plus she was giving a lift to Krystal Yates, a young single mom who also lived in the trailer park and had started work at Charlie’s about a month earlier. Already the sun was a fiery red ball and the air held the promise of another scorcher ahead, maybe even hotter than yesterday. After quickly throwing on her uniform and washing her face, she wet combed her hair with her fingers and lightly applied a pale lipstick, the only make up she wore. Walking back into the main living area she laughed to see Mischief already draped across the front window of the trailer, his back to her, fur bristling in all directions and his long black tail swishing his obvious displeasure at her preparations to leave for the day.

Aw, Mischief sweetie, don’t be like that. You know your mama has to go earn the pennies that pay for your designer cat food, plus the cost of leaving the air on for you all day, you spoiled boy. But no amount of cajoling would make him turn his head and she grinned quietly to herself. This was a ritual game they played every workday, he would ignore her, ignore the kibble she left out and act as if he didn’t care diddly squat whether she stayed or went. And every day when she returned home, there he would be in the same position, as if he hadn’t moved a muscle all day, except that his bowl would be empty and there would be an incriminating cat-sized depression right in the middle of her bed. Mischief had come to her as a tiny kitten, abandoned in the courtyard of the apartment block she had lived in for a time in L.A. He had traveled out to Amarillo in a cat cage on the front seat between her and Karla and had voiced his displeasure at the trip with ear splitting moans and howls every five seconds for the first one hundred miles of the journey. His vocalizations were equaled only by Karla’s bitching about him and when she finally avowed that either he shut up or she was getting out at the next roadhouse, Dianne was more than tempted to pull over and leave the pair of them by the roadside. A towel draped over the cage seemed to solve the problem and when they had finally unpacked in the new apartment Karla’s parents had rented for them, the feline had walked calmly from the cage and ensconced himself on the couch as if he had lived there all his life.

That morning, as Dianne locked the door and slid into the cab of her truck she reflected on how that apartment had driven the first wedge into her relationship with Karla. Lighting her first cigarette for the day, she checked her watch and realized that she was at least ten minutes too early, as likely Krystal would be her characteristic five minutes late anyhow. The large Cottonwood tree next to her trailer, one of the few mature trees in the whole park, kept her truck relatively cool and she took the opportunity for some quiet introspection before the hurly burly of the day began. Hell she thought grimly, the apartment had been just the beginning of the influence Karla’s parents had wielded on her partner’s life from the moment she arrived back in this dusty cow town. The girl she had met in L.A. had seemed so self sufficient, and independent. From their first meeting she had been attracted to Karla’s ‘I know what I want and I know how to get it’ attitude. At the time Dianne had been the chief design artist at a large branch of a nationwide print and copy chain. Karla had been employed as a PA to the top executive of an Advertising Agency with whom they had a large account and she had come barreling into the shop one morning to pick up an order of brochures. All it had taken was one look to send her heart into instant overdrive. If it had been a movie, Dianne reflected wryly, there would have been fireworks going off, birds singing and love hearts drifting across the screen,. The gal standing in the other side of the counter had been a tall, slim blonde dressed in a business skirt, blouse and heels but Dianne’s gaydar alarm had rung off the scale. And she was rarely, if ever, wrong on that count. In two days they were talking on the phone for hours, by the end of the first week there had been a dinner date and a movie. Two weeks later she spent the night in Karla’s bed and within the month, Dianne had moved in with her. And yeah, she certainly heard the term ‘U Haul lesbian’ from many of her friends, gay and straight alike. She didn’t care, she was totally besotted with this gal and to her eternal wonderment, Karla seemed to reciprocate. Suddenly domesticity seemed the most natural state in the world and the more time she spent with Karla, the more she wanted, this was serious stuff…and she had loved every second of it.

This is country radio KSTA and the time is 6.40am, here’s the new one from Carrie Underwood…

The announcer’s voice broke Dianne’s train of thought and she swore as she eased the truck out from under the tree and crawled impatiently at the park limit of ten mph towards the far back corner of the park where